#They want to legislate my personal sex life and my privacy and to hunt down my friends to deport them!

[rubyvroom]

Hi I'm gonna promote the tags by @mejomonster

#im just reblogging so the conversation continues#i think like. bullying the rich honestly is a good approach (best done by white men though - so they don't get attacked by arrest)#like Redditors blocking X just because they hate musk is a nazi? That's a good strategy because it means less traffic to musks site and#silencing musks voice. i'd also say regular people making ALTERNATIVE social media they ACTUALLY all migrate to is a decent strategy#Truth Social by Trump? was never a success.#so if Meta and Twitter were LEFT in such large numbers that the sites were ghost towns? then free speech would be spread more in actually#free-er enviornments. the next step of course is the rich would try to buy the new sites or ban them. #and it would be the normal people who made it's job to stick to their guns and NOT sell. and make a new site if their site gets banned.#also calling rich people directly and threatening them tbh. but again i think only white men should be doing this as they'll be less likely#to be arrested. at least if it's a threat but not ever carried out#(whereas a white woman just said deny depose and she is now facing charges. even tho she didnt actually hurt anyone or act in any way)#i think in person some of the best ways to help is SCHOOL BOARDS AND CITY COUNCIL MEETINGS#bug and annoy the shit out of local policians who cannot avoid you. make your voice louder than the conservative people pushing trans#attacks and book bans and increasing police.#i think the college kids directly protesting AT BOARD MEETINGS was very effective. so effective the colleges wanted to expell them because#those board members FELT how upset people were and wanted to avoid it.#i think the best strategies will be to directly affect the lives of the people effecting policy.#whether that's bullying rich people online. in their phones. showing up to every local govt meeting and make sure#your govt knows you DO care and will expect them to care or they'll never escape hearing u

I think this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be considering, emphasis mine.

Impact politician's lives directly. Make their neighbors hate them. Make their commute difficult. Make their job a constant hassle. Make it unpleasant to be caught even slightly enabling fascism. Make it PERSONAL.

Would really like to hear more people talking about how to effectively protest in 2025. Standing in a public area holding signs is ineffective. Public shaming only works when your opponents have any shame (apologies to Stokely Carmichael) so what do we do?

Cities are blue overall. So is disrupting cities, blocking traffic, really going to be effective? It just becomes images on the news that people can dismiss as "city problems". Do we take protests somewhere else? Target city halls across the country in smaller communities to try to light a fire? Take it to people's houses? Protesting the Supreme Court justices at home seemed to freak everyone out quite a bit, is that the way to go?

The only way to hurt plutocrats is to hit them right in the money, so how do we do that effectively? I'm not convinced boycotts do anything? So what would actually hurt them?

I don't know if these discussions are happening in private, which would make sense but is frustrating for people who'd like to get involved, or if they're just not happening.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Trans Artist Breaks Down the Walls of Bathroom Stalls

Emmett Ramstad, “You’re Welcome” (2016) removed gender segregated bathroom signage, replaced bathroom signage, dimensions variable (photo by Erin Young)

MINNEAPOLIS — Public bathrooms are sites where private lives meet public space. Central to any space but never centered, bathrooms are incredibly necessary and tremendously fraught. Though seemingly banal and unobtrusive enough to be forgotten after use, bathrooms are simultaneously sites of danger for some. Bathrooms are also places to seek solace, take a break, have sex, do drugs. Because these activities deviate from the engineered purpose — the universal need to void — bathrooms are, more than ever, subject to monitoring and policing.

Artist Emmett Ramstad, a trans artist living in Minneapolis, sees public bathrooms as contested spaces emblematic of how the United States functions. Ramstad’s inquiry into the current politics surrounding bathrooms begins with their formal aspects — the stall “legs,” the space underneath, the ubiquitous beige color — to open a dialogue about privacy, vulnerability, mundanity, serviceability, shame and pleasure, segregation, and access. Ramstad’s sculpture, installations, and participatory actions unpack the architecture of social and moral codes that organize the physical space of the bathroom. He is currently working on an artist book called Quasi-Public, Semi-Private that will be released in November. When debates about bathrooms occupy the Texas legislature and tweets dictate the fates of transgender people in the military, Ramstad’s query is especially timely and relevant.

