Re: the statement
Ovarian Psycos
On Saturday, September 3, 2016, Xela De La X <xela...@gmail.com> wrote:
The Ovarian Psycos were created from the 500-year-old traumas that still haunt us and still target us till this day. And we exist for the purpose of empowering future generations, young womxn of color, so that they may understand the full capacity of their worth and use it to create viable, material change in their community by any means necessary.
Several years ago, the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade embarked on a mission to allow our collective to be documented, interviewed and to have our story told to the public. It was a decision that did not come lightly, but we reflected on the necessity of the story, our story, of womxn of color organizing, fighting for each other, fighting to protect our hood and fighting for an autonomous space for us by us. Despite the fact that we were comfortable enough with the end result to allow it to be screened, there were still many issues left unresolved - some so troubling that it drove us to write this statement.
When we were approached back in 2012 by Kate and Joahnna, we had several meetings about the film and the filming process.They explained that we would have agency and last-word on editing and really anything to do with the film because they wanted us to be part of the entire film and post-film process. And yet when we gave them our criticisms of fetishizing the brown womxn long-suffering Maria-martyr, as they did by focusing on our emotional breakdowns as oppose to focusing on the work, they did nothing to change that. Instead justifying their fetishizing with the weak argument that we failed to allow them into our working processes. And although to a certain extent that’s true, we remember the meetings and organizing work we did allow them to film that are now completely missing from the documentary.
Although we as a collective were absolutely inexperienced with the entire filming/documenting process, it is exactly our inexperience that they exploited. For example, although they informed us of the distributors they were signing on with, they described Women Making Movies as a nonprofit distribution agency. Never did they go further in explaining that they would be potentially garnering a revenue from this nonprofit agency, neither did they explained to us what we were signing gave them complete licensing rights to the misery we lived and to the work that we’ve done to combat that misery.
Womxn in the collective, who already work part-time or full-time, who already do unpaid labor, such as emotional labor, raising families (reproductive labor), were volunteering their time in promoting the documentary. This was exhausting but we knew we had to do it. We did this because 1.) We knew our story was important; not the Ovarian Psycos story, but rather the story of working class womxn of color independently organizing, and 2.) We had a sense that this documentary was not only going to be a great resource for womxn of color in the country, and abroad, but also here in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, as we type this, the Ovarian Psycos political headquarters, La Conxa, based in the industrial section of Boyle Heights on 1st Street, is under threat of being gentrified. Our rent is going up more than $500 per month to an already-unaffordable rent. For those who are familiar with Boyle Heights, it comes as no surprise that people of color are being displaced. We live and breathe gentrification, and so naturally we live and breathe resistance.
La Conxa is based in one of the most important locations on the eastside. The new-age colonizers, the gentrifiers, are trying to call this area the Boyle Heights Arts District. There are dozens of new art galleries on Anderson Street and Mission Road - all of which are from well-funded, horribly-intentioned, capitalist-colonizers, some of which are actually connected to real estate and redevelopment projects.
As the Ovarian Psycos documentary is being circulated throughout the U.S. and abroad, as folks gather around to see our story, the womxn in the documentary are literally losing their political home.
Unfortunately, the responses from the documentarians have been an emphasis on legal protocols, academic social justice buzzwords and an alarming sense of self-justification for the documentarian project - coated under layers of ego-stroking.
In an email to the Ovarian Psycos in an exchange on our sharing our concerns and requesting more tangible forms of assistance, they responded, “Our primary goals for this documentary project have been to produce a film that honored the story of the Ovas.”
Well, if you indeed truly wanted to honor the Ovas, you would be doing better to do what not is necessarily “allowed” in the ethical documentarian social justice world (which we completely reject as bourgeois reproduction of capitalist moralism and ethics; fuck that, we demand compensation, in one way or another, for actual work and for allowing you access to the work we are doing). But the documentarians are unfortunately adamant that this film is an “independent project … of Silvia Frances Films.” We maintain and stand firm with the fact that this is not an independent project of Silvia Frances Films because it would not exist without the sacrifices, commitment and totality of Ovarian Psycos unpaid work invested for the benefit of womxn, children and our community at large.
