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‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail, Sami al-Saei's testimony for the Guardian and more accounts of torture in Israeli prisons (jan 21st, 2026)

"Al-Saei has paid a high price for speaking out. Forced to move away from gossiping neighbours, he has struggled to find work and is haunted by vivid nightmares about his children’s future.

But he does not regret his decision to become a voice for those who cannot face adding new pain to deep trauma. “It was my choice,” he said, adding that during 16 months in jail he saw clear evidence in the overcrowded cells that many other prisoners had been assaulted. “Even if the others didn’t speak about it, it was obvious they also had this experience.”"

d3monl0ver

self portraits w/ commentary from men

#art

guelwaar

said this in someone's replies already but you don't need to 'groom' usamericans into protecting their material interests by killing global southerners they're frothing at the mouth to do it & you should reflect on what it is exactly you gain by using the structuring metaphor of the passive mindcontrolled Child being preyed on by sexual deviants to describe the direct perpetrators of imperial violence

fatehbaz

killed (stole!) so much time at work reading through snippets of PDFs, articles, chapters, etc., trying to pin down a definitive date for ol' Walty B's tenancy at Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (a couple months? in 1924-1925?) just so i could make a single half-assed but (and this is important) accurately-cited joke about transsexuals in Berlin jazz venues being foundational to critical theory.

but joke canceled, since it's hard to pin-down the dates. joke also cancelled because i got genuinely saddened (niederschmetternd, even) by thought-tangents of the unceasing police/state crushing of German organizing and radicalism 1918-1933 (and beyond, of course). also factored into joke cancellation: "am i doing that, y'know, kind of thing where twenty-first-century observers wistfully (re-)imagine a half-mythology of a pop-historical idealized Golden/Roaring Twenties, as if it were mere nostalgic entertainment for an intellectual tourist contemplating bifurcated modernism and destitution, grieving the loss of one of history's supposedly-key windows of revolutionary opportunity?"

anyway, though Einstein was in town at the beginning of the decade, Josephine Baker was visiting in 1926, and Adorno would be hanging out by the time of the market crash, the critical moment (for joking purposes) would be at the mid-point of the decade, in which case the joke would've made use of this (potential?) confluence in the city:

on some brisk and cloudy day in Berlin in 1925, it might've been possible (however unlikely, and depending on those dates!) that you could've seen some cabaret seated alongside newly-anointed dramaturg Bertolt Brecht and then chilled on a patio with Walter Benjamin, who rented a room for a time at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.

joke-potential now entirely dissolved. all that remains: the desire--the will--to be the transsexual in the tavern booth. is she sullen? or instead is she--am i--smirking?

fuckyeahmeikokaji

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) in Lady Snowblood (修羅雪姫), 1973, directed by Toshiya Fujita (藤田敏八).

#lady snowblood #film

vicholas

I frankly don't care how many Venezuelans around the world support the invasion. I think it's a good example of how the "listen to X voices" rhetoric is essentially flawed.

There are already many Venezuelans in my country out in the streets celebrating the invasion and I'm pretty sure there will be more celebrations by the Venezuelan diaspora around the world in the coming days. This is gonna be an elephant in the room (at least on this site) because people want to condemn US interventionism but they also don't want to "speak over Venezuelans".

People are gonna opt to pretend the celebrations are not happening because acknowledging it makes them feel uncomfortable. People are gonna pretend all Venezuelans are against the US, but I feel it's way more productive to talk about how "listen to X voices" is flawed than to play dumb about reality.

markiafc

#hmm #one hundred steps #film

nica-nopal

“Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca wrote one of the earliest known descriptions of gender nonconforming individuals in Native American society. In the 1530s, he described seeing, among a group of Coahuiltecan Indians in what is today Southern Texas, “effeminate, impotent men” who are married to other men and “go about covered-up like women and they do the work of women” (Lang, 1998, p. 67). Like de Vaca, most of those who reported on gender diversity in Native American cultures were Europeans—conquistadors, explorers, missionaries, or traders—whose worldviews were shaped by Christian doctrines that espoused adherence to strict gender roles and condemned any expressions of sexuality outside of married male-female relationships. Consequently, they reacted to instances of nonbinary genders, in the words of gay scholar Will Roscoe (1998), “with amazement, dismay, disgust, and occasionally, when they weren’t dependent on the natives’ goodwill, with violence” (p. 4). A less judgmental account was provided by Edwin T. Denig, a mid-19th-century fur trader in present-day Montana, who expressed astonishment at the Crow Indians’ acceptance of a “neuter” gender. “Strange country this,” he stated, “where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!” (Roscoe, 1998, p. 3). Another matter-of-fact narrative was provided by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, an artist who accompanied a French expedition to Florida in 1564, who noted that what he referred to as “hermaphrodites” were “quite common” among the Timucua Indians (Katz, 1976, p. 287). At the other extreme was the reaction of Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa. In his trek across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, Balboa set his troop’s dogs on 40 male-assigned Cueva Indians for being “sodomites,” as they had assumed the roles of women. Another Spanish conquistador, Nuño de Guzmán, burned alive a male-assigned individual who presented as female—considering the person to be a male prostitute—while traveling through Mexico in the 1530s (Saslow, 1999).”

— [“gender is a colonial imposition” - Maria Lugones] (via rienfleche)

#words #maria lugones

Absolutely GORGEOUS image of Alpha Azieru & Char for the Char’s Counterattack prologue in the 1/1988 issue of Newtype. Illustrated by Hideyuki Sato.

#gundam

hateusandseeifwemind-deactivate

awildwickedslip

rereading lolita for the first time since i was a teenager and already feeling something i’d sensed and hope to refine: how absolutely up the wall it drives me that it is held up as a “good” case of dealing with transgressive or morally revolting content because you “aren’t supposed to” find it erotic, because it’s only supposed purpose is to didactically make the reader feel bad if they ever find it erotic. unlike those other dirty bad “fetishistic” examples that mingle the erotic with the depraved. but lolita is absolutely an erotic text! and maybe the point is that this horror is baked into our cultural ideas of the erotic! it’s in the language and the images and the way we conceive of and communicate beauty. and so i think you miss the point hugely when you imagine the only acceptable affect toward it, and the one all other texts fail by not inducing, is tsking repulsion. you are ignoring the deliberate eroticism of the text.