Emmett Ramstad, “Watching You Watching Me Watching You (Hunting Season)” (2017), hunting stand, ladder, bathroom stall wall, toilet paper cache, smoke alarms, near dead batteries, dimensions variable (photo by Rik Sferra)

Risa Puleo: In works like “Watching You Watching Me (Hunting Season)” (2017) you placed an elevated platform like the ones used as hunting blinds in front of a wall of standard bathroom partitions. While clearly about bathrooms, but not being overtly about trans people, you signal the power dynamics that occur at any policed boundary.

Emmett Ramstad: I built that sculpture in February 2017, right after the U.S. election when a lot of people I knew were talking about how vulnerable they felt, penned in and watched. I built my own wall from bathroom stall components to draw attention to how anti-transgender bathroom legislation distracts us from talking about the ongoing enforcement of exclusionary policies that create walls. Bathroom bills encourage people to police gender by monitoring public restrooms in the same ways that “respectable citizens” are called on to monitor their own neighborhoods for criminals or terrorists (read: people of color, Muslims, or people who look “different”). People are rewarded for exhibiting fear and making themselves monitors. But this is not specific to trans people; it’s a pattern of state securitization. When I built “Watching You Watching Me (Hunting Season),” I wanted to create tension between the position [of] the tower, and the area beyond the wall, the stall. Viewers can climb up into the platform and look over the wall to see what’s there. But they are vulnerable when they are standing alone on the platform. There is vulnerability in both watching and being watched.

RP: In another work, “Safe,” (2016) the open space above and below a freestanding bathroom stall has been filled in by a picket fence. The juxtaposition of the fencing with the bathroom made me think of gated communities and gender neutral, single stall bathrooms. Both models seem to be material manifestations of a neo-liberal agenda and the increasing privatization and isolation of body. Museums in particular like to signal that single stall bathrooms are gender neutral, but is a bathroom really gender neutral if one person at a time can use it?

Emmett Ramstad, “Safe” (2016) Bathroom stall partitions, bathroom doors, peepholes, cedar fencing, welcome mat with daisy, 6’x3’x5’ (photo by Sean Smuda)

ER: That is an interesting question, what is neutrality? Is gender ever neutral? Perhaps these so called neutral ones are actually the segregated ones? I think about how the common bathroom stall colors are variations of “neutral” beige, the same tones that are popular Home Depot carpet colors, siding on homes in the suburbs, khaki uniforms — these product colors are being sold as neutral or customizable but are so industrialized. Stores and commercial buildings buy these steel bathroom partitions so that they are the same, recognizable across different kinds of spaces. Neutral is produced as something you can really see difference against. And, yes, the fence is emblematic of this neoliberal agenda in the United States and the idea that one can purchase safety, privacy, and freedom if you have the means. Single stall “gender neutral” bathrooms awkwardly reflect the institutions that make them. “Just buy those trans people a bathroom so that they stop trying to come into ours; that will fix it. Keep them separate so that we don’t have to feel confused.” I’m not sure this strategy will ever fix the problem, which is so much about segregation, othering.

RP: Of course, we use bathrooms for more than voiding bowels. There is also a banality to the bathroom, and the potential for encounter — sexual, aggressive, congenial, it’s a place to take a break, gossip, cry, talk on the phone. You and I talk on the phone in that bathroom a lot, even for this interview. The phone in the installation “Stall” reminds me that both toilets and phones are two types of portal spaces.

