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camilliar · 8 years

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I'm curious about your trans headcanons now. I see occasional fic with CP characters as trans men who are already fully transitioned by the time they get to college, but I would be really interested to see the dynamics of a character coming out as a woman. Especially a character who presents very masculine in the comic, like Jack.

Hiiiii, Ilove this ask, come here, let’s be friends.

I’m not muchof a headcanon person, by which I mean, when I have ideas about characters Itend to put them into stories instead of “what if” informal posts. Thiscomplicates my cool fannish image because I look very inactive when really I’vejust been writing tens of thousands of words that, like a dodo, I absolutelywill not post as WIPs. On the other hand, it does mean I’ve written 20,000words about Jack being trans. I’ve mentioned it here,but I’m not sure to what extent it’ll end up as a story that gets posted.

At theoutset I should say that I take a center-liberal approach to fic writing, whichis to say, I like things to be canon-compliant when they’re not straight-upAUs, but I’m not fundamentalist about what canon-compliant means. I think there’sroom to write a story that adheres to the comic canon but posits that the circumstancesof the characters’ lives and relationships might shift in the future, beyondwhere canon takes them. In that sense I think you have to look at who Jack isif you’re going to do this, and there isn’t a lot of overt evidence that he’ssuffering gender confusion.

There is,however, a lot of subtext. Jack’s story is, in a lot of ways, about strugglingto conform to a neat performance of masculinity. He works incredibly hard tomeet these social expectations; the kind of person Jack is supposed to be doesn’tdeal with mental illness, or drug dependency, or like boys. There is a lot oftextual evidence in the comic that he is consciously or subconsciously fightingagainst these things by controlling the aspects of his life that he can bringin line with expectations: how he spends his days, what his body looks like,and what he reveals about himself to other people. He’s vague and sometimesobfuscating about that, and puts his experiences in terms of what he doesrather than who he is, which I find to be an interesting kind of detachment. Hegoes around telling people he is dating Bitty, but in the comic so far hasn’t identifiedas gay or bi or even something more general like queer or not straight.

I liked thatmoment where he was talking about thecosts of playing hockey that he’s willing to endure, and he mentions, “The expectations and the spotlight …. The anxiety…” Obviouslyhe has expectations for himself, but by and large “the expectations and thespotlight” are things that are external to Jack, things happening to him; Ithink given the recurring theme of people speculating on and assessing him,fairly or unfairly, it seems like he is thinking of these expectations as thoseheld by other people, not ones he’s placing on himself. His anxiety is not anexternal thing, though; it’s something that’s real but is only ever happening inhis brain, that he’s doing to himself. It might be exacerbated by a toxicsports media culture and the general drag that is patriarchal heteronormative bullshit,but his brain is something for him to own, and he’s putting some distancebetween himself, and that.

It’s interestingto me that Jack comes out to George when they’re running. Some of this ispractical; Jack wants to talk to her in as private a place as he can, and heprobably doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to get her alone at work, and itmight have been too much build-up for him to reach out and say, “I need to getyou alone so I can talk to you.” At the same time you have to look at all thethings Jack is tacitly communicating to George: I’m dating a dude, but, I’m still an elite athleteconforming to all of the other expectations of masculinity, I’ll go on this runwith you, I’m down for whatever you put on me, I’m the same person I was the last time we went on a run. He even puts on a dude-ish baseball cap before he gets out of the car, like he’sputting on his dude drag to go have this conversation. God forbid hisconfession that he’s with Bitty undermine George’s view of him as one of herhockey players.

