Time to think outside the ballot box.

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
AnasAbdin
noise dept.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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trying on a metaphor
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

Product Placement
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
YOU ARE THE REASON
almost home

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NASA

roma★
taylor price
RMH
Peter Solarz
i don't do bad sauce passes
d e v o n
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@cosasdecolor
Time to think outside the ballot box.
Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law, parliaments; and it also extolls authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (via pintu)
Affection had appeared, but through a fissure, a crevice, in the person, through which, behind affection, came all the winds of fear. For the act of love is a confession. One lies about the body but the body doesn’t lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it.
James Baldwin, Another Country (180)
Human beings cannot be defined in purely biogenetic terms-that is, from a purely phylogenetic cum ontogenetic perspective, or, in other words, from the perspective of the purely physiological conditions of being human (i,e., phylogeny and ontogeny), as we are now defined to be in terms of our present liberal or bio-humanist order of knowledge.
Sylvia Wynter, On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desetre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project (via beautone)
Her Story - episode 6
Watch here: herstoryshow.com
Her Story is a web series about the dating lives of trans & queer women, which stars trans & queer women, and was written and directed by trans & queer women. (One of the creators Jen Richards is also on tumblr @smartassjen )
More gifs here
Can I talk about this scene?
While it comes at the end, It was actually the first one I wrote. It was originally an epic Julia Sugarbaker-type monologue where Paige goes in deep on all the ways white queer culture excludes and hurts trans women. Everyone told me it was way too long and had to be cut down. We struggled a long time with how to do that. One night Laura & I were talking with Sydney and someone (I can’t remember who now), said, “What if went the opposite way and had her barely speak at all?” Laura and I started re-writing on the spot, imagining Angelica carrying the scene with just her looks, allowing the Lisa character to talk herself into a hole until Paige delivers just the core message of the monologue.
And that core message is what I love about the final version.
Paige is not engaging in a debate about the reality of trans women, or the arguments of some lesbians who feel they don’t belong. She recognizes that Lisa, and people like her, have decided that trans women aren’t women, but she doesn’t care.
ALL she cares is about is the safety of trans women. That’s the focus of her work, that’s her motivation, that’s the only reason she goes to the cafe to confront Lisa.
Paige has had a lifetime of being told what her body means, where she belongs, and has overcome all of it. She’s beyond people like Lisa. She’s fighting for the safety of other girls like her, and make no mistake, she will win.
I just really fucking love Paige.
I love love love love love this scene (and this whole show tbh) and I really love what Jen says about the scene here. It was so freaking powerful and amazing and I love it so much.
male person silences a woman and calls her a bitch. shocking.
How interesting that the person who acts like the villain in the piece does exactly what the villain in the piece does…
The cis/trans binary also furthers centralization and colonialism, assimilating and categorizing all identities outside of itself. Like all forms of representation, the cis/trans binary as an all-encompassing set of categories is both flattening and inadequate. There are genders that are not cis but do not place themselves under the trans umbrella. Despite this, anyone who isn’t cis is assumed to be trans, and vice versa. An LGBTQ avant garde moves to assimilate all “unusual” genders, and even the lack of gender, into trans-ness. This leaves no room for anyone to fall outside of these categories. This often plays out in a colonial manner, rendering non-western genders legible to and manageable by western LGBTQ narratives of gender and sexuality.
Against Gender, Against Society - nila nokizaru (via hazelxvx)
She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan, Contact (via theglasschild)
Viola Davis has never shied away from harsh truths. On Tuesday, Davis spoke to the Stuart House (a nonprofit for sexually abused children) about trauma in her own family. Through her speech, she explained how abuse changes survivors’ lives and what she wishes she could say to her sister now: “I wish I could tell my sister …”
“Memories have teeth”
The gender system is not just hierarchical but racially differentiated, and the racial differentiation denies humanity and thus gender to the colonized.
