Rini Yun Keagy

Shelby Johnson: This is exciting! I'm so happy to be talking to you. I really loved all of the work that I saw of yours. A first question, to pull from the name FEMEXFILM Archive - how do you define “feminist” and “experimental”? What do these terms mean to you? Do you define yourself as a feminist?

Rini Yun Keagy: It's so lovely to be speaking with you, too, and thank you for seeing my work! Yes, I am a feminist. This term, however, I feel is limiting, especially in the context of a kind of fractured lexicon we currently employ in society - one coming out of a cultural argument that extends from identity politics. By argument, I mean that there still exists among some people a refusal to acknowledge the types of inequities and oppressions that certain groups experience on a daily basis or have experienced through history. So the idea of speaking to truth or some sort of veracity of experience is very difficult right now – it seems that people are speaking different languages.

To be more direct to your question, feminism to me is a recognition of the trajectory of human society, which first constructed the gender binary then utilized it over centuries to oppress roughly one half of society– namely anyone who was not a man. It is through a suppression of their voices, their rights, and their ability to thrive as the other half does, who in turn held/hold all the power to make decisions – economic and social –the power to mold the world in their favor. A feminist to me is somebody (of any gender) who acknowledges this trajectory and, more importantly, who promotes the active reversal of its effects. I should mention, when I say women, I mean any sort of identity position that has suffered the same types of oppressions for the same reasons, especially those of marginalized race, social class, sexuality, ability, etc. So, feminism begins with acknowledgement (often intersectional) and is continued through political and personal action to change it, for the future. It’s very future looking.

In terms of “experimental,” the term came into use because it was a sort of catch-all category outside of the dominant forms that cinema started taking in the early 20th century, which would be fictional narrative films and linear documentary. Anything outside of those two categories became “experimental.” This I find also limiting, as it generalizes a vast array of formal possibilities of the filmic medium into one word. I don’t think it’s very useful.

Luckily, those of us really interested in the medium of moving image have been having this discussion for some time, asking: what are these forms? What is the range of possibilities? What questions should we be asking of this (somewhat ever-changing) medium? How was this medium pushed historically and how can it be pushed now? If we look at the history of experimental filmmaking as being the bastard step-child of the Hollywood industry, or what cinema became synonymous with, we do see artists really pushing those boundaries despite obstacles, creating new forms, innovating, thinking forward. Unfortunately, many of these innovations are co-opted by the mainstream, then presented as if the mainstream had invented them.

On another thread with experimental filmmaking, its history has been much like the other sectors of film: extremely male and white dominated. The experimental film movements of the 50s and 60s are practically synonymous with white, privileged men. So this is another thing a lot of filmmakers of color, or women, or anybody who identifies as non-binary has had to address and resist.

S: I can definitely see where you are coming from. I really like your idea of “thinking forward”; I think it’s a very useful way of situating feminism and the same thing for experimental film. It has to be future-looking to truly be experimental, to be doing something new. Also, the hegemonic nature of mainstream cinema versus what is defined as “experimental” is othering towards people who are doing things that are different, that are not so stuck in these paths of capitalism… Anything that doesn’t make money, or isn’t mainstream is called “experimental” or “feminist”; and that means that it’s not important, which feels very limiting to me.

R: Absolutely, it simply perpetuates the current norms.

S: I know you identify as a mixed-race or multiracial person. How does that experience inform your work? Does it connect with feminism to you or your experience of creating things?

R: It affects every aspect of my life and how I must navigate in the world. First of all, my identity connects with feminism because being multiracial is still a minoritarian perspective. We are still a curiosity to others who can’t quite place us, can’t quite identify us. When you’re mixed racially, at times you are also culturally different from people in your own family and in your own domestic space. This kind of displacement of identity is obviously very disorienting. One of the very poignant experiences that we must continually endure is this idea that we may not even 'belong' in our home, let alone to any particular group outside of it. You can’t trace your lineage to a single origin – it’s always multiple. And what's interesting is that multiplicity oftentimes equates a sort of absence or nothingness. Since you can’t locate a site of origin, you can’t locate a definitive explanation of your identity. It's fragmented, scattered, it’s difficult for others (and sometimes even ourselves) to perceive or understand.

