#i also find it interesting that as the demand for more racial gender and body diversity in covers (and books in gen) has increased | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xo-hugs-n-kisses-ox · 13 days

Text

Rumination

Ruminate

(v.) To think about something deeply

After Edward left her, Bella Swan fell apart. Desperate to try and save his eldest daughter, Charlie brings his youngest daughter to Forks to see if she can bring her sister out of her depression.

Now, y/n must try to help her sister find her way back to the light while also trying to navigate her Junior year of high school in the odd town of Forks.

---

Chapter Twelve: Consequences

Now Playing: Breakin’ Dishes by Rihanna

I listened as Billy told us all the story of Taha Aki and his family, how they dealt with the Cold Ones. I had heard this story before, when Bella and I had come over with Charlie as children.

Bella fell asleep after a while, and Jacob picked her up to take her back to Edward. I had gone back with the rest to Emily’s house.

I showered and put on my pajamas, walking out to sit on the couch as Jared set up some movies. Emily made popcorn and Sam dug out blankets.

The movie Jared ended up turning on was some action movie I wasn’t particularly interested in. It wasn’t bad, though.

I fell asleep about half way through, and I woke up in my bed. I wasn’t sure how I got there, but I figured one of the guys put me to bed so they could fold out the couch bed.

I made my way towards the kitchen, only to find Sam, Jared, and Paul sitting around the table looking grim.

I slid into the seat closest to me, asking them, “What happened?”

Jared handed me a newspaper.

On it, the title read, “Seattle Terrorized by Slayings.” Underneath the title, I read about nearly fifty people having been killed at random. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the brutal murders; no racial bias, no gender bias, not one part of the city safe from the attacks. The only thing that authorities have determined was that all the victims were from ages twenty to thirty, with a few victims being in their late teens. I felt sick.

“We will be patrolling more,” Sam said grimly, “We are meeting with the Cullens.”

“Do you think it’s… supernatural?” I asked, my brows drawing together, “It could be human doings, there’s some sadistic people in the world.”

“There’s not a fingerprint there, no tracks, not a single thing pointing to human murders,” Paul said, his voice tense and his body pulled taught, “Better safe than sorry.”

I pursed my lips, nodding.

---

Bella called me.

“You saw it, right?” She demanded, her voice hushed. I knew what she meant.

“Yeah, we all saw it.” I confirmed, and I heard her sigh in relief on the other end of the phone.

“Carlisle asked for help from the Denali coven, the one I told you Laurent had stayed with,” she explained, “They won’t help us, if this is caused by Victoria.”

“Why?” I asked, slightly confused. Weren’t they friends with the Cullens?

“Laurent was involved with one of them,” she said angrily, “And now the Denali coven wants to kill the pack because they killed Laurent.”

I was silent for a long moment.

“Fuck Laurent and fuck them, we don’t need their help anyway,” I said slowly, anger simmering in my chest, “He tried to kill us, he deserved to be destroyed.”

Bella agreed with me, adding, “Yeah. Listen, I need you to talk to Sam. If the things in Seattle are because of Victoria, we need to work together or everything will be for nothing.”

“He wants to talk to the Cullens,” I informed her, “I think it’s going to be some of the others who need convincing.”

“Okay,” she said, “Okay. I’ll call you, if I know anything else.”

“Back at you,” I tell her, “Love you.”

“Love you too, Y/n.”

The call disconnected, and I ran back to the front of the house to tell everyone what I had learned.”

---

Bella said that Alice was having a party. We both agreed that it was a stupid idea.

Sam wants to speak with the Cullens, but he doesn’t trust them. He wants answers, he wants to know what they know.

I think he believes that they’re somehow the cause of everything, and I don’t really disagree. I think, though, that the Cullens are trying to keep everything safe and close to their chest.

Jacob got Bella, but they hung out at his house.

I was making food with Emily, watching as the guys cycled in and out of the house. Sam had everyone doing double shifts, and it was taking a toll. When they weren’t out in the forest, the pack was sleeping. I had to coax them awake to get them to eat, and as soon as they were finished, they were right back asleep.

Paul had just gotten back from his shift to trade out with Embry, when Bella stormed into the house. She was holding her hand, furious and crying, and I was quick to rush to her side.

Despite his weariness, Paul woke himself up to oversee everyone’s safety.

Bella’s hand was broken, and Emily was the one to look at it. She explained what happened, and I stared at her. I was still as a statue as she spoke, my eyes wide as fury exploded in my chest.

I shoved to my feet, my chair tipping over behind me as I stormed outside to find Jacob. Paul was on my heels after smacking Jared awake to watch over Bella and Emily in the kitchen.

I stormed over to where Jacob was standing in the yard, debating if it was worth it to break my hand to punch him, too.

Instead, I stopped an arm’s length away from him and watched him coldly. I was so angry that I was shaking, and I demanded, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

My voice almost didn’t sound like me, and it would have been a bit more startling had I been less upset.

“Y/n, listen—” he started, but I cut him off.

“I don’t give a single damn about what you have to say!” I snapped, “I know you like my sister, and no one fucking liked Edward, but that doesn’t give you the right to kiss her against her will!”

“Y/n, it’s not that bad, I—”

I cut him off again, “If Edward doesn’t kill you, I very well might, you pushy, idiotic, piece of shit.”

I turned, looking to Paul.

“Explain to him what consent is, because it seems like the constant fever has gotten to his brain,” I ordered, “And keep him away from the house.”

I stormed back to the house, listening as Paul started to lay into Jacob.

---

I took Bella to the Cullen’s home. It was the first time I had ever seen it.

We marched in and I saw Edward first.

“What happened?” He demanded, and Bella explained everything to him.

I was still fuming, and Edward was tense beside me as Carlisle fixed Bella’s hand.

“Don’t touch any of the others,” I muttered, “But Jacob’s free game.”

Edward inclined his head, “We share similar sentiments on him now, I see.”

“If I could have, I would have broken his nose.”

---

I ended up staying the night with the Cullens.

Alice made me shower, since I “smelled like wet dog,” and gave me some of clothes to wear instead. She stuffed me into a pair of black pajama pants several sizes too big, tying them a tightly around my hips. The shirt, which was also slightly large, was a band tee for Metallica.

Bella and I took monopoly over the couches, Edward sitting beside her.

Emmett and Rosalie had come out of their room, and Emmett asked, “What happened, Bella? Walking and cheering gum at the same time?”

“Punched a werewolf,” she corrected, and he laughed loudly.

“Which one?” He asked eagerly, “That why your sister’s here?”

“Jacob,” I answered, “Feel free to break his jaw, if Paul didn’t for me.”

Emmett grinned, sitting down happily beside me, “Paul’s the one who tried to beat my ass when I accidentally got over the creek, right?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, “No hard feelings about it.”

Emmett laughed again, “If we weren’t supposed to hate each other, it’d be cool to wrestle. They’re bigger than the bears that I hunt.”

I raised my brows, “I’ll relay the sentiment.”

After a minute, my phone rang. I picked it up and I walked back outside, listening to Paul’s voice as it crackles to life on the other end of the line.

“How are things over there?” He asked, “Are the lea— Cullens taking care of your sister?”

“They’re nice, the good doctor put a brace on Bella’s wrist, Edward’s taking care of her right now.,” I informed, then asked, “How are things over there?”

“Pack’s a little divided,” He told me honestly, “Some think Jacob wasn’t overly in the wrong, Emily, Leah, and the rest of the girls think Bella should’ve been able to break his nose.”

I hummed, “What about you? What do you think?”

“I think I hate vampires and want you and Bella away from them, but that Jacob had no right to kiss Bella when it wasn’t what she wanted.”

His answer was good, and I told him as much.

“Good answer,” I murmured, “You get some brownie points.”

“For being a decent person?” He said dryly, “Thanks, Y/n. I’ll take them where I can get them.”

I snorted, “Alright, Hot head, whatever. Meet me over at my house? I think I’ll murder Jacob if I go back over there, and I need to tell Charlie about Bella breaking her hand.”

“Took care of it already,” He replied, and I could hear him walking to the door, “I’ll see you over there.”

I hung up and kissed Bella’s temple, hesitantly patting Edward on the shoulder as I left. I felt awkward in their house, but I thanked them for their help and hospitality.

———

Sorry this was put out so late!! Anyway, hope y’all enjoyed!!

Also, this was about when I started realizing that Stephanie Meyer wasn’t a good writer in general bc Jacob and Edward weren’t shit and Bella was a victim of both at any given time

Also also, I got a few requests!! I’m so happy and I’m working on them rn!! They should be out sometime this week and thank you guys so much for the interest in my writing 🥰 I adore yall 💕

(Ps I got a guinea pig and he’s adorable and SO soft)

58 notes · View notes

richincolor · 11 days

Text

New Releases

All of these books look interesting to me. I don't even know which book I want to add to my TBR reading list first.

Gita Desai Is Not Here to Shut Up by Sonia Patel Penguin/Nancy Paulsen Books

It’s eighteen-year-old Gita Desai’s first year at Stanford University, and it’s a miracle she’s here and not already married off by her traditional Gujarati parents. She’s determined to death-grip her good-girl, model-student rep all the way to medical school, which means no social life or standing out in any way. Should be easy: If there’s one thing she’s learned from her family it’s how to chup-re—to “shut up,” fade into the background.

But when childhood memories of her aunt’s desertion and her then-uncle’s best friend resurface, Gita ditches the books night after night in favor of partying and hooking up with strangers. Still, nothing can stop the nagging voice in her head that’s growing louder and louder, insisting something’s wrong… and the only way she can burst forward is to stop shutting-up about the past.

Click below to read about all of this week's new releases.

Ida, in Love and in Trouble by Veronica Chambers Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Before she became a warrior, Ida B. Wells was an incomparable flirt with a quick wit and a dream of becoming a renowned writer. The first child of newly freed parents who thrived in a community that pulsated with hope and possibility after the Civil War, Ida had a big heart, big ambitions, and even bigger questions: How to be a good big sister when her beloved parents perish in a yellow fever epidemic? How to launch her career as a teacher? How to make and keep friends in a society that seems to have no place for a woman who speaks her own mind? And – always top of mind for Ida – how to find a love that will let her be the woman she dreams of becoming?

Ahead of her time by decades, Ida B. Wells pioneered the field of investigative journalism with her powerful reporting on violence against African Americans. Her name became synonymous with courage and an unflinching demand for racial and gender equality. But there were so many facets to Ida Bell and critically acclaimed writer Veronica Chamber unspools her full and colorful life as Ida comes of age in the rapidly changing South, filled with lavish society dances and parties, swoon-worthy gentleman callers, and a world ripe for the taking.

Till the Last Beat of My Heart by Louangie Bou-Montes HarperCollins

When you grow up in a funeral home, death is just another part of life. But for sixteen-year-old Jaxon Santiago-Noble, it’s also part of his family’s legacy. Most dead bodies in the town of Jacob’s Barrow wind up at Jaxon’s house; his mom is the local mortician, after all. He doesn’t usually pay them much mind, but when Christian Reyes is brought in after a car accident, Jaxon’s world is turned upside down.

There are a lot of things Jaxon wishes he could have said to his once best friend and first crush. When he accidentally resurrects Christian, Jaxon might finally have that chance. But the more he learns about his newfound necromancy, the more he grasps that Christian’s running on borrowed time—and it’s almost out.

As he navigates dark, mysterious magics and family secrets, Jaxon realizes that stepping into an inherited power may also mean opening up old family wounds if he wants to keep the boy he may be falling for alive for good.

The Rez Doctor written by Gitz Crazyboy & illustrated by Veronika Barinova HighWater Press

Young Ryan Fox gets good grades, but he’s not sure what he wants to be when he grows up. It isn’t until he meets a Blackfoot doctor during a school assembly that he starts to dream big.

However, becoming a doctor isn’t easy. University takes Ryan away from his family and the Siksikaitsitapi community, and without their support, he begins to struggle. Faced with more stress than he’s ever experienced, he turns to partying. Distracted from his responsibilities, his grades start to slip. His bills pile up. Getting into med school feels impossible. And now his beloved uncle is in jail. Can Ryan regain his footing to walk the path he saw so clearly as a boy?

Desert Echoes by Abdi Nazemian HarperCollins

From Abdi Nazemian, the award-winning author of Like a Love Story and Only This Beautiful Moment, comes a suspenseful contemporary YA novel about loss and love.

Fifteen-year-old Kam is head over heels for Ash, the boy who swept him off his feet. But his family and best friend, Bodie, are worried. Something seems off about Ash. He also has a habit of disappearing, at times for days. When Ash asks Kam to join him on a trip to Joshua Tree, the two of them walk off into the sunset . . . but only Kam returns.

Two years later, Kam is still left with a hole in his heart and too many unanswered questions. So it feels like fate when a school trip takes him back to Joshua Tree. On the trip, Kam wants to find closure about what happened to Ash but instead finds himself in danger of facing a similar fate. In the desert, Kam must reckon with the truth of his past relationship—and the possibility of opening himself up to love once again.

Desert Echoes is a propulsive, moving story about human resilience and connection.

Between the Pipes Story by Albert McLeod with Elaine Mordoch and Sonya Ballantyne (Contributor) & illustrated by Alice RL HighWater Press

Thirteen-year-old Chase’s life and identity should be simple. He’s the goalie for his hockey team, the Eagles. He’s a friend to Kevin and Jade. He’s Kookum’s youngest grandchild. He’s a boy. He should like girls.