Maria Lugones, Towards a Decolonial Feminism (via bodieswithoutsexes)
You can let your lustful bodies touch even though you’re committing a sin, but you cannot keep loving someone who is not willing to let you in.
Stories I’ll tell one day #73 – Ming D. Liu (via mingdliu)
silience
n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, Kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)
Sylvia Plath - from Mad Girl’s Lovesong (via watchoutforintellect)
It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that? I’d just like to make a point here that is very important. Although I use the term “race,” and I have to use the term “race,” “race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.” Once you say, “besides ontogeny, there’s sociogeny,” then there cannot be only one mode of sociogeny; there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” For example, in our order, which is a bourgeois order of kind, a bourgeois order of the human, the woman was supposed to be the housewife and the man was supposed to be the breadwinner. Each was as locked into their roles. By making the feminist movement into a bourgeois movement, what they’ve done is to fight to be equal breadwinners. This means that the breadwinning man and the breadwinning woman become a new class, so that the woman who remains in her role becomes a part of a subordinated class. … What we are witnessing is the incorporation of the bourgeoisie. You are incorporated like Skip Gates has become incorporated–if I use him, I am just using him as the very model of someone who has been incorporated into academia; and, to be honest with you, as has Cornel West who, for all his “radical” talk, has become incorporated. What I have been trying to work through is this whole idea of “genre.”Because, you see, when Césaire resigned from the Communist Party, he said that our issue cannot be made into a subset of any other issue; and so I’ve been saying, “What is our issue?” And our issue is the “genre” of the human. So when Black Studies came up, when this guy called for another order of “truth” (because every genre has an order of “truth”), what he was calling for was this. Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with “genre” and say “gender” is a function of “genre,” they don’t want to hear that. Look at the tremendous perks that feminism has given to some Black women, for example, and “of color” women as they call themselves. Right? This is what I am trying to say about the temptations, you see; and then you say you’re a “Black feminist,” but what is happening to Black women? … Black women’s struggle is quite other. Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man,” of which the Black population group–men, women and children–must function as the negation.
Sylvia Wynter–Proudflesh Interview–2006 (via drtjc)
وانتظرها :إلى أَن يقولَ لَكَ الليلُ لم يَبْقَ غيركُما في الوجودِ فخُذْها، بِرِفْقٍ، إلى موتكَ المُشْتَهى …وانتظرها - Wait for her until the night speaks to you thus: There is no one alive but the two of you. So take her gently to the death you so desire, and wait for her.
Mahmoud Darwish, Wait for her. (via inderacinable)
For queers to make things work can be pressure as well as a project. You know that if there is a break up it can fulfill an expectation that such relationships are less lasting, less secure; fragile. There is a kind of queer fatalism at stake here: that to be on a queer path is to hurtle toward a miserable fate; queer as self-shattering. And then if things do shatter (as they do tend to do) you have fulfilled an expectation that “this” is where being queer led you to. We can note from these examples of queer or mixed intimacies how some relationships are assumed to be inherently broken, as if their fate is to break. And this is difficult: the assumption of fragility can make something fragile; just think of how you can become clumsier when you are trying to be careful not to break what easily breaks. Or think of how if you are already known as the clumsy one, you might become even more afraid of breakage, because you know that if there is a breakage, you will be judged as the one who is behind it. The harder you try the more you seem to slip up. Or think of how leaving the accepted social paths can be to leave behind support systems, those institutional ways of holding, protecting, nurturing. To leave a support system can mean to become more fragile, less protected from the bumps of ordinary life. And though fragility might be a consequence it can be recruited as cause: as if you willfully caused your own damage by leaving the safety of a brightly lit path. No wonder so much queer and feminist invention comes from creating our own support systems.
Sara Ahmed, “Fragility” (via eduefueqidqkwohdbef)
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
Sylvia Plath (via wordsnquotes)
But maybe when we undergo [mourning], something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who am ‘I’ without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who were are or what to do.
Judith Butler’s “Violence, Mourning and Politics” in Precarious Lives (via reichsstadt)