#and ignoring the intersectionality of race and gender. because they look at it from a white perspective and think that's the standard

[schadenfreudich]

A post ends up being mildly popular and everytime someone likes or reblogs, I think "I have correct opinions" to myself.

[apas-95]

How do you not realize your Marxist ideology is false when it says shit like a trans black woman small business owner is oppressing her cis white man employees?

I don't think you're, like, genuinely asking, or are curious, here, but I'll answer anyways, for everyone else who might be confused on issues like this: it's intersectionality.

You could make this argument about essentialy any axis of oppression - 'how do you not realise your LGBT ideology is false when it says shit like a cishet black person is oppressing their white trans gay employees', or, conversely, 'how do you not realise your racial ideology is false when it says shit like a white trans gay person is oppressing their cishet black employees'.

The point here isn't to have a rock-paper-scissors, Pokémon type-effectiveness ranking of which axes of oppression 'outrank' which others, it's to understand that each axis of oppression is an entirely distinct social system that overlaps with the other. A black business owner suffers from the social system of antiblackness, and benefits from the social system of capitalism. The specific overlap of their blackness and their class character also gives them an entirely unique character with regards to their segment of society. If they are USAmerican, for example, in their specific case the state and progress of the national liberation movement in the US means that they make up the rear of the revolutionary movement, despite being themselves petit-bourgeois. These systems of oppression are qualitatively different, and cannot be simply, quantitatively, summed up against each other.

With this in mind, it should be understood that the Marxist understanding of class as the principal contradiction does not mean that class is the most important, overruling factor, and that other axes should be ignored. Class is considered the principal contradiction because it is the contradiction that all other axes of oppression, genuine in their own rights, grew out of. Antiblackness was created by the slave trade (not vice-versa), and the slave trade was created by the growing European bourgeoisie's need to extract surplus-value, in the collapse of the Feudal economy. In the example you gave, the petit-bourgeois business owner exploits the labour of her workers, and is supported in doing so by an entire legal, political, and philosophical system based on the expropriation of the proletariat. She is also herself repressed and exploited on the basis of race, gender, and transness. These do not cancel each other out. However, given the ultimate source of racial, patriarchal, and cissexist oppress is political-economic class, her ability to genuinely fight for her interests in those fields will be hamstrung by her class position - just as her ability to attain and maintain that class position in the first place is itself hamstrung by her oppression in other fields.

Ultimately, there are no simple rules that society can be flattened down by. Each and every instance and scenario must be investigated in its own right. The idea that people are driven to Marxism because it provides an easy or simplified way of looking at the world is (perhaps unfortunately!) wrong, it actually means a lot more work!

[autolenaphilia]

Farrell's Fallacy

One of the most common forms of antifeminist arguments is something I'm now going to call Farrell's Fallacy. I've discussed it before in this essay, but now I have a snappy name for it and what I said bears repeating. Farrell's fallacy goes like this.

"Feminists say we live in a patriarchy and men have male privilege. But look at this group of men undeniably experiencing marginalization and oppression. Where is their male privilege? Checkmate, feminists!"

It's named after Warren Farrell, "father of the men's rights movement." This is admittedly partly for alliterative reasons, but also because he used an early version of it in his 1993 book The Myth of Male Power, where he used the fact that working class men are exploited by capitalism and are drafted to die in wars to argue that, well, male power is a myth and in fact "men are the disposable sex."

Yet you can substitute any group of marginalized men in the argument, and the argument is pretty much the same. The "group of men undeniably experiencing marginalization and oppression" can be non-white men, disabled men, gay men, trans men, and so on, sometimes all of them at once. It's therefore very popular here on tumblr as a way to sell antifeminism to social justice people who have a poor grasp of feminist theory, because it appeals to their understandable desire to support marginalized groups.

And it is a fallacy, because it relies on a strawman. It presumes feminists are doing the most simplistic analysis possible of patriarchy and male privilege, where only gender is taken into account and complicating factors like class and race are ignored. In reality intersectionality has been an important part of feminist analysis for over 30 years.

And while Farrell's Fallacy uses real oppression as part of its argument, it dishonestly contextualizes that oppression. It ignores that the oppression is not on the basis of these men's gender, but on other factors. These men are oppressed, yes, but it's because of systemic injustices based on class, race, disability and queerness and so on.

This often means their male privilege is severely curtailed, but it doesn't remove it. Women also suffer from these forms of oppression and they are often worse for women because they often intersect with the misogyny of patriarchal society, which is why we have terms like misogynynoir, lesbophobia and transmisogyny. It is in comparison with similarly marginalized women that we can see the male privilege of marginalized men.

This is one of the most common antifeminist arguments, especially here on tumblr. And i hope this post helps you recognize it for the nonsese it is.

[puppiekit]

I think the funniest thing ever to me is seeing people on tumblr preach "transandrophobia bad" but then you look at the transandrophobia tag and its basically just "transmascs are not cis, do not have cis privileges, and still face oppression / societal discrimination" and "I have personally faced (X) and (Y) issue because of my tansmasc identity"

.... Aka literally no different from any other minority on planet earth talking about their issues.

But for some reason people on tumblr want to tell you acknowledging this issue specifically, and putting a name to it, is not only bad (because for some reason acknowledging that transmascs have issues = claiming cis men are oppressed...? Because idk people feel the need to make shit up);

but actively harmful to transfems (And I'm going to be blunt here: acting like transfems are the only ones who have problems, or are the only ones allowed to talk about their problems, is so incredibly horrible it's actually insane. And quiet frankly very infantilizing).

To be quiet frank it only boils down to the communities continuous hatred for masculinity. Nobody wants to admit the fact that their community will never be a truly safe space before they stop labeling people "good" or "bad" dependent on who they are or how they chose to identify. It's harmful when cis people do it, and it's equally as harmful when queers do it.

And don't even get me started on the fact that a large part of this pointless beef is rooted in the communities refusal to acknowledge intersectionality (aka a bunch of white people unable to grasp the fact that they are not the default and peoples race can play a part in their gender, how it is perceived, and how it effects their oppression... Including masculinity).

I know this is going to piss a bunch of people off but to be entirely honest I was raised a woman for 18+ years, and I still socially pass for a woman NOW, and the shit I get in my day to day life does not even compare to the amount of hostility I face FROM MY OWN COMMUNITY as a transmasc.

At least a random person on the street will be blatant about their hatred for me, trans or not. The people in this community will instead manipulate and gaslight and try to convince you their crap treatment towards transmascs is "a good thing" or "good allyship". No, hating others for identifying a way you don't like and and "betraying their womanhood" does not make you a good ally to anybody, and especially transfems -- in fact, I'd say you're kind of throwing them under the bus by using them as an excuse to be a terrible person.

Whatever... Ignore my rant... I'm tired of people being terrible to eachother. And also it super pissed me off as a POC to see people compare talking about the problems transmascs face to "what if white people claimed they were being discriminated against for being white?!?!?!" as if that is anywhere near the same..... Like are you a legitimate dumbass or what? Why the hell do you people always use POC and their experiences as leverage against others.

How are you going to compare a TRANS person talking about their unique experiences with TRANSPHOBIA to a person at a societal advantage falsely claiming to be oppressed??? POC are only worth considering when you can use our issues to your benefit I guess

WHATEVER.....

[jellyfemmedyke]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can you explain why radical feminism is harmful?/gen

I'm probably not great at explaining this but I'll do my best. Radical feminism, the theory came from second wave feminism, it basically states the the root of all oppression is misogyny.

it strips everyone of gender and states that we are oppressed on sex alone, that all males oppress and subjugate all females. It states there is an oppressor class (males) and an oppressed class (females ) always.

