Widening the Aperture, with Virginia Thomas

In addition to serving up delicious cocktails and hosting great musicians, Myrtle supports Awesome Foundation Rhode Island, a monthly program offering restriction-free grants of $1,000 in support of ideas that benefit the Ocean State. The foundation’s most recent recipient, RI BIPOC Trans Oral History Project, is spearheaded by Virginia Thomas. We had a chat to learn more about the project and Virginia herself.

The Well (TW): Good afternoon Virginia. Congrats on the grant! Who are you?

Virginia Thomas (VT): I’m a southern queer academic living on the unceded lands of the Pokanoket. I research the impacts of white racial hierarchies on the formation of family, gender, photographic archives, and property. 

TW: Tell us about growing up in the South.

VT: I grew up in a small one story ranch in the woods playing witches on a rock outcropping and watching a lot of TV. My sister and I would climb trees, eat spiders, and walk a mile out into the fields behind our house (used to be a dairy farm until it was developed into a mansion cul-de-sac) until we heard a whistle from our dad to come back home for dinner. Our dirt driveway led to a two lane highway (15-501) with a Black-owned old style country store (Gordon's) painted forest green with a line of empty glass coke bottles on a shelf near the ceiling. By the time I was 18 it had become a four lane highway with a Walmart, strip malls, and major developments. I attended a public school and made friends who lived in gated mansion communities and friends who lived in trailer parks. For a couple of years I attended a tiny hippie private school where kids were allowed to run around naked all day if they wanted to and half the school day was “nature class,” which I loved. Throughout my childhood, I went to a small Episcopal church every Sunday in Pittsboro. When I was 7 I cried because I wanted to be an Acolyte in the church so badly, but you weren’t allowed to be one until you were 8. Needless to say, this saintly child was an Acolyte from age 7-18. I learned to drive a stick shift at the age of 12 while helping my dad clean up branches from an ice storm. I have carried a handkerchief in my back pocket—trained by my dad—since I was 6. We did so many chores that my friends even knew not to call me at certain times on the weekend because it was “chore time.” I went to a loosey-goosey Quaker high school that taught me how to hold complexity, to never judge a book by its cover, and to really listen.

TW: How about art practices, or more self-directed hobbies?

VT: I was really into ceramics as a kid. I remember hand-molding my vision of Puff the Magic Dragon around age 7 and having a feeling of being truly proud. That and pressing wild flowers into books.

TW: Are you still molding dragons? 

VT: I am not molding dragons at this time, but I did build a cob oven—first time doing such a thing—with my friend, Kate Jones, for the West End Raices Urban Farm (a program of Movement Education Outdoors) which brought a similar kind of pride in playing with mud. And you can bake things in it so I guess the fire element is there, too.

Above: Virginia’s in the tree; red sweater

TW: So you’re now a New Englander now. Where exactly have you landed? 

VT: My partner and I moved to Warren from Providence last year and have been surprised by how much we love it. After living in a tiny one person apartment with our dog, Milo, for 7 years, the magic of sitting on our porch, growing vegetables and herbs in our backyard, and walking to the town beach for a dip at the end of a summer day is really not lost on us. We've gotten into clamming; my partner has the waders and everything. A lot of people like to go to Blount Clam Shack, which we love, but we also send as many people as possible to Amaral’s–a classic old school Portuguese spot with the best Rhode Island clear chowder and fish sandwiches around. There are also a fair amount of flashy spots, but we usually make our way to Arc{hive}, a bookstore slash bar owned by two really awesome folks, Janet and Euriah, who make it cozy for newbies and townies alike. 

TW: How about Warren through the lens of your research practice?

VT: There is so much history that has yet to be addressed here, so we are starting to slowly peel the layers back. I just got back from visiting the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and Warren (along with Providence, Bristol and Newport) is listed among some of the top cities in New England to import enslaved Africans between 1501 and 1808. There is an annual Pokanoket Heritage Day held at Burr’s Hill in early August each year that we always recommend.

TW: And, what of Rhode Island more broadly?

VT: Rhode Island is a place profoundly shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism, with a wide array of present day collectives either reproducing these histories or fighting for their undoing. My relationship to Rhode Island is rooted in my own ancestor's multiple generations of settler colonialism here. While I grew up in North Carolina and my family has lived in North Carolina and Virginia since before and just after the Civil War, looking further back, I actually have settler colonial ties specifically to Rhode Island. Several family names appear on street signs and mills like the Cutler Mill in Warren. My current relationship to this place grows out of a desire to redress the harm of my biological ancestors, and a love of the communities I am part of who are aligned in those values.

Above: Artwork for Queer StoRIes Project by Hilary Nestor

TW: How are you getting by? Is research your paid gig and if so, where?

