#I am keeping in mind that it is a capitalistic patriarchal institution

[cuteniaarts]

More art of @silima’s OCs, this time featuring Kali, aka the love of my life, + a small infodump of almost everything I know about her. Can’t believe it took me this long to get around to drawing her, considering she’s been living in my head rent free for like a year lol

Bonus version without all my incessant rambles in case you don’t want to look at my shabby handwriting:

[waka-chan-out]

I am a woman and a feminist. And as such I’m feminist tiktok. We love. We stan. It’s beautiful.

But I keep seeing things that irk me and I was wondering if this is internalized misogyny or something. Please help. I want to be called out if I’m wrong. But I’m just genuinely… mad so I don’t know if I’m overreacting or a jdksjdjsj

Okay.

Woman posts a tiktok where she shows a… thing… that makes it so you don’t get panty lines. And another woman stitches back saying that women shouldn’t care if their panty lines show.

Another woman just unprovoked says that if you can’t fathom wearing a tank top on a first date without shaving your armpits then shaving isn’t a choice and that’s a failing due to patriarchy.

And I’m mad because… why do we police what is and isnt okay to feel? Like it has nothing to do with a date I just feel better when I’ve shaved. Most of my girlies and I go to the beach every weekend (or we did precovid) and only two out of the nine of us shaved.

I like when my panty lines don’t show. I like being shaven. I like not wearing makeup. Why is it that some choices get to be “feminist” and others aren’t. I feel like if a woman made the choice for her own comfort… it shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. Like maybe it makes them comfy because they’re conditioned by patriarchy. But women being happy and comfortable and making choices that make them happy and comfortable…. Shouldn’t be what we’re calling out. I don’t know. Maybe I’m stupid and this is internalized misogyny that I need to get into check. But like…. Ahhhh. Its making me madddddd. Could I get your perspective/opinion on the situation please?

my million essays and classes and readings on gender and feminist theory are coming in clutch.

i’m gonna talk about feminism and gender and misogyny here so if you don’t want to read, just skip this post.

keep in mind that these are my opinions and interpretations of theory and my own experiences. if you disagree, that’s fine. i don’t really want to start an argument about this on my page but i do like taking about it, so if you have any questions i’m happy to continue the conversation.

the most feminist thing in the world is to mind your business. that sounds so dumb and simple but it’s true. literally, just leave women alone.

a lot of the things we do for ourselves are technically rooted in misogyny and capitalism (though i’m not gonna start yelling about that on my anime porn blog. just remember that stuff like shaving was popularized for women because razor companies realized they had an untapped demographic and wanted to exploit that). it’s important to remember that. however, it’s not even remotely feminist to insist that women express their gender in a specific way, even if you think you’re doing a good thing. if a woman wants to shave her legs, yes, she might subconsciously want to because of the patriarchal expectations of the society she lives in. she might also just like having smooth legs. at the root of the behavior is misogyny, but we have no right to judge what someone does or doesn’t want to do even if we know where the behavior comes from. we should educate each other to break down those strict, gendered behaviors over time, but no one person needs to feel obligated to push back against every expectation for women. that’s annoying and impossible.

gender is completely made up, and the expectations of how women should dress, act, and behave are determined from the second they’re born. that’s why it’s so hard to break out of those expectations in a society that, at its root, hates women and believes they should act in an extremely specific and limited way. and it hates women of color even more than that. expressing gender outside of the typical expectation for women makes the rigid rules society has set for us collapse, and that’s shocking and confusing for many people. it’s why men shame women for not shaving or cutting their hair short. it doesn’t fit how a capitalist and patriarchal society expects women to express themselves.

so yes, you’re completely right. women shouldn’t have to care if panty lines show, but if they don’t want them to that’s fine. women shouldn’t feel obligated to shave, but if they want to that’s fine. mind your business and let people do what makes them feel safe and comfortable. policing what women do, even if you’re trying to push back against gender expectations, is just narrowing the box women are allowed to fit into.

i’m a judith butler fiend so here’s a nice quote i like that kind of sums up my feelings on this:

“No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.”

the article is about “gender and the trans experience” and is really interesting so if you’d like to read it check it out here.

[tipsycad147]

Rooting: Dark of the Moon Ritual and Healing Practices

On the land I live with, it is a time of seeking shade and cool places. The height of summer buzz is only gently starting to wane as the nights begin to flow further into the hours while daylight starts to ebb. The great swell of energy leading to Midsummer is only just starting to dissipate and I find myself slowing down as I find restful places to be still with my thoughts, my feelings, my dreamings of the land of my body and the land around me. During these unprecedented periods of heat during our current climate emergency, I have struggled to be restful, worrying that I should be in constant movement, but it is in the pause that we are able to refocus, breathe more deeply, and reconnect to what needs to be done to protect life and the land. And so the Dark Moon beckons, calling us to the shade before we spend any more time in the heat of the day.

