Friend and artist Aiyana Graham recorded with KWNK Community Radio recently to speak on the “radical ethic of care”. The recording is available on streaming platforms in addition to being played on air via kwnkradio.org and 97.7FM in January 2024. The transcript is below and you use the player to listen online!
I want to talk about a “radical ethic of care.” A radical ethic of care is something that requires us to look both inside, as well as step outside of, ourselves. I’ve found a lot of frustration lately in the ways that people around me are thinking about allyship and marginality, as something to emphasize difference and create guilt/shame.
To give you a little bit of background, my name is Aiyana Graham and I graduated from UNR with degrees in Art and Gender, Race, and Identity. A lot of my artwork is centered around themes of subjective experiences, such as being disabled or trans, which I display in order to create an exchange of compassion between people, regardless of identity. I typically share that I’m a Black lesbian who is trans and neurodivergent to give context for where I am coming from.
Introduce love politics, talk about loving the self and guilt, how it bleeds into relationships with others, creates the problem of speaking for others; when one loves themself, they are able to transcend the self, avoiding political organizing created by guilt, and creating a majority who desires a better future to fight for and allowing us to create community even while living under white supremacy
Primary articles: “Practicing Love” – Nash and “The Problem of Speaking for Others” – Alcoff. What do I want to talk about? I want to talk about allyship, effort, Blackness, community, … identity politics, “problematic,” labels, shame, Alcoff page 22, love for the self— “Regardless.” (447) a radical ethic of care (452), “revealing that womanist politics requires a particular orientation of self and that ethical management of the self might even prefigure the political and creative projects that the womanist subject engages in.” (448)
Retreat response inflicts a false sense of individualism and can identify a pattern of avoiding accountability through “honesty”
“We might try to delimit this problem as only arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less privileged one. In this case, we might say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member. But this does not tell us how groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw the categories? I am a Panamanian- American, and a person of mixed ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group identity leaves many unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many conflicting groups but my membership in all of them is problematic…. No easy solution to this problem can be found by simply restricting the practice of speaking for others to speaking for groups of which one is a member.” (Alcoff, 8)
I encourage privileged (and especially white) viewers and readers not to shy away from engaging with topics that they may have preconceived notions about. In Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” she articulates the importance of engaging with issues that are not our own: she emphasizes that while it can be necessary for privileged speakers to “back down” and choose not to speak, the ability to back down also reinforces privilege. She therefore emphasizes the importance of recognizing one’s location (race, gender, geographical location, sexuality, etc.), as well as refusing to use one’s sense of “honesty” in order to avoid accountability for what they say. She says,
I would stress that the practice of speaking for others is often born of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another’s situation or as one who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise. And the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a reinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies…. But this development should not be taken as an absolute dis-authorization of all practices of speaking for. It is not always the case that when others unlike me speak for me I have ended up worse off, or that when we speak for others they end up worse off.11
The importance of location is why I name my identities at the beginning of this paper, and why I find the insistence of ambiguity so frustrating. It is too often that people refuse to hold complexity in their hands, and either refuse to speak about something or speak so much about something that they forget themselves: they forget that their actions are not innocuous, whether it be because of some minority status(es) that they have or simply because they have gotten too comfortable. Alcoff does not come to a concise conclusion about what is to be done about the problem of speaking for others because it is impossible to do so—to come to a clear answer would be to refuse the complexity and the work of feminism, activism, and anti-racism. In this conversation of ambiguity—and with my work in general—I hope to remind people that allyship is work and that it is not comfortable.
About Aiyana: Aiyana Graham is a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at the University of Nevada, Reno. They are a painter with an interest in sculpture and fiber art and was a 2024 recipient of The Nevada Undergraduate Research Award for their work in transgender and disability studies. Graham’s art revolves around the body as a site of queer, trans, racial, and disability issues. Their current exhibition, bodymind: exploring a trans disabled present, focuses on highlighting the complex lives of marginalized people through embodied surfaces.
Artist Statement: Influenced by how people perceive their own and others’ experiences, my work uses a/typical surfaces and bright, colorful paint to emphasize the subjectivity of perspectives. With my experiences as a nonbinary, Black, neurodivergent lesbian in
the United States, my experiences place me outside of all of the “normal” constructions of western social categories. Through my own filter, I use textured paint and embodied surfaces to draw in my audiences formally with shape, color, and layering to give them access to complex issues of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and race. Emphasizing experience, my work demonstrates a need for compassion
and nuance to generate a better future.
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