January 2012
92 posts
“The task of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems.”
—
Deep Green Resistance (via cultureofresistance)
It isn’t about making people who do wrong things or display ignorance still feel sort of kind of good about themselves, it’s telling the truth in a way that conveys the full oppressive state of the situation.
(via daniellemertina)
“‘Queer’, a derogatory term leveled at the non-hetero-seeming, was reappropriated in the late 1980s, early 1990s by its victims as a defiant means of empowerment echoing black activists’ use of ‘nigger’ in the 1960s. Relieving the burden of the titular expansion of L-G-B-T- (lebian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), queer’s most basic function is as an umbrella term or catch-all for uniting various forms of non-straight sexual identity. But it means much more than this. Queer represents the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression…In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both gay and straight sexuality. As Richard Dyer rightly reminds us, the contemporary formulation of queer functions in sharp contrast to its past, it signifies a fluidity of identity where, historically, queer represented an ‘exclusive and fixed sexuality’. To be queer now means to be untethered from ‘conventional’ codes of behavior. At its most expansive and utopian, queer contests (hetero- and homo-) normality.”
—
New Queer Cinema: An Introduction by Michele Aaron.
ALL OF THIS. except the n word part…these words are not parallel in their re-appropriation
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
—
bell hooks (via cultureofresistance)
Word…we do this to all little boys…”quit crying toughen up you are a boy”
(via slumbeauty)
patriarchy hurts everyone.
(via dopegirlfresh)
Although I’ve never been male, I have been on the receiving end of this treatment. It really is horrifying, and it deeply disturbs me that most of us (including myself) don’t seem to talk about it much. I don’t say that to be all “what about teh menz” (it’s not just men who have to deal with this, anyway); I say it because I can’t see patriarchal misogyny as separate from patriarchal pressure to “be a man”, and I don’t see how, in the larger scheme of things, we can realistically address one without the other.
(via kiriamaya)
This is kind of why I run and hide from most cisgender feminists, since its irritatingly rare for them to get this.
(via eateroftrees)
“Cross-racial struggle made clear the work that white women needed to do in order for cross-racial sisterhood to really be powerful. Among the directives were the following: Don’t expect women of color to be your educators, to do all the bridge work. White women need to be the bridge - a lot of the time. Do not lump African American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women into one category. History, culture, imperialism, language, class, region, and sexuality make the concept of a monolithic “women of color” indefensible. Listen to women of color’s anger. It is informed by centuries of struggle, erasure, and experience. White women, look to your own history for signs of heresy and rebellion. Do not take the histories of Black, Latina, or Native American women as your own. They are not and never were yours.”
—Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” in Nancy Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminisms (via ohgeeznora)
You cannot have a conversation about feminism and refuse to talk about WoC
Because then you’re not having a conversation about feminism, you’re having a conversation about white people. And we already have plenty of conversations about white people.
its not long enough to be a manifesto, but it should be: taking down "come out culture" once and for all
To me, the whole notion of Malcolm X being a coward for not coming out when he was alive and well points to a larger problem, come out culture in general.
I’m not talking about coming out as a personal process, but a larger LGBT culture which perpetuates multiple falsehoods about the motivations and realities for coming out of the closet.
A larger culture which has created a dichotomy of coming out the closet as being associated with
- bravery- because while yes, coming out is brave, there is no bravery in merely attempting to survive environments that are hostile to LGBT existence and bodies {sarcasm}
- progressive- your act is a sign of the changing times, of how things have “gotten better” and the more people who come out, the more society will have to accept LGBT people for who and what they are {we all know dis a damn lie}
- martyrdom- you are using your identity as a platform for teaching bigots and the otherwise politically neutral about how LGBT people are just as “normal” as straight people. you are becoming a warrior in the out and proud rainbow army which is gunning for the homophobia of the larger straight world. You’re in the army now! and that’s a damn noble cause if i do say so myself {epic sarcasm!}
Anybody who doesn’t come out is usually indited as a coward single handedly holding progress back by refusing to make their identity a political platform. They are ticking the clock hands of progress in reverse because, and often-times they are unfairly compared to those choosing to live out lifestyles without critical understanding of what motivates the decision to come out versus the decision to keep sexual identity to onesself.
Come out culture in and of itself is loaded with privilege denial and reeks of privilege.
It ignores the circumstance of the individual over the perceived collective need of the group, often blaming them for things beyond their control, such as financial/stability dependence on a loved one who espouses anti-LGBT beliefs both verbally or violently.
