heaux chinoise

Because I'm worth it. Please do not link my offline name with this blog (e.g. google searches). Please do not reblog my untagged content.

[freuds-cokedealer]

Chatterjee seems unaware that he is reviving a well-established Orientalist notion of the East as a culture in which actors are essentially other-oriented, lacking any notion of individuality, unmoved by their material interests. The West is the site of the bounded indi­vidual, while the East is the repository of Community. Chatterjee explicitly warns against assimilating an analysis of Indian peasants into a general theory of peasant action—Indians require their own theory, he asserts, because they do not think like other agents, especially those in the West. They need a theory of their own, sensitive to their peculiar psychology. All this has a drearily familiar ring to it, even if dressed in radical language, for it harks back directly to nineteenth-century colonial ideology, not to mention contemporary reifica­tions of the unchanging East.

Vivek Chibber, Post-Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (via freuds-cokedealer)

[heauxchinoise]

I swear to gods the white boys of class 02 is trying to send me to the afterlife with their shenanigans.

At the end of class in the first week, the white Aussie dude asks me, “So, are you a PhD student are what?” After stuttering for a bit, during which some of the other students of the class giggle, I finally say to him, “I don’t think that’s relevant to this class.”

The week after, I put up a photo of pho and a photo of pasta as part of the semiotic analyis. What is the significance of the fact that pho is photographed with chopsticks and bamboo mats nine out of ten times while pasta is photographed in a minimalist style five out of ten times, I ask them. The white American boy, who is friends with the aforementioned Aussie, names it straight away. He then starts looking through photos of his own on his phone. “I took a trip for six months throughout Asia, after I worked in Korea for three years. So chopsticks weren’t some special thing anymore. But most of the photos of food I took had chopsticks in them. At the time I thought it was just more aesthetically pleasing, but...” He looks at me, and I hastily turn the conversation into about the structure of the assignment and how I expect a certain level of critical thinking from them.

This week, the white American boy approaches me after class. “I wanted to ask, are you American?” We chat for a bit; I ask him what brought him here to Australia. When asking me why I’m here, he stutters, “So uh I guess after your two years in China, you came here to be a professor...?” I laugh and tell him I’m writing my thesis (of course I’m not telling them that I’m a Masters student, like them).

[wocinsolidarity]

From Standing Rock to the Red Power Movement: New Series "RISE" Focuses on Indigenous Resistance

February 24, 2017

We speak with the filmmakers behind “RISE,” a new Viceland series that examines indigenous resistance past and present, from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline to “Red Power,” which looks at past indigenous resistance and the evolution of the Red Power Movement. Michelle Latimer is a Toronto-based filmmaker, programmer, actor and activist of Métis and Algonquin descent. Sarain Carson-Fox is an Anishinaabe artist, activist and the host of the series. The RISE series airs on Fridays at 10 p.m. EST.

[korndoggy-deactivated20240227]

Saw this regarding pewdiepie being dropped by disney due to his anti-Semitic jokes recently. And couldn’t have said it better.

[heauxchinoise]

This links up beautifully with this thread here on how Gamer Gate led to the rise of the alt-right.

[heauxchinoise]

"Happiness" has captured the social imagination of westernized cultures for the past decade or so. Born out of the recognition that "money does not buy happiness"--a conclusion haphazardly reached through the observation that middle and upper class people are not necessarily happier than the working class or the working poor, as well as through movements such as the popular positive psychology movement began to define happiness beyond traditional markers of success (S.DiMartino, July 23, 2013, personal correspondence).....In this popularized "up to us" version of happiness, we hold the responsibility to be happy. If we are not happy, then it is us, our attitude, our perspectives, our goals, our desires that must change. Social oppression remains unquestioned, and therefore unchallenged. For example, if a mad person is unhappy, it is because of a problem in our psyche and not because we live in a saneist culture, or that a large majority of mad people are homeless or underhoused (Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2013); if disabled people are unhappy, it is because we are mourning our unfortunate circumstances and not because we live in an ableist culture or that a majority of disabled people live under the poverty line (Council of Canadains with Disabilities, 2013); if fat/differently sized people are unhappy,  it is because we are fat and not because we are more likely to live in poverty and are less likely to have life partners or receive appropriate medical care than people living in a fatphobic, fat-shaming culture (Lupton, 2013).

