Queer Justice
Semester 2 Key Terms
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is defined in Martha Minow’s book, When Should Law Forgive?, as “a conscious, deliberate decision to forgo rightful grounds for grievance against those who have committed a wrong or harm”(7). This decision must be made with the criteria that you have been wronged by the person or group you are forgiving, but when forgiveness is given in order to spite a person or a group, it is not forgiveness, but vengeance instead. This is seen with Donald Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters, as this group had not done anything wrong to him, so his forgiving of the group was, in reality, just an act of vengeance against those opposed to him.
Forgiveness is also a gift, and when asking someone to forgive you, you are inadvertently indebting yourself to them. This is best demonstrated in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden when Gerardo starts to ask Doctor Miranda for forgiveness, Paulina immediately responds with, “Don’t you dare ask forgiveness from that piece of shit”(Act 1 Scene 4). In Paulina’s eyes, this man, who has wronged her so severely, has nothing she could ever want, so she would never allow her husband to receive anything from him either.
Performance
Performance is brought up in David M. Powers’s From Plantation to Paradise? where he discusses how performance was set up in the French colonies. He speaks on how everything from who sat in which seats to who was even allowed to attend was all a performance, stating “The composition and seating of spectators in all theatres adhered strictly to the established social hierarchy”(79). Performance here is used as a way of maintaining the status quo. By forcing the rigid social hierarchy onto people even in times that are meant to be fun, it forces people into a complacent mentality where they do not question the validity of the hierarchy at all.
But, performance can extend to much more than just performances on stage. Performance is also seen in governments’ responses to other nations they have wronged. In Edwin Battistella’s article, “When nations apologize,” he comments on an example of a performative response from Reagan, paraphrasing his quote, saying, “‘We deeply regret any loss of life’ but that the shooting appeared to be ‘a proper defensive action’.” This may appear to be an apology for the loss of life that occurred, but in reality, it is simply the performance of an apology in order to be absolved of the blame that would be put onto the nation otherwise.
Memory
Memory is many things, it is a subject of debate, a site of politics, and a category of analysis. “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory,” written by Omar Bartov and others, speaks to this debatable nature of memory, saying, “appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today, and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine”. This speaks to how memory is a site for politics, as the way memory of the Holocaust is used to justify the war in Gaza is a hotly debated topic. The reason the nation of Israel invokes this almost worldwide shared memory of the Holocaust is to justify the destruction of Gaza by comparing the October 7th attacks to the Holocaust.
Memory can also be used in memorialization as a way to twist narratives, like how it it is done in the National Museum of the American Indian. Memory is weaponized here in the very way that the museum is layed out. Military propaganda describing how Native Americans fought in every war is the very first exhibit you walk through, exhibits describing atrocities natives faced are burried all the way in the back of the museum, and between these are exhibits filled with art and culture in order to cover up these important exhibits in the back.
Queer
Savannah Shange in “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship” says that “To be queer is to pick a fight…to choose to fight for the space to love and live autonomously.” This refusal to submit is seen throughout the ACT UP protests that are described in “Choreographies of Protest” with die-ins, “disrupting the commutes of those working on Wall Street and at adjacent corporate facilities housing companies known for their profiteering from experimental treatments for AIDS.” The groups that participated in the die-ins were sick of the medical companies refusing to release treatments for AIDS, so they fought back, in order to get people to see they were there and they would not go quietly.
In Zeynep Gambetti’s “Queering Performativity,” she writes that “queering is a subversion of norms.” This idea that queer people exist outside of social norms is echoed by Shange writing that, “queer subjects are indeed figured ‘outside’ of the order of normative gender.” Because queer people are set outside of social norms they engage more heavily in these fights for rights, not only for themselves, but also for others as they do not fear what others may view them as when they stand with other groups.