It ignores the ways in which sexuality plays a role in certain community dynamics with respect to class, race. and religion. Instead it chooses to focus on those who have come out in those respective communities and have prospered, making them an all too high standard to live up to.
It ignores the harsh realities members of communities may face in coming out, painting this overly rosey picture of coming out as either being a relatively consequence free endeavour or one with adversity that can easily be overcome with time. Instead it chooses to vilify those communities for not making a safe space for its LGBT members to come out in, often speaking over existing in-group conversations around issues of sexuality, gender identity, and gender presentation.
It ignores the homelessness which plagues LGBT people, the violence of street living as a result of homelessness or simply being coded walking down the street as too flamboyant, too masculine, too binary breaking, too androgynous, too south of straight and heteronormative. The lack of legal protections for housing, marriage rights, employment, medical treatments/services, violence against LGBT people with respect to law enforcement outside of the federal level.
The scathing irony of all this: come out culture is a fairly white-washed aspect of the LGBT movement which has been adopted by LGBT people of color attempting to fit into a larger movement which barely includes them in the first place. We kick ourselves for not having Harvey Milks or Judy Shepards or more contemporary out and proud brown figures who are living the good life since coming out the closet. We villify those living on the down lo instead of first asking what about our respective cultures makes those people feel unsafe, or what about the construction of brown masculinity or brown femininity and the underlying gender roles makes a person feel as though their identity must be kept a secret.
We attempt to adopt this haphazard rhetoric and apply it to our communities not realizing that much like condoms, its not always one size fits all. We adopt this rhetoric when our priorities should be figuring out whether having a come out culture is even significant to us. Is coming out as an LGBT brown person signficant to the advancement of LGBT brown people, or can we mobilize and advance without people putting themselves in harm’s way.
And if we do feel as though having a come out culture is worth it, then our priorities should be actualizing the ways in which brown come out culture looks to us and feels to us and makes our brown queer bodies feel safe and stable, not attempting to compete with a white narrative which makes coming out seem like winning or loosing a game of cards, and often overlooks and misrepresents the harsh realities facing white LGBT people who lack financial independence or stability enough to come out and brave the ramifications of their own communities.
So honestly, as a queer woman who has been out since she was 14 and is now 21, as somebody who is working on coming out as an African American muslim woman who chose Jewish Studies as a major long before coming into her own religious identity. as somebody who is not out to my Jewish studies colleagues on a lot of levels, sexuality included, because i chose to build my relationships not based on my identities but my ability to master the material and my interest. fuck come out culture.
Your identity is not there to teach people right from wrong, just from unjust, or martyr from coward. You are no less a queer person for not jumping out of the closet with a pogo stick and your contributions are not undermined simply because you choose not to live your life on the front lines for everyone to praise and condemn.
You don’t owe queer people the strength in your number if it comes at a great expense to your life, your safety, your stability, or even your mental health.
You are here to exist for you and only you. To breathe, to survive, to make your dreams come true, to actualize yourself in a way which means the wheels keep on turnin and don’t stop.
“As a female legislator, I often speak to groups of women — from Girl Scouts and graduates to fellow female attorneys and aspiring politicians. I share my personal experiences and discuss the myriad of challenges females face in elected office. But I rarely convey how much chauvinism and sexism still go on in politics today because, quite frankly, I am embarrassed by it. I do not have the heart to tell a classroom full of girls that the same attitudes and animosity they encounter on the playground persist to our highest levels of government.”
—Michigan State Senator Gretchen Whitmer says sexism is rampant at the State Capitol | Michigan Radio (via mimitakestheleftturn)
This is the internal battle I feel when talking to prospective Dartmouth students who are black—or, God forbid, black and female. (via ethiopienne)
This is the internal battle I feel when talking to prospective Dartmouth students who are black—or, God forbid, black and female. (via ethiopienne)
“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”
—
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (via arewomenhuman)
Exactly.
(via readnfight)
“Before AIDS became part of the medical and then popular lexicon, newspapers reported on a strange “gay cancer.”Most cancers are named for the part of the body they attack—lung cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, etc.—not for the demographic group that suffers the highest initial losses.More importantly, while a susceptibility to cancer may be hereditary, cancer itself is not communicable. Members of a community or population who may be linked culturally, socially, politically, but not genetically, could only be diagnosed with “gay cancer” under the operative assumption that queers shared some specific bodily anomaly unknown to heterosexuals. Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), which replaced “gay cancer” (until the Centers for Disease Control settled on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in 1982), was not much of an improvement in this regard. Ideological precedents within both the research community and the larger culture that biologized homosexuality made the decidedly unscientific labels of gay cancer and GRID sound reasonable and accurate and set the tone for AIDS rhetoric for years to come.”
