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Charles wondered if there were people whose job it was to seek out and follow the progress of emerging words, to study aspects of usage, monitor frequency, track movements, chart evolution - above all, recognize when a word had reached its linguistic tipping point, completed its mission, and infiltrated the general population to become one of them. It was sad in a way, when you thought about it, this acceptance, this legitimacy, because at that moment, a word's life as a covert, rogue element in the language came to an end. There was a kind of death - at least that's how Charles saw it - when a word permeated the lexicon to a degree that warranted its inclusion in the dictionary; instead of this renegade entity darting around, furtive but unbound, it became just another gray-flannel suit trudging through the book of common usage.

From 'Language Arts' p. 228, a novel by Stephanie Kallos (2015)

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Arnold Schwarzenegger got paid a record breaking $30 million for Mr. Freeze in the Batman film that had ice skating and nipples on the Batsuit.

Franco, James (2013). Actors Anonymous: A Novel. USA: New Harvest, p. 13.

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Spoken word poem on intersectional feminism.

Written and Performed by: Ashia Ajani, Abby Friesen-Johnson, Tolu Obiwole and Alexis Rain Vigil, four Denver-based poets

YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/4fiOSGvYMBA

Feminism

Feminism is so clear-cut when you’re six years old

It’s watching the cheated girls and not liking boys

Girl power is the first form of solidarity to be learned

The deceptive beauty of unity

 I learnt feminism from riot girl punk bands

From the bruises my brothers gave me

Feminism is where I abandoned my tea set

Traded princess for bad bitch

 I stopped wearing dresses

But still went to bed in perm caps so I feel pretty in my sleep

I learnt feminism at my mother’s knee as she baked bread for me and stood her steel when people said her work was not real

In different DNA she’d be called welfare queen

 I have to fight a different war

Rosie the Riveter did what women of colour had been doing for years

They fought to stay home while planned parenthood built abortion clinics in their neighbourhoods

White feminism is lobbying for reproductive rights

And silence around the forced sterilization of women in prison

It is saviour, complex feminism

Hashtag Hilary 2016!

 Bomb women to liberate them

Welcome to the solidarity club!

Where we teach table manners like micro-aggressions

The price is ethnically ambiguous

The price is a brown paper bag test

You may be drinking our tea

But you will never host

 That is a white’s job

A woman in my skin makes such a good ornament

A woman in my skin must know that ‘queen’ means work

 Means not being invited to the party

Means embracing your power makes you the villain

A passionate black women is treated like a volcano ready to erupt

The sprawling thundercloud that does not fit

I constantly chew my words before I speak so when they leave my mouth they are easy on the ears

I’m afraid that calling myself a feminist will add to the list of things that make me an easy victim

Another reason for them to attack

 I’m afraid of passing for white

Lost in an agenda that will never include me

There is so much more than black and white feminism

Chicana feminism is the aftermath of hands of machismo wrapped around our throats

We become a crutch, an excuse

 What are you afraid coloured girls are sitting at the table set for you

The slaves still deliver just not to the plantations

I’m accustomed to men fighting for the idea of me

White girl crying her way out of speeding tickets, weak and white

And everything they’re supposed to protect

 White womens’ tears will sweeten your tea

Dissolve blame and rewrite history

They’re magical

They whiten your teeth

Get people elected

Fired, killed

 I have to fight a different war

I have to fight for things you take for granted

Like, pretty

Before I am a woman

I am black

 ‘Woman’ and ‘colour��� should not have to surrender to each other

I’m fighting a different war!

My thick hipbones become the weapons of my own destruction

My skeleton will always speak first

 To be a girl whose struggle could never be polite

Is to be the girl who is pulling at the zipper of a dress that will never fit her

 Because it wasn’t made for her

It’s time we sewed our own

 Feminism isn’t just for white women anymore

And it never was

 It’s wearing different dresses cut from the same cloth

Drinking the same tea

Digesting it differently

Trading honey for honesty

Feminism is the four of us in this moment reading this poem

 Even when we disagree

We are burning the table

Building a new one

No one is invited because everyone is already here!

Note: I transcribed this by ear for an English lesson on intersectionality, but there may be errors as some parts of the video are a little muffled.

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Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are.