I remember when I started at UC Berkeley (years ago!) – I was already a junior by then because I had transferred from several junior colleges and state colleges. I had to navigate higher education alone because my parents (divorced and from very different cultures) knew nothing about the academic system. I had parents who were first and foremost occupied with figuring out their own identities and livelihoods, as minorities and immigrants themselves. My mother emigrated from South Korea, to Germany, to Guatemala and the US, and my father, a dual-citizen of the US and Guatemala, was born in Guatemala and raised in both places. My mother speaks four languages and my father two. At Berkeley, there were a lot of student groups, like the Filipino Student club or the Korean-American club, and I realized that I couldn't quite belong to any one of them. Then I found a Hapa club, which was for people who identified as half-Asian or Pacific Islander, and I truly thought that I had finally found “my people”! What I discovered was that the students in the club were predominantly half-Asian and half-White, and that their parents were still together. A lot of them had quite a bit of money, resources, and cultural capital, because their parents were highly educated. I didn’t find anybody who had been raised like me in any sense – by a single parent with hardly a high school education who was a farmer and Latino, working blue-collar jobs. I found myself completely at odds with the people there who all seemed to come from professional backgrounds – and for me that was like coming from a different planet.

So this is when I started understanding this idea of intersectionality, although I didn’t know that term back then. That it wasn’t just a racial identity I was in conflict with, but it was a socio-economic and a cultural identity that I was grappling with. I found myself, a first generation college student, surrounded by many, many, people who had had plenty of exposure and access to cultural capital, whose parents had college educations.... and so we had nothing in common.

To answer your question of how this connects to my filmmaking or artistic practice, first of all it took over a decade to even think I could be a filmmaker. And in terms of the topics or subject matter I’m dealing with in my work, even when it may not have to do with race and class directly, it is always implicit. This can partially be understood in the sense that I embraced a more formally experimental way of expressing myself in the first place. I’ve always compulsively rejected what I’ve considered to be mainstream. And I think that’s understood by life experiences – it's when the mainstream never speaks to you. I think it very much informs who I am and how I make work.

S: When you make work that does talk about race, it can be very difficult as a mixed person to make a claim or political decision to talk about your identity. It can be very exhausting to think about privilege all the time, and where you fit in with the subject matter you want to talk about with your experiences, and if those experiences are even valid.

R: Exhausting is exactly the word, and I think that’s why some people really reject the notion that they ever have to talk about their race. I would just argue that I can’t ever ignore it, because it’s prevalent in my life: it’s how I look, it’s how I’m perceived in the world. Maybe it's a defense mechanism or something, but it’s something I have to talk about. It’s indirectly there, because any experience that I’ve had has been pretty much colored by that.

S: Yeah. You can just pretend, but it's not going to make the way that you've grown up or experienced life just go away. It won't disappear just because you maybe want it to–– but that is just race in general.

R: Absolutely. We do not live in a post racial world. That is just a fact. I've also been thinking a lot about disability. I don't know if this comes through in my work yet, because it's something that I always felt that I couldn't make films about, but it's territory that I'm recently starting to explore.

I think that it will become part of my body of work in a more direct way going forward, because I've always suffered from autoimmune disease. It's something that I always thought I couldn't talk about. I thought it's just something I have to suffer through. I am so absolutely grateful for the people who have brought issues of disability and ableism into the national and international arts discourse as something that we all have to address.