This ignores intersectionality- a critical concept that recognizes how individuals hold multiple identities and face unique challenges at the intersections of those identities, coined by Kimberle Crenshaw a black feminist

because they believe that misogyny is the root of all oppression, other forms of oppression end up being secondary, things like racism, fatphobia, homophobia- instead of being their own unique for of oppression that intersect with misogyny, they are born strictly out of misogyny. because they believe all males oppress all females, they believe that trans women are oppressors as well, which you start getting into trans exclusionary radical feminism, but I would argue that radical feminism itself is trans exclusionary because of how it makes everything out as a male vs female thing. It's a flawed theory that upholds white supremacy.

Then, we have things like transradical feminism, that takes this theory and says "No actually we are only oppressed for our gender" so that transmisogyny is actually the root of all oppression and that trans men oppress trans women. Both of these theories ignore the internationally of both sex and gender, along with race and all the other forms of oppression. that's pretty much the gist of it. There's probably some other stuff I'm missing but that's the rundown . Also intersectionality isn't just 1 opression plus another oppression = worse oppression the way people tend to misuse it.

It takes things like, for example, a white cis man, this man is at the intersection of white and cis man, and those things affect the way he interacts with the world. It's a fat cis white man, and how those intersections affect each other. I use those examples because people tend to ignore that intersectionality affects everyone, including cis white men. I'm also not the person to talk to about black feminism either, but Bell Hooks and Kimbrle Crenshaw are two people that you should look into if you want to read about that. Anyway, I hope this helps. also that's not a stupid question. I think it's a good one

[jascamille]

Blog Post - 10/3

Can we be known for our virtual presence?

Yes, being known for who you are on any type of social media is possible. When it comes to social media personas are created because of the choices made. The decisions we make through our profile reflect our morals and beliefs. As we know what we post on the internet will stay online forever, it's important to think before posting.

Can the internet be a "utopia"?

The internet cannot be a "utopia". A utopia is described to be a "picture-perfect" reality and especially the internet cannot be perfect. Whether or not people have fake or "real" profiles on social media it's still not reality. Kolko mentions that the longer someone is behind a fake persona their real self when soon rise to the surface. Seen from the Black Mirror episode the lady driving the truck explained how she started to lose her filter when the merit system failed her and her husband.

How can we prevent game creators from creating games like "Shadow Warrior"?

From what we learned about intersectionality, it's important to understand the different variables, to learn one, you must look at the others. Not knowing what intersectionality is, is not knowing different perspectives. As mentioned by Ow, the game makers of "Shadow Warrior" included a very similar event to the real-life event called "My Lai". The event of My Lai took place in Vietnam where hundreds of unarmed citizens were massacred by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Ow states that the creators of "Shadow Warrior" are ignorant when it comes to using a historical event for the purposes of entertainment. To prevent problematic games such as "Shadow Warrior" again, game companies should make their teams more inclusive. Inclusivity gives perspective and varying experiences, also a great way to reach a broader audience.

What is a "cyborg"?

A cyborg is a combination of technology and an online persona. When reading "Race in Cyberspace" I didn't know there was a different meaning to cyborg, I first thought that a cyborg was like the one in television and movies, but it's a term used in the online world. Online personas of others see the gender of the cyborg before looking at the identity behind the screen. Many believe the term "cyborg" is inclusive, but it's the opposite, cyborg excludes women of color and the LGBTQ+ community, as it truly appeals to white women.

Sources:

Kolko, Beth. "Race in Cyberspace".

Ow, Jeffrey. "The Revenge of the Yellow-faced Terminator".

Ray, M. (2024, September 11). My Lai Massacre. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/My-Lai-Massacre

Brooker, C. (Writer & Director). (2016). Nosedive (Season 3, Episode 1) [TV series episode]. In C. Brooker & B. O’Donnell (Producers), Black Mirror. House of Tomorrow.

[cumbunnywitch]

For the record, I am a trans woman. I've been going off about it for a little bit but the use of TMA/TME to identify masc-aligned AFAB people is actually pretty shitty and you shouldn't do it. If you think you're doing it in good faith, I have good news for you: You're not actually an asshole yet. Let me explain beneath the Keep Reading(it's gonna be a long one folks).

TMA/TME is meant to be an identifier for people who are "Affected" by Transmisogyny. Now that looks really dang simple on the surface, believe me it does. Let me tell you where it gets complicated.

Transmisogyny is the intersection of being a transgender woman and experiencing misogyny. This is the easy part.

TMA/TME isn't intersectional.

The use of TMA/TMA has lead to a notable increase in the divide between feminine and masculine aligned trans folk.

This distinction is not only too vague, but entirely unhelpful.

Number 1: Every trans person can be affected by every kind of misogyny and misandry. Yes, Misandry is a real thing, it's a word that exists in the dictionary and everything.

Let me give you an example. A TERF might say that a trans man is "just a confused girl". This is actually Misogyny, because the subject that the TERF is basing their belief on is the person having been born female. A TERF might also say "that trans man is going to kill a woman because all that raging testosterone and becoming aligned with men!" This is misandry (this has also been coined transandrophobia) because the TERF is basing their belief on the person transitioning and taking hormones.

So, now do we see? We can do the same with trans women, too. Allow me: "That trans woman is a groomer who wants to turn kids gay." The subject is feminine, and the transness is treated as the problem. Another! "That girly boy is wearing a skirt again, someone should tell him how gay he looks." The subject again is a trans woman, but is being treated as a man. This is misandry.

So, we can see now that the focal point of all this is actually the intent of the transphobe. See, they don't actually care about being right, they care about whatever delusion they've paid into. While it's important to identify transphobia, we can all be affected by it in varied ways that don't actually matter.

Number 2: TMA/TME isn't intersectional. Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.

What the fuck does that even mean, you may be asking. Well, I'll tell you. Basically, every single part of who you are, where you came from, how rich or poor you were, both in wealth and social mobility, race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, gender, hair color eye color ayyy macarena all lead in to how privileged you are, in terms of a feminist progressive analysis. Basically, "being intersectional" isn't even really a thing? It's just a buzzword people mistakenly throw around when they actually mean inclusive.

If they do mean intersectional, then they are specifically referring to identifying oppression that a person may experience due to - and this is really important - every single part of their background. A trans woman can experience all kinds of oppression and violence, for a multitude of reasons. A trans man can experience very similar kinds of oppression. There are no single words, no matter how many prefixes and suffixes you butcher to get it to look pretty, it's not worth the scrabble points to try and nail down a single comment by transphobes as being one hyper-specific thing.

Number 3: This is the big one, and the reason I'm making this post. This Ask/Answer is a huge, HUGE problem. Implying that trans men, mascs, or AFAB enbies cannot or will not ally with trans women, or that they actively hate cis and trans women or AMAB, is not only a willfully ignorant point of view, but is actively dangerous to trans people as a whole, not to mention the progression of trans rights.

The thought that trans men are dangerous men, changing the words a bit and using TME instead, is actually transphobic. You are being "phobic" against some kind of "trans" person. See that? I'm being literal right here, too. If you saw the inverse of this and don't label it as transmisogyny, then you're either lying to yourself, or you don't understand anything about homophobia, transphobia, or possibly any language on Earth.