VT: I get by through my full time job as an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Art History at Providence College. To do my research and scholarly projects like Queer Stories Project (QSP), I have gotten small grants ($1,000–$3,000) from places like the Awesome Foundation, Rhode Island Foundation, and Rhode Island Humanities.

TW: Read that before the Providence College gig, you did postdoc studies at Rice. Always curious to hear about life beyond our borders...what was Houston all about?

VT: It was incredibly hot and humid. I thought I was ready having lived most of my life in the summer heat of North Carolina, but it was a wholly different experience. Biggest, most intense thunderstorms I have ever witnessed occurred regularly. There, I had the opportunity to work with some amazing scholars who read my work and helped me develop it which was such a gift. Also, the food there was absolutely incredible. I am grateful to my dear friend Sophie Moore, who has the best taste in food of anyone I know, who educated me on this fact.

TW: Cool. Now that we know you a bit better, let’s get into the Queer Stories Project. What is it; what are the goals?

VT: The work I do with the Queer StoRIes Project is about creating space for queer and trans stories to be told. It's about challenging archival silences that perpetuate normative ways of thinking about who we are. But it's also rooted in understanding white settler colonial definitions of family, gender, and relationship practices that appear to be innocent and healthy, but are designed to perpetuate logics of property. I am driven by a craving to listen to and hear stories that might give us windows into other ways of being that have existed and persist despite the attempts to erase, censor, and remove them from our perception of reality.

TW: Where did this idea originate, and how is it taking shape today?

VT: The Queer StoRIes Project came out of a time when I was in graduate school doing my American Studies PhD at Brown. I noticed there was no centralized, publicly available archive documenting the area's LGBTQ+ history. I contacted the Providence Public Library to see if they would be interested in hosting an LGBTQ+ oral history archive since they had an orientation around community-based archives. They were excited about the idea of an oral history project and were also open to my approach of training youth how to do oral histories and then pairing them with "elders" to do oral histories. During summer 2018, I started working with youth from Youth Pride, Inc. and since then it has expanded to a training that is open to people of all ages and, particularly, working with organizations and collectives who want to record their histories for their own use. We are super excited because we are currently working in partnership with Project Weber Renew's Beyond the Understanding of Gender and recording oral histories with some of their members. Participating doesn't mean your oral history will go into the PPL's archives, but it's an option if that is important to you.

Above: Virginia highlighting student work at a Protest Against Censorship on Providence College’s campus

TW: Truly awesome work! When did you first start being interested in, or more deeply researching things like racial hierarchies, power structures, etc?

VT: Growing up in the South, the air is thick with its history as a slave plantation economy, the southern civil rights movement, and the ongoing consolidation of power by wealthy elites and their disenfranchisement of working and poor people. I grew up in a family and in schools that taught us about the importance of the civil rights movement and celebrated desegregation as the pinnacle of justice movements. However, from a young age, it was clear to me that race continued to be very powerful and it informed gendered and sexual norms (not how I would have articulated it, but those were the feelings). 

TW: Did you have the sense things were different elsewhere?

VT: I actually grew up with anger at "The North" because I perceived it to carry a superiority complex to the South. Now I can see that that was partly based in a problematic position fomented by a culture that perpetuated Old South nostalgia. But it was also based in a sense that the South was backward and the North was forward which is a logic that not only allows people from northern white families to avoid accountability for the ways their wealth and power derived from slavery and colonization, but also, as historian Natalie Ring has argued, enables the US to operate as an imperial country and global empire with the perception of itself as progressive. I was so angry at all of that and I still am. 

TW: You turned the anger into action. 

VT: It's hard not to let that rageful despair eat you. So I decided to try to find the words to describe it, to make the familiar strange, and to find ways to address it. I felt, and still feel, I must live my life looking directly at it, trying to understand it, and seeing what other ways to be are possible.

TW: Could you provide one or two concrete examples of how white racial hierarchies impact family and gender?

VT: What many do not realize is that the gender binary originated in European cultures as a means of outcasting and degrading the gender systems of peoples in Africa, Asia, and the lands that are currently known as the Americas. As Europeans sailed across the Atlantic and Indian oceans enacting genocide and enslavement in places like India, Nigeria, and Brazil, they used the idea that there are only two genders against the people they encountered whose gender presentations differed from this model as an excuse to dehumanize them. Holding the European gender system above other gender systems became a rationale for dehumanizing Black and indigenous people as well as settling upon their lands and robbing natural resources in order to concentrate power and wealth among European nations. It was the descendants of Europeans who transformed what was a largely British colony into a settler colonial nation state that began operating independent from British rule. This history is the foundation of our legal system, medical system, education system, and dominant culture writ large in the contemporary moment.