—Nancy Ordover - American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (via effusionofbiopower)
Trust Women to Make Their Own Decisions Regarding Their Bodies
Join Trust Women Week.
From January 20 to 27, join the first-ever “Trust Women Week,” an online mass mobilization for women’s lives and rights. The Trust Women/Silver Ribbon Campaign is the coordinating partner in this unique collaborative campaign, working with MoveOn.org and more than 50 organizations nationwide, to let legislators know that reproductive health, reproductive justice and reproductive rights are at the top of our agenda, and should be at the top of theirs.
In this collaborative national action, your messages as “virtual marchers” will be packaged and delivered directly to members of Congress, governors and state legislators to underscore that Americans trust women to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives.
Online participants may select up to six tailored messages:
1. “I trust women and I vote;”
2. “Reproductive rights are human rights;”
3. “Keep abortion safe and legal, and make it affordable and accessible;”
4. “Stand up and be counted for reproductive justice;”
5. “We are the 99%. Fix the economy, and stop the attacks on women’s health;”
6. “Contraception Is Prevention.”
Join in this virtual freedom march, and you’ll see your participation on a real-time online map. Your participation is essential to this effort, so thanks for your support!
Click here to join the March!
Trust Women Week overlaps the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and reasserts our firm commitment to reclaiming the future of reproductive decision-making in 2012.
Thanks again for your support.
“African American women’s internal life experiences are part of the American story. So, when we’re listening, for example, to the GOP rhetoric about this nostalgia of this America when things were simpler and better. You could never tell that story if you bothered to think about African American women’s experiences because there is no moment in history where it is nostalgic and better to have been a little black girl.”
—
Melissa Harris-Perry (via sociolab)
Damn straight.
(via jenikamcontheonesandtwos)
“The thing is, I’m not looking for people to mindlessly force themselves to call me ‘he’ in order to avoid making me uncomfortable. If comfort was my goal, I could probably have found a smoother path than the one I’m on, right? I haven’t chosen this word ‘he’ because it means something true to me, or it feels all homey and delicious. No pronoun feels personal to me. I’ve chosen it because the act of saying it, of looking at the body I’m in and the way that my gender has been identified since birth and then calling me ‘he,’ disrupts oppressive processes that fix everyone’s gender as ‘real,’ immutable, and determinative of your station in life. I’m not hoping that people will see that I’m different, paste a fake smile on their faces and force themselves to say some word about me with no thought process. I’m hoping that they will feel implicated, that it will make them think about the realness of everyone’s gender, that it will make them feel more like they can do whatever they want with their gender, or at least cause a pause where one normally would not exist. Quite likely, this will be uncomfortable for all of us, but I believe that becoming uncomfortable with the oppressive system of rigid gender assignment is a great step toward undoing it.”
—Dean Spade on pronouns in “once more… with feeling.” (via accumulatedephemera)
If you want me to be open and willing to educate you on the Trans* community, here's a few do's and don'ts before you... →
fuckyeahsexeducation.tumblr.com
DO NOT-
- Ask what’s in my pants. It doesn’t matter, and it won’t affect you in any way.
- Ask what my birthname is. Again, it just doesn’t matter.
- Try to tell me what my “sex” is. I’m very well aware.
- Tell me that I still look like my assigned sex. Again, I’m well aware It…
If you want me to be open and willing to educate you on the Trans* community, here's a few do's and don'ts before you... →
fuckyeahsexeducation.tumblr.com
DO NOT-
- Ask what’s in my pants. It doesn’t matter, and it won’t affect you in any way.
- Ask what my birthname is. Again, it just doesn’t matter.
- Try to tell me what my “sex” is. I’m very well aware.
- Tell me that I still look like my assigned sex. Again, I’m well aware It…
“In order to understand why transphobia and cissexism persist and are continually perpetuated throughout feminist communities...