(side note, transphobia and homophobia isn't a literal fear of those stated groups, it's actually closer to a mass hysteria led from a fear of the unknown, xenophobia, and the very human habit to be aggressive towards scary things as a defense mechanism, wrapped up tightly in complex emotions because this defense mechanism was meant for when we were afraid of being eaten by predators in our caves.)

The point anyway, is that I've seen a large portion of the trans community outright denying that trans men can even have their own special kind of transphobia, which is untrue(see point 1), and using TMA/TME language to get around outright saying that transmasculine people are, in their minds, equivalent to the oppressive patriarchy. Please talk to more trans people. Everyone is an asshole in their 20s, I sure as fuck was.

Number 4: Ok so TMA/TME doesn't actually define anyone. Like, it can't. The only people who can literally be TME, is the known ruling class of a society that makes and enforces laws.

Here's the fuckin' thing guys, gals, and nonbinary pals: TransMisogyny, as stated, affects anyone that could be perceived as Feminine(the gyny part), whether they actually are or aren't.

Do you know what we base hate crime on, in the US at least? Intent. If someone attacks, say, a dark skinned woman because they think she's black, but it turns out she just has a really dark spray tan, or is Indian, or a Pacific Islander, or South American or it was really dark out, or... it doesn't matter. The intent is what matters.

You see, in this example, the woman was attacked because someone thought she was black and attacked her because of that false idea. Full stop. If a man attacks you, a trans woman, because he thinks you're "just a man with tits", that's a transphobic attack, full stop. That's where we stop caring about what kind of attack and what you actually looked like and deal with the intent of the attacker.

So, say we want to actually identify that intent and label it. IDK, for statistics or to relate to others or whatever. You can define that attack in whatever way you want from there, I guess, but if the attacker thinks "this man needs to be taught a lesson" then the attack was actually that the man intended to attack a "man", despite that not being how you identify. The overall attack is still transphobic, but comes from a place of misandry/androphobia. This comes down to a whole other list of things I'll get character limited trying to explain, but the intent is what defines an act. That's why Attempted Murder is a crime. Just because someone doesn't finish the job, doesn't mean go scot free; the intent was to kill.

___________

Let me finish with a plea. Please stop trying to make TMA/TME work. The only thing it actually does for the trans community is waste time, waste energy, and gets us to use transphobic and exclusive language. If you still think I'm wrong, go spend some time researching what intersectionality gets wrong. Spend time thinking of things that can help us all retain our rights and fight for the ones we've lost or never had.

Yelling at each other about who is more oppressed right now is by far the most idiotic thing we could be doing as a community. It's like playing chess and instead of trying to take pieces from your opponent, you knock some of your own pieces down and remove them from the board. You're just putting them in a better position to beat you. When you're down to just one pawn, your king and queen, and maybe a rook against a full board, you might as well just surrender.

If you want to be another Blair White, please get the fuck out, and stay the fuck away from pride you dumb piece of inflammatory shit. If you read this entire post and you still think it's a good idea to hate on "the other side of the spectrum" or that trans people of a different flavor are less oppressed, less subject to oppression, or anything of that nature, I invite you to please block me, and never talk to a single trans person for as long as you may live.

We don't need you. Stop holding us back.

[vanilla-voyeur]

Police brutality is a men's issue

I want to start off by saying that I am 0% denying the role that race plays into police brutality. Black people are disproportionately targeted by the police.

However, police brutality is even more of a men's issue than it is a race issue. If you look at the numbers, the ratio of men vs women who are stopped by the police, incarcerated, and killed by the police is a significantly higher disparity than the ratio of black vs white people.

This page which pulls data from a variety of sources goes over the numbers for various types of police brutality. Figure 1 of this study shows the race and gender breakdown. Statista has information on police killings by gender and by race. (Please be aware that any study that shows a higher raw number of white people killed/incarcerated/etc is not taking into account that black people only make up 12% of the population.) To summarize, in 2022 black people were 2.6 times more likely to be killed by the police than white people. Men were 23.2 times more likely to be killed by the police than women.

Also anecdotally have you ever noticed that the vast majority of high profile cases of police brutality are black men? That's not a coincidence. Black men are our most vulnerable population when it comes to police brutality. Partially because they're black but mostly because they're men. In fact white men are more likely to be killed by the police than black women. This is a form of intersectionality of marginalization that I'm just not really seeing brought up anywhere.

When I tried to Google stuff about misandry and police brutality, I instead got a lot of articles about misogyny and police brutality. Duckduckgo was a little better at finding a few articles on misandry but most of the articles were focused on how race affects victimization without bringing up gender at all.

So why is this major aspect of the issue being ignored?

Btw sorry this is US-centric. I understand the situation presents itself differently in other countries but I'm not well-versed enough in global politics to speak to these issues in other countries.

Once again to be clear, black people are disproportionately targeted by the police. Black women are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by the police than white women. Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than white men. Just because this is a gender issue does not stop this from being a race issue. This problem is a yes and situation.

[columboposting]

Honestly not even the last fifteen years — try since the 1990s. A lot of the language we use to talk about social issues today comes from academia, and it is language that has been in use in academia for far longer than it’s been in vernacular. “Social constructs” and the ways in which texts produce/subvert/question them have been, broadly speaking, the primary concern of literary scholarship since the ‘80s. The third wave of feminism started in the late ‘80s; Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1989, and very soon after it gets picked up by a lot of literary critics. Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is pretty much the starting point of postcolonial theory, came out in 1978. By the year 2000 Queer Theory and Gender Studies are flourishing. Fuck, I was so busy talking about those guys I almost forgot to mention that Marxist lit theory has been alive and well since the fucking ‘70s!!!! If you go back and read a piece of literary theory from 1998 you will probably be surprised by how much it sounds like it could have been written yesterday. But that’s because many of the ways we now describe gender and race and sexuality were invented by academics — queer and female academics, academics of color, other marginalized academics — thirty-forty years ago. 

Obviously, criticism from the early/mid-20th century is, to generalize a little, going to suck for all the reasons you think it will; back then, most critics had this idea that a text had one objective correct meaning, and the critics deciding on that meaning were overwhelmingly wealthy straight white men (that said, we even owe some things to those nerds — mainly close reading, looking at a paragraph or a sentence of a work and examining its form and content and using it to draw conclusions about the work at large, AKA what’s happening in 90% of tumblr media analysis). But since the 70s literary criticism has been primarily post-structuralist, and since the 90s that post-structuralism has primarily turned its attention to examining how a text understands structures of class, race, gender, sexuality, culture and society at large in very nuanced, intelligent ways. There are a lot of fantastic scholars doing a lot of fantastic work!!! Post-Colonialism, Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and New Historicism are all doing quite well at the moment — within the past fifteen years or so you can start throwing Ecocriticism into the hat, if you want to see people talking about how literature treats the natural world. By dismissing “scholars,” you’re ignoring the fact that there are a lot of really cool literary critics you could be learning from RIGHT NOW!!