Even hischoice of Bitty as a romantic partner is something I don’t think the fandomexamines enough. Partly it’s because Check,Please! is a yaoi slash heart-eyes adoraboo webcomic, so a good portion ofthe audience is going to just accept this canon couple as a given withoutlooking into it too deeply. I remember Ngozi saying somewhere, at some point,that Jack needs someone really special to get through to him, with theimplication being that Bitty is that special person, he is a flawless angel childwho straddles both ends of the gender-presentation spectrum with his tinyperfect ass bisecting the middle, god bless him. But I’m cynical so I can’tjust take that as a given, and I have to think about the way in which thepeople we associate with, and especially, the people we are attracted to, areways in which we practice our own identity construction. How does standing nextto Bitty make Jack look? Maybe Jack doesn’t think about it in thatstraightforward a manner, but he must be aware on some level that this is goingto reflect back on him. Why does he send Bitty a zillion roses for Valentine’sDay? I mean, the comic isn’t there yet, but let’s think this out for a second: it’sa textbook male gesture to send the person you’re dating flowers. So, Jacksends Bitty shitloads of flowers. It’stoo easy to just say that Jack is super intense and he gives 110 percent, he’sso extra, etc. Like, yes, he is extra, but why is he so extra? Because he canbe? Or because Bitty will be 110 percent happier with 110 extra roses? Or because he’strying to perform 110 percent masculinity?

Writingabout Jack coming out as a woman and transitioning is an interesting way toneedle at his character. (And also, an interesting way to needle at myself, youknow, that’s writing for you.) Back to my center-liberal mode of fannish participation:I do not think that Jack is fundamentally being written this way, but rather,that it’s one way to interpret and examine how Jack relates to himself andparticipates in traditional masculinity. There are a zillion other ways to dothis, and I find that almost every OMGCP fic I write or post I make is essentiallygetting at the problem of Jack’s character from a different angle. (Except onefic that’s the same, except, Kent Parson instead.)

For me, a majorissue in the problem of Jack’s character is that trying to establish himself inthe echelons of professional hockey caused him to suffer greatly, to the pointof almost dying, possibly intentionally—but he decided, for some reason, thathe wanted to go back for more, and try again. So much of the work I see in thisfandom is about how Jack pushing himself to overcome his issues and succeed inhockey is a positive character trait, and readers are proud of him. But Ithink, within the canon and within the fandom, there is a major unansweredquestion in the form of, what the heck is going on with this character that hecannot and will not stop doing things that have the potential to cause himserious harm? Is he just autistic, and unable to detach from this thing he’sfixated on? Is it that he has literally never thought about anything else hemight do with his life? Or is it that he cannot stop thinking of himself as ahockey player? What would happen if he did? How would he start to think abouthimself, if he stopped thinking of himself as a hockey player and began to thinkof himself as anyone or anything else, and stopped compartmentalizing hisidentity and his experiences?

His brain ishorribly roadblocked. “I don’t think about this stuff too much,” he tellsShitty.And, sure, that’s normal, especially among men raised in hyper-masculinecontexts. But it’s normal because those men exist in a social context wherethey should be afraid of what they might find out about themselves if theythought about it too much. He then makes a joke about how he’s a robot andmakes fun of Shitty’s arguably less fraught romantic life, as if Shitty havingfeelings for Lardo is some kind of weakness. He then picks up Shitty and throwshim in a pile of leaves, which is so painfully overt and demonstrative adisplay of masculine and dominant behavior that Bitty notices from inside andyells at him. I don’t think this is what Ngozi intended, but it’s a fair enoughinterpretation of what’s going on: Shitty made Jack feel a little too much, ora little too conscious of himself, and so he has to respond by emasculatingShitty. Shitty’s like, “Love has changed you,” but like, I dunno, has it, or,how has it?

Granted, alot of this is nebulous, because we don’t know and probably won’t find out muchabout what happened to Jack when he was in juniors, what happened to Jack whenhe was in rehab, or what Jack’s decision-making process was when he applied tocollege—by which I mean, it’s unclear if he just saw it as a means to an end.It’s also unclear how Jack handles his anxiety—is he in therapy, is he takingmeds? It’s unclear how he thinks of himself in terms of drug use—for the mostpart, ending up in rehab at 18 is incongruous with having a beer every now andthen, though it’s also worth asking how having a beer at key moments makes himlook to other people, or how it makes him feel about himself. We just don’tknow that much about Jack, for all the comic is largely about him. It can bedifficult to pinpoint exactly how much he knows about himself, and why he’smade the choices he’s made, because many of those decisions are opaque toreaders.

