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 organized abandonment that followed Hurricane Katrina. We distill the racial capitalism playbook into six steps:

ISOLATE people from necessary social services;
BLAME them for the abuse they survive;
CRIMINALIZE them for their survival;
DESTABILIZE  their communities;
ERASE them from the city of their birth; and then
TAKE their land

Those steps are ones that WWAV has used to understand, track, and build collective analysis about the violence we are living through, and also to understand and connect our present struggles to those of our ancestors. And we hope the racial capitalism playbook will be one tool our readers will use to understand and theorize these operations of racial capitalism in their daily lives and worlds. At the Born in Flames Living Archive, you can learn more about how we use the racial capitalism playbook in our work and also “talk back” and share insights from your own.

In the book, we also offer up WWAV’s four-part counter playbook for fighting racial capitalism and building a world in which it is possible to live and thrive, not just survive:

ACCOMPLICE – something we learn from Indigenous Action Media, active engagement, support, and organizing in loving partnership and solidarity on-the-ground to dismantle racial capitalism and make Black feminist liberation have “skin in the game”

REFUSAL – not allowing the logics, tactics, and violence of racial capitalism supremacy in one’s own life or community, daring to operate outside of the confines of the world as it is to build the world that must be

OTHERWISE – the possibility of a world beyond the violence of racial capitalism, the act of bringing forth this world first through imagination and then through action, the understanding that the world we are trying to build already exists in fragments and glimmers all around us

SPEECH – the refusal to be erased by continually speaking the truth of your community, the impacts of racial capitalism, and the possibility of a world otherwise, the knowledge that speech is a creative act: to speak into being

Each part of this counter playbook has been learned in community, on the ground, through decades of doing the work. And so we offer it to our readers as a discipline of hope. We are living through dark times, and we want to — we need to — see our movements grow. That can only happen by being in it, day after day, face to face, showing up for one another and continuing to speak the world that must be into being.

Deon: We also know that this work won’t be completed in our lifetimes so it’s essential that we continue in the tradition of sharing our knowledge and wisdom with the folks who will continue this work for generations to come.

Young people give me hope. I see their passion, their desire for liberation. I see how unapologetic they are. And just as this work was passed to me, I am one day going to pass the torch along to the next generation of Women With A Vision. Just as I can’t predict the future, I can’t tell the folks who are coming up exactly what tomorrow will require of them and our movement. What I can do is share what we know up until now—that is we can share the works that have shaped our thinking and ways of being and we can share what we’ve observed of our oppressors i.e., the racial capitalism playbook. And in sharing our counter playbook, we can point the next generation in the right direction, while allowing them to apply our strategies to their unique circumstances.

Kali: This book has something really important to say about religion. You critique reductive ideas about religion in the South and fight back against the religious roots of violent criminalization. You also say in the book that what WWAV does is sacred work in a place which is, itself, sacred. What does it mean for you to do this critical work as a sacred calling?

Deon: New Orleans is a place of seeming contradictions, pious and obscene at the same time. I think that what people often see is a city in the Deep South seemingly free from a lot of the judginess of our Bible-belt neighbors. And some would attribute that to the city’s Catholic tradition, which is true to some degree. But I would say, it has more to do with the city’s West African roots.

As I said earlier, New Orleans is the most African city in the United States. Our traditions, as people ripped from their communities in West Africa, endured here. Our music, our dance, our processionals, our masking traditions continue on to this day. There’s a popular song played by secondline bands here, I think originally written by Rebirth Brass Band, called “Do Whatcha Wanna.” Our ancestral traditions aren’t built on white supremacist, patriarchal, Western notions of morality. There’s space here for transgression. There’s a kind of “do whatcha wanna” attitude that is divorced from a lot of Western, white religiosity. We live in a city where men build stunning suits (Mardi Gras Indians), in a tradition rooted in our West African heritage paying homage to our maroon ancestors and the folks who helped them as they liberated themselves from the bonds of slavery, and call each other pretty. That’s radical.

Yes, there are challenges here. The white supremacists using their religion as cover seemingly have this place in a chokehold. But that’s not the full story. There is love and acceptance and a commitment to letting people live as they see fit, and I would say that is more radical than anything you’d find in whiter, more so-called progressive locales.