It's perhaps more on the forefront nowadays this idea of resisting the body as a machine of production. Rather that this body, in all of its weakness, can also create discourse, can create knowledge, or can imagine other kinds of futures that aren't reliant on the able body, on being a so-called productive citizen of a nation state. I explored the idea of forced labor and the 'philosophical concept of sloth' in my thesis film (for which Irene Lusztig was an advisor) when I worked with young Cambodian artists in Philadelphia whose family members had suffered the forced labor regime of the Khmer Rouge. A bit later, I was able to meet a contemporary filmmaker/artist whose work has since really inspired me in this direction, Carolyn Lazard. She lives in Philadelphia.

R: In 2018, I was an artist in residence at the University of Minnesota Special Collections and Archives in their library system. I worked in the Wangensteen Biomedical Archive, which is an archive of medical books and illustrations, dating from 1430 to 1930, and I really wanted to look at how medicine has been written about, the progression of this intellectual field, and also the science behind all of this.

I was specifically looking for mosquito-borne diseases in the tropics, because the tropical world generally constitutes what we call the Global South. What I found during the Age of Exploration and then during the Colonial Era was that Europeans would come to these tropical lands and find that mosquitoes were causing a lot of diseases they hadn't previously known. So they started this whole plan of eradicating the mosquito. That plan still continues to this day, although now in a more globalized sense. But in the past, the project of mosquito eradication was a colonial project that was enacted on the backs of people who ended up becoming indentured servants or slaves, who were out basically changing their own landscapes, diverting the waterways, clear cutting for agriculture, in order to get rid of the mosquito. This was mostly not for the benefit of the natives, but for the benefit of the white colonials who didn't want to contract diseases.

So I thought this was really interesting, because when I was three years old and living in Guatemala, I was bit by a mosquito, and I got encephalitis, which is sort of like meningitis. It affects your spine and then your brain. It's essentially a swelling of the brain, and it often causes you to go into a coma. I was in a coma for about a week, and my parents were told that I had a 30% chance of living, and I ended up surviving.

But my father always says that I have never been the same since, and it's really kind of sad, because he thinks that I was more of a happy child before, and then afterwards, I was very irritable [laughs]. I think that perhaps this did change me for the rest of my life, and in some ways, it's probably what caused me to be a very critical thinker! I've also read that encephalitic children who became comatose but survived often have loads of anomalous health problems as adults.

I sometimes really wonder - “Why was my body so susceptible to this disease?” So I started researching, because I'm very interested in disease as it relates to race. There are diseases, throughout the world and historically, that have had greater impacts on certain races and genders over others. You’ll probably remember from reading “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” that there is this notion of autoimmune diseases being a kind of a Western and very female thing, because something like 75% of autoimmune cases affect girls/ women.

I sort of feel monstrous and mutant-like at times, but I'm just really interested in how the medical system deals with bodies, and especially different bodies. Western medicine inadvertently caused the creation of the term “racialized body” because it's exactly what it doesn't deal with very well, at all. So that is all part of a kind of ongoing project.

There is a film that I didn’t show you, that is meant to be a part of an installation. It plays on a little iPad through this box with a hole in it. I originally called the installation Voicebox, but the video is called She is a Singer/ Notre Dame is Burning. Last year I lost my voice for two months due to a severe upper respiratory infection. I was in this state of isolation where I couldn't speak with anybody. When I did have to communicate, it was through notebooks, writing notes that I'd pass back and forth with someone speaking to me, but also using an electronic voice on my phone or computer when necessary – like when I was a passenger in someone's vehicle or in larger meetings. So, I made a video sort of about this technology and it utilizes some of the medical reports that I got where the reports are read through some of the electronic voices that I was using – which are all somewhat eerie. The video is kind of comedic, which was a huge departure for me, but I think I needed to make something to lighten the heaviness of isolation. When I show that video in public, I always mention that when I made the film, I didn’t have a voice, and that in this case I am commenting on my experience with a temporary disability and not a permanent disability. I always want to acknowledge the fact that temporary disabilities are very different from disabilities that myself and others suffer throughout their lives.

