Jadelynn Stahl

Jadelynn Stahl interviewed by Emerson Latshaw

Friday October 23rd, 2020, 9:00 am

Emerson: Can you please give a brief introduction of who you are and what you do?

Jadelynn: Yes, my name is Jadelynn Stahl, which is the name that I use in my artistic work. Jadelynn St Dre is the name my partner and I took, and that's the name that I use in my practice as a clinical therapist - an arts-based trauma therapist and sex therapist. So if you do any research on me you will often see both of those names. I use she/her pronouns. For the purposes of this interview, I'm going to be focusing on my work as a community organizer and as an artist, specifically creating collaborative community art work within the context of the movement to end sexual assault.

Emerson: When did you first start getting involved in artistic activism? And what made you interested in it?

Jadelynn: So as my background, you know when I was a younger person I was involved in traditional theater, so I did a lot of traditional theater performances. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and it was there that I started to really explore some of the performance art traditions, specifically feminist and queer performance art traditions of the 1970s and 1980s. I was really inspired by people like Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle, Ana Mendieta, La Pocha Nostra, groups of folks that were doing really radical political work and it kind of opened my mind to the fact that I could move out of the more traditional legit theater and into work that was both devised by myself or in collaboration, and also applied this political commentary, specifically at this time. I was influenced by feminist performance art, I was using my body as the context for which we were exploring violence against the bodies of women. My work was often explicit: I was exploring sexuality and there was a lot of taking off my clothes and covering myself in red karo syrup type of stuff - so a lot of what now seems like young, explorative performance art work.

So after I did that I became involved with the group called the LIDA project. This was a group of folks in Denver who devised socio-political performance work together and radical performance work and they had a really incredible method. We would take a subject and collaboratively create the work over six months together and then perform the work to the public. It was through that group that I created some of my really early collaborative relationships with people like Brian Freeland, Julie Rada, folks that we're doing theater in the traditional format in the sense that folks were coming to see it at like 8 o'clock on a Friday, but in a completely non traditional format in the sense that the location with which we were performing with always changing and often in the public sphere. The subject matter that we were working with was explicitly political and radical and it was so inspiring for me to be around these folks and to discover that performance work could be a vehicle in this way.

I am mixed race. My mother's family is Mestizo and came to the States from Mexico. And my father's family is white European, German predominantly. My mother made the decision to cut off her family for a variety of reasons, including trauma, so I didn't have a lot of access to information about those ancestors or our cultural or racial background. Growing up in Southern California, however, we knew we were different and sometimes people would make loaded comments. I got a lot of like, “you're very exotic looking.” Around 12 or 13 we were kind of like something's different about our family. And it was then that we started to discover and kind of unearth bits of information that contextualize our cultural racial experience as a family, specifically, and how assimilation and the impact of anti-Lantinx racism really impacted us.

And also growing up, I was a person that experienced multiple incidents of sexual assault and experiences of intimate partner assault and witnessed that happening in my family as well. So there's an intergenerational trauma component of my history where many generations of women and men, my family does not have any people that identify as nonbinary or trans for now, so both cis women and cis men, this legacy of trauma has been pervasive throughout the course of many generations. I highlight the gender-based violence component and I highlight the racialized component, the cultural racial component of those experiences of trauma because that's what I focus on in my artistic work. Around the time I was working with LIDA, I had just left a very abusive relationship and was kind of starting to get my feet back underneath me after many, many years of experiencing trauma and abuse.

And it was at that point that I started to really discover how creating artistic work that directly addressed this trauma and, in fact, contextualized it in a larger frame of how this trauma plays out in the world in general and how so many people experience this kind of violence felt like something that I did that directly impacted my ability to transform and experience restoration from those experiences of harm, and also felt as though I was impacting the larger intergenerational frame. So it was around my mid-20s that I moved to New York and that I started to get involved in some activism and organizing around LGBTQIA+ folks - I’m also queer - and started to do more International performances and national tours that were dealing explicitly with political content looking specifically at violence.

