there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.
and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.
idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.
which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'
*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.
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80+ PROTESTERS VIOLENTLY ARRESTED AT UCSC
PROTESTERS ARE ASKING ALUMNI TO PARTICIPATE IN AN EMAIL ZAP: bit.ly/zap-ucsc
& FOR EVERYONE TO DONATE TO THEIR BAIL FUND: (Venmo) pizza_party_1312
[ID: UCSC students waving Palestinian flags and holding protest signs at the base of campus. /ID]
Longer write-up based on personal knowledge, news articles, and multiple direct sources below.
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For roughly a month, UCSC administrators, including chancellor Cynthia Larive, have been essentially politely asking protesters at the pro-Palestine encampment to "voluntarily disband." I was told personally by members of the encampment that among the demands they were given by the administration, two were 1) to guarantee Larive's safety, in part by not allowing any calls for violence against her, and 2) not to use images of her to make memes. "They specifically said memes," said the protester I spoke to. Additionally, protesters were told the use of the word "genocide" in a public statement by UCSC admin was "off the table."
The consensus among organizers appeared to be that Larive was vainly hoping to "wait [them] out," knowing she was in a no-win scenario: call the police and risk looking evil, or let the encampment stay and risk looking toothless. (It was clear which side she leaned towards.) Additionally, @kiegotakami mentioned hearing from a source at the department that "none of the local cops want the public scrutiny nor do they care abt the encampment so they’ve been avoiding it."
Protesters escalated by first blocking the entrance/s to campus temporarily, then moving their encampment down to the base of campus, beginning an academic worker strike on Monday 5/20, and finally, as of Tuesday 5/28, blockading both campus entrances indefinitely. Classes moved online. There was a dispute as to whether an ambulance was blocked from entering campus to help a child who was choking; protesters maintain that it was police, not them, who formed an obstacle. Larive later claimed again that it was the protesters.
(Larive also characterized SJP's demand that UCSC cut ties with specifically pro-Israel groups as "demand[ing] that we end relationships with organizations that support our Jewish students and funders that support important student success work and happen to be Jewish organizations." (emphasis mine) SJP did not call for the disbanding of all Jewish groups, not even all Zionist ones. They singled out the ones which list furthering Zionism in their mission statements. The conflation of holding a specific political opinion with being Jewish generally is an unacceptably racist one that echoes the "dual loyalty" myth.)
After protesters refused to disband their encampment at the base of campus, 100+ police officers from Eureka, San Francisco, Watsonville, Berkeley, San Mateo, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Riverside, as well as the California Highway Patrol, slowly dismantled the blockade, bulldozed the encampment, and arrested anywhere from 80-100+ people. (Numerous student/protester/organizer sources list more than 100 arrested, as well as greater numbers of police.) The bulk of the conflict occurred between 12 and 9 AM on Friday 5/31 morning, marking the 31st day and a full month of the protest.
Students present at the demonstration say the police were outfitted in riot gear and focused their abuse immediately and especially on women of color at the encampment. Students were "stabbed... in the stomach" with batons, hard enough that some vomited. One was covered in a spit hood for saying the cops' "glasses looked stupid," and thrown to the ground hard enough to give him a concussion.
From an anonymous source:
We were thrown to the ground and dragged along the concrete. Our faces were clawed at, masks were ripped from our faces, helmets were torn from our heads so the straps dug into our throats, and our eyes were gouged out. Several of the women had their clothes ripped off, one particular trans comrade who was pleading for the cops to have any form of humanity, had “trick” screamed at her before her skirt was ripped off and she was thrown to the ground. All the while, they laughed. Snickering as people were beaten unconscious.
After each one of us was detained, the police took selfies with us, grinning over their trophy. We were shoved into buses and vans where they blared music that rattled the cages we were thrown into until we couldn’t think. This went on for hours. In one of the buses, people were told to go to the bathroom on the bottom staircase.
We were organized by sex (not gender) and the cops called non-binary people “x-rays” for the x identification on their license. First, it was the county jail, then a university parking lot, then a university building. The cops, with their hands on their pistols, shouted for us all to sit down. We all sat with our wrists tied behind our backs, the marks of which I still have on my arms a day later.
The cops proceeded to play the “good guy” act as though all of us weren’t covered in bruises inflicted by them just hours earlier. Our restraints were cut, and they slowly called us by name. After several hours, my name was called. I was banned from school for the rest of the year, given a court date, and sent out like none of that had just happened.
Despite the brutality, protesters were back at the base of campus by the end of the day on Friday. Morale appears largely unshaken, and (despite bots brigading r/UCSC) student support across online and in-person spaces is at a high.
Some students were asked by KSBW about their arrests. “The people in Palestine are going through far worse than a citation," said Aydan Beavers. "So yeah, I believe it was worth it."
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Once again, students are asking alumni to support them in an email zap at bit.ly/zap-ucsc, and for everyone to please donate to their bail fund, Venmo @/pizza_party_1312.
Sources: [Sentinel] [KSBW] [SJP Instagram] as well as multiple anonymous private sources.
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