“They Wanna Be Saved”: Black and Queer Women as Saviors and Superheroes in Higher Learning
摘要
The #MeToo Movement, which emerged in the mass media in 2015, highlighted the sexual violence of powerful men in Hollywood like Harvey Weinstein and Russell Simmons. Now, as entertainers like Sean “Diddy” Combs and R. Kelly have been held accountable for sexual violence which often occurred among other male witnesses, people in the mass public have turned an eye to the ways that power, race, and gender intersect. Political scientist and queer feminist Cathy Cohen writes, “I envision a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades” (2005, 22). Her prescient words frame this analysis and the struggles of many Black women who have long sought to have their experiences with disproportionate power constraints and gendered oppression made visible. These fights are heightened on college campuses which have long been sites of ongoing sexual violence. This political moment has also exposed the ways that sexual violence against Black women and their leadership on this issue is often overlooked and erased given that the #MeToo movement was actually created by a Black woman organizer named Tarana Burke in 2005. During the Trump Administration, not only did the White House make it harder for survivors of sexual assault to come forward, but many feared that the lack of real legislation on gun control left schools, and college campuses more vulnerable to mass shootings. Now, as wars rage across the globe, racism, misogyny, sexual abuse and harassment, transphobia, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and other displays of bigotry continue to mar the experiences of college students.