The Dark of the Moon is an interesting time, not one observed as broadly as say the Full Moon or New Moon, but a period of time during the lunar cycle that I cherish in my own personal practice. (1) The Dark Moon is a period of profound rest before a new lunar cycle begins. If the New Moon is re-emerging onto a stage, the Dark of the Moon is when we are behind the curtains, waiting backstage, grounding and centering before we re-emerge back into the world. Without this period of rest we are unable to sustain the work and energy of the rest of the lunar cycle - though the importance of rest in magickal work and healing can often be overlooked or made difficult to access by capitalist-driven overcultures that pervade both institutional and personal spaces. There is a reason why, in this time of climate emergency, when we are confronting global patterns of consumption, waste, and destruction, that the call for rest as restorative justice has been growing. We need to rest for rest's sake, not to rest in order to become more productive to work, but to rest as a path of self-realization and community resilience. That is the magick of the Dark Moon.

For those who move through the world as womxn or somewhere on the spectrum of femme identity, however that manifests for you, there is a transgressive and radical magick to working with the Dark Moon. In patriarchal cultures, a womxn’s worth is tied up to her fertility and the Dark of the Moon is a time of un-fertileness, the barren field, the Hag who is unconcerned with what society says of Her, allowing her to move freely throughout all of the worlds. It is a time of breaking the hex of the male gaze (which hurts all of us, no matter our gender) and conjuring the collapse of oppressive systems of power. It is beautiful and wild and if this magick calls to you,

Just before the New Moon takes to the sky and far from the fecundity of the Full Moon, the Dark Moon marks the time of greatest dark during the lunar cycle. It is a time to be slow and still, joyfully unproductive, fertile to nothing else but our own needs, and to tend to the boundaries and edges of our wild spirit that help to shape who we are. Descending and returning, shedding and stillness, remembering and forgetting are all key energies of the Dark Moon.

Herbal Traditions

There is not an official correspondence within Traditional Western Herbalism to the Dark Moon. If we were to think of the Moon phase as a cycle of building a sacred structure, the Dark of the Moon is the temple completed, but empty of movement, waiting to be filled up with the sounds of life that people bring, but content and whole unto itself to be still and quiet at this moment. It is the point of the process of creating sacred space that we realize that the spaces we inhabit in are living and breathing and exist beyond us and our needs and our process of coming to respect that. For my garden-minded friends, the Dark Moon is the period between the end of one compost cycle and the beginning of the next.

As I've shared throughout this series, lunar work is deeply personal and I encourage you to trust your intuition and spiritual callings when creating when it comes to working with the Moon and interpreting Her cycles. For me, the Dark of the Moon is a time between work, as lengthy or brief as that may be, where I pause from doing and rest into being. It is both one of my favorite parts of the lunar cycles and one of the most challenging ones as I continue to undo patterns of overwork in my own life. If you believe you do not have time to rest it is a sure sign that you need to rest more. And I recognize that rest is more accessible to some, which is why it is so important for all of us to create cultures which recognize the sanctity of fallow periods as much as fertile ones.

In my own practice I very rarely make herbal remedies at this time and I try not to schedule classes, consultations, or other outer world work. For remedy-makers I think it is really important to have regular time off from making remedies and I invite you to explore what that might look like in your own practice, whether it becomes a Dark of the Moon practice or another lunar phase practice, during your Lunar Return, or perhaps tied to physical cycles like menses (another traditional time to pause from medicine-making). I don't have any specific plant parts that I work with during the Dark Moon. Personally, it's a time of Crone and Hag Goddesses, so I am more likely to reach for plant allies that I associate with elder, haggish, fiercely independent energy.

Examples of Dark of the Moon Herbs: Elder (Sambucus nigra), Mullein (Verbascum thapsus), Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), Rose (Rosa spp.).

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris, spp.)

To be perfectly honest, Mugwort is the lunar herb in traditional western herbalism so it can be easily called upon during any Moon ritual. I'm writing about it here, at the Dark of the Moon, because Mugwort is referred to as the "oldest of herbs" within Old English herbal and spiritual tradition and the Dark Moon is a time of Hags. (2) Mugwort is an herb that has a strong effect on me so I am very intentional when I choose to use it and the period of the Dark Moon is one of my favorite times to engage with their magick.

Mugwort's latin binomial clues us into some of its healing qualities. Artemis is a Goddess of all womxnfolk and their magick, with a particular resonance with womb-bearing womxn and the cycles of menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause.  Mugwort is a warming and opening herb, helping to warm up the uterus and clear out stagnant blood. Take just before your menstrual cycle to release tension, ease cramping, and soothe back pain. After a birth, Mugwort helps cease postpartum bleeding and hemorrhage.

As a fiercely protective herb, the Artemisian qualities of Mugwort help guide us back to the sanctity of our sexuality as fully our own, defined by our own parameters, and expressed however we please within the holy boundaries of consent. Along these same lines, Mugwort has a special affinity for womxn who have experienced trauma, especially of a sexual nature, where they feel isolated from their spiritual power, have difficulty feeling their emotions, and feel frozen in their anger and despair. The herb helps us to step back into our power.