But, that’swhere fandom gets to work. So I come back to the trans Jack thing here. Jackhas spent most of his life, probably, being told (perhaps implicitly more thanexplicitly) that he needed to do certain things and seem a certain way in orderto be taken seriously, and not be suspected of any kind of femmey or queerinclinations. (He knows that being with Kent Parson could have “really messedwith” their hockey careers, for one thing.) Am I saying that butch people, like, don’treally exist, and it’s all a construct? I don’t want to stick my nose into anature/nurture thing, but it’s undeniable that the style you project is part ofa complex network of influences, some of which are prejudices. To write Jack astrans is to ask questions about how those prejudices have affected him, andwhat might happen if he discarded them.

In terms ofhow a story about trans Jack would look, I can tell you what I’m interested inexamining: biology is destiny, and Jack’s body is pretty materially mannish. Towhat extent would it be possible to conform to that, reject it, subvert it?Jack’s attraction to Bitty is probably fixed, but Bitty is gay, and being withJack is an aspect of his constructionof self. How does Bitty cope with having someone else’s decisions destabilizehow he thinks and what he thinks he knows about himself? Jack is a publicfigure with a lot of privilege, but nor does Jack seem like an ideal or enthusiasticspokesperson or model for trans (or gay, or mental health) visibility. We don’tknow if Jack has any awareness of queer discourse or narratives, or how Jack wouldeasily fit into those, or not. How long does Jack think about this—is itsomething that occurs to Jack slowly, over many years, unsure how to act on it?Or is it something Jack realizes, suddenly, and wants to act on immediately? Howdoes this change how Jack relates to Jack’s parents? To the idea of being a parent? Would Jack want to playin the NHL as a woman? How does retirement and a life after hockey fit intoJack’s process?

Ultimately Idon’t think this fandom does that great a job at interrogating characters, orthe general situations they’re in. I’m kind of shocked at how little discussionthere is of what being a not-straight-guy paying hockey means. There’s a lot oftalk about how toxic masculinity is bad and learning to love yourself is good,but I don’t think the fandom is honest about just how physically andpsychologically damaging a hyper-aggressive sport can be, and why thesecharacters put themselves in harm’s way to endure it. It’s not just makingfriends and the thrill of winning and being Canadian; there are socially coded valuesinvolved. Bitty wrestling with his fear of checking to become marginally betterat hockey (if not at NHL-level) is, through one lens, a story about personaltriumph over adversity. But through another lens it’s a story about someoneputting themselves through hell and exposing themselves to harm over and over again,voluntarily—and for what? For camaraderie, for some scholarship dollars, forJack’s ass, sure—but that’s not all Bitty’s getting out of this.

So too withJack, is the thing, but times a zillion. And I wish the fandom did a better orat least more open job of addressing this. Writing a story where Jack is atrans woman is one means of doing so, or asking, why is he so freaking extra? What’she getting out of this? What does all that extra jocular dudeishness and hockeyfervor compensate for?

What’s itdistracting him from?

And whatwould happen if you took that away?

#meta

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balasha7sanbardo · 6 years

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I think you’re an extremist lefty. I’m not on the right wing. I’m Muslims too. I just find it strange how these modern day Muslims can say they’re Feminists and believe in this pronoun rubbish. Like Seriously. Allah has given us Aql. We Muslims should not bend over for their culture. Yes let them do what they want but supporting it? Come on. We know what Prophet SAW warned us yet we ignore it because we want to be “good” and “nice”. These are shaytaans tricks he makes bad things look good

😂 bruh First of all, what does “Modern Day Muslim” even mean?? Is that what fundamentalist-conservative scholars refer to progressive Muslims as? Pronoun rubbish? wow Since you say that Allah has given us 3aql, I suggest you use that 3aql to research and understand why people use these pronouns and why it’s important to be culturally sensitive to non-binary, genderfluid/genderqueer, transgender or queer persons.