Laura: These are precisely the complexities of religion that we try to hold fully in Fire Dreams. And in doing that, we’re honoring the history of Black women’s theorizing about race and religion in the South. In the scholarly and popular imagination, the connection between race and religion is too often still presumed to cohere on Black women’s bodies through racist tropes around ecstatic forms of worship, singing, and dress that are rooted in the myths that Black religion is supposedly “primitive” compared to white religion and Black women are somehow “naturally” religious. So it was a really important intervention for us to write a public-facing religious studies book centered in a Black feminist collective in the South, led by a group of mostly non-churchgoing women who are working on the frontlines of struggles for harm reduction, reproductive justice, abolition feminism, HIV liberation, and more — and organizing daily against those racist tropes.

Throughout Fire Dreams, we lift up the precision of WWAV’s theorizing about white supremacist Christianity and our work to build otherwise. That comes through in so many places in the text –– from the moral panic around the early AIDS crisis, to the religious roots of the Crime Against Nature law, to the religious underpinnings of carceral feminism and the war against sex workers, to the vicious organizing against abortion and bodily autonomy.

And we also show how WWAV’s work is sacred work. Not just in the making of sacred space like front porches and WWAV’s office itself. But also in the ways we dream of a world otherwise and speak that work into being, in the ways we care for one another and honor the sacredness of Black livingness. To imagine, much less create, the world anew is profoundly rigorous work. And those sacred traditions run deep in the relational caverns in which Black radical thoughts, actions, and dreams have been kept safe for centuries, just like Deon explained.

That is the gift of Fire Dreams. It is an offering of love that honors the transformative religio-racial practices that generations have used to cross worlds, open portals, and conjure revolution. And it invites all of our readers into doing that work with us.

Kali: Finally, I want to ask you: what’s next for WWAV? In the book, Deon tells us that “the work will continue to get done, no matter what.” The final words of the book are, “forward ever”; and here, you’ve already spoken about how young people give you hope. What is your vision for moving forward? What do you see on the horizon? And how can others support and join you in that work?

Deon: In this moment post-Dobbs, with a governor hell bent on disappearing our community members behind bars, it’s time to get back to basics. I’m thinking a lot about what this present moment has in common with the era in which we were founded. WWAV’s foremothers started their work at the peak of the War on Drug Users, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and so-called tough-on-crime policies. We’ve got to apply their same tactics and strategies today. We’re focusing on applying harm reduction to everything we do. For our reproductive justice program that means getting our community members the information and resources they need in a state where abortion is banned outright. It means talking to our community members about how voting is not the end-all, be-all, but is a critical way to reduce harm for our most vulnerable neighbors. We’re focused on connecting the dots within our community so that we can continue to care for each other when local, state, and federal institutions abandon or outright attack us.

(Image source: Women With A Vision)

As we’ve talked about, this work is a sacred calling that must be passed on to the next generation. We’ve relaunched our Young Women With A Vision program so that young Black girls and femmes have a place where they are the architects of their own liberation.

We’re continuing our harm reduction and outreach services, working with the state to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and continuing to support our substance using community.

Laura: And we are using this book to support us doing this work and sharing WWAV’s hard-won strategies with our people locally and nationwide. This is also what it means for us to approach this work as a living archive. We honor the dreams of our foremothers by living them and by working together to build the world that must be.

Over the coming year, we’ll be partnering with movement organizations across the country to shore up our relationships and build community power at the intersections of struggles for harm reduction, reproductive justice, abolition feminism, and more. We launched this book with our community in New Orleans on the book’s publication day, March 5th. On March 22nd, we gathered with WWAV’s longtime Atlanta comrades at Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, Black Feminist Future, Feminist Women’s Health Center, The Georgia Harm Reduction Coalition, Project South, SisterLove, Inc., and SisterSong for a packed event at Charis Books and More. On April 2nd, we’ll be convening virtually with our partners at the Drug Policy Alliance to talk about drug criminalization, community-driven research, and more. And then, we’ll be hosting our next in-person gathering in Baltimore with The Bloom Collective for Black Maternal Health Week on April 16th. We are currently booked out through November, when we’ll look forward to engaging with religious studies scholars at the American Academy of Religion in San Diego for a porch talk organized by the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit and the Afro-American Religious History Unit.

As Deon says in her foreword and we repeat throughout the book: “The work will continue to get done, no matter what.” Forward Ever.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor and writing coach based in New York City. 

Laura McTighe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Cofounder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans.

Deon Haywood is Executive Director of Women With A Vision, a New Orleans-based organization that has organized for Black feminist liberation in the South for decades.