Documentary Poetics

Probing the strengths and limits of a poetics of fact (sampled from Dee Morris)

[jareckiworld]

Rammellzee (1960-2010) — Garbage Gods "Traxx" [made of found objects, 1980s]

[halogenic]

debra shaw at alexander mcqueen fall 1996 “dante”

[artoftheglitch]

carnival (206), 2019 instagram | website | patreon

[lesbianlegacies]

“The New Our Right to Love: A Lesbian Resource Book” Simon and Schuster, 1996, ed. Ginny Vida

“Strategy and Stamina: Marilyn Laguerre and Marsha Neal.” Ph. Morgan Gwenwald.

[nobrashfestivity]

Shirley Clarke, Bridges-Go-Round, 1958

[milkandheavysugar]

Big Mama Thornton (1926-1984):

“They lied on me, said ‘I would fight the promoters.’ I never did fight the promoters. All I ever did was ask for my money. Pay me and there won’t be no hard feelings. They have always been jealous of me because when I hit that stage, I perform. I give you entertainment. I don’t go out on stage trying to look pretty. I was born pretty. Just get out there and perform. I get out there crack a few jokes and sing my song and people love it. That’s why they were jealous of me, because the people were giving me recognition and they didn’t get the recognition I had, because I was unique.” 

[poshtotties]

Mj Rodriguez for Alexa

[shirazade]

Indya Moore photographed by Agnes Lloyd-Platt

[latinademais]

BRAZIL. Rio de Janeiro. 1980. Samba celebrants returning home after the Carnival. Bruno Barbey.

[evilrashida]

Dominique Jackson as Elektra Abundance, Pose Episode 7 “Pink Slip” 

[anarchopuppy]

Simple mutual aid ideas

Many people are demotivated from providing mutual aid to their community because they assume it’ll be expensive, complicated, and/or illegal. Not so! You can make a big difference in your neighbors’ lives just by sharing what you have and building solidarity with them (Note: Your local public library, community garden, or makerspace may be happy to host one or more of these if you get in touch with them!)

Connect on social media: A good first step is to start a group message, Facebook group, Discord server, email list, or anything else that allows people to talk to each other consistently. From here you can start to build solidarity and discuss what unmet needs your community has and how to address them

Bartering, time banking, and free stores: From there it’s easy enough to start the conversation about how to provide each other with material aid. Poor communities often have needs and the ability to meet those needs right next to each other, but they are never matched together just because people don’t have enough pieces of paper to give each other. A way around that is to start trading with each other - a jar of jam for an old unused bike, car repairs for fresh honey, 2 hours of guitar lessons for 2 hours helping repaint your deck, etc. This doesn’t have to be formalized and kept precise track of - “I’ll owe you one”s or just a general culture of “homies help homies, always” are a great way to build up trust and a sense of community

Buying coop: Buying wholesale can save a lot of money, but a lot of people never have enough money at one time to take advantage of that (besides not needing an entire pallet of dish soap). A buying coop lets a group of people pool their money to buy wholesale instead, saving everyone money in the process

Food sharing: Food waste/excess and food insecurity are a perfect match, and as such there have been plenty of ideas for bringing them together. Community pantries can pool and hold nonperishables inside something like an apartment building; a simple veggie share can be built and set up outside for communities with a lot of gardeners/farmers; a people’s fridge can hold perishable items if you can get a hold of the appliance itself and space/power for it; a setup like MIT’s FoodCam can connect hungry people to unwanted leftovers; and Food Not Bombs collects commercial food waste to share with communities all across the world (your city might very well have one already - look it up!)