In the future, I am really thinking of moving more outside of the moving image. I'm thinking of using some of these artifactual medical data to create installations or something a little bit more tactile and embodied, because I do find that making films is very disembodied. So that's kind of the direction I'm headed.

S: Yeah, I was going to say that I noticed you have been creating more video installations or showing films in more three dimensional ways. I agree with what you are saying about filmmaking as this disembodied experience. There is something about an installation or a gallery context that feels more embodied or tactile. There is definitely something special about moving and walking through a space where you are experiencing art in this very embodied way in a very specific context versus in a traditional cinema screening format.

I want to ask you what has drawn you to more installation, because based on the work I was able to see, you have been doing more installations and collaborative works as of more recently.

R: I started thinking towards collaboration because I really wanted to incorporate more embodied movement. For example, One Removed, which I made with performer Chitra Vairavan and visual artist Tia-Simone-Gardner, is an audio-visual piece with live performance. I wanted to incorporate the body, movement and sound in a more immersive form. It's a different way of thinking through movement, when some of it is live. I think it's one of my interests in expanding outside of the frame of “Cinema” with a capital C and the theatrics of sitting and watching a screening in a dark room. I’m really interested in material form and the possibilities of all of it. Sometimes I think,“oh no” it’s not limiting enough, because I do need limitations around my work. The idea of having limitless possibilities is very overwhelming to me.

But at the same time, based on what we've been talking about in terms of being multiracial and multicultural; having a sort of fragmented, fractured type of existence; having lived in many, many places around the world and in the States, I feel that there isn't a single medium that really encapsulates the way that I feel I can be expressive, in the kinds of gestures or the kinds of ideas that I want to explore.

I think of having gone to film school as a graduate student... this is the most fascinating thing to me, and it’s something that took me a long time to realize, because I felt so excited about going to film school, never having thought I'd have the opportunity... When I started film school, I was not a filmmaker, but I had invested in a video camera after college. I had gotten a job, and I had some income, and I bought a video camera. To me that was very revolutionary, because growing up we never had any kind of moving image producing device – I have no images of myself as a child in film or video. We didn't even have that many pictures of ourselves. So having a video camera in my hand was just very revolutionary to me. I started using it by just filming things that I found surreal, that were real, around me. I started trying to capture the sensorial around me. I tried to play and experiment with movement: both my own body moving through space and, by extension, the camera moving through space; but also, just movement in the world. I started experimenting formally with this medium of video.

So I knew that if I were to get into film school, I needed to have something in my portfolio. And I had never really edited before, but I decided to take all of these fragments of things that I had filmed. Because I really think in terms of gestures. Like, have you ever sat in a park and, just, done some people watching, or looked at a tree swaying in the wind? All of these things are so fascinating to me. What do these things really add up to? What kinds of ideas can be derived from them? So I took all of these fragments and I edited together something that had a kind of rhythmic flow, that had a sort of playfulness, that was very gestural. And I really loved it. I loved the process and I was just making it up as I went along. I never had any formal training in any of this.

This is a very long story to tell you that, after years of grad school, I felt like I lost that instinctual, impulsive instinct to just make something. Instead, I felt that my creativity and ability to make things was stifled by all of the discourse around the film canon and what I "should" be making. What topics were off-limits? What forms were off-limits for me to use? I had a professor who told me I could not make a Dada film if I wanted to experiment with that form. He just said, "No, you can't do that." There was a lot of "You can't do this."

It's very difficult to unlearn something, and there is a certain kind of indoctrination that happens when you go to school and you start thinking in the company of others.

Obviously I learned so much and it has shaped a lot of who I am, but it also robbed me of a certain type of spontaneity and belief in myself that I had before I went to grad school. It became about claiming space. I think I'm sort of rebelling against these confines and wanting to distance myself from capital F “Film”.

S: I really love the performative aspect of your work, especially with your newest project, so fragile so wild, which is a found footage film you made that was accompanied by a live orchestra performance. I know it just premiered on February 4, 2020. How did the performance go?