As a warming Moon herb, Mugwort is especially good at moving emotions that have stagnated or frozen up in the body. Mixed with the anger and frustration of past or current traumas, indications that Mugwort can be useful include intermittent fever resulting in both hot and cold conditions in the body. Mugwort increases circulation and warmth throughout the body, clearing out stagnation. It wakes up a sluggish digestive tract and stimulates the secretion of digestive fluids making it a valuable ingredient in bitters blends. If the sleep is disturbed with vivid and disruptive dreams, Mugwort is a night ally, bringing deep sleep and growing a dreamer’s ability to be lucid.

One of the ways that Mugwort works its magick is by opening us up to our own psychic gifts and ability. In small regular doses (i.e. 1 drop daily) or by using the flower essence on a regular basis, Mugwort can help to establish an appropriate protective barrier around our psychic senses to help us avoid psychic overwhelm and burnout. The herb can help us articulate our psychic and emotional experiences to ourselves and others in a way that helps us feel connected to our self and our community.

Altars + Rituals

Cover your altar, your body, with a veil. Be hidden away from the world, known only to yourself. Let yourself be completely naked to the eye of your spirit, to your love, to your own deep way of being that can only be you.

A Simple Dark of the Moon Ritual

To honor the roots of your power

The following ritual helps you to reset as the lunar cycle comes to an end and  before it begins again, reconnecting you to what it is that keeps you rooted in your power so that you can more deeply rest your whole self. This ritual can be performed at any time of day or night, but I recommend performing it just before a period of rest (including bedtime) and relaxation.

The charm that you'll be speaking during this ritual starts with "I root my power in…" Examples of how you might complete this sentence might be:

I root my power in the wisdom of my ancestors. I root my power in the courage of self-love. I root my power in the hope of the land.

You can choose a few statements before starting the ritual or be guided by what arises during the ritual. In my own tradition, I would recommend three, six or nine statements, but work with the numerical system that is most meaningful to you and your cultural and/or spiritual traditions.

To begin, remove all of your jewelry and sacred adornments that you wear daily, including scents like perfumes. As you do this, begin to soften your breath until you are breathing in a way that is filling and easeful, guided by your own rhythm. Place all your sacred adornments in a bowl (or bag or on a cloth) that you can comfortably hold in your lap and lift above your head. If you can, sit cross-legged with the bowl centered in your lap, but choose the position that is most comfortable for you with the bowl low in your body or placed on the ground or table in front of you.

Take a deep breath in and out.

On the next in-breath, lift the bowl above your head, the objects in this bowl symbolizing how you present yourself to the world, the crown you wear for all to see. Speak the first of your charms (I root my power in the way of…), as you lower the bowl before you, maybe circling it softly, moving it through your energy centers before resting again on your lap (if the items are on an altar before you or not easily lifted, you can lift just your arms and hands instead).

Continuing to breath deeply, look at the items in your bowl, perhaps picking them up one-by-one and asking yourself if they align energetically with the charm you just spoke. Perhaps everything is in alignment, but if something feels like it doesn't quite match up energetically, remove it from your bowl and set it aside. The item might need to be cleansed and/or recharged, just need a break for a lunar cycle or longer. In some cases an item is ready to move on and be gifted or disposed of in a sacred manner.

Repeat the process with all of your daily adornments until your bowl is full of items that help reflect your inner values and principles with your outer appearance.

Take a deep breath in and hold the bowl above your head. Breathe out and lower the bowl to your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out and lower the bowl to your lap. Breathe in, reveling in the alignment of your energy.

Once the ritual is done, take a few more deep and centering breaths before retiring to rest. I often like to take a moment at the end of any magick, but especially when I am grounding and centering to be grateful for the people, places, things, and experiences which have affirmed who I am and helped me to rest, whole and complete.

A Simple Dark of the Moon Tarot Spread

To help you find the path of rest

Card 1 · Restless

This card highlights what is hindering your ability to rest deeply.

Card 2 · Restful

This card shows you what tools or practices can help you to rest fully.

Card 3 · Story

The overall message of the Dark Moon in your life. If you are familiar with your birth chart and how to find the transiting Moon in your chart this card can help you to understand the message of the Dark Moon in the context of where it lands in your chart.

I hope you enjoyed this fifth and final post in my series exploring simple ritual practices of the lunar phases (and thanks to my patrons who requested this series!). You can find the posts for the other phases here:

Waxing Quarter Moon

Full Moon

New Moon

Waning Quarter Moon

If you’re looking for more lunar magick, start by finding the Moon in your birth chart. I also teach a full course centered on lunar herbalism and astrology to help you discover your unique gifts as a healer called The Lunar Apothecary.

Wherever the Moon finds you I hope you find yourself and the kind spirits who inhabit the dark places of the night, holding up a mirror to your brilliance as you reflect the back the brilliance of the stars to them.

