Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions within the Occupy Movement

Abstract

Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions withinthe Occupy Movement Molly Talcottand Dana Collins During week six of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City's Zuccotti Park, Angela Davis spoke to the Occupiers with enthusiasm in a much-circulated video. Her speech was narrated through the "people's mic" (where people repeat the speaker's words verbatim and in unison), and she issued a vital challenge to the young movement: "We have come together as the 99 percent. There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in community. So, how can we be together? How can we be together in a unity that is not simplistic and oppressive? How can we be together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory?"1 It is this enormous yet promising challenge—the building of a complex, emancipatory unity among diverse collectives of activ ists— that has intrigued us as witnesses to the growth of the Occupy movements that sprang up in the United States in 2011 and that continue to exist, expand, and morph. As we discuss below, the ethos of masculinized resistance that is often present within such spaces, along with the very language of "occupying" used by the movement, are troubling from a transnational antiracist feminist perspective. However, we feel that it is vital to carefully peer into these spaces with a feminist curiosity that searches for openings, listens for the difficult dialogues, and glimpses the feminist and decolonial perfor mances of resistance occurring from within. FeministStudies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 485 486 Molly Talcottand Dana Collins Through our photographic analysis of the Occupy Los Angeles (OLA) movement, we ask: How are women, in particular, challeng ing the masculine, racialized, and imperial/nationalistic logics that continue to operate within some Occupy spaces? Are they contributing to the building of this complex and emancipatory unity from within the movement of the 99 percent?2 If so, how? And which women? Photographs do not capture an external or stagnant real ity; rather, as Wendy Cheng has argued in her photographic explo ration of urban political history of Los Angeles, photography is a part of a method of social storytelling, requiring the photogra pher to be a social actor among the urban spaces she seeks to repre sent.3 The photos and analytical reflections shared here arise out of our own participation in OLA—we frequently attended the OLA encampments, taught and participated in workshops at the on-site People's Collective University, and were in the encampment the night of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) raid on Novem ber 30, 2011. Dana has used photography to document OLA as well as regional labor and racial justice protests that have adopted the language and ethos of the 99 percent following the formation of OLA.4 These photographs emerge out of the performative social rela tions of political protest; they reflect interactions between a white woman photographer and the women who agree to be photo graphed.5 I (Dana) photographed widely; however, I am most inter ested as a feminist visual sociologist in how women shaped Occupy protest space, particularly given the critiques of the masculiniza tion of the movement. Social positioning shapes the very production of these photographs, as women express openness to being repre sented by a politicized woman photographer (Dana) whose visual sociological method encourages women to choosehow they will pose with their signs for the photograph. While the smiles of the women in the following photos might at first seem to relay a romanticized resistance, we interpret their posing as a forceful expression of their politicized display of bodies, signs, and presence. Our analysis below therefore combines our photographic work at OLA, our participant observation, our assessment of Occupy images and discourses as they have circulated on the Internet, and our commitment to deco lonial/antiracist feminist social transformation. Molly Talcottand Dana Collins 487 We feature imagery that represents, from our specific OLA refer ence point, reoccurring patterns that we recognize. Other settings may have different outcomes and dynamics, but we begin from the OLA context as a way to pose questions relevant to the...