#I have complicated feelings about immortality and our lack thereof and it gets so much worse when we get ill

[thethingything]

for some reason our brain apparently decided it was time to have a dream that was basically just being like "you can't be immortal anymore and you feel like shit about it" and like... wow thanks yes I do and now I get to wake up with the weirdest fucking combination of emotions 😒

[nevermindirah]

Do you have any thoughts on the use of AAVE for Nile (or lack thereof) in TOG fanfiction? I've been reading some Book of Nile fic and some writers seem to write her as a Millennial™ (using words like "fave" and "woke") but never acknowledge her Blackness in her patterns of speech. I know we don't see her use as much AAVE in the films, but I would argue she's in situations where code-switching would be valued (first in a "professional" environment in the army, then around a group of non-Black strangers).

Hi anon! I have many thoughts on this and I'm honored you asked me! But I should start by saying I'm white and any thoughts Black fans and especially Black American fans have on this that they want to share would be beyond lovely. (I'm not gonna tag anybody bc that feels rude but please add onto this post if any of y'all see this and want to!)

The main reason I personally avoid AAVE for Nile in my own fics is because I'm not Black. But Nile-centric fics by Black writers tend to avoid using much of it too, at least from what I've noticed/understood, and my guess is it's largely for the reason you mention, that she's in situations that encourage code-switching.

In movie canon Nile is highly competent at tailoring her language to each situation she finds herself in. This fantastic linguistics analysis meta shows how skillfully Nile chooses her vocabulary and grammar to meet her goals with different conversation partners in different contexts. In comics canon Nile had a bunch of different civilian jobs before joining the Marines, so she would've had experience code-switching in the ways that made sense for all those different contexts as well as the Marines and her family and high school and wherever else she spent her time before we met her. And now she's spending her time with a handful of immortals none of whom are native English speakers and a fellow Black American but one with a Queen's English UK accent whose professional experience is in the CIA where high-status code-switching is often an absolute must for success or even survival.

Fics featuring Nile are charged with extrapolating from that to how it might show up in her use of language that she's coping with a traumatic separation from her family and her career and pretty much everything she's ever known and now she needs to be able to make herself understood to people who seem to care about her and each other but are super duper in crisis, three (soon to be four) of whom predate Modern English entirely and the only one who's anywhere near her contemporary she's not supposed to talk to for a century. All of these people are telling her that pretty much any contact with any mortals poses an existential threat to her and the rest of the group. How the FUCK is she supposed to cope with that, like, generally? And would it be a more effective way for her to cope if she talked to Andy Joe and Nicky using the speech patterns that she used to use with her mom and brother, to at least retain that part of her identity even if it means having to do a lot of explaining, or would it meet her needs better to prioritize Andy Joe and Nicky understanding what she means with her words over using the particular words and grammar forms she used with her family?

I've seen several fics, both Nile-centric / BoN and otherwise, explore this a little bit in how/whether Nile uses Millennial™ speak. It's often a theme in Nile texting Booker despite the exile because of the popular headcanon that he as The Tech Guy is the only other immortal who understands memes. But Nile's much-younger-than-Booker mom probably uses Boomer and/or Gen X memes and Andy has been adapting to new communication styles for forever as evidenced by her canon high level of fluency with standard-American-accented English.

Which brings us back to people avoiding AAVE because they're not Black and they don't want to make mistakes (or they're not Black and they don't want to get yelled at for making mistakes, though I think many people overestimate how much they'll get yelled at while underestimating how much these mistakes can hurt). I can imagine some Black fans hold back from using much AAVE in fic because they don't want to share in-group stuff with white people who are likely to then adopt and ruin it, as white people so often do with Black cultural stuff. Some links about this including a great Khadija Mbowe video. I'm saying this gently, anon, because you might not know: woke, an example you cited as Millennial™ speak, is AAVE, and that's gotten erased by so many white people appropriating it and using it incorrectly online.