So that's the background of it, but it wasn't until probably my late 20s that I started to organize more explicitly. It was definitely around the subject of sexual violence, different kinds of events would happen. Slutwalk was an event that I got involved in and at that point, I also organized and co-founded a group called DISCLOSE, which is group of queer folks that organized the community specifically through artistic direct action, exhibition and through salons where we would invite survivors of violence - and we use the word Survivor and there's a critique we could bring to that word, not all folks that have experienced sexual assault identify as survivors - but people that experienced sexual assault would come together in someone's home, in a confidential space and an artist that identified as the same would present artistic work and that would create the basis from which we would jump off and have these larger conversations around experiences of harm. Artistic work creates this different language for us to be able to speak in, to express these deeply somatic experiences that are often hard to articulate in words, and yet the world wants us to be able to. I am doing broad strokes here, but I started organizing with DISCLOSE and then from that part got involved in more community organizing at the local level.

And then also at the national level, that's around the time I met Hannah and started organizing with FORCE as well around the Monument Quilt and that has kind of carried me to now. There's many other components of the work I'm doing but I don't want to kind of answer every question in one statement.

And so that's all to say that a lot of times people will ask, “When did you become politicized?” as connected to how I got started in this, and my answer to that is really that coming from the family that I did and experiencing violence throughout the course of my young life, being politicized wasn't something that was really a choice, right? Yeah, because these components of my experience, my family's experience, and so many people, so many experiences of the people I care about, being a queer person, as well, being a woman, being a femme - all of these things conspire to place me in the context of a world where politics impact my world directly and fiercely and also compels me to be aware of the ways in which barriers are in place or harm is inflicted that seems out of my control as a result of these identities. And so organizing has felt like a direct path and and a really impactful path to be able to intervene on that harm, not only as it's happened to me, but specifically as it happens to our collective communities.

Emerson: Up until this point what has been some highlights in your journey as an artistic activist?

Jadelynn: I mean the first thing that comes to mind is community. It's a little different now, when online is a huge component to organizing. If you don't have a Facebook event for things, it feels like nobody knows about it. But one of the things that I really appreciate about organizing and what I think is essential to organizing is multi-sensory connection. Sitting in front of each other, talking, that door knock makes such a difference to be able to look someone in the face and have a conversation with them. Sharing a meal with someone, having deep, long conversations that sometimes span into the wee hours of the morning. And talking about the questions you're asking. What brings us to the work? And creating and fostering a sense of interdependence that really emphasizes one of the core elements of why organizing is so important, which is our ability to depend on each other and our ability to imagine a future that many worlds - using the words of Zapatismo - “a world in which many worlds are possible” actually intimately depends on our interdependence. And so the first thing that comes to mind is the relationships I've developed. So many incredible humans that I've been inspired by. Sometimes a person I’ll meet and I'll see their work for a brief moment or a flash in the pan or I heard them say something and feel so inspired by them and then I’ll never be in contact with them again. Or people that - we met at an organizing room and now have been friends for years and years and years and that I depend on in so many other ways in the context of my life. So I think the relationships are one of the big highlights.

And then other highlights - I'm a person who really enjoys the creation of a moment. And the organizing of a moment, like what gets us to the actual moment happening. I feel less enthralled by the performance or the product, but what feels really important to me is when I think about all the steps that have happened to make that moment of connection happen - the action, or the exhibition that is happening or the artistic works that have happened. One of the other things that feels like a highlight are those moments in which other people get to encounter the work and the messaging resonates.