Marcel Duchamp

(via art-and-fury)

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Are you a feminist?

i have common sense yes

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[A]s Petersen put it in 2005, summing up twenty years of inquiry: 'We see a shift in elite status group politics from those highbrows who snobbishly disdain all base, vulgar, or mass popular culture... to those highbrows who omnivorously consume a wide range of popular as well as highbrow art forms...' In other words no works of culture are alien to me: I don't identify with any of them a hundred per cent, totally and absolutely, and certainly not at the price of denying myself other pleasures. I feel at home everywhere, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that there is no place I can call home. It isn't so much a confrontation of one (refined) taste against another (vulgar) one, but of omnivorousness against univorousness, a readiness to consume everything against finicky selectiveness. The cultural elite is alive and kicking; it is today more active and eager than ever before - but it is too preoccupied with tracking hits and other celebrated culture-related events to find time for formulating canons of faith, or converting others to them. Apart from the principle of 'don't be fussy, don't be choosy' and 'consume more', it has nothing to say to the univorous throng at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy.

Bauman, Zygmunt, Culture in a Liquid Modern World (UK: Polity Press, 2011), pp. 2-3.

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Guest workers are unskilled workers drawn from the neighbouring countries […] not covered by national labour legislation and hold only individualised contracts with their respective employers, often mediated by employment agencies. […] Significantly, with the exception of the Thais, the national origins and ethnicities of guest workers are the same as those of the Singaporeans: South Asians (generalised locally as ‘Indians’), Malays and Indonesians (generalised as ‘Malays’) and ethnic Chinese from neighbouring countries. As such, they can be absorbed with relative ease, both racially and culturally, into local ethnic communities without intensifying existing ethnic differences; yet they will remain temporary and marginal. Both the state and, often, their Singaporean racial counterparts treat them as ‘outsiders’ – as ‘others’, as ‘essentially’ different – their presumed ‘cultural’ inferiority stemming from their economic underdevelopment. In this can be detected the sense of the nation, of ‘Singapore’ and ‘Singaporean-ness’: Singaporean citizenship and status are privileged over any possible racial connections, affinities and identities. Economic development and the consumerist culture it entails have positioned ‘Singaporeans’ as ‘superior’ to those Malays, ‘Indians’ and Chinese from ‘underdeveloped’ Indonesia, South Asia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). An exception for ethnic Chinese should be noted. Given geopolitical conditions, the government has made a fetish out of changing demographics and has decided that the Chinese population should constitute approximately three-quarters of the total population at all times. […] Such blatant preferential treatment created unavoidable tension and dissatisfaction among Malays and Indians.

Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control’, Race & Class, 44/3, (2003), pp. 59-77, p. 69.

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Racialised cultures work ideologically to displace and suppress any public discourse that foregrounds the human costs of a capitalist culture. The contradictions that inhere in such an ideological stance are reflected in the re-elevation of a discourse centred on ‘Asian values’ that functions as a critique of the very attitudes that have accounted for Singapore’s capitalist economic success. It can be seen, for example, in the tendency of the older generation, including members of the ruling party, to condemn younger Singaporeans for their excessive individualism, their consumption of globally imported goods and their spendthrift lifestyles. In other words, this is a government that ideologically denies the significance of capitalism as culture and its manifest material effects, while aggressively encouraging it substantively in education and production.

Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control’, Race & Class, 44/3, (2003), pp. 59-77, p. 67.

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State rhetoric about the creation of a cosmopolitan society with a ‘Big Singapore mentality’ which welcomes foreigners is not intended to be all-encompassing. There are definite limits to cosmopolitanism in Singapore’s vision of a global city.  To date, public discourse on foreign workers has focused on issues such as the social problems of foreign worker enclaves, the impact of maids on the Singapore family and the need for quick solutions to repatriate foreign workers found abandoned in the streets to avoid the “issue of vagrancy” from tainting “clean and green” Singapore rather than their incorporation into the social fabric of the global city. Public discourse is highly uneven across the skills divide.

Yeoh, Brenda S. A., and Chang, T. C., ‘Globalising Singapore: Debating Transnational Flows in the City’, Urban Studies, 38/7, (2001), pp. 1025-1044, p. 1034.