Tool share/library of things: There are a lot of things that you use once or twice a year at most and then let sit in your attic the rest of the time. Post hole diggers, Batman-shaped cake molds, 3D printers, turkey basters, etc. Not only do these sit around unused for a majority of the time, but worse, if someone in your community needs one, they’ll likely go out and buy a whole new one. Instead, try finding a community area where you can put a lending library. That way, everyone in your community can pool their scarcely-used resources, and rather than owning 20 hammers altogether, everyone can share 2

Little free seed library: Little free libraries are a fairly well-known way to informally share resources with your neighbors, but if you live in an area with a lot of gardeners, or hopeful gardeners, saving seeds can be another way to use the same design. Just set aside the seeds from your harvest, or your groceries, then put them in reused envelopes from your junk mail and leave them in the box to be picked up by your neighbors. You can also share cuttings and clones from your garden!

Community composting: Composting is a dead simple process for turning food scraps and other organic waste into rich fertilizer - saving any gardeners in your neighborhood money (and keeping harmful pollutants out of the environment) with no ongoing investment needed. Personal setups require specific inputs in specific quantities for best results, but in large enough piles those rules can be largely ignored and still give great compost. If you get enough people involved, then, your composter can be as simple as a large box on the side of the road. ShareWaste can connect you to people with food scraps, whether you have a personal or community composter

Bike/car sharing: People aren’t moving around at all hours, meaning a majority of the time their transportation is sitting in garages or driveways unused. Starting a bike share can be a fairly easy, low-cost way to address this and improve people’s mobility. A car share can be a lot more involved, but worth it for all the money and carbon it can save (especially for areas with little or no public transit)

Feel free to share other ideas below!

[killer-snail-deactivated2019112]

Albany Anarchists Organize Really, Really Free Market

by Black Cat Connolly / Love and Rage – NY ALBANY – Another successful Really Really Free Market was organized by a local group of anarc

Another idea: a Really Really Free Market! Since we live in a world with an abundance of stuff, it’s perfectly feasible to have a market space where everything donated is completely free to take by anyone who needs it. I’ve been to this particular market before and it’s really cool because everybody gets the necessities they need without worrying if they have the money for it.

[anarchopuppy]

I just found out about Freecycle Network and the Buy Nothing Project, both surprisingly widespread and definitely worth checking out!

[lesbianherstorian]

clippings from “women seeking women” personal ads in the baltimore sun, 1995

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Chelsea Manning: ‘No Pride for some of us without liberation for all of us’

Chelsea Manning’s statement to the Queer Liberation Rally in New York on June 30, as read by Janus Cassandra Rose

Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army veteran and trans woman, spent seven years in military prison for sharing evidence of U.S. war crimes with WikiLeaks. Earlier this year, Manning was thrown back in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury convened to justify the U.S. extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Despite everything, we as a community face daunting challenges every day. The world feels colder and more alien somehow. Our society constantly reminds us – in both obvious and subtle ways – of the need for us to meet THEIR standards. To meet THEIR expectations. We somehow always need their approval.

Our spaces changed. Our neighborhoods gentrified. Our protests became parades. Our acts of defiance became exhibitions. Our love and rage were commodified – turned into something that could be packaged and branded and sold.

Christopher Street, Washington Square, Stonewall – on these streets, on this land which rightfully belongs to the Lenape people, the true history of queer and trans liberation is written. All these places tell stories: Stories of solidarity, of love, of rebellion. Our movement for freedom began here, and the fact that you are all standing here today proves it is far from over.

The first pride was a riot. But we will not allow that historic struggle to simply become a catchphrase on designer T-shirts. We are here today because we know that no matter how much they claim otherwise, the forces of capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy have always – and will always – work against queer and trans justice.

[nemfrog]

Conventional signs for maps. Topographic maps and sketch mapping. 1920. 

[atapi]

very important: say hi to any crows you walk past, respect your corvids

[buttonpoetry]

“I have clawed my way to okay and it will just have to do for now.”

— Rachel Wiley, from Nothing is Okay

[historicity-was-already-taken]

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

[roachpatrol]

Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important. 

[kogiopsis]

Why Gender History is Important (Asshole)

[treewizarded]

“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants

[notyourdamsel-in-distress]

I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating. 

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?

[historicity-reblogs]

Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass” includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht” was reclaimed, as such.