For example with the bicoastal projection that DISCLOSE did in collaboration with FORCE - organizing that piece, projecting that video that we did on the Oakland Police Department. In Oakland, Celeste Guap, a sex worker of color, had just broken open the truth of how the Oakland Police Department was sexually assaulting and manipulating sex workers and other folks in order to get them to avoid charges in the Bay Area. That case had just broken open and we were a group of people that had experienced sexual violence standing in front of the OPD and with this video projected, and we had a speak-out where person after person after person got up and got on the mic in front of these lines of cops who had tried to stop us from getting to OPD -- like they sent out riot gear cops. It was totally ridiculous. Folks were just standing there on the mic talking about how they hadn't felt safe. Safety is not something that was possible with the police and there was not a way for them to access any sort of this thing we call "Justice" or sense of safety after their experiences of assault, because it felt like there was no one to go to. And to know that those officers were hearing the words of these people that have experienced violence, and what it did for those people to speak them in that context where we had created a container of safety in front of lines of armed cops that were in front of the OPD - that felt like a real highlight. So that's what I mean about these moments in which the messaging collides with people that haven't been involved in the project. We really get to see its impact that feels really important to me.

Emerson: You talked about how you are a therapist. How did you get into therapy? And does it relate to your art practice?

Jadelynn: So I got into therapy because well, I had been in therapy and I was super frustrated that none of the folks that I had gone to were other queer people, so it felt like this entire aspect of my identity was never in the room and and I never was working with responsive providers as a result. I also got into therapy because I knew that the world had an assumption on what the definition of this word 'healing' was and I knew there was a journey you were supposed to take to get there that often involves therapy and then you were supposed to get to the other side of your 'healed'. And I had tried therapy and I had bought into that idea of what healing is supposed to be, and realized that and for a while, felt like well, it must not be for me because I'm not experiencing this "other side" that everyone keeps talking about, or this incredible restorative moment that everyone talks about that is supposed to happen in therapy. So there must be something wrong with me. There's a real barrier to me moving forward. And that pissed me off.

So I got into graduate school specifically to understand the language and to critique the language of the Western psychotherapeutic field that was so clearly designed by predominantly white cisgender men and heterosexual men, and that wasn't built to represent people like me or so many other folks. So I wasn't even clear about getting licensed when I went to graduate school. I just was pissed and wanted to learn the language and understand more about the way we contextualize healing in the states. And then once I finished my internship, which was working at a shelter that worked around intimate partner assault, I did this unsanctioned community work, and DISCLOSE was part of that. I took a break from legit clinical counseling and then decided to go back in and finish my licensure credentials because I realized that one of the most significant ways to impact the field is to get license myself so I can supervise other queer folks and specifically LGBTQIA+ folks in general to get licensed, and to work with a supervisor that is actually going to be able to responsively support them and their clients. To be there for my clients as a person that, when I wasn't able to find a queer therapist, that other people WOULD be able to find one that had an anti-oppressive frame on things like sexual violence, and a multicultural, actively anti-racist frame as well.

So that's how I got into therapy, how I got licensed. Now I work in private practice. I was working for nonprofits for a long time, doing program development and clinical counseling. Now I work in a private practice and my focuses are trauma therapy and sex therapy as well. And I look at the way that those two things intersect with trauma. I work almost exclusively with LGBTQIA+ folks and also have a side specialty of working with folks that are mixed race, which is a really particular experience in the context of the states.

And it's absolutely connected to my artistic work. And the thing that's wild is that these two fields want to keep themselves apart from each other. When I do grant writing for artistic work, like Choreographies of Disclosure, when I presented it for grants often the comments that I would get back were kind of like “this feels a little bit more like therapy than art to me.” And oftentimes in therapy when I'm talking about using artistic modalities as a component of the work that I do with my clients, what I’ll hear is like, “oh art therapy? Isn't that just for kids?” So there's this real separation. The institutional art world is on its high horse. The clinical therapy world is on its high horse and never can the two meet. And the truth is that I am an artist and I am a clinician and I am the whole person. I am in all of the environments that I roll in. The reason why I use two different names, one for my artistic work and one for my clinical work, is mostly because some of my artistic work can be explicit. I have worked in Burlesque before and my clients just might not need to see that. For some of my clients, that knowledge might be helpful, but they still might not need to see it. So I keep a separation, not because I would be upset if they ever saw anything, but rather to make our clinical relationship a little more comfortable. But also simply because sometimes if I'm applying for a grant I don't want them to be able to find out I am a therapist, because then my project is art therapy in their minds. And that is a distinction that has everything to do with elitism, sort of like institutional academic posturing and something that I hope we could move beyond a little bit more.