But it’s not that simple. Chase doesn’t like girls the way that the other boys do. It’s scary being so different from his peers. Scarier still is the feeling that his teammates can tell who he is—and that they hate him for it. If he pretends hard enough, maybe he can hide the truth.

Real strength and change can’t come from a place of shame. Chase’s dreams are troubled by visions of a bear spirit, and the more he tries to hide, the more everything falls apart. With the help of an Elder, and a Two-Spirit mentor, can Chase find the strength to be proud of who he is?

“Between the Pipes” explores toxic masculinity in hockey through the experiences of an Indigenous teen.

They Thought They Buried Us by NoNieqa Ramos Carolrhoda Lab

Horror fan and aspiring film director Yuiza gets a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As one of the few students of color at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy, Yuiza immediately feels out of place. A brutal work-study schedule makes it impossible to keep up with the actual classes. Every expense, from textbooks to laundry, puts Yuiza into debt. And the behavior of students and faculty is… unsettling.

Yuiza starts having disturbing dreams about the school’s past and discovers clues about the fate of other scholarship students. It’ll take all Yuiza’s knowledge of the horror genre to escape from Our Lady’s grasp.

How to Lose a Best Friend by Jordan K. Casomar MTV Books

For as long as anyone can remember, Zeke Ladoja and Imogen Parker have been best friends. Their classmates, their parents, and even the school custodian think that they’re meant to be together. And that’s exactly what Zeke wants: for Gen to be his girlfriend. Now that she’s about to be sixteen (and allowed to date), Zeke is finally going to tell her how he feels—in front of everyone at her birthday party.

Imogen loves Zeke with all her heart, but only as a friend. The pressure to be with Zeke has sometimes been overwhelming, but up to this point, she’s been able to manage it. Then she falls for the new boy, Trevor Cook, and she knows the news will devastate Zeke. The last thing she wants to do is hurt her best friend, but she also resents the fact that no one seems to care about what she wants.

The night of Gen’s party, everything goes wrong. There’s backlash, most of it directed at Gen, and Zeke feels emboldened. He isn’t about to give up on his feelings, and he’ll do whatever it takes to prove that she made the wrong choice…even if it means destroying their friendship. But Gen isn’t about to give up on fighting for herself and the freedom to love the boy she wants, not the boy she’s expected to be with.

#new releases #weneeddiversebooks #young adult books

14 notes · View notes

lokiinmediasideblog · 1 year

Text

I Intentionally Start Shit in the Loki Tag

If you complain about Sylvie being "harmful queer rep" BUT want "Lady Loki" in the MCU, which was Loki possessing Sif's body just to torment Sif, I need you to sit down and shut up. a. Genderfluid people don't go by "Lady " when they're femme or women. b. If you don't see the transphobic dogwhistles in the comics possession subplot, I don't know what to tell you... But let's say that hag that wrote those crappy books would love it. c. If you weren't aware about this, maybe you should read the wiki at least before giving uninformed opinions.

I definitely agree that they should not have led people on with the promise of genderfluid rep during the promotion of the series. But get mad at Disney/Marvel for that. Not at the writers or Sophia Di Martino that had to cave in to Feige's demands. That's literally what they have to do.

I really don't give a damn about the "autogynephilia" allegations, which again, is ALSO PRESENT IN CIS WOMEN. Like why the fuck should I care about someone finding themselves hot? There's fascists out there. AGP even if it was a trans-specific thing harms no one. The only harm said to come from it is DUE TO FASCISM because it plays into RESPECTABILITY POLITICS.

If you use AI to create a "proper" Lady Loki or love interest for Loki, you can't complain about the blatant product placement in S2. I am not a fan of product placement either and won't defend it, but those are the rules. Show some integrity. And before you ask, I have not given a cent to Disney since they pissed me off with attempts to trademark Dia de los Muertos for Coco.

If you complain about how being a "Loki" is not a role (unlike Spiderman) and how it should have been all 100% Tom Hiddleston, you don't get to call it selfcest as a gotcha, because you're already differentiating between the variants with different DNA. Like do y'all hate selfcest or not? Make up your mind. The series treats a Loki as an archetype of sorts, so it can be a role. Also, having the same name does not make you related because we don't know what Sylvie's parents are? And we don't even know if Sylvie is also a Jotun, a prop claims she isn't.

If you say you want Sylvie dead but claim to not be misogynistic, because you'd love if a specific love interest from the comics or mythology replaced her, STFU. You only like those because you can project whatever the fuck you want onto them.

If you claim Sylvie is a misogynistic depiction of women but salivate over characters written by cishet white men in the 1960s-1980s that made wanting to fuck Thor or being in a monogamous marriage with Loki their entire personality (there's so MANY OF THESE), STFU. Do you hear yourself? And no, it's not misogynistic of me, a woman, to criticize offensive depictions of women by cishet white men. They're not real.

Our MCU!Loki is not the young adult Ikol reincarnation currently. Of course 20-something Verity is not going to be there! The Loki show should be praise for having multiple female cast members around the same age as the protagonist and pragmatic clothing choices that allowed SdM to nurse her baby.

Selfcest isn't real and I cry tears of boredom whenever someone clutches their pearls over it.

The comics aren't perfect. As much as I loved the recent Dan Watters run (and German Peralta's art), the comics art has some very questionable tendencies, especially regarding Loki's nose when she's femme. It's associated with how some kinds of facial features are considered masculine or feminine (and racialized). Noses have no gender, ffs! Women with nose bumps exist! For some reason Loki always has a tiny button nose when she's a woman or femme. There's also the BLATANT physiognomy that has ALWAYS PLAGUED Thor comics since their inception, and Loki's facial features as they've become more "grey" and less evil is an interesting study. Peralta's far from being the only artist with this problem, and is far from being the most problematic. For comparison from Loki (2023) run:

Loki from ye olden days:

#selfcest #mcu!loki #comics!loki #mcu!sylvie #marvel comics #loki series #physiognomy #queer rep #istartshit #hot takes

44 notes · View notes

ladyonfire28 · 4 years

Photo

Came back from my little break for that new article ! Here is the translation of Adèle and Aïssa’s interview for Libération. It’s a very long, but very interesting one. So i recommend to read it. There may be a lot of incoherencies so please tell me if something doesn’t make sense !

Aïssa Maïga and Adèle Haenel : «Finally there’s something political happening»

They stood up together at the César and have since been striving to invent a common front against all forms of discrimination. For "Libération", actresses Adèle Haenel and Aïssa Maïga retrace the journey of generational awareness.

Some kind of symbol. A large mural, in tribute to George Floyd, a 46-year-old black American who died on 25 May when he was arrested by a white policeman, and to Adama Traoré, who died at the age of 24 on the floor of the "caserne de Persan" (Val-d'Oise) following an arrest in 2016, was painted at the beginning of the week on the façade of a building in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. Close by, the Adama Committee organized a press conference on Tuesday. Words, demands and the announcement of a new march to fight against police violence. It takes place this Saturday in the capital, from the Place de la République to the Place de l'Opéra. The organizers dream of seeing a huge crowd come together. This demonstration comes at the heart of a tense period. Young people are demanding answers and action, while many police officers feel that the Minister of the Interior is letting his troops down in the face of the scolding.

In the street, we will find associations, politicians and many people. Adèle Haenel and Aïssa Maïga will be there. Not a first. They were already present on June 2nd at the rally in front of the Paris high court. The actresses didn't really know each other before the last César ceremony, marked by the speech of one and the shattering departure of the other. Since then, they have never left each other. Both describe the moment as a "turning point". The fights converge.

When the idea of a cross-exchange came on the table to put words to their commitments, they did not hesitate. On Thursday, in a roadstead near Belleville, Adèle Haenel arrived first, followed by Aïssa Maïga. They are not of the same generation, the journeys and paths are different. The styles too. The one who got up at the announcement of the prize awarded to Polanski goes up and down, talks with her body. The one who, at the same ceremony, invited to count the black people in the room appears calmer, stays seated on her chair, speaks in a low voice. Adèle Haenel and Aïssa Maïga complement each other.

From where are you speaking?

Adèle Haenel: I speak from my personal political background, rooted in feminism, a background that is shaken by the worldwide movement around police violence and by the French movement around the Adama Committee. I would say that taking charge of my own history has given me the ability to deal with other broader issues that do not immediately affect me. I'm talking about a kind of political awakening. This desire to show my support for the families of the victims, for the political movement against racism and police violence in France, and for the actors who take a stand. I'm thinking of Omar Sy, Camélia Jordana and you, Aïssa.

Aïssa Maïga: This intersectional awakening evoked by Adèle is a place where I have been for a long time without necessarily being able to name it. For a long time, the racial question in cinema was so pervasive in my life that it cannibalized everything else. I felt that it was less difficult to be a woman, in a world that discriminates women, than it was to be a black woman. The work done by Afrofeminists in France and abroad put the words in my mouth that I didn't have because I didn't have that heritage. I am speaking from a place that is on the move and that is not made up of certainties, that is made of interrogations, especially about the fact that I can implement changes on my own scale. And I'm also speaking from a place that is purely civic and is tinged with various influences. I didn't grow up in a poor suburb, I didn't live in financial precariousness, I come from a rather intellectual middle class, it gave me certain tools, and yet I haven't escaped this very French thing, a soft racism, rarely seen but which is haunting... because it's omnipresent.

Why did you get involved with the Adama Committee?

A.M.: Because this is a fight for justice. It was Assa Traoré who came to meet me during the release of the collective book Noire n'est pas mon métier ("Black is not my job"). I knew her from afar, I knew her struggle, and she appeared. The support became obvious and it has really taken shape in the last few months. I was immediately impressed by this woman, her quiet strength, and this ability to forge a bond, to think of her family drama in political terms. Her voice matters. She's not just an icon: she allows a movement to emerge.

A.H.: For me, it's even more recent, I had to go through a problem that was going through me, that involved my body in discrimination in order to mingle with other injustices. I was listening to what Assa Traoré was saying and I was struck by her determination and intelligence. But it is only very recently that I also became physically aware that I could not fail to support this woman and the whole fight against police violence and racism, in the same way that I am taking up the fight for feminism and against sexual violence. I can't have it two-tiered.

On June 2nd, more than 20,000 people gathered in front of the High Court of Paris, at the request of the Adama Committee. An unprecedented turnout, with many young people, why?

A.M.: The Adama Committee saw very well the link between George Floyd's drama and their own. The death of Adama Traoré, choked under three gendarmes, was materialized before our eyes with the unbearable images of Floyd's death. The French youth who look at these images cannot fail to make the connection, it is obvious. There is also a form of accessible activism that is developing via social networks. Activists will involve others through simple, accessible sentences: if you are not a POC, you are still involved, it is your responsibility to listen and take an active part, at your level, in the fight for equality. There is also the idea that we need to establish a link between police violence, the racism that can be found in other social spaces, the issue of gender equality, the environment, and the urgency of dealing with these problems now. There is also a form of anxiety among young people: they are told that in fifty years' time there will be no more water. And finally the feeling of injustice, which is omnipresent and linked to the circulation of images on social networks. Police violence follows one after the other, and this creates an accumulation effect. It is not just a dogmatic political vision, but a reality that is lived or perceived as real.

A.H.: There is a turning point in the effectiveness of the movement as well. This feeling carried by Assa Traoré that we are powerful. It's not just ideas that go around the world, it's ideas that make the world happen. It gives hope and responsibility to a whole generation.

During Aïssa's speech at the Césars, in which she confronts the profession with the near-invisibility of actors, filmmakers and producers from French overseas territories and African and Asian immigrants in French cinema, you are in the room, Adèle. You don't know each other yet. Do you understand her speech immediately?

A.H.: It's obvious, but it's not immediate, it takes a little time to understand the extent of the racist mechanism when you, yourself, haven't been forced to see how it works. I was brought back to particular assignments, but not to this one. So it takes a long time before it becomes unbearable evidence. When Aïssa takes the floor, it's courageous because the room is very cold and it's making it even colder. I thought it was funny and I thought "finally, something political is happening".

Did you both understand that people find it violent to count black people in the room, and even that they might find it paradoxical to split the audience?

A.M.: Counting isn't splitting, it's measuring the gap between us and equality. When it comes to inequality, to be blind to color is to be blind to the social burdens that come from our history and the imagination that flows from it. I am fighting for art and culture to deconstruct racial fictions. In our field, cinema, there is a tendency to believe that when a few exceptions appear, the problem of racial discrimination is solved. I do not think that my presence, that of Omar Sy, Ladj Ly or Frédéric Chau, Leïla Bekhti, for example, however gifted they may be, exonerates French cinema from an examination of conscience. There is always an over-representation of people perceived as non-white in roles with negative connotations - and it's not me saying this, it's the CSA, through its diversity barometer. There are still too few opportunities for younger people, who today in 2020 deplore what I deplored when I was starting out. Still too few non-whites behind the camera and almost no one in decision-making positions. I started this job when I was 20 years old. I am 45. A generation, not a few exceptions, should have risen. It hasn't. And it's unbearable as a citizen, a mother and an artist.

At the César ceremony, I deliberately used a inflammable symbol. If we refuse to measure differences in access to opportunities in terms of racial discrimination, perhaps we are accepting the status quo. Today, we need concrete action by decision-makers and numerical targets in order to measure progress. A few personal successes, however brilliant they may be, cannot justify the violence of large-scale unequal treatment.

