#intersectionality of personhood

[sk3let0rz]

I wish Hollywood didn’t show women making an effort to be romantic to men who reject them and then they end up with that shitty man. It reinforces this idea that men are unaware of the emotional consequences of their actions and allows them to avoid responsibility for treating people as disposable.

Men are allowed to be flawed, struggle morally, cause harm, and then overcome that without ever doing the internal work to become a better person. Because men have inherent value and if a man has to consider that he acted in an unethical way, that means his value is less (this is specifically about America’s prison slavery system and it’s ’othering’ of groups like women, poc, lgbtq, disabled). Men have inherent value and they can struggle without that value coming into question.

Women can NOT make mistakes. Because they do NOT have inherent value. Women are valuable on a conditional basis. Can you (as a women) provide sex, companionship, validation, housework, children? If you stop providing these things or are unable to provide certain things a women’s value goes down.

This is why women have to answer for their actions while men only have to answer for their intentions.

Back to the Hollywood trope- women are shown as having romantic daydreams and wanting those dreams to materialize. They try to encourage or support the man in carrying out those dreams (do you remember what day it is, honey?). This doesn’t go well and we as the viewer are encouraged to side with the man.

Be clear in your message = the woman’s actions are judged as most important.

The man was tired or there were other external factors = the man’s intentions are judged as most important.

This is bad because it encourages men to act as if there are no consequences to their actions as long as they mean well. It’s bad because it teaches women that men should not be judged for their actions. It’s bad because it encourages certain people to treat others poorly and another people to accept poor treatment.

Women who do not receive reciprocity in their romantic efforts should cease all romantic efforts with that person. GIRL there are millions of people out there one of them will treat you right. Stop trying to teach a man how to treat you.

[communistkenobi]

Would you be willing to dunk on speak more on mainstream feminist theory you're reading? And/or share some of the non-juvenile feminist theory you've read?

(Note: I will try to link to open access versions of articles as much as possible, but some of them are paywalled. if the links dont work just type the titles into google and add pdf at the end, i found them all that way)

If there’s any one singular issue with mainstream feminist thought that can be generalized to "The Problem With Mainstream Feminism" (and by mainstream I mean white, cishet, bourgeois feminism, the “canonical feminism” that is taught in western universities) it’s that gender is treated as something that can stand by itself, by which I mean, “gender” is a complete unit of analysis from which to understand social inequality. You can “add” race, class, ability, national origin, religion, sexuality, and so on to your analysis (each likewise treated as full, discrete categories of the social world), but that gender itself provides a comprehensive (or at the very least “good enough”) view of a given social problem. (RW Connell, who wrote the canonical text Masculinities (1995) and is one of the feminist scholars who coined/popularized the term hegemonic masculinity, is a fantastic example of this.)

Black feminists have for many decades pointed out how fucking ridiculous this is, especially vis a vis race and class, because Black women do not experience misogyny and racism as two discrete forms of oppression in their lives, they are inextricably linked. The separation of gender and race is not merely an analytical error on the part of white feminists - it is a continuation of the long white supremacist tradition of bounding gender in exclusively white terms. Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (2000) engages with this via a speech by Sojourner Truth, the most famous line from her speech being “ain’t I a woman?” as she describes all the aspects of womanhood she experiences but is still denied the position of woman by white women because she is Black. Lugones in Coloniality of Gender (2008) likewise brings up the example of segregationist movements in the USAmerican South, where towns would put up banners saying things like “Protect Southern Women” as a rationale for segregation, making it very clear who they viewed as women. Sylvia Wynter in 1492: A New World View likewise points out that colonized women and men were treated like cattle by Spanish colonizers in South America, often counted in population measures as "heads of Indian men and women," as in heads of cattle. They were treated as colonial resources, not as gendered subjects capable of rational thought.

To treat the category of “woman” as something that stands by itself is a white supremacist understanding of gender, because “woman” always just means white woman - the fact that white is left implied is part of white supremacy, because who is granted subjecthood, the ability to be seen as human and therefore a gendered subject, is a function of race (see Quijano, 2000). Crenshaw (1991) operationalizes this through the term intersectionality, pointing out that law treats gender and race as separate social sites of discrimination, and the practical effect of this is that Black women have limited/no legal recourse when they face discrimination because they experience it as misogynoir, as the multiplicative effect of their position as Black women, not as sexism on the one hand and racism on the other.