Art creates this different language for us to express experiences of harm and trauma that we sometimes aren't able to do with just words, like in talk therapy. And thinking about the kind of holistic growth and thinking about the well-being of our collaborators in the context of artistic works is essential for us to be able to organize an effective way. So yeah, they absolutely influence each other.

Emerson: What have you learned from being a therapist?

Jadelynn: Throughout my life, I've had a lot of imposter syndrome stuff. My family before my generation, the highest level of education that almost anyone had received was high school, although my grandmother and aunt went to nursing school. But there wasn't this history in my family of academia. We were definitely broke growing up and moved to the middle class. And also, this is true as a queer person. This is true as a mixed person. There's always this way when I'm in these institutional spaces that I feel kind of knocked off my bearing and imposter syndrome teaches us that we're not supposed to be there. And so it kind of keeps us from using our voice and really achieving or presenting or offering what we are best primed to offer.

And so one thing that therapy has done has really underlined the fact that there is a place for me to be impactful that is really really needed. Because when you look at the field of therapy, it's just so clearly in need of anti-oppression intervention. It's wild, especially when we look at sex therapy. Almost all of the trainings that I go to, 90% of the room is white. Most of the folks are heterosexual. Most of the folks, if not all, of the folks are cisgender, documented, many self-identify as able-bodied - all of these things. So I have been able to find a group of folk and colleagues in that field that have helped me to continue to develop and assert a place at the table for my communities.

One thing that I know that I'm good at is looking at large systems and understanding how they connect, which is what I think is part of what makes me a good organizer. And I have found my group of people that work with me. They hold me accountable, encourage me and also ask me to do better. They inspire me and are inspired by me. And so that has been a wonderful complement to the artistic world that I'm part of as well. Yeah, and I would say that some of the emotional literacy -- or my ability to connect with people and understand some of the vulnerabilities that come with some of the asks I make when I invite people into collaboration with me because the work can be very tender -- is also helped by my clinical practice.

But most of what I learned around compassion and being emotionally intuitive was learned from growing up in abusive dynamics. Yeah, so it's kind of like my history informs my ability to be a therapist which informs my ability to be an artist and then it goes the other way around too.

Emerson: Can you talk about the importance of balancing self-care and well-being?

Jadelynn: When we're organizing, especially when it's the final hour and we're putting the finishing touches together and things are super wild and everyone's running around and trying to get stuff done, the first thing that we take off of the the docket is generally self or community care. Usually our ability to incorporate taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other is totally off the board. And the focus is just on: we have to get stuff done because right now because things are literally so critical that it feels like we don't even have the time to stop and take a breath. The problem with that is that it really feeds into this capitalist idea that if we don't keep producing and producing and producing and then we aren't going to be able to survive. And the truth is that if we don't attend to our needs as individuals and attend to the needs of the collective, whether that be our intimate community, the larger communities that we are a part of, then we have no hope of sustaining the struggle. And if we're running on fumes, our tank is empty, then we aren't able to show up as artists, as organizers, as support people in a way that provides the greatest positive impact. And when I say positive impact, I mean that site-specific impact too. Like we also can't just come and apply a rule to every environment. We also have to have the wherewithal to be able to be emotionally intelligent or intuitive enough - I think intuitive is a better word - to read what people need to connect with them on an intimate level. It's really hard to do when you're exhausted.

