Eclectic Electric Eccentric zwɪndʒ

Because I am a fool, this is a sideblog; I love all of you and we are mutuals in my heart (me following you from my main)

[only-tiktoks]

[ms-demeanor]

I reblogged this last year and then immediately bought some of this tea and it was the best decision. It is *SO AWESOME* to have a pitcher of Thai tea ready to go in your fridge.

[jame7t]

I’ve been showing my hamster your blog and it seems to really like it, biting at the screen. I also have a hamster(the small animal kind) too and he seems to like your blog as well

the fuck is the first hamster then

[standwithdaanes]

read too much about southern italian & italian american history alongside anti-racist theory and now im cursed with awareness

[standwithdaanes]

like its kind of frustrating to me how people will talk about italians history of being racialized in america as if it was like. this quirky oddity we stumbled into. how strange! how unnatural! that WASP americans wouldn't consider europeans white! its used as proof that whiteness is a construct, and it is proof of that, but when the takeaway is more "old timey racism was so absurd people were racist towards europeans, instead of only the obviously nonwhite people!" you end up decontextualizing everything in a way i. do not like.

like racist criminology was fathered by a northern italian who specifically applied his theories to southern italians. if you read the shit people wrote during the unification of italy, it was straight up racist imperialism, with the explicit goal of "civilizing" the "primitive" southerners:

As the northern bourgeoisie crafted a national identity from its history of medieval city-states, the Renaissance, and the “glory” of the Roman Empire, it sought to discipline the insurrectionary and “barbarous” South. Many of the government officials who traveled throughout the South following national unification commented on southern Italians’ supposed racial inferiority. The senator Eugenio Faina, for example, noted that Sicily was unlike other regions in that it was “inhabited by rough people with primitive instincts.” As a result, the Italian state confronted southern resistance movements with martial law, violence, and by stigmatizing peasants “as criminal members of a racially inferior people who preferred the superstitions of religion to civiltà italiana.” As one government official wrote in 1861, “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civil virtue compared to these peasants.” Civilization, northern officials believed, would have to be imposed on southern peasants at gunpoint— “otherwise the tumour represented by the Southerners’ behavior would grow and infect the rest of the nation.” Government officials found support for these views from the new school of positivist anthropologists, including Cesare Lombroso (1841–1936), Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and Enrico Ferri (1856–1929). Together these men founded the field of criminology, providing “scientific proof” to support the ruling elite’s beliefs in biological evolution and racial determinism. In particular, they advanced an argument that supported what many northern political leaders suspected: the darker “Mediterranean” southerners were not only racially distinct from the lighter “Aryan” northerners; they possessed “inferior African blood” and demonstrated “a moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.” Southern Italy’s history of Greek, Roman, Norman, African, and Arab invasions, and its location as a crossroads between Africa, Europe, and the East, they argued, had given shape to “a region that is a priori condemned to perpetual inferiority.” [...]

By the late nineteenth century, Lombroso and his colleagues in Italy produced hundreds of studies to support this ideology, arguing that the pathology of the “savage woman” was located in her anatomy. Their publications often included elaborate drawings that compared the “sexual anomalies” in the “primitive genitalia” of Italian prostitutes to African women. In popular culture, these connections were often extended to all southern Italian peasant women. Travel writers routinely argued, for example, that southern Italian women “seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.” The Italian ruling classes also drew these kinds of connections between Africans and southern Italians to justify two simultaneous military invasions—one in southern Italy and the other in Africa. In 1890, the same year that the North launched a brutal campaign to suppress antinationalist sentiment among peasants, Italy prepared to conquer Eritrea and join Europe in the colonization of Africa. One contemporary observer noted, “They [southern Italian rebels] kill and rape like beasts thirsty for blood and booty and not men created in the image of God.” Similarly, a government official conducting an inquiry into the southern resistance movement noted that, “in short, this is a country which ought to be destroyed or at least depopulated and its inhabitants sent to Africa to get themselves civilized!”

