2011: Email from İllet* Ahead of the Evaluation Meeting
Hello,
We are writing this text having learned that an evaluation meeting will be held about the March 8 night march. As women/trans people who participated in this march, we want to attend this evaluation meeting, share our feelings and thoughts, give and receive criticism, convey our words and listen to others’ views. But our concerns, too, reach beyond mountains. We cannot be sure it will be a space where we can speak sincerely together, in an environment where no one is judged or interrogated and hierarchy is not reproduced. During the march, some of our friends were subjected to violence by some women present there, and we witnessed some others suffering violence that went beyond criticism and even imposition. We cannot locate what we experienced within any kind of feminism (its essence, if there is one; its true form, if there is one; its ethics, if there are any; and so on). Some of our friends were treated as deliberate saboteurs, and some of us were subjected to various insults. We hear that the contents of the banners we carried are being discussed in various email groups. We do not know whether anyone has questioned the form of the criticisms directed at placards, the “warnings” made, the insults hurled during the action, and even the interventions directly imposed on our bodies.
As a result of these events we experienced, we are concerned about being subjected during the meeting too to an aggressive tone and a condescending gaze, about being placed in the position of the “group under scrutiny”. And we need this sensitivity to be taken into account, with “violence” the first item on the agenda. Before we can undertake any assessment of content, we first need this ethical condition to be met. See you at the evaluation meeting.
Sent by: İllet
* “İllet is an anti-authoritarian autonomous collective centred on lesbians, bisexuals, queer, intersex and trans people, on the side of pleasure and resistance. İllet is a monster that takes on the appearance of an owl at night, a witch burned in the Middle Ages, a feminist haunting patriarchy, a trans man admitted neither to a women’s party nor to the coffeehouse. In newspapers, it is the ‘killer lesbian’, the ‘cleaver-wielding transvestite’. It is our desires we deny, the pressure identities place upon us, the revolutionary who wants to dance.” Source: https://illetblog.wordpress.com/