It's not that I'm not exhausted. Because I'm definitely exhausted. But I try to keep in mind consistently, how am I caring for myself in a way that allows me to have the energy and the reserves to be able to do this work? And to do that I have to expand the frame outside of myself and look at how I am nurturing my relationships, how I am staying in touch with the people that I've mentioned before that are part of my intimate community, how I am tending to my relationship with my partner, with my child, all of these things. It feels like a lot to balance when we describe it in that way but it's essential that we attend to ourselves in order to be able to do work that has integrity and to be able to have that energy to sustain the struggle.

Emerson: What difficulties have you faced when striving to balance both?

Jadelynn: I get it wrong all the time. Yeah, it's hard. It's very hard. I think the biggest things that I try to keep an eye on includes saying yes out of guilt or obligation -- that feels like a huge one for me. Definitely I am a person that has had to work around my codependence in really, really big ways. I'm a person that really feels the urgency behind people's needs, and so oftentimes I'll find myself saying yes, yes, yes - wanting to say yes to other people's needs in a way that steps over or ignores my own. That's one thing. And that also comes out of a scarcity mentality, being a person that has never really had access in my life to tremendous financial stability. When I first started my practice and my business, it was like "I have to just say yes to all the work", which really ran me down and put me in situations that were not always the best ones for me. So keeping an eye on my "yes's," understanding what my true yes's were and giving myself permission to use my no, feels like a really big part of balancing that struggle.

And then also accountability to myself, which is difficult to define, but taking the time to define what it means to be accountable to myself. Accountability to my community, to my intimate community and holding that frame with some degree of tenderness is the other thing that feels like it has just been really essential because I'm also a person that when I get it wrong, I feel it super, super deep. Yeah, and sometimes it'll roll and roll and roll and I won't be able to let it go and that's sort of like tearing myself apart -- it's a form of hyper vigilance. I can basically feel like I have some sort of control over something that has happened that has had an impact, that has caused harm, that I now have no control over. And I have to remind myself that we as human beings - like the poet Nayyirah Waheed, she talks about how as humans it is an intrinsic quality and deep responsibility to be both an organ and a blade. So we have the capacity to both experience harm and to cause harm.

Remembering that, and having people around me that specifically I have talked to that I can say “will you show up for me when I experience harm, when I cause harm and when I witness harm?” creates the conditions in which I can be a little bit more gentle with myself when I don't always get it right, because this taking care of self and taking care of community thing is a constant balancing act. You feel like you have 50 million plates in your hands and you're just trying to stand up straight. And so that gentleness and that tenderness feels really important, because it allows the breath that makes the room for true accountability, learning and action.

Emerson: Why do you think art is this sufficient way to address issues that are important to you?

Jadelynn: The way that people understand or are able to receive a message is really particular to each individual person. And we can also say this is the case for individual communities, right? And so at its best when we're trying to make a change, if we have a kaleidoscope of different ways that messages are being sent and received, we have more of an opportunity for those messages to land in the right way, at the right time for someone to actually change their thought or their action.

What's wonderful about artistic work is that it can often intervene on the messaging in multiple ways at the same time. So we can use -- like in the Choreographies project, we did this to an extent -- we used movement, we used sound and music - the work of LeahAnn Mitchell, who created a musical piece specifically that encapsulated the whole process. We used visual art, photography by Quinn Peck, textile work by Angela Hennessy, video by Lydia Greer and Eliza Barrios who even used an Oculus for a virtual reality piece. We also invited the folks that interfaced with the project to actually create things of their own. So letting people really get their hands on the work. This was all in addition to the deep and resonant work of the survivor collaborators involved who brought their words, their gestures, their movement, their stories, their breath, their immense and unapologetic vulnerability. So artistic work allows us an opportunity for people to engage with content on multiple different levels. It's multi-sensory, or it can be.

And it provides us an opportunity instead of a written word on a page, to engage and move out of the cognitive mind that processes language, and to engage different parts of the body. Like for example, our guts and our stomach, that visceral reaction that you might have when you see an artistic work that moves you and when you hear a piece of music and the vibrations of it, those minor tones land in your body in a way that stirs up emotion or creates a memory. Even the smell of something can bring back an important element that allows you to connect to content in a different way, which is why it's so unfortunate that we often can't have the bodies in the room with each other now.

