Critical Review Of Che Gossett's Silhouettes Of Defiance

Rivera and Johnson were both transgender women of color who also lived on the streets, forced to engage in survival sex work, due to transphobia, homophobia, and racist employment discrimination. This discrimination was not only apparent throughout their lives, but in the record and memory of their lives as well. In “Silhouettes of Defiance” Che Gossett argues that the historical erasure of individuals such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson is called “archival violence”. This type of violence “imposes a structuring law and order upon memory, domesticating and institutionalizing history, while also homogenizing and flattening its topography of difference and heterogeneity”. Despite the fact that Rivera and Johnson were both present and actively engaged in the resistance against the police on that hot summer night of 1969, their stories were ignored while others were privileged as archival evidence. The privileging of certain narratives imposes a whitewashed version of queer resistance and deprives history, and those who created that history, a full and honest record. This not only harms the memory of important actors,

Due to the persistence of racism, classism, and transphobia the notion of “good victims” and “bad victims” is unmistakably palpable. Sarah Lamble’s article, “Retelling Racialized Violence” discusses the practices of memorialization and questions the politics of how certain victims are remembered in juxtaposition to other victims of violence. Lamble contends, “identities are thus marked as constituting so-called good and bad victims and these categories fall along particular class, gender, and racial lines”. Meaning, the good victims were individuals who adhered to the categories imposed by society, whereas the bad victims were individuals mandated to the margins of society due to their race, class, sexuality, and gender