Transfeminist theory has further problematized the category of gender by pointing out that "woman" always just means cis woman (and more often than not also means heterosexual woman). The most famous of these critiques comes from Judith Butler - I’m less familiar with their work, but there is a great example in the beginning of Bodies That Matter (1993) where they demonstrate that personhood itself is a gendered social position. They ask (and I’m paraphrasing) “when does a fetus stop becoming an ‘it’? When its gender is declared by a doctor or nurse via ultrasound.” Sex assignment is not merely a social practice of patriarchal division, it is the medium through which the human subject is created (and recall that gender is fundamentally racialized & race is fundamentally gendered, which I will come back to).

And the work of transfeminists demonstrate this by showing transgender people are treated as non-human, non-citizens. Heath Fogg Davis in Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination (2014) recounts the story of an African American transgender woman in Pennsylvania being denied use of public transit, because her bus pass had an F gender marker on it (as all buss passes in the state required gender markers until 2013) and the bus driver refused her service because she “didn’t look like a woman.” She was denied access to transit again when she got her marker changed to M, as she “didn’t look like a man.” Transgender people are thus denied access to basic public services by being constructed as “administratively impossible” - gender markers are a component of citizenship because they appear on all citizenship documents, as well as a variety of civil and public documents (such as a bus pass). Gender markers, even when changed by trans people (an arduous, difficult process in most places on earth, if not outright impossible), are seen as fraudulent & used as a basis to deny us citizenship rights. Toby Beauchamp in Going Stealth: Transgender Politics & US Surveillance Practices (2019) talks about anti-trans bathroom bills as a form of citizenship denial to trans people - anti-trans bathroom laws are impossible to actually enforce because nobody is doing genital inspections of everyone who enters bathrooms (and genitals are not proof of transgenderism!), but that’s actually not the point. The point of these bills is to embolden members of the cissexual public to deputize themselves on behalf of the state to police access to public space, directing their cissexual gaze towards anyone who “looks transgender.” Beauchamp points out that transvestigators don’t need to be accurate most of the time, because again, the point is terrorizing transgender people out of public life. He connects this with racial segregation, and argues that we shouldn’t view gender segregation as “a new form of” racial segregation (this is a duplication of white supremacist feminism) but a continuation of it, because public access is a citizenship right and citizenship is fundamentally racially mediated (see Glenn's (2002) Unequal Freedom)

Susan Stryker & Nikki Sullivan further drives this home in The King’s Member, The Queen’s Body, where they explain the history of the crime of mayhem. Originating in feudal Europe (I don’t remember off the dome the exact time/place so forgive the generalization lol), mayhem is the crime of self-mutilation for the purposes of avoiding military conscription, but what is interesting is that its not actually legally treated as “self” mutilation, but a mutilation of the state and its capacity to exercise its own power. They link the concept of mayhem to the contemporary hysteria around transgender people receiving bottom surgery - we are not in fact self mutilating, we are mutilating the state’s ability to reproduce its own population by permanently destroying (in the eyes of the cissexual public) our capacity to form the foundational social unit of the nuclear family. Our bodies are not our own, they are a component of the state. Situating this in the context of reproductive rights makes this even clearer. Abortion access is not actually about the individual, it is the state mediating its own reproductive capacity via the restriction of abortion (premised on the cissexual logic of binary reproductive capacity systematized through sex assignment). Returning to Hill Collins, she points out that in the US, white cis women are restricted access to abortion while Black and Indigenous cis women are routinely forcibly sterilized, their children aborted, and pumped with birth control by the state. This is not a contradiction or point of “hypocrisy” on the part of conservatives, this is a fully comprehensive plan of white supremacist population management.

To treat "gender" as its own category, as much of mainstream feminism does (see Acker (1990) and England (2010) for two hilarious examples of this, both widely cited feminists), is to forward a white supremacist notion of gender. That white supremacy is fundamentally cissexual and heterosexual is not an accident - it is a central organizing logic that allows for the systematization of the fear of declining white birthrates (the conspiracy of "white genocide" is illegible without the base belief that there are two kinds of bodies, one that gets pregnant and one that does the impregnating, and that these two types of bodies are universal sources of evidence of the superiority of men over women - and im using those terms in the most loaded possible sense).