E. Chandler & C. Rice on how classist narratives are tied to the oppression of mad, fat, and disabled peoples, in the Alerity In/Of Happiness

[heauxchinoise]

Things that make me super upset the more I think about them:

- how badly my parents fucked up

- how my parents fucking up has in part led to my eating disorder, my cPTSD, my bipolar, my psychotic depression, my OCD, my COPD, my fatigue, and my IBS

- how many health professionals have downplayed my health problems and failed to diagnose them

[gothhabiba]

Brownness has a lesbian history; because there are brown lesbians in history, whether or not you could see us, whether or not you knew where to find us. As Camel Gupta (2014) has noted it is sometimes assumed as brown queers and trans folk that we are rescued from our unhappy brown families by happy white queer communities; but not, what if not, what if not; what if brownness is what rescues us from the white line, the line takes us in a direction that asks us to give up part of ourselves?

Sara Ahmed, “Living a Lesbian Life” (via gothhabiba)

[worm-monger]

Leslie [Feinberg] was a tremendous organizer. We were so small, and we saw that something had to be done. But how could we get the people of Boston to oppose the racists? So Leslie tried something: Leslie went to the lesbian bars. There was a famous bar called The Saints. Everybody knew The Saints; it had been raided a number of times. Leslie went and started making speeches, started making contacts, started doing this, started doing that. One night, Leslie got the whole Saints bar and a sister bar to do a car caravan at midnight. They went to South Boston, which was the stronghold of the racist movement, and put up posters all night long, so when they woke up in the morning South Boston was full of antiracist posters. And the lesbian community had really taken it to heart that they were an integral part of this movement. Only Leslie could have done that. The movements at that time — gay, lesbian, and trans — were kind of isolated. And Leslie brought the lesbian and gay community to an antiracist march that was led by the black community. It was a tremendous step forward in the civil rights movement as a whole, both for the black community and for bringing gay, lesbian, and trans people into the movement. You just felt it. The movement felt it. The March Against Racism itself was fantastic. Many thousands showed up. The city opposed it, and had the police attack it. We literally pushed the police back and marched to Boston Common. It was one of the best marches Boston had ever seen. And Leslie was a huge part of it, and the gay and lesbian community was a part of it for the first time. That’s what Leslie’s life was: not just staying in the community that Leslie was part of, but making sure the working class as a whole, that we all moved together.

Ed Childs, “Remember Me as a Revolutionary Communist”: Reflections on the life of Leslie Feinberg, the late radical activist and author of Stone Butch Blues. (via endwealth)

I really recommend reading the entire article, it includes lots of great stories about Feinberg’s life that I never knew. 

(via endwealth)

[mehreenkasana]

The company behind Trump’s online ad campaign as well as Brexit Leave (leave.eu led by Nigel Farage) is Cambridge Analytica. It uses psychometrics to ‘measure’ tendencies among individuals and groups through their digital traces. Specifically what you like on Facebook. 

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company - SCL or Strategic Communications Laboratories - uses psychometrics for psychological manipulation and behavioral change communication. The business structure conducts “political upheavals in developing countries; others had done work for NATO, developing methods for the psychological manipulation of the population in Afghanistan.”

For those who know me know that I work with analytics, algorithms and the intersection of technology and society (society in the holistic people-oriented sense, not cloistered enclaves). I’ve been talking about this for so long; how Big Data has played a massive role in emboldening the most unhinged forms of fascism in society and how Silicon Valley is one of the places to blame.

Of course, when a woman says something like this, the go-to reaction among tech folks is to label her hysterical and brush her doubts aside by telling her that she is too 'emotional’ to discuss and analyze technology’s role in politics and governance.

Among those to mock my thoughts were upper class white men who hide their lack of empathy under the guise of 'rationalism,’ middle class white men who buy waifu pillows on Amazon and yell at minorities online via anonymous Twitter accounts, and South/East Asian men who’ve made it big in SF and feel the need to parrot their white peers’ ways so as to avoid being called betas. It’s a pretty sad sight all in all.

But this is a truly terrifying read on how psychometrics and data-driven communications played an integral role in fascism and Trump’s victory through online marketing and micro-targeting using the O.C.E.A.N. method.

[redlightpolitics]

Necropolitics being a global expression of sovereignty in which the world is divided into those who are disposable and those who are not, those whose lives can be wasted and those who cannot. In this political order a new form of control is exercised over those whose lives are considered disposable or what Judith Butler would call “those whose lives are ungrievable”. Mbembe’s necropolitics are matters of State and sovereignty however, each of the people who contributed to the point we have reached today have made necropolitics their own. They have gone as far as appropriating and repurposing feminist ideas to attract white women into their fodder. For them, the personal is necropolitical.

When the personal is necropolitical: on Inauguration Day and alliances of hate – This Political Woman – Medium

Something I wrote about Trump’s inauguration and what we can expect for the next four years.