And also there's the part where fandom is a hobby and you never know when you're reading a fic that's the very first thing someone's ever written outside of a school assignment. This cultural considerations of language shit takes a level of effort and skill that not everybody puts into every fic, or even could if they wanted to because they haven't had time to build their skills yet. It's definitely easier for non-Black fans to project our millennial feels onto Nile than to do the layers of research and self-reflection it requires to depict what Blackness might mean to Nile, and it's not surprising that often people sharing their hobby creations on the internet have gone the easier route. There's not even necessarily shame in doing what's easier. It's just frustrating and often hurtful when structural white supremacy means that 3-dimensional Black characters are rare in media and thoughtful explorations of them in fandom are seen by the majority of fans as not-easy to make and therefore Nile Freeman, the main character in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, has the least fic and meta and art made about her of our 5 main immortals.

I've been active in different fandoms off and on for twenty years and I barely managed to write 5,000 words about Sam Wilson across multiple different fics in the 7 years since I fell in love with him. There's an alchemy to which characters we connect with, and on top of that which characters we connect with in a way that causes us to create stuff about them. Something about Nile Freeman finally tipped me over the edge from a voracious reader to a voracious writer. It's not for me to judge which characters speak to other individuals to the level of creating content about them, but I do think it's important for us to notice, and then work to fight, the pattern where across this fandom as a whole Nile gets way less content, and way less depth in so much of the content that's in theory about her, than any of these other characters.

Anyway, back to language. My two long fics feature Nile with several Black friends — Copley and OCs and cameos from other media — but all of those characters except Alec Hardison from Leverage aren't American. It's very possible I'm guilty of stereotyping Black British speech patterns in I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore. I watched hours and hours of Black haircare YouTube videos in the research for that fic and I modeled my OCs' speech patterns on what I heard from some of those YouTubers as well as what I've heard people like John Boyega and Idris Elba saying in interviews, but the thing about doing your best is you still might fuck up.

I'm slowly making progress on my WIP where Nile and Sam Wilson are cousins, and what ways of talking with a family member might be authentic for Nile is a major question I need to figure out. For that, I'm largely modeling my writing choices on how I hear my Black friends and colleagues talking to each other. I haven't overheard colleagues talking in an office in a long-ass time, but back when that was a thing, I remember seeing a ton of nuance in the different ways many of my Black colleagues would talk to each other. Different people have different personalities! And backgrounds! And priorities! A few jobs ago my department was about 1/3 Black and we worked closely with Obama administration staff many of whom were Black and there was SO MUCH VARIETY in how Black people talked to each other, about work and workplace-appropriate personal stuff, where I and other white coworkers could hear. There are a few work friends in particular who I have in my head when I'm trying to imagine how Sam and Nile might talk to each other. From the outside looking in, God DAMN is shit complicated, intellectually and interpersonally and spiritually, for Black people who are devoting their professional lives to public service in the United States.

One more aspect of this that I have big thoughts on but I need to take extra care in talking about is the idea of acknowledging Nile's Blackness in her patterns of speech. There's no one right way to be Black, and Nile's a fictional character created by a white dude but there are plenty of real-life Black Americans who don't use much or even any AAVE, for reasons that are complicated because of white supremacy. (Highly highly recommend this video by Shanspeare on the harms of the Oreo stereotype.)

Something that's not the same but has enough similarity that I think it's worth talking about is my personal experience with authenticity and American Jewish speech patterns. My Jewish family members don't talk like they're in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I've known lots of people who do talk that way (or the millennial version of it), some of whom have questioned my Jewishness because I don't talk that way. That hurts me. Sometimes when another Jew tells me some shit like "I've never heard a Jew say y'all'd've," I can respond with "well now you have asshole, bless your Yankee-ass heart," because the myth of Dixie is a racist lie but I will totally call white Northerners Yankees when they're being shitty to me for being Southern, and this particular Jew fucking revels in using "bless your heart" with maximum polite aggression, especially with said Yankees. But sometimes I don't have it in me to say anything and it just quietly hurts having an important part of me disbelieved by someone who shares that important part of me. The sting isn't quite the same when non-Jews disbelieve or discount my Jewishness, but that hurts too.