I realize that most of these readings are US centric, which is an unfortunate limitation of my own education. I have been really trying to branch into literature outside the Global North, but doctoral degree constraints + time constraints + my own research requires continual engagement with it. I also realize that most of the transfeminist readings I've cited are by white scholars! This is a continual systemic problem in academic literature and I'm not exempt from it, even as I sit here and lay out the problem. Which is to say, this is nowhere near the final word on this subject, and having to devote so much time to reading mainstream feminist theory as someone who is in western academia is part of my own limited education + perspective on this topic

[mijlen]

I wrote this thread on Bluesky, but I wanted to bring it here and let my thoughts marinate more without a character limit.

The more I sit with it, the more I appreciate that one of the most powerful themes of Severance S2 is intersectionality and solidarity. Yes, you can be in a position of power and still be the victim of institutionalized oppression and exploitation, with some in a more tenuous position than others!

But if everyone recognizes that and realizes there is a common goal to dismantle the thing, some can utilize their positions of greater influence to help! People are often in different places regarding their security and survival instincts, though, and need their glass breaking moment.

One of the things I love about Cobel's arc this season is that in retrospect it's a slow glass-breaking moment. An older, well educated, white woman, part of the institutional in-group, who has been horribly exploited by that institution. Being shunned, she attempts to intimidate the power structure on her own, and realizes all at once (in a scene that baffled me at first but which is now so impactful) that even if she holds some very powerful cards, she cannot do this alone. Her intentions are still not 100% clear, and she may still be only motivated by her own whims, but her actions in solidarity were still materially harmful to the institution.

Milchick's arc MUST be focal next season. The real cliffhanger for me was not knowing how this man - this highly capable, empathetic, joyous, brilliant, Black man who gives everything to maintain only a modicum of power within the system, use that to champion tiny humanitarian reforms, and lose his personhood in the process while grappling with the fact that he will never be allowed to make real change within this evil racist institution - reacts to being the face of Lumon, the oppressor, in the eyes of this uprising. I'm truly hoping for that to be the culmination of his own slow glass-breaking moment. Drummond is dead. Bar the floor, Milchick. Don't let anyone in. Solidarity. "Fuck you, Mr. Milchick?" Nah, fuck LUMON.

Lastly I want to mention Ms. Huang, whose impact on the season's themes became blindingly clear once I viewed it through a lens of intersectionality. She's a young Asian woman beloved by an academic institution with a pipeline to the evil racist corporate institution. Expected to be good, subservient, a blank slate for their needs. Model minority. Her only outlets for expression and agency are explicitly taken away or denied (the theramin, her ring toss game), and along the way she sees Milchick as her oppressor. Having no other avenue for agency, her only attempt to claw any power out of her situation is to report him to the institution. But Milchick knows she is a child. The aftermath of her "acting out" in this way is another major moment for him, as he seemingly begins to realize that he should be a role model and champion for this child, who is tacitly powerless, but he cannot be that within Lumon's system.

This post is only about the corporate-affiliated representatives of these themes, but it goes much deeper. Literally. The implications of Gemma's story and place within the narrative as an Asian woman are A LOT to read through the lens of this theme. But for now... wow.

Anyone who says S2 is lacking in cohesion and "moving the plot forward" can suck it.

[conflictedbird]

on why FtM transitioning and being nonbinary are antithetical to feminist progress

****This was originally a quote repost (which is still on my blog a few scrolls down so you can see the OP that inspired me to write this), but i’ve decided to make it its own post too****

Recently I’ve been thinking about how gender roles are essentially a social hierarchy, with man/maleness at the top, and woman/femaleness at the bottom.

If you transition to pursue that maleness or start to identify as nonbinary, perhaps in order to escape the rampant sexualization of the body you were born with (which I understand can be suffocating), you have ultimately only helped yourself individually by attempting to ascend that social hierarchy.

You have done nothing feminist, despite the modern liberal view that “real feminism includes all gender identities” in the name of inclusivity and intersectionality. Nothing has been accomplished for the liberation of females as a class from the shackles of patriarchy, misogyny, and restrictive gender roles. At the end of the day your individual symptom has been addressed, but not the systemic cause. Sex-based oppression still stunts the progress of the rest of the female/woman population, and the original social ladder is still in place— you alone have simply climbed it. No rebellion has occurred— in fact, it is a surrender.

