#german tango

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[gremlins-hotel]

yeah, agreed...would you like to go to the gym?

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Louis Raemaekers - The German Tango, c. 1916.

[huariqueje]

Tango night at Clarchen's Ballhaus , Berlin   -  Carola Schapals  , 2015.

German , b. 1957 -

Oil and acrylic on canvas , 140 x 170 cm.

[dozydawn]

Gisela Galeassi and German Cornejo “A Los Amigos” Tango, 2019.

[lafcadiosadventures]

The spotify algorithm lobbies hard for bach. every time i listen to an instrumental piece from any period/region it suggests a bach prelude/variation etc. and now it’s starting to suggest his sons as well. and I don’t mind, bach goes well with everything but lol why

[vrgelivvvv]

Every morning with him is so sweet 🥰

[drzibs]

@jellieland he is like the puppy that was raised in a household of cats, they all just think hes a Really Big Cat

my take on the life series’ smp members! done in a catified style, of course ^^

credit to @xmaruu11 for the base design!

[sunshine304]

Yesterday was the pro dancer challenge for "Let's Dance!", the German version of "Strictly Come Dancing" and "Dancing with the Stars".

As usual, performances were fanstastic! The three finalists were Ekaterina Leonova & Paul Lorenz, Anastasia Stan & Evgeny Vinokurov and Massimo Sinato & Valentin Lusin. These three pairs had to dance a short routine to the same song and all of them were awesome as you can see above!

Their three long routines were:

Anastasia & Evgeny performed a dance to the theme of Vlad Dracula and his lost love. Anastasia was a revelation this season, a newcomer to the show who proved great at working with her celebrity and proficient in choreographing fun routines. And I really enjoyed seeing Evgeny back on the LD dacefloor.

Ekaterina & Paul danced a tango to the "Mr & Mrs Smith" theme, which also incorporated their own past relationship (they were dance partners and also a couple off the dancefloor) that was mostly ended by miscommunication. Their connection is still obvious.

Massimo & Valentin danced a routine to "Vivaldi vs Beethoven", which I enjoyed immensely. Massimo wasn't so good this season with his celebrity, but he felt much more energetic in this number. Valentin seemed much more relaxed this season, I found him more likeable.

[aureachaos]

Doc and Etho were telling Cleo, Ren, and Tango about how Etho broke Doc's shop

Doc: He [Etho] walks over to my shop and goes like "hm, Doc, you said this can't break. Let me test it." And he goes like do do do do do do do

Doc starts punching the ground to demonstrate

Etho, laughing: Doc- Doc said "There's no way for a hermit to break this. I am German engineer. It is perfect." So of course I've got to try it

Tango and Cleo start laughing

Cleo: That's your fault! That's your fault! I'm with Etho on this one. You can't- you can't challenge people