A.H.: The substance of what Aïssa said to the César is relevant, it speaks to the moment, and being shocking has the virtue of awakening. The criticisms that followed were "I agree but"... In fact, it means that even when the substance is right, the form is never the right one. It's a form of censorship, there are people who have the right to speak and others who don't.

A.M.: Allowing oneself to express anger head-on is taboo because we are actresses and we are supposed to preserve the desire that others project on us. And also because it highlights the precarious nature of this profession: are you able to overcome your fear, to express your opinion, with the risk of losing something?

A.H.: From my point of view, that of a white woman - forgive me for putting myself in this position, but it's still unfortunately an assignment - I see that when I spoke about what happened to me personally, I received a lot of support, especially from people who are not especially on our side. However, as soon as I spoke up, politically, to say that giving the prize to a rapist fleeing from justice was an insult, all of a sudden I was really overstepping what I was entitled to do, what I could interfere in...

Do you think there's a "white privilege"?

A.M.: Words are so tricky...

A.H.: When Virginie Despentes uses the term "white privilege", it's a bit related to Aïssa's gesture when she counts the black people in the room. It's a question of pointing out, by calling up words that should be those of the past, the gap between the evolution of universalist ideals and the facts of manifest exclusion at work. Provocation points out this flaw and invites us to close it.

Is there state racism?

A.M.: I don't know about "state" racism, it would have to be written into the laws to say that. The right word is systemic: it means that there is something that does not allow for real equality, something in the established rules that allows a small number of people to discriminate without being worried. What also raises the question is the inertia of the state in the face of the continuation of systemic inequalities.

From what you say, we are at a turning point in the struggle against racial, gender, social and other forms of discrimination...

A.M.: I felt the turning point in 2018 with #MeToo, Time's Up, and when I saw all these women from such diverse backgrounds (in the streets) after Trump's election. It was an image I had never seen before in my generation. It was in the United States, and yet something happened to me in France, because I had been dreaming of this convergence for a long time. I'm not here to defend my chapel. I'm not going to be satisfied with a breakthrough if blacks have more roles while Arabs and Asians are still in a degraded situation in French cinema. The convergence I'm talking about didn't quite take place at the time of #MeToo, which quickly became a white women's movement in my eyes. In French cinema, there is also the "50-50 for 2020" movement [collective for parity and inclusion founded in 2018, editor's note] that I saw coming like the guerrilla movement we had been waiting for for a long time, pragmatic, quick, positively impatient, very constructive. The work done in favor of parity is colossal. On the other hand, I regret that diversity is the next program. But it cannot be the next program for me, that is the mistake. I've talked about it very openly, and frankly in a fairly relaxed way with some of them.

A.H.: Much more relaxed than I was, by the way!

A.M.: And then I said to myself that the battles are progressing on different levels and that we're going to have to find some kind of alignment. The fight for women's rights is not just a women's issue, it's a men's issue, just as the fight against racism is not just about POC. And it wasn't until 2020 and the murder of George Floyd that there were those voices, especially white voices, that said, "This is my problem too." Including in France, where this awakening of consciousness is made possible by the work done by the families of victims of police violence.

A.H.: In my political journey so far, I had forgotten to understand the places where I am not just in a situation of domination. I am also, as a white woman who is not in a precarious position, in a dominant position in certain aspects. Understanding that, feeling that, is essential. My political agenda was focused on feminism, and I didn't realize that it was implicitly white feminism, unintentionally excluding. What Aïssa says seems fundamental to me: the agenda that would order one cause after another is not conceivable and leads to inertia. It leagues us against each other in identity issues that are sterile, since they reiterate the terms of oppression. This is a major issue in the effectiveness of political struggles: how can we mobilize without reiterating the categorization we are fighting against? This implies understanding that there is a deep articulation between all systems of domination and that there is a need to defend these causes in a cross-cutting manner.

Aïssa's speech on June 2nd, during the demonstration initiated by the Adama Committee, called for a fair, dignified and positive representation of minorities in the media. But who can judge what is dignified and fair? Only the ones who are affected ?

A.H.: Today, in France, female characters in films are implicitly white women: I have a much wider range of possible jobs than that offered to a black actress. But in my field of so-called universal women, very often, women are offered satellite roles around male characters. These roles take up what is considered to be the normal white female nature, of restraint and reification. What appears natural here is a cultural construction of identity that is done precisely through stories. This is one of the reasons why the political stakes of representations in the cinema are so important.

Is this a criterion for assessing or rejecting a work? What should be done with existing works that have been reassessed as problematic?

A.H.: Works must be recontextualized. They are not created out of nowhere, out of time. Let's question them! That doesn't mean that we stop watching them, but that we ask ourselves what their political substratum is and what they convey. Questioning representations is a sign of vitality. And that does not mean that we would no longer have the right to see these works.

A.M.: With this waltz of statues of slavery figures in the United States or in the French overseas departments at the moment, the citizens gives their answer. Either the work must be contextualized, in a museum or in a place with a historical explanatory note, or it must stand out.

Is it women, more willingly than men, who carry this convergence of fights ?

A.M.: I feel a change in the scale of our lives, a major turning point in the way we perceive each other and allow ourselves to hybridize in these battles. Regarding the massive presence of women from cinema in front of the High Court on June 2, I wonder. In particular about my own capacity to build bridges... while guaranteeing the visibility of the fights against discrimination against women or POC. How do we ensure that the fight against discrimination, for equality and equity, is as visible as the rest? I am not at all sure how to do this. But it has to be done. When, the day after the César, I received a text message from Adèle, even though we don't know each other, and she writes to me to say "I heard you. I'm here. Let's meet", it can be as simple as that.

Why did you send that text?

A.H.: Because of the solitude in this room. And the brave gesture of saying what she said on stage. We'd met the same evening and maybe I hadn't caught the moment, I was captivated by our own event... That is, what had happened after we'd, let's say..., gone to get our coats a bit earlier in the dressing room... (Aïssa Maïga laughs) And I thought, let's not forget the constructed gesture, the political intentionality of Aïssa in there. I wanted to get closer to her courage. So I think that we shouldn't talk about masculinity by saying "men", that we should consider masculinity as a field of organization of power with its own complexities, and its intersectional repercussions. I refer to Angela Davis' book, Women, Race & Class, on the issue of the difficult articulation between the civil rights movement in the United States and the emerging white feminist movements where there was a lot of racism. Why don't we think of ourselves as spontaneous and necessary allies between categories of discrimination, racial, social and gendered? We need to take the history of this division seriously in order to work on it and overcome it. As Assa Traoré does in an ultra-intelligent way when she says "Whatever your religion, your sexual orientation, wherever you come from, whatever your skin color". It is an invitation to self-criticism of our own movement. This is my discovery at the beginning of this year: the self-criticism of my history as a white feminist.

When you get up during the César, is it thoughtful or impulsive?

A.H.: This award was a claim to the right to do whatever you want as long as you are at the top. That is to say: rich white men who don't feel concerned when we talk about violence. What it means beyond sexual violence is that there are people to whom repressive laws do not apply. It's as if the police and the laws shouldn't act against them, but around them... And that's what you feel in that moment in the room. What happened on César night was a dissolution of the status quo. Now it's either you stay in the room or you don't stay in the room.

A.M.: And it was important to be there at the César, because I read a lot about boycotting that evening, but for me there was no question of backing out. A boycott is not just staying at home behind your television, not being there without anyone really noticing. It was important to say that the home of cinema is also our home, our space, our place of expression. We are in a position to speak out and for that to have the virtue of provoking discussion. When that person wins that award, it's the time of the turkey, where someone praises the rapist grandfather, when everyone knows. And you're breathless, you can't move, time becomes elastic, everything is extremely heavy, it's unreal. You enter another dimension. And the fact that a person manages to regain possession of time, to become master of their time and master of their body by standing up and saying no, it put oxygen back in, it woke us up. Adèle and I looked at each other two or three times during the evening, we knew we were together. There was something like a physical experience. We boarded the ship together.

We're spotting the allies.

A.M.: That's right. And time returned to normal when Adèle, Céline Sciamma and others, including me, got up. It was a coherent political gesture in which many people recognized themselves.

Do you think that your political positions, formalized at the César, can have an impact on your career?

A.M.: The question is how do you break a family secret? Festen is one of my favorite films. (Laughs) I wasn't born at the time of the 2020 César, it's the result of a personal journey and a legacy. Others before me have spoken, for example Luc Saint-Eloy and Calixthe Beyala on the same issues at the Césars in 2000. When Canal + and the César invited me to come and give an award, I said "yes, but I want complete freedom". Blowing up a family secret is a movement for self-liberation, it's an essential meeting with yourself. Choosing to be on the side of silence, of the status quo and therefore of injustices with full knowledge of the facts is something I was quite incapable of doing. The consequences for one's profession are not that one doesn't care, but spitting out what one has to say is a top priority. The question of what it is going to cost behind it is resolved by the feeling of freeing the word, provoking debate, making a generational contribution to the fight for equality, which in essence concerns us all. I have an appointment with myself around 60, 65, the age when my children will be about the same age as I am today. There is something about transmission. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I don't want to tell myself that I haven't taken advantage of my little privilege of being a POC exception in French cinema to the detriment of all those young people I meet on the street, who aren't white and who say to me with fear in their stomachs, "Do you think I can still do this job?"

What about you, Adèle?

A.H.: The message that was sent to me very clearly by a casting director is that I will never work again. Obviously, this person was very sure of himself, since he wrote it in print capital letters about a dozen times. What do you say when you ask for respect and silence? They say, "Don't speak out politically because it's not your role". But also: "Don't take the lead artistically either because you're an actress, you have to follow the genius of your director". This whole structure is part of this culture where you shouldn't listen to yourself but to submit. I don't know what the consequences will be for my job. What is certain is that I will never regret it. We did something that night that freed the voices of a lot of people. That is worth much more than all the threats to my career, which in any case is always fragile, because it is a precarious environment. If I totally respected the rules and said, "Yes, yes, you have to separate the man from the artist", that wouldn't stop me from being able to get out of the game. It's as much about inventing one's life as trying to open up the future.

Written by Cécile Daumas , Rachid Laïreche and Sandra Onana. Photo by Lucile Boiron

#adèle haenel #aïssa maïga #adele haenel #aissa maiga #portrait of a lady on fire #that was a very great read #can i just say i gasped when aïssa mentioned Festen #it's an incredible movie !!!#portrait de la jeune fille en feu #libération #sometimes i translate things #long text #black lives matter #blm

947 notes · View notes

coochiequeens · 3 years

Text

Men on a train also didn’t see a problem with a woman being raped.

Women's satisfaction with the treatment of their gender in the United States is at a record low, according to a Gallup poll. A majority of men, however, don't see a problem.

The study, released last week, found that 53% of Americans are very or somewhat satisfied with the treatment of women in society - tying a record low that first hit when the #MeToo movement gained national attention in 2017. Since 2016, women's satisfaction has dropped 17 points to 44%, while men's fell by five points to 61%, according to Gallup's findings.

The poll also found that 61% of men think men and women have equal job opportunities, while 33% of women agree. However, majorities of both genders, 72% of women and 61% of men - favored affirmative action programs for women.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul, a writer and virtual speaker based in Arlington, Texas, wasn't surprised by the study's findings. "It's not only that women aren't treated well. Sometimes we're invisible," she said.

Gallup's findings underscore how men and women view gender equity issues differently in the United States, said Radhika Balakrishnan, a professor of women's gender and sexuality studies at Rutgers University, adding that male privilege can often distort men's perception of gender disparities.

For instance, men "have a very different perception of what it feels like to walk home than a woman walking home after sunset," Balakrishnan said. "And I don't think you can inhabit that body in the same way."

It's also crucial to factor in the different lived experiences of women, Balakrishnan said. These issues are "gendered, but also racialized. With the intersection of race and gender in terms of women of color, it's even worse," she added.

Indeed, the study found that almost half of White women (46%) said they were satisfied with women's treatment in society while 38% of Black women and 43% of Hispanic women felt the same. Along party lines, the study found 72% of Republican women were satisfied with women's treatment, compared to 32% of Democratic women.

While #MeToo has drawn greater awareness around misconduct and harassment, Balakrishnan believes the pandemic has also exposed the burdens placed on women in particular, contributing to the all-time low in their satisfaction with societal treatment of their gender.

"Covid has had such an impact in kind of revealing all the different things that women's lives encapsulate," said Balakrishnan.

She said Gallup's findings, which come from its June 1 to July 5 Minority Rights and Relations survey, indicate how the pandemic has compounded issues for women. Child-care limitations and labor force demands have been the greatest source of dissatisfaction, she said, forcing many women to leave the workforce.

"The unemployment statistics are kind of shocking," said Balakrishnan, who also serves as commissioner for the Commission for Gender Equity for New York City. "We're back to labor force participation rates for women of the 1980s because so many have left."

In September, men gained 220,000 jobs, while women lost 26,000 jobs. Another 309,000 women left the workforce, dropping labor force participation down to 51.7%, according to the National Women's Law Center. Overall, women are short nearly 3 million jobs than before the pandemic hit.

Alongside the pandemic, heightened racial and social issues of the past year have also likely influenced women's dissatisfaction with society's treatment of their gender, Balakrishnan said. Among those issues include a reckoning on race in the wake of killings of unarmed Black people last year, deadly shootings in March targeting Asian American women and a wave of antiabortion and anti-trans legislation.

