Against Hate

The film documents the journey of Council member Jovanka Beckles of Richmond California who battles Chevron, a multi billion dollar oil company in an election laced with dirty oil, dirty politics, and dirty money The film explores the lack of inclusion of members of our society by the law, by religion, and by corporations.

Comments:
Queer studies scholar David Halperin has argued: “Homophobic discourses are not reducible to a set of statements with a specifiable truth content, that can be rationally tested. Rather, homophobic discourses function as part of more general and systemic strategies of de-legitimation.” B.K. Williams’s film makes this claim but through an intersectional lens, demonstrating how race, gender, sexuality, state, and capitalism converge to produce these localized enactments of discipline and regulation on this black lesbian representative’s body. The film not only reveals the limits of the law for multiply marginalized subjects, but also raises questions about the limits of political representation. While we’ve seen great strides in LGBTQ representation in state, local, and national governments, certain political identities register as a threatening to state-sanction norms—in this case black lesbian identity as a progressive mode of political expression—and are therefore unable to be fully included as representative of our of so-called multicultural democracy. The film not only reveals the contradictions of state inclusion, but also how systems of oppression still pervade so-called “post-racial” and now “post-LGBTQ” state forms. The film asks what LGBTQ politics has to say about issues such as urban poverty and environmental justice. And it envisions a politics of coalition. I hope this film has been as generative to your thinking as it has been to mine.

Darius Bost, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Sexuality Studies
Assistant Director, Center for Research and Education on Gender & Sexuality
San Francisco State University