And this is a little beside the point but I do really want to note that also: you’re neglecting the fact that YOU are doing scholarship, even if you’re not “scholars”!! Like, I hate the people who invented close reading, but holy shit close reading is the foundation of like every piece of tumblr media analysis ever!! Furthermore: Frankly, if you’re talking about the latent meaning hidden within the text you are probably also doing a little bit of psychoanalysis because that’s where we get that idea about reading literature (sorry, fellow Freud haters). If you’re talking about the emotional reaction the text provokes, if you’re interested in how the serialized nature of dracula daily changes the experience vs reading it as it was published — congratulations, that’s Phenomenology, the study of how people experience a text!!!!!! Plus there are (as previously mentioned) all the ways that we get our vocab on gender and race and class and social constructs from theory. Your blorbo analysis post is a form of literary criticism that is deeply, deeply indebted to both modern post-structuralist theory and earlier 20th century ideas of close reading and psychoanalysis, even if you don’t know it. In that respect, and in the fact that modern criticism is going to be working under many of the exact same methodological and ideological influences as you, I promise literary scholarship is worth your time. 

since I'm paying more attention to drac daily stuff this year I'm seeing a lot of posts saying "scholars always get the book wrong" and guys, ya gotta read better scholarship. poke around on jstor and google scholar for publications from the last ~15 years. see if you can find queer / feminist / postcolonial centered journals with online public archives. find a writer you agree with and see who else they cite. I prommy that academics are not your enemy and a lot of them are in their line of work precisely because they're just as not normal about their blorbos as you are. hashtag don't turn this into another "historians will say they're just friends."

[janeindamembrane]

Final Assessment

Introduction:

Watchmen (2019), is a limited series from HBO which is a retelling/extension of the 1986 graphic novels of the same name. Starring Regina King as ‘Angela Abar’, the series features many vigilantes in a story that sets heroes amongst politics, morality, and corrupt and flawed power dynamics. The idea of the hero and its modern day playability is challenged by the thematic scope of the show and the flawed nature of the heroes at the center.

To sources:

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” centers around how people look towards images to recognize parts of themselves. There is the eventual realization that the self (the I) does not perfectly resemble the other, and thus an ego which attempts to reconcile the two is formed.

bell hooks, “Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” discusses how other audiences besides the dominant audience can derive pleasure and catharsis from media/representations. A focus is put on black female audiences because of their invisibility in media as well as their position within the intersection of not being a male and not being white. Oppositional gaze can provide interrogation or ego libido.

Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” is about the continual legitimization of systems of power even within opposition. It talks about how perceived differences have too long been manipulated to further drive apart and that the power that difference holds must be redefined.

Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation” focuses on audiences interest in truth/realism and how images and the languages around them can come to define truth. If truth is defined by images, the creators of these images hold power over the depicted who bear the burden of the depictions. The article discusses the importance of participation/representation as a response to previously standing power dynamics. Common Hollywood stereotypes about races are mentioned and later stereotypes, what they reveal about society, and the issue of completely ignoring stereotypes is discussed.

Methodology:

First, I will discuss the similarities in the above sources, particularly pertaining to agreements surrounding power structures in media and the dominant (white, male) audience. Second I will discuss differences amongst the sources regarding how non dominant audiences view media and what role dominant media plays in creating an oppositional media/view and vice versa. The final section will look at two scenes one from Watchmen’s episode 6, “This Extraordinary Being”, and the other from episode 8, “A God Walked into Abar”. I will point out what I believe the authors would take away from the scenes.

Section One:

All of the authors talk about representation of images and how dissimilarity between the images one sees and their own reality can cause them to mend their own representation or image of themselves.

Lacan talks of the mirror phase: when the connection between the image of oneself and what is reflected back to them in the real world (the images of others) is perfectly in sync. This perfect reflection is eventually ruptured, whether it is simply maturity or the realization that one does not (such as through racial, class, or gender difference) resemble the others promoted within society. Lacan mentions that the reaction of forming the social I, the version of the I heavily informed by society and its views, is mediated by cultural norms. The other theorists would elaborate on that and say that these norms are power systems which continue to enforce themselves through the distortion of difference, particularly the weaponization of stereotype.

Additionally, these theorists (beyond Lacan) would agree that there is intersectionality within these power systems. The title of Lorde's works point these out: age, race, class, and sex. It is along these intersections that minorities will be unable to resonate fully with the representations created by those in dominant positions within the intersections. Lorde and hooks talk about the inner relation between the black woman and the white woman beyond just the relation of man and woman. The white woman may be the image of desire that the protagonist watches, but the black woman is ignored, belittled, or violated. Additionally, while the black male may not have the looking and representational privileges of the white male, they still have a higher position than black females.

The qualitative differences of these groups have been distorted to create a mythical difference, as Lorde calls it. Or they have been simplified to several characteristics which are then deemed negative enough to justify certain treatments. The representations of certain groups holds large weight because of how little representations there are are who these representations have been controlled by. The theorists agree that marginalized groups are forced to gain viewing pleasures in different ways because they do not see the 'mirror image' of themselves when it comes to the dominant images produced. When these images do actually resemble them, the distortion of differences and stereotyping can cause the audience to have difficult views of themselves and others.

Section Two:

The difference among the theorists is what the takeaway of the power dynamic in images should be. The oppositional gaze of bell hooks talks about the importance of continuously critiquing the dominant media in how it ignores or represents minorities. Shohat and Stan talk about the importance of representation not only in images (casting) but when it comes to who is creating. Since Lacan does not directly address the power dynamics of images beyond that of the ego being heavily informed by cultural norms, he does not adequately address what to do when those culture norms are unfortunately racist, sexist, and etc.

Lorde provides the most radical view that insists that certain forms of opposition only exist to uphold systems. For example, even by being critical of media and explaining it, it upholds the idea of certain marginalized group explaining themselves to the dominant group.

What the takeaway from the power dynamic is- should new images be formed or use same tools

Section Three: Is there Justice for The Hooded Justice?

[From left to right and clockwise] Will watches the Cyclops headquarters burn; He takes off his mask and confronts the brutal nature of the violence; His memories (through Angela's experience) flashback to him finding his wife (as a baby) during the Tusla Race Massacre.

The scene from Watchmen’s sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being”, that I will be looking at occurs from _________. This is when Will Reeves burns down a warehouse belonging to Fred after killing the occupants individually inside. Before I get into what I believe would be the key takeaways from our authors about this scene, I want to to do a quick analysis of Will Reeves who is the vigilante The Hooded Justice. I think his character is pretty well encapsulated by a quote from later in the series:

People who wear masks are driven by trauma. They’re obsessed with justice because of some injustice they suffered, usually when they were kids. -Episode 8, “A God Walks into Abar”,

For Will Reeves, the Hooded Justice is literally a mask but also figuratively one that lets him escape being a black man while also protecting others. He is attempting to right the wrongs that he and others like him have undergone, but his way of doing this through hiding his blackness and embracing the violence of the original injustices eventually consume his character causing his wife and child to leave.

Audre Lorde’s writing focuses on feminism and the subcategory of racist feminism and other intersections within feminism. I do believe she would, however, find connections between her writings’ philosophies on difference, oppression, and liberation with the ways that Will Reeve’s enacts Justice. Lorde strongly asserts that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (110); true redemption is knowledge and community, yet acts of redemption which seek to further alienate or (in Will’s case) enact the violence he previously suffered. He strangles one of the guys in the building in a way that resembles his lynching. He later hypnotizes Judd Crawford to hang himself. He is using the exact playbook- the ‘tools’- of his oppressors. Watchmen forces the audience and Will to confront the question of whether this is justice. Yes, the ones attacked our villainous and racist, but Will has (as seen through his later confrontation with his wife and child) let his anger consume him and become an opposition yet a mirror to his oppressors. When he burns down the cyclops headquarters, he uses the mask of Hooded Justice- the mask of liberation- to enact his rage. When he watches the building burn down, he is forced to confront the similarity of the situation to the Tulsa Massacre. During this scene, he takes off his mask and watches not as a vigilante but as a man confronting that he is capable of the same violence done to him.