There is plenty of information out there that clearly and explicitly demonstrate that gender roles are a social construct. How you identify with your gender has nothing to do with your biological sex.

I know God gave me a mind to use, and yet I wonder why you haven’t used it? Beyond that there is something you wouldn’t know about which is something known as خلق and in Arabic that word goes beyond the meaning of politeness, respect or understanding. It is the combination of all of those and more. So, even if you choose to be ignorant and dismiss the science and research available to you - I suggest you use your mind and what little manners and respect you have for yourself and for others - and be kinder and respectful of people’s choices or gtf off of my blog.

There is no “us” and “them” - literally that idea is against the very core of Islam. You come here preaching yet you fail to even acknowledge the very core of this religion and you expect me to entertain your bs? Who do you think you are? Islam doesn’t ask us to hate. Islam asks us to be kind, to bring forth good and peace and help those in need.

Transgender and queer people were around during prophet Mohammed’s (pbuh) time and he NEVER shunned them or was phobic towards them. There is nothing even remotely explicit in the Quran that says any member of the LGBTQIA+ community is an abomination. The things that have been banned in the Quran are clear as daylight. Being gay, or trans or nb isn’t one of those. So, my pRoGrESsiVE tHiNkInG tells me you’re wrong and you’re not actually reading.

I am not supporting to be “nice” or “good” - I’m doing so because I’m a fucking human being who acknowledges other people’s identity, experience and existence and I don’t try to dictate it because it made me uncomfortable at some point or because it was a new concept to me. I’m supportive because I believe in logic, kindness, science, my faith, and in what God has taught me from the Quran - which is to do my part in understanding people, being respectful of them and their identities and acheiving the utmost knowledge I can while being kind and open minded. Don’t come on here and tell me what is right and wrong, I know what the book says.

#messages #message #inbox #answered #anon #anonymous #تلحس طيزي دود #balasha7sanbardo

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Equality is a Lie: Men, Women, and Everything In Between

“I am a modern day Nero / So hand me a fiddle and bow / ’Cause dancing on ashes and graves / Is the only joy I know.”-This Is Hell, “Procession Commence”

“And we danced like a wave on the ocean, romanced / We were liars in love and we danced.”-Hooters, “And We Danced”

It doesn’t get any more tiresome than the same re-hashed social justice causes that are essentially no longer causes. Physics Today bemoaned the fact that there’s still a gender pay gap between men and women (5.7% after factoring in age and experience), which the magazine then goes on to unintentionally explain away as women being less aggressive in salary negotiations and in asking for raises. It’s a small gap to begin with, and we now have the solution right there in front of us. Case closed. Right? Wrong.

Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, states that in negotiations, men are more likely than women to request higher salaries: “Women say ‘Thank you very much.’ I’ve done that myself, several times—it’s embarrassing.” I thought women could do anything a man can, so simply speaking up shouldn’t be an issue, now that the root cause has been identified, right? Again, wrong. Nancy Hopkins of MIT believes that women should be on hiring committees proportional to their numbers in the field of physics, but I don’t see how that solves the issue of gender disparity or the pay gap in the field. Claude Canizares, also of MIT, states that;

“Men need to be more proactive about equity for women and underrepresented minorities”

Equity, as you should know by now is a clear SJW red flag; but quite beyond the fact that the bizarre comparison between men and minorities (are there not male minorities?) has been made at all is that this is an empty platitude uttered exclusively for virtue-signaling brownie points. Most of the physicists interviewed attributed the stubborn pay gap to the ever-elusive “unconscious bias.” Mind you, we’re talking about a very small percentage which, as I mentioned, the article already attributes to a pair of correctable factors. Nancy Hopkins observes, “It seems like women have been talking about gender discrimination forever.” Yes, yes it does.

Education Researcher recently released an article that revealed the “disturbing” fact that there is a gender gap in PhD article submissions and publications. On average, men submitted an average of 5.9 manuscripts for publication and women submitted 3.7 publications; the number of submissions published were 4.9 for men and 2.9 for women. So men submitted more often and were accepted more often…but women, statistically speaking, were more likely to be published. The article goes on to explain that more women teach and more men serve as research assistants, so logically, would the fact that men are involved in more research and hence more potential papers not explain the disparity in submissions? Also, could these causes get any more niche?

