Culture Corner Series: Making New Words, Knitting New Worlds
This essay is the first in a series exploring the language that shapes our lives, our politics, and our possibilities. Each installment features words that have helped me make meaning of my lived experience and of the world we are building together.
As Kaveh Akbar writes in Martyr, “An alphabet, like life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”
PART I: REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
When I was pregnant, half a lifetime ago, I taught myself to knit. I loved it so much. I had a deep fascination with how a strand of yarn could be transformed from string into a garment. It felt similar to what was happening inside my body, where I was co-creating a magical little cluster of growing cells.
I’d always wanted to be pregnant, but, as a “genderqueer (1)” I didn’t always like what it was doing to my body. Or better said, I didn’t like what my changing body signalled to the world, how it opened me to constant outside messages about who and how I should be. I felt resentful of how people thought they could now touch me without asking, as if my body was just a thing carrying a baby. I was quietly dismayed by all the assumptions both strangers and loved ones made about my gender and my sexuality. This was decades before I had my fledgling trans’tache and when culturally, I felt my queerness in conflict with my Cubanidad (2). But with every seemingly caring comment on me becoming a “mama,” every message about what motherhood is supposed to be, I felt objectified, patronized, and controlled, courtesy of racial capitalism and patriarchy. On days when I felt like my body was not my own, the tangible satisfaction of feeling a tiny baby hat grow from the work of my hands was a balm.
Lately, I have been imagining the founders of Reproductive Justice in their gestation and collective labor. as they birthed a movement. I imagine them knitting, expanding a blanket that was not big enough to cover the collective body politic of our Black and brown communities. At the time, the co-opted reproductive rights movement narrowly centered access to abortion. In “Reproductive Justice,” these founders coined a term that expanded our ability to talk about our lived experiences of reproductive labor, family-making, and care-giving, outside the narrow structures of traditional gender roles and nuclear families. In doing so, they knitted language itself to create a garment of new possibilities for our communities.
Often I don’t have the words to describe the conditions and circumstances around me, or to process and plan what we should do in the future. But, I persist in knitting words to make meaning. I take my inspiration from what our founders knit, a movement built by words, connection, meaning, and action. I’m soltando la lengua (3), letting my Spanglish flow with my co-workers, another practice of knitting together languages to make new words. I journal and I listen. And, all around me, I see new words emerge, and with them the creation of new realities.
Footnotes