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May 24, 2003 Dear friends and supporters- I have been out of town this week for the sentencing of another SOA Watch activist and Oberlin graduate, Becky Johnson, who went into custody for six months in Columbus, Georgia on Wednesday morning with two other defendants. Becky has a cell phone, and Jesse called us three times on Tuesday, which was really amazing ? it felt like he was with us, present as we drove south and as Becky prepared for court the next day. As scheduled, Jesse received his second injection on Thursday night. When he went to medical call, the doctor had forgotten to bring any of the inmates' injection medications, but he returned after his shift was over at 9:00pm ? because he was "instructed" to make sure that Jesse did not have to wait until the next morning, presumably due to the strength of our advocacy! Jesse was in good spirits when I spoke with him yesterday afternoon, and he was excited for a three day weekend. He enrolled in Bingo and Pictionary tournaments, and is excited for another visit with his parents. If you would like to visit Jesse, send him a letter and he will send you a visitor form to fill out (his address is at the very end of this email). Jesse also wanted to thank everyone who made a contribution to his commissary account, and said that he does not need any more contributions at this time. Below are the two letters that I received from Jesse this week. In the end of the first is a request for your support of another prisoner, and Jesse reiterated to me that he has checked in with Steph and that she will indeed appreciate mail from friends and supporters who she does not (yet) know. The second letter was originally intended only for me, but I have received a lot of feedback from people who appreciate hearing from Jesse about his thoughts on gender. So I have thought a lot about it, and with Jesse's permission, the text of the second letter is also below. The "you" he refers to is intended to be me, but I think his words are applicable in a broader context as well. Thanks for all of your love and support!
Take care and stay strong, May 15, 2003 I just got off the phone with Becky, and we exchanged ? I don't know. Good energy, lots of love, strength, and ego-boosters. I am wearing a big smile but feel a bit like crying ? it is so wrong that I should be calling from prison to wish her good luck in prison. As you know from our depressing attempt at a phone conversation earlier this week, I am having some problems this week, mostly stemming from sleep deprivation. That probably sounds weird, that between medical stuff, the women around me, the petty (and not-so- petty) injustices, the visiting stuff, etc. it would finally be one night of not sleeping that gave me my first little bout of depression. I think it just all caught up to me suddenly ? it takes a lot of energy to experience and process the things that happen every day, or on bad days, every few minutes. Luckily tonight (Thursday) Katherine, Mimi, myself and a woman named Roz had a long talk. Mimi, Katherine and I try to get together every Thursday around 8ish because that is when SOA prisoners and supporters around the country are trying to pause and hold each other for a little bit. We take that time essentially to talk about what is happening to us and to the people around us and how we feel about it and how we can resist it or survive it or help others do the same. This evening we talked a lot about the emotional consequences of prison, primarily around depression and rage. Most of the inmates here seem to exist in sustained states of moderate depression for their entire time here. That doesn't mean that they're sad all the time at all. There is a lot of laughter and teasing and joking, there are strong friendships and even some serious romantic relationships. There is also rage, all bottled up, expressed mostly at other inmates, because expressing it to our warders would be an exercise in futility and result in anything from further humiliation to severe punishment. Today my ground crew along with all of CMS (camp maintenance services includes garbage, electric, plumbing, carpentry, etc.) was on the bus to be taken back to our building for lunch when Mr. Silba (sp?), Grounds' version of Mr. Metielski, came on the bus and goes, "Shut up!" Just like that ? he doesn't have to ride the bus with us or anything, just wanted our attention so he could say, "From now on I don't want any one getting on the bus early because the days are getting hotter and I don't need you all sitting here sweating and stinking up my bus." The rage I'm talking about is from things like that, the little (little?) things of how one is treated day to day, the reminder again and again : you are worthless. you are bad. you deserve punishment. you are not in charge. I guess the reason I called that a little thing is because of the other issue I've been listening to/helping out with this week. Imagine for a moment: You came into prison with a late period. You've `been careful' so maybe it's stress ? nonetheless you mark "possibility" when the paperwork asks if you are pregnant. During your first week the usual lab samples are taken ? blood for HIV and Hepatitis testing, urine for drug and pregnancy testing. Another week passes and you have now missed two periods. You start the routine that everyone with any medical issue goes through ? the same one I went through for weeks before outside advocacy forced my issue to be addressed. You wake up