Evelyn Lynn, Noemi Y. Molitor, Cara Page, and Lamont Sims, "A Conversation about Southerners on New Ground: Transformation, Legacy and Movement Building in the U.S. South"
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Part of practicing accountability is to create the spaces we are meeting in together to share knowledge, tools and strategies. In this, SONG brings core agreements and protocols with an emphasis on positive ways of interacting.[9] Against the background of oppression we are asked how we relate to each other. As simple as it may sound and as vital as it is to sustain a movement, we ask ourselves what makes us feel good and fulfills our longing and desires. We ask what could be an ideal space, what creates the conditions that make us feel good, uplifted, and possible as we work together across differences—in a particular Organizing School or local mentorship circle or in the context of a broader social justice movement.

By sharing our version and vision of SONG in the form of this article, we hope to have shown how through SONG's political framework of asking what our "longings and desires" are, we can become inspired to build locally, regionally, and globally beyond geographical, political, and spiritual borders. As we acknowledge how we are all implicated in violent structures and in power relations, we challenge ourselves and each other "to be transformed in the service of our work." As we invite our experiential and emotional knowledge, we can hold and support each other towards resiliency and longevity in our present and coming movements for social justice. Let us close, then, with a quote from one of our authors:

"Having the courage to speak to our singing hearts, SONG does not presume to escape difficult histories to transform our collective selves. We are instead asked to sit in grief inside of our love and liberation and to build a powerful resiliency that can hold both without putting one down for the other. As mentioned through Evelyn, 'we do not have the luxury to keep anyone out.' My addition is that we do not have the luxury to shame or isolate anyone for harm they may have done, and we do have the tools to imagine how to transform the harm and learn how to take care of one another. SONG dreams and imagines what and who we are to make these things possible." —Cara

Endnotes

1. For example, BLOCS Atlanta (Building Locally for Community Safety and the Georgia Tech Student Planning Association. [Return to text]

2. We mean people who might not have U.S. citizenship or folks whose families immigrated post-Civil War. Our use of the category immigrant here points to contemporary border policies and citizenship privileges while being aware that to this day the U.S. is a settler colony. This legacy of European colonialism is frequently euphemized in the term "immigrant nation," a gesture we oppose. SONG is committed to bringing indigenous perspectives to the forefront of the movement. See for instance: "Two-Spirit First Nations Collective: In Lak Ech: You are the Other Me; Arizona, Queerness, Immigration: A Critique and a Call to Action" from 2010. [Return to text]

3. See Andrea Smith, "Feminism Without Bureaucracy, Beyond Inclusion, Re-centering Feminism," Left Turn 28 (2008); Also see The Abolitionist's interview with Andrea Smith (PDF); and The Boarding School Healing Project. [Return to text]

4. Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," In All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, Gloria T. Hull Ed. (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982): 13-22. [Return to text]

5. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Books, 1983 [1967]). [Return to text]

6. See Gayle Rubin's analysis of transphobic discourses: Gayle Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries," In Transgender Studies Reader, Susan Stryker and Stepen White, Eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006): 471-81. See also Janice Raymond writing against transwomen: Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979). As another critique of transphobic discourses, see: Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See further: Jean Bobby Noble, Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape (Toronto: Women's Press, 2006). And also: Krista Scott-Dixon, Ed., Trans/Forming Feminisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006). [Return to text]

7. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 181. [Return to text]

8. See John O'Neal of June Bug Productions. [Return to text]

9. SONG's core values. [Return to text]

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