To be clear, this isn’t an attack on anybody— it is simply my analysis of the deeper consequences of what I can only think of as a current social contagion. I can certainly understand the drive behind transitioning, especially for young girls influenced by genderist internet culture. It will be alluring, after all, to want to identify as a man when society sees man as human, and woman as object.

But gender ideology is not the solution. Like I said, it only addresses the symptom, but the poisonous cause itself is still deeply rooted into the fabric of our society: the cause being the sex-based stereotypes that have been the social foundation upon which rests women’s discrimination, oppression, and limitation of freedom & expression. We must never stop the fight to uproot this poison.

The solution is not women transitioning into manhood or adopting some genderless nonbinary identity to be afforded respect and dignity and freedom and a non-objectified life. The solution is demanding that as a female, as a woman, you ALREADY deserve the respect, dignity, freedom, and non-objectified life that are all in fact your birthrights.

Because being female IS being fully human. It IS full, multifaceted, unique personhood. It IS the ability to wear anything, enjoy any hobby, embody any personality, pursue any field, accomplish any feat, and house brilliant intellect. Make them see it, no matter how long it takes. Because we deserve it, while still remaining in the body we have. Without changing.

TLDR;

don’t affirm the ladder’s existence by trying to climb it.

Destroy the ladder.

[lurkingshan]

Only Friends and Engaging with Queer Male Media as a Cishet Woman

I’ve had some good conversations this week with friends as we’ve been unpacking our early reactions to Only Friends, which has only just begun getting into the messy dynamics we know the show is going to explore. One of the things that has come up in conversation is our different reactions to the scene between Boston and Top in the shower stall, and how we each read that in terms of consent, sexual coercion, and what it says about each of the characters. Some of us were relatively unfazed by the scene, finding it to be a fairly realistic depiction of a pushy aggressor and his conquest who is not that into him, but also not really opposed to getting sex anywhere and any way he can. Some were more uncomfortable, recognizing behaviors we might call assault in other contexts and wondering whether we should be condemning the character or the scene for the behavior depicted.

For me, this discussion brought up a lot of my previous fandom experiences, taking me all the way back to ye olden days when Queer as Folk (US) was airing and the majority cishet woman fandom spaces were scandalized, scandalized I tell you, by some of the aspects of gay male culture it depicted. It was not the first or the last show to do so, but it stands out in my mind as an important cultural moment at the turn of century as I was coming of age, when the internet was booming and the proliferation of online fandom spaces was rapidly accelerating. Because QaF did it all—casual sex, cruising, group sex, very public acts of indecency, aggressive boundary pushing and peacocking, open and polyamorous relationships, cheating and betrayal, age gaps—and it depicted it all quite explicitly, which made a lot of people uncomfortable. Especially women who were used to thinking about sex and relationships through two primary, and heavily socialized, lenses:

heteronormative romance, and

heterosexual rape culture.

Let’s take a moment to unpack those terms. Heteronormative romance is a big, broad term that I’m using as a kind of container for a lot of things, including patriarchal structures, misogyny, rigid gender roles, purity myths and fetishization of virginity, courtship rituals, promiscuity and respectability politics, the madonna/whore complex, sex as an act primarily for breeding and procreation, expectations of sublimating sexual desire in service of caretaking for others, and so on. Basically, all the bullshit cis women get jammed into our heads from birth that gives us so many hang ups about sex and love. With heterosexual rape culture, I am referring to the undeniable culture of sexual violence women also endure in a majority heterosexual society, in which we are in constant danger of having our boundaries transgressed, being physically and psychologically hurt, and then being told it doesn’t matter because our personhood has always been in question and never mattered as much as any one man’s power or pleasure. I’m not going to drop a bunch of citations for the above because this is tumblr and I have escaped the icy grip of graduate school, but if any of these ideas are unfamiliar to you, google is your pal (and please read about intersectionality as it relates to these concepts while you’re at it, because there are layers of identity that make these dangers worse for some, like our trans and BIPOC sisters, and all of this is undergirded, as ever, by white supremacy).

So, yes, engaging with media about sex is fraught for women, especially when that media does not conform to our heteronormative ideas of morality that have been shaped by all of the above, and particularly when we as individuals have not done the work to unpack and interrogate our socialized beliefs, which is often the case for cishet women especially. Many of us instinctively cringe away from unromantic depictions of sex. Many of us can’t stand cheating and betrayal in our love stories. Many of us shy away from media that depicts the unfortunate reality of grey and dubious consent. All of that is valid, to an extent, and rooted in the way we have been taught to think about this stuff from birth, and the ways we’ve had to adapt to survive. 