Once again, I see no one’s talking about the gender gaps in mining, logging, and garbage collection. I wonder why? Less lucrative? Less visible? More physically demanding? More likely to be killed on the job? If we want true equity, we had better goddamn well start seeing equal numbers of men and women slinging trash. For your consideration, a few of the most dangerous occupations in the United States, accompanied by the male percentage of the profession and their fatality rate per 100,000 workers (courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics):

Logging: 97.2% / 132.7 Fishing: 99.9% / 54.8 Garbage Collection: 89.6% / 38.8 Truck Drivers: 94.9% / 25.2 Construction: 97.3% / 15.6 Police Officer: 86.4% / 11.7 Mining: 99.9% / 11.8

It can’t have anything to do with wanting to have your cake and eat it too, can it? Can it?

Consider the following news item from last June, where the “accidental gay parents” Biff Chaplow and Trystan Reese announced their “trans pregnancy”; Reese is a biological woman who “identifies as a gay man” and Chaplow is a gay man who identifies as the “mom.” Reese told NBC that, “We know a lot of transgender men who have babies. We have several in our close friend circle.” (S)he explained to CNN, “I’m OK with my body being a trans body. I’m OK being a man who has a uterus and has the capacity and capability of carrying a baby. I don’t feel like it makes me any less of a man. I just happen to be a man who is able to carry a baby.” As Stuart often repeats in Hello Ladies, “I don’t know what the rules are!” We are through the looking glass, people.

Gender and sexuality are, as we “know,” fluid, n’est-ce pas? I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t “taught” who and how to fuck, nor cajoled into rendering myself sterile when I was a child because I was a child, and thankfully my parents aren’t evil, like lesbian couple Pauline Moreno and Debra Lobel who have their eleven-year-old on hormone blockers (direct quote from The Daily Mail: “The mothers say that one of the first things Thomas told them when he learned sign language aged three - because of a speech impediment - was, ‘I am a girl’”) nor did they send me to a “transgender day camp” like the one in San Francisco that caters to children as young as four, though according to UC San Francisco professor Diane Ehrensaft, children understand their gender by age two. What could possibly go wrong?

Brad/Ria Cooper, who had his first sex change at fifteen, has decided he will now undergo his third sex change to make himself more like a woman again, as at age eighteen Cooper “transitioned” back to his biological sex to live life as a “gay man.” Cooper originally took hormone blockers to stop puberty and, per The Sun, “had female hormone injections to help [him] form breasts and cut down [his] body hair, but [he] didn’t have full gender reassignment surgery.”

Let me say this, and I’m appalled I even have to: children are off limits. We do not have sex with them, we do not sexualize them, and we do not project our feelings, desires, or inadequacies on to them or make executive decisions on irreversible hormonal treatments while they’re still developing, but the Social Justice Warriors do this all the time. As for the rationale, well, it is the current year, so simply because we mark this year on the Gregorian Calendar as 2018, training yourself to be bi-sexual or something should be a given with no further explanation. Try this one on for size: “I mean, why isn’t there a white ethno-state? It’s 2018!” What do you make of that? Or as Ricky Slade says in Made, “Can I color me that?”

Color indeed: the demography of the future is downright harrowing. Fear of a black planet? Not exactly, but there are very serious consequences coming our way regarding the shifting demographics of the post-modern era. While Westerners are busy dressing their one adopted nine-year-old in drag or out “dogging” in the woods (or is that no longer a thing “because current year”?), the demographic time-bomb between the Tropics is set to explode. In the past, due to high infant mortality rates, diseases, and other causes, it was often necessary to have a good number of children, but today, with our modern advancements in medical care and vaccines, in order to sustain the population, reproductive levels do not need to be what they were in previous eras.