Notes

(1) The New Moon and the Dark of the Moon are sometimes used interchangeably, but in my practice they are two distinct, though closely situated, periods of time and space. I was taught that the Dark Moon is when there is no Moon visible in the sky for a day or two before the New Moon when a crescent becomes visible. The Dark Moon corresponds to the Balsamic Moon in astrology. Honoring the Dark Moon is a tradition passed down through Goddess spirituality and feminist circles that places emphasis on honoring not only the bright energy of the Full Moon but the beautiful dark depths of the Dark Moon (of course, the honoring the Dark Moon is not exclusive to those spaces and traditions, but that is where I learned it).

(2) I highly recommend reading the full Nine Herbs Charm in both modern English and in the original Old English. Read the Old English out loud to get a feel for the deeply trancey rhythm and pace of the spell (though you can listen to it in modern English here).

http://www.wortsandcunning.com/blog/tag/lunar+rituals

[theblackpoets]

Purity: A Loss for Thesaurus Words, A Creative Nonfiction by Patrick J. Derilus

Heteronormative, Able-Bodied, White Male Terrorism", conjoined as a one term, is considered a sociolinguistic cue that has long been permeated throughout American society.

-Thursday evening-

I typed purity in the thesaurus search engine yesterday. One of the few synonyms that came up was,

Whiteness.

I regressed for a few seconds and had to glance at Whiteness again. I had been gullible and felt so used that I didn’t know I had been used. I think my whole life, I had been forced to glance at Whiteness — it was internalized White supremacist ideology; the toxin that it was, that virulently imbued White purity through the inside of my exhausted bones veiled by my Black flesh as a Black boy. This “blessed” perversion imbued within me disfigured my Black identity, but no—

This Whiteness was not the cleanliness of my teeth, the Whiteness of a void, the dribbling White paint on the walls of a house, or the off-Whiteness of my sclera.

This Whiteness was the Western world: America, the people of the Caucasus region who have long ago been conflated with Whiteness.

Whiteness is the systemic racism run over four-hundred years in America along with the rest of this World.

Whiteness is the voyeuristic condescension of many countries exploited by colonialist and imperialist practice.

Whiteness is habitual racist objectification, exploitation, and commodification of our Black bodies.

Whiteness … is the follow-up desensitization and hashtagging of Black existence.

Whiteness is Western civilization’s complicity in our commonplace Black nihilism, the Black nihilism I had not discerned with, within myself until I confronted my Blackness, acknowledged my Black identity and its significance to White America. It took me years to finally notice the racial cues and adjust to the fact that I was never considered human in this racist country.

Blackness is meaningless to White America unless it is possessed, fetishized, manipulated, and exploited. And part of all that it took, was a Thesaurus: a distant lexicon of the Dictionary, bearing all sorts of words, denotations, and associations we assign to them, a linguistic tradition we have pedagogically been coerced to follow since the 18th century and since then there have been many semantic evolutions to words yet…

today, purity still means,

Whiteness

.

We, among the rest of the colonized minds of our American society, have been conditioned with an unconscious predilection to favor, and show fallaciously invented justification and immediate repentance to White people, to heterosexual, able-bodied, White men above all else, disproportionately more than we value our Melanin, our Dark skin, our … Blackness.

No matter how heinous the actions of heterosexual White men were, the institutional systems they had already set in place had protected them from sound judgment. Historically, they sheathed themselves in their westernized connotations of Whiteness: untouchable innocence, irresistible sententiousness, and … purity, which also protected them from true justice—

like a parent who looks at their White cismale child, and submissively murmurs,

“how could I ever say no to that face?”

While White children never have to worry of their “purity”, we look at Black children and hold them to the same standards as White people. If they do not fit the mold of internalized White purity, they are distinguished as “inferior” Black people among Black people. We tell them to “keep doing good.” We tell ourselves to “keep doing good” as if reaching goodness is a means to an end … as if, Black children, Black you, Black me … are not intrinsically good. We are supposedly evil. The believability of our goodness is an implicitly habitual, racist practice; our goodness is impetuously defenestrated when we “resist arrest” from crooked police, “protest improperly”, or “act like niggas.” I did not see it before because of my own internalized racism, but I know, for some vague reason, that all Black people are good. Not “some” as most individuals say to patronizingly describe us as if there are a rare breed of us. All of us are intrinsically good although at first, our implicit biases of ourselves and them will not allow us to see goodness. No Black individual among us is patronizingly exceptional in the sense that they blindly deny their Blackness by claiming they have so-called “transcended” it.

A lot of us have helped by supporting the ongoing fight against social injustice while others have stood in solidarity with marginalized groups to ameliorate this World, let alone American society, our human values and the potential of our collective being. Nonetheless, we have not achieved egalitarian justice because our rights to assign ‘humanist consequences’ to Whiteness have been denied validity, and Whiteness has once again, shielded itself in its invented, westernized connotations to evade repercussion from true egalitarian justice.