The elite considered the anarchist movement, in Italy and abroad, to be the most dangerous form of political rebellion. This fear developed not only in response to the willingness of some anarchists to utilize assassination and bombing as political tools but also because adherents sought to overthrow the state and capitalism and thus attracted “a sizeable and militant following among the Italian working classes until the late 1920s.” The anarchist movement took hold in Naples and Sicily in the 1860s as a result of government repression and spread quickly because of its compatibility with peasant resistance traditions. Once the island was placed under martial law after the uprisings in the 1890s, those anarchists who did not languish in prison went underground and into exile. Most went to the Americas to nurture a transnational movement in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey, among other locales. To the criminologists, like most of the Italian elite, anarchism was merely a form of brigandage. Thus, they considered the popularity of anarchism as indicative of the inherent criminality and primitive nature of the southern peasantry. In this way, they helped “to formulate the definition of the political subject by elaborating ever more closely the criteria for political exclusion.” Enrico Ferri, for example, declared that it was possible “to delineate good idealist revolutionaries and sick rebels”—one struggled for the nation, the other against it. Lombroso linked the Sicilian peasant rebellions of the 1890s with race, explaining that the epicenter of the movement was in the towns surrounding Palermo, because it was here that “the rapacious Berber and Semite tribes had their earliest and longest-lasting settlements and where anatomical types, customs, politics, and morality retain a clear Arab imprint.” He pointed out that “the Arabs are a race of greedy conquerors who are hospitable but cruel, intelligent but superstitious, and always restlessly in movement. Their blood must play a role in fomenting spontaneous and implacable insurrections and perpetuating brigandage.” Consistent with his overall ideas about female criminals, Lombroso viewed southern Italian women rebels as the most abhorrent, noting “everyone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelty.” In this way, the Italian criminologists used political radicals as a “foil for defining the boundaries of nationhood and the shared characteristics of ‘normal’ citizens.” Moreover, they offered “a scientific way to understand the failures of unification and a blueprint for disciplining groups that resisted integration into the new national culture.”

(from Living the Revolution: Italian Womens Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo)

and Italy shipped its homegrown racism right over to the US and Canada. & i think something similar can be said for how people act the same way with racism against the Irish in the US, as if its not directly connected to the colonization of Ireland and the oppression of the Irish people in their homelands.

and this is just scratching the surface of this topic, but it feels like the result of internalizing the specifically USAmerican white supremacist worldview, that the natural state for European people is imperial colonial whiteness before any ethnic identity, to the extent that the idea of Europeans being conquered / colonized / racialized feels unnatural - separate from whether or not you think blatantly racist ideas are good, you still think its natural for Europeans to be the conquerors even if its bad. you still think there is a fundamental whiteness that really exists, its just that its been poorly defined by avowed racists.

that sense that people you are taught to see as white were once blatantly racialized & that being unnatural may be used to introduce people to the construction of whiteness, but if that feeling isn't ever used to radicalize people further on resisting white supremacy, then what good is it actually doing? how can we discuss the racialization of italians in the US without discussing the imperial violence and racist ideology constructed in italy against southern italians, and in europe more broadly? how can we discuss the assimilation into whiteness of italian-americans without the broader context of escape from poverty and oppression, the anti-social(ist) violence of the First Red Scare and how it targeted anti-racist leftist Italian organizers including many women? how the bloody pursuit of whiteness and imperial dominance is an intergenerational cycle of violence, one southern italians on both sides of the atlantic have participated in?

[mayfieldss]

Exactlyyyyyy

[ace-trainer-alice]

there's a really fun balance when you know someone has a crush on you where you can tease them for having a crush on you without letting them know you know they have a crush on you. this only works because people who have crushes will analyze everything you say but not very well. anyway, i love playing with my food.

