Critical Review Of Che Gossett's Silhouettes Of Defiance

Rivera and Johnson were both transgender women of color who also lived on the streets, forced to engage in survival sex work, due to transphobia, homophobia, and racist employment discrimination. This discrimination was not only apparent throughout their lives, but in the record and memory of their lives as well. In “Silhouettes of Defiance” Che Gossett argues that the historical erasure of individuals such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson is called “archival violence”. This type of violence “imposes a structuring law and order upon memory, domesticating and institutionalizing history, while also homogenizing and flattening its topography of difference and heterogeneity”. Despite the fact that Rivera and Johnson were both present and actively engaged in the resistance against the police on that hot summer night of 1969, their stories were ignored while others were privileged as archival evidence. The privileging of certain narratives imposes a whitewashed version of queer resistance and deprives history, and those who created that history, a full and honest record. This not only harms the memory of important actors,

but also deprives young queer activists the right to knowledge and awareness of their own history.
A pivotal moment in Rivera’s activism and exclusion comes from her speech at the Christopher Street Liberation day rally in 1973. On this day Rivera had to fight her way up to the stage due to exclusionary social practices, hierarchies of power, and marginalization within the LGB community. As the crowd booed and hissed at her, Rivera endured as she criticized the community that dismissed her as strongly as she had fought for it. Rivera expounded, “You all better quiet down. I’ve been trying to get up here all day for YOUR gay brothers and YOUR gay sisters. I believe in us getting rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That’s all I wanted to say to you people”. This was a pivotal moment for Rivera because after this speech, she removed herself from the spotlight of queer activism for decades. She was shunned by the people she considered to be her family, just like her biological family she was pushed to the margins and left there to be forgotten. In her speech to the LGMNY Rivera described a violent image of her community not being allowed on the back of the symbolic bus, but rather being pulled by the bumper of that bus with ropes around their necks. This imagery is powerful because it displays the impact that isolation and rejection had on Rivera while fighting for the rights of her supposed brothers and sisters.
This moment was critical for Rivera, as she finally expressed to her community the oppression that she has been subject to her entire life. She revealed the rigidity of identity politics that Jessi Gan describes as, “seeming to desire to cling to explicative postures [and] unified subjecthood [that] has often resulted in repression, self-censorship, and exclusionary practices that continue to trouble organizing efforts”. This effort to homogenize the movement as a single subject, likely that of a gay, white, male of privileged economic class, placed individuals like Rivera on the margins, the memory of her and her contribution to the numerous movements for social justice were deemed as insignificant and therefore disposable.
Rivera notes in her speech to the LGMNY that, “they [the LGB community] keep pushing us [the T community] every year, we’re further and further towards the back”. Rivera reveals in both of her speech’s that the marginalizing of transgender people was the same method used by the heteronormative, cisgender community to marginalize the gay community. Therefore the erasure and imposed invisibility of the transgender community can be attributed to a variety of individuals and communities. This is so due to the prejudices against intersections of identities such as race, class, and refusal to adhere to strict assumptions of what gender is meant to look and act like.
In the article, “Identities Under Siege Violence Against Trans persons of Color”, Lori Saffin discuss how the intersections of race, class, and sexuality are often dislodge with one another, leaving the individual with nowhere to feel safe and welcomed. Saffin discusses the contentions that many transgender people of color face between their ethnic community and the LGBT community, a conflict that inevitably leads to the individual being rejected by both communities. Saffin argues, “racism within the LGBT community, together with possible ostracism from ones own ethnic community, put transpersons of color in a precarious position as outsiders among the margins… rigidity constructing and reinforcing the boundaries of identity erase lived realities of transgendered persons of color”. As a person of color Rivera faced racism within the LGBT community, and as a transperson of color Rivera faced transphobia and homophobia within her ethnic community.
In addition to facing discrimination for their gender identity, sexuality, and race many transgender people of color also face economic inequality, further pushing these individuals into dire situations that force them to put their health and bodily safety at risk. Saffin argues, “with few sources of social support compounded by economic inequality, sex work becomes, perhaps the only means for survival. This not only puts queers of color at risk for violence but endangers their health from increased exposure to HIV and STIs”. Both Rivera and Johnson were forced into survival sex work as their communities ostracized them. In her speech to the LGMNY Rivera visits this topic arguing that survival sex work is often misunderstood for what it truly is: to survive. She discusses the fact that people failed to realize that there were not other options for people like Rivera and Johnson. Rivera argued that sex work was “the only alternative to survive, because laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man”.
The marginalization of transgender people of color can be seen in the way they are memorialized after their deaths.

Due to the persistence of racism, classism, and transphobia the notion of “good victims” and “bad victims” is unmistakably palpable. Sarah Lamble’s article, “Retelling Racialized Violence” discusses the practices of memorialization and questions the politics of how certain victims are remembered in juxtaposition to other victims of violence. Lamble contends, “identities are thus marked as constituting so-called good and bad victims and these categories fall along particular class, gender, and racial lines”. Meaning, the good victims were individuals who adhered to the categories imposed by society, whereas the bad victims were individuals mandated to the margins of society due to their race, class, sexuality, and gender

identity.
Furthermore, Lamble discusses the so-called “good victims” such as Mathew Sheppard, who Rivera notes in her speech to the LGMNY as, “a white, middle class gay boy that was effeminate”. Rivera also notes in her speech that the same outrage and support did not exist for Amanda Milan, a transgender woman of color. It is because of these identities that an individual like Mathew Sheppard was an ideal candidate for the cis and heteronormative society to digest as an innocent victim, whereas someone like Amanda Milan was not. Lamble argues that “without history or context the systemic roots of violence are rendered invisible, and violence is only comprehensible at the micro level, by which transphobia, in Amanda Milan’s case, is the only viable explanation”. In remembering the dead, specifically the victims of hate, it is important to acknowledge the intersections of identity that may have lead to the death of certain individuals as well as the methods and channels through which they are remembered.
This paper has analyzed the impact that racism, sexism, classism, and gender-policing has had on the individuals who are not only sent to the margins by society, but also by their own community. Sylvia Rivera is just one of many who have made a significant impact on the overarching culture as well as their community they fought for. If it weren’t for individuals like Rivera and their determination to fight for what is right, the movement may never have been as successful as it was. The odds were stacked against her and yet she endured and persisted through all the hatred and in the end she succeeded.