True egalitarian justice is foreign to me. However, I am aware that it has been a utopian mirage. True egalitarian justice, nor democracy have ever existed in this police state of Whiteness: America, and we have always been victim to the life-depriving minutiae of illusions, having only experienced perceived equal rights. In actuality, we are still objects, slaves under the thirteenth amendment.

We have been ingrained with these White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal ideologies, subjected to believe that the White savior complex, White male normativity and heteronormative White male homosocial sadomasochistic culture are inclusive traditions. A lot of us do not question when two or more people engage in a fight, fists are thrown, they are on the ground, bleeding, and like heteronormative White male homosocial sadomasochistic culture, which has indirect correlation to Black demise and nihilism during slavery, a time of gathering for White people, let alone White men when the slaves had been continuously been raped, murdered, mutilated, and lynched, was one way White people commemorated their Whiteness: by happily scrutinizing the decimation of Black life. We unconsciously gather around these bleeding persons, these persons who are fighting for their lives. In this regard, we, unfortunately, do not question our thoughts, ourselves, because this had been so-called “tradition” to us. Ourselves had not been ourselves when we were first brought into this World.

We had all been born into this World with a White-washed upbringing. Heteronormative White supremacist patriarchy prowled into our psyches before we knew it. Thus our Black pain, our collective pain…has never been our faults. We had never brought injustice upon ourselves as that has been White supremacy’s way of gaslighting us into believing what my ancestors and I have experienced at the puppeteering hands of heteronormative White supremacist patriarchy, was not real.

We, I reiterate, have been conditioned, unconsciously justifying the heinousness of White men: Christopher Columbus, King Leopold of Belgium the II, Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam, J. Edgar Hoover, Timothy McVeigh, Dylan Roof, Ryan Lochte, Brock Turner, and the list goes on.

Why?

Heteronormative White Male terrorism to American society is oxymoronic. We have yet to deem “Whiteness” as “terroristic”, though it has been for centuries.

The more an Abuser psychologically, emotionally, and physically assaults their victim, the victim’s reality becomes distorted. He cannot distinguish pain from living life, feeling unpunished. He will eventually believe the abuse that has been done onto him, is “normal.” The victim, victim-blames himself for the abuse, real and invented, and uncomfortably holds himself responsible for the pain his Abuser has caused him.

Abuse victims finally become aware of their abuse when they muster the strength to liberate themselves from it by practicing to speak out against their Abusers.

tumblr: http://heisp0etic.tumblr.com/

[feedmeandtellmeimprettyplea-blog]

Compassionate Observations as Inauguration Day Looms Near

This morning I am taking a break from writing my dissertation to return to this so-often neglected blog. Not because I have writers block (as is normally the case if I’m blogging), but because sometimes taking a step away from a project to think through other things can be helpful. Often, my tendency is to use work to fill up my mental capacity as a way of avoiding negative or hurtful emotions. So I tend to become overwhelmed with tasks and forget to let myself feel emotions until they all arrive at once in ways that are loud, disruptive, and unavoidable.

Originally, I conceived of this blog as a space that would allow me to share recipes and stories about food. But this post is not about food, not really. Over the holidays vegans often have to answer a lot of questions about why and how we decided to become Vegan. For me the answer is always related to the concept of ahimsa--the principle of non-harming. If you follow yoga, the principle of ahimsa is about doing all that one can to contribute the least amount of harm to the world. So often the choices that I make are focused on what I can do to not harm, upset or unsettle anything or anyone else around me. Almost to a fault, this can mean that I’m not as aware of what I can do more (or less) of to cause the least amount of harm to myself, as an individual and as a being in the world. The most important element of ahimsa is that it is a concept and practice of non-harm either to the self or any other being. Of course, no one is perfect and ahimsa is not about perfection. Striving for perfection is one of the most dangerous and ultimately harmful behaviors someone can engage in. This is a hard thing for most of us to remember. It is even harder to avoid in practice than in theory. Particularly for graduate students (ahem). 

When I first started taking the steps to transition to a vegan diet and lifestyle I was coming out of very unhealthy 6 year long emotionally and at times physically abusive relationship. Feeling broken and worthless and out of place in the world after the situation collapsed led me to a deeper and more self-conscious yoga practice. Before I finally decided to break free of that situation yoga was little more than a sometimes challenging and fun form of exercise that I could do to feel like a part of a community or club. I didn’t really grasp the way that instructors talked about yoga as being transformative or spiritual until I needed something that would help me look into myself, not to see flaws, but to observe and reflect and become more responsive to my own needs and the needs of those around me. When people ask me why I “decided” to “go vegan” I don’t always tell them the whole story but I do always think back to that time in my life when I felt so unfit and unloveable and degraded--broken. And my response is always more or less the same “there is so much suffering in the world and I don’t want to contribute to that suffering.” When I say “suffering” I think people more often than not take that to mean that I don’t want to contribute to the suffering of animals. This is true enough. Factory farming is cruel and inhumane and the animals produced in factory farming institutions are born into a life where suffering is the only thing they will ever know. But the suffering that the factory farming industry produces does not end there. We live in a time of ecological collapse. Factory farms contribute to ecological disaster not just because the production of cows for slaughter contributes to massively increasing levels of greenhouse gases, but also because the amount of resources that it takes to raise and feed factory farmed animals contributes to growing levels of world hunger. The animals farmed, slaughtered, and sold in America contribute to first world obesity and third world neglect. The meat industry contributes to human suffering on almost every level imaginable. Being as non-complicit as possible in the production and continuation of that suffering, somehow, helps me to feel better about other things that have happened in my life that I cannot change but I can work to feel better about, even though at times it is a struggle. 