[ace-trainer-alice]

Gosh, that's so perfect. Your friend is actually the only one who is engaging with this post correctly. Supersedes my original intent, even. Sorry, I bow to her wisdom here. Tell your friend I hope she's having fun!

[catonaqueue]

[ID: Screenshot of tags that read, "#friend sent this to me #DOES SHE KNOW??". /End ID]

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

the supplicants of the DSM-5 cult are going to murder me for my opinions about plurality

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

"pretending to be plural" is frequently an artifact / symptom / consequence of being plural. no singlets allowed! get plural now!!!!!!

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

like. ok. i know i've talked about this before but i genuinely think that the boundary between "plurality" and "singlethood" is so fucking fuzzy and ambiguous because i do not think a boundary exists. like. ok what do people know about "internal parts therapy" or whatever. god. nevermind ignore that i said that. listen to me.

do you feel like, around certain people, you are an entirely different kind of person? with some people, you are outgoing, excitable, loud, outspoken, confident? with others, you are quiet, reserved, shy, anxious? obviously these do not mean these are necessarily two different people, right?

well, I mean. what the fuck is "a person." or rather what the fuck is "a consciousness" is maybe a better question.

plenty of systems have the whole "i have amnesia and my parts are profoundly distinct and cannot communicate with each other internally" etc etc etc but 1) this is like. a specific expression of a broader phenomenon and 2) this is not the only way to be plural.

a better example than the above is maybe "when I'm at work, I am Literally A Different Person than when I am at home with my wife."

this is something that I think most people would not balk at saying, even if it's nominally in jest or hyperbolic. but like, what makes that not literally true?

if we accept that a Part or an Alter or a Headmate or a Distinct Psyche or whatever you want to call it Does Not Need to be profoundly distinct in the way the "DSM-5" articulates it as, i.e. you can have parts that do not have amnesia and who share some level of awareness, memories, etc, can communicate internally, etc. what determines the boundaries of a Part? In our experience, the most constrained definition of "what a part is" could be defined as "a distinct psychic mode of existence which can be temporarily occupied, and is sometimes occupied based on contextual triggers."

your "inner child" is a part! your "worksona" is a part! when you have a bad day and you hear a voice in your mindspace that tries to encourage you to get up and take care of yourself, that can be a part!

likewise, the voice in your head that denigrates and derides you can be a part. and, if you give yourselves permission, you can try to talk to them.

imo. the biggest "hack" for "determining if you are plural" (fake, everyone is plural) is giving yourselves just. permission to even "pretend" to be distinct. you may shock yourself. you may surprise yourself. you may think into your mindspace "hello, is anybody there?" and you may be surprised to find that sometimes. someone might answer back "yes."

the way we first realized we were plural was literally that we were in a car talking with a friend who is a system and they said to us, "well, if you were separate parts, what would you say?" and then an entirely different emotional state clicked into place and a cheerful and excited voice piped up out of our body and said "WELL, if I ever got to distinguish myself as separate, I would..." before stopping and realizing what she had said.

the thing is that plurality is psychic. it is "psychological." it is, by definition, "all in your head." because every part of your personhood(s) is "in your head." you can play pretend. you can do imagination games. what makes that "less real" than other thoughts in your mindscape? if you pretend hard enough that you are different kinds of people in your mind, you might just literally be different people in your mind. why not? what makes on "personality" or "psyche" or "fragment" real, and another "pretend?" it's all pretend. none of it is pretend. your personhood is made up in your mind. you are already playing pretend! you are playing pretend that you are a person! having thoughts and beliefs and emotions and opinions is make-believe! it is made up of the same essential psychic Stuff as playing pretend.

you may be pleasantly surprised to find out how joyful the different parts of your heart and your life might feel to be granted the respect and autonomy to distinguish themselves as distinct and unique and each worthy of personhood, choice, and expression.

once again: no singlets allowed! get plural now!

