No abstract
The project of creating an anti-oppressive composition issue began with multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration between Julia Havard, Erica Cardwell, Anandi Rao, Juliet Kunkle and Rosalind Diaz, who crafted a call for community-building and community-transformation: to build tools, resources, and spaces for transforming our classrooms, specifically our writing classrooms; and to approach the teaching of composition in community, with accountability, and with urgency. This collaboration started as a working group at the University of California Berkeley, Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Composition, as a number of instructors at multiple levels of the academic heirarchy struggled with the differences between our writing classrooms and our research. Following Condon and Young (2016), Inoe (2015), and Gumbs (2012), our editing team wanted to create a context and process for rich unraveling of un-teaching oppressive systems through composition.
The organizers of the Anti-Milo Toolkit aimed to contribute to a broader counter-movement that would make it easier for university campuses to challenge and de-platform white supremacist and fascist speakers sheltered under the auspices of “free speech.” This toolkit gathers info-tracts, syllabi, flyer templates, and other activist materials collected and widely distributed across campuses in preparation to protest Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos's 2016 “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” Yiannopoulos was slated to speak at thirteen college campuses in support of an alt-right platform founded upon the weaponization of “free speech,” xenophobia, and transphobia. In addition to providing materials for protest, the authors of the “Anti-Milo Toolkit” take critical aim at appropriation of liberal-academic vocabularies by right-wing groups and Yiannopoulos's history of outing trans and undocumented students at his events, and call for widespread action against the spread of violent rhetoric targeting marginalized communities in order to maintain the university as a space of sanctuary. Because of its accessibility via digital channels and its wide range of short and readable pieces written in a variety of styles, and because of the collective's wide network of organizing connections, the kit circulated very broadly.
Nic sighed apologetically and announced to the cast of our dance piece, "Tiny Glitter Dances," "I can't use glitter." An affirmative echoed through the cast. For many of the dancers in the Bay Area Disabled Dance Collective, glitter use was not possible due to sensory aversions, skin sensitivities, and other access issues.As choreographer, I felt a momentary panic pass over me, trying to re-formulate what it would mean to create this piece, which was based on a queer disabled experience of glitter as aesthetic, without actually using glitter. But access needs result in creative thinking. Collectively, we began to brainstorm how to invoke glitter without using it. The dance piece, which premiered in February 2021 on Zoom, emerged out of a desire to explore queer crip grief, pleasure, longing, and care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Performed, composed, and directed by an all queer and disabled collective, the piece invoked the rich archive of gestures that we call upon for ritual, belonging, and care of community and self [1]. As queer and trans disabled people, our aesthetic approaches are vital, mutating the objectifying gaze that falls on disabled bodies by allowing ourselves to catch the light differently. Our aesthetics allow us to find each other, to locate pleasure in the ways we perform our identities, and to create alternatives to the cultural roles we are often forced into. Nic's moment of access-based refusal at the beginning of our rehearsal process offered the question-how do we distill glitter's meaning without its material?
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