early every morning to go to 6:30am sick call. You say, am I pregnant? are the lab results in? Come back tomorrow, I'll check. You come back tomorrow only to get the same answer ? come back tomorrow ? I didn't have time to check, but tomorrow. You come back tomorrow and are told, come back next week ? I'll know Monday. You consider your life ? you are in prison. you've lost your job. You've lost your apartment. you owe the gov't more than $150,000 restitution. You decide you want an abortion. You go back on Monday. No results. Tuesday, no results. For 3 weeks you check every day and there are no lab results. The doctor says to you, "You know, if there was a problem they would have told us. You know, this is probably all in your head, and the more you think you're pregnant and worry, the more it delays your period." (Now there's medically sound advice if I've ever heard it.) Finally you go to the unit manager who seems to know something but won't tell you ? the line has changed from "no lab results" to "I am not allowed to tell you your status as far as pregnancy goes." You're told that you'll "probably" be on the call-out to see the OB GYN "sometime" soon. That evening you are called to the C.O.'s office where an angry Mr. Metielski awaits you with a changed bed assignment-you are being moved from "top bunk status" to "bottom bunk status." Metielski is pissed. "Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?" he asks. You say, honestly, "I didn't know." The guard there smirks and says, "What? Immaculate conception?" Now that this woman knows, finally, that she's pregnant she has to start all over again with this process to figure out how to get an abortion, a procedure that changes vastly in risks and cost as more time passes. At a certain point my ability to name things is just gone, and all I can do is describe what happened. Summing it up with words like `sexism' or `inefficient bureaucracy' or `bad healthcare' feels like just that ? words. They'll all be in the report. The statistics will bear me out. Right now I don't even care ? this woman, a friends, cries every day. That is what is happening. When women fight with each other it breaks my heart ? but what are they supposed to do? Punch the idiotic doctor? Tell Mr. Metielski to go fuck himself? They chould. They would be in the hole in a second, and possibly have months, even years, added to their sentences. That is the key to prison, to the rehabilitation of prison: We will punish you until you submit. YOU WILL LEARN TO FOLLOW RULES. When you hear the quote about how you can tell the humanity of society by how it treats prisoners, that's true ? but not because compassion for prisoners would measure compassion for others, not because humane prisons would indicate humane streets. It's because prison is the microcosm of our ideal society ? prison encompasses what we, as a society, think people must know in order to be functional members of our communities. U.S. prisons spell it out clearly : submission, obedience, individualism, hierarchy, punishment. As I wrap this up, I must ask for another bit of advocacy, just as important if not more than the advocacy did on my behalf. There is a woman here named Steph who works with me on grounds. She is very strong and very amazing. She has struggled through a lot in her time here. She is a mechanic on grounds and has taken good care of me (an all our lawnmowers) during my first few weeks of working. She started out at the FCI (high security) and worked her ass off (remember: submission, obedience, punishment) to convince the powers that be to transfer her to the camp (minimum security). She has two sons, Jason and Jonathin. To be direct, it makes her sad ? depressed ? to not get mail. She sees the 3 SOA folks get called up again and again during mail call. Please trust me when I say that to say this depresses her is an UNDERSTATEMENT. Every day I get long letters from friends and family, and short notes from strangers that all boil down to the same thing : You're doing a good job, hang in there, are you o.k.?, we're thinking of you, we're praying for you. Write to Steph. Mimi and I want her to have at least a solid week of mail-call madness. Ask her about her sons. Tell her good job and congrats on making it to the camp. Say a prayer for her, and tell her what you said. Tell her about your self or your family. Send her your favorite poem or a neat picture. In order to make this happen you must all send something. If you think it won't matter, you're wrong. Knowing that people love you, care about your situation and are willing to take time to write can do SO MUCH for a prisoner's sense of self and self-worth. Stephanie Austin's address. The fact that this evil place is a FEDERAL MINIMUM SECURITY place, supposedly the BEST type of institution to be in just kills me. Also, I do have gender thoughts. Tons of them. I'm sorry I haven't written about them yet. Soon. :) In struggle, May 19, 2003 Gender ? yours and mine We have discovered again that to become conscious of something is one way to become alienated by it, that understanding reveals not simple truths, but complex layers of `the real.' How do we even talk about gender? It is not enough to simply make up new words, because new words must still be defined using old ones. Our language does not prevent us from existing, but it prevents us from naming ourselves, which we have been taught means ownership, which is the most important value of the culture we were raised by and are still in many ways inundated