Who counts as authentically Jewish is a messy in-group conversation and it doesn't really make sense to explain it all here. Who counts as authentically Jewish is a matter of legal status for immigration, citizenship, and civil rights in Israel, and it's my number 2 reason after horrific treatment of Palestinians that I'm antizionist. But outside that extremely high-stakes legal situation, it can just feel really shitty to not be recognized as One Of Us, especially by your own people.

It can also feel really shitty to be The Only One of Your Kind in a group, even if that group is an immortal chosen family who all loves each other dearly. Sometimes especially in a situation like that where you know those people love you but there are certain things they don't get about you and will never quite be able to. I'm definitely projecting at least a little bit of my "lonely Jew who will be alone again for yet another Jewish holiday" stuff onto Nile when at the end of I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore she's thinking about being the only Black immortal and moving away from the community she'd built with a mostly-Black group of mortals in that fic. Maybe that tracks, or maybe that's fucked up of me.

Basically, this got very long but it's complicated, writing about experiences that aren't your own takes skill which in turn takes time and practice to build, writing about experiences not your own that our society maligns can cause a lot of harm if done badly, it can also cause a lot of harm when a large enough portion of a fandom just decides to nope out of something that's difficult and risky because then there's just not much content about a character who deserves just a shit ton of loving and nuanced content, people are individuals and two people who come from the exact same cultural context might show that influence in all kinds of different ways, identity is complicated, language is complicated, writing is hard, and empathy and humility and doing our best aren't a guarantee of avoiding harm but they do go a long way in helping people create thoughtful content about a character as awesome and powerful and kind and messy and scared and curious and WORTHY as Nile Freeman.

[bonesandblood-sunandmoon]

The Baggage of Love

CoA prompt for Dec 2019 - “Love” [Call for Submissions]. Under a cut due to length; there’s a few sections: Family, Friends, So-Called “Puppy Love”, Love is a Four-Letter Word, and “not gay as in happy, but queer as in i love you”. (Link to that quoted post is provided.)

Family

In terms of feeling (personal experience) and topic (impersonal), there’s an iceberg when approaching familial love (and the lack thereof). I don’t have the spoons for poking at the effects of our parents’ lives on us, divorce, growing up in an essentially single parent house, or the fragility of familial love, usually framed in terms of acceptance, around queer and trans identities. Other people have written about the popularity of the Found Family trope in queer fandom, intergenerational trauma, and all kinds of family stuff, and I am but a simple blogger. I do remember that it was first with my family that I was exposed to the concept of love and saying that I loved them, and when push comes to shove, it’s not uncommon for stories to default to parental love as an important element of a character’s story (‘at least their family will always be there for them’).

Familial love can be fraught with complications of our own parent-child or caretaker-child baggage (if grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. raised us), but I suspect there are some aros who would say that it’s a different flavor of love from what’s talked about in relation to aromanticism. The whole offspring thing is a whole ‘nother can of worms that could be a separate CoA prompt, but I can see child rearing being separate from the alloromantic relationship elevator in a way that isn’t incompatible with being aro, even if co-parenting is usually presented romantically in most media. (At least, off the top of my head, I associate it with ‘becoming a step-parent’ narratives, but that doesn’t mean non-romantic co-parenting isn’t out there.)

Friends

I know I’ve seen it cross my dash about not emphasizing platonic love over romantic love or over emphasizing friends as a means of ‘aros are still human’, but I didn’t save links for an idea of how discussions about prioritizing friendship have been happening. On the one hand, I can understand how uncomfortable and alienating this can be for aplatonic aros, but on the other hand, I spend most of my time in the allo-allo world with people who clearly prioritize romantic love over friendships, so it feels like I don’t actually experience very much prioritization of friendship. I don’t mean that the aro community shouldn’t be cautious of prioritizing platonic love and relationships. It’s more of a personal balancing act, but I’m not quite finding the right words for what I want to say right now.

