In 2012, Women With A Vision (WWAV), a Black feminist collective based in New Orleans, helped organize sex workers to stand up for their rights to defeat Louisiana’s “Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation” statute, which predatorily criminalized poor, Black, cisgender and transgender women, and LGBTQ people by placing them on the sex offender registry for periods of fifteen years to life. Shortly after that victory, arsonists firebombed and destroyed WWAV’s headquarters — incinerating the community home they’d built and sustained, as well as the archive that held decades of their work. This fire — and the many other fires that have wrought destruction and ignited fights for justice across the South — are the flames that inspired the new book, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press, 2024), written by Laura McTighe with Women With A Vision.
The Women With A Vision collective, co-founded by Danita Muse and Catherine Haywood, has been fighting for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers’ rights since 1989. Deon Haywood (Ms. Catherine’s daughter) is a longtime activist and community leader who has been a member of WWAV for decades, and became the organization’s Executive Director in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Laura McTighe is an abolitionist ethnographer and organizer who has been a part of the movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years. She is also an assistant professor of religion at Florida State University and the co-founder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy, whose work centers collaborative knowledge production as both theory and a method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and how to build the world otherwise. Laura has been an accomplice (a concept she will expand on further in our conversation) to WWAV’s work since 2008.
Fire Dreams is a groundbreaking book for many reasons. The book is co-authored by Laura with Women With A Vision, and Deon wrote the foreword. Its publication is part of a long process of collaboration that has prioritized finding new, more ethical ways for academics and activists to create and share knowledge together. It is a work of deep and rigorous scholarship, peer-reviewed and published by a prestigious academic press, that will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research. At the same time, and just as importantly, the book is written as a toolkit for activists and organizers working for justice, care, and freedom for their communities. It’s an extraordinary book — in no small part because it is also beautifully written. It’s a thrill to read Fire Dreams, and a thrill to get to talk to Laura and Deon about how they wrote this book and how they hope you, as readers, will use it.
Below, Deon and Laura discuss the history and current workings of WWAV, what it meant to co-author a book representing so many years of thinking and fighting together, and how they hope readers will find inspiration and tools to work and fight with them.
Kali Handelman: This book is being published in the lead-up to the 35th anniversary of Women A Vision’s (WWAV)’s founding. Could you tell us about the organization’s origins, who you are, and the work you do?
Deon Haywood: Thirty-five years ago during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the War on Drug Users, a collective of Black women set out to counter the organized abandonment of our communities with care. They called themselves Women With A Vision.
At the time, the bulk of HIV/AIDS resources were going towards New Orleans’ white, gay community, while poor Black folks, the folks in the city’s public housing projects, were facing skyrocketing rates of infection without any real, concerted effort to meet our community’s needs. Danita Muse, who was a social worker in the city’s Office of Substance Abuse, had been working to start an organization to counter that deadly fact. The story goes that Danita and my mother Catherine Haywood, who was then working with the Children’s Pediatric AIDS Program, locked eyes across a crowded conference room and committed themselves to the sacred, lifesaving work Black feminists have been doing for generations—creating ways of survival so that one day we can thrive.
My mother always says this work is based on relationships. WWAV’s foremothers knew that it wasn’t just a lack of resources that contributed to the abysmal rates of HIV infection within Black communities; it was a lack of trust. Black New Orleanians, and this goes for Black Americans in general, had no reason to trust white institutions. Governmental agencies and non-profit organizations had long isolated, blamed, criminalized, erased, and taken from us. So when white institutions finally decided to do something about the HIV/AIDS crisis, they held no standing within our communities.
What WWAV’s foremothers did so brilliantly was to rely on the relationships they already had to disseminate information and resources, while continually building new ones. Our foremothers, and the women who have kept WWAV going over the last 35 years, were never in the business of “saving” folks; they were there to share life-saving information so that folks could make the decisions they deemed best for themselves. For the most part, we’re not the churchgoing types, so we don’t come from a place of fabricated moral authority and we’ve never had time to play respectability games. From day one, we knew that appearing more “respectable”—whether that be speaking a certain way, dressing a certain way, getting to a certain place on the economic ladder—wasn’t going to get us or the people we work with any freer.
(Image: Women With A Vision logo)
In a way, I grew up with WWAV, distributing condoms and sterile needles through street-based outreach with my family and holding house parties where we’d talk about safer sex practices and harm reduction around substance use. After Hurricane Katrina, I stepped into the role of Executive Director. Our people were hurting. The forces of white supremacy used the storm as an opportunity to permanently banish Black New Orleanians from what is the most African city in this country, a place that is sacred and is the cultural capital of Black America. And it was the folks that we work with—Black women, poor folks, sex workers, substance users, and queer folks—who were most at risk for displacement, criminalization, and death following the storm.
Our work post-Katrina grew in response to our community’s needs. When our clients came into our offices bearing licenses branded with “SEX OFFENDER” after being charged under the state’s Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) statute, we organized alongside them to put an end to the policy that turned survival sex work into a scarlett letter that barred women from taking their children to school, limited their housing options, and further prevented their entry into the formal economy. As our elected officials took aim at our community’s right to determine when or if to have children, we built out our reproductive justice program. And just as our foremothers nurtured me and instilled Black feminist learnings, we knew that we needed to nurture the next generation of Black feminists, and so we started our Young Women With A Vision program. Today Women With A Vision’s work includes integrated voter engagement, harm reduction and drug policy, HIV/AIDS education and prevention, reproductive justice, sex work decriminalization, and youth education and advocacy.