What concerns me, however, is that in Africa particularly and to a lesser extent most of the rest of the Third World, these people are not adjusting accordingly, which bodes very ominously for the future, especially when you consider Westerners have simply given up on reproducing altogether, unless they are mixed-species gender-queer vegans. The people of the Third World are not showing a willingness or, more terrifyingly, ability to adapt to their changing circumstances. I know many people get into a tizzy when I mention biological realities, but this really does have a lot to do with differing levels of time preference or the ability to plan and manage resources. It’s not at all unreasonable to use race as a civilizational proxy. The Japanese build Japan, the Swedish build Sweden, and the Somalis build Somalia. The issue is when you import Somalia and expect to get Sweden. Just ask Maine or Minnesota.

The real questions, to my mind, are, however, how many of the people in charge, and/or to what degree, do they actually expect identical outcomes? How much of this is egalitarian window-dressing masquerading as “tolerance,” “equality,” and “diversity”? For some, perhaps many, the fiction is too tantalizing to resist, or maybe they simply don’t know any better, but for others, there can be no question that the large-scale importation of the Third World is designed explicitly to at minimum atomize whites and in their isolation make them easier to control, but more likely in the face of mounting evidence, the Final Solution is not to move them all to Madagascar, but to erase their very existence.

The literature strongly suggests that the host (white) population in Western countries is being adversely affected by the sustained commitment to the diversity agenda, and it’s directly responsible for the squandering of what Robert Putnam terms our “social capital.” In his 2006 study, Harvard professor Robert Putnam found that, based on analysis of the responses of almost 30,000 Americans, the greater the diversity in a community, the less people trusted each other, the less they donated to charity or worked on community projects, and the less they voted and were civically-engaged. In the communities “enriched” by diversity, neighbors trusted one another half as much as they did in homogeneously white communities. From the very beginning, there was a concerted effort to ensure that the citizens of the West would have no say in the mass importation of alien peoples who, it has clearly become evident, do not share our values and don’t particularly care for our delicate, liberty-oriented political systems that’ve evolved in fits and starts since classical antiquity. Though immigration started after World War II in certain parts of Europe in the form of “temporary workers,” it wasn’t until the mid-1960s in the United States and a while later for most of the other non-Eastern Bloc Western countries that the numbers started to trickle in, but by the turn of the century, that trickle became a (relative) flood—though that flood is going to get Biblical when the population in Africa hits four-and-a-half billion! And there’s only a relatively small strip of water separating Africa from a Europe that’s largely proven unwilling to defend itself.

As Jared Taylor says, “The purpose of immigration is not to set a moral test for natives.” Ah, but it appears that it is. Louis Farrakhan recently used his bully pulpit to call for an end to the White Man, “because his nature is not in harmony with the nature of God.” He continued:

The white man was only given 6,000 years (6 days) to rule. You cannot deny he has ruled but on what principle did he rule? Righteousness? Truth? Justice? Fairness? I don’t think so.

How interesting that the most open and tolerant societies the world has ever known have somehow become the bad guy. In this inversion of reality where not only Farrakhan but a majority of the world now lives, the people who abolished slavery, the people who established the doctrines of self-government, who enshrined women’s rights, and civil rights, and gay and transgender rights, the people who built the modern world, these are the wicked and the cursed, these are the ones denied a heritage, these are the ones told to debase themselves. As Jim Goad catalogued:

The more that white people apologize, the more they get mocked. The more they concede, the more that is demanded of them. The more frequently they make gestures of goodwill, the more they get emotionally sandblasted with malicious rhetoric about how “whiteness” is a poison that needs to be uprooted and eradicated…Whites are publicly reprimanded if they dare to notice anything in white history beyond slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Look with disgust upon these squirming white worms with their endlessly tacky public displays of self-flagellation, exulting in the idea of their own wickedness, trying to drown their historical sins in a cleansing wave of softly genocidal immigration. Afflicted with a perverse sort of racial body dysmorphia, they would crawl out of their white skin if they could only find a way. This is the sort of thing that happens in the late stages of a crumbling empire, when the fat, lazy, and pampered have grown so soft they’ve blinded themselves to the wolf pack waiting at the door that’s eager to tear them to pieces. Believe this—if white people actually held such iron-fisted power and were remotely as ruthless as they are portrayed, there would be no such mocking.