"We're at a very interesting moment in U.S. history," Balakrishnan said. "I think there's definitely this momentum towards a more conservative view in terms of women. But at the same time, we're also seeing a lot more conversation with the MeToo movement."

Abayomi-Paul, meanwhile, isn't too convinced that much is changing. "On the outside, we have this feminist approach on the surface layer of America," she said, adding that the media often misleads people into believing that more progress is being made than it really is. "Then behind closed doors, it's different."

Balakrishnan said there are substantive steps that can help bring women back into the labor force, though. Earlier this year, the Biden administration established the White House Gender Policy Council to develop a federal strategy for advancing gender equity and equality for women and girls. And President Joe Biden's $3.4 trillion spending bill aims to make child care more affordable.

"We need to look at structural issues, in terms of wage discrimination and care work," she said. "It kind of has to be a collective support structure, not an individuated one of. And how do we do that without real government policy?"

#Men took are jobs #Men prolonged the pandemic #Men don’t step in when women are attacked #Biden and his ilk won’t even address women’s issues by saying women

4 notes · View notes

africanization101 · 4 years

Note

Heya :) Just idly wondering as to your tastes and if you had a fave or even top three models you admire?

I’m not all that much into fashion model fandom, but a fellow creative recently pointed me to something from that niche that might be of interest to you.

Vogue Korea profiled a model called Binx Walton in its October edition; the interesting thing about Walton is that, according to Wikipedia, she has “African American, Irish, Dutch, German, Indian, and Eastern Asian heritage”, so she’s exactly the kind of multiracial beauty we’ll be seeing a lot more of as borders soften and hearts open to the possibility of interracial love. Here she is:

Fashion designers have long had a fascination with androgyny and that look is certainly present here as well. Not everyone’s cup of tea; if you’re into big curves, catwalks really aren’t your scene. But I find the combination of fit slenderness and figure-hugging wetlook outfits quite alluring.

On that note, there’s another model that could pull off this look quite well: Andreja Pejić. Pejić is a trans woman, which only seems to make it easier for her to achieve that slightly androgynous feminine charm fashion designers are so hot for:

At first glance, it may seem like this topic has little to do with the theme of my blog, but the same individuation trends that fuel this newfound fascination with mixed-race and transgender bodies and aesthetics in high fashion are also behind the increase in interracial relationships. White supremacy has always rested on the demand that people stick with their given racial and gender expectations; what models like Walton or Pejić promote to the world is the contrary idea that you can be outside of those expectations and not just be accepted, but celebrated as beautiful.

Not everyone is influenced by the messaging of high fashion, just like not everyone watches Blacked, but the more social institutions promote this idea of diverse beauty, the more we will see people experiment with it. And that’s really my favorite thing about the fashion industry nowadays. Hopefully I didn’t completely miss the point of your question with that. x)

62 notes · View notes

meloncubedradpops · 4 years

Text

Repo! the Corona Opera: Part Two Fascist Boogaloo

Greetings fellow Repo! fans,

Here is my second installment of a series of three essays where I compare our contemporary times with the movie Repo! the Genetic Opera. My first piece detailed the similarities between the two worlds, and turns out, I have an awful lot to talk about still. I ended my last article by posing the question, "What went wrong in this dystopia to normalize the concept of death due to nonpayment?" No doubt, this movie is incredibly outrageous on many fronts, particularly within the dynamics of the Largo family. As mentioned in the previous piece, I highlighted the pervasiveness of GeneCo's power and influence towards the citizens in the city (is it called city of GeneCo? GeneCo-land? GenCity? An actual city in Italy??).

People who write stories often bend the rules to make their story compelling. Be it exaggerating social interactions, creating scientifically impossible scenarios, or even allowing the characters to use technology that does not exist yet. I admit the creators of Repo! applied all those tactics and more, which makes the parallels I draw that much more surreal. I want to acknowledge this before I dive deeper because yes, I truly think it would be impossible to have a company who can offer cheap and dirty surgeries with an absence of debilitating class action lawsuits resulting from botched procedures, infection, or their body rejecting the organ transplant. And while I admit Zydrate does not exist, yet, but we do have a long history with opioid abuse. If you asked me when I first watched the movie if I think the Largo family could be a mirror of an ultra wealthy family from real life, I would have politely disagreed with you. But times right now are freaking weird. A single day does not go by where something completely outlandish is blasted all over the news, particularly in the United States.

In my last essay I pointed out examples where the citizens in GenCity live a life after experiencing a mass extinction event. Besides the technological anachronisms, society and GeneCo have an uncomfortably close relationship with each other. GeneCo is not merely a corporation that offers healthcare and surgeries, it has an unyielding power politically too. I argue that GenCity is ran by a fascist government that is controlled and operated by GeneCo.

If you're not a person who is super familiar with fascism, basically it's an extremist right wing government philosophy. I find it interesting that in the song "21st Century Cure", Graverobber says: Industrialization has crippled the globe. Although plagues, war, and other hardships existed before industrialization, that paradigm of change accelerated the imbalances between man and nature. Fascism did not exist until after World War I, after all. Between the world war itself and the Spanish Flu of 1918, there was a lot of pain and suffering felt all over the world. Fascists took advantage of vulnerable populations and asserted that their political party is the only correct party, and those who oppose are considered an enemy. Historically fascist governments have blurred the lines between the spheres of what's considered "public" and "private", and often danced harmoniously with business allies in pursuit of profit. As an effect, fascist governments have required citizens to foot the bill of a private company's losses. With enough propaganda, fascist governments will have you believing that this is ultimately for the betterment of everyone. And if you give them enough time, they will normalize terrible acts against humanity that barely make a peep, if the truth even comes to light.

For the rest of this essay, I will be highlighting examples in the Repo! movie that correspond with characteristics of fascism, using political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt's The 14 Characteristics Of Fascism, which was published in the spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry magazine.

The 14 characteristics are:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

The world surrounding GeneCo occupies itself with the concept that this incorporated area derives a sense of nationalism, in the absence of much dissent. If you see below, there is an advertisement on the top right corner that says, "Your Birthplace for a new Heredity". GeneCo is not just a company that sells organs and surgeries. It is its own incorporated city. This ad, combined with GeneCo's relentless messaging that not only did this company save humanity, you must conform to the idea that only GeneCo can provide you the experience of feeling clean, safe, and perfect.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Being able to legally repossess someone's organs because they didn't make their organ payments is about as disdainful as you can get. Nathan has a whole song called "Legal Assassin", and there doesn't appear to be many laws that would at least have the pretense that these repossessions are remotely humane. There are multiple instances in the movie where Nathan approaches a client who is already restrained, panicked, and powerless. From what I can gather from the media in Gencity, GeneCo proliferates the idea that the company would be dysfunctional if people could get financed surgeries and let those payments go to collections. When you're a mega corporation, they let you do it.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

While the career of a Graverobber is certainly creepy and macabre, the idea that they could be executed without a jury of their peers is especially strange. After I created my last essay, my friend Veronica pointed out, that per "A Needle Into A Bug", one of the deleted scenes from the movie, that street zydrate is not actually derived from the brains of dead people. He extracts zydrate from bugs that nest inside the craniums of dead people, which in my opinion is a huge distinction. So who is he really stealing from? Is it morally okay to dig up a corpse to get drug goo to sell to junkies? Absolutely not, and the idea is incredibly disrespectful for the dead. And while I am sure there are graverobbers in this world that likely steal things like jewelry from corpses, I still wouldn't justify being executed extrajudicially.

Further, Graverobber's relationship with the Largo family has me believing even more that GeneCo needs them more than their media campaign can justify. Rotti has access to incredible surveillance of the city, so you would think he would eliminate anyone who enabled Amber Sweet's addiction. My theory is GeneCo knows that street zydrate may result in more surgery sales. However they want to continue making money selling the lab-grown stuff. So the end justifies the means, if we can associate graverobbers and those who use street zydrate as criminals, we can continue believing that "they" are the enemies setting everyone else back.

4. Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. AND 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

GeneCo employs a private police force to carry out law enforcement. They patrol around a graveyard, a quasi-public space carved out for those who mourn. And because there is pervasive video surveillance, Rotti can demand that they do his bidding at any time. An example is his order to murder the repo man. We aren't aware of any sort of involvement beyond the borders of GenCity, but even the concept of a graveyard being a warzone is a special kind of hell.

5. Rampant Sexism- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

Genterns! On the surface, it’s pretty cool that there is a large volume of female medical professionals who are skilled enough to carry out surgeries. However behind the sexy veneer is the reality that Genterns are not set up for success. They are not provided adequate PPE and work under non-sterile conditions. In the "Mark it Up" scene, one is killed by Luigi. Imagine going to medical school for years and years, only to be tasked with the job of organ warehouse worker. Then on one of your shifts you are stabbed to death because the CEO's son bumped into you while you were working. Not only that, but you are also expected to dress proactively for the purpose of selling the GeneCo product and experience.

6. Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. GeneCo has a monopoly on the media of the city. Politics, entertainment, healthcare, you name it, they have a direct stake in, and control over, the media. We do see from time-to-time tabloid clippings of the Largo family. But generally speaking, GeneCo puts a lot of effort in upholding their image. The best evidence is Blind Mag's story. She is a singer who acquired the ability to see after a GeneCo cornea surgery. And while she clocked into work day in and day out, singing and advertising for GeneCo for 17+ years, her departure resulted in Rotti murdering her. But why? Was he afraid of the things she would say? Rotti knew he was terminally ill when she declared her resignation, and yet killing her on stage is somehow less of a scandal?

7. Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. Fascist countries use fear as a tactic to keep the masses scared and compliant. The universe of Repo! is one filled with tragedy. Millions of people have died. I would imagine that the series of events that would lead to the creation and success of GeneCo was contingent upon people being scared for their lives. While dealing with the coronavirus, I find myself constantly checking my temperature, keeping my distance from people, and wearing a mask out in public. The human spirit is resilient, which is how we have survived so long. However sociopaths smell our fear and use it against us. The city of GeneCo is surrounded by plots upon plots of graveyards, signifying the carnage left after their public health crisis. I have a strong feeling that GeneCo was able to harness the threat of whatever caused the massive organ failure epidemic and as an effect created a power vacuum.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

This one is going to be a reach, particularly because there is an absence of religion in this story. I don't think religion would be on the creator's of Repo!'s purview, and honestly I don't blame them. If you look at the imagery of the story, however, it is very gothic. We have no idea if religion survives, and if it does, to what extent. I would imagine that people still have spiritual needs, and I argue that the GeneCo Opera is an example of how they get that fulfilled.

"If you want it, baby, GeneCo's got it"

The GeneCo opera is not your typical opera experience. GeneCo specifically tells their customers to "testify". People are singing in unison, praising GeneCo. Clearly GeneCo has taken several human rituals and blended them together to create an over-the-top entertainment experience that seeks to advertise their company behind the testimonials of its patrons. The benefits of the opera for GeneCo, as a fascist entity, are two-fold: have people associate their most nirvana moments with an experience only GeneCo can offer (zydrate and surgery), and distract them with religious-like concerts so they won't question their neighbors being murdered on the streets by that very same company.

9. Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. AND 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

Throughout the entire movie, the Largo family is front and center. We know Rotti is terminally ill, and he utilizes his final moments to tie up loose ends in his life. His children feel entitled to his estate and the company of GeneCo. At no point do we see Rotti consult with a board of directors at GeneCo, a private fiduciary firm, or with any government entity. I would describe the company of GeneCo to be a weird combination of an aristocracy, government body, and corporation. His children commit crimes with no recourse or justice. Rotti kills the doctor who tells him he's dying. Luigi kills multiple people throughout the movie. In one of the opening scenes, we see a photograph showing Pavi is cutting off a woman's face. In the credits we see Amber's body guards lying dead on the floor during her press statement. What sort of corruption took place to make these occurrences so prevalent and normalized?

10. Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

We aren't super privy to the machinations that make this city functional. But there is a clear stratification that has sustained itself long enough that healthcare is not a right in this city, and those who can't pay for necessary healthcare can finance it. In a just society, if we have the means to save humanity, we can figure out a way to pay for it. Be it taxes on the most wealthy or other cost-saving measures, if there is a will, there is a way. However if you give a company enough power and money, it will do everything it can to stay on top. The best examples I can think of would be Nathan and Blind Mag's tenuous career at GeneCo. Neither really wanted the job they were given, but they were forced into those positions by Rotti. Had Bling Mag belonged to a entertainment union, would she have had more protections? Would a proper investigation into the murder of Marni result in justice being served, and the opportunity for Nathan to live a better adjusted life? Rotti masterfully manipulates situations that create powerless outcomes for his employees.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts We don't see any particular evidence that GeneCo is currently hostile to higher education or academia. What we do know is the technologies of this world are akin to something we'd see out of the 20th century. However GeneCo is advanced enough to synthesize usable organs. In my last essay, I drew parallels to today by highlighting that there may have been a "brain drain" of intellectualism as a result of academics dying from their public health crisis. Outside of the opera house, we don't see many examples of art in this world. Maybe this is what happens when a government stops funding programs it deems frivolous or challenges the status quo?