But, here’s the thing, girlies: most of those socialized hang ups I just talked about? Do not apply to a story by, for, and about queer men. 

Before you start yelling, here is your disclaimer: of course patriarchy and misogyny also hurt men. Of course rape culture also exists in queer communities, and of course some queer people engage in heterosexual sex, so these are not mutually exclusive categories of people. And, importantly, cishet women are not the only ones who struggle with these tensions—just the ones who are most relevant to this particular post. 

So, after that long and winding road, back to the point: this debate about the bathroom scene in Only Friends is the same shit that’s been debated in majority female fandoms around depictions of queer male sex since time immemorial. And whatever your personal feelings are on that scene, or the no doubt numerous other depictions of questionable romantic and sexual etiquette and dubious consent coming our way in this show, what it boils down to is this: can a majority cis woman fandom step outside of our own conception of sexual morality to engage with this show not with judgment, but with curiosity about what sex and relationships look like for queer men? This show has an entirely queer male writing and directing team. It is made with love by people of the community, for the community. They know what they’re about, they have resumes demonstrating they are damn good storytellers who understand safe sex, consent, sexual health, and sex work, and they are here to tell us a story grounded in their reality. BL has been moving in fits and starts toward depictions of sex that are more honest about queer male experiences, and Only Friends, spearheaded by the Jojo Tichakorn Phukhaotong (who demonstrated quite ably that he has a firm grasp on consent, sexual assault, and the damage that dubious consent can cause in The Warp Effect), is the next step in that evolution. The key point is that sexual activity simply does not mean the same thing or carry the same associations and hang ups for queer men as it does for cis women. With that in mind, can we try our best to process and critique this story on their terms, instead of our own?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Only Friends is not going to be a good time for people who are looking for romantic depictions of relationships and sex or invested in identifying heroes and villains amongst this cast of characters. This show is about deeply flawed people hurting each other, rooted in the lived experience of the Thai queer male community—and those of us who do not share all of those lived experiences may not understand the nuances of every single thing that is happening. We can be sure that the characters will all be wrong sometimes and they will all do things we think are stupid or reckless or unkind. Does that mean we can’t have empathy for them? Do they have to act in a way we think is morally “correct” in order to love them? You don’t have to be comfortable with the things these characters do, and it’s certainly valid to point out when you think lines have been crossed. But attempting to sort them into “good” and “bad” camps is pointless, and moralistic judgment of their behavior is out of place, particularly when it comes from a place of trying to force them into our own irrelevant frameworks for sexual politics. 

And with all that said, I am passing the baton over to my dear friend @waitmyturtles, because there’s an entire aspect of the intersectional cultures at play here that I have barely touched on—Only Friends as an Asian queer story that is building from a specific lineage of Thai queer media. I’m gonna let her take the mic for that part, and say thanks to her, @bengiyo, @neuroticbookworm and @wen-kexing-apologist for reading this over and helping me think through what I wanted to say here, and shoutout to @williamrikers whose post I also linked to above. 

[lemonhemlock]

Daenerys’ people were not slaves, they served her because WANTED to because they were grateful.

She didn't profit from any previous slaves selling themselves back into that because actually it made the masters think they could do it to anyone. Only out of a hundred wanted to go back and that is mostly cause they were stuck there and they didn't know how to live.

I don’t see how any of that changes the fact that she is nothing like the people who abuse people for fun.

i'm not sure what you're trying to get out of this conversation because you're not addressing any of the points i've actually even made in relation to daenerys recently.

daenerys owned slaves when she was khal drogo's wife because that's part and parcel of being the wife of a khal. or, rather, so you won't say i'm being unfair on dany's own victimhood, let us allow that drogo was the one who actually exercised ownership over the slaves since i'm not sure the dothraki would recognise dany's legal personhood beyond herself being the property of the khal

but, genuine question, why are you so resistant to familiarise yourself with the concept of intersectionality? do you think it will bite you or something? ponder on the situation of white women in the american south whose husbands owned slaves. say they had a gentle heart and felt for the plight of this historically brutalized minority. what then? does it mean they didn't simultaneously profit from the slaves' economic subjugation?

