It's such an honor to be invited to speak with so many amazing women who are doing radical social justice work. When I decided to participate on a panel of women to discuss reproductive rights and liberation, I became really nervous. Body politics has always been a central part of my life as a Black woman working to figure out ways to be liberated in my own body. Like many people of color, Black folks live in a culture that tells us that we are overly body-oriented. We have been called animalistic, hyper-sexualized, and deviant in our very physicality. In my resistance to these white supremacist cultural messages, it became critical for me to think of myself and to be thought of by others as an intellectual, pure mind and denial of body. Typical Western mind/body split. I think, therefore I am.

As I've reflected on my own alienation from my body, I've been doing more reading about the way the Black body has been manipulated in American culture and politics. So at the same time that I spoke with Ann here with Radical Women about speaking tonight, I was in the middle of reading Killing the Black Body by the brilliant Dorothy Roberts. Roberts describes the American legacy of the bodies of Black women being raped, tortured, controlled, and manipulated for economic exploitation. She makes connections between the economic and sexual exploitation of slave women when slave owners raped slave women so that their wombs could be used as a perpetual labor force and the contemporary demonization of single Black mothers that has manifested in so-called welfare reform and non-consensual sterilization of Black women (not to mention other women of color and poor women).

Roberts argues that feminists need to advocate for a robust understanding of liberty. Women have the right to our bodies - misogyny, male domination, and white supremacy notwithstanding. Not only should we be on the front lines making sure we have the right to abortion, but we must protect our right to have babies without censure from the state. We must protect our right to have dignity and integrity with our bodies without oppressive institutions using our bodies to achieve whatever social agenda in vogue at the time. In short, keep state laws out of your uterus.

I think we are all on the same page with this need for women to have liberty with their bodies. Still, as I read this book, I felt so unsatisfied with the conclusion that if only we resisted the state's intrusion into women's bodies for exploitive purposes then we would indeed find liberation. I kept asking myself why is it that Americans have this obsession with controlling bodies. Sure, we live in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (as bell hooks compactly puts it), but there are lots of ways that oppression can be manifested. Why has the body been such a profound location of domination?

I believe that we have a fear of bodies. When bodies transition, our repressed and limited culture is nearly incapable of dealing with it. Brandon Teena was a transgender man who was raped, beaten, and murdered in Nebraska in 1993. The men who raped him did so partly because they were so threatened by his transitioning body, by the fact that Brandon could obstinately decide to be a man despite his female genitals. We are scared to death that we can't control bodies. Our able-bodied supremacy is also deeply connected to the fear of the transitioning body. Feminist and disability theorist Susan Wendell writes that suffering caused by the body and the inability to control the body are despised, pitied, and above all, feared.

Part of the reason that we fear bodies so much is our culture's increasing emphasis on alienation from the body. I have a friend who rides the bus everyday to work. One morning she forgot her walkman that she listens to during her bus trips. She kind of freaked out a little. Her discomfort was located in the idea that she would have to engage with other bodies on the bus and on her way to work. That she would have to listen to the rustle of other people's existence. We talked about how engagement with others is increasingly becoming unnecessary. I saw a commercial that implied that soon we wouldn't have check-out clerks at the grocery store. Imagine how far we've moved when you can buy an apple without ever engaging with the farmer, the produce clerk, the check-out clerk, and the community that you share food with. With the familiarity of the internet becoming ever more available, we can do so much without ever really talking, seeing, or interacting with anyone. I think, therefore I am. Existence is no longer about engagement or community.

What does this disappearance of engagement and community mean for us as feminist activists? Let's look at the impact of alienation on our social justice movements. The way that we've organized to end domestic violence is that we shepherd battered women into shelters and we herd batterers into prison. We never have to see them. The community never has to engage with it. We bank on the assumption that domestic violence somehow disappears when the battered and the batterer are cleanly placed in their respective social service/criminal justice track.

Similarly, rape crisis lines are very detached from individuals. Imagine - a body that has been raped becomes a disembodied voice over the phone to another voice that remains anonymous. Engagement in many ways becomes contrived and professionalized and the caller becomes just another person to be tracked and counted and dealt with so that the rape crisis center can efficiently move on to the next disembodied voice.

I have a friend who works in an abortion clinic. Recently, her management's main priority has been quantity rather than quality. We want to see as many women as possible because abortion clinics are few and far between. But as a result, that clinic has come to a point where they are shuffling women around like livestock, and there is so little opportunity for real human connection.

I recognize that domestic violence shelters, rape crisis lines, and abortion clinics have helped millions of women and it's not my intention to minimize the incredible work that activists have put forward to make sure that women are safe and supported. I am saying that these types of solutions, while helpful, are not necessarily about liberation. Liberation is not a disappearance of problematic bodies. Rape survivors, rapists, domestic violence survivors, batterers, poor women, single mothers, folks with disabilities. Ending rape and domestic violence does not mean hiding bodies in their respective institutions in much the same way that ending able-bodied supremacy does not mean hiding disabled bodies away in their institutions.

Liberation is about building community agency and community accountability. When are we going to supply our next-door neighbors, our co-workers, and our girlfriends with the information that they need to make sure our community is safe and the people in our community are taken care of? When David John Walker was murdered by a police officer this Spring, I was very pissed off at the institutional racism that is still so incredibly pervasive in our criminal justice system. But I was also wondering where my Black community was in terms of taking care of Mr. Walker and the rest of our developmentally disabled sisters and brothers to make sure they aren't wielding a gun and feeling compelled to rob a store for a quart of milk.

Liberation is about building and supporting community. We must have agency within the reality that our bodies exist in a mode of interdependence and reciprocity. We have to hold on to each other fiercely without always relying on institutions to take away the problem for us. We must engage in order to survive. We are therefore I am.