14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Based off context clues in the movie, we know that there is a group of voting citizens who help determine whether or not a company can repossess financed organs that are passed due on their payments. We don't know who makes these votes, the election process, or anything like that. So it is hard to say if GeneCo goes beyond their media campaign convincing voters to keep repossessions legal. Despite this lack of knowledge, I would argue that GeneCo wields incredible power regarding the course of elections for laws that apply to them. Okay, you want to pass a law to make organ repossession illegal? Fine, we don't have to offer products on a payment plan. The very threat of being able to take away healthcare is something right wing governments loveeee doing.

Speaking of elections, the United States 2020 general election is approaching. Now that I argued the ways that GeneCo is fascist, I will tie together ideas from both of these essays into a final piece that I hope you will like. If you enjoyed this article, please send it to all your Repo! friends.

#repo! the genetic opera #repo #Fascism #halloween #election #geneco #politics #horror #2020 #coronavirus #zydrate #musicals

46 notes · View notes

arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

On July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a cable to American embassies across the globe with new instructions. In the face of what he described as the growing threat from authoritarian and populist forces emanating from countries around the world, he urged U.S. diplomats to actively “seek ways to exert effective pressure on those countries to uphold democratic norms and respect human rights,” and vowed that “standing up for democracy and human rights everywhere is not in tension with America’s national interests nor with our national security.” This, he specified, must apply even to America’s allies and partners, declaring that “there is no relationship or situation where we will stop raising human rights concerns.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has explicitly characterized his foreign policy as waging “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” and described the world as at an “inflection point” that will determine for the future “who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” And while he has named China and Russia as the top threats to democracy, he has stated that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.”

This kind of rhetoric has led many to describe Biden as gearing up to lead a new round of global ideological competition akin to the Cold War, and Blinken’s cable appears to be a step toward operationalizing this conception into everyday U.S. policy.

…

Blinken’s invitation had in fact been a response to a June 26 declaration made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, which itself followed the completion of a “comprehensive report on systemic racism,” which had unsurprisingly discovered its titular subject ingrained around the world – especially in the “excessive policing of Black bodies and communities” in the United States. In her statement, Bachelet castigated the West for a “piecemeal approach to dismantling systems entrenched in centuries of discrimination and violence,” declared that “the status quo is untenable,” and called instead for an immediate “whole-of-society” “systemic response,” with a “transformative agenda” to uproot systemic racism everywhere and implement the “restorative justice” urgently demanded by “the worldwide mobilization of people calling for racial justice.”

The Biden administration could hardly have responded with anything less than full-throated support for such an idea, given that battling the omnipresent specter of America’s “systemic racism” has become a core feature of the administration’s political identity.

And few administration officials have embraced this battle with as much personal zeal as Blinken, who moved immediately after his confirmation to not only install a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department (in a powerful new position reporting only to himself), but ordered every bureau in the department to also appoint a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Diversity and Inclusion as well – with his stated goal being “to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the [State] Department’s work at every level.”

…

Speaking of that kind of thing, most of those upset about Blinken’s invitation of the UNHRC’s racism inquisitors strangely seem to have missed another development in a related front of the global culture war.

This despite the fact that the State Department is eager for you to know that, “On June 23, the United States led, and 20 countries co-sponsored, its first-ever side event on the human rights of transgender women, highlighting the violence and structural, legal, and intersectional barriers faced by transgender women of color.”

So there’s that. But side event to what? That would be the last session of the UNHRC, where the U.S. worked to address assorted “dire human rights situations” by helping to pioneer the launch of the “Group of Friends of the Mandate of the United Nations Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (GoF IE SOGI).

Besides the United States, the inaugural SOGI Group includes: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Who is this Independent Expert with so many friends? That would be Víctor Madrigal-Borloz, Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

After its formation, the Group’s first act was to consider a report produced for the UNHRC by Mr. Madrigal-Borloz titled “The Law of Inclusion.”

“The Law of Inclusion” states that all evidence necessarily “leads to the conclusion that all human beings live in gendered societies traversed by power hierarchies,” and declares that, as we all seek to “build back better” (here inexplicably adopting Joe Biden’s campaign slogan) the “adoption of gender-based and intersectional analysis” is “a fundamental component of a diligent discharge of [all countries’ human rights] responsibility.”

Crucially, an intersectional approach leads to a “recognition of how race is gendered and gender is raced, as well as the many other factors which affect how one is allocated rights.” Plus, as a bonus, “gender theory is also relevant as a tool to address, analyse and transform systems of violent masculinity.”

…

Ultimately, based on his intersectional analysis, the Independent Expert declares a new “fundamental duty of the State” based on his careful investigation:

To recognize every human being’s freedom to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression.

(I don’t think you will find a more flawless one-sentence summation of the End-Stage Liberalism I’ve previously outlined, characterized by its endless quest to liberate us from any and all limits, than this, by the way.)

…

The United States and the rest of the SOGI Group immediately issued a statement fully endorsing the report, noting that they “would like to reaffirm” that: “As clearly demonstrated by the thorough analysis provided by the report, gender is a social construct”; that intersectional analysis has “proven to be fundamental to the design and implementation of inclusive public policies”; that they support “the importance of advancing legal gender recognition based on self-identification”; and that they “oppose any attempt to erase gender from international human rights law instruments and processes.”

I hope you will retain at least one takeaway from my subjection of you to this word salad of intersectional jargon on race and gender: that the distinctive language and doctrinal ideological concepts of the New Faith have extended far past the Harvard Quad, crossed the oceans, and have now, as the report puts it, thoroughly “permeated” themselves through elite-managed global institutions like the UN Human Rights Council.

Conservatives, in particular, are typically dismissive of the UN in general and the UNHRC in particular (President Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of the council in 2018, after which Biden rejoined as an observer), as they see it as a pointless talk-shop that spends a majority of its time criticizing the United States and its allies, though with little practical effect. This is a mistake.

What is happening here is the steady creation and entrenchment of new norms that aim to redefine what is considered the normal and acceptable window of cultural, political, and legal practice by countries the world over. The UNHRC may have no direct political power, but it is precisely the ignorance or flippant disregard for the transformative long-term power of norms that has so far lost conservatives every culture war battle they have fought. Somehow conservatives – and now Liberals – have been consistently blindsided by norms falling out from under them (gradually, and then suddenly) even as they have held positions of political power.

Meanwhile, under the Biden administration, Washington has now embraced this kind of norm-setting mechanism for remaking the world in its new and ideologically improved image.

…

Not every country is completely woke to the need for unlimited gender self-identification or a “whole-of-society transformation” to address its hierarchies of oppression, however.

International Expert Mr. Madrigal-Borloz has also noticed this problem, which is why he and the SOGI Group are producing a follow-up companion report to “The Law of Inclusion,” this time to be titled “Practices of Exclusion.”

…

Probably in most other contexts, when an external power or powers attempt to “deconstruct” and replace the “traditional values” and “cultural and religious” norms of a distinct people against their will, this would be called that what it is: imperialism (or, occasionally, worse).

Nonetheless, “Practices of Exclusion” is set to be published at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September and will undoubtedly be endorsed by the U.S., U.K., and the other progressive members of the SOGI Group at that time – even as many of these same countries are actually still experiencing their own fierce bouts of “resistance” to its core ideas.

What does this all mean? In short, that the ideological battles of Cold War 2.0 are not going to be limited to categories similar to those which at least broadly seemed to characterize Cold War 1.0, or necessarily even uphold the classic conceptions of “liberal-democracy” and “authoritarianism” or “autocracy” with which we are familiar.

Instead, it should be understood that the Biden administration and its like-minded partners are now operating under a rather different ideological calculus about what “democracy” and “human rights” mean, even as, similar to the original Cold War, that calculus directly links domestic and international ideological foes.

In this worldview, in order for a democratic state to be a legitimate “Democracy,” it is not enough for it to have a popularly elected government chosen through free and fair elections – it also has to hold the correct progressive values. That is, it has to be Woke. Otherwise it is not a real Democracy, but something else. Here the term “populism” has become a useful one: even if a state is not yet authoritarian or “autocratic” in a traditional sense, it may be in the grip of “Populism,” an ill-defined concept vague enough to encompass the wide range of reactionary sentiments and tendencies that can characterize “resistance” to progress, as based on “traditional values,” etc. And ultimately, we are told, “Populism” is liable to lead to Autocracy – because if you aren’t progressing forward in sync with Democracy, you are sliding backwards along the binary spectrum toward Autocracy.

Moreover, as in the case of the struggle between Capitalist-Liberalism and Communist-Authoritarianism during the original Cold War, the insidious “forces” of Populism-Autocracy are present not only out in the undecided “Third World,” but even lurking inside Democracies in good standing – constantly threatening to tip them, like dominoes, into the opposite camp. Hence why Biden issues warnings like the one claiming that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” The fight against the perceived forces of Populism-Autocracy within the United States, or within the European Union, is not in this conception at all separate from the fight against the likes of China and Russia on the world stage; they are the same fight.

…

Exacerbating this sense of fear and division is the fact that a Democracy can’t just hold some of the correct values – it has to hold all of them, in toto. This is after all the prime conclusion of intersectional analysis: all injustice is interlinked, forming interlocking systems of oppression; therefore injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Intersectionality thus demands liberation in totality; there can be no pluralism – no one can simply be left alone or granted the slightest leniency, because no injustice in any place or of any degree can be suffered to exist, lest it pollute and threaten the entire system.

The conclusion is inevitable: the New Faith must be a missionary, evangelical faith. By its own internal logic, for its own survival, it must march abroad to convert the heathens even as it hunts heretics at home.

…

There are still plenty of countries out there – in fact, a vast majority of them – who think intersectional gender theory and other fruits of the New Faith are in essence stark raving mad, and are also rather attached to keeping their own cultures and traditions.

So even if you are a strong supporter of LGBT rights, feminism, or other liberal-progressive ideals (and yes, many countries around the world of course do treat LGBT people, women, and racial minorities terribly), it is still worth considering the practical consequences of Intersectional Imperialism. If the West makes ideological conformity an integral requirement for joining, receiving aid from, or even working with its Democracy bloc (as Blinken has implied), then many of these countries are liable to flee into the arms of China and other genuinely authoritarian but ideologically non-missionary states, despite the security concerns they may have.

…

At this time it was the Soviet bloc, including communist controlled Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, who argued that freedom from discrimination should take precedence over the rights of freedom of expression and assembly.

And it was the Western liberal democracies, together with the Latin American states, that rose to (unsuccessfully) oppose this idea.

The “fundamental right of free speech” was, argued U.K. representative Lady Gaitskell, “the foundation-stone on which many of the other human rights were built,” and it was the U.K.’s position that, despite abhorring racism, “in an advanced democracy the expression of such views was a risk that had to be taken.” Hungary shot back that free speech and tolerance was pointless if “fascists” were tolerated anywhere.

When the U.S. delegation attempted to restrict the scope of speech defined in the law to that “resulting in or likely to cause acts of violence,” the move was blocked by the Soviet group, with Czechoslovakia countering that there could be no democracy if “movements directed towards hatred and discrimination were allowed to exist.”

…

Times have changed. As the European Union prepares to consider writing “hate speech” into the official list of EU crimes, tweeting “gender-critical” thoughts is already an arrestable offense in the United Kingdom, and the United States looks to enlighten the world about the dangers of oppressive microaggressions, one wonders if there is any country remaining, the world over, still willing to genuinely represent liberal values in these terms today.

Instead only the crusaders of the New Faith remain to march into battle against the Autocrats and their Populist allies, and you are either with them or against them. Welcome to the Woke Cold War.

#n.s. lyons #substack #left wing cultural imperialism #read the whole thing

1 note · View note

intersex-ionality · 5 years

Text

A friend requested that I post this response separate from the main thread so that it can become its own discussion. Here it is in “isolation,” with minor clarifying edits.

CW: This post discusses a hypothetical person’s dysphoria and experiences with medical, physical, domestic, and sexual violence.

I want to address the claim that intersex is not a gender.

That concept--intersex being separated from all other aspects of gender theory--is very young. It is, in fact, younger than me. When I was a child, intersex was not only considered a gender, it was specifically considered a subset of transgender.

For reasons that, I hope, will become obvious by the end of this post.

You see, all of the forces that target, oppress, and harm intersex people are the same forces that target, oppress, and harm trans people. The causes and the effects are almost identical.

Let me present some examples, because human beings often learn best through pattern matching and examples.

Imagine a child is being assigned male.

This means that the child is being forced to adhere, both physically and mentally, to other people’s definitions of manhood. Society looks at the child, declares the child to be a boy, and then enforces boyness on the child.

This enforcement may be medical, and it may not. But, the enforcement will always be psychological.

There will be actions the child is forbidden from taking. Spaces the child is forbidden from entering. Expectations the child will be forced to adhere to. Toxic societal beliefs that child will be forced to internalize. All because society looked at a baby, and said, “you’re going to be a boy now, with everything that entails, with nothing outside boyhood, and you don’t get a choice.”

Imagine the child grows up feeling trapped in boyhood, forced to conform to these limitations. The child knows, on some deep level, that boyhood is wrong for them. The child even knows, in as much as a child knows things about anatomy, that something about their body doesn’t match up quite right with their identity, and becomes despondent and alienated from themself over it.

Is this child suffering because they are intersex? Or are they trans?

It doesn’t actually matter.

In both cases, the child is being constrained to boyhood, often by force, and denied anything else. Because someone, when the child was born, decided, “this baby looks like a boy, better make sure they become one.”

