Published in the 2025 Winter Issue of Bi Women Quarterly.
When we picture activism, we often imagine bodies in motion — marching, chanting, confronting power. But not all revolutions are loud. Some take place in the small rooms where we paint, write, compose, and dream. Some happen when we dare to tell our stories differently. My own activism unfolds there: in music, in writing, in collaborative art projects. I rarely hold a megaphone. Instead, I hold a pen.
For a long time, I thought this made me less of an activist. I’m autistic, bi+, and chronically tired; protest crowds overwhelm me. Yet my desire to dismantle injustice is no smaller. Art became my accompliceship — not a substitute for direct action, but a form of it. Still, I’ve had to learn what that word really means.
Dean Spade reminds us that accompliceship isn’t simply solidarity; it involves risk, redistribution, and accountability. It means using one’s privilege to materially disrupt oppressive systems, and letting those most impacted lead the way. My early understanding was naïve — “showing up in whatever form we can.” That was safe. Comforting. But accompliceship begins where comfort ends. It requires the willingness to give up control, to make mistakes publicly, to fund, to listen, to step back.
For me, that has meant using my platform to pay and promote artists who are too often tokenised or excluded. It has meant refusing to curate “Asian aesthetics” through a Western gaze, and instead inviting Japanese teachers and collaborators to define the direction of the Japan Fans project themselves. I am constantly learning how to unlearn extraction — how to move from fascination to accountability. My admiration for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese art forms must not erase the complex histories and hierarchies between them. As Edward Said warned, Western fascination with “the East” often disguises power. I try to ensure my cultural work resists that — not through purity, but through transparency, relationships, and reparative exchange.
Accompliceship also asks that I face my own privileges. I am white, European, and highly educated. I have access to academic and artistic spaces that many others do not. My autism, queerness, and ADHD often exclude me within those same spaces — but they do not erase my structural safety. I move between advantage and marginality constantly. That tension is not a flaw; it’s the condition of my practice. The work is to notice where I hold the microphone, and to decide when to hand it over.
Quiet activism can be misread as comfort, or worse, as depoliticisation. I’ve worried about that. Because disability justice, as Mia Mingus and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha insist, is not just about care and creativity — it is about collective, often uncomfortable, resistance. My quiet activism does not replace the radical organising of disabled comrades who block inaccessible buses or fight austerity in the streets. It intertwines with theirs. My art helps raise funds through Japan Fans for disability-rights initiatives; I design posters and websites for grassroots campaigns; I offer rehearsal and workshop spaces to organisers who need a room. Sometimes I simply show up to document or translate their work, amplifying it beyond language barriers. Art is not a parallel lane to direct action — it is one of its support systems.
To create in this world is also to resist its economics. Neoliberalism has commodified rest, care, even attention. Art schools close, funding disappears, creative labour is devalued unless it sells. Under austerity, making art becomes a privilege of those who can afford time. I can — sometimes. And that means my responsibility increases. The machine that thrives on despair is not abstract; it is the network of austerity policies, the medical–industrial complex, the productivity cult that tells us we must monetise every breath. To sit at my piano or write this essay is not escapism. It is how I take ten minutes back from capitalism and give them to the community instead.
Intersectional feminism gives this work its compass. There is no feminism without trans* liberation, without racial and disability justice, without ecological awareness. But intersectionality is not a decorative list; it’s a practice of staying with contradiction. My feminism has to hold the mess: that I am both a product of privilege and a target of ableism; that my vegan ethics sit uneasily within capitalist food systems; that I can love Indonesian cultures and still carry a colonial passport.
I try to navigate these contradictions through action: growing herbs and vegetables on my balcony rather than buying plastic-wrapped produce; mending clothes, knitting, refusing fast fashion; sharing vegan meals made from local ingredients; buying art supplies second-hand; teaching children to make music with found materials instead of imported instruments. These gestures are small, but they are refusals — ways of withdrawing my consent from exploitative systems while acknowledging that withdrawal alone cannot dismantle them.
Even within my community work, privilege complicates everything. “The workshops are free for those who cannot pay,” I often say, but free is not simple. We use QR codes for anonymous donations to avoid forcing anyone to “out” themselves as poor. Still, inequality shows itself in who gives and who walks away. I remember a concert by Japanese musicians where older white visitors left smiling, but without scanning the code. When I gently confronted one of them, he replied that the performers “enjoyed themselves anyway.” That sentence — the assumption that joy is payment — revealed everything. Accompliceship means noticing such moments, naming them, and changing the system so that joy never substitutes for justice.
Through CEAL (the Centre for Enthusiasts of Asian Languages) and through the dojo I dream of, I try to link art to collective change. The work is messy: budgets, translations, misunderstandings, burnout. But it also creates tiny infrastructures of care — sliding scales, shared meals, community archives. These are not aesthetic gestures; they are political logistics. They are how I keep art tethered to reality.
And yet, there are days when all this feels too small. The planet burns; fascism rises; policy strips away our safety nets. What can a song do against that? But I return to what Amie McNee said: “Making art is activism. The act of making art is inherently political.” When I create, I remember that I still have agency. I can refuse despair. I can model care. And care, in a culture of cruelty, is radical.
We often underestimate the politics of gentleness. But gentleness is not the absence of struggle; it’s a strategy for survival. It’s how we refuse to replicate the violence we oppose. In every community project, in every classroom or dojo, I try to build spaces that embody the world I want — inclusive, patient, slow. My revolution is not about perfection. It’s about persistence.
So this is my accompliceship: imperfect, accountable, ongoing. I will keep writing, painting, composing, teaching. I will keep redistributing what I can, and making room for those whose stories are still silenced. I will stay uncomfortable. Because art is not decoration — it is declaration.
I don’t know if it’s enough.
But I know it’s necessary.