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

#good and helpful reminders#were all simply weird animals who make up rules for things#there are no rules let the 12 year old you in your head stretch their/your legs and stop pretending to be one cohesive animal all the time

DING DING DING WINNER OF UNDERSTANDING WHAT I'M SAYING AWARD GOES TO THESE TAGS (/GEN)

there are no rules. it's literally all make-believe. go ham. the child who lives in your heart must be let loose at all costs. I'm letting this fucker drive! [universally understood symbol for "the two year old alter"]

[legionforweare-many]

we're all obsessed with material conditions until a trans guy exists and then what really matters is his male soul and the body it might hypothetically have in any number of situations that are not reality and have no bearing on it. "if trans men were cis they'd be cis men" "if trans men were cis they'd be cis women" it literally does not matter because we're not fucking cis

[nonbinary-culture]

Can we pick up “diamour” for a nonbinary partner again? Because that word was nice and pretty as heck.

It came from “diamoric”, which describes the non-straight, non-same-gender but intrinsically queer nature of relationships involving a nonbinary person (or multiple nonbinary people).

So like, a relationship between a girl and an agender person is diamoric and the agender person is the girl’s diamour!

Or, an androgyne and a genderfluid person dating are diamours!

I just love that word so much!

[diamoricpositivity]

!!!!

[eldritchboything]

A word I'm a big fan of is positionality. As in, the way someone is treated by, perceived as, and moves through the world. It's closely linked to intersectionality in my mind.

A big problem in queer feminist theory in my opinion (in general, not just in the discourse) is a tendency to treat identity labels as positionality in and of themselves. This frequently goes hand in hand with gender essentialism and extremely deepseated cisnormativity. People will take two groups that share an identity, and then use that to transitively map a certain positionality onto one of those groups by comparison. And generally, the cis, binary perspective is the one being imposed on the other. And if you're not watching for it or familiar with the topic, you might not notice the switch, because of how common it is to treat the two concepts as interchangeable.

But they're not. For example, A cis man and a trans man and a bigender man all share the identity of "man," but they each occupy a different positionality in the world. As in, the way other people perceive them and treat them, and the way they act in response to the world, is different. They occupy a different material context.

A lot of theory by and for trans women has already explored and firmly established this idea, in regard to trans and cis women. We have words like transmisogyny to describe how the positionality of being a trans woman or transfem effects, for example, the misogyny a person experiences.

Many people don't extend this to its natural conclusion when it comes to trans men and non-binary people, though, and justify that with a misunderstood definition of intersectionality. Our shared identities with other groups are used to project experiences on to us that are not actually true–and in doing so, to silence us.

This is what someone is doing when they say things like "of course trans men have male privilege, they're men," "trans men aren't the primary targets of misogyny, because they're men," or "as men, trans men are treated better than trans women." These ideas (setting aside for now the exorsexism of how transmascs who are not men get shoved into this categorization) rely on taking a person's identity, in this case, "man," and making it synonymous with the positionality of another group with an overlapping identity, cis men. "This is true of cis men," they say "so it must be true of all men." Identity (a fluid and internal thing that a person expresses via dialogue with society) is subsumed by positionality (the material conditions a person operates in).

And when you point out that none of those arguments are materially true, they meet you with "so you don't believe trans men are men?" Here, the argument is sort of a reverse motte-and-bailey (is there a word for this fallacy more specific than strawman? I'm not sure), taking one statement, that being "trans men do not occupy the same positionality as cis men" and treating it as synonymous with another, "trans men do not share the same identity as cis men." The strong, obviously hard to challenge argument is rhetorically swapped for a strawman that can easily be knocked down, and it's done by merging positionality and identity into interchangeable concepts with a meaning that they can move between as suits them.