None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.

[greenandhazy]

A lot of the above is both true and important, but I just want to chime in and say that it’s overly simplistic (and often inaccurate) to say that “men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have” and “women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.” In fact, in some cases the exact opposite is true.

I no longer own the books, so unfortunately I can’t cite my sources specifically, but in one of my graduate courses we read “Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States” by Premilla Nadasen and “Gendering Labor History,” which is a collection of articles by Alice Kessler-Harris. Both of these authors deal with gender and its relationship to the state, and specifically the way in which women rely on and demand aid from the government differently from men.

I believe it’s Kessler-Harris who explicitly states that historically, men in the labor movement have typically been more likely to favor “hands off” legislation. They often wanted the government to intervene at egregious abuse from management, but because men view themselves as the providers, they believe that they are all entirely capable of success as long as the playing field is level; and in fact, if the government intervenes too much, they’re resentful and see it as infringing on their rights. It’s just as true to say that men don’t want to be “taken care of” because that’s coddling and they’re men, damn it.

On the other hand, women have often been more willing to ask for help. Not that they always believe the government will do the right thing, but some women are so used to being cheated by the system that they don’t believe the playing field can be leveled by hands-off legislation. They want the government to regulate the workplace and the home more closely, they’re more willing to ask for benefits when they need them, and they’re more likely to place the welfare of themselves and their families over their pride.

Obviously these are broad generalizations, and depending on the situation and the individual, they can be flipped. But I just wanted to push back a bit because I think it’s important to allow for complexities and multiple versions of the truth in history. I’ve also seen this Thing happen on tumblr (not just in this post, and in some cases way more strongly than in this post) where a gendered analysis gets… universalized, I guess? Like, there are and have always been women who don’t feel screwed over by the government. There have always been women who are happy to uphold the status quo and to perform gender in the way they’re expected. (This is what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous quote “Well-behaved women rarely make history” refers to–historians’ tendency, in the 70s and 80s, to pay attention only to rebellious women who subverted gender norms while devaluing and ignoring anyone else.)

While I wouldn’t suggest that every post talking about the courage of Jewish women and other targets of the Nazi regime also included a sentence saying “P.S. Lots of women were also Nazis and happily supported the Nazi regime because some women trust in the government by default,” I am wary of doing the opposite–taking the experience of oppressed women and saying “this is indicative of the fact that [all] Women Resist Bad Government.” Even if that’s not what the post was intending, I think it’s pretty easy for it to be misread that way.

Also I’m aware of the irony is asking for a source when I myself could only vaguely point to two books, but I’d be really interested in a source for that third story, because the idea of SS officers “honoring the courage” of a woman who tricked them and robbed them of two or three people they were trying to enact a genocide against… I’m skeptical, let’s just say.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Hi, OP here. This is such a fantastic critique. And actually, reading your critique I can’t help but wonder if we attend(ed) the same grad program, had/ve the same adviser, and took the same Gender and Social Policy seminar, but I digress…

That particular quote, added in a reblog over 5 years ago, clearly speaks to so many people, going on how many included it in the latest wave of reblogs. But, it’s kind of double edged, and really is, as you pointed out, grounded in some of the central problems with second wave feminist historiography.

As a public historian, I am okay with it being simplistic, because small ideas are what draw people in, and get them to a place where they’re ready to build on and critique those initial concepts. But stepping away from the public history pov, you’re absolutely right. This isn’t about some fundamental subversive quality inherent in women. This is about the gendered spheres German Jewry operated within in the 1930s, and how those spheres impacted their interactions with non-Jews and State officials.

Just, everyone, go read Marion Kaplan, Especially:

The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Studies in Jewish History (Oxford Paperback)) by Marion A. Kaplan

Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945 edited by Marion A. Kaplan

Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Studies in Jewish History) by Marion A. Kaplan

ps. @greenandhazy I think you’d like this post I wrote a while back about a woman in the welfare rights movement: Beulah Sanders