queertations

[queertations]

“I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society. It’s a very hermetically sealed world with very unattractive features, including racism.”

— James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview given with Richard Goldstein, in the Village Voice

[queertations]

Unlike the other women, all of whom, again, were white, this Black woman had no name, no family, no context. The viewer sees her only as victimized and uncooperative. She cries when shown pictures. She pleads not to be forced to view the bloodstained room and her disfigured face. The program does not help the viewer to understand her predicament. The possible reasons she did not want to testify- fear, love, or possibly both- are never suggested. Most unfortunately, she, unlike the other six, is given no epilogue. While the fates of the other women are revealed at the end of the episode, we discover nothing about the Black woman. She, like the "others" she represents, is simply left to herself and soon forgotten.

I offer this description to suggest that "other" women are silenced as much by being relegated to the margin of experience as by total exclusion. Tokenistic, objectifying, voyeuristic inclusion is at least as disempowering as complete exclusion. The effort to politicize violence against women will do little to address Black and other minority women if their images are retained simply to magnify the problem rather than to humanize their experiences.

Mapping the Margins, Kimberle Crenshaw

(you may notice that the experiences of women of color, specifically Black women, are brought up when it's time to strengthen an argument, but never to be addressed on their own. And if you hadn't noticed it before now, it's time to start! Do you care; do you treat these experiences as important when it's not relevant to you?)

[queertations]

"Such articles [about how sex is better than a movie, a book, a game etc] imply not only that sex is normal and wonderful but also that sex is the main source of adventure, reflecting what journalist Rachel Hills calls "the sex myth" in her book of the same name. The sex myth, which is an extension of compulsory sexuality, has two parts. One is obvious: sex is everywhere and we are saturated in it, from song lyrics to television shows to close-ups of women's lipsticked mouths eating burgers, meat juice trickling down their throats. The second part is the belief that "sex is more special, more significant, a source of greater thrills and more perfect pleasure than any other activity humans engage in." No sex means no pleasure, or no ability to enjoy pleasure.

"The result is that anyone who isn't sexual enough or sexual in the right way becomes lesser. The label of asexual should be value neutral. It should indicate little more that sexual orientation. Instead, asexual implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel."

~ Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

[queertations]

Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape. Many people don’t take advantage of their own freedom.

Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

[queertations]

“When sex is a commodity, having and flaunting sex becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, used to signal that we are not passionless, uptight, boring, and robotic but instead have the financial and social capital to be hip and fun and high status and multiorgasmic. Aces do not comply and so are dismissed and told that our experience is depression or delusion or childish innocence, and that we cannot play with the big kids. We are not quite right, or not quite worthwhile—made in the shape of a human but with faulty wiring and something lost, something fundamental to the good life.”

Excerpt From: Angela Chen. “Ace.”

[queertations]

i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner's garden.

[queertations]

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive–all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." – Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

[queertations]

[ Image Description: "The first time I saw two men kissing, I was six, / Living in 1970s L. A. My mom took care / Of an elderly woman who found herself in a fix / And moved into a complex of all men, bare / Chested men, within cut-off jeans and tinted glasses. / My mother's friend gave me chocolates that matched / Her skin - this must be heaven. These sons' asses / Peeked out beneath their shorts, but watched / Over her better than mom. Took donations for heat, / A sofa and a new wig - all changed her mood. / They even did her laundry. They did sweet / Better than honey. Did family better than blood. / And between duties, two men always off alone / So desire, like dishes, could also get done." End ID. ]

 make out sonnet by F. Douglas Brown

[queertations]

“The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism [TERF] in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynistic echoes in recent history. TERFs... didn't invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin in it...portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depressed could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s... Recent work by historians has cast doubt in his popular TERF beliefs ever were outside a few loud agitators... If anything, TERFs, whether in the 1970s or in their contemporary "gender-critical" guise, are better understood as conventional boosters of statist and racist political institutions... TERFs, like the right-wing evangelicals or white supremacists who agree with them politically, are not the lynchpin to trans misogyny; rather, they are at best one of its latest manifestations.” ― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Affiliate link)

[queertations]

In the one month following the publication of Portrait of a Jew, while people were telling me that I was exaggerating, several events occured which unfortunately confirmed my doubts. In Argentina the swastika was carved on the thighs of a few Jewish students. In England neo-Nazi meetings were held in which "Jews get out" was heard again. In America they continued to pillage the synagogues: twenty-five in two years. Here and there the Fascist International was being brought to life. And in North Africa, one of those great historic migrations of a Jewish community in its quasi-totality began. Of course, they were in a hurry to explain that all that was without significance and of no importance. Moreover, the English Fascists were, it seems, dispersed by the country people themselves; the Argentine government promised to punish the guilty parties; the African refugees were welcomed. What did we have to complain about? Of not much, effectively, except this: in the final analysis Jewish history in the Diaspora continued to repeat itself to an astonishing degree...

—Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew

[queertations]

[ Image Description: "I see it all. / I feel it all. / My eyes fill with tears." End ID. ]

Virginia Woolf, from her novel titled "The Waves," originally published in 1931

[queertations]

[ Image Description: "But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends." End ID. ]

— James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk

[queertations]

“People ask me, “Have you tried yoga? Kombucha? This special water?” And I don’t have the energy to explain that yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve tried crystals and healing drum circles and prayer and everything. What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. I will still take a cure if it’s presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I’m missing living my life. I know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.”

Alice Wong “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century”

[queertations]

“You all know I’m queer, but I still have to play the cool hijabi[…] The not too religious hijabi, the hijabi who can rock it with the alternative crowd, who won’t judge you, who will be accepting and tolerant, the Good Muslim. I’m in full on silent rant mode now. Unlike those Bad Muslims, the religious ones, the ones who are inconvenient in their practice, the ones you have to pause for as they break their fasts, the ones who have to step out to pray. The marginalized ones you would fight for, organize for, protest for, but would never be friends with, who you would studiously avoid at a brunch. I’m the cool hijabi only because you’re projecting your xenophobic narrow-mindedness, your lack of imagination of Muslims into me. You’re still projecting them. Your prejudices are still in the room. ” ― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues (Affiliate link)

[queertations]

The binary term normal-pathological could be used to sanction social norms and social fears deeply felt by the masses with the approval of medical science. The terminology could also be used effectively to enlighten or persuade a non-scientific public because it is conceptually isomorphic with so many other binary terms that regulate the perception of social life: moral-immoral, criminal-honest, sane-insane, violent-passive. The power to pronounce on the nature of the norm and its pathologies gave nineteenth-century medicine a social authority out of all proportion with the numbers or the status of doctors. This power gave to medicine and its ancillary sciences the right to mediate between the general public and deviance, to pronounce on its causes, and to devise its cures. Medicine gained its social power because experts shaped a medical discourse that spoke to all those problems in comprehensible language, which appeared to many contemporaries to be an accurate portrayal of the world. The widespread influence of medical discourse about deviance had, as we shall see, profound consequences not only for the “pathological” part of the population, but also, as with any binary relation, for the “normal” one as well.

Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, by Robert A. Nye

[queertations]

There's no way that you can talk back to a gun. The gun doesn't have an opinion, it's just trying to hurt you.

In my latest newsletter I talk to Annalee Newitz about their new book, STORIES ARE WEAPONS, and how to protect ourselves about psychological warfare.

[queertations]

Audre Lorde, from "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981)