Queer Conversation with Amber Johnson and Lore/tta LeMaster
- Queer Conversation with Amber Johnson and Lore/tta LeMaster
Please tell us your background, your current position, and the research that you are currently working on.
I'm Amber Johnson, associate professor of communication and social justice at St. Louis University. I have the Justice Fleet, which is a mobile, social justice museum that fosters healing through art dialogue and play. We've had two exhibits in rotation for the past three years, "Radical Forgiveness" and "Radical Imagination."
Our next exhibit, "Trans Futurism," is almost finished. That is a photography and oral history project where we interview and photograph Black trans and nonbinary people. I send the interviews off to Ripley who is a Black trans woman who is an illustrator cartoonist. She turns them into superheroes, sends them back to me, and then I paint them on these huge canvases. Once they're done we'll launch virtually and then, we'll have an in-person show.
The exhibit following that is going to be a grief garden. It is a place where people can publicly come to grieve and engage in intentional activities to tap into their grief following systemic injustice, whether it's community violence or white supremacist violence. The grief garden sparked up because people were asking "Where's the Justice Fleet?" after really bad things happened. I said, now's not the time to talk forgiveness. We gotta heal first. Or we need to grieve first. Or be enraged. [End Page 174]
We just launched the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity at St. Louis University. It is a team of four Black faculty members from law, psychology, public health, and myself in communication. Our goal is to change the narrative around equity and focus on humanizing equity. Those who are most impacted by systemic racism should be the ones who are the face of the solution. Not those who are doing harm. And right now that is what's happening.
We also have a Truth and Reconciliation project to change interpersonal racism in medical care delivery.
Long story short, I'm from Long Beach and have been doing queer trans activism since the early 2000s. I don't know how that happened, but here we are.
In terms of entering the academy, it has been a painful battle of resisting where I finally am right now. I feel like a large part of my trajectory has been trying to reconcile what it means to be in this position. I spent a lot of my time, not in the academy doing queer and trans community work and trying to ask the bigger question "What can communication do?" and understanding what healing can be facilitated without a therapist license. I am asking what can we do with these degrees that is not just about critiquing media images but is about fostering development?
I can conceptualize my current projects in four areas. One of them is around erotics and erotic futurities. Taking narratives of sex and sexuality and imagining what can be versus what is and trying to imagine where that possible track is. A lot of that track has been in community. Specifically, sexual erotic community with other trans people and how we name our bodies in different ways and how we communicate in very impersonal ways.
Another area of focus for me is abolition praxis and working with students. We're doing a year of programming on abolition in our teaching and research. Ending in the summer with the phenomenology of abolition and all the graduate students are committing to a second year of abolition movement. Which is going to look very different for all ten of those students.
Another area is called "Encounters," and this was inspired by the Freedom Riders nonviolent workshops led by Reverend Lawson. We are simulating intense teaching and scenes with students. The point is to rehearse how to intervene when there's racism and trans phobia in the classroom. How to intervene instead of calling campus police. What is our...