Emmett Ramstad, “Stall” (2016) Bathroom stall, functioning telephone, toilet, sign “If the phone rings, please answer,” 3’x5’x6’ (photo by Erin Young)

ER: Yes, they are portal spaces! I was interested in the ways that phones and bathrooms are similar; they are this way to get away from the present moment. “Hold on, I have to take this call” or  “I’ll be right back, I just have to dot dot dot.” But bathrooms and telephones are also sites for potential connection. In “Stall,” there is a sign that says “If the phone rings, please answer.” I’d call the stall at random times and talk to visitors who choose to enter the bathroom stall to answer the phone. There is a kind of thrill when an art piece is calling you, but also a thrill about doing the illicit act of talking on the phone while you are peeing or taking a poop. This piece was a jumping off point for my next series of participatory works called “Calling Stations” which consist of bathroom stall partitions laid on the floor with a birch wheelchair access ramp, a chair and a phone number handwritten on the wall. The phone numbers in the two companion installations connect participants to each other or to my cell phone. I was answering strangers’ calls all the time, doing any number of mundane things, including going to the bathroom. Encounters now with cell phones feel very different because you can screen every call.

RP: During your exhibitions, you also change the signage of the art space’s bathroom —often in an ad hoc way like marker on printer paper. The form speaks to bathroom graffiti but also shifts the state of sex-segregated bathrooms to gender neutral. Can you speak to the potential of the artist and institutional critique to intervene in public space and legislation?

Emmett Ramstad, “Calling Station II” (2016) ADA sanctioned bathroom stall door, maple flooring, foam, cedar awning, landline princess telephones, telephone numbers, 6’x 8’x 5’ (photo by Rik Sferra)

ER: I realized I was making work about the intimacy of daily life, including materials found in bathrooms like toothbrushes and soap, but I wasn’t addressing the intimacies of the spaces where I was exhibiting. The Rochester Art Center had sex-segregated bathrooms next to where my work was being exhibited. So I proposed to do a piece “You’re Welcome” (2016) which involved replacing the gendered signage with circular mirrors on which I wrote the words “You’re Welcome” in permanent marker. The text addresses the bathroom user. YOU are welcome, as in please come in, or colloquially you’re welcome to the person who says thank you for the unmarked bathroom. I was exerting some rare art privilege by making a piece that alters the institution’s design. Rochester Art Center permanently converted one of their bathrooms to all-gender after my show, as they didn’t have any before my exhibit. I decided to continue variations of this piece everywhere I exhibit now. I have made one at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I’ve also made super temporary signs that say “the bathroom” that have been torn down. Unlike the move to make single stall bathrooms “gender neutral,” I am making these multi-stall bathrooms “gender together.”

RP: Can you talk about scale in your work? Right now you are working on a miniature model of a line of bathroom partitions? This dramatic shift in scale seems to shift the conversation to access and disablement.

Emmett Ramstad, “Everybody’s Bathroom” (2016) removed gender segregated bathroom signage, replaced bathroom signage, waterfall soundtrack, dimensions variable (Photo by Rik Sferra)

ER: As well as social and sexual spaces, bathrooms are also where trans and disability issues meet. I am curious about how tall or long or big a wall has to be to keep someone in or out. The standard stall size keeps lots of people out, disabled people in particular but also fat people for whom “standard” is always too small. Restroom architecture calculates how much of the population will need an “accessible” stall and how to provide the minimum necessary while maintaining an idea of the “normal” person who can squeeze into a tiny stall. The yet-to-materialize border wall boasts so much strength in length or height, yet it ends at some point. It is symbolic as much as functional. So I thought if I made a miniature wall that looked like bathroom stall components I could have a conversation about these issues together. The miniature wall hangs out on the floor, barely visible: you would trip over it if you didn’t think it was an art piece. I have played with the idea of building a full scale ramp to go over the wall, but also full size ladders–playing with scale, but also ideas of access. I’m thinking about calling the piece “To: Texas,” a gift of an easily built, maintained, and surveyed joint border and bathroom wall. If artists were paid to build the wall, like a WPA project, and we each did it in our medium, this would be mine: easily dismantled, traversed over/thru, knocked-down, comical, demi-bathroom wall.

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