(Aside: When I think of love that hasn’t been otherwise specified, I think of the middle school banter with some of my friends - something like a minor inconvenience leads to “I hate you” “Aw, I love you, too” - juxtaposed against feeling blindsided in high school that, apparently, I’m misleading others if I say ‘I love you’ to a friend. Unbeknownst to me, I was dating someone for about two or three months in 9th grade because of that. I think of wanting to tell someone that I was proud of them facing one of their fears during the course of that day’s work (“I love you for trying”). I think of reassuring friends that I care about them.)

When I think of just the word ‘love’, I think of an amorphous, unspecific feeling love that seems to reasonably include friendships. Some posts that were probably meant to stay personal/venting posts from aro bloggers use love to mean romance, but sometimes, that feels about as restrictive as allo-allo people assuming I must be dating a friend in order to say love. I may not feel as comfortable saying it out loud anymore, but I still love my friends in a way that’s hard to name or specify any further yet isn’t romantic.

So-Called “Puppy Love”

I feel like I’ve explained this before, but I have memories of crushes that have faded and become hard to translate to present/future perceptions. One of my past rounds of shadow work was specifically aimed at recovering from a crush on a friend ending our friendship, and I’ve always been embarrassed to talk about it, particularly as the final straw that set off one of my depressive episodes in high school. ~ One of those overperforming emos writing sad poetry about an unrequited crush? The emotional dysregulation of experiencing the first major heartbreak and becoming a depressed teen stereotype? ~ It was cringey before calling things cringey was a thing. (Also, please don’t go looking for my middle/high school era DA account where that’s been immortalized.)

In hindsight, I can recognize a whole bunch of comparatively minor crushes were probably more based on aesthetic attraction because they didn’t actually come with the same type of ‘butterflies’ and daydreaming about hypothetical futures. The crushes that were more substantial and had to be accommodated were more likely on friends, and it faired better to just wait out the feelings with no disclosure. I can think of at least one occasion where I was semi-aware that my crush was aesthetically based and I didn’t actually want to date him, but that awareness didn’t come along until undergrad. The last situation I definitely call a crush was in Sophomore year of undergrad and involved a friend, who in the past year found out about it and wasn’t upset or anything. (Shout out to friendship that can survive accidentally revealing that time I had a crush on her because she follows my tumblr.)

The Lightning Incident (as I so creatively refer to it) was this random, out of the blue event in my (I believe) Senior year of undergrad where my brain just kinda blanked, I felt internally giddy, and I just forgot how to speak while a cute girl I didn’t know was talking to me. Like, I just mentally shut down a bit and wandered away from the salad bar in a daze. For sheer experience on my end, I’m including it here, but I’ve still never been sure if it was a crush because my brain forgetting how to talk is incredibly counterproductive to interaction (and hasn’t happened before). I felt incredibly nervous talking to her during future conversations, but it didn’t quite feel the same as what I’ve experienced as a crush before. (I’m also 99% sure she never picked up on any of my internal weird feeling experiences and hasn’t found out since then, so yay me for keeping a lid on that.)

Love is a Four-Letter Word

Originally, I had something about hearing the line attributed to this section from a cartoon villain and the presentation of an inability to love in some form as a shortcut to villain coding planned, but then, in the midst of ‘pre-headache brain static’, I remembered a line from a post, “M is for the lack of madness | Called love that others see” (‘Aromantic’ acrostic poem). For a certain amount of aros, it’s probably just a relatable line, and they don’t necessarily give it much thought. I still haven’t been able to figure out how I feel about equating love to madness. On the one hand, there’s somewhat of a literary tradition, so it’s not exactly a new idea:

“Love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do, and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love, too” (As You Like It, Act 3 scene 2, No Fear Shakespeare link).