And because every other aspect of society followed along the same path.

Whether the child is trans or intersex doesn’t change those facts.

The only thing that changes is the details. A trans child is far less likely to have undergone infant surgery, but then, not all intersex kids undergo such surgeries either.

The underlying cause, and the resulting trauma, are the same for both the intersex and the trans child.

Let’s say our hypothetical child grows up a bit, learns about gender and sex theory, learns about dysphoria and surgery. And ultimately, decides to seek out medical treatment to achieve a body that feels more right.

Our now adult thought experiment spends years trying to find doctors who will help them.

They’re denied most therapeutic interventions because their therapists consider the alienation they feel from their body to be a type of mild delusion. They’re turned away from most clinics, because “transitioning to something outside the binary” is seen as frivolous or as faking for attention. Surgical intervention becomes less and less accessible with each denial, because now they have a mental health record that makes them “unfit” to decide healthcare issues for themself.

Again, being trans or being intersex makes no difference. The denial and the isolation are still the same. And are still caused by the same force.

A ray of hope for our thought experiment: surgery to bring a body to a state outside the sex binary becomes more possible and successful. Eventually they are able to get the necessary therapeutic letters to seek out this surgery.

And another seemingly dead end: there are so few doctors who perform these surgeries, even fewer who are covered by insurance, and none at all within a realistic traveling distance for them.

This scarcity of options, the therapeutic barriers to access, and the obscene costs associated with specialized gender and sex surgeries are also the same whether the person is intersex or trans. The sex binary doesn’t care why you want to do something different, it only cares about making sure you can’t.

But, let’s say that our thought experiment is luckier.

They have the money, the support, and the opportunity. They get their hormones and their surgeries without so much as a hiccup. There are no false starts, no failed attempts. They achieve a 100% perfect realization of their physical ideal.

Their body is visually androgynous and sexually ambiguous.

And now, they are faced with a new set of problems born from binarism. Problems that still don’t care whether they are trans or intersex.

They get sick, and their doctors blame the illness on their hormones. They get injured and their doctors blame their injuries on their surgeries.

They get attacked and their doctors blame their broken bones not on their attackers, not on blunt force trauma, but on their own “risk seeking behaviour” because of their body and the changes they’ve made to it.

They were attacked because the bastards that jumped them could see that their body was hard to gender. It doesn’t matter if the reason their body was hard to gender was because of being trans or being intersex. The outcome is the same. Violence and victim blaming.

Let’s say our thought experiment is luckier still. They’re white, wealthy, attractive, young. People don’t perceive them as a threat.

They start dating.

And a new set of problems arises. Again, the problems don’t care about the underlying motivations of their decision to have, embrace, and celebrate a body outside the binary.

Again, the problems are based simply on that body, on that divergence from the binary.

When a relationship begins to get heated, and they explain the facts of their body, partners panic and abandon them. If they don’t explain, partners panic and attack them for lying. They’re told that their body is rape, because it’s “false pretenses.” They’re told that no one will ever consent to sex with them.

This, too, happens regardless of being trans or being intersex. The cause is the same either way: a body outside the sex binary is perceived as a trick, a lie, and a scam.

Our hypothetical adult persists. Carefully navigating the minefield of sex and romance, until they finally find a partner who loves their body just as much as they do.

Or, maybe more than they do.

Or maybe it’s not love at all.

Because this new partner obsesses over their body. Begins demanding particular sex acts that they aren’t comfortable with, which emphasize how different their body is from the norm. At first, they are okay with the demands, but as things escalate, they begin shying away from these acts. They begin feeling used, and reduced to a sexual object. When they try to explain their feelings to their partner, they are ignored, or shamed, or made into a guilty party. After all, their partner just wants to celebrate their beauty, how can that be bad?

This objectification through sex also does not care if their body is the way it is because they are trans or because they are intersex.

But now they’re in a relationship, with all of the interpersonal complexities that entails.

And they know from long experience that if they leave it may take years to find another person who is interested in them romantically or sexually. What if that new relationship is just as bad as this? What if it’s worse?

So our thought experiment becomes trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse.

Abuse predicated not on being trans, or being intersex, but on being outside the sex binary.

This pattern repeats over and over. For every negative experience trans people have, there is a matching intersex experience. For every negative experience intersex people have, there is a matching trans experience.

The reason trans people are oppressed is their divergence from what society has deemed correct and appropriate within the binary.

The reason intersex people are oppressed is their divergence from what society has deemed correct and appropriate within the binary.

The cause is the same, the effects are the same. Details may vary, but no more so than details vary among, say, racial groups marginalized for their shared divergence from whiteness in different ways. No more so than individual disabilities are marginalized for their shared divergence from the abled norm. No more so than different orientations are marginalized for their divergence from straightness.

In fact, these differences in detail are significantly less pronounced than the differences in detail between trans people and LGBPQA+ people’s marginalization for their shared divergence from gender roles.

So we’re left to ask ourselves: who benefits from setting up this separation between trans and intersex people. Who benefits from getting intersex people to police trans people, and getting trans people to police intersex people, and getting us both to think of trans people and intersex people as Irreconcilably Different?

It’s not trans people. And it’s not intersex people.

But the sex and gender binary?

All of a sudden, a group that presents a real and present danger to it, and to the class systems it upholds, is fractured. Is fighting itself rather than overturning the oppressive force.

Trying to inflict hard boundaries between trans and intersex people just serves to dis-empower trans people, dis-empower intersex people, turn us against each other, and leave those of us–like you and I–who are both trans and intersex, stuck trying to figure out which parts of ourselves to embrace and which part to ignore in any given situation.

It doesn’t benefit us in any way.

But it sure benefits the people and systems hurting us.

TL;DR: any system that targets and harms intersex people also targets and harms trans people. Usually in the same ways. There are differences in the details, but the causes and effects are both the same for intersex and transgender marginalization. The only people who benefit from intersex and trans people ignoring our commonalities and policing each other, are the people who want to divide and conquer us so that the sex and gender binary continues to be upheld.

#Intersex #actuallyintersex #gender #trans #queer #identity politics #intersectionality #overlapping identities #My Words #tme

275 notes · View notes

lavendulaconminatio · 4 years

Text

Years ago I ran a blog on ace discourse: @asleepingwindow As a lesbian raised in the Catholic Church, where you can be gay just don’t act on it, I knew asexual activism had nothing to do with being gay. I know an asexual gay person is the church’s fucking wet dream. I always insisted I don’t care whether people identify that way but stop trying to say you suffer as I do as a lesbian. Stop fucking invading lgbt spaces too and making them unsafe for us! But that was a losing battle. I wonder how this time period will be seen 20-30 years from an lgbt history perspective.

Anyway, besides knowing asexual gay people are the kind of gay people straight people want, I also hated this idea that seemed to be gaining popularity about people being more oppressed simply because they weren’t seen as valid. Validity didn’t mean laws meant to protect their population, or having police see your body as human and worthy of life; they merely meant existing in popular media so people see them. There was never anything deeper than that to so called asexual oppression, which I will never think is a thing. I mean asexuality is a thing but people don’t actively hate you for not having sex, that’s a fact of fucking life. My people died by the thousands in the 80s, sometimes with only lesbians to give a shit, and some straight person says their totes oppressed because they don’t want to fuck? Yeah ok. Or if there was a basis in oppression, it was often just blatant sexism and homophobia. All men say you’re a prude for not having sex, this is nothing special, Jan.

Now years later after arguing my heart out, making a master post and closing up shop, I find myself with another side blog to combat an issue that I once again feel harms lesbians and women. Instead of being more concerned about the men that berate, beat, and kill trans women, activists are literally attacking women, especially lesbians, for not validating trans people. The level of vitriol leveled at a woman for talking about her vagina is so above and beyond any hatred for the men who have murdered trans women.

Then in some perveted irony, those same deaths are propped up as reasons to shut down women talking about sexism. Meanwhile, more women than anyone can count die every day because they are female. We don’t get the luxury of our deaths being marked a hate crime. Instead it’s domestic violence, or maybe FGM gone wrong amoung the countless other things that needlessly and horrifically kill women. And I haven’t even talked about rape.

I knew the ridiculous activism of the asexual movement would have lasting consequences but I honestly never thought the concept of validity would be taken and warped so far to try and pretend biological sex doesn’t exist and that women aren’t female just to make trans women feel better about their dysphoria. I feel immense compassion for anyone with dysphoria, I have it and struggled for a long time to figure out if I was trans or a butch lesbian. There is such an immense disconnect here about the importance of validity and what real oppression looks like. Especially when you refuse to even discuss detrans people for fear it will make you seem less valid. So their struggles don’t exist to make you feel better. Once again, all about erasing females to stroke the egos of males.

This is not the biggest issue on my plate, but it’s a recent small example of tangible consequences to prejudice. The other day I was trying to refill an opioid I have a legal prescription for but the pharmacist refused because they couldn’t find it. Despite having going through this before this woman refused to look where I suggested, and I suffered in pain for 3 days before my doctor’s office was able to tell them they had it for sure. I mean this isn’t about sexism and more about ableism (though women’s pain is often discounted more, black pain even more) In that moment, I didn’t want to be validated. I didn’t want the pharmacist to know who I am, my identity, my disabilities, I wanted her to stop judging pain patients as a whole and give me my fucking legal prescription. Every single legislation and guideline that limits opioid prescriptions are born of a prejudice against addicts and a indifference to people in pain. That pharmacist didn’t give a shit about my pain, to bother even looking, because the rules made her right and I was probably an addict anyway. That is a real tangible feeling of oppression, and like I said it’s nothing compared to other examples I just didn’t want to dig up anything more upsetting.

That is how I feel about oppression. Validity matters, representation matters, but it is not the nitty gritty of what oppression is. It’s screaming at the walls, throwing your phone, because someone with the power to judge and fuck up your life, did exactly that. And worse they feel righteous for what they did because to them you’re just a “insert slur here”. And that’s just a small nonviolent and nonlethal example.

Now unlike asexuality, I know to be trans is to be oppressed and to suffer. But you cannot lift yourself up by putting others down, you will be on a tower of dominos that can fall the moment some other group does it to you. I always said trans people obviously belonged with LGB groups because obviously bigots didn’t care if a couple was two gay men or a man and non-passing trans woman. To me it spoke to a shared history and understanding. But maybe I was wrong, maybe that doesn’t exist. I think at least the one major difference now that I can definitely see is it’s ridiculous to infer female privilege by calling us cis. One thing is for sure, LGB and trans history are not as simple as I had ignorantly assumed in the past.

I don’t want to dictate what trans life is like, I don’t want deny any adult the right to transition, I don’t have any interest in misgendering, I believe there is a difference between sex and gender. But by fucking god I will not let anyone trample on my rights, call me bitch, cunt, terf, cum dumpster, deny my oppression as a female, deny my suffering, deny my reality as a female, just so You can feel better about your body. I will not sacrifice my body at the alter of your perceptions of your body.

Society loves to say otherwise, but women don’t exist to make you feel better. We don’t exist to make men feel more like a man or for trans women to feel more like a woman. We exist for our fucking selves, leave us alone! I’m not sorry if it makes you feel less of a woman because you need to address the misogyny you have been socialized into as a male. You all reek of sexism and think being trans means you magically cannot be affected by male socialization. That is some first class Bullshit. I’m a poor disabled lesbian, and none of that erases the racial bias I was taught and raised in as a white person. I always need to be willing to confront that, and it’s no different with males. Trans or cis, all of you were raised to hate women. Own it so we can fucking get past it.

Furthermore, our society only does better when we foster discourse. Disagreeing can be enraging but it’s how you learn if your own beliefs are worth keeping or discarding. It’s how you grow. Only insecure bullies feel the need to demand loyalty, stamp out dissent, and mock their opponents than actually argue. Don’t give into this intellectual dishonesty that might be easy, feel good, gain you a moment of praise, but ultimately throws women’s liberation and equality under the bus and into a raging inferno. How dare you think your right to feel valid is more important than my right to live freely and without shame as a female.

I’m very much open to good faith discourse on this topic, but do not mistake me. I have suffered for being born with a vagina, and no male will ever get to shut me up. So the next time you want to say choke on a dick, choke on your own.

#misogyny #sexism #feminism #trans activism #radical feminism #gender critical

7 notes · View notes

emma-what-son · 4 years

Text

Exclusive: Emma Watson On Why She’s Joining Kering’s Board Of Directors

Vogue June 2020: The actor tells Vogue her hopes to create a more sustainable future for the fashion industry — and how the pandemic has given her a chance to reflect on how she can create meaningful change away from the screen.

Here, we caught up with Watson to find out more about her new role at Kering and what sustainable fashion means to her.

Why did you decide to take up this new role at Kering?

“As the Covid-19 crisis has shown, sustainability is an urgent issue which closely aligns to questions of justice and equality for women, black, indigenous and people of colour, and the environment. The work Kering is doing [in advancing sustainability in fashion] feels more vital than ever and I am extremely grateful to be able to join these efforts, putting my support behind a group who are demonstrating they take this responsibility seriously.

“I look forward to helping Kering further accelerate the pace [of its] work, building upon what it’s already doing. I am also extremely excited to collaborate with Kering’s women’s rights foundation. I’m always just excited to learn.”

Why is sustainability in fashion so important to you?

