#willfulness

I would claim the lessening of effort as essential to the phenomenon of privilege. If less effort is required to unlock the door for the key that fits the lock, so too less effort is required to pass through an institution for bodies that fit. Social privilege is like an energy-saving device: less effort is required to pass through. No wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so 'trying.' Not to fit, or to fail to inhabit a norm, can often mean being charged with willfulness, whatever you say or do...Not only do you have to become insistent in order to receive what was automatically given to the others; but your insistence confirms the improper nature of your residence. We do not tend to notice the assistance given to those whose residence is assumed. Insistence is a form of political labor, given that it is unevenly distributed as a requirement. Insistence can thus be understood as a political grammar. For example, to be transgender can be to experience the labor of having to insist on what is automatically given to the others: having to insist on being 'he' or' she' or 'not he' or 'not she' when you are assigned the wrong pronoun; having to keep insisting, where the necessity of repetition gets in the way of the hope of things just receding. Sometimes you might have to insist on not being gendered by pronouns at all: willfulness can be the refusal to be housed by gender. And to be in a same-sex relationship is to experience the gendered pronoun as a sign of struggle, one that is both personal as well as political: when your partner is assumed to be 'he' or 'she' you have to correct the assumption, and the very act of correction can be heard as a willful imposition on others. It is exhausting, this labor, which is required because certain norms are still at work in how people are assumed to be and to gather; even if we have rights and recognition, the ongoing and everyday nature of these struggles with signs are signs of a struggle. A desire for a more normal life does not necessarily mean identification with norms, but can be simply this: a desire to escape the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist.

I… want to inherit the witch in my women ancestors—the willfulness, the passion, ay, the passion where all good art comes from as women, the perseverance, the survivor skills, the courage, the strength of las mujeres bravas, peleoneras, necias, berrinchudas. I want to be una brava, peleonera, necia, berrinchuda. I want to be bad if bad means I must go against society—el Papá, el Pápa, the boyfriend, lover, husband, girlfriends, comadres—and listen to my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.

my therapist: you have a right to be angry about so many things! it’s okay to be angry!