On the other hand, I have complicated feelings around the idea because of my own mental health issues. But if a crush ended a friendship that was important to me in high school, and it was tied up with depression, doesn’t that make it sorta relatable? Maybe for someone else, but I wind up thinking about the ashamed teen who couldn’t explain what was wrong in such a way to be believed and get help because it was ‘just an unrequited crush I would outgrow quickly’, and the isolation of not being able to talk to anyone about a same-gender crush that didn’t help the depression. I may not have had to face homosexuality being listed as a paraphilia, sexual orientation disturbance, or other listing in the DSM, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was a supportive atmosphere to reach out to ‘trusted’ adults.

I don’t have the energy to poke at other relevant details around my mental health right now, but there’s a certain knee jerk reaction to feel uncomfortable with the implication that an element of a romantic, sexual, or otherwise specified orientation may get people called crazy. I know aros are usually trying to joke about alloromantics (punching up, as it were), and no one wants to disclaimer their posts for every little thing. It’s entirely possible I’m overthinking this, and it’s bumping up against other baggage (around gender therapy and not being ‘too mentally ill to be believed’, for example), but I would rather not have ‘love is madness’ be a thing that people try to fold into permanent aro infrastructure. (The use of ‘love’ to mean ‘romantic love’ might also cast too wide a net and people who use ‘love’ non-romantically might think they’re being included.) If someone wants to call me ‘mad’, I’ve got brain shenanigans and symptoms to use as justification instead.

“not gay as in happy, but queer as in i love you”

There’s something about the first half of this post [link] that seems suited for spoken word poetry, and I don’t know how to translate my feelings into a written reply or commentary. However, I want to end with this because it scratches a hopepunk itch, and since I’m wrapping up this post on New Year’s Eve 2019, I feel like I could use a little hope for 2020. Maybe love is a messy concept that’s broad and narrow, felt by everyone and felt by no one (depending on each definition), and carries only as much meaning as you give it. Maybe love has no inherent feeling that’s universal, and it’s all down to action and inaction, like radical kindness. (I don’t know.)

[glittergummicandypeach]

How a Stars and Stripes Hijab on ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ Reveals America’s Troubling Relationship to Gender, Ethnicity and ‘That’ Religion | Religion Dispatches

Honestly, we blame ourselves.

We should have known that releasing an episode of Keeping It 101 (A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion Podcast) about religion and RuPaul this past Wednesday meant we were in for some goopery when the next episode of Rupaul’s Drag Race aired two days later.

But how could we have known season 12 contender Jackie Cox would bring a freaking STARS AND STRIPES CAFTAN AND HIJAB to the ball? We. Were. Gagged. 

That said: if we had known Ms. Cox would be featuring this garment on tonight, we could’ve clocked Jeff Goldblum’s Islamophobic response from clear across the club. We would’ve told you that women who dress like Cox to express modesty are immediately racialized as Muslim, forced to defend Islam against accusations that it is uniquely hostile toward women and queer people, and especially vulnerable to violence.

The Persian Princess of Drag

Cox has made much of her Iranian heritage, dubbing herself “the Persian Princess of Drag” and tearfully thanking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her advocacy work on behalf of immigrants like Cox’s mother, an American citizen born in Iran. But so far this season—as we literally just said!—Cox has claimed her Iranian-ness solely in racial and cultural terms. Even when commending AOC for “working in Congress in solidarity with Congresswoman Tlaib and Congresswoman Omar,” the first two Muslim women elected to serve in Congress, Cox never said the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’.

L to R: Jaida Essence Hall, the now-disgraced Sherry Pie, and Heidi entreat viewers to vote in the November 2020 presidential election while Jackie Cox waves from the top of the runway. See? Subtle. (Screengrab from episode 12)

We assumed that Cox or the producers or both had decided to frame Cox’s story explicitly in terms of racism and immigration, which fit neatly into season 12’s pronounced emphasis on urging viewers toward increased political engagement. (In drag’s grand tradition of understated subtlety, every episode now ends with the remaining queens prancing down the runway waving huge “REGISTER TO VOTE” signs. Image left.)