Here, we get the "weaponizing your AFABness" and "misgendering yourself" strawmans too. When a trans man says he doesn't have the same experiences as a cis man, he is stating something material, such as "I need to access gynecological care and being a trans man makes that more difficult" or "I'm targeted by misogyny in my everday life because of how people perceive me." Note that the supposed rebuttals I listed are identity based again. To this argument, if you acknowledge a different positionality, you must be admitting to a different identity. In this way, unique transmasculine struggles are erased by folding the entirety of transmasculinity into, and making it subservient to, cis masculinity. Our experiences must be judged first to see if they apply to cis men before we are allowed to talk about them applying to trans men.

This affects non-binary people too in both similar and different ways. In the overlap, you see people taking the existence of non-binary people who also identify as cis to justify the idea that a certain kind of non-binary person is "cissexual" or "has cis privilege," or something to that affect. Similarly, they might isolate a part of a non-binary person's experience (such as using the pronouns associated with the gender enforced on you) and use it to say the same. An overlap, or even a perceived overlap in identity with a binary cis person is seized on to impose a binary cis person's positionality. Again, the purpose is to erase them, to silence discussion of their unique struggles, and to exclude them from community.

Another way this manifests against non-binary people is in forced binarization. A very, very common non-binary experience is the questions that amount to "are you a boy enby, or a girl enby?" and "are you an enby I will assume to have a penis, or an enby I will assume to have a vulva?" People will assign, or at least try to "figure out," which binary identity you're supposedly closest to. And once they've assigned you one, they will map a positionality onto you based on that (typically either that of a binary cis person or a binary trans person). The experiences that are distinct to being non-binary get erased in this collapse of the venn diagram.

A lot of this, I think, stems from oppositional sexism and overconfident assumptions. A member of one group, lacking insider knowledge on another group, takes the shortcut of simply making their best guess based on overlapping or "opposite" groups they assume they already understand. And then, when members of the group they confidently spoke over say "this is not true about us," the person retreats into that overlap to justify themselves. A binary trans man assumes a non-binary transmasc has basically equivalent experiences to his own, or a trans woman assumes trans men are treated better than her because cis men are.

That's where it often starts, at least, but if someone doubles down on this fallacy when confronted, they may start to believe (or act like they believe) in more and more absurd ideas based in positionality and identity as interchangeable concepts. I think this is the stage you see nonsensical arguments like "trans men have privilege over cis women," "trans women are overall more impacted by abortion bans than trans men," and "non-binary people are cis trenders pretending for attention."

This impacts other groups of queer people too, like bisexuals and asexuals for example. This post is already long and I wanted to focus on gender in particular, though. Intersex people as well, but I don't feel personally equipped to explore the examples there, and I'd welcome elaboration from anyone who does.

I feel like we might benefit from a word for this rhetoric. I'm not sure what it would be, and "positionality" is a bit of a mouthful to make affixes out of. It's also closely tied to intersectionality (as it's essentially a denial and replacement of the particular intersection a person occupies with an allegedly-similar one), but that concept is...poorly used, in queer discourse, as it is. I'm a big proponent of the utility of very specific terminology, and feel like especially as people who face so much erasure that we could use more of it.

Positional collapse, maybe? I need to chew on it more.

[redstonedust]

i appreciate when websites have a spectrum of blocking options. i hate when the only choice is to hard block op like sometimes you need the option to mute or block a specific post. absolutely no beef with the person who made the post you just put an image of a large spider on my dash 400 times and i dont want to see that please thank you.

[drill-teeth-art]

Wow! Here’s something incredibly personal.

This is Good Bi Gender. A comic I made to express some feelings I have about my gender. I don’t really have that much else to say about it. Here it is.

[Image Description: A digital comic made with sharp, angular abstract lines and only the colors white, blue, pink, and black. The featured character is all white, except for facial features and hair colors, which changes from panel to panel. The comic reads: Cover Panel: The text “Good Bi Gender”, the words colored with the trans flag. It shows a glitchy person’s face, half pink and half blue. Panel 1: White text reads: “Hello. My name is apparently irrelevant. And my pronouns are he/him and she/her. But you can’t call me she/her. And here’s why.” Someone with a half-pink and half-blue shirt looks to the side. One eye is covered with hair, and the other eye is pink while the iris is blue.

