Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.
California-native, femme writer, theorist and feminist who likes pretty things. Bloodstream of ink, lyric heartbeat. I queer everything.
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Students protest over transgender student's 'special treatment'➜
“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.” - Gwen Sharp
I’m not feeling articulate right now. But this needs to be addressed. Can some please offer a critique of the framing and biased nature of this news article?
(via projectqueer)
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If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
S. Bear Bergman, “The Field Guide to Transmasculine Creatures”
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
(via feminist-fuel)
(via fabricated-sky)
via feminist-fuel➜ -
➜I'm curious as to what kind of social situation the poster that says, "I accept your gender but I'm going to use your real name, ok?" addresses. What does it mean by "your real name"?
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Update: 11 year old trans girl lost appeal
The above article is an update. Her mother went to appeal to keep her out of the psychiatric ward and lost. She will be institutionalized because of her expression of her gender. She will be held until she conforms to male gender and then released to foster care, not her mother who was supporting her.
Please, if you haven’t signed the petition, sign it, reblog it, ask your friends to sign it. We’ve managed to get 40K signatures for a pageant model, we’ve only gotten 11K for a little girl about to have her life ruined. Lets get on the ball and spread the word.
I literally just repeated the f-word until I ran out of breath.
Let me catch my breath. I may go on a cursing spree again as soon as I get it back.
Seriously people…
WHY THE FUCK AREN’T PEOPLE REBLOGGING THIS??
(via notjamesdean)
via transawareness➜ -
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I love this idea of resonance, of not having to constantly out oneself or conform to stereotypical gay appearances to have our sexual orientation read correctly, but live with all parts of the self in alignment and have that resonate to those around us. When a confident person walks into a room or a party, that aura of confidence resonates around the room. Everyone can feel, or sense it, even though that person isn’t going around and declaring in each conversation, “I’m confident!” Why can’t it be the same with other key parts of our selves, like our sexual orientation?
One line I can’t stop thinking about: ” I should avoid acting afraid because of assumed straightness.” This is the ideal I, too, want to press towards. There are real dangers in society if we do not act through a fear of the sexual orientation of those around us who are the socially accepted norm. We are policed through this fear of “assumed straightness,” and we police ourselves, because we do not want to be harmed or put into a stereotypical box and have the lid closed on us to all other possibilities. At the same time, I know I cannot get lost in this fear—it is easily internalized, with crippling results. I am still searching for the right way to deal with all the pressures.
A suggestion - resonance, over visibility.
For most of this tumblr blog, I’ve been trying to think about how to make my being-gay (for the sake of this post, it’s easier to say gay instead of bi), visible. My preoccupations have been with the oppression of having to be in a closet, of the need to have to come out in order to be publicly gay, of having to self and publicly identify as gay (as a stereotype), and about how exactly I can live my life with the fact of being gay being true…and yet to not have my gayness mark me any more differently than any straight person’s orientation does. I’ve been wondering about how to like men, yet not fall into the category/stereotype of ‘gay’ and all the cultural baggage attached from the departure gate.
My problem has largely been about having visibility, and yet not being consumed by this fact of myself being visible; I want to be known as gay, to be able to acknowledge being gay, and to be visible as gay. Yet, this basic visibility immediately opens me up to being just-gay, to being a stereotype, because having to make my gayness visible tends to overwhelm anything else I am. In order to initiate a relationship, to experience this part of myself (which, being an attraction, does dwell with others and not solely myself), I need to be visible as gay in order to make a date possible.
At first, I thought about the idea of being open, not out - basically, of just acknowledging my sexual orientation freely without worrying about coming out of the closet to anybody. But, this is a very limited option: if no one asks, how will they ever know? I’ve only recently begun finding out people’s sexual orientations being similar to mine, around me, but that is because I’ve never thought to ask and it took an accident to prompt questioning at all. Further (but I will post later on this), it is harder to affirm your gayness when you are bisexual, and hence I can join in with my heterosexual friends in appreciating the beauty of women and not face questions or be able to say I like men too.
