Fun With Autonomy

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-16175482-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {} Autonomy - Every individuals right to determine the circumstances and conditions in which they live. Fun - Anything that isn't boring Just a little page where I can document, share and archive a bunch of writing all themed around autonomy in some loose way. I guess my life is a quest towards autonomy and an exploration of the fun ways to get there. Will probably use this stuff as a basis for various zines in the future... This blog is mostly written on Nyungah Boojar. Australia always was and always will be aboriginal land.

[funwithautonomy-blog]

Street Punk! Banda Aceh: A Film About Punks Refusing to Be Destroyed

An insider's look at the struggle that Indonesian punks face against the tightening grip of the Sharia law in North Sumatra, as told by the film's director and producer....

[fullpraxisnow]

Understand the Israeli – Palestinian Apartheid In 11 Images | Thrival Room

[funwithautonomy-blog]

We all know the fascination that the love, or horror, of the state exercises today; we know how much attention is paid to the genesis of the state, its history, its advance, its power, abuses, and so on. The excessive value attributed to the problem of the state is expressed, basically, in two ways: the one form, immediate, affective, and tragic, is the lyricism of the cold monster we see confronting us. But there is a second way of overvaluing the problem of the state, one that is paradoxical because it is apparently reductionist: it is the form of analysis that consists in reducing the state to a certain number of functions, such as the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of production, and yet this reductionist vision of the relative importance of the state's role nevertheless invariably renders it absolutely essential as a target needing to be attacked and a privileged position needing to be occupied. But the state, no more probably today than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance. Maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modernity - that is, for our present - is not so much the statization [etatisation] of society, as the "governmentalization" of the state.

Foucault, Governmentality

[patrickorozco-deactivated202005]

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G.L.O.S.S. - We’re From The Future

Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit

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[funwithautonomy-blog]

"From an early age, we are inundated with the story of our deaths, we relive it over and over many times before we actually die. This same story is taken up, commoditized, and mass produced by communities outside of ourselves — media outlets looking for sensational stories, academics looking to produce research, and as Morgan Collado points out, even “LGBT” human rights organizations eager to use the statistics of transphobic violence to garner funds used to pursue the interests of cis, white gays and lesbians. Even well-meaning liberal cis people, eager to earn “ally” points, consume and exploit the narrative of the doomed trans woman in their way.” 

[...] "Janet Mock and Laverne Cox are wonderful “possibility models,” but they are not enough.  I want — we need — more: More than liberal righteous anger, we need concrete funding for trans shelters, scholarships, program grants.  More than nihilistic leftist rhetoric, we need creativity and transformation.  We need people to stop talking about how trans women get killed all the time.  We need people to start telling us that they won’t let us die."

This is related to something I have been thinking about lately: narratives of death and how to overcome the inaction produced through dread. There is an extreme juxtaposition of gender in queer communities - as fabulous and as oppression. Gender presents a paradox of simultaneous liberation and (social) death.

Do we need balance? Is a middle ground desirable? Can the liberation of fabulous confront and defeat the powers of death in a dialectical annihilation? If it can, will a new normal prevail, or can we break through and find something more?

[southernish]

RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made. The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.

This was how it began. 

Today is World AIDS Day. We’ve come a long, long way since 1981 but we’ve still got a ways to go to end stigma, to make treatments affordable and to find a cure.

[safeword]

AIDS is and always has been about way more than the queer community, especially now when it ravages poor communities of colour, and remembering that is important, but as a queer i want to speak for a moment about queerness. i want us to take a moment and remember how much of queer life has been shaped in the shadow of AIDS.

i was born into a generation of plague and i didn’t know life, let alone queer life, before that scar ran across queer bodies and queer culture. it shattered communities and killed the people who should have been my queer elders, my parents and grandparents, older siblings and nurturing role models- it kicked the division of queer life from one nurturing community to into political and apolitical camps and kicked the most privileged among us towards abandoning the rest. it layered the existing divisions between queer men and women. it divided us.

if you’re under 40, you’ve never known queer life or queer culture that wasn’t shaped by AIDS or its shadow. it’s difficult to imagine what queer life might have been without it, but i promise you, if you don’t regularly feel the shockwaves of the plague in your body as a queer person then it’s because it hit us so hard and changed us so thoroughly, silenced the people who could have taught us about our pasts so completely, that we don’t even know what came before or could have come now. if you don’t feel its presence, it’s because all you know is its presence. fish don’t think about water.

if you don’t know the history of the plague, learn it. it matters.

these scars run through us.

[funwithautonomy-blog]

This.

Is something I think about often. Especially the absence of queer elders. I also think about the loss of history and dream about alliances between queers, injecting drug users and sex workers. Following from this; the kinds of activism that made a difference and could continue to make a difference.

[dvshnt]

One of these days, people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have the poscred readily available or not.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (via dvshnt)

Best and creepiest novel I have read in a while. Like a trip, a good author tears seams of your sense of reality.