Panel 2: The character sits happily, imagining facial hair and a masculine voice. “I don’t want top surgery. I love my chest. And I dream about being on testosterone someday soon.” The character looks at a phone, frowning. The phone shows the male symbol with an “X” through it. Text next to it reads: “People don’t seem to think that the features I dream of are very pretty though… Or they think even worse of them than that…”

Panel 3: The character’s features are all pink, and sits in a blank frame. The character reaches over to a blue frame, frowning. “I don’t like the animosity. I really despise it.” A photo of the character shows an all-blue frame and blue hair, with pink outlines and facial features. “To be a boy… I aspire to be one. I aspire to be masculine in all its handsomeness. All its prettiness.” Panel 4: The character sits in an all blue panel, but reaches back out to the pink panel. “And I’m still a girl too. I was so excited to have both. To love both. To have handsome femininity. Beautiful masculinity.” The frames break and connect, and pink and blue swirl together. The character smiles in between the frames, with one pink eye and one blue eye. “So excited. And yet I get asked…”

Panel 5: Two hands hold out two different pills to the character, one blue and one pink. They ask “Male? or Female?” using the male and female symbols.The character, facial features an array of pink and blue, looks between the two hands, distressed. “It’s both! I’m both! They’re not opposites. Not narrow boxes. I say I’m both despite the insistence that I can’t be. And I know what I look like. I know I look like a girl to most. I know that if I say people can call me she, that’s all I will get from most. Because it’s “easier”. It “makes more sense”. To have my masculinity, I am often forced to be unflinching in it and it alone. To never use she. Because if I don’t, I will never get to have he.” [The words “she” and “he” are italicized.] Panel 6: Text reads: “I’m still very happy to be so comfortable in my identity. To know, despite all that, that I am indeed a boy and a girl and both. But you know. Telling people to only use he/him for me. Guarding my masculinity all just to have it. All at the expense of the part of me who is happily and unashamedly a girl.” The character cries from one pink eye, the other hidden. The character holds a pink girl in a sea of blue, the girl crying out. In the midst of the blue, text reads: “Well, it fucking breaks her heart.” End ID]

Edit: @starberry-skies wrote an ID for the comic, so I added it to the og post with its permission!

[ase-makes-polls]

Active or not, how many sideblogs do you currently have?

None

1-3

4-6

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10-12

13+

Remaining time: 5 days 23 hours

[evil-pansy]

billboards should be illegal🧑‍🩰

[swagvo1d]

dead end

[joeyclaire]

steven is a really funny character actually. he never went to school. one of his powers is astral projection for no real reason. hes a musical prodigy. he was so traumatized by the end of the show they had to make an entire epilogue series about it. he spent seven years looking like a 3rd grader. he was even bisexual

[joeyclaire]

he went to the center of the earth. he saved the world in flip flops. he broke his bones every day and didnt even notice. he killed someone

[pawpels]

he didn’t have a bellybutton. he actively chose to eat super crispy bits of potato that got left in the deep fryer. he lived in a house but his dad lived in a car within walking distance of his house. he could revive people from the dead. all of his clothes were concert merchandise. he had an outdoor washing machine. he was put on trial for murder. he broke both federal and state child labor laws

[imhereformysciencefriends]

The murder he was on trial for was different than the murder he committed

[hedronalignment]

The murder he went on trial for was a murder his mom committed. The victim of the murder was also his mom.

[joeyclaire]

he plead guilty

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#not to be That Guy but#what the FUCK happened on this show

They just explained what happens on this show

[kafkaesqueer]

Your worst sin is that you've destroyed and betrayed yourself for 3 notes on a tumblr post

[elierlick]

There is still time. It's never too late to transition.