“In order to understand why transphobia and cissexism persist and are continually perpetuated throughout feminist communities, particularly the vegetarian-ecofeminist community, it is important to consider the origins of anti-trans advocacy as a conscious project of prominent, elite White feminists in the 1970s. In the late sixties and early seventies, trans people were very active in the women’s and queer liberation movements. The Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall rebellions of the sixties are evidence of that, as are women like Beth Elliot of the Daughters of Bilitis, Sandy Stone of Olivia Records, and Stonewall veteran Silvia Rivera who was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. So it’s important to keep in mind that trans women, and trans people more generally, were an integral part of the early women’s liberation movement. But in the mid- to late-seventies, there was a transphobic backlash within feminism to systematically remove and exclude trans people, explicitly transsexual women, from the women’s and queer movements. For example, Rivera was targeted and physically attacked by cissexist women separatists at a gay rights rally. Elliot was targeted by Robin Morgan and separatists at a lesbian women’s conference. Stone was targeted by Janice Raymond and forced out of Olivia Records with threats of a boycott. And Gloria Steinem of Ms. magazine openly attacked trans women. Over the last couple decades, there has been an increase in organizing and activism by trans people, yet we continue to be the targets of a systematic backlash from elite feminists. So-called ‘women-born women’ policies are still used to exclude transsexual women from participating in our own movement. And while trans women are disproportionately targeted by homelessness, prisons, and sexual and physical violence, an alliance between anti-trans feminists and the state has been used to circumvent human rights laws in order to bar us from many vital women’s facilities and services. Trans women have even been forced out of women’s services organizations they helped create.” — Ida Hammer, in an interview with Bitch Magazine (via mikroblogolas)
Racialicious: There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions by Audre Lorde →
racialicious.tumblr.com
File this under: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”
From “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions” by Audre Lorde
I was born Black, and a woman. I am trying to become the strongest person I can become to live the life I have been given and to help effect change toward a liveable future for this earth and for my children. As a Black,…
Play
“One of the most common biphobic narratives is that the penis is what counts. A woman who has sex with men is really straight, even if she also fucks women; a man who has sex with men is really gay, even if he also fucks women. If a man fucks a man, even once, he is forever corrupted from the heights of heterosexual masculinity.”
—Bisexual Men, Like, Exist And Stuff | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? (via a-blog-called-everything)
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
—
bell hooks (via cultureofresistance)
Word…we do this to all little boys…”quit crying toughen up you are a boy”
(via slumbeauty)
patriarchy hurts everyone.
(via dopegirlfresh)
Although I’ve never been male, I have been on the receiving end of this treatment. It really is horrifying, and it deeply disturbs me that most of us (including myself) don’t seem to talk about it much. I don’t say that to be all “what about teh menz” (it’s not just men who have to deal with this, anyway); I say it because I can’t see patriarchal misogyny as separate from patriarchal pressure to “be a man”, and I don’t see how, in the larger scheme of things, we can realistically address one without the other.
(via kiriamaya)
The only way to destroy sexism is to change the way boys are raised. As someone who was perceived as male growing up, I was subjected to this sick 24/7 hazing ritual. Until we address the disease embedded in male socialization, we will never make any lasting progress.
(via amydentata)
“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
—Josephine Hart (via butchrag, mols) (via painsmypleasure) (via fuckyeahfeminists)
“For people living on the outskirts of traditional gender, being perceived as different genders at different times and coming to find out how subjective gender assignment is, and how fleeting membership in any gender role can be, can generate new feelings of experimentation and increased independence and pleasure. Suddenly, this thing that has always been a given in our culture—that all people are male or female their whole lives, and that this difference is inscribed by ‘nature’ in our very genes— falls away when some people perceive you as a woman and others as a man, and when gender starts to come apart in pieces: hair, chest, clothing, walk, voice, gesture, etc.”
—Dean Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters” essay (via os-car-a-non-y-mous)
Trans* Studies Syllabi →
agreaa.org
The following is a list of syllabi for trans studies and related courses that devote significant time to trans issues. These syllabi have been posted here with the permission of the professors who created them and who reserve all rights to their work.
2011's Best Black Radical Reading →
guerrillamamamedicine.tumblr.com
including Columbia’s very own Alondra Nelson and Kellie Jones
While post-Black vapors have intoxicated contemporary culture, many of our favorite books of 2011 were part of a wave of scholarship that re-evaluated the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power era and took a second look at a long-ago time when “black” was still…
Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe →
socialtextjournal.org
For Butler and Monáe, transhuman disabled bodies offer possibility and freedom that simple humanity forecloses. Monáe’s use of disability as metaphor supports her alter ego’s search for a freedom in a world much like our own. However, by reducing disability to metaphor and by using ableist language, the real lives of disabled people are obscured. Butler’s depiction of Shori’s hybrid body serves as a flash point for eugenic impulse, allowing an investigation of the deep seated racial prejudices of our time. However, punishing characters through impairment makes disability into retribution, a just sentence for wrongdoing in an ableist world that doesn’t make accommodations for people who need them.
