From co-organizer, David Waggoner:
Greetings friends. It has been such a privilege and pleasure to be a part of the organizing of this project, and I want to thank Teague, Marc Tizoc and Anne for including me. We have had many poignant conversations over the last several months, full of laughs, sighs, moments of silence, expressions of exasperation, and moments of lucidity and excitement about the possibilities before us. And now we are inviting you to join us in dialogue, negotiation and collaboration to provoke, practice, play and postulate in the interests of radical, transformative justice.
Greetings friends. It has been such a privilege and pleasure to be a part of the organizing of this project, and I want to thank Teague, Marc Tizoc and Anne for including me. We have had many poignant conversations over the last several months, full of laughs, sighs, moments of silence, expressions of exasperation, and moments of lucidity and excitement about the possibilities before us. And now we are inviting you to join us in dialogue, negotiation and collaboration to provoke, practice, play and postulate in the interests of radical, transformative justice.
While we may take comfort in the process of our struggles, and acknowledge the fluidity and radical subjectivity of our lives, we nonetheless are very much about real outcomes, and developing strategies and tactics that will produce tactile, tangible results for our clients, our communities and ourselves. Housing, healthcare and education are not mere platitudes or the slogans to be affixed to a bumper sticker. Access to life’s basic necessities provides the context for experiencing love and pleasure, and it is for these basic rights we struggle. In that vein, from that heart, we seek to come together to create new moments of resistance, metamorphosis, and radical social transformation which have yet to be realized but are within our grasp. We are realizing the intersectionality and multiplicities of identity and hegemony - and how we are often influenced by the dominant modes of power and unwittingly reproduce what we are trying to fight - in ways that are truly opening up completely new opportunities to be in coalition, new opportunities to create fresh critique, and previously unconsidered methods of radical change.
Together, we can draw out from one another the hidden thoughts that will provide the glue to build a thousand thousand experiences of justice that one can taste, hear, touch, smell and feel. There is no reason why we can not provoke in one another – vis-à-vis questions, visions, critique, spontaneous exuberance – more that we ever thought we were capable of to realize exponential well being. We can escape the Socratic method, the desire to control and be controlled, the hegemony of IRAC, the fascism of the four corners of the document and “thinking like a lawyer,” to embrace completely new ways of being human, of being advocates, of using the law to love, of grinding the bones of racism and misogyny to dust. So many briefs remain to be written, arguments to be made, laws to be repealed, judges to be disqualified, communities to be organized, class actions to be certified…
Elvia Arriola is one of many, many people who have begun to show us the way. I hope you will find her remarks as nuanced and enlightening as I did. I look forward to seeing you all soon.
Love and Revolt,
David
RESPIRO LIBRE:1 COMING HOME TO A LATINA LESBIAN SELF: Race and Sexual Orientation in Legal Scholarship
Remarks of Elvia R. Arriola
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SCHOOL OF LAW
Lesbian and Gay Section of the Association of American Law Schools Meeting
Friday, January 9, 1998, San Francisco, California
Good Afternoon. I feel I have been trying to have this conversation for such a long time. I can't help but feel emotional as I stand before you to have this discussion on race and sexual orientation in legal scholarship. I have been writing about and been involved as a feminist Latina lesbian scholar for so many years. And for so many of those years, as I think back upon the environments or the conditions surrounding my work, I can't help but remember how alone I often felt because of the intersectional nature of my identity, as not only lesbian and feminist but also Latina. I remember for example, when I was writing my very first law review article -- as I was coming out as a lesbian and also budding as a civil rights lawyer in the early eighties in New York City. At times I felt very connected to the gay and lesbian civil rights community I was coming to know personally and professionally through my progressive contacts. For awhile, after my post- graduate fellowship at the ACLU National Headquarters, I volunteered my legal services for Lambda Legal Defense and met wonderful people who helped me feel proud of the fact that I had the courage to come out publicly as a lesbian. But so many other times I felt disconnected completely from these same people; I felt the conspicuousness of my brown skin and Spanish surname when I sat in huge conference rooms as the lone minority among over two dozen other lawyers and activists, deliberating, for example, the litigation strategies for the then upcoming hearing by the Supreme Court in the Bowers v. Hardwick.
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