So artistic work creates, to me really, the most effective palette for us to be able to have multiple options at our disposal to bring people into identifying and feeling invested in a struggle more deeply than any other medium that we have. And I would say that's the reason why I create artistic work but also engage the community, combining my two favorite flavors of getting the message out, which is that artistic component, which I just talked about but then also, what I talked about at the beginning of this interview, which is when we get people together. We ask them to come in contact with each other. We ask them to grapple with differences in the way that they're approaching things, different than their experiences. Perhaps share food or a meal. A lot of times there will be food involved in these meetings, in these spaces that I craft and articulate in collaboration. So, artistic direct action brings both of these things together and creates the context of an experience that can really expand our ability to become invested in a subject matter because it's hitting our body, it's engaging our bodies somatically on multiple levels so that it becomes a comprehensive experience.

Emerson: Why is the focus of disclosure so important in your work?

Jadelynn: So the word “disclose.” We used the word 'disclose' intentionally for the collective, which we organized around 2012, which was pre-Me Too the movement, but we all know Tarana Burke had been doing anti-violence work for some time prior to the movement kicking off. The genesis of DISCLOSE started in my brain bank. And then I brought a couple of colleagues in to talk to me about it, and together we created some of the larger ethos of the collective. I was really attached to disclose being name of the collective and a big part of the reason why was to emphasize the importance of people feeling as though they had the the right to speak their stories. The opportunity for a group of people to disclose their experiences of sexual harm was practically non-existent then and because, in the work that I was doing, it felt like almost every time I went to a social gathering, I would have folks saying to me “I've never told anybody this...." talking about an experience of sexual harm they would have. So disclose was not a demand because we also know that people that experience harm, it's often not safe for them to disclose. We wanted to create the context where we as survivors can share about an experience of sexual assault and the impact. And I would say - and I will flag my abolitionist politics here - that the criminal justice system, which is often where people first share their stories, is not a safe system for people to disclose.

So DISCLOSE wanted to create an environment that felt as though people could come, they could observe, they can engage, they can speak but that it was a space that was explicitly saying “if you want to disclose an experience of harm, this is a space.” I'm not going to say safe because the word 'safe' is very site-specific and, in many ways, remains a concept not an actuality for many people. But this is a space that could be safer for you to engage in that act. I disagree with the sentiment that a lot of therapists hold, which is “you have to tell me your story in order to heal from your experience of trauma.” There's actually many folks that I work with as a therapist that never tell me their entire story of harm, like the narrative of the harm they experienced. But having the opportunity to share aspects of your experience and to feel in community and connection, to feel understood and to feel heard and witnessed is essential for folks to feel as though they're not just completely in isolation. And every single meeting we had in DISCLOSE, every single one, someone would say “I have never spoken about this before" and speak in the meeting. So we witnessed how powerful it is when we create the conditions for people to feel as though when they speak they are going to be held and heard. So that is why I chose the name. Also, creating the conditions within which a disclosure can be held and the person that is the disclosee feels invited to share aspects of their story, whatever aspects they want to and that there are no conditions on that, feels like an essential part of the work that I do to this day.

Emerson: What inspired you to create the Choreographies of Disclosure exhibit?

Jadelynn: So there's a couple things. One was a personal derivative. My first experience of assault was when I was four and then over the course of my childhood and adolescence and into adulthood there were several other experiences and multiple people that I experienced assault from. This question that kind of lived in my brain as a person that had been assaulted was “what was it about me? Was there something about me that caused this to happen on multiple occasions? Was I somehow more vulnerable? Was there a way that the first experience at four kind of marked me? that other people in the future saw it and were able to exploit it in this way?” And that was a question that rolled around in my brain and caused some disturbance for me. So I really wanted to look at that.