And so the wicked shall fall. Between Goad’s “cleansing wave of softly genocidal immigration,” and whites’ self-abnegation, learned helplessness, and their genderless, barren-wombed, de-fanged Eloi-like existence, Farrakhan won’t have long to wait before we’re nothing but a memory. Then the world will know true peace, harmony, and prosperity. In the meantime, it’s much better to focus on niche issues like “dead-naming” and “transphobia” than the fact that the entire fabric of Western civilization is coming unraveled.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

That blood-dimmed tide sounds an awful lot like Enoch Powell-by-way-of-Virgil’s “River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

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neo-losangeles · 7 years

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http://www.thevocal.com.au/loudest-room-isnt-correct-rise-twitters-pop-sociologists/#.WNCDbxq9GSs.twitter

Devyn Springer Devyn Springer is an Atlanta artist, writer, and activist who is currently studying the African diaspora and art history at Kennesaw State University. Approx 8 minute reading time My grandmother used to always tell me, “the loudest one in the room is not always the smartest, and the one saying the most words is not always saying the most truth.” Then again, a year ago, days before publishing my first book, a mentor of mine reminded me, “the person whose book has the most pages does not always have the most knowledge on the pages.” Taking these two statements to heart and analysing how they exist in different spaces, I instantly thought of social media, specifically Twitter.

Over the past few years the world has witnessed a paradigm shift in the ways Twitter is used, with the platform rapidly transforming into a tool used for education and sharing of news. Following the death of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, we saw a rise of people utilising Twitter as a means to educate and inform people on different topics. And while this was not new to the popular social media platform, it did begin a new trend of what I call the “pop sociologist,” or folks who dedicate much of their existence on Twitter to educating people on various topics of race, gender, class, activism, history, etc.

As someone dedicated to delivering dialogical and liberatory education, the possibilities of educating individuals on Twitter are endless, but not without limits. There are trends in several popular Twitter ‘pop sociologist’ accounts that at times can do more damage than good.

The concept of an audience, or building a following, plays a central role in motivating individuals to produce content which can be seen as damaging. A trend has set in which promotes the idea of “watering down” or discussing topics on very basic, 101 levels for the sake of gaining a large following. While it is important to start with basics whenever discussing a topic, it is important to understand the problematic nature of never progressing educational content beyond this basic level.

Tweets are often made in thread form – a tool which allows you to string together several tweets and easily pack lots of information together – for the sake of going viral, not for the sake of educating individuals. This alludes to the intent of many Twitter ‘pop sociologists,’ and doing this allows for content to go viral which lacks critical engagement with the subject, dialectical analysis, and historical context. It is the difference between discussing how non-Black people of color often have anti-Blackness in their communities and discussing how non-Black people of color have anti-Blackness in their communities due to a specific historical context and integration into a systemic context which leads them to this. The latter would be less popular because it discusses a historical context and lends itself towards a solution-based analysis, while the first would go viral for its simplistic nature. When statements that lack nuance, depth, and historical context go viral, this often allows for the misrepresentation and misuse of content and theory. Tweets that allude to theory, but do not explicitly source, discuss, and cite, allow generalisations and blanket statements to become the norm, which is a problem.

Another problem we often see is the deliberate altering or rendering of form and content within tweets for the sake of whiteness, or rather white comfortability, to garner more retweets. Content is often pacified and de-politicised in order to not upset white followers, and what this creates are several accounts nearly appropriating radical language for a white audience. Examples of this are several “pro-Black” accounts that create content about Black politics from a very liberal and respectable perspective. Individuals who perform a radical or leftist politic, but obscure true leftist content with neoliberal ideals.

To understand this, we can look at how several Black queer intellectuals exist on Twitter. People like myself tend to stay in our lane, continually talking about the things we are well knowledged in, keep our content heavily experiential based, and never seek to make ourselves an authority of any certain politic. Contrasted with several other users, you can immediately notice individuals only talking about certain things when they are trending topics, often appearing to present themselves as authority on topics and politics in order to gain social capital.