R: I was so excited about this, because, as an artist, you can't disentangle yourself from your audience or how you're perceived in the world or characterized by others.

I mean, this is the same thing as identity formation in society. I can't control how people see me or what kinds of prejudices or racism they'll have against me. In your artistic career, it's very similar. It's like this kind of weird negotiation of "Who am I as an artist?" and "How do people see me as an artist?"

When my friend deVon Russell Gray who is a local composer, asked me to do this film, he said, "Hey, I was commissioned to compose music for this program. Do you want to work together and collaborate on this?" I looked up the program, which was a silent film showcase with live musical accompaniment by a string quartet, then told him, "I really don't think any of my films are going to go with this program.” I mean, we're talking about silent era films like Laurel and Hardy, and what essentially constitutes this extremely white history in the United States and the burgeoning of Hollywood.

I didn't want to do it. And deVon, who is black and who grew up in St. Paul says (of music composition), "This is the most white male-oriented field you could possibly imagine. Going back to Mozart and Beethoven, they're literally wearing white wigs and they have European ancestry. The reason I'm asking you is because I want to shake things up. Let's do something totally different. I'm being commissioned to do this. I get to choose." So then we started brainstorming and I thought it might be fitting to make a film completely out of archival footage... so of course I went to the Internet Archive. But one of the things that always happens to people of color or of marginalized histories is that when they look in any archive, they do not find themselves. It’s frustrating, and I decided I was going to try to find every woman of color I could find and make a film to celebrate them.

I went to the program, and my film played first. The second film was a montage of old 1950s sci-fi films and space footage, the two others were a Laurel and Hardy film and this 1914 silent slapstick comedy, Daisy Doodad’s Dial.

I don’t have anything specifically against silent era films – it happens to be an important part of film history, but when I was sitting there watching those two last films, it was very violent to me, because it makes me think about all the erasure that is happening in the moment of these films’ creation. This was the entertainment for all of the populace, and just thinking about the violence of that time period and what it meant to be a person of color in the United States during that time, and how sad and sickening it is. To sum up, while I had these huge reservations, and still have some reservations about the posterity of me being in that program [laughs] I realized that what happened is actually quite subversive, which I really liked being a part of. These people, these very lovely nice white men who are running the show, and who do this every year, they had to go up and introduce me and they had to introduce deVon and had to say, “Usually we don’t do this kind of thing,” in front of this huge audience of like 800 people, mostly older white people. It made a lot of the older white people very uncomfortable and I’m glad that it happened. So in this sense, I think that something happened there and sometimes we have to break out of our safer spaces where we’re preaching to the choir. We have to move our work to a venue that is not historically accepting of that kind of thing.

I think it was really fantastic. To describe it a little more, my film was the only one that had not only the string quartet – who were truly brilliant, by the way, but also deVon and another musician DJ'd on stage making live electronic sounds, and we also had a dancer on stage choreographing movement with the movements of the film itself.

S: You should have definitely had the last spot in the program!

R: I know! It was really strange, because it was the first thing, and everybody was in a state of shock, and then it was like we went back to the usual programming. So it was really fantastic. It was this huge audience, and even during intermission or ahead of the show out in the lobby when people were buying tickets, it was just incredible to be in a venue where people were so fancy and dressed up – but subjected to experimental film!

So it was a huge learning experience, and it was really wonderful to collaborate with musicians and performers in movement. It really opened up my mind to other possibilities. And the last thing I’ll say is about the actual music that deVon composed. I would have never had the idea to compose that particular tone or kind of music for my film – I would have no idea how to go about composing for viola, cello and violin. It was really interesting to see my work and my perspective being juxtaposed and combined with somebody else’s completely different angle and expertise on it. And then seeing the visual, sonic, and live experience come together. It was great.

S: I’m so happy that it went well. I think it’s so important to be making things that will be seen by people who wouldn’t normally come to your work and wouldn’t normally want to watch a bunch of archival material of women of color. I guess I want to know if this was a frustrating process for you? We spend so much time trying to find marginalized people in these mass media archives, and when I do find them, I get this feeling that I am supposed to be grateful for it?