As religious studies scholars, we were thirsty for more explicit engagement with Cox’s religio-racial heritage. But we allowed that the show’s glossing of anti-Iranian hostility as racism was still important political work: though classified as white, Iranians in the United States (religious or otherwise) often face anti-Muslim hostility, which is related—but not reducible—to American white supremacy.¹ American whiteness is fragile, contested, and—especially for folks associated with Islam—contingent on good behavior. On episode 7, Jackie Cox wept while outing herself as the child of an immigrant from a Muslim-majority country and claiming “this part of [her] heritage that [she] hid for so long.” We were prepared to leave our analysis of Ms. Cox at that: viewers might suspect their Persian Princess had a relationship with Islam, but the show left Jackie’s religious commitments (or lack thereof) safely tucked out of sight.

But then SOMETHING HAPPENED, America. 

Salaam RuPaul Joon

Episode 9, “Choices,” had contestants facing off in a debate to become America’s first drag president.² The pinnacle of every episode is the queen’s final runway looks; this week’s theme was “Stars and Stripes Forever.”³ And heeeeeere’s Jackie:

She’s giving us “a beautiful, [red and white] striped, flowing caftan” and “a midnight blue hijab that is outlined in fifty silver stars.” She’s insisting “you can be Middle Eastern, you can be Muslim, and you can still be American.”

In the immortal words of Latrice Royale: she said THAT.

As Jackie Cox swanned down the runway trailing her patriotic caftan behind her, guest judge, dinosaur Zaddy, and Woody Allen defender Jeff Goldblum let out an “oooooh” or a “nooooo.” Either way, it was clear Cox’s look evoked a strong response from Goldblum. Camera held tight on his face for reactions; Goldblum seemed fixated and (to our trained killjoy eye) bordering on disgust. 

A smiling Cox faced the judges with a cheery “salaam RuPaul joon!” Veteran judge Carson Kressley called her outfit “beautiful and touching” and said it “makes a political statement;”4 guest judge Rachel Bloom celebrated that Cox’s “simple outfit…says so much” about what “America really is.”5 This presentation primes the viewer to see Cox’s eleganza as boundary-pushing and indicative of something essential about Jackie Cox as a performer.

If you watched the show or you study religion or you exist on the internet, you already know what happened next. 

“Are you religious, may I ask?” Goldblum inquired, because OF COURSE HE DID, eyebrows raised above thick black nerd glasses, elbow propped on the judges’ table, supporting a face slouched casually against his hand. Cox replied that she’s not religious and insisted that the importance of her outfit lies in “the visibility religious minorities need to have in this country.” 

“Isn’t this an interesting wrinkle, though,” Goldblum continued, waving his hands around his face with pre-COVID abandon. “Is there something in that religion that is anti-homosexuality and anti-woman? Does that complicate the issue?” (emphasis added, and Reader: feel free to pause and hit the shade rattle button if you need to). “I’m just raising it and thinking out loud and maybe being stupid. What do you think?” he concluded.

We’re so glad you asked us that, Jeff Goldblum. Here’s what we think:

Seeing a hijab-wearing woman and dribbling half-baked, anti-Muslim talking points from out the mouth atop your admittedly striking and grizzled jawline does not make us think you’re interesting, Jeff Goldblum. It makes us think you haven’t done your homework.

Islamophobia is Not an “Interesting Wrinkle”

Here’s the T: religion has always been messy on Drag Race—which makes sense, since religion is messy in general. Keeping It 101, like Marie Kondo, loves mess, so you know we had to get into this gig. Whether it means to or not, Drag Race has always given us characters with complicated relationships to religion: Monique Heart’s devout Christianity despite undergoing conversion therapy; Valentina claiming la Virgen de Guadalupe as her drag mother; debates about whose religiously-inspired garments are culturally appropriate and whose are appropriation. 