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling, in many ways, similar to the way I felt two years ago when I first realized the extent of the abuse that characterized my last and longest relationship. Emotions are attached to memory in interesting and infuriating ways. An emotion that triggers a memory can make you feel as though no time has passed at all since the last time you felt that way. Feelings of being defeated, doubting oneself, feeling abandoned and alone and unworthy can creep up in everyone from time to time, but in a traumatized brain these emotions can overtake everything else, making it feel as though things have never been or will never be ok. Traumatic memory is not always triggered by events that remind you of other events but also by smells and sounds and feelings. I woke up feeling this way--like I was still the person that I was when I was in a situation where I felt that being devalued, gaslighted, and at times assaulted and alienated was all I deserved. I went to a yoga class and, while it certainly did not cure my negative emotions outright--yoga is not a substitute for seeking help when you need it--it did help me to try to find more compassionate observation about myself. Compassionate observation, understanding, and reflection are important tools that yoga has helped me to work on cultivating and perhaps that is why I am so attached to it--not just as a form of exercise, but also as one of my most important methods of self-care. 

This week president-elect Donald Trump will take office. The impending thought of having a president who devalues the humanities, so often conveys fiction and bias as fact, denies the factual validity of climate change, uses abusive tactics to gain power, and has a long history of sexually abusing women is perhaps one of the strongest traumatic triggers for my memories of living with an abusive person. Often since November I have woken up feeling a mix of underwhelmed and overwhelmed, devalued, exhausted, exasperated, and hopeless. While people around me have been working to organize, protest, and resist I feel paralyzed in the face of these efforts. Perhaps this is because I feel that this is not a form of expression to which I have access. Protest can take many forms and there are various ways of showing up, however. I have nothing but respect and love for those who can make noise and risk imprisonment or physical injury to try to enact change and make their voices heard. But it is also important to recognize when you have physical and emotional limitations that prohibit you from showing up in that particular way at this particular time. Part of the compassionate observation, understanding, and reflection key to practicing ahimsa is realizing that different people participate differently in the alleviation and prevention of suffering. Together different forms of protest and participation--some quiet and some loud--work together to form what will hopefully become a community strong enough to get through the next four years and begin working towards making America less patriarchal, misogynistic, fascistic, and oppressively capitalist. 

As I work on finishing up this thought a friend and colleague sitting across from me asks me if I have found it harder to work on my dissertation since the election. I pause my writing to tell her yes, it has. I explain that after the election it took me about a month to really be able to focus on my writing again. I think a lot of folks who work in the humanities experienced something similar after the election. This is not necessarily because we have lost a sense of purpose. More to the point, I think it is because there is now someone in office who so openly and brazenly devalues the human sciences and fact-based knowledge. The group in office now lacks compassionate observation, understanding, and reason. In many ways, this makes academic work so much more integral. So much of what I and my colleagues are engaged in focuses on compassionate observation, interpretation, reason, and understanding. It is easy to feel that this work does not matter and that it will not have a lasting impact. However, to continue to do this work and continue to work towards compassionate observation and understanding against the backdrop of hatred, bigotry, fascism, and misogyny is the most concrete form of protest that I can think of and it is work that I am proud to be engaged in. 

So while it is easy to be hard on oneself and to think that there is more that one could or should be doing, we must remember that if we all continue to do what we can to increase awareness and understanding, to decrease suffering and ignorance and hatred, and to understand one another on a more fundamental level--we might ensure that Donald Trump’s presidency will not increase racism, hatred, fascism, and misogyny but will rather encourage us all to wake up and to stay woke. To continue to work, despite feelings of being devalued and belittled and oppressed, is to work towards producing a voting public that in the next four years will understand better, will have a stronger sense of what we need to resist and fight against and work toward, and will make sure that the next person to enter the oval office will not win on a platform of hate and ignorance and authoritarianism. 

Some days it is hard to keep this in mind, but most days it is enough to propel myself forward. 