R: Right. One thing you might have recognized in so fragile, so wild is that initial sequence where you see the white women from ads or other types of campaigns. In no way did I intend for this film to be “anti-White woman.” In fact, I hope that people might come away with the idea that I am celebrating and empathizing with all women. Those white women who are in the beginning of the film are all in the position of having to show off their beauty and are pawns to this conformist beauty standard.

You’ll notice that a lot of the stuff from the beginning of the film is very high production value. A lot of it came from ads and commercials from the 1950s and 1960s. You can tell that these were shot with the best cameras, good lighting, and that there was a whole studio behind it. And when you get to the last two-thirds of the film and you are looking at all of the women of color, it’s not the best footage. That’s something you often encounter when you’re doing archival research. Much of what I found could also be considered ethnographic footage of women in different parts of the world, because they were being studied as specimens in some form or another. While there is an objectifying gaze upon the White women, here the gaze is objectifying and exotifying. But I made it a point that after the first third of the film, you only see women of the color until the end, and I edited it to give a sense of agency to them that was perhaps not afforded in the original material. They often look back at the viewer, just as the young girl does who visually 'narrates' the film.

So yes, it’s very frustrating, but it’s also an impetus for doing more of the work. It’s also going back, full circle, to this idea of thinking about the future. It’s like the work I have been doing with Tia-Simone Gardner. We’ve now had two shows together, one at Napoleon Gallery in Philadelphia and one at The White Page in Minneapolis. Our work often deals with this idea of the “colonial archive,” which includes everything that is there, but also everything that is absent. Everything that is absent constitutes as much a part of the colonial archive. It's an impetus for us to engage in the act of creation/ to make work around the things which were destroyed intentionally or the things that were erased and left out.

It’s a really strong motivation to make work. How do I make work that is going to somehow fill in the absences, fill in the spaces of history? During the time I was doing archival work in the Wangensteen Biomedical Library, I was also working in the Immigration History Research Center Archives. I was looking specifically for Guatemalan Civil War Era migration documentation. And I was looking for first-hand accounts of the migrants themselves. For example, an indigenous Guatemalan in the year 1985, who fled a certain village to come across the border. I'm looking in these archives and I'm thinking, I just want to hear that person's own voice and their own account of what that was like, but all you find is stacks and stacks of documentation from Amnesty International, all of the NGOs, or the governmental organizations that were dealing with these bodies coming across the border as statistical data. First-hand accounts just don't exist, they weren't documented because it wasn't important enough to do so according to the organizations doing the work to help them. So these things are always mediated through the people in power and the people who have voice.

Archaeologists now sometimes use this technology to understand what might be beneath the surface of a particular landscape. Since 2018 and then continuing on for the last two years, archeologists have found thousands of Mayan structures under thick jungle cover that they never knew existed. What I love about this is that these ancient pasts, which were very, very viciously removed and erased through the imperialist project – in this case Spanish colonialism and Catholicism –are now coming back to the surface, because we have this technology. These things are coming back alive, in a certain sense. I really want to do a project around that, because to me, that metaphor is just so absolutely beautiful. Especially in the age of land acknowledgements, with this erasure there is a kind of resurfacing. I just really want to explore that metaphor a little bit more. I have been in contact with people who work with LIDAR and it’s something that I really hope that I am able to do eventually.

S: I really like how you’re always thinking about the future in all of your work and it’s just such a useful way to make work and to think about history. Thinking about the future, is there something you would like future generations to take away from your work, decades from now?