with. I notice more and more that you (and I) define our gender(s) with a series of contextual and contradictory positionings. We know that gender is social ? socialized, a source of social power, a means and basis for social punishment and marginalization. We know that gender is individual, cannot be neatly separated from sex and or sexuality, comes from feelings outside and bodies inside. It is essential but changes with age, self-awareness, internalization, lovers, children, and expression. It is classed and racialized, every religion (including progressive secularism) has rules for it, Nations and other governments shape it and are shaped by it. Out of all this still emerges that simple pressing question: WHO THE HELL AM I? You say you are a woman because that is what we call people with breasts and vaginas who bleed regularly and could give birth if they chose, even though you know that many women do not meet any of those criteria, and many people who do meet these criteria are not women. You know that you are woman enough to be flirted with, harassed by, subject to the sexual attention of men, but you are not woman enough to actually feel or return those attractions ? except with men who are rather womanly, men who actually are women and assorted others whose self-definition, gender-wise, is at least as long and complicated as your own. You could use the word `feminine' to describe yourself physically, except when your leg hair is showing or you get another haircut, and even then you are left wondering, is this really the difference between feminine & masculine? Hair? You could use the word `hardcore' to describe yourself, your politics, your arrest record, your vision of what the world could be, but why should militancy, radicalism be framed as un-feminine? In dominant culture which you live in, they're defined as unfeminine because they are undesirable, and implying that they are a sign of gender deviance is a way to control you ? hence men who share your beliefs are effeminate hippy faggots while women are mainly deviant bulldaggers. The gender binary in reverse, called upon to show the perversion of the world for which you advocate. Complicated because non-dominant culture(s), which you also live in, and which you are also trying to CREATE, welcomes, at the least, a reverse of the gender binary, if not the complete transformation of it. So how do you say, it's not either, or, it's and, both My (your, that is) radicalism IS a departure from femininity in that you are departing from these silly control via sexism rules about how long the hair on various body parts must be or what beliefs your lips and body must speak and live in order to remain beautiful. AND it's an embrace of femininity because femininity is part of you and you are learning to embrace yourself. AND it's a redefinition of femininity because, and this is for all the macho radicals out there, the revolution doesn't have to swagger around gaining and defining power through violence, sexism, or the masculinization of resistance. AND it's a challenge to the whole binary itself, because you are NOT always or solely feminine. Here we are a good page and a half later and I probably have still not captured all or even most of the complexities you face in thinking about, let alone defining, your gender(s). I think this is why many trannys and young feminists try to write about who they are and end up with these strange tracts ? I am a glittery rocket ship flying straight into the hearts of starts, etc. No. you are not in outer space. You are right here. You have beautiful eyes. Your hair is dark & soft and somewhat tangled when long and, I imagine, very thick when short. You have a million different smiles, including a heart-struck shy one that is probably on your face right now. You are small and have strong shoulders and hands. You will arm wrestle anyone, and tie them or win. When you laugh your dimples go deep and your eyes close part of the way and you put your hand on your breastbone, gently. If someone who didn't know you read this description they would not know if you were a man or a woman. If someone who knew you read this description, they would know it was you. Is that your gender? Yes, it is that and more. It is hands cuffed and body limp, carried to a police van. It is fingernails dirty with mud and compost and recyclables. It is a keeper in your dresser and blood-stained sheets and underwear. It is organic deodorant and herbal shampoos that leave you smelling like? yourself. It is more simple AND more complex than most people would have you believe. Sometimes I want to be able to use man and woman and gender in the exact right ways and a particular order, like cracking a code and suddenly finding that they are enough to say who I am or who I love. But I can't and they won't. We have to keep using them because of the society we are in, we have to keep using them even if it's only to point out again and again how ridiculously inadequate they are. When we're out there, trapped in these words, showing how the traps hurt us, using our pain to discredit its source, using the source to define the pain, we have to remember who we are. What we look like when we smile. How we feel when we're being held. What we do with our bodies other than possess genitals. Those are my thoughts on gender for now. Not all of my thoughts, obviously. But I hope it is ______ to read ? interesting? thought- provoking? funny? Whatever, as long as it's not a waste of time. <3 Jesse Jessica Carr 91389-020 |