[juliagoesplacessometimes]

June 6th: I wanted to share why I am actually here, I am doing a study abroad! I am doing 8 weeks of classes. These are my schedules for the past three weeks, with the topic being discussed within that specific class. I wanted to talk about what my average day of classes include. Before classes even start, all the students that are there chant prayer together at the entrance of the institute about peace, learning together, and welcoming the new knowledge we are about to be taught.

I am taking three course taught by phenomenal professors. They include Dr. Prithvi who is teaching us Culture and Civilization in India, Dr. Ramarao Indira, she is a nationally known gender activist in India and she is teaching just that (gender in India), and Dr. Vombatkere who is our Sustainable Development and Technology professor. Every single one of my classes is so eye opening in the way that they teach. Doing this study abroad made me realize how Eurocentric North American curriculum is. Eurocentric is when there is main focus and importance on European culture/history, excluding a wider view of the world; it regarded as the base of knowledge. Having a brand new way to look at the world and compare it to the world view I was taught makes everyday so interesting. After every class I leave wanting to discuss and devour everything that I learnt. Each of my professors emphasis’ the importance of questioning the practice in our world of depending on dominant forms of knowledge, which is the Western way of deeming what is ‘fact’ which is found in the ideologies/institutions of capitalism, economy, healthy practices, patriarchy, the female body politics, and so many other things that I never once questioned. There are two main types of knowledge systems. There is formal (structured) ones such as institutional education structures, contracted by informal ones, for instance, learning by observation or unstructured means. These are both ways in which knowledge is obtained and are important in the ways history is recorded, however their is more of prioritize towards one since it aids in maintaining the economy (especially capitalistic needs) and the restricting norms of society.

In Gender in India, we have been learning about the ways in which the caste system(s) works in India work with the patriarchal structures in place and how they reinforce each other. It is truly a very complex but enveloping subject.  We are also exploring the systems which can exploits and suppresses women that are institutionalized structures in India’s society and culture. We keeping in mind the ways the patriarchy works, it is very interesting how it works here compared to Canada and also seeing the central similarities. All while through a feminist lens, this literally sounds like the class of my dreams.

We discussed a lot about how if the women’s movement is becoming complacent and what’s different about it now versus when they were protesting in the 80s. They feel it’s really changing (esp. in regard to the lack of physical protest) and I think it’d because protest isn’t necessarily what is needed. We have the laws, but laws don’t change culture. 

But then there is my Science, Technology, and Sustainability Development course and it is figging mind blowing the things that we are being educated on and the way he is able to explain complex concepts with such ease. We explore the ways in which world structures have define how we measure development and progress, bring up the question on how sustainability is minimized in the name of industrialization. This then leads into how there is a need but not a demand to redefine technology as its understood today. We are now starting to dissect how this needs to start in the transition to sustainable energy.

However I wouldn’t have any clue on what my other two profs were even talking about half the time without my history course. It allows for there to be a context in which I can plug into the other courses information. Not only that but also allows for me to understand the ways this society has formed. But this understanding of society through history is only true to a certain extent since India is so diverse and is one of the oldest countries that I could never fully understand it even if I studied their events, customs and cultures over a life time. Additionally and arguably more importantly I am visitor looking in and I could never fully understand every aspect of a society, especially without being an active part of it. 

oops didn’t mean for this post to be so long!!

[unapologeticallychingona-blog]