“I’ve been interested in sustainability in fashion ever since I had to properly engage with it during my time of junkets and promotional tours for Harry Potter. That started as early as 12. At school, I took a specific interest in Fair Trade fashion and renewable energy sources under the supervision of a really inspiring geography teacher. This eventually led to a trip to Bangladesh in 2010 with sustainable brand People Tree.

“It became clear to me then that sustainability in fashion is a critical issue given how the industry can have damaging impacts on the environment, on workers’ rights, and on animal welfare. It is also a feminist issue. It’s estimated around 80 per cent of the world’s garment workers are women aged between 18 and 35.

“At this unprecedented time in history, we have big decisions to make and actions to take in how we positively reinvent and reconfigure what we do and how we do it. It genuinely feels like an exciting time to have this opportunity when things might shift. So, for example, when I saw last year that Kering announced the group would become carbon neutral within its own operations and across its entire supply chain, with a priority of first avoiding, then reducing, then offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, I noticed!”

There are lots of different ideas about what sustainability actually means. What does it mean to you?

“I understand sustainability as the interrelationship between society and community, the economy and the environment. Issues of justice, fairness, and equality are key to what sustainability means — whether we’re talking about environmental justice and the fashion industry’s impact on our planet, or workers’ rights and the impact on families’ abilities to support themselves.”

How does this new role at Kering connect with other work you’ve been doing?

“During this pandemic, like many of us, I have had time to reflect on the work I want to be involved with and what is meaningful to me moving forward. Having been so public in making films and being so active on social platforms in my activism, I am curious to embrace a role where I work to amplify more voices, to continue to learn from those with different experiences (from garment workers to designers to company directors), and to ensure a broader range of perspectives are considered. Behind the scenes now, I hope I can be helpful in making a difference.

“If people notice a new quietness from me, it does not mean I am no longer there or do not care! I will just be doing my work in a different way (fewer red carpets and more conference meetings!) This is a unique moment in time and I intend to embrace the opportunity it presents for change. As my friend [artist and scholar] Dr Fahamu Pecou says — this work is a relay marathon, not a sprint, and I know I want to be in this for the long run and in the right place when it’s time to run my relay.

“Last year, I was part of the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council convened by President Macron, and while our recommendations were directed at states, without question, businesses play a hugely important role in driving change. So I hope to find ways to ensure that fashion companies can use their power to help create a more just and equal society for people of all genders.

“As part of the TIME’S UP movement, we’ve campaigned hard to ensure that all workplaces are safe places for women. Having heard horrific stories of abuse and intimidation from within many industries, I’m keen to ensure that workers across the fashion supply chain can do their jobs free from fear and intimidation, and that new policy developments like the International Labour Organisation’s Violence and Harassment Convention are felt on the ground in factories and on shop floors. Many of the organisations I’ve supported over the years work with garment workers, women farmers, and others in the textile trade, and I hope to share what I’ve learnt from these voices in my new role.

“I’ve worked a lot with domestic violence charities here in the UK and beyond, and during the Covid-19 lockdown, calls to these services in many countries have seen a sharp increase. So I’m also really keen to work with Kering’s foundation to see how we can meet the challenges that organisations working on gender-based violence are facing in these difficult times.”

Are there particular issues within the fashion industry that concern you?

“There are so many, from the ways that fashion marketing can affect body image issues in young girls to levels of water pollution by denim brands.

“Covid-19 has obviously had a huge impact on the demand for clothing and it concerns me that not all companies are acting responsibly towards factories and workers in these challenging times, with many cancelling orders or demanding price reductions for clothes that are already being made. Happily, Kering has honoured all of its commitments during the pandemic.

“In the present moment, brands have rushed to show their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, but we need to ensure that this is not rhetoric and that the industry gets its house in order with regard to representation and inclusion. There are still huge issues with employment discrimination, issues with how black talent is represented in leadership and creative roles, how black people are depicted in marketing materials and the fashion media and so on.

“So yes, there are lots of concerning issues, but it feels like there is a real opportunity for uncomfortable conversations, radical decision-making and lasting systemic change — whether that’s in relation to environmental sustainability or racial justice. 2020 has been tough so far for so many people, and there’s a lot of talk about ‘going back to normal’. But it’s increasingly clear that ‘normal’ wasn’t working for so many people in our society.”

Do you have any tips on how to shop more sustainably?

“I’m a supporter of the Good On You app which makes it very easy for consumers to see what impact individual brands are having. I have committed to only purchasing and wearing brands that are rated ‘It’s A Start’ or above, as I want to be able to support brands moving in the right direction.

“I’m also a big fan of TRAID [in the UK] who provide door-step collections of clothes you no longer wear and then reuse and resell them in their shops. They then use the money raised to fund projects to end abuse in fashion supply chains.

“Really learning about yourself, who you are, and what you actually wear enables you to be a smarter buyer. Tailoring, modifying and being creative with clothes gives them a longer life, more meaning and personality. I recently wore a dress for a [pre-lockdown] photoshoot that I originally wore to a premiere when I was 15. I carefully archive and catalogue everything special I wear in my wardrobe and keep everything!

“The best-dressed people I know have figured out their formula and know they tend to wear a few favourite things over and over again. Invest in those and don’t buy fashion you’ll throw away. Never buy anything unless it’s perfect. I’ve convinced myself to buy some strange things because I said I’d alter them or I’d grow etc. And I don’t!

“My friend Emily used to say that everything has a ‘cost per wear’. Meaning every time she wore it, it reduced its overall cost of purchase in her mind and the cost to make it. A bargain isn’t a bargain if you never wear it or it falls apart! I often leave a shop and if I don’t go back for the item, it’s a sign I didn’t really want it.”

What are some of your favourite sustainable and ethical brands?

“Anything vintage! Reusing and recycling and rewearing clothing that already exists is the most sustainable thing you can do as a consumer. I highlighted some really awesome black-owned vintage shops on my Instagram recently. If you do need to buy something new, I am loving Christy Dawn’s summer dresses and jumpsuits. The brand’s designer and founder Christy is wonderful.”

---

Is it just me or did she say a lot without actually saying much? Oh well. I feel like this really was a way to tell people that she’s still a good activist even though she isn’t quick to comment on something lol. And I believe that she won’t do many red carpets since there won’t be many events anytime soon and she has no movies coming out. Notice how she mentioned the Good On You app again.

And was she really involved with fair trade fashion at 12? I feel like we would’ve heard about that long ago.

#kering #fashion

3 notes · View notes

lifebydesign66 · 5 years

Text

Licensed Psychologist Dr. Nia

CONNECTION * AFFIRMATION * EMPOWERMENT

Therapy can help you discover the tools within you to write your own story and reach the healing you deserve.

Hi, I’m Dr. Nia (she/her/hers) and I want to congratulate you on taking the first steps towards reaching out for support. Although I am a licensed psychologist, I believe you already have within you the tools that can support your healing journey. I honor the experiences and resiliency that have brought you this far. My goal as a therapist is to create a space where you feel safe and empowered to explore what your own healing may look like. We may practice using new words to describe how you are feeling inside, creating a shared language for your experience and paying close attention. Ultimately, you are in control and I am a guide.

I feel particularly called to work with people of color, women and girls, LGBTQ+ folks, students and young professionals, and those whose identities contribute to difficulties with feeling accepted or valued.

CULTIVATING COMMUNITY AND HEALING

I consider the impact of family, cultural, or societal messages that can interfere with your journey towards wellness and self-love. As a Black woman, I understand the pressure we can feel as we take care of others, sometimes at the cost of our own needs. I am passionate about working with other Black and Brown women who may experience these difficulties as they navigate the everyday demands of work, school, family obligations, and romantic relationships. I support clients to unlearn old strategies that may be self-defeating and learn new ways of coping and being in relationships with themselves and others.

CREATING SAFETY, TRUST, AND SOMATIC HEALING

Drawing on my extensive training in treating trauma, I value creating a space where clients feel emotionally safe. I utilize an authentic and empathic therapeutic style to create a space where clients feel seen, heard, and valued. I model transparency so clients can understand the reasoning behind therapeutic interventions and feel empowered to make informed choices about treatment. When working with trauma, I integrate Psychodynamic, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Interpersonal Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Somatic interventions. I integrate somatic work because our experiences stay with us, not just mentally and emotionally, but physically. Our bodies hold a lot of wisdom about where healing is needed. I utilize body-based interventions to encourage you to pay attention to not only your thoughts and feelings but bodily sensations.This can help you develop trust in yourself to understand what you might be needing in the present moment.

BLENDING CLINICAL EXPERTISE AND CLIENT-CENTERED VALUES

I draw heavily from Psychodynamic, Relational, and Somatic approaches within a multicultural and trauma-informed framework. I collaborate with clients to uncover hidden conflicts while also acknowledging the external pressures that may keep them feeling ‘stuck.’ I can support you in processing childhood trauma, setting better boundaries, increasing coping skills, developing self-compassion, combatting perfectionism, managing stress, and improving work-life balance. Because I know we are often racing to check things off our to-do list, I will focus on slowing down and paying attention to the physical sensations that arise during sessions to increase awareness of what you might be needing in the present moment.

HELPING CHILDREN THRIVE AT SCHOOL AND AT PLAY

Children are naturally curious and still learning the necessary skills for being successful in an adult world.They can feel worried, sad, and angry, but often do not have the language to express these big emotions. Parents and caregivers are an essential part of child therapy and I will work collaboratively with you to best support your child. I use a play therapy relational approach with both verbal and nonverbal interventions (art, movement, therapeutic games, sandtray). This approach allows children to develop a sense of trust and express their emotions in a safe, contained way. Play therapy within the context of a trusting therapeutic relationship can help identify the unmet need underlying a child’s problematic behavior and support parents and caregivers in responding in healthier ways.

NAVIGATING LIFE’S UPS AND DOWNS WITH TEENS

If you are a parent or caregiver who is at your wit’s end dealing with your teen, please know you are not alone in this struggle. Although parent-teen conflict is common in this age group, there is hope for getting through to your teen and improving your ability to connect with them. I have extensive experience treating teens who are dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma/abuse, or have trouble fitting in with their peers. They may also struggle with low self-esteem and figuring out who they are with respect to their identity. I am particularly interested in working with teens who have suicidal thinking or engage in self-harm and other risky behaviors. I use a combination of talk therapy, play therapy, family systems, and somatic approaches to help teens with managing their symptoms, increasing their ability to cope with stressors, and improve their relationships. In my work with teens, I honor their developing independence while supporting their connections to the people who truly care about them.

SUPPORTING STUDENTS, YOUNG PROFESSIONALS, AND ADULTS CREATE BALANCE

It can often feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day. Whether you are in school, working, or both, you are likely dealing with multiple demands while trying to stay on top of everything you need to accomplish. The thought of taking time for yourself makes you feel selfish so you struggle to say “no” to outside obligations. Utilizing a blend of somatic, holistic, and relational approaches, I help clients to develop healthy boundaries while nurturing the relationships that are most important.

HELPING COUPLES AND FAMILIES RECONNECT AND FIND JOY

It’s common for there to be conflict in couples and among family members. Sometimes, these difficulties are impacted by patterns of relating to each other that were developed earlier in life. These patterns can often span generations and be difficult to change. What’s important is that even after a rupture, you can repair the relationship. Using psychodynamic, family systems, and relational approaches, I can support you in repairing those ruptures and improving the quality of your relationships.

I utilize a holistic approach in couples and family work that integrates techniques such as Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), Somatic Therapy, and Family Systems interventions. These approaches help you recognize harmful or dysfunctional patterns and rework them while paying attention to the feelings, thoughts, memories, and bodily sensations that arise during interactions with each other. Using this new knowledge, couples and family members can improve their communication, have a renewed sense of attachment, and rediscover joy in each other.

SPECIALTIES AND INTERESTS

Healing for Black and Brown girls and women

Treating trauma and attachment difficulties

Adjustment challenges and dealing with life transitions

Supporting teens with the transition to adulthood

Body image and self-esteem concerns

Coping with depression and anxiety

Healing from grief and loss

Foster care youth and adoption

Acculturation stress

Supporting children and teens of divorce

Helping separated and divorced families with co-parenting

Improving family connection and communication

Reducing self-harm and risky behaviors in teens

Identity exploration

Treating psychosis and mood disorders

Working with parents of children with ADHD

Healing from childhood abuse and inter-generational trauma

Healing from racial trauma and microaggressions

Increasing self-worth and setting boundaries

Improving self-understanding and self-compassion

Managing school and work stress

Women of color issues in school or the workplace

Supporting families with communication challenges

Couples and families navigating trust issues or attachment ruptures

Interracial couples and cross-cultural relationships

CREDENTIALS

Licensed Clinical Psychologist, PSY31472

Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) at Alliant International University.

M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University

B.A. in Psychology, minor in Women’s Studies, St. John’s University

TRAINING

Healing Trauma in Children with Play (2019)

Working with Latinx Families (2019)

Dominant and Subjugated Narratives: The Culturally Sensitive Assessment (2019)

Early Childhood Mental Health: Integrating and Assessing Complex Trauma with young children and their families (2018)

Project WHAT- Working with children of incarcerated parents (2018)

CARMA Foundations for Working With Complex Trauma (2018)

Gender & Culturally Responsive Mental Health Practice with African American Male Youth (2017)

Engaging foster youth in Treatment (2017)

Expressive Arts and Drama Therapy (2017)

Trauma-informed Systems Training (2017)

Radical Healing (2017)

Integrative Treatment of Complex Trauma-Adolescents (2017)

LEARN MORE ABOUT DR. NIA

Hear about her views on healing, therapy and more!