There is the continuous symbolism of the mask. On the practical level it is so Will can escape identification. But on top of the physical mask there is also the mask of painting the skin around his eyes white- so that the Hooded Justice is mistaken as a white man. This is effective since the show within a show parody, American Hero Story, portrays the Hooded Justice as white. June (his wife) advises him to do so since “If you're going to stay a hero, then the townsfolk are going to need to think that one of their own is under [your hood]” ().

This touches upon the idea of the mirror image, as this extra mask is all about how he is perceived by others. June talks of being “one of their own”, and how that is the only way for the Hooded Justice to be a hero. While Lacan doesn’t touch upon the ideas of audiences with power (as Shohat and Stam do), June and Will are concerned about the Hooded Justice’s reputation with the white audience as it is this audience who controls potentially violent backlash against Will. When white audiences think the Hooded Justice is white, they see not only themselves in him but an idealized version which insinuates power within themselves to stand up to wrongs when those wrongs do not confront their own privilege such as the saving of the white couple after Reeves survives the lynching. Laura Mulvey refers to this as the pleasure of ego libido (715). If this audience were to know the Hooded Justice is black and that he is particularly acting against injustices against the black community by white people in positions of power (such as the police force), the mirror stage (the perfect reflection) would be broken. Since they are the dominant audience, this would not result in ego defense. The white audience does not alter their own social Is (the ego) to better fit with the ideals of the Hooded Justice, as that would require them to still look up to him. The “cultural intervention” of a world steeped in racist power dynamics defines what the white audience’s relation to the black man and the othering competition he provides (Lacan, 79). Instead, he would be villainized and persecuted, through the distortion of difference (the mythical difference()), and he would be fit into the stereotype of the violent black man. Unfortunately because of the Hooded Justice’s visibility, this stereotype would gain weight; the public image of one black man being violent would, due to the limited representation of black men, come to dominant beliefs by the white audience about the nature of all black men (Shohat and Stam, 183).

Will Reeves own relation to his blackness is complicated. It could be argued that he himself is attempting to uphold a mirror stage or ego libido- he wants to be like the cowboys he grew up watching on screen (in the end montage during Crawford’s hanging snippets from Bass Reeve’s movie are shown). The Bass Reeves character is the inspiration behind Will Reeves joining the police force, and when Will realizes that he corruptness of the force he creates his own type of Lone Ranger. He is not allowed to this ego libido as he is reminded of how little power he has in his black body. His white coworkers lynch him simply because they can. He attempts to become white through the Hooded Justice, and while at first logistically necessary, he eventually depends on it. The only way he can be a hero, and fulfill his need to become like the heroes he watched on screen, is to be the white presenting Hooded Justice. He is attempting to present the Hooded Justice as the mirror image of white ‘heroes’. The same ones that a la Birth of a Nation are the exact perpetrators of the racist and white supremicist myths that subject Will to his treatment.

[from left to right] Will Reeves assuming power through the police uniform and through enacting a form of violence (strangling) that is very intimate and resembles the lynching he suffered.

He has become the emulation of the tools of the master to the point where he denies positive representation of ego libido for his son. He wears the costumes of systems of oppression- whether it is the mask of the Hooded Justice or his police uniform- and when he gives up on changing these systems he uses his masks to commit the same retaliatory violence. By becoming the Hooded Justice and joining the force, he provides opposition which provides interrogation of the systems. Yet by embracing the whiteness of the Hooded Justice and stooping to the same violence enacted to him, he adds to the system- perhaps experiencing some ego libido by being somewhat accepted (contingently) into some forms of white power. The show does not allow this to be a win, as shown by his facial expressions in the aftermath, the allusion to the Tulsa Massacre, and the loss of his family. Additionally, his fight against Cyclops does not stop the struggle that his granddaughter faces. When tools of oppression are used in opposition, perhaps time/history are endless.

bell hooks talks of intersectionality and how black men can still hold power within the patriarchy and white women can still hold the privilege of being white. Will Reeves, despite his own restrictions, is able to access certain privileges. His being in the police force is contrasted by the image of Angela (through the Nostalgia memories) who faces other restrictions due to being black and a woman. His access to the Hooded Justice gives him a semblance more of access to the white male patriarchal structure- which he uses to get temporary revenge rather than elevate those around of (in terms of intersectionality) below him within this system.

This is seen in his interaction, following the burning of the Cyclops headquarters, with his son and wife, June. His son looks up to him (because of the limited representation of black men having systematic power), but Will realizes with horror that the path of the Hooded Justice is not something he should want for his son. The costume represents hiding true identity and anger rather than true justice. His anger at his son can be interpreted as anger at himself and his failure to become 'Bass Reeves' and his further contribution to the lack of justice in the law (as a vigilante).

The larger question that the series poses is the morality of the situation, and the chicken and the egg debate (mentioned in the next episode I will be analyzing) over history and its injustices. Will Reeves may be using the tool of his oppressors, but whether there were other tools available to him (the community and understanding that Lorde touts) is debatable. Reeves violence is reaction to injustice, but will be weaponized to further stereotype racial difference so that further generations will continue to suffer the same injustices and stigmas.

Section Three and One Half: A God in a Black Body

Not addressed by Dr Manhattan but seen by people around him (also meta because of the influence on audiences).

Throwaway line about appropriation but otherwise no dialogue

It’s quite an interesting form you’ve decided to take. It’s not the 80’s anymore, Jon. This kind of appropriation is considered quite problematic now. - Adrien Veidt, Episode 8,

People around him perceive or may put weight on it but ultimately the difference of body distorted (Lorde), (

Choice of making Jon a Jewish man

Difference of Lorde perspective Shohat

Comfortability within this body and also previous non showing of manhattan (not confined)

Opposite of being praised

Ending potentially could be seen as retaliation

[genderkoolaid]

“The white woman had just claimed that all women were bound together by their common plight under patriarchy, but the black woman disagreed. She asked: ‘When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see?’ The white woman replied that she saw a woman in the mirror. ‘That’s precisely the issue’, said the other, ‘I see a black woman’. She then went on to explain how her ethnicity was part of her everyday consciousness, whereas, for white women, their colour was invisible because they were (and still are) privileged in that respect. Kimmel was profoundly struck by this exchange because he realised that when he looked at himself in the mirror, not only had he failed to see his whiteness, but he had also failed to see his gender. What confronted him was just the image of a person – an ordinary human being.” (quoted from Men and Masculinity: the basics by Nigel Edley)

So thinking about this quote, because this is very important when talking about intersectionality.

Dominant identities are seen as transparent. They aren't seen as material things in the same way marginalization is. We other people by their marginalization and therefore make their marginalization noticeable, while ignoring our dominance because we are not forced to acknowledge it (until we are). We see things like black womanhood as intersectional, but not white womanhood, because white womanhood has long been seen as the default, and black womahood as a deviation from the immaterial norm.

When trans men look in the mirror, we see a trans man. It's not like we see a nebulous trans person and don't see our maleness. They are intertwined; I see a trans man (amongst other things), not just a person. My manhood cannot be invisible or negligible for me, it has to be a part of my everyday consciousness.

Transness changes gender. Transness intersects with gender and changes how it is treated. It changes how womanhood is perceived, and the intersection of transness and womanhood and it's unique oppression is transmisogyny.

We cannot ignore the intersection of transness and manhood. To do so would be to do the same thing Michael Kimmel found himself doing in that quote: making manhood invisible.