Querida Mija Paloma

Querida Mija Paloma, I want you to always be an unapologetic Chingona Chicana. I want you to always believe that your identity of self is rightfully yours to claim and that no individual, ideology, or institution can ever tell you who you are or should be. You are now eighteen and making the decisions about where you want to take life’s journey. Life is a gift that will be filled with experiences; some will be blessing and others burdens and all will be lessons. As you head off into this great wide spectacular world there are a few things I want you to know. I want you to know where you come from. I want you to know about our people, our history, and our place in this world. I want you to always know who you are with pride and self-confidence. I want you to go out in the world with love, compassion, and empathy. I want you to make the world a better place. I am saddened that you are starting your adult journey during a very precarious time. It has been three hundred and twenty days since the 45th President of the United States has taken office and every one of those days has brought either fear, concern, and/or anger. There have been so many attacks on the most vulnerable people in our communities. There have been direct attacks against Mexicans. There are attacks towards women’s rights. There have been attacks towards the LGBTQ community. There are attacks on the environment and Mother Earth. There have been marches by white supremacist that seemed to be sanctioned by our Executive Office of our Government. It all seems so overwhelming and scary with all these attacks coming at us and undoing generations of social justice fights and victories. But I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed or scared. You come from a history of resilient people that have known all too well the burdens of struggle and fighting who have not just survived but thrived through adversity and hardship. I want you to know why I claim Chicana as my identity. I was given a research project in my WGS 300 GWAR: Gender, Race and Nation writing class. I was prompted to pick a “topic of interest” related to my major of women and gender studies and on one of our in class work days we were asked to just write down a bunch of words or phrases of possible ideas for a topic. It was during this activity that I wrote down “no cookie cutter Chicana” and that was it; I wanted to further understand what it meant to be Chicana. In my research I was able to look back at history, at my experience, and especially take a big look at myself; this was definitely one of those life lessons that I mentioned earlier. As the part to this project I was asked to now present my research in another genre. I decided my new genre would be a blog. As I was struggling to work on a vision/mission statement for my blog we had a class reading assignment that inspired me to write this letter. In the epistolary essay “Dear Henry” by Lisa See, the author write to her four year old son a letter in response to the election of the 45th U.S. President. See writes, “We are not helpless… we aren’t powerless either. We are strong as a family, and we’re strong as individuals. Don’t ever think, I can’t fight back, because you can.” This passage in the letter reminded me of one of the greatest lessons my mother, your grandmother Teresa taught me is “La Lucha Sigue” that means “The Fight Continues” When I read this essay I was moved to write you this letter explaining why you must always believe that you are strong and that it is important to fight against those that threaten your rights and freedoms. I am writing you this letter so you know why I claim my Chicana Identity and why I pass it on to you. I want you to know the importance of claiming your identity as we fight the continued attacks against so many by forty five and the powers that be. One of the biggest attacks on us by the current President is the “build the wall’ rhetoric and agenda to keep the “bad hombre” Mexican out of America. Here is the irony in building a border wall, we as Chicanos are the product of that border. We became Chicanos out of our experience of living between Mexican culture and American Anglo society, always straddling the border between the two. We had to learn to claim our identity because our history and knowledge was being erased and replaced with false narratives being told under the guise of “American History” It was this continued oppression that the claiming of Chicano became essential to the survival of our people. I wrote about this in my research paper when write, “Rodriguez notes, ‘Gomez-Quinonez says that while resistance has always been present in the Chicano community, ‘Something different did happen in the 1960’s that wasn’t there before. It was an attitude.’ That attitude was reflected in the concept of Chicanos belonging to a community and that Raza were not foreigners, but indigenous to the Southwest.” (4) This reclaiming of place, indigeneity, and self-determination came to be known as Chicano and is connected to a political and cultural consciousness in activism.” I want you to always remember that the claiming of place that I write about is the connection to our indigenous roots to this land and that no line drawn in the dirt or a wall built in the desert can erase our history to this place and that we have a right to be here in this place. You come from strong indigenous women that have a long history of fighting for our rights. We have fought to claim our reproductive rights, our autonomy and agency over our sexuality, and the right to self-determination over our lives. In the current news women in the entertainment industry and public offices are coming forward to call out the men that have sexual harassed and abused them. The revealing of a dirty hidden reality for a majority of women is a needed fight to take our power back from the dominant hetero-patriarchal systems that have perpetuated sexual harassment and abuse. I want you to remember that you are a strong proud woman that has rights over her body, mind and soul and that no individual, ideology, and/or institution can take your freedom of self-determination. The freedoms and rights gained by the LGBTQ community are also being attacked by this new administration. As a queer identifying Chicana I am being attacked. I want you to always remember that love is love. Two spirit people such as myself have always existed and we have the right to live and love freely whomever we choose. I want you to know the social construct of gender was created as a form of control over bodies and that the binary system of male/female gender is a lie. Gender falls on a spectrum and you get to decide where you fall on that spectrum because your experience is yours to claim. It is important to continue to dismantle the ideologies that expect us to conform to the binary and expected gender norms of this Anglo society. This Anglo society has been built on capitalist ideologies that have no care or concern for the environment and Mother Earth. The consumption of natural resources and pollution of our air, soil, and water is in direct violation of what our people's beliefs are; we were placed on Earth to protect and love her. She has given us life and the money hungry capitalist have no respect for the life she provides. I want you to fight to protect our Mother Earth from those that have lost their connection to her. The connection between my claiming Chicana and white supremacy is in the fact that people of color have been othered, dehumanized and villainized by Anglos imposing a hierarchy of superiority to maintain control over brown bodies. Racist have always been in our midst but it now seems as if they have been given permission to openly hate by the President. And now more than ever it is important to claim our identity and fight for social justice, equity and equality. I claim my Chicana identity for all the reasons I have mentioned but especially because so many have fought for my right to claim my identity. I am passing you the identity of Chicana but the important thing I want you to remember is that you get to choose whether you claim Chicana for yourself. Paloma don’t feel overwhelmed or scared to go out into the world and fight for your rights and the rights of our community. Mija go out into the world knowing you have the support and strength of our family, community and ancestors always with you. Our resiliency in the face of oppression and adversity is in you and will continue through you. Now go out into this great wide spectacular world with self-confidence and pride in who you are and fight for what you believe. We are Chicanas. We are love. We are compassion. We are community. We are family. This letter to you is my vision/mission statement for my blog by using my blog to further understand, fight, educate, question, and create knowledge to connect our communities through love and stories. I am always here for you and love you forever and always for exactly who you are. Amor y Paz, Your mother Shonnon Gutierrez An unapologetic Chingona Chicana