Religion should be messy on Drag Race, we’ve argued, because religion is what people do, and people are some messy bitches. Lived religious experience changes as people change; rarely are people just one thing or one thing all the time or one thing throughout their whole lives. Jackie Cox has been bringing the complexity of her Iranian identity to us every week. But despite Cox asserting her Iranian-ness in terms of culture, national origin, and ethnicity, the judges read her “Stars and Stripes Forever” outfit exclusively and explicitly as religious. 

As RuPaul’s longtime co-host Michelle Visage would say: meh.

Look, we’re not surprised. Americans know disturbingly little about pious fashion, which has led to some truly tragic and dehumanizing feature items on nonwestern modesty practices. Most Americans still seem unaware that how people cover their bodies has far more to do with where they are than whether they belong to a particular religious community (though students always nod when we explain that folks going out on the town in New York City dress differently than in, say, Tuscaloosa). Folks who wrinkle their noses at Muslim modest fashion seldom express the same concerns about conservative Christian women in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. We know how you do, America. We work on racialization and religious intolerance.

As we discussed on our “Religion Is Not Done with You” episode, we also know that Muslim-coded people don’t get to opt out of Islam: “Arab-looking” folks, folks with “Muslim-sounding” names, Sikhs in turbans, folks who dress in “Muslim garb,” all get read as Muslim. Identifying as atheist doesn’t get anyone who can be read as Muslim out of “totally random” TSA pat downs. This is how we racialize Islam, distilling a billion-person millenium-old global religion into one (terrifying, not-American) thing.

So yeah, when Jeff Goldblum looks at Jackie Cox in a hijab and says “that religion,” of course we know what he means. Goldblum doesn’t say “Islam”—in fact, no one says Islam or Muslim for the rest of the episode. No one has to. With this question-cum-critique, Islam became what was happening On Tonight, and Goldblum became every white dude in any audience or classroom who doesn’t think he’s racist, who doesn’t realize he’s part of the problem, and who definitely didn’t do the reading. 

That Religion

Goldblum’s use of that here—making Islam “that religion,” unnamed and unsafe for women and queer people—belies the disgust we clocked on his face as Cox brought modest fashion to the runway. He’s asking (though it’s really more of a comment than a question) whether the religion he projects onto Cox’s queer, feminine-presenting body hates her queer, feminine-presenting self; hates all women and queers. 

Goldblum is asking Cox if Islam hates her, the beautiful queen standing before him, who chose to wear this clothing to represent herself and her communities. Goldblum begs the question of Islam-as-oppressive, as though expecting Cox to thank him for liberating her with his tired, basic question. 

Dinosaur Zaddy, WYD? Why are you proving our point by assuming folks who look like Muslims must be religious—immediately racializing and pigeon-holing literal billions of people? Why would you assume you already know everything you need to know about Islam? 

Oh, right. Because you’re American, and America is that girl. We knew she was. 

Cox, to her credit, ignored the bigotry and argued for complexity: “I’m not [religious],” she told Goldblum. “I have my own misgivings about how LGBT people are treated in the Middle East, and at the same time, I am one. But…when the Muslim ban happened, it really destroyed a lot of my faith in this country, and it really hurt my family.” (Jeff Goldblum, open-mouthed, nodded along as Cox spoke.) “I’m here, and I deserve to be in America as much as anyone else.” 

In a challenge meant to celebrate American inclusivity, Cox had to share her personal trauma and champion religious freedom (very American of her, no?) so as not to have to defend a religion of 1.9 billion people (Islam), a nation-state of 82 million (Iran), and an immigrant community already under siege. 