Except here, manhood is being viewed as privileged because people refuse to see the intersection. They see it as manhood + transness, two separate things. People view it as "you are privileged for being a man but oppressed for being trans," which is not intersectionality. That treats transness and manhood as two things which do not interact with each other. Even more, it views "manhood" as being defined by cis manhood, as if trans men are simply cis men with some amorphous "transness" applied (and therefore possess some level cis male privilege, which is only weakened by being trans).

Transness impacts gender. Transness impacts manhood. It changes how manhood is perceived and treated. Transness turns manhood deviant. There is an intersection between transness and manhood, and there is a unique oppression experienced by those at that intersection.

When we deny that manhood and transness can interact and that transness changes manhood, we are denying intersectionality on this specific point for no other reason than we see manhood as transparent and immaterial.

When we see dominant manhood as transparent, it's a benefit to dominant manhood because it goes unquestioned. When we view marginalized manhood as transparent and ignore it's intersection with gender, it is a detriment because we ignore so many interactions between the patriarchy and transness, race, ability, colonialism and prevent the people at those intersections from having a voice to describe those experiences.

[kingjasnah]

for the unpopular opinions: i know i'm sending this to you, isha kingjasnah, but i feel that jasnah's character, while it had the potential to be really interesting, is now approaching #girlboss status. like some of the moments that could have been handled with more nuance (especially by acknowledging the class aspect) like the kharbranth alleyway scene, her feminist letter, her role in the conversation about what to do about the heralds and the singers in OB (the one where kaladin keeps getting shut down 😒), as well as her sword through the throat moment in row ended up way too exaggerated and Strong Female Character™. like especially in alethkar, where we see class / caste and race (referring to the singers here) as such a powerful system of oppression, the feminist intent falls flat because it ignores the class aspects so blatantly. like there is zero intersectionality here.

tl;dr jasnah's character suffers both solely in (a) the understanding of gender by using very Strong Female Character™ moments, and in (b) an understanding of intersectionality and the ways she has privilege as an important aspect of her identity.

this is SO funny cause i just sent an identical ask to ella @bridgefourisgayrights so u get two takes for the price of one <333

anyway yea she was my fave character in book one and even now i think the way we are revealed more and more about her experiences in a really sinister way is chilling in a cool way......the kharbranth scene where shallan is like holy shit what happened to you. the mentions of her """""illness"""""" as a child in ob. whatever the fuck amaram was implying before she ruined his whole career. like CHARACTER wise she's still so shrimpteresting like i go crazy when i think about her relationship with her father (prologue era) and with renarin but ur ABSOLUTELY right whenever the narrative shifts from being not about who she is and more about her place in the story im like...........who tf is she. what is she doing.

jasnah is such a weird case cause she understands class politics more than any other lighteyes in the series and it seems like she prides herself on objectivity, that's why that scene with kaladin could've been actually interesting if it meant shifting her knowledge and expertise from the theoretical to the practical...that's an interesting lens to look through if we actually got a chance to think of it that way. and she goes from that to the emancipation scene in row which was equally theoretical and shallow. #girlboss. i don't think she's anywhere near one dimensional but it feels like the further we go on the more those dimensions seem 2 conform to a very white feminist angle

ty mira ive been thinking about this a lot.....i am still isha kingjasnah 😔 and she still makes me crazy but it is unfortunate that her character has suffered under said kingship

[starfieldcanvas]

"your struggle and my struggle are connected, we are part of the same larger fight" is solidarity. intersectionality is different. it doesn't just mean a positive message about "struggles intersecting", even if that's what it sounds like (and even if you have heard smart and compassionate people use it that way repeatedly.)

the term was coined in an essay by kimberlé crenshaw about the way both the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement (and specifically the legal edifice set up to defend the rights of women and black people in U.S. courts) frequently seemed to forget black women existed, or, when their existence was acknowledged, they were expected to choose only one part of themselves to identify with and fight for.

this pressure to separate out into one identity or the other was not problematic merely because it made the two associated movements less effective. it was a problem because it ignored the discrimination black women faced specifically for being black women. (Crenshaw cites a case of a company that couldn't be sued for either gender or race discrimination for never hiring black women, since they DID hire white women and black men.) crenshaw asserts that marginalization is not additive—that is, being a black woman does not translate to "black problems plus woman problems." rather, an "intersectional experience" refers to the experience of discrimination that is specific to the point where multiple marginalizations intersect, and which may actually be quite different from what is seen as "generic" discrimination against either category on its own.

a simple example would be the way that post-war USA patriarchy is famous for pressuring women to stay at home with the children...but that wasn't actually how they treated BLACK women at all. Black women were looked down on for having children, looked down on even more for staying home with them, and were very much expected to work outside the home constantly. so if you tried to explain their specific situation as "black problems plus woman problems" you'd be badly wrong!

crenshaw's essay was a critique of how discrimination law was written and adjudicated. it was also a critique of social movements that claimed to speak for all within a marginalized category when really they were ignoring the unique situations of many multiply-marginalized people within that category.

it eventually became a term people used to remind those in a given movement to stop being bigoted toward their own members, reinforcing the idea that no movement's goals should be driven solely by the most socially dominant within the marginalized group. "hey feminists stop being racist and start caring more about race issues, lots of women aren't white." "hey queer people stop being classist and start caring more about economic issues, lots of queer people are poor." "hey labor stop being sexist and start caring more about pink-collar jobs, lots of exploited workers are women." and so on.

and from there it got turned into a generic "remember to take other identities into account" mantra, which itself got reworked into a dozen reasonable variations on "remember that other marginalized groups are your allies."

but if you want to know the original meaning, OP's summary is pretty spot on.

I'm taking the word "intersectionality" away from internet discourse and putting it on the shelf until people learn that the meaning is "the sum of your identity can not be split into pieces and sorted neatly into easy-to-understand boxes because each piece influences the rest" and not "these people are The Most Oppressed"

[fortheloveofqueer]

Intersectionality in Queer Media

Hi all, my name is Cora and I’m fully new to Tumblr, but let’s skip the pleasantries and get right to it :)

As someone who has identified as queer as long as I have labelled my sexuality, I have always liked seeing queer people who are like me in popular media. While I do love reading queer theory and find that texts and essays that are a part of throrough queer analysis, media in the form of TV, movies, podcasts, etc. is much easier to consume. It is less dense and typically more likely to reach a broader audience than dense essay collections that typically would have to be searched for deliberately in order to be seen. While some media that depicts queer people does so in a tokenistic way in attempts to seem inclusive, there is also a lot of media that actually depicts accurate representation of queer people and doesn’t ignore a queer character’s intersectional identities. 

One show I love and I feel actually is inclusive and attempts to bring about discourse on why ignoring that intersectionality is harmful is Shameless. Shameless not only features a plethora of queer characters, it does so in a way that also acknowledges their race, gender, class, and disability or mental illnesses that all need to be seen in order to truly understand who the characters are. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the show as just a consumer of the media as well (#Gallavich ftw) but I think it’s an amazing piece to look at for a show that is in its roots a comedy/drama. 

