EMERGING FEMINISMS, Dear Communities: In Lieu of a Conclusion to the “Collective Voice of the Voiceless”: Campus Violence, Resistance, and Strategies for Survival

By Administrator on November 12, 2015

Dear Communities:

We are grateful for your engagement with this Forum over these past two and half weeks—reading, comments, and sharing with others. Your interest in the Forum and continued support of The Feminist Wire reminds us of the strength community provides.

We are grateful for the work published in the Forum and for the contributors trusting all of us with their intimate thoughts and experiences, and for sharing their theories and strategies regarding violence, self-care, and social change. Your writings provide us with insight on how to think through each other’s pain and develop new approaches so that we may work together to reclaim educational spaces for liberatory work.

We are grateful for the virtual place of The Feminist Wire, which has been materialized in so many ways through everyone’s commitments to ending a world saturated with white supremacy along every axis of power. Your imaginations, labor, and collective love on a daily basis makes real all the possibilities of just futures, today.

Yet amidst all this gratitude, dear Communities, we remain outraged at the continued re-solidification of white supremacy and hetero-patriarchal privilege in our educational systems. In the two and half weeks of this Forum, we have witnessed ongoing violence against youth of color in high schools and universities. We are outraged at the militarization of our schools and people’s complicity in this process. As this forum has detailed, the hostile environments of our educational spaces are toxic, violent, and antithetical to the work of justice. No student should carry this burden of violence—on their body or soul. No faculty, staff, or student should ever have to face retaliation for speaking truth to power.

We are outraged about the way universities trivialize and infantilize Title IX, gender and sexual violence, and anti-violence activism and awareness into cutesy cupcake festivals. We are outraged at the constant renaming and cooptation of historical feminist political projects into neoliberal mainstreaming that diverts attention away from institutional violence. We are outraged at the ways in which academic departments historically have been, and continue to be, sites of violences that go ignored by the administration. We are outraged about the school-to-prison pipeline, the blatant and violent racist conditions in which university students, faculty, and staff exist and the continued denial of safety, access, and humanity.

We write this letter to you in lieu of a conclusion to the Forum. What has been raised in this Forum is far from an ending; rather, it has offered up an opening to keep conversations going and build new strategies together. We ask you to continue to engage with us—we ask that you continue to send us your writings and naming the violences and sharing your strategies for self-care, solidarity, and survival. As editors, we will archive this work as a collection that is part of a larger collective.

Together we will refuse the silences and amnesias of institutional violence. Together we will educate each other with history and intimacy. Together we will dismantle this system and reconstruct anew. Dear Communities, you are already doing this work and we send you strength to keep doing so—thank you.

In continued love and solidarity,
Mick & Heather

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“COLLECTIVE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS”:
CAMPUS VIOLENCE, RESISTANCE, AND STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

Table of Contents

Monday, October 26

Introduction, Mick & Heather

What I Should’ve Said Then, Emily Rooney

Tuesday, October 27

Taking What’s Mine, Alex-Quan Pham

Wednesday, October 28

The Silence of Burning, Grace Kuell

Thursday, October 29