(via redlightpolitics)

[creativecommess]

Chinee Girl (2011)

Directed & Produced by Natalie Wei Best Short Film (Audience Award) at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival 2011 Available on DVD: http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00ZAEW5B Facebook:…

Women of Chinese descent in Trinidad occupy a space that is simultaneously visible and invisible. Despite national and regional acknowledgment of this minority group’s significant cultural and economic influence, female voices are notably absent within the academic literature and early migration history of this unique culture. The mixed-Chinese claim varying degrees of Chinese heritage and also co-exist with recent migrants in the fourth wave of Chinese migration to Trinidad. What does it mean to be simultaneously visible and invisible? What purposes are served by existing in the space in-between?

[communistcoppola-deactivated201]

@renxiaoyao

[bigfatscience]

When I came into the fat movement, I was immersed in a community of fat people who taught me a lot about what fatphobia means. In turn, I learned a lot about dieting. Dieting didn’t and doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It has a history that connects to religion and gender, race and class. It has everything to do with control and repression. Dieting is about forcible weight control, based primarily on the idea that fatness is unhealthy and unattractive, and that fat people bear the responsibility to change our bodies to conform to bigoted social standards. Furthermore, dieting doesn’t work for the overwhelming majority of dieters, no matter what the ideological basis for the behavior is, and no matter what they call the behavior. My anti-dieting stance seems obvious to me in light of having received this intersectional political education. Many of the most vociferous advocates of body positive dieting argue that is it their right to diet. And I don’t disagree. I truly believe, however, that the right to diet will be overshadowed when we prioritize the right to live a life free of the oppressive cultural mechanisms and ideologies that dictate what we look like.

Virgie Tovar, 

How Did Body Positive Dieting Become A Thing?

(via bigfatscience)

[quantumdialectics]

…sometimes protests get “out of hand,” which is to say, they actually impact the authorities’ ability to keep the population under control. Then, without fail, police and politicians proceed to the second strategy in their playbook: they declare that they support the protesters and are there to defend their rights, but a few bad apples are spoiling the bunch. In this new narrative, the enemies of the protesters are not the police who are gassing and shooting people, but those who resist the police and their violence. When this strategy works, it enables the police to go back to harassing, beating, arresting, and killing people with impunity—certain people, anyway. Sure enough, a few hours after these articles about “criminals” and “outside agitators” appeared, the St. Louis police killed another man less than three miles from Ferguson. Here we see how defining people as “criminals” and “outsiders” is itself an act of violence, setting the stage for further violence. You can predict police behavior at protests with a fair degree of accuracy based on the rhetoric they deploy in advance to prepare the terrain… Throughout the civil rights struggles of the 20th century, participants who are celebrated as heroes today were tarred as “outside agitators.” The term has a long history on the tongues of racists and reactionaries.

The Making of “Outside Agitators” “By borrowing a charge used against civil rights movement participants and 60s-era militants of color like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, and even Martin Luther King Jr., as “outside agitators,” city residents have been told that the interests of all “authentic Oaklanders” are the same.“ - Who is Oakland: Antioppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation (via gothhabiba)

[gothhabiba]

just imo but saying that someone is “white passing” as if it’s a description of their appearance (much less a description of their appearance that any one person on the internet can judge, like a lot of weirdos on here try to do) is a misframing of the issue

“white passing” is not a description of appearance per se but rather a description of how someone moves through the world based on how the people around them perceive their appearance. that is, it doesn’t describe an appearance, but rather an experience or set of experiences

& that change in framing (from appearance to experience) is conceptually important bc it brings to the fore the issues that are really at stake when we talk about passing for white, & the differences in lived experience that the term “white passing” is meant to describe. the determiner of whether someone passes for white is not any one person’s judgement of their appearance, but rather, whether or not they actually pass for white!–that is, whether or not they move through the world, in their daily life, as if they are white among people who aren’t in the know

& this is especially relevant given the potentially culture- or location-dependent nature of passing for white (or not)–different potentially racialised features may be more or less marked depending upon how culturally visible members of a specific race are in a specific sociopolitical / geographical context

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

To talk even of decolonisation is inappropriate in the case of settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. In these cases, the colonisers or invaders did not leave, and no real dismantling of the forms of colonialism has taken place. Although there are significant differences in the recognition of native title in each case, they remain nation-states based on invasion and the appropriation of Indigenous peoples and their land.

Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (183)

[popthirdworld]

“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

[heauxchinoise]

Things I am currently thinking through:

- how call-out culture has negatively impacted our willingness to make new mistakes, which as Angela Davis put it last night, are so important and needed in order to expand the possibilities of organizing

- how the discourses surrounding “monosexual privilege” and “Asian privilege” are examples of how our postmodern/post-structural understanding of privilege and institutional power is broken and doesn’t work