Maroons
LeConté J Dill defines maroons in her article “Maroons: Blackgirlhood in Plain Sight” as, former enslaved people who physically fled their enslavement to maintain absolute sovereignty”. This is seen in Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” when discussing the creation of Africatown for the freed Africans. Due to the fact that the Africans were not able to return to their homes in Africa, they instead had to build their own piece of Africa in America as “ a haven from white supremacy and the ostracism of black Americans”(Afterword). The enslaved African people were thought poorly of by both white and black Americans so this creation, so the only way to solidify their identity as Africans in America was through the establishment of this town.
Dill also claims that Blackgirls are “present-day maroons … in plain sight.” This is so because black people exist on the borders of a law that often forgets about or disproportionately affects them. Because of this existence on the borders of society, black people now resemble the maroons of the past and work to exist in a place free from the white supremacist mindsets that plague the country.
Protest
In Susan Leigh Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest,” she works to set up a framework where protest has a “perspective on individual agency and collective action, one that casts the body in a central role as enabling human beings to work together to create social betterment.” Having the body central to protest is important because, unless safety or well-being is at risk, protest is meaningless. This is seen in the ACT UP protesters with their signature die-ins, where they would enter a location with tombstone signs and simply lie on the floor while police officers tried to drag them away. They did not resist arrest, but they also did not comply with officers’ demands, which ultimately only served to further anger the police. Real protest also puts the responsibility to take action if an issue is faced on every individual, as it is only when discussion is held about a topic and action occurs that real change takes place. Protest also relies on the combination of a wide spectrum of identities coming together in order to hammer home a message as well. When discussing the protests to the US invasion of Iraq, Foster writes about the people surrounding her, saying, “immigration and gay rights activists, seventy-year-old ecologists on one side, twenty-year-old students on the other,” showing the vast number of bodies rallying behind this effort.
Mass Incarceration
As defined by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration consists of “a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices…[that] trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage”(229). As stated, many different things work together in order to make this system work, and not all of the systems seem as though they are working to oppress at face value. For example, the fact that there is a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows for involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, paired with the fact that black people are disproportionately arrested and imprisoned, just shows how mass incarceration is just a new form of legalized slavery. This is not a new system; rather, it has evolved and changed faces over the years, going from systems of slavery, to segregation, to what we see it as now, and it continues to change.
We see situations worsening today with the recent deportations to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. The people being sent to these prisons are alleged gang members according to the Trump administration, but it has been found that a high number of these people are not. In fact, they are just regular people who have been taken off the street, and this goes to show that the more we allow the government to overreach its control, the more at risk we put ourselves every day.
Revenge
There is a thin line between justice and revenge, and Euripides’ Medea shows off how easy it is to cross over. After Jason leaves her, Medea is destroyed, and she swears she will get justice for how she has been wronged. She starts off by killing Jason’s new wife and King Creon, and then proceeds to murder her own children. She does this to seek justice for herself, but she never physically harms Jason, the only one who has actually done a wrong against her. Justice for Medea was her punishing Jason by killing everyone that he loved, including her own children, but because of the harm to innocent people, she was really just getting revenge to satisfy her anger.
Bibliography
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2010.
Battistella, Edwin. “When Nations Apologize.” Oregon Humanities, Summer 2009, https://oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/revision-summer-2009/when-nations-apologize/.
Bartov, Omar. “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory.” Jewish Journal, 2023, https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/358735/an-open-letter-on-the-misuse-of-holocaust-memory/.
Dill, LeConté J. “Maroons: Blackgirlhood in Plain Sight.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 35, no. 6, 2022, pp. 547–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2042066.
Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden. Translated by Ariel Dorfman, Penguin Books, 1994.
Euripides. Medea. Translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Classics, 1963.
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Choreographies of Protest.” The Drama Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–13. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1162/105420404772990178.
Gambetti, Zeynep. “Queering Performativity: Reading Rancière in the Wake of Butler.” Theory & Event, vol. 14, no. 2, 2011. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/431648.
Minow, Martha. When Should Law Forgive? W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Powers, David M. From Plantation to Paradise?: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1750–1830. Michigan State University Press, 2014.
Shange, Savannah. “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 953–976. https://doi.org/10.1086/696554.
