Gossett and Dunham on resistance: “Be in friendship with one another”

Autostraddle has a really remarkable interview with Reina Gossett and Grace Dunham, trans activists, researchers, storytellers, and community-builders. The piece is worth a read in full, but I was particularly struck by Gossett’s and Dunham’s reflections on the reproduction of state violence by and through marginalized groups. 

Something that I’ve been trying to do in thinking about these moments in history when groups that perceive themselves as marginalized enact violence is trying to look at those movements with empathy and understand the way that, as Reina says, the state moves through people in those moments.

On movement histories and who gets remembered:

What does it mean… to not look for the event or the moment or the person that has the capital letter, but to look for the life that’s expansive and doing all of this work that doesn’t get remembered in the way that institutionalized histories and institutionalized success gets remembered? …A lot of what we do together is just be in a friendship with one another.

Check out the full piece here. Transcript below.

In these groups that have come to be understood as the beginning of the gay rights’ movement, there was this intense push to distance themselves from the behaviors that were penalized, the behaviors that were criminalized, the behaviors that were seen as undesirable in the eyes of the state. I remember when Reina and I first became friends, I read this brief account of something that had taken place at one of the first meetings of the Sisters of Bilitis, which was a lesbian affiliation organization in San Francisco of mostly middle and upper-middle class white lesbians. Someone in the group showed up wearing butch clothing, showed up wearing men’s clothing, and everybody in the group surrounded her, held her down to the ground, ripped her clothes off of her, redressed her in women’s clothing and there was this recounting of the fact that when they finally got her to wear a skirt, everybody in the room cheered and applauded, that they had finally gotten this woman in the room to dress in this way that, to them, was a signifier of inclusion. Something that I’ve been trying to do in thinking about these moments in history when groups that perceive themselves as marginalized enact violence is trying to look at those movements with empathy and understand the way that, as Reina says, the state moves through people in those moments. It’s easy as someone who is consistently read as a white lesbian and as someone who came into my queer identity having a relationship to that history to feel a lot of anger at the ways in which people who came before enacted these kinds of violence. But I think that looking at those moments is an opportunity to think about just how deep the state goes into us and into the ways that we reproduce the state’s violence. So, for example, that’s something that really concrete and those moments have a very powerful after-life and we might not even know the way that they affect us in the social spaces that we build and in the ways that we want to be perceived. I can see traces of behaviors like that in my own becoming, and in my own becoming a queer person, in ways that I was afraid of being perceived.

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