So that is kind of the basis behind looking specifically at people that had experienced sexual harm and how their bodies moved in the act of disclosure. So the whole choreography component where I invited these people that had experienced sexual harm to sit with me and to share with me whatever aspect of their experience they felt called to, and with their consent videoed this disclosure, and then afterwards would sit with the video and transcribe all of their movement, all of their gestures, their patterns of speech, different ways that they would hold their shoulders, their posturing, and in that transcription kind of create this movement, this set of choreography. It's almost like the dance of the body in the act of describing trauma. This was my artistic nerd brain way of looking at this question of “is there something about the bodies of people that have experienced sexual harm and, in this case, specifically queer and trans people that is somehow visible in ways that were not aware of?” So that was that was the first question that I was intervening on as the basis of the piece.

Then the second part that informs the piece was dissatisfaction with the examples that I had of 'survivors'. At the time when you would go on the internet search in Google, the image that would come up of survivor of sexual assault was a picture of someone that appeared to be a cisgender woman, blond, thin, high-heeled, garter belt, like very femme presenting, on top of a box looking to the side with this long cape behind her. And that was really indicative, underlining the fact that there weren't examples of these survivor folk that I felt were accessible to me or many people in my communities. This is especially the case for trans people, especially the case for people of color and and for disabled people. I wanted to create a space in which we could be more legible and demand that our voices be counted in this movement, because even in “Me Too” I feel as though LGBTQIA+ folks are very underrepresented. I wanted to uplift the voices of queer and trans folks that had experienced this kind of harm, which is why the piece is centered around those voices. All of the survivor collaborators and all the response artists are also LGBTQIA+ identified folk. And so those are kind of the two basis behind the genesis of the work.

Emerson: For someone who has just seen the exhibit, what is one thing you want to leave them with?

Jadelynn: I think for people within LGBTQIA+ communities, I wanted them to feel as though the space was one they could enter, one that might be activating for them - not that I wanted to activate them, but just acknowledging that we're talking about trauma and that can bring up activation - but in that experience of coming in and being confronted with the words, the stories, the artistic representations of other queer and trans folks that experience sexual assault, that they felt a sense of holding, a sense of familiarity, a sense of being witnessed, a sense of celebration of our resilience as a community, a sense of tenderness for our vulnerabilities as a community, a sense of connection, of possibility. Which is why such an emphasis in this work was articulating and collecting the visions of LGBTQIA+ community for a future without sexual assault. We wanted to not only present the impact but also move forward towards what the future could be like. Because queer and trans folks have a specific ability to imagine new futures -- our whole life growing up queer and especially for folks my age and older, but even now -- so many people live in homes that are hostile to their identity. And so we have to constantly engage from these early ages in this imaginary realm of - maybe someday there will be a world that can include me. So I really wanted the exhibit to create some of that space and possibility for them.

For folks not in the LGBTQIA+ community, I wanted to create a space where they could come in and recognize and feel aligned with and invested in our experiences being part of the conversation, and to invite them into active allyship in this way, which allyship should always be active. I wanted the space to provide an education that we can't just be lumped in as like, “oh right, like LGBTQIA+ folks experience it exactly the same that that straight people do.” There are nuances to our histories and to our experiences. People often will say, “oh, well, are you gay because you experienced sexual assault as a child?” for example. This correlation between identity and trauma, because people want to pathologize queerness, because people want to pathologize trans-ness, shines a light on some of those discriminations and oppressions. We created this space so that folks outside of the LGBTQIA+ communities can be more educated around how to ally with us and to never speak on our behalf but to have some examples that they could articulate to other folks within their community that could create more visibility around our struggles, specifically within our communities around sexual assault.

Emerson: What have you learned from your various collaborations such as Choreographies of Disclosure, the LIDA project or the Monument Quilt?