[majoringindebt]

Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship – have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds strategies to exploit and reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value an be extracted from it.

Jonathan Crary author of 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (via majoringindebt)

Awesome. I love when hard rhetoric gets redeployed for something new. XD Ususally i am all #sleepwhenyouaredead but im down with this recently.

Also, I love the need to justify desires with revolutionary rhetoric. Like desire needs justification.

[albatrossanarchy-deactivated201]

Everyone should watch this- I met Kyol at an environment activists training camp early this year, and he ran a really good workshop about how to be good activists and respectful allies when working closely with Indigenous communities during environment protests/blockades etc. This talk is especially important for people from overseas to see, because there is nowhere near enough information out here on the Internet about the bullshit way Indigenous Australians have been treated, and about the creeping racism and backsliding that is happening right now.

[funwithautonomy-blog]

I especially like the analogy exercise he leads at about 10:00min in. Some important points made here that are not made that often.

"No such thing as a bad Aboriginal"

"Native Title is not land rights and reconciliation is not justice it is a tokenistic gesture, Native Title is the lowest form of ownership under the Commonwealth Crown"

[funwithautonomy-blog]

There is a widespread belief that a politics of alliance means pluralism, compromise and therefore containment. It is a familiar militant gesture to denounce such compromises and insist on revolutionary purity; this gesture is not unknown in men's anti-sexist politics, for instance, from anti-pornography activists. I would argue that the pluralism is necessary but the containment is not. If patriarchy is understood as a historic structure, rather than a timeless process of men abusing women, then it will be ended by a historical process. The strategic problem is to generate pressures that will culminate towards a transformation of the whole structure; the structural mutation is the end of the process, not the beginning.

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, p.238

[veganpowerlifting-deactivated20]

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FUCK EVERYTHING.

WE GRIND THE PIGS. WE SPIT ON POPES.

FUCK EVERYTHING.

NO GODS/NO COPS/NO FUCKING BROS.

FUCK EVERYTHING.

[funwithautonomy-blog]

(Gay men) are in a position to adopt, negotiate or reject a gay identity, a gay commercial scene and gay sexual networks, all of which they encounter ready formed. A decade on, they are the inheritors of the world made by the gay liberationists and 'pink capitalists' of the 1970s, the generation now devastated by AIDS. And they have very little sense of, or connection to, this history.

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, p.161

[clarematthews12-blog]

After only a week in Perth (which we previously considered the most beautiful city in the world) we have decided that it is in fact the place where dreams, hopes and wishes go to die. After a week we have no friends in our hostel, no job prospects and have discovered that dignity has a price and…

[funwithautonomy-blog]

Welcome to Perth. It only gets worse.

[destroyedforcomfort]

A Queer Noise to Drown Out TERFS, by Various Artists

11 track album

Check it out! An anti-TERF, anti-transmisogyny, anti-white supremacy noise compilation where all the artists are trans or non-binary. Also it’s FREE. So, like, there’s literally no reason you shouldn’t be checking this out and becoming more familiar with queer experimental artists.

And, shameless plug, there’s a brand new Destroyed For Comfort song on track 6.

[funwithautonomy-blog]

My fav track so far:

A Queer Noise to Drown Out TERFS by Flesh Prison Flesh Palace

[earthfirstjournal]

Tukijo, Farmer and Activist Who Was jailed for 2.5 Years in Jogjakarta is Free (Indonesia)

from 325 [translated]

Tukijois a farmer and activist from Kulon Progo, Jogjakarta, Indonesia. He…

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[funwithautonomy-blog]

I guess this is pretty old now. But still <3

[funwithautonomy-blog]

The problem is that a degendering practice in a still-patriarchal society can be demobalising as well as progressive. A response that simply negates mainstream masculinity, that remains in the moment of rejection, does not necessarily move towards social transformation.

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, p.142

Just finished re-reading Masculinities, and even more than I remember, I love Connell's writing not only for her accessibility but for the transparency of process as an academic. Oh and the theory itself I suppose.

[ktspit]

Evie is an awesome person, member of our community, freaking talented drummer and a transgender woman. Let’s support her by having a rad time whilst helping raise funds for this life changing operation. Medicare are fucked and don’t pay for Sex Reassignment surgeries - surgeries that are super expensive, taboo and sadly inaccessible to a lot of people even though for most it is a need. Being transgender is NOT a choice. Everyone deserves to be who they truly are.

VERY excited to have been added 2 this bill! Like actually the most happy i’ve felt about playing any show this year Gender reassignment surgeries are lifesaving and life enabling. The fact they are not supported by medicare and made so difficult to access is COMPLETELY unacceptable, evil and needs to change. Please come to the show and share <3.  Also if you can’t make it pls donate 2 Evies possible campaign <3 

[funwithautonomy-blog]

Would be a good weekend to be in Sydney <3