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Malays’ relatively weak economic position is also a persistent source of friction between them and the government. For example, the government has expressed concern that Muslim religious schools, the madrasahs, will produce adults who may not be able to gain higher-paying jobs in the new knowledge-based economy because of their lack of technical proficiency. In Singapore’s political culture, such a public airing of government concern was tantamount to a warning of potential intervention if the madrasahs did not make curriculum adjustments. While it could have been argued that the government had missed the point of a ‘religious’ education, which might well be motivated by a renunciation of materialism, such a response was not made, although the government’s pronouncements did make Malays unhappy. In the end, the madrasahs agreed to integrate the curriculum of the state schools into their own. This may reflect the ways in which the managers of the madrasahs shared the national preoccupation with economic success or it may reflect their political defeat. For those not privy to the deliberations between the two parties, it is impossible to know.

Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control’, Race & Class, 44/3, (2003), pp. 59-77, p. 65.

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On political independence (1965), Singapore, given the presence of different Asian communities within it and its geopolitical situation as the only Chinese-dominated country in the Malay ‘sea’, declared itself a constitutionally multiracial state – possibly the first such state in the world. Rather than resisting or denying the pressures generated by a multiracial society, the Singapore government’s adoption of multiracialism as self-definition enabled it to incorporate the concept as a tool for governance. […] Under the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) scheme, every Singaporean is officially racially typed at birth. A child is automatically assigned the father’s ‘race’ and all possible ambiguities of racial identities are summarily dismissed. The state thus insisted that everyone be a hyphenated citizen. Each hyphenated Singaporean is supposedly embedded in his/her race-culture. […] By the logic of this racialization, there is, ironically, no culturally defined ‘Singaporean’ way of life in Singapore. Hence, to claim a Singaporean identity without racial boundaries, as liberal Singaporeans often do, is immediately to take a political position against the state.

Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control’, Race & Class, 44/3, (2003), pp. 59-77, p. 60.

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Many nation-states, whether of Third World of First [sic], have pursued and continue to pursue policies of ethnic assimilation (or even in extreme cases of ethnocide). The Singapore solution however has been radically different in that rather than seeking harmony through the abolition of ethnicity, or at least of minority or otherwise annoying ethnic groups, it has set about not only enhancing ethnicity as a primary social identification, but has extended this principle to making ethnicity the main form of socio-cultural classification in the country. Every Singaporean or Permanent Resident is thus required to “have” an ethnicity, of which there are four officially approved alternatives: Chinese, Malay, Indian or “Other”. This ethnicity is inscribed on the individual’s identity card, is demanded of him/her on many official forms and documents, is transmitted through the male line and is one’s primary social classification. Privately one may define oneself by religion, dialect, caste or some other principle, but publicly ethnicity is the dominant mode, to which there are no alternative officially approved possibilities.

Clammer, John, ‘Ethnicity and the Classification of Social Differences in Plural Societies: A Perspective from Singapore’ in Journal of Asian and African Studies 20 (1985) pp. 141-155, p. 9-10.

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Colonisation involved, first, the usurpation of land by the large-scale destruction of indigenous populations and, subsequently, the confinement of those remaining in isolated areas. […] Against this bleak history, the indigenous peoples [of Canada and Australia] have sought to obtain restitution for past injustices through land claims and other compensations. […] Yet such land claim issues do not emerge in Singapore - the question is why? […] Malaya was reluctant to bring Singapore, an island with an overwhelmingly Chinese population, into its fold. […] After two years, Singapore separated from Malaysia, without violence. This history of separation is popularly rendered as Singapore being ‘kicked out’ of Malaysia. Having ‘kicked out’ Singapore, Malaysia ceded its right to claim Singapore for itself, in the eyes of both the international community and of Malaysians themselves, particularly now that Singapore is economically successful. Hence, this history makes it difficult for Malays in Singapore to appeal to their Malaysian counterparts for support over any suggestion of reunification in the name of ethnic solidarity. A shared Malay identity has been displaced and replaced by the primacy of postcolonial national identities.

Chua,Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control’, Race & Class, 44/3, (2003), pp. 59-77, p. 63.

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Rest in peace Leelah.

If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but...

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Sexually Enlightened R&B Song

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where is the lie