And within the context of Twitter, the idea of creating yourself as an authoritative figure on a subject is important to note because it often positions one’s politics as anti-dialogical, or above criticism and approach, and stifles critical engagement. By positioning themselves as some social justice authority through various means of accumulating social capital, individuals present themselves as uncheckable and infallible. This is an individualised rendering of a popular mechanism of neoliberalism; to position your politics, your identity, and your positions as binarily true. To position your self with a false sense of authority is to disrupt the organically engaging, dialogical, and uniquely communicative nature of Twitter.

What does this mean in the larger context of Twitter and what does it mean to exist in a manner that might be inherently damaging, even if done with pure intentions? And what solutions can be theorised and put into practice to effectively use Twitter for education? For starters, it means accepting the notion that if you want to dedicate your account to education and advocacy, you are taking on a responsibility to also progress and sharpen yourself over time. This is a process that the social justice oriented individual should be invested in already, but as our great elders like Paulo Freire, Walter Rodney, and Assata Shakur have taught us, the responsibility of education is not one to be worn lightly.

It also means the one dedicating to using Twitter to educate people having a clear line of introspection, as well as a pedagogical approach rested on engagement. Of course no one person is required to engage in any capacity if they don’t wish to, but on some level critical engagement is critical and vital to the education process. A model for this pedagogical, or educational, approach would be one that not only welcomes but insists upon engagement, constructive comments, questioning, and even at times critique; which Twitter is the perfect platform to allow this sort of pedagogy to blossom. The educator, like the activist or the artist, can be anything but neutral, and we must begin to see Twitter as an extension of a liberated classroom if we are to continue to attempt to use it as such. Tearing down the walls of promoting certain individuals as ‘authority’ of a certain politic due to their following and social capital is harmful to this pedagogical approach, because it allows individuals to deny introspection as well as critique.

And we have to ask, is Twitter even the best platform for the role of education? Surely, as a realm for social interaction and entertainment it is of fantastic use, but is it possible to ever properly use it pedagogically? I believe it can be, or it often is, but when done correctly with good intentions. Certainly many can agree that only so much depth and nuance can be packed into 140 character tweets, leaving out large portions of theory and context often, however with innovations in Twitter’s threading, linking, and photo/video uploading features, this is rapidly changing. While Twitter is not (and should not be viewed as) a space to build an entire personal political analysis from, replacing books, personal study, and research, it can be a great medium to exist as a starting point for analyses. We have to begin to see it as such – a starting point – and develop the craft of using Twitter to educate around that notion.

Much of my own nature on the platform exists in this same space, having dedicated the majority of my presence on the site to educating folks on different topics I’ve studied and devoted time to, so this exists not just as a critique to strangers but a self-critique and reminder as well. A reminder that if I am going to use what tools the master has given and attempt to subvert them to build power, I need to also hold myself accountable to using the tools as best as possible.

We saw the rise of the “pop activist” in 2016 and the entire construct was critiqued to hell and back, and rightfully so. But may I suggest the “pop sociologist” or “pop expert” is an equally problematic and at times harmful construct that we need to examine, dissect, and mould into something better? Can we turn the ‘pop sociologist’ into a pedagogical figure where false authority doesn’t replace dialogical critical engagement, a large following is not more important than the actual depth of content being produced, and knowledge is not pacified and distributed without historical context for the sake of appeasing a following?

As Paulo Freire informs us in his book Pedagogy of Freedom, “whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.” Therefore those dedicated to using Twitter as a platform for educating others must never feel they are above being educated, because it is a crucial part of a healthy pedagogy. One that involves the ‘pop sociologist’ to move beyond analyses formed solely on social media and into a praxis of education rooted in theories of liberation. Twitter can be a powerful tool for education and pedagogical activism, as we’ve seen already, but only if we continue to harness its power in the sharpest, most emancipatory ways possible.

Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. – Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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