Like the principle colonizers of this continent who cut up the land and gave it their names and gave everything their measurements and called them borders, the indigenous resistance demanded they honored the treaties. And, so, we do the same. Honor the Ovas by acknowledging the inescapable wrongness of materially benefiting from the collective’s unpaid labor of womxn of color.Recognize your privilege, but for the purpose of relinquishing current benefits and in so, righting the wrongs inflicted upon us from colonizers invasion of this land. Colonization is a line without interruption. That legacy continues and our people still have nothing.
This legacy has everything, absolutely everything, to do with your current social positioning that would allow you the time, the education, the resource knowledge and capacity to be on the other side of the lens making moves and movies, signing contracts and receiving royalties for the rest of your lives.
In the contract between the Ovas, the documentarians and their distribution company have agreed to allow us only two years of compensation and 25 percent. Two years. But the documentarians will use this documentary to generate income for the rest of their lives and their established career with the film company Silvia Frances Films created in this process.
Let us be clear. Without a concentrated effort to really, authentically listen to the oppressed communities an outsider is documenting or serving, what ends up happening is a project of poverty tourism.
From the same email between the Ovarian Psycos and the documentarians, they said:
Our relationship and sense of responsibility to the women in the film… is deeply important to us...during a time that the neighborhood is struggling within the context of rapid gentrification and displacement, on top of all the other issues you struggle against, like police brutality and gendered violence. We also know that you are all busy, overworked, and fighting collectively to keep the Ovas and La Conxa afloat, to address the needs of the community, to organize Luna Rides, events and an annual Clitoral Mass, and are also all working hard individually for yourselves, partners and families.Here, they seem to acknowledge our hardships but the agreements are still contradictory to this. How do you, outside documentarians, actually plan to help out the Ovarian Psycos, La Conxa and dozens and hundres of groups that are in one way or another connected to La Conxa? By only giving us two years of royalties?
Allies, such as white allies, need to risk more, put in more work, put in more sacrifice. We do not feel the documentarians are any close in doing their fair share.
This is turning from a documentarian project into a contemporary colonization project with a false sense of academics, of graduated activists with degrees, justifying exploitation and oppression.
We, the Ovarian Psycos, call on the documentarians to do the following in order to rectify their actions, regardless of how good their intentions were:
The documentarians will give 100 percent distribution after the 50% necessitated by their distributor Women Make Movies, free of any time constraints, instead of the measly 25% after two years and a public self-critical statement on their behalf apologizing and also agreeing for the community, and especially the Ovas, to hold them accountable.
The documentarians will be 100% transparent and disclose the hardcopies of their expenses, something which they say they are not legally obligated to do, nor are they individually comfortable doing (again, we do not care about bourgeois laws or their individual comfort).
The documentarians will make an addendum recognizing the fact that they never thoroughly explained the legalities in the consent forms we signed. This addendum would rectify their feelings of entitlement and ownership over organizing work and the traumas never lived nor work they ever did to combat these traumas, fully understanding then their position of privilege, class and power.
The documentarians will agree that they will consult with us first prior to screening a film, and that past, present and future members of our collective be given a priority to attend screenings as a platform to further mobilize our movements in marginalized communities of color only. In other words, it is not sufficient a past, present or future Ovarian Psycos at a screening if not for the purpose of furthering our community’s movement of resilience and resistance.
The Ovarian Psycos recognize that these demands might seem outlandish to some, maybe even to the documentarians, but our existence has always been that: outlandish, inappropriate and subject to targeted scrutiny. We ask for a basic understanding that our lives are at stake. In our communities, the war is real. In our communities, our womxn and our children and our men included, continue to be easy targets for continued exploitation and for the continued acts of genocide that seeks to erase us completely. It is our sincere hope that the documentarians can step away from their privileged position and show some compassion toward this horrific reality we live daily. However, and unfortunately, as has been historically proven, we also completely understand that the documentarians, like the colonizers before them, only understand one reality: profit. These documentarians and other future white poverty tourists must know this: us, the colonized, only understand war and resistance. You work with us or against us. Your choice.
--
Ovarian...@gmail.com Ovarianpsycos.com Facebook.com/Ovarian.Psycos
“We are a womxn of color bicycle brigade cycling for the purpose of healing our communities physically, emotionally, and spiritually by addressing pertinent issues through cycling.”