Ren: Yeah, that's fair enough

~~~~~~~~

Etho: And I legit thought it was perfect. I did not think it was going to break

Doc: I didn't think it was going to break, okay. I really thought

Etho: And even as I was doing it, Doc was like "There's no way to break this. This is perfect."

Etho: ...and then it broke

[swugflower]

Sometimes I randomly remember that the best thing I have ever written came from a creative writing exercise, the art work ‘Summer evening on the beach at Skagen’ by Peder Severin Krøyer and my obsession from the Cell Block Tango (glee version).

We were tasked to write a short story inspired by the art above and somehow I turned it into a intense story about a wife threatening her husband with a weapon because he cheated on her with her sister… just randomly as homework written by fucking hand

[gremlins-hotel]

okay it's not ludwig, but it is aldrich (ancient germania). redraw of something from last year. i'd like to play with his color palette more but alas.

[theminecraftbee]

list of hermits i would consider to be supervillains:

doc. his whole aesthetic is "german mad scientist". he is the flavor of mad scientist who cackles about trying to take over the world but is very easily distracted by a cute cat and really just wants an excuse to use his doomsday devices.

tango. he is a cartoon character crossed with saw (so like... yami yugi by way of doofinshmirtz?). he wants to make death games and also would squeak if you hit him with an anvil.

grian. in his defense these days he's trying to be less of one, he just has a reputation.

cleo. in their defense these days they're trying to be more of one, and also grian took the blame for the civil war so REALLY they could be getting away with more around here,

scar. look he seems like the harmless huckster/scam artist but scar I REMEMBER YOUR SOCK PUPPET ALIEN. I REMEMBER YOU IMPLYING TO DOC'S FACE YOU FED THE NHO TO IT. WHAT THE FUCK,

cub. he's the mastermind. he's the quiet twist villain who isn't actually a twist at all. he just wants to see the world burn. he'll do this while going "haha, cool man :)". terrifying.

[abtrusion]

Tranny Tango

There's a man on the sidewalk, looking over, then up to see me walking past. He stops in his tracks and stutters back and forth, his read || reaction to me flickering between upstart woman // taller man || hold ground // make space, glitching him in place. When I step off the sidewalk and into the grass, he sheepishly passes me by without a word.

I'm interested in the everyday glitches, the double-takes, the way "everybody is just a little bit disgusted by you," what Susan Stryker calls 'monstrosity' and more than that, the casual experience of being a gaping hole in the gendered world. Stryker attributes this monstrosity to the idea that medical transsexuality, more than any other form of transgenderism, "represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders." She takes anti-trans feminists at their word, assuming that their hate stems from some abstract gender trouble that transsexuals pose to female spaces, and her solution is a near-complete identification with that trouble. We can do better. This monstrosity, this glitching, is not just a downstream consequence of spectacular interruptions to some abstract 'fixed genders.' It is certainly not dependent on some unique threat posed by medicalization. It exists through instinctive disgust and constant little glitches in the social infrastructure that is gender, an uneasy response to an uncanny bricolage of the building blocks of gendered life.

Escaping the Cisgender Gaze

The classic trans encounter is to see a visibly transfeminine person out on the street, or as an escort, or in some carefully-curated performance piece, and to realize that gender is a lie. This is part of the utility of transmisogyny, which renders people both constantly accessible and utterly exemplary, and in turn this casts transmisogyny itself as spectacular exclusion instead of a slow social and economic death that sometimes spikes, particularly with multiply marginalized subjects, into horrific violence.

This singularization of transfeminine life and oppression (particularly with trans women of color) through suicide and murder statistics renders both trans life and pain spectacular and implicitly places one as a 'natural' consequence of the other. We need to seriously inspect the many interactions between non-passing transfem people and cis people which do not end with one of them dead. One way to start is Sandra Lee Bartky's understanding of hegemonic femininity as a disciplinary practice.

Femininity as Disciplinary Practice

As the lesbian separatists of the 1970s and 80s intensified the work of rooting out patriarchy from their spaces, they began to discover that nothing was sacred: nearly all everyday social activities were shaped by gender. As Bartky argues, the 'imposition of such discipline on female identity' influences every second of every day:

Iris Young observes that a space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion—as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks—and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. In an extraordinary series of over two thousand photographs, many candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male figures is what Wex calls the “proffering position”: the men sit with legs thrown wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing outward, often with an arm and a casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread thigh. …in a way that normally goes unnoticed, males in couples may literally steer a woman everywhere she goes: down the street, around corners, into elevators, through doorways, into her chair at the dinner table, around the dance floor. The man’s movement “is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best trained horses.”

Bartky concludes that, between behavior and makeup and skin-care, these disciplinary practices "produce a 'practiced and subjected' body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed,” and that "the practices that construct this body have an overt aim and character far removed, indeed, radically distinct, from their covert function;" that is, she claims that gender is everywhere, that it is power, and that cisgender women are structurally made unaware of this connection.

What does this mean for transfeminine experience? First, as seen in the sidewalk example we started with (so chosen precisely because of how fucking boring it is), the abstract 'genderfuck' of transfeminine existence congeals into actual examples in the context of gender-as-infrastructure. Gender is a crossing-guard, a gatekeeper, a reviewer -- it performs social functions, all the time, which glitch and shake in our presence. Transmisogyny is not necessarily vitriolic rage at 'boundary-breakers,' it can also just be the passive exclusion of a person whose existence causes a few too many little frictions.