Kali: Building on the idea of centering relationships, could you share more about the process of writing this book? Laura, you wrote Fire Dreams with Deon and the entire Women With A Vision collective. Can you tell us what that means and why it was important to co-create Fire Dreams as a collective?
Laura McTighe: Like Deon shared, this work is based in relationships. Deon and I first met in 2008 at a small gathering that brought together AIDS activists and prison abolitionists to try to unite these two movements around the knowledge that mass criminalization was a structural driver of the HIV epidemic.
Over the coming year, Deon and I spent hours talking by phone. We were building a friendship, but she was also apprenticing me to the foundational methods that Danita and Catherine created through WWAV. The first time I came to New Orleans I was invited by Deon to facilitate a meeting that birthed the NO Justice Project. Through this project, WWAV organized to fight Louisiana’s use of the felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) statute to criminalize sex work as a registerable sex offense. We partnered with a team of movement lawyers to bring a constitutional challenge of the statute, and won! – securing the removal of more than 800 people from the sex offender registry. Two months later, WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed in direct retaliation for our work.
After the fire, city officials, the police, politicians – everyone tried to say this was an atypical, exceptional attack. But at WWAV we knew this wasn’t a singular attack on a single organization at a single moment in time. Fire means something in the South. It means something in the lives of Black and Brown and Indigenous people. It means something in the lives of Black women. So we had to dig deep into the theory and praxis of WWAV’s foremothers and of the generations who came before them.
Research became a tool of survival for us. We never set out to write a book. We were trying to rebuild an organization and recreate the archive that was destroyed in the attack. We began by collecting every life-giving ember we could find. That included handfuls of photographs, posters, and documents that had not gone up in flames, which are now preserved at WWAV’s offices on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. It also extended to new ways of recording our presence with one another and with our communities: life history interviews, collective storytelling sessions, and more.
Fire Dreams is a story that we have created in time and in space, through pictures and porch talks, in the context of our relationships as comrades, friends, and family. Our processes for committing this story to paper are as living as the relationships in which we do this work. At any given time, every member of the WWAV collective has their role. As one of the writers in the collective, my role has most often been to record the WWAV vision and practice, working closely with Deon and the rest of the WWAV leadership to refine the message that we share, and talking through drafts and dreams. As we say in the book, “the labor of writing is inseparable from the organizing and theorizing that we are writing about.’
Writing as a collective is a theoretical and methodological innovation. Through this approach, we are working to transform conceptions of who the “author” is as well as who the “subjects” are. Both, as we argue and show, are fundamentally authoritative in the telling of the story. And that is a really radical intervention. It’s supposed to be. As a collective, we examine the work of community building and organizing undertaken by Black women in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the aftermath of what could have been a fatal arson attack, and we stitch our work to the freedom dreams of generations of Black women organizers in the South whose work we carry forward every day. In so doing, we destabilize neat boundaries around questions of authority and representation. We are one. By showing that and publishing this book with Duke University Press, we hope that Fire Dreams will open up new ways to think about academic authority, the division of labor in authorship, and the tools we use to evaluate academic work.
We desperately need to open up scholarship in this way because of the violence that academics have historically done in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities through extractive research practices that have mined community and ancestral knowledges; dispossessed members of their sacred objects, sites, and cosmologies; and perpetuated lethal stereotypes that are part of the ongoing legacies of chattel slavery and settler colonialism. In the book, we talk about how much violence these sorts of practices, usually shrouded in the myth of “objectivity” as the ideal research position, have done in our communities. In contrast, we work strongly in the lineage of Black feminist and abolitionist thinkers who have taught us that telling the stories about what we witness, theorize, envision, and practice is the most rigorous kind of knowledge we can make. They have also taught us about the love that needs to unite us and ground us in relationships in all that we do.
Deon: Racial capitalism destroys relationships and communities; it thrives off of individualism. Our work as a collective flies in the face of racial capitalism. We invest in each other and work collectively because that is what this work requires and because it is an act of protest. From day one our foremothers realized that this work was too big to hold alone. Black feminism is about building structures of care to ensure our survival in a world that wants us dead. Accompliceship is a challenge to build those structures of care, to build trusting relationships across identities to ensure our collective liberation. That’s not easy. This is deeper than a call for allyship. This is a demand that accomplices put real skin in the game and pour from themselves to aid in the liberation of all people.
Women With A Vision is a Black woman led organization. Our work has been and will always be in service of Black women, but we realize, as so many Black feminists who came before us, that true liberation requires us all. This work isn’t easy, but to get to where we are going, we’ve got to form and nurture loving, revolutionary relationships so that we can tackle systems of oppression together.
Kali: In the book’s Introduction, you tell readers that it is “not simply a book to be read. It is a toolkit” and “a call to revolutionize that knowledge into praxis in order to build the world otherwise.” Could you tell us about some of the tools you offer readers and how you hope they will be used?
Deon: It’s only because of the generations of work done by our foremothers, both known and unknown, that we’re able to continue this work. So much theory and praxis has been passed onto us in books, articles, and speeches, but also through conversation and through the ways that Black women have made their way in the world at the intersections of white supremacy and the patriarchy.
Laura: That’s precisely why we call our work the “Born in Flames Living Archive.” We use the term “living archive” to center the relational practices through which our communities have shaped and passed down for generations what living freedom means amid constant surveillance. In other words, we center what we call their “theory on the ground,” which we define in the book as, “theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the deeply enduring resistant visions of generations past and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, toward new and more possible futures.”
You get one of the core tools we offer in the first pages of the book: the “racial capitalism playbook.” In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the police tried to blame WWAV and the communities we serve for the violence we survived. And we knew that response had a history, just like the arson attack itself and the
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