One thing that has always stood out to me in Shameless is the way it takes its main family of characters from the South Side of Chicago and consistently depicts the disparities between the Gallaghers as a poor family and other characters like Jimmy/Steve and his family who come from wealth. Particularly, in the queer interactions between these to families is between Ian and Jimmy/Steve’s dad, Ned. The two spark a sexual relationship through encounters in a gay club, but there is a huge difference looking into the way these to characters handle their own sexuality. Ian, coming from a poor family, is confident in his gayness; his family knows his sexuality, he’s completely open to them about other gay relationships he has had, and he doesn’t hide the fact that he works in a gay club. Ned, on the other hand, is married to a woman, has had multiple children with her, and only expresses his sexuality in secret. The disparities between the twos class backgrounds lead into why they are expressing themselves the way they do; Ian has always had to be close to his family, they went through a lot together from being separated into foster care/group homes or having to all find ways to make money in order to have food and a roof over their heads, the Gallagher family is a tight knit group. Oppositely, Ned is completely closeted. He and his family are well off and have the means to keep their personal lives separate, and have not had to form the same reliances on one another in times of despair like the Gallagher family. These differences highlight how people are able to hide their sexualities if they have the means to create a facade of a straight-lifestyle. We see Ian getting bullied through school for being gay, while nobody even knows Ned is gay because he has a wife and only expresses his sexuality when he feels like he can/ when he wants to. 

A topic for another day but I’d like to mention is the way Shameless also opens up for a discussion regarding race and class in its latter seasons with the way Liam, as a black person, is raised by a completely white family and only begins to learn about black culture when he begins going to a wealthy school and talking to the one other black person he has grown up around, V. The show is not afraid of having the “tough conversations'' and has had a platform to bring about useful discourse through its airtime and beyond.

[stuhde]

After taking some time off to cry, understand, and speak with myself. I decided to write something out expressing my thoughts and feelings about everything going on in this country. It’s long, powerful, and provactive but I need to get my voice out. Like, comment, share, have discussions with me when i finish my social media cleanse, but I will not stand silent in times of injustice. 

After seeing and reading the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, I was quick to delete all my social media apps and hide away from the “uwu Black lives matter posts,” the underserving claps white celebrities get from doing the bare minimum, and just witnessing the continuous realities of injustice that take place in this country.

As a first-generation Sudanese American, I was nothing but confused and lost in the midst of a growing movement, particularly George Floyd’s murder hitting home the most because the police who were arresting Floyd was responding to a call from an Arab American-owned store. With intersecting identities of being black, Muslim, and Arab, witnessing the anti-blackness rhetoric spew from my religious and ethnic communities clash with my racial identity stirred tension and fear in what it means to be a black Arab Muslim in this country and what my place is in the Black Lives Matter Movement. I often found myself asking, “what is my duty to the black community?”, “Am I too Arab to be black, or am I too black to be Arab?” And “what is my privilege in identifying as Arab and a non-hijabi Muslim?” Black Arabs like me often experience issues with invisible intersectionality, people often forcing us to “take sides” or strongly reside with one of our identities when it sees fit (refer to how people responded to the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident).

But I have come to the conclusion that my blackness is comprised of being a woman, Muslim, and Arab - not separately and that’s what makes this unique. Black Arabs are often finding themselves at the struggle of fighting against racial injustice because of our skin color and against the xenophobic and Islamaphobic rhetorics that have only increased since the beginning of the Trump campaign. However, you all have a duty not to ignore the experiences of black Muslim immigrants in this country, like Yassin Mohammed - he was murdered by police in Georgia earlier this month. Say his name and remember him.

Yassin like me is a Sudanese American - black, Arab, and Muslim but he wasn’t reported or written as such. The media called him a “Muslim man” and yet, our Muslim community remained silent. Why? Because it only brings to light the deep and historical roots of racism that are instilled in our community and we need to address it. Muslim and Arab Americans have a duty to stand with our black brothers and sisters in times of injustice. They were there for us in supporting Palestinian liberation and with us against the Muslim ban - now it is our turn. Listen to Black Americans and Black civil rights groups about their unique experiences and learn how we can best support our collective struggle against injustice. You have a duty to educate yourself and tackle anti-blackness in our community. As quoted in Surah An-Nisa [4:135], “be persistently standing firm in justice, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives” - support your local CAIR organization and others like the Arab American Action Network and the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, who are all standing with the Black Lives Matter movement and doing their best to bring all our communities together to end all forms of racism, discrimination, and injustice.

For my fellow Sudanese, this is our fight too. While we must recognize the centuries-long of cruelty and pain the African-American community has endured since forcefully coming to this country and understanding that their pain is different from ours, we share the same skin and we will go through the same thing they are going through. I can tell you personally, from even the youngest age that I have always been afraid of the police. Why? Because I witnessed the disproportionate amount of cruelty and violence with which people who look like me are treated with.

While our older Sudanese community members will try hard to erase our blackness simply because we have drops of Arab blood, at a tragic reality we have all experienced and witnessed discrimination and racism at the hands of law enforcement. This is hard because we have a complicated relationship with race on the fault line of racial consciousness because our country is on the border between Arab and black Africa. However it is, we are BLACK and we need to have conversations about race in our community. We as Sudanese people are not doing enough to eradicate racism and prejudice that exists in our community as well as our Muslim, Arab, and general US society. The next phase in the revolution is to recognize that these issues exist in our Muslim community, come together with black Americans and African-Americans, and create change to take down these systemic institutions that were never designed to protect black and brown folk.

I will continue to do my social media cleanse, but I welcome those who wish to discuss what my views and opinions are more with me - should you agree or disagree. People who care will know how to reach me. In this time, I am reading, learning, and liberating myself to make a change and I can only ask you to do the same. There are so much power and knowledge invested in books:

How to be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Dr. by Ibram X Kendi and Jason Reynolds

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis (HIGHLY recommend to my Muslim and/or Arab folk)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Resources for my black Muslims, courtesy of my University’s Muslim Student Association:

The Muslim Anti-Racist Collaborative - deconstructing anti-Blackness within the Muslim community Believers Bail Out - re-imagining the prison and police systems through Islamic perspectives Sapelo Square - an online forum that places Black Muslims at the center: Reconstructed Magazine - a creative magazine and conversation space led by Black, Shia, and queer Muslims The Black American Muslim - space for Black American Muslims to share testimonials and resources on faith, history, and power Justice For Muslims Collective - an organization reimagining a world where radical inclusion leads to collective liberation for Muslim communities and beyond Kayla Renée Wheeler, Ph.D. - Islamic Studies Professor who created the BlackIslam syllabus Amina Wadud, Ph.D. - African-American scholar on gender and race in Islam. Learn more about her through her interviews here Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Ph.D. - Scholar-Artist-Activist & Author of Muslim Cool Islamophobia is Racist Syllabus - resources to understand empire, anti-Muslim racism, and ideology

For my black friends, I hope you are well and I hope you are safe. I am with you all the way through in our fight for liberation and human rights. Take care of yourself first before anyone else and if you need a minute or more before protesting and educating those around you, take your time, you need it. All the love x

[gofancyninjaworld]

watching ONE write women

One of the joys of following a writer for a while is that you get to follow how their ideas develop.   One of the things that ONE brought up in an interview (annoyingly I’ve lost the link) was that he didn’t think that he wrote women particularly well. 

I was thinking about that.  When ONE says that, what comes across to me is that he has no problem writing a female character as an individual rather than a role.  All the girls and women he’s written so far have their own voices, own their problems, and have something to do within the story that would be noticeable if they weren’t there.  Quite frankly, that alone is over and above what various tests of representation (such as the Bechdel test) ask for.  

What he’s not so good at is appreciating what being female brings to a character’s experiences and outlook.  But he’s not just left it at that.  More on what he’s been doing in a bit (and under the cut).

“...the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges...” -- Anatole France

With his sharp eye and talent for exploring the implications of whatever he posits, ONE has brought up some issues are not inherently gendered, but usually are. 