READY TO WORK WITH DR. NIA

#licensed Psychologist #psychotherapist #therapist #counselor #mental health therapist

1 note · View note

arabfanon · 5 years

Link

I built a white feminist temple. Now I’m tearing it down.”—Layla Saad

I’ll always be here for Kimberle Crenshaw. She gave a name to the face of compounded oppression that women like me survive on the daily. Women who live in constant danger at the intersection of race and gender. What I was not here for was the concept of intersectional feminism. The notion that white women will magically take accountability for their dismissal, bias, and mean girl spirit and become the kind of gals who are all about passing the mic to black and brown sisters… unheard of.

It wasn’t until I re-read Angela Davis’s Women, Race, & Class that I had a change of heart. A biography about American women’s liberation from slavery to present, Women, Race, & Class uses history and factual resources to spell out what white women have yet to comprehend; their ignorance and apathy towards the struggle of black women has been to the detriment of any could-be collective feminist movement. While white women were exercising their freedom, black women were fighting to stay alive on the plantation field. When black Americans pleaded with white feminists to support their efforts to gain the right for black men to vote, Susan B Anthony spoke against it. She, along with Elizabeth Stanton and a slew of other white feminists demanded that women be granted the right to vote before Blacks, despite the mass lynchings, race riots, and the KKK, which destroyed black communities simply because they had the voting power to do so. White feminists chose self-interest over the lives of black people. This fundamental decision was the beginning of what is now known as white feminism.

I became convinced that Women, Race, & Class would bring about a massive come-to-Jesus moment to white women who failed to see the racial violence in their detachment from non-white women and non-white issues. It was also around this time that I started watching lectures and interviews by Kimberle Crenshaw to learn more about the intersections women experience (gender + race + sexual orientation, gender + race + physical handicap, gender + race + ethnicity).

If intersectionality was a train, I was the conductor. I ranted on and on about both the concept and the term to anyone who would listen. I spoke about it to college students at SUNY Old Westbury. I even created an intersectional book club for cisgender and trans women. I was all in.

Intersectional feminism doesn’t mean anything if white women still struggle to support and advocate for those who’s identities cross intersections that are foreign to theirs.

As the honeymoon wore off, I began to notice some things I hadn’t before. For starters, many white women announced themselves as intersectional feminists, yet, were still completely detached from the lives and issues of cis and trans black women and women of color. I also noticed that black women and women of color weren’t too quick to join the intersectional movement either. Instincts and too many bad experiences in white-centered environments made them very distrustful of intersectional feminism.

As time progressed, any hope that intersectional feminism would be this magical path to racial and cultural harmony between white women and non-white women disappeared. Despite the legion of spaces dedicated to intersectionalism—including my own book club, it always seemed that every environment was divided by race. I know what sisterhood is and I know what white women think sisterhood is; they got it all wrong.

Deep down inside I knew what the problem was, I just didn’t have the heart to admit it. Intersectional feminism doesn’t mean anything if white women still struggle to support and advocate for those who’s identities cross intersections that are foreign to theirs.

Meanwhile, the sisterhood between black women of color and non-black women of color has become increasingly stronger. Social and racial justice warriors are creating spaces exclusively for non-white women, allowing us to exhale, grow, and continue strengthening our collective goals and organic connection. It seemed as though all that time standing on the outside made us realize, “We are in this. Together.”

I was beginning to lose sight of the role white women were supposed to play in this whole intersectional feminist thing when the wrongful arrest of Chikesia Clemons happened.

Chikesia and her cousin Canita were dining at a Waffle House—not the same Waffle House where four Black people were massacred by a white man. A different Waffle House (Stay. Out. Of. Waffle House). After a request for cutlery, Chikesia was told she’d be charged fifty cents for it. Upon challenging this fee, employees did the thing they always do when they’re free to enable white supremacy without judgement: they called the police. This resulted in an unnecessarily aggressive, humiliating arrest that left Ms Clemons face down, hands cuffed, and breasts exposed.

I waited for the moment when white women were going to learn how to pronounce Chikesia’s name and fight for her justice with the same conviction they would fight for their own, Parkland style. I’m not a fool; I expected nothing from white feminists, or even the run-of-the-mill standard feminists—the ones who cap out of convenience rather than conviction. Still, I sincerely expected… something from intersectional feminists. I expected them to show everyone what true sisterhood looks like. No doubt, there were more than a few white women who spoke Chikesia’s name and donated to her GoFundMe’s campaign that’s raising money for her lawyer fees. But, in regard to the collective white woman… *crickets*.

What happened to Chikesia has all the ingredients that require radical feminist action. She was wrongfully arrested. Her body, exposed to the world for every hater and prospective employee to see. The intersection of being a woman in black skin could have cost her her life. Sadly, the women who are in need of protest, protection, and sisterhood most, black women, are the ones who get it least. Even when a black woman creates a term and a concept to describe just how dangerous it is to be a black woman, white women take it, run with it, build over the fundamentals, and save no room for black women. Fucking ironic.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do, but, it’s also healthy. As a black woman who lives in a country that can arrest me for needing to eat with a fork, murder me for not putting out my cigarette, demote me for wearing my hair natural, and do everything to convince me that I’m not pretty, I’m not composed, I’m not smart, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not… I’m not putting up with this idea anymore.

I find myself at the end of my intersectional feminist road. It’s time to hop into survival mode, ditch this dumpster fire, and live by a black feminist agenda. One mapped out by the pros. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patrisse Cullors, Angela Davis, Kola Boof, and all the other sisters who stay convinced that we need to divest from white feminism and invest in black and brown women, nurture our black magic, and hold one another to a higher esteem.

Black feminism gives me everything I need. Removal of any and all environments that hold no space for me and my sisters, a sisterhood bonded in dedication towards the progress and liberation of all of us, and freedom from the respectability politics that strangle us.

When I live life as a black feminist who’s dedicated to a black feminist agenda, I’m doing all the things that I did before, only, I’m centered inside the collective goal. I can hold space for all my marginalized sisters, rather than feel as though I have to compete with them for the few vacant ‘minority’ slots reserved at intersectional functions. In the words of Gabrielle Union, “I don’t want to be at your table at all. I built a house over there.”

We can’t all be black feminists. It’s something you’re born into, it isn’t acquired. However, we can all and we should all adopt a black feminist agenda. When black women win, mankind wins.

I’ve broken up with plenty of people and things before due to my conviction, but leaving intersectional feminism is way different. It becomes easier to stop loving someone or something when you accept the fact that it does not love you back. At the end of the day, if intersectional feminism holds no space for Chikesia, it damn sure doesn’t care about me.

This post was originally published on Medium. Tamela J Gordon is a writer, black feminist, and creator of the women’s empowerment group, Sisters with Aspiration.

#intersectionality #white feminism #western chauvinism #feminism #intersectional feminism #imperialist feminism

12 notes · View notes

herphdjourney-blog · 5 years

Text

What is “Inclusion”?

That question was the focus of this year’s Gender and Diversity in Organizations (GDO) Plenary at the Academy of Management (AoM).

Modupe Akinola, PhD, an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School, said inclusion is: “Feeling like I can be myself and people are curious about my story.” Further, that “inclusion” is when people are not just curious about her identity but also about WHO she is and WHAT makes her who she is.

Derek R. Avery, PhD, the David C. Darnell Presidential Chair in Principled Leadership at Wake Forest University, said that inclusion is “when you can be exactly who you are and it’s OK.”

Other scholars shared insights on inclusion that I’ll touch on in future posts. I recorded the session so that I could cite them in my future work!

But first...under Modupe and Derek’s conceptualization of “inclusion,” let me introduce myself:

My identity:

I am an Afro-Latina, PhD student in organizational behavior, executive/life coach, entrepreneur, dancer, licensed Zumba instructor, traveler, and survivor. I’m from NYC and the daughter of 2 Central American immigrants.

WHO am I?

Hi! My name is Samantha and I am proudly multidimensional.

WHAT makes me who I am?

All of my life experiences these past 43 years.

Yes, I’m 43.

I started my PhD Journey at the age of 41 after 20 years of progressively advancing in nonprofit organizations doing fundraising and communications work on behalf of causes that I care about.

...after 10 years of teaching and performing Latin dance on stages around the world.

...after 2 bachelors degrees and 2 masters degrees.

...after several heartbreaks.

...after 2 near-death experiences.

...and after lots of world travel, including many visits to Costa Rica, where my mother is from, and Panama, where my father was from. He passed away but he was pretty awful during his lifetime (that’s a story for another post). My father’s awfulness & other grown men’s awfulness during my childhood led me to pursue the academic and professional experiences that shaped who I am today.

MY EDUCATION:

My undergraduate degrees are in Psychology and Women’s Studies. My 1st master's degree—was in Women’s History, which I earned in 2 years while working full-time. My 2nd master's degree was in Nonprofit Management. I earned that in 2.5 years while working full-time in an extremely demanding role. Toxic work environments led me to pursue training and certification in life/executive coaching. Now, I am pursuing a PhD in Organizational Behavior.

MY WORK:

I started working at nonprofit organizations during my undergraduate years. Besides the Help Center on my campus, where I volunteered for 3 years, my first off-campus job was an internship at a domestic violence shelter.

Immediately after college, I worked at a civil rights organization, a homeless shelter for women, and a reproductive health clinic.

I worked at feminist organizations for a while but although they espoused diversity values, their lack of a racial analysis or an intersectionality framework in practice is what led me to move on to racial/social/reproductive justice organizations.

My experiences advancing in those organizations is what led me to explore what “leadership” looked and felt like via additional education, workshops, books, blogs, conferences, etc.

Now--I am specifically interested in how people can thrive, not only survive, and I’m both fascinated and saddened by toxic workplaces...as well as by Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book, Dying For a Paycheck.

I study whiteness--not as a skin color but as a phenomenon of power and dominance. I also study thriving/flourishing, allyship, women’s leadership, courage/fragility, rage, love, intersectionality, CEOs, nonprofits, and philanthropy.

MY PASSION:

I have been dancing all of my life. As a kid, I also did gymnastics and cheerleading.

After graduating from undergrad, I also started dancing, teaching, and performing Latin dance around the world. I did that for 10 years until injuries and my intellectual curiosities channeled my attention back to nonprofit organizations and to my first master's degree.

MY DEFINING MOMENTS:

I had my 1st health scare in 2012: blood clots had traveled to both of my lungs from my left leg (a “pulmonary embolism”) but I had NO CLUE that was happening. All I knew was that it felt as though I was having a heart attack. I was hospitalized for a week but then put on blood thinners + watched over by doctors (and my guardian angels) for several years.

That was my 1st wake-up call.

I had been dancing all of my life but stopped and let the “work grind” take over my life. I had been relatively healthy all of my life, so I took my health/wellness/life/blood circulation for granted. My spirit and all of the cells in my body rebelled against me.

After that experience, I was so freaked out that I might die at any moment that I decided to pursue things on my bucket list, including more education and world travels...especially solo world travels, which freaked my doctors AND my Madrina (“godmother” in Spanish) out.

I had my 2nd health scare last year during the 1st year of my PhD Journey...a 2nd pulmonary embolism. You would have thought I had learned my lesson about the pitfalls of sedentary work life the 1st time around, right? 🤦🏽‍♀️ Now I am on blood thinners in perpetuity and more concerned about LIVING (literally staying alive) than I am meeting others’ conceptualizations of “success” in this “publish or perish” academic culture.

I bring all of the above into my PhD Journey, which is why so many of my social media posts are about wellness, self-care, and a #FitPhDJourney.

It’s not that I don’t “grind.” Folks only see the moments when I take a break to capture my life. Not when I’m interviewing research participants for my qualifying paper, analyzing data for my research fellowship, writing papers under huge looming deadlines, coaching clients, working on consulting projects, or laying on my couch depressed and unable to leave my apartment for entire weekends (yes, even coaches are HUMAN).

How do I deal with the stress of this PhD journey?

I try to find moments of peace, joy, and community. Those moments look different for all of us but for me, dance, travel, and adventures have always been my go-to stress relievers. And, since I recently decided to become a licensed Zumba instructor as an act of survival, I also post a lot about Zumba. 💃🏽 I’m aware that my mere existence in this world is resistance to what Max Weber described as the “iron cage” and what Barker & Thompkins described as “concertive control.”

So, circling back to the question of “What is Inclusion?” as I wrap up this very long post...

If we agree with Modupe and Derek’s definition of inclusion (and we should...BUT I will also share other scholars’ insights on other elements of “inclusion” in future posts, which may resonate in other ways with you), then I have questions for you:

Taking intersectionality into account when understanding the multidimensional nature of oppression, what are the implications for mentoring [PhD] students who have various racial, ethnic, gender, family, nationality, professional, academic, and life experiences?

How do we support [PhD] students in their various journeys in ways that challenge them and prepare them for the future THEY want without putting them in the aforementioned “iron cage” of “concertive control”?

If culture and socialization work as unconscious filters shaping our perceptions, how do you engage in reflexivity and mentor people who may or may not look like you...and may or may not want to BE like you “when they grow up” even though you’re amazing?

More to come on “inclusion” in future posts…

xoxo, Samantha

#PhDJourney PhDStudent PhDGrind AfroLatina SurvivingVsThriving Transitions

1 note · View note