Goldblum’s comments are dangerous. Characterizing Islam as inherently anti-LGBTQ, anti-women, anti-anything, really, falsely collapses the complexity of Islam and Muslims into a conservative anti-American monolith—while letting America off the hook for the very real damage it’s doing to women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and Muslims every day, and with increased urgency during our nation’s public health crisis. 

We the People

Standing on the stage in front of the judges, Cox—like so many women who cover—found the complexity of her identity reduced to the fabric on her head. Despite not being religious, Drag Race stripped her complicated performance down to its proximity to Islam. It might be too much to expect a campy televised game show to give us realness about religion, except that historically, that’s exactly what Drag Race has done. 

Shepard Fairey’s “We the People Are Greater than Fear.”

RuPaul loves a reference, but no one on that judges panel seemed to get that Cox’s caftan and hijab were inspired by Shepard Fairey’s “WE THE PEOPLE are greater than fear,” part of a poster series created in response to the 2016 election [image left].  

Many people carried this image during nation-wide Women’s Marches in January 2017 to protest the 45th president’s inauguration. The poster inspired praise (for including a modest Muslim woman as a symbol of American patriotism) and criticism (for implying Muslims need to support American militarism and imperialism to be “truly” American). 

Not all Muslim women feel liberated by the image Cox is referencing; as Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Katebi says, “Know that Muslims are tired of having to ‘prove’ they are American [and] know that one does not need to be American to deserve respect, humanity, dignity, equality, rights and freedom from hate and bigotry. An over-emphasis on being American as a prerequisite of deserving respect is harmful for immigrants and refugees.” 

How a woman (or a man dressed as one) engages with religion (or not) is not something you can tell by looking at her. Muslim women are more than what they put (or not) on their heads. Looking at a woman who covers and assuming she’s an observant Muslim contributes to the racialization of Muslims—the fear that Muslims are too different, too dangerous, to be allowed to be fully American. Asking a female-presenting person who covers her head with a hijab whether Islam hates women or queers implies that the woman needs saving, that she hasn’t chosen to dress herself in a way she knows makes her a more likely target for hate speech and violence. Assuming Islam hates Muslim women or queer Muslims is some white nonsense: Islam hates nothing; all religions are made up of people. 

Assuming a Muslim woman or a queer Muslim must be especially at risk because of their religious belonging collapses a long, complex history of gender relations in Islam into a soundbite that makes the internet yell at you, Jeff Goldblum. It ignores that many religions, including Islam, can and do contribute to both the empowerment and the oppression of women. Because religion is what people do, DinoZaddy, and history has shown us that people oppress women. 

When you look at a woman who covers her head and assume you know everything worth knowing about her, Jeff Goldblum, you make an ass out of you. And us, as it turns out, for releasing our hot take on RuPaul and religion too early to yell about this on the air. Better luck next season, we guess. 

In the meantime: salaam, Khanoom Jackie Cox joon. Thank you for not turning your pious fashion runway moment into a reveal. We stan.

1 Check out the Islamophobia Is Racism syllabus and especially Neda Maghbouleh’s excellent Limits of Whiteness (Stanford 2017) for more on this religio-racial tension.

2 Again. Season 4 episode 9, “Frock the Vote,” featured precisely this format — but that was before the show hit basic cable and expanded its mainstream viewership.  This is probably for the best, as Chad Michaels’ “LadyPimp” platform has not aged well. And PhiPhi O’Hara’s calling Black queens “the help” didn’t play well even then.

3 Personally, we would have gone with “Amer-I-Can!” but we’re still waiting for our recruiting call from the show’s producers.

4 Speaking of political statements: don’t even get us started on Carson telling Widow that she came off as an angry Black woman, or on the fact that the lipsync for your life literally pitted a Black queen against a hijabi queen while declaring the white queen in ACTUAL IMPERIAL GARB  safe. We cannot even.

5 Bloom called America “a nation of immigrants,” which obviously obscures the genocidal violence perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples of what is now the United States and against those forcibly removed and enslaved to become the bedrock of this country’s economy.

This content was originally published here.