Jadelynn: So much. So, so much. The hope is that we are constantly in the act of active learning. There will never be a time where I will call myself an expert on something. There can never be a time where we are able to say, this is the project. I never want to have a project create the basis for “now I teach this for the rest of my career.” The thing that I have most learned, that I hold most closely to me is that in staying engaged in these collaborative projects, staying engaged in organizing and artistic work, these deeply intimate creative spaces, creates the conditions for me to never sit on my laurels and get lazy in my perspective of the world. It creates the conditions for me to have, like I was talking about before, people in my life that are holding me accountable, and for me to understand how to better hold myself.

And so the learning is massive. There are so many things that I have learned and it's continuous. And so when you ask me that question what comes up for me is both, wow, like, this whole catalog of things that I've learned and that I hold dear to me and people specifically that have provided me that knowledge is constantly acknowledging the shoulders on which all of this work stands. Both people that are theorists, that you might have heard of that have done this work, people like Audre Lorde, there's so many people... all the way to the personal connections in my life. But I also get really excited about like, “oh, right. Yeah. I've learned so many things but there's so much more to learn.” And staying in that place of humility around never obtaining an expertise status and devoting myself to this constant practice of the creation of artistic work and community collaborations as a gesture towards constantly being in the act of learning - I think that's one of the biggest things I've learned is staying in the work. It's like a metronome. It's something I'm constantly repeating to myself, “stay in the work and the learning will continue as long as the living is continuing and I remain open to it and and remain committed to doing the work constantly and the people around me call me on my bullshit.” Then I can say that I'm living my life in integrity. So I would say that is the biggest thing.

Emerson: Is there anything else you would like to tell people about your work?

Jadelynn: I don’t know. It's always interesting to have these conversations and then not to have the work, like not be able to see the work. I think that the biggest thing, outside of what I just said, would be when we have these these rich, incredible moments like the “Me Too” movement, that moment was exploded out of years and years and years of work of so many people. Tarana Burke laid the specific ground work for the explosion of that movement, but Tarana Burke, as she talks about, her work is influenced by so many others. As she was creating that work there were so many pockets of other folks doing that work as well, including folks like DISCLOSE and so many other people that I hold dear to my heart.

So I think part of what we can do, and we see this doing work in organizing, is that sometimes when big movements happen we can get lazy for a time. For example, there's so many people that thought we were post-racism after the Civil Rights Movement. And here we are right? Finding so clearly that that is not the case and really having to engage in a whole other generation of folks literally dying in order to get people to understand the message -- that we still have so far to go. The folx most impacted never thought we were post-racism, right? So who bears the cost? So one thing that I hope my work does and what I want people to consider, is again, this act of staying engaged and learning, educating ourselves and engaging with the struggles that feel deepest to our hearts and at least tangentially knowing about other struggles as well. Committing ourselves to that is an essential act for us to actually continue to move forward and not take a passive stance on the world as it stands, and the great many injustices that continue to happen in it. So artistic organizing work, even if it's just for that moment where that video is projected on the side of the building, or that artistic action is happening in the middle of the street or that person is on the bullhorn, or that exhibition is happening in that old building that you know is being squatted for the purposes of the artwork, engages folk and this work continues based on its heart - it often doesn't have a lot of funding to continue. There are so many beautiful pieces that we don't even hear about because they're happening in the small quiet corners of people's homes, of people's garage spaces, backyards, all that kind of stuff.

So, I think something that I'd want people to know about my work but "the work" in general is that if you have the impulse to create something, as long as you are making sure that it is true to an experience that is important for your voice to contribute to -- what I mean specifically is not speaking on behalf of other people's experiences -- and you're engaging in community and asking yourself these questions around integrity and around accountability -- make that work! Engage with that work, be inspired by work in other places, seek it out and we will continue to have a revolution that is colorful and beautiful and irresistible, which is a famous phrase by Toni Cade Bambara that is said often is that “an artist's work is to make the revolution irresistible.” And I think it is a wonderful phrase that is essential for us to think about.