when talking about efforts to forcibly institutionalize or otherwise wield psychiatric violence against trans people you should be conceptualizing these things not as misuses or perversions of originally well-meaning and necessary processes but instead as natural extensions of the continuum of violence represented by the psychiatric system. this is not a power that psychiatric doctors should hold over anyone, and so long as they do it will continue to disproportionately impact vulnerable groups in devastating ways
if you've followed me for any time at all you know i believe so deeply in people getting outdoors and camping in whatever way they're most comfortable. like zero judgement zone as long as you're respecting other people and the environment you're in do whatever enables you to enjoy the great outdoors.
However. ☝️ what irritates me is when people hate on certain aspects of the outdoors and act like everyone else is stupid for disagreeing. specifically about bugs.
every single time i post a photo napping on the ground somewhere there are comments like "ew aren't you worried about BUGS?????"
saw a guy talking about why he likes camping tentless and someone commented like 'once i went camping a SLUG got into my sleeping bag??? stop telling people this is a good idea.' like he was doing something wrong? lmao
listen i'm not saying anyone has to Like finding a slug in their sleeping bag (although i would personally bc i love slugs)
but acting like people are weird or even irresponsible for not caring about insects outside is enough. I've had it. it's the outside. that's where bugs go. they're deeply important and they matter just as much as everything else alive and deserve to live just as much as birds and deer and trees.
again you don't have to be thrilled about bugs crawling on you, obvs. and there's gear (literally any standard tents) painstakingly designed to prevent that. but idk if you're like 'i love the outdoors but i better not see a bug' idk do you??? do you??? the bugs are literally a feature.
🗣️ and before you try to comment about lyme disease and parasites and mosquito allergies: OBVIOUSLY i'm not shaming anyone for not wanting to contract infectious diseases. u know that.
The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. Since 1954 we have drawn the attention of French and international psychiatrists in scientific works to the difficulty of “curing” a colonized subject correctly, in other words making him thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type.
– The Wretched of the Earth, "Chapter V: Colonial War and Mental Disorders", Frantz Fanon
Quite a few months ago now, there was a conversation happening on this app about the popularity of 'therapyfic' in fandoms – i.e. fanworks that feature a character going to therapy or otherwise doing the mental work/using the vocabulary we associate with modern psychotherapy – and what the creative impetus behind such works could be. What is the fantasy here? What is the catharsis being achieved?
Now, the draw is clearly a fix-it one, but I would argue it is narrow and assimilationist in scope. It is concerned primarily with taking unruly characters and rendering them safe and legible to the modern reader, a reader that is, given fandom’s dominant demographic, likely white, middle-class/upper-middle-class, educated, and Western. Therapyfic aims to fix canon and achieve a happy ending, not through changes to the material conditions laid out in the text, but by changing the character’s emotional and cognitive response to these conditions, or in other words, making them "fit into the social environment of the colonial type."
For example, you’ll see fans insisting that XYZ Naruto character should be in therapy, but CBT won’t fix the trauma of being a child soldier, not being a child soldier will. Rather than investigate the systems of power that shape these imaginary worlds and explore ways to dismantle them, therapyfic instead arms its protagonists with the tools necessary to conform and flourish within their bounds.
And you see this across fandoms! If a canon’s original setting doesn’t support the existence of therapy, an in-universe analogue will be invented in the fanon – see, Star Wars ‘Mind Healers’ or ‘Halls of Mandos/Gardens of Lorien’ in Silm/Tolkien fandom. These narrative devices take the place of a modern therapist and magically churn out characters that are rehabilitated and well-adjusted – i.e. they think, react, and feel in ways that make sense to the audience. They no longer pose a threat to the fictional status quo or, more importantly, the audience’s comfort. They have been effectively neutered. Lobotomized. The Joker is gently inquiring if your boundaries have been violated, Sasuke has sagely forgiven his family’s state-sanctioned massacre, the Sons of Feanor have learned breathing techniques for the next time they’re seized by horrible flashbacks of all those innocent people they killed.
The primacy here is given to the character’s inner, affective world rather than the material one. The most important change that can happen is internally, and this internal change then acts upon the external world rather than the other way around – its redemption fics that feature a former antagonist who now uses therapyspeak to tell everyone how he feels really very bad about everything he did without making a single, tangible move towards reparation, and if any of his (female) victims refuse to forgive him, then they are unreasonable, vindictive, and mean-spirited; its traumatized characters receiving therapy and realizing the orphan-crushing machine that killed all their friends wasn’t so bad, actually, and they were misguided to try and destroy it; its characters that are threatening and angry and illegible being rendered docile and comfortable.
The impulse here is deeply neoliberal in nature – hyper-individualistic, depoliticized, and rooted in imperial practice. It’s important to remember that not only is therapy not a magic cure-all, it’s also a practice that has historically been used to protect the status quo and suppress dissident elements in society. When we use it as the vehicle through which a fix-it is occuring in fics, it’s worth asking ourselves what role it’s playing in our narratives, whether we’re applying a band-aid to a gushing, arterial wound, and if we’re using therapy and modern psychobabble as a crutch to avoid asking deeper, possibly uncomfortable, questions about the source text.