Last week, I was listening to a lecture by the philosopher Simon Critchley - this man is one of the foremost Levinas scholars, and so I may want to do my doctorate with him some day down the line. He was lecturing about politics, and he was discussing a shift in the focus and goals of public protests. In the 60’s through to the 90’s, the goal of social activism was for protests to be visible. Large crowds would protest and show popular opinion, creating a space to be seen in, so that their voices might be made visible. However, Critchley points out, there has been a shift towards public protests holding resonance (as opposed to visibility). What I have taken this to mean is that we want not to be visible, not to be heard, but to be felt - to resonate our sexualities to those around us. Imagine striking a tuning fork against the side of an empty wine glass, and hearing the sound resonate throughout a table full of empty glasses - my being gay must be felt by those around, not merely seen.
And so, now, a possible tool - resonance. It is not a problem of having to be seen as gay - again, if my being-gay has to be announced, it immediately becomes “the thing” about me, a central and all consuming fact which (remembering Foucault) then filters all other facts about me. Instead, I must strive for a way of my sexual orientation to be one bit of sound, sung amongst multiple infinite others, reverberating off of those with whom I interact, instead of one visible thing protesting for its place in everyone’s view. I know this is convoluted - I can only sketch what I am feeling at the moment, but I hold hope in this idea.
I guess the idea would be to freely integrate my sexual orientation into my daily life, such that whenever I am grabbed by a fancy towards a guy, I should simply act as if he could be gay, that he could be homosexually oriented; the idea being that I should avoid acting afraid because of assumed straightness. Perhaps, if I can cease to worry about my sexual orientation being an important and limiting presence to my mind and heart, if I stop fretting about having to make myself visible as gay, I can allow the simple fact that I like boys as well as (and, for the moment, more so than) girls to resonate with those I meet.
How to make this work, this is the question…
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rethinking ideas around femininity: a queer femme of color’s perspective➜
My femme identity is a purposeful reclamation of femininity from the white supremacist classist heteronormative cis-patriarchy. It is a way of saying there is no contradiction being a radical anti-white-supremacist feminist and supporting my local immigrant-woman-ran nail salon. There is no contradiction in being my own kind of pretty and getting work done.
In fact, it an act of resistance. Femme is a chosen, rather than assigned femininity.Femme is taking all the toxic representations of femininity that have scarred us our whole lifetimes, cutting out the rotting parts of shame, and finding a way to celebrate what we liked in the first place.
Femme is fat-positive, poor and working-class-positive, brown-positive, sex-positive, queer-positive femininity.
It does not buy into femme-infighting or girl-hatred; slut shaming or rape culture; diets, eating disorders, or skin bleaching; the fashion industry’s insistent constant redefinition of aesthetic acceptability; the belief that the point of being femme is to attract mates; femme does not buy into anything that harms any of us.
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In a humanities class, once upon a time, we were told to write on paper the biggest insults you could possibly call a man.
pussy
bitch
girl
pansy^ These were among the top 5 responses.
“Now what do these words have in common?” the professor asked of us.
“They pertain to females,” one student answered.
“Very good. And why do you think these very gender-specific names would be so caustic to a man?”
“Because women are considered lesser than men,” the student eventually responds. A part of me wants to vomit, break a wall. Break a face. Set fire to a building.I feel males (and very easily a LOT of females) have decided women are incapable of being hard. Or not allowed to. Like there has to be some catastrophic event to allow a hard repercussion. Sometimes when a girl/woman/what-have-you is being hard, (this is often the case when I come across hostile female strangers) it’s because she is sick and tired of being bullied. It’s a reaction. A way to get across to someone so people don’t trample her and she can get shit done.
In modern-day American society, women tend to make a choice: cutesy, loveable baby or evil dura mater (Latin “tough mother”), who, well, gets shit done.
Yes, I understand name-calling is an immediate reaction to intimidation. But just because we’re intimidating, you are not suddenly given the authority to demean us based on whether we were born with girl-parts or not.
Don’t call us bitches. It’s wrong.
Me or any other female. And girls, it’s not being sensitive, it’s knowing the difference between right and wrong and standing up for it. Do you honestly know what you’re saying by calling another human being a bitch?: “Not only are you a dog, but you’re a female dog. You are the lowest form of low.”
Nuh-uh. Not on my watch. This is abusive. And ignorant. And shows what a sad, pathetic, diction-less critter you are.