As we've noted, the singularization of transfeminine life makes non-spectacular trans life impossible for cis people to understand, leading to a constant current of disgust/disdain that accompanies their more exciting bouts of transmisogyny. One major inlet to this current is social friction, the way that non-passing transfems are structurally prevented from using social/visual gender infrastructures to do everyday things. The second inlet, which I will discuss in the next section, is the unease provoked by the negotiations transfems take to navigate gendered systems despite this breakage, making small corrections which are ignored, must be ignored, leaving only the horrible lingering fear that they're better at this gender thing than you.

Gender work

Because transfemininity makes no sense from a vulgar gender-power perspective, cis people generally view transfeminine people as either unwitting 'dupes' of gender or as spectacular hyper-aware gender predators, as seen across the HSTS/AGP split, the dead tranny/serial killer media split, the 'scheming eunuch' archetype, and the binarization of transfem identity in queer spaces. But because cis people also generally want to assume that they're talking to someone that isn't an evil serial manipulator, personal interactions encourage and enforce the good tranny archetype, which demands absolute suppression of any sort of informed gender negotiation. This archetype is impossible to fulfill because of the systematic failure of social gender-power infrastructure to account for transfeminine people, which demands some degree of semi-intentional gender work to fill in the gaps.

Fortunately, this work will basically never be understood as such by well-meaning cis people because of transmisogyny, so you don't have to be /super/ subtle about it. Unfortunately, ignoring this transfeminine gender work takes a lot of effort on the part of cis people, particularly if they also have had to perform reparative gender work because of trans-adjacent conditions (divorce, infertility, lesbianism, PCOS). The invisible work cis people must make to keep themselves separate from transfeminine people is then associated with our presence, most clearly articulated in Janice Raymond's lament that transsexual lesbians are feeding "off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self" -- our proximity alone demands intense effort to keep cis gender negotiations distinct from trans ones, growing frustrations that feed the slow current of transmisogyny.

Even if a cis person successfully suppresses their understanding of transfeminine gender work, for folks within queer & women's spaces, this itself leads to a horrible looming anxiety because people in these spaces usually pride themselves on having a full consciousness of gender, and we're a pretty notable exception to that. These anxieties are then channeled into a constant fear of the bad tranny, manifested in the horrible trans woman that your cis queer initiators will tell you to stay far away from. But there is really not much of a difference between the shadowy machinations of the bad tranny and the gender work transfeminine people have to constantly perform to even exist within queer spaces, so transfeminine people are rendered constantly precarious.

What's so deliciously ironic about all this is that this is just a shallow repetition of the cis man // cis woman dyad! Archetypes like 'the poisoner witch' or 'the gossip' or 'the slut' have always been used as a reaction to negotiating power gained via the kitchen, or cloistered social activity, or sex, all routes that men could never understand as a direct consequence of their own gendered power -- so in response to this fear, these roles pilloried exemplary women to structurally terrify the population, but just as importantly to exonerate the rest of the female population, to let men pretend that these weren't tools that everyone was using, to pretend that heterosexual relationships were pure! Just as transfems serve the role of gay best friend^2 in gay mens' films, they serve the role of women^2 in queer spaces, constantly performing gender work which is simultaneously unknowable and terrifying to the cis majority, forcing periodic purges to pick out 'the bad ones' which temporarily exonerate the rest, letting the majority believe that the 'good tranny' actually exists: that mythical trans woman who is not semi-intentionally managing their gender presentation around you, the one you can fuck without worrying if she's just faking it, the one who is good and pure and radical and really, really boring. I have never met a non-passing trans woman like this, but I'm sure plenty of queer people have.

Conclusion

So there are two main forms of everyday experience that express and constitute transmisogyny. The first is the social friction inherent in being freak-gendered in a world that relies on gender to make people move and talk and shit correctly. The second is the friction between the gender awareness demanded of transfeminine people (none) and the practical result of transgendered living in the world. If you want to take some of this back to cis womanhood, I've been trying to reframe the marginalized position of womanhood in terms of articulation work -- that while women have always worked, that work has generally been rendered unreal, always carried out with a dream of not existing, turned into stage-setting for the real boys to grow up and come in and be breadwinners. In this context, our components look like 1) do gender work and 2) don't let it show, and the framing of transfeminine people as socially useless outcasts despite their constitutive role in social life via flexible labor starts to sound a lot like the making of a super-woman, like the mujerísima sometimes invoked in Latin American travesti activism. That sounds just about right. I will become a witch of witches, the lurking terror that eats astrologers, always and ever a little bit too real.

[bucket-of-amethyst]

HELLO MINERS AND CRAFTERS GOOD TIMES WITH SCAR HERE FOR HERMIT-A-DAY MAY DAY 11

This one has been a long time coming dslgkj. Scar is, well, a big Mutt! More specifically, I wanted him to be a choco Lab (for the sillies), Husky (for the drama), German Shepherd (for the strength) mix!

I feel like i will regret picking this wheelchair for his design but i have to admit it looks pretty cool dfljfdh

✨ My commissions are open check it out if you’re interested! ✨

🐶More puppers: 

Jog / Pixl / Porl / SoupGroop / Tango / Zed / Grian / Skizz / Cleo / Jimmy / Jev-Stress-Wels / Doc - Doccy / Mumbo / Bdubs / False / Etho / Iskall / XB

[vrgelivvvv]

Hes the perfect doggo