R: That’s an interesting question, because I don’t think about legacy so much. We live in a country that’s really obsessed with legacy, and that’s one of the reasons our politics are so messed up. But in my relatively short lifetime, so much has changed and I am really interested in how our cultural discourse has changed and how norms are transformed. Earlier in my life, there’s absolutely no way I would have thought that these giant institutions, like the Oscars for example, would now be starting to be infiltrated by people who are recognizing that they have power and a voice. They’re going in and saying things that would never have been said during my childhood. I still don't take the Oscars seriously, of course, but they still yield enormous power, influence and attention and that part must be taken seriously. Too many people are fighting everything that shifts their own sense of power, tooth and nail. But it's important to recognize that minute changes can become large transformations over time.

I also think it’s crucial to always live in a world where you understand that there are different generational sensibilities. All the the things we've been discussing in this conversation are political and have wide ranging ramifications. We need to hold space for growth, openness to new ideas, and especially those that come out of a new generation, because they are the ones that are necessarily occupied by the real future.

S: Do you have any advice for people that are just starting out making films, like people who are students or otherwise that are interested in creating this kind of work?

R: Something that really messed me up as a younger person is that I was convinced by society, as it was, that other people had the power to determine who I was. And I am understandably still plagued by the injurious effects this wrought on my sense of self and personhood. So I would tell any young artist to embrace your own determination and your own agency to define who you are. This is a path to finding your specific, particular, unique form of expression. It's fine to emulate others, to admire others, to study other people who have gone before you or people who have had more experience or have made things that you really like. But it’s important to not invalidate your impulses, because you are comparing them to other people’s ideas, or other people’s products, or the way that other people get accolades. Movement only ever happens and change only happens through a certain amount of risk and pain and getting out of your safety zone—testing the waters and pushing through the barriers that you think exist. The inequities in society and the negative representation of certain groups of people of course have had deleterious effects on those folks. It's difficult to disentangle our own perceptions of ourselves from what we've been fed. And this weakens our own ability to be who we are and to affect change for others. But communities are recognizing and resisting and knowing, that if we don’t allow ourselves to be who we are and do what we want to do, then we are essentially saying to other people who might be in our same situations, that “You can’t do it either.” We need more role models, more people who are resisting against other people defining them.

It’s easier said than done for sure, but I have been doing a lot of thinking and reflecting upon creativity in general and about what is a creative space. How do we create a space or zone for us to truly thrive and to think and and explore our own ideas without being inundated by everything else? Unfortunately, a lot of that comes from having some leisure time. It comes from rejecting all of the noise in the world, and saying “Right now is my own time. It’s my time to be quiet. It’s my time to explore my own thoughts and my own opinions.” And unfortunately many of us don’t have that kind of luxury.

Another thing I would really like to explore in the future, which also has a bit to do with illness, is the relationship between time and labor. I find that in everyday American activities, there is a lot of time wasted. And I don't mean leisure activities, I mean some of the inane responsibilities that we sometimes are forced to have. One of the things I really try to honor for my students is their time. So for example, I try to start class on time and I end class on time. I don’t make them linger and stay longer and lose track of time. I mean, this might be a radical thought for some, but when someone disregards or disrespects your time, I believe it is racist, it is classist, it is ableist, and it is sexist. It is sexist because women make 60 cents on the dollar. It is classist because a lot of people are working, they are laboring for hours and hours of the day and barely making any money because their labor isn’t worth as much as other people’s labor. It is racist because, as we know, most of the people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are of marginalized races, and it’s ableist because it’s like you’re saying “Your time is the same as everybody else’s.” When you’re somebody who is disabled in any way, you have to have so much more time to rest your body, to take care of your body, to feed yourself, etc... So to me, time and labor are these very fraught things and they very much intersect with each other. It’s something, as a disabled woman of color that I experience a lot. For people like me, the act of allowing ourselves permission to not give all our time to everything and everyone, and to not rob ourselves of our ability to thrive, limited as it is, has been socialized out of us. It's unfortunate that it is a 'radical idea' to take such care for ourselves. I think it is metaphorically similar to what I was saying about claiming your space and not letting other people define you. It’s much, much, much easier said than done. But we need to say it first before we can start practicing it.