#tasha fierce

[laurellynnleake]

where do we go from here? a roundtable from some disability justice organizers in this the only moment in time, hosted by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

"Something I keep thinking this year is, where do we go from here? There’s been a real 'what the fuck?' and 'what do we do now' vibe out there in criplandia and DJlandia...

...To try to speak to these questions and this moment, I reached out to some disabled BIPOC people doing disability justice organizing to ask where their work, heart, spirit, dreams and fears were at right now...I hope other disabled folks struggling with similar questions can gain grounding, ideas and inspiration from these examples of many different actions disabled people are taking to cancel the apocalypse make a disabled free future present."

FEATURING:

Tasha Fierce, they/them/the divine feminine, Black queer fat nonbinary disabled mad autistic femme, Tongva/Kizh land (Pasadena, California)

Aimi Hamraie: they/them, diasporic Iranian, Southern, nonbinary, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, Autistic, chronically ill, Cherokee and Chickasaw land, Nashville TN

Sami Schalk: she/her, fat Black queer disabled femme, pleasure activist, educator & writer in Madison Wi

Bri Joy Yakshini-Moore: Ze/Zir, Black, Jamaican-American, nonbinary trans, disabled, neurotangy, alien-prince proudly from The Bronx but based in Los Angeles, CA. 

Read the full roundtable on the Disability Visibility Project!

[catjoyy]

American capitalist patriarchy employs a divide and conquer strategy to turn oppressed peoples against each other. We’re made to believe that there’s only so much freedom to go around, which encourages us to invalidate the oppression of others in order to lend credence to our own. Intersectionality as praxis counters that strategy by creating space for each person’s lived experience with oppression to be heard and validated. By acknowledging the existence of multiple levels of oppression, we can work toward eliminating oppression altogether. State-sponsored racist and sexualized violence is meted out against black women as part and parcel of our dual oppression. That violence is minimized as a function of maintaining a status quo of representation.

—Tasha Fierce, for Bitch Magazine

[severin]

But what of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Yvette Smith, and Rekia Boyd? Unless you’re looking for their names, you won’t find their stories—all Black women shot and killed by police officers in the past five years—featured in the discourse surrounding police reform. While media attention has focused on the tragic loss of Black cisgender men, it seems like we’ve forgotten that Black women are subjected to the same state-sponsored violence. Black women are also on the front lines of #BlackLivesMatter protests across the country. They are holding it down. They are daughters in the spirit of the Black women who fought in the Black liberation and feminist movements of the past, whose contributions have been minimized in the interest of maintaining the patriarchal, white supremacist status quo. Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t see the narrative on police brutality shift during her time on this earth, but these Black women are intent on ensuring the narrative is shifted during their own.

[ppaction]

I don’t have any regrets about my decision, and I’m not “haunted” by it. It was the right decision for me, emotionally and financially. ... Black women are blamed for a litany of ills that plague our community, and we’re constantly disrespected for the choices we make regarding our bodies. ... As with too many other experiences I’ve had that should be strictly personal, my abortion ended up being one more reminder that Black women are so often damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Tasha Fierce on Ebony.com: "I Just Had An Abortion"

Powerful must-read: A Black woman on making the best choice for herself, despite the stigmas and shaming attempts.

[mustreadsandstuff-blog]

Health status should not be something that is used to discriminate against anyone. You do not deserve to be treated as less than human because you are unhealthy—you have the right to do whatever you want with your body. If you want to treat it like crap, that’s your call. And fat does not automatically equal unhealthy. So assuming that a fat person is unhealthy simply because you can see that they’re fat is lazy thinking at best.

http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2011/09/in-defense-of-fat/

In Defense of Fat

MONDAY SEP 19, 2011 – BY TASHA FIERCE

[megaera]

The “fat girls give better head” stereotype is of course fatphobic but is also inherently slut-shaming because it’s representing being proficient at a sex act as something negative. And in a lot of people’s minds, being good at sex means you’ve had more, which equals slut/whore for women. It’s tied in to the stereotype of fat girls as “easy” (aka slutty) because they have low self-esteem, and not because they simply love sex. When you’re a fat girl you’re not allowed to have a lot of sex unless you’re desperately searching for attention. The sex-loving, confident fat girl is in this case invisible. Our sexuality is always complicated by the difference between our view of our own sexuality and society’s view of what fat sexuality should look like. Meaning, it should be either kept completely behind closed doors or fit within the framework of self-loathing and body hate that all fat women are expected to experience on a daily basis. This is why cultivating a sex-positive culture is necessarily important to fat/body acceptance, and why we have to make fat visible in sex-positive movements and spaces.

Tasha Fierce, Sex and the Fat Girl