Don’t call us cunts. Don’t call us whores. Don’t call us sluts. Call me Danielle because that is my name, and as your co-worker, you respect me. Give my fellow co-workers the same respect.
And if I ever hear the C-word out of a man’s mouth again, I am walking directly to Human Resources and getting your ass fired. I don’t care if you’re my friend. I don’t care if you’re good at what you do. It’s an immediate threat and I am not going to lower my standards as a human being. That’s just how I roll.
Tell it like it is. And seriously, folks, these are not words to just throw around like they are the equivalent to “sister” or “friend” or “woman” (except in certain bedroom situations where there is consent by all parties involved). They are too heavily laden with misogynistic history to pretend they are easily reclaimed.
via hellogorey➜ -
➜Nowadays, I believe, identity-based conflicts are less pervasive and people interested in transgender politics are not using “border” only as a metaphor. We are beginning to think instead about the ways in which racial identities, class backgrounds and immigration histories have a profound impact upon one’s experience of transsexuality, one’s access to health care and community, one’s social role post-transition. While many of the early debates that we call “border wars” took place within and among white transsexual and lesbian/gay communities, more recent discussions have occurred among and between queer communities of color.
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APOPELECTRIC: A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hipsI worked hard for thismy...➜
A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips
I worked hard for this
my ass doesn’t make me cis.Even if I’m not curvy, you’ll still look to my chromosomes,
a letter on a document I had no say on,
you’ll fit me into a ‘close enough’ definition
but I’ll stick outta that box and you won’t stop… -
I Want To Know What It’s Like (by RyanJamesYezak)
Click here to be part of this effort to create change:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanjamesyezak/second-class-citizens-documentary
via youtube.com➜ -
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…I guess not. This is the case of the pot calling some kettle black. I don’t generally do this, engage strangers over the internet, but the blatant hypocrisy within 45 minutes here was too ironic to miss. It’s too bad, because she occasionally posted some cool stuff in the past, or I wouldn’t have followed her.
Demisexuality is a valid space of identity. I am not some “bored teen.” I am 24. I have been around the block a couple times. I have been a straightedge, then a “SLUTTY SLUTTY MCSLUT WHO WANT[ED] TO FUCK TOTAL STRANGERS,” then a revirgin, then a closet case, and now I identify as a homoromantic-queer demisexual, although I do consider myself to be fluid.
And don’t give me any shit about not knowing what I am talking about. I do a lot of reading about sexuality and identity politics/theory regularly, as I am a gender studies and lit theory double major. The OP seems to be speaking from a position of ignorance and intolerance. Which I felt required a response. So I sent this to her ask box, in an effort to dialogue with her to educate her. But I received no response, and besides, more people than just the OP need to know that demisexuality - any identity you define yourself with - is a valid space of identity. Your identity is valid no matter how you define it. Don’t let some angry stranger on the internet invalidate your identity. She is not the authority on your identity. You are.
I’ve never heard of demisexuality before…but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid identity. In a language and society that requires us to label ourselves, in some way, in every part of our lives, it’s not wonder there are so many different identities. We are not homogenous. Even if two people use the same identity label, it could mean very different things. Identity is both a personal and public thing, but it is the individual who gets to decide and have agency over the way they are perceived and identified. When you police someone’s identity or ridicule it because you have not had the same life experiences and don’t understand it, you are trying to take away their agency. You are acting in a bigoted, intolerant manner. You are not the authority on someone else’s identity.
Thank you.
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If I ever get pregnant and have to answer the inevitable question “Boy or girl?”, my answer shall always be “Jedi”.
Gender matters not. Judge me by my gender, do you?
Finally, a great solution to an inevitable future problem. *grin*
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This calendar is BULLSHIT. Are you kidding me? Really? Also, here’s a great tidbit on AIDS from the artist for it:
The “truth” is that AIDS is an “elective” disease. It STOPS the day guys quit sticking it to each other. And for the tragedy of women and children infected— THAT stops the day their gay husbands and fathers stop cheating on them.
Anyone need MORE education, science or funding to understand THAT?Most things don’t make me angry but this done. Stop people from buying it!
What the hell. Seriously. What the HELL.
via queerty.com➜