(Obligatory Disclaimer: I do not think writing/reading therapyfic makes you a colonizer or in any way a bad person. I am known to enjoy a good therapyfic myself. Nor do I think this is in any way a definitive analysis. But we do Live In A Society, and it’s worth it to investigate our creative impulses and where they stem from. Thank you. Also a shout-out to @tobermoriansass who iirc had many cogent thoughts about exactly this subject and articulated them far better than I.)
if you take a well lit photo of your face and up the contrast and put it in black and white you can usually see the places that are the most shadowed and the places that catch the light the most. commonly the lightest places are the forehead, cheeks/cheekbones, chin, nose, upper lip etc and the darkest places are eye sockets, under cheekbones depending on your face shape, and the under nose/under lip area, but everyone is different
emphasizing these places in makeup by highlighting the places light falls and contouring the places where shadows fall can make you look like a More Intense version of yourself. it can also be used to give the illusion of having certain features when you don't, etc by manipulating light and shadows
and doing the OPPOSITE of that can help you evade facial recognition systems. :) make places that are convex look concave and places that are concave look convex! draw a weird dark blue rectangle on your forehead! confuse an evil computer today!
something that's important I think is that everything that's good for human children to do is also good for human adults to do because actually they're things that are good for all humans to do. things like
recess
making up stories
arts and crafts
clambering
dig a hole
learn new things
build stuff, with blocks or otherwise
prepare and cook food with family
sing a little song
humming
coloring
side walk chalk
rhymes and tongue twisters
jig saw puzzle
bounce a ball
chase
dress up game
face painting
skipping, hopping, jumping etc
cut your own hair or someone else's hair bad
wear clothing items that don't go together
draw on the wall
friendship bracelet
casual silly low-stakes competition like "who can win at red rover" instead of deadly serious high-stakes competition like "which of us gets to have a kajillion dollars and exploit everyone and which of us can't afford their medication"
[ID: traditional marker illustration of grey heron with background of swimming minnows. Minnows are green brown. Where they intersect with body of heron, they become simplistic and white with blue outlines. /end ID]
On related note, a few years ago, the Entomological Society of America officially discontinued the use of "gypsy moth" and "gyspy ant" as common names for Lymantria dispar and Aphaenogaster araneoides. L. Dispar is now known as the "spongy moth," so named for the appearance of their eggs, but I don't think a new common name has caught on for the ant species yet.
These changes we brought about, in large part, by the advocacy of Romani people in academia. You might not think that bug names are a very serious issue, but I believe that language matters. These species became known as "gypsies" because their attributes were likened to certain stereotypes and negative perceptions of actual Roma, so the continued use of those names reaffirmed those negative associations in the public consciousness. Slurs and pejoratives can never be truly decontexualized.
In my mind, one of the biggest obstacles that Romani people face when we are trying to advocate for ourselves is a lack of recognition as a marginalized group that deserves the necessary consideration. Even for seemingly trivial matters, like bugs or comic book characters, the way that people talk about us-- and talk down to us, when we get involved-- is telling. So, I always think that changes like this are a win, because it means that people are willing to learn and grant us the dignity we deserve. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to effect change in your own field, even arts and science.
Do you have handy a where everyone else is supposed to go in a land back situation? I think that's what freaks out most people when they initially hear land back, it's the instinctive what about me/where do I go in that scenario? (If not no worries I'll eventually get around to finding one)
*takes a deep calming breath*
I know you and at least some of the people who ask this question have good intentions and are mostly suffering from misconceptions, so I will address that group of people here. There is a separate group of people consisting of already-hardened communists and anarchists who frankly should know better but they require different strategies.
The thing is that almost no one who advocates for Land Back is in any way suggesting that we want to forcibly eject all non-Indigenous people from North America (or whatever other settler colony we are discussing). By and large the only people who say things like that are certain extremely frustrated and rightfully angry Indigenous people who have probably been provoked into ranting publicly by racists.
Virtually no Indigenous community that I know of in the US and Canada is actively pursuing a future that involves forcing out all non-Indigenous people. Now, there are tensions around landback even within our communities, and some people may say I'm not being strong enough in my "version" of landback but I'm mostly stating this as a STARTING point. Most Indigenous people I know want things that seem quite reasonable to me, like, "we want to be able to exist and sustain ourselves in the places we live without our lands, resources, and bodyminds being terrorized and destroyed by settlers."
This does not mean settlers all have to leave (they can if they want to tho...) but it does mean that settlers have to stop all activities that infringe upon Indigenous life and the land that sustains it. This is why to me, full Land Back is not really possible without the destruction of capitalism (because so long as capitalism exists, the impulse to gobble up more land and labor will remain) but also the destruction of capitalism alone does not guarantee landback (because it is very much possible to have a socialist society that continues to treat Indigenous land as a resource for "public good").
In some cases, this might mean some settlers do have to give up some things. Like, if there is a parking lot or a golf course on an ancestral site, I do think settlers should have to vacate that and engage in reparations so Indigenous people can care for the site. What the landback process can/will look like is not fully clear; right now many people are focused on literally giving property to recognized legal entities representing Indigenous nations. There's a whole lot that could be said about what Indigenous-managed land looks like and how settlers figure into that.
Anyway I think I have run out of steam even though there's more that I could say about this. Unfortunately there is no "handy guide" to Land Back (a fact which seems to piss off a lot of people especially on the left) because the "guide" is "actually spend time getting to know Native people and our history and contemporary realities and our dreams for the future" but no one wants to do that. they want a 10 point Land Back manifesto plan