A: Childcare

Metal Bat appears to be the main, if not sole, carer for Zenko.  How it affects him is fascinating.  He’s one of the longest-serving heroes in the Hero Association, being there before Class S was formed, literally within the first six months of its establishment.  He’s been extremely loyal and is highly trusted by the HA -- they put Narinki’s life into his hands without fear.  His battle strength is literally praised to the heavens.

Metal Bat makes Zenko a priority, structuring his availability around her school schedule and being present in her life. He gets very angry if these times are threatened without overwhelmingly good cause.  His reward is to be perceived by the Hero Association as less committed and so they under-recognise him in terms of ranking, and since rank and pay are linked, under-pay him as well.  It’s a story all too many women can relate to.  But that’s not all.

Because ONE writes so simply yet conscientiously, something else comes up and has a peek: intersectionality. It’s the concept that we often have multiple social disadvantages that interact and compound our problems.  The first is sexism.  Regardless of whatever childcare policy the HA has, the sexist assumption that only women care (for the record: this is bullshit) makes it unlikely for them to ask Metal Bat.  Second, social capital. The fact that he’s Zenko’s sole carer means that he has low social capital, that informal network of people around you who can help out -- or tell you where to find help and what things to say in order to get that help. [Aside: this is why programmes to help people, unless they reach out aggressively, tend to disproportionately attract those who need it least.]  Metal Bat doesn’t have the knowledge.  The third is the challenge brought by his being a 17-year old boy.  He’s quick to perceive challenge as threat, and threat as something to be met by anger.  Witness him threatening to smash the HA headquarters if it turns out that he’s missed Zenko’s piano recital for nothing -- completely not useful to anything. [Another aside: the importance of learning to disambiguate emotions and do useful things with them even if it means being vulnerable as a part of growing up as a man is the whole point of Mob Psycho 100.]

What do the Neo Heroes do?  They ask Metal Bat if he wants help with childcare AND HE JUMPS SHIP PRONTO.  If that’s not an indictment of the Hero Association, I don’t know what is.

B: Emotional Labour

Saitama has been delegating more and more of the day-to-day work to Genos.  What started as an act of service to express his gratitude, respect and love for Saitama is increasingly turning into a second job for Genos.  It’s not just the cooking and cleaning and the shopping and the bailing Saitama out if he’s forgotten his wallet again, it’s also the worrying about Saitama, sometimes at inappropriate times.  Has he drunk enough water?  Has he clean clothes in good repair? What sales is he looking forward to? Have they been marked on the calendar?  It’s honestly not doing Genos any good, and it’s one of those things all too many frustrated wives and girlfriends can relate to.  This doing the practical and emotional work for another is not intrinsically gendered, but funny how often it breaks that way.

It’s not doing Saitama any good either.  He’s using this freed up time to fritter his life ever more aggressively away, playing games with King and finding pointless competitions to enter, all while complaining about feeling less and less connected to anything (if you don’t address the problem, it doesn’t get better, duh!).  Worse, he’s started to take that gift of service for granted, witness him airily telling King how he’ll just have Genos go clear up the mess of monsters he’s left outside the flat.  I was heartened to see what happened when Saitama went a little too far and asked Genos to go cook and instead of jumping up, Genos gave him the the evil eye and let the awkwardness hang there.  That was good -- there’s hope for this guy yet.

Speaking of Genos, he also over-functions for something else Saitama struggles with: advocating for himself.  He tends to have Genos be the ugly one so he doesn’t have to be.   You can see just how bad he is at self-advocacy when Forte and friends could invite themselves into Saitama’s house at will despite his protests -- and it stopped the instant Genos showed up.

In a sense, it’s not surprising that Genos can do that. When you’re differently-abled (and for once, this is not a euphemism) as he is, being able to clearly ask for what you want and need is life-and-death necessary. If Genos was shy about it, he’s long since had to discard that.  But!  Let me point to a nuance the story touches on.  How pushy you can be without being punished for it depends a lot on who you are, intersecting strongly with race, gender, social status, etc (remember my mentioning intersectionality before). What’s called assertive in a man is called bitchy or sharp-elbowed in a woman.  Even taking gender and race out of the equation, there’s still a noticeable difference in the way the world treats Saitama and Genos.  You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to understand the way the short, ugly Dr. Kuseno sweats making sure that Genos positively radiates youth, beauty, wealth and power. That’s part of his right to ask and be taken seriously.  You can see how drastically different it is for Saitama, even from his middle school days.  Genos notices, and makes sure to leverage his social power for Saitama. 

What I love about these examples are that by not automatically heaving a woman into these characters’ roles, ONE’s brought a less frequently seen angle that illustrates the problems they deal with are not ‘womens’ issues per se but are rather inequities that disproportionately affect women -- which is at the heart of what feminists keep saying.  When you read Makai no Ossan, you can appreciate that ONE could have gone with female characters and done a great job, but his choosing not to has brought a very welcome dimension to the story.

Women proper

“I’m not like other girls”

Still, bit by bit, ONE has been working more women into his stories.  After his interview, the next thing he worked on was the single-volume sequel to Mob Psycho 100,  Reigen.  He took his challenge head-on by making the POV character Tome and putting her in an all-girls’ high school.

Throughout the story, we see Tome thinking of herself as special, better than her fellow classmates, whom she sees as vapid and shallow.  The denouement comes with Tome being humbled as she gets to know her classmates better and realises that  they pursue interests just as varied and weird as hers -- only they’re also practicing being socially adept on top of that.

It’s a gentle story, but it’s still a great side-swipe at self-internalised misogyny, the idea that it’s shameful to be like a ‘girl’ and it’s something to distance oneself from.   Fortunately, Tome can laugh at herself and grow up.

“Ha ha ha”

For a long time, the only (named) women we had in OPM were Tatsumaki and her younger sister Fubuki.   We’ve gotten more women both good and bad: in particular, it’s been very gratifying to find that one of the most dangerous, story-shaping villains in the story is Psykos.

In the webcomic, ONE’s pushed even further.  A recent Tweet featured him talking about how hard he finds it to draw women. And he’s added several.   No same-face for him!    I’ll talk about the new heroines he’s added, but first, let me draw your attentions to something most artists don’t realize they do: massively skew the gender distribution of crowds, even when it is incredibly illogical to do so.   With ONE, even drawing the crowds at the fair who gaggle at Amai Mask, he’s got a far more even balance of women and they’re not all young and pretty -- which is much more true-to-life.  He’s in the business of drawing people.

ONE has featured microaggressions before, particularly in the way Fubuki can have perfectly sound things to say and be totally ignored,  but he brings it properly to the fore with Suiko.  No one calls her incompetent, but the little put downs she gets when she puts herself forward for the hero test in lieu of her brother, oh they’re well-observed The look on her face just makes it.  I love the way she shut the recruiters up subsequently. 

  Let’s conclude this tour with a look at Webigaza’s lonely figure.  We have another mono-manically focused cyborg in the story.  Genos has been called a lot of things -- determined, obsessive even, but crazy? Never. Notice who it’s been reserved for instead.  It’s no slip of the tongue.

Wrapping Up

I’m of the impression that ONE really wants to try to capture as much of the human experience as he can in his stories, however whimsical or fantastical the stories themselves are.  I’m disarmed by his humility in accepting that he’ll never have the lived experience of half the world’s population but he sure as hell can put some effort into learning how to to writing well-realised, believable, female characters.  

I watch ONE’s continued development as a writer with interest.