Two male shop stewards of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), Pat Breslin and Mark Fisher, were sacked for organising a wildcat solidarity strike that saw British Airways baggage handlers stop work for two days, costing the airline between 30 and 40 million pounds. The Gate Gourmet workers, originally employed by British Airways until they contracted out their catering services to Gate Gourmet in the 1990s, were part of a South Asian (and largely Punjabi) community in Southall who have long ties as employees with British Airways and Heathrow Airport, and these baggage handlers, who were also TGWU members, were very upset by the treatment of their colleagues. Under labour legislation such solidarity actions are illegal, and the two TGWU stewards were fired for organising them. They were, however, eventually awarded very large compensatory settlement payments by TGWU and the airline, under conditions of confidentiality. The former shop stewards were ‘allegedly following union orders’19 (presumably, as they had been following union orders to take illegal action), and if they had successfully proven that, the ripple effects of liability for the union would have been potentially disastrous.20
The outcomes of the strike action by the Gate Gourmet workers left many of the women workers feeling betrayed by their union.21 The TGWU negotiated a settlement that enabled the company to achieve many of its desired objectives – such as the reinstatement of some of the striking workers, but on worse terms (less sick leave, less pay for overtime and other changes). Some workers took voluntary redundancy. But fifty-six of the women refused to accept voluntary redundancy or compensation and continued their struggle for several years. By 2009, all but a handful of workers had had their unfair dismissal claims rejected by the Reading Employment Tribunal.22 The strike is both a testament to the ongoing militancy of women of colour workers and a reflection of the particularly punitive consequences they face due to outsourcing, privatisation, and restrictive labour legislation.
In other employment sectors and institutions populated by relatively more privileged workers, such as the civil service, universities, or museums and galleries, sociologist Nirmal Puwar argues ‘we are witnessing an unflagging multicultural hunger within the drive for diversity’. ‘Alongside this shift’, she notes, ‘long-standing traditions seem to be alive and well, as the spiritual, authentic, exotic, religious, ceremonial, innocent and barbaric continue to be the dominant ways in which diverse bodies are received.’23 She shows, with great nuance, the complex and ambivalent status of the racialised body in spaces that have hitherto been closed to the presence of these ‘space invaders’. Our experiences in the workplace continue to be shaped by hyper-surveillance, rigid and reified categories of legitimate speech, and the steadfast grip of ‘somatic norms’ which render racialised bodies out of place vis-à-vis a universal subject who remains white and male.
As with today’s austerity policies and the cuts to councils and local governments that followed the 2008 financial crash, a disproportionate number of women and people of colour were affected by Thatcherite labour policies as they held jobs in sectors affected by budgetary cuts.24 And thus it is crucial to recognise, as Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel argue, the 2008 crisis intensified, rather than produced anew, the effects of a racialised social and economic order that has always operated to the disadvantage of women of colour workers.25 And while it is also imperative to recognise the vast differences in the conditions of work for working-class women of colour and middle-class professionals, the pressures of austerity and cuts to funding, along with the increasing precarity of work across practically all public sectors of employment, have certainly impacted even relatively privileged women of colour workers.
The concrete issues around which Black and anti-racist feminists organised from the 1960s onwards included housing, health, social welfare and immigration. The work done by organisations such as OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, founded in 1978) and Southall Black Sisters (founded in 1979), among many others26 would lay the groundwork for feminist resistance to austerity and discriminatory immigration policies that continue today (see, for instance, the work of Focus E15, or Sisters Uncut UK).
Of course, there were omissions, exclusions and difficulties in Black feminist movements in the UK. Sexuality was largely absent in the political positions and concerns they articulated. In a collective conversation titled ‘Becoming Visible: Black Lesbian Discussions’ published in the 1984 OWAAD issue of Feminist Review, four lesbian women (one of whom, Gail Lewis, features in this volume) discuss the intense difficulties and challenges they contended with in the process of coming out, both within Black feminist organisations such as OWAAD and in relation to family and community. Deeply entrenched homophobia and heterosexism, compounded by racist notions that white, liberal social and familial spaces were somehow more enlightened in relation to sexuality than Asian and Black communities, made coming out a very fraught process for Black lesbians.27
It was therefore a groundbreaking development when Black lesbian and queer feminists in the 1970s and ’80s managed to put sexuality on the agenda at major women’s conferences, including the OWAAD conference in 1983. In spite of such victories, as Roderick Ferguson reminds us in One Dimensional Queer, dominant queer histories have not ceased to fall prey to the erasure of their multiracial and coalitional character. Our interview in this volume with Gary Kinsman traces some of the ambiguities and contradictions of activism from the 1970s onwards that sought to bring together anti-racist, queer and anti-capitalist critique with resistance to militarism and many other forms of state violence. This early political work, and all of the labour it entailed, set the scene for the development and reception of a queer of colour critique. A queer of colour critique, as defined by Ferguson, seeks to place the figure who has been routinely marginalised in radical Western epistemologies – the queer of colour, the sex worker, the vagrant – as the central subject in our theoretical frameworks and political concerns. Methodologically, it means engaging ‘nonheteronormative racial formations as sites of ruptures, critiques, and alternatives’.28
This is especially pertinent for thinking through the task of cultivating critical, creative and oppositional positions in relation to contemporary nationalisms and global capital. Moreover, Ferguson argues that in reformulating culture and agency, and opposing nationalism and the state form, women of colour feminisms ‘helped to designate the imagination as a social practice under contemporary globalisation. In a moment in which national liberation movements and Western nation-states disfranchised women of colour and queer of colour subjects, culture, for those groups, became the obvious scene of alternate agency.’ Culture became the field from which to imaginatively work against the disfranchisements of nationalism and the debilities of global capital. 29 Many of the interviewees in this volume are poets, fiction writers or photographers, and have engaged other media (such as film) as part of their praxis, providing many rich examples of how cultural and artistic practices are central dimensions of radical thought.
Of course, another major difficulty with which Black feminists in both the UK and the United States have had to contend is the racism of mainstream or white feminist movements (whether liberal or socialist).30 Julia Sudbury, in her groundbreaking book ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation,31 utilises the term ‘womanist’ as a means of recognising how fraught the term ‘feminist’ was for some Black women activists in the 1990s. She writes:
Womanism is also symbolic of my accountability to a community of Black women activists for whom the term ‘feminism’ is associated with daily struggles against racist exclusion by white women’s organisations. The interviewee whose funding application for a Black women’s refuge had been undercut by the local [white] women’s refuge claiming to serve ‘all’ women. The organisation which had been allocated a white feminist project officer by the local authority only to discover that the latter