In addition to being used as a tool to legitimize the colonization of indigenous lands and forced displacement of indigenous people, the binary and heterosexuality became part of a system of passing down property. With the rise of capitalism in Europe and the translation of this emphasis on private property into colonialism, the question of how that property was passed onto others became a central cultural and legal concern.  As Fredrich Engels has argued, monogamous, heterosexual familial arrangements are not based on what is natural, but on upholding the transformation of indigenous lands into private property. Colonists imported to what is currently known as the United States very rigid, stringent gender roles, gendered division of labor and power construction of the hetero-normative family—to ensure that men who were the legal property owners had clear, undisputed paternity over their children, for whom women in that arrangement were designated to biologically reproduce heirs. This was a system designed to hold onto land from which colonists could extract resources to transform into social and financial capital.

Above: Virginia (left) discussing the history of quilting by Black women at Gee’s Bend, Alabama. With Betty Anderson (right), Executive Director at The Shoe Shop Museum in Camden, AL.

VT: This was in direct contrast to the equitable gender role distributions in many Indigenous communities—wherein women were farmers, in charge of resource distribution, where power balance was often equitable across genders, and women were leaders and decision makers. For the colonial system to reproduce itself and to take over, the policing and demonization of gender identities and sexualities outside of the colonial model had to be done in order to maintain the charade that heterosexual and cisgender identities are the most natural and therefore entitled to the ownership of property and the wealth derived from private property.

TW: You’ve elsewhere cited queer relational practices as being part of the toolkit we might use to combat oppression. Could you offer a definition for that concept, and talk about what it looks like in action?

VT: Queer relational practices will always be beholden to a legacy of LGBTQ+ folks fighting against capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia, but in our current political cultural moment, I think it's important to understand queerness—not as a style or identity—but a set of practices that work against dominant forms of power. Another way to put that is fighting for the world to become more livable for everyone. These practices change over time as the context changes. They can even change moment to moment. With the Queer StoRIes Project, I think it is important to hear about how people who have been marginalized due to their gender and sexuality built a life and formed communities while under police surveillance, being exiled from their bio families, struggling with employment discrimination, and so many other forms of structural violence. I also think it's important to look at the ways people hoped to challenge some norms while they perpetuated others; being able to hold complexity is its own vital praxis. I think listening to people's histories is a vital way to pass on skills and frameworks we can use to build futures that empower everyone to thrive.

TW: A few minutes ago, you mentioned this idea of the logics of property. Could you flush that idea out a bit for us?

VT: Basically, white settler colonial logics of property shape every facet of life. Advertising, intimacy, art, political discourse, historical archives, the food system, architecture, every facet. Every interaction is undergirded by a massive campaign to hide the fact that indigenous people here had their own ways and systems for relating to the land and that dominant culture has opted to invest in a system that white settlers have used which has involved writing English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish words on paper to claim ownership of indigenous land. This system of property and its logics also informs ways of relating to one another. For example, if you have ever wondered if a person is worth your time, you are operating out of property logic. Of course, there are and have always been groups of people—most importantly and originally indigenous people—who have fought these systems and ways of thinking. There have been and are other ways to be. But private property is a system imported from European contexts to suit their intended ends and we still live under the immense weight of that.

Above: A young researcher, out in the field

TW: We’re getting low on time and there’s a lot more to learn here—what are some books you’d suggest for folks who want to keep digging?

VT: Understanding Health and Care Among Sex Workers: Perspectives from Rhode Island by Claire Macon, Eden Tai, and Sidney Lane, and Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America by Camille Owens.

TW: You’ve got your own book in the works, too?

VT: Yes, tentatively titled Dark Trees: Visual Grammars of Family and (Anti)Lynching Aesthetics, which should be published in about two years. It is about the indelible ways in which racial capitalism has shaped the nuclear family through looking at the ways in which the figure of the tree has been used to symbolize family structure as well as racial terror through lynching violence. I focus on white supremacist applications of the tree as symbol for two out of four chapters and, for the other two, on how Black visual activists have taken the tree and reworked it into material to make worlds based in environmental and reproductive justice.

TW: At the top you mentioned an interest in photographic archives—we’d like to close by asking about a favorite photographer or collection.

VT: My favorite under-the-radar photographer is Pauli Murray, who I learned about via the Pauli Murray Center when I was an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill. An album s/he made in the 1930s-1950s is an amazing portrayal of his/her life and Black life in Durham, NC and Harlem, NYC. It has photographs cut out into hearts, keylock holes, and a daguerreotype of her grandfather who was a Union Navy soldier.

TW: Thank you, Virginia. We can’t wait to head over to the PPL and check out the Queer Stories Project!