I Don't Think This is Home: Privilege, Isolation, and Resistance

This past weekend I was at an anti-racism workshop at the college I go to. This blogpost comes from a weekend of reflecting on whiteness and disability; struggling to figure out and name the ways that intertwining systems of privilege and oppression function in my life.

I realized that I have internalized the notion that the straight white non-disabled (cis)male-bodied experience is comfort and safety within their own bodies. Sometimes that is how some people (esp. white, able-bodied people) treat me, when they either don't recognize or choose not to recognize the fact that I am hard of hearing/deaf. I feel like I've internalized from white supremacy and patriarchy and heterosexism and ableism the idea that if my deafness/hard of hearing-ness could be eliminated, I'd be "normal", and finding "home" would be no problem. Within that context, that ideology, the solution seems to be to fight for access for me, and every other oppressed person, to live in the same ways that those with multiple privileges do; and I feel like that is how I've generally imagined what "home" would look and feel like.


But there's something that is nagging at me; that says no, it wouldn't feel like that at all. Because when I am treated as if I am a hearing person; I feel isolated. I have never felt like that space is a home; just that it is what I've been told that it should be. And when I engage that isolation, I feel lost, like I'm stumbling around trying to figure out where I am and where I'm going. Because the compass I've been given points towards the spaces where I and my friends who experience similar and/or different oppressions have been denied access and experience violence, isolation and invisibility. But I know and feel that going isn't the direction where "home" is; for me, and I'm not sure it is for any of us.

Because when I tap into what feels like home within my body, the spaces I inhabit, and the relationships I have-what feels like home is within active resistance to oppression and isolation. Home and liberation begin to feel like possibilities when I don't follow the compass pointing towards a life of living within bodies and spaces of privilege and domination alone, moving instead with my friends and communities toward a shared destinations that shift and change as we need them to.

In order to inhabit those spaces, resisting white and male-bodied supremacy is just as important as resisting internalized ableist oppression. Re-imagining what home and liberation means involves reinventing the ways I relate to people and spaces that I inhabit that reinforce isolation and oppression. Because if I don't do that, I begin to recreate the space that isolates me. In creating the spaces where I become vulnerable, I feel that a tension creates space for growth and movement towards a world where liberation and home becomes possible; imaginable, and maybe even real, even for just a moment.

Third World women, lesbians, feminists, and feminist-oriented men of all colors are banding and bonding together to right that balance. Only together can we be a force. I see us as a network of kindred spirits, a kind of family. We are the queer groups, the people that don't belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our own respective cultures. Combined we cover so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the collective fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit we are a threat. - Gloria Anzaldúa "La Prieta"