dany is not like the people who abuse slaves for fun because she has different character flaws, like poor planning for the future and entitlement. no one is actually debating that daenerys doesn't feel sympathy for the slaves and thinks it's an appalling practice. that's a strawman argument. what her critics are pointing out is that she's not good at governing, you know, the kind of thing westeros is in great need of

[skincareroutine]

im just soooo against making specific people the face of social liberation movements. especially in retrospect cus when u think about past historical figures who were the face of movements theyre sanitized of ALL personhood n mentioned akin to saints n then when it comes out oh what they did was illegal at the time or their views on other movements/intersectionality werent as liberating for all. theyre demoralized and suddenly theyre like the devil cus we have insane PURITY culture now. it also just freaks me out because we all live under the dome of white supremacy where historical social movements are sanitized to make it more compelling to people.

[samasmith23]

Viewing Kamala Khan as a mutant through a queer lens

I’ve gotta say, after having read Issue #3 of Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant miniseries yesterday, one of the elements that I’ve really grown to love about this book is how well it functions as a metaphorical coming out narrative for Kamala Khan! In addition to the previous issues showcasing Kamala struggling with the newfound pressures that being a mutant comes with, especially during a time when anti-mutant bigotry is at record levels following Orchis’ genocidal attack on Krakoa, during this issue’s dream sequence we’re introduced to the idea that Kamala’s hesitancy to accept her newfound identity as a mutant and inability to access her new powers is all due to a mental roadblock inside of Kamala’s own psyche. However, when the villains try to force Kamala to accept her mutant powers before she is ready by invading her dreams (as part of a Trojan horse to activate a psychic bomb against other mutants), Kamala refuses her “dream-self’s” offer upon realizing that only she alone can decide when she’s ready to define who she is, countering Orchis false anti-mutant narratives and defining her solely by her latent powers by proudly proclaiming, “It’s not about the powers. It never was. It’s about the why we fight. The who we fight for. My powers don’t define me! They aren’t the testament to who I am, in here! I was afraid that being a mutant meant that I was no longer anything else. But that doesn’t erase any other part of me. It just makes me more… me. Who I am — that’s up to me to decide.”

Kamala’s story has always been one about identity, self-acceptance, and intersectionality. This has been evident since her initial run by G. Willow Wilson & Sana Amanat, where Kamala was at a crossroads in regards to figuring out who she was as Pakistani-American Muslim from an immigrant family who had just obtained Inhuman powers, eventually deciding to embrace the best aspects of each part of her respective identities.

Discovering that she now also happens to be a mutant doesn’t erase those previous aspects of who Kamala is, but simply adds to them. Additionally, several X-Men stories in the past have framed the mutant allegory through a queer lens, and there’s a lot you can read into Kamala’s journey of self-acceptance as a mutant in regards to both queer theory and intersectionality. I’ve mentioned before how the recent spike in anti-mutant bigotry amongst the general public following Orchis’ attack on Krakoa Island bears a lot of real-world parallels to the recent upsurge in homophobic and transphobic legislation by Republican politicians here in the US, and Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3 further expands these parallels. Similar to how Queer people of color are the groups most severely affected by homophobic and transphobic legislation, Vellani effectively demonstrates how Orchis anti-mutant hate campaign significantly impacts Kamala as a woman of color who just found out that she’s also a latent mutant. Orchis’ attempt to try and play on Kamala’s fears of being rejected by her non-mutant superhero friends while framing mutants as inherently arrogant beings with god-complexes, feels eerily similar to how Republicans have recently tried to push false “groomer” conspiracy narratives in order to frame LGBTQ+ people as inherently “predatory towards children,” further isolating an already vulnerable community by falsely defining them solely through the lens of sex. But similar to how sex & sexuality does NOT entirely define a gay or trans person’s identity as an individual, mutant powers do NOT solely define the sum of Kamala’s identity either. It may be an important aspect of who she is as a person, but it is NOT representative of the whole of her identity. Just like how being a Muslim from an immigrant family is an important facet of her personhood, but it is not the sum total of her personality. People are more complex than the narrow-minded stereotypes that bigots like to falsely project onto them, and Kamal effectively demonstrates this by accepting her newfound status as a mutant as merely another facet of personhood. She’s a mutant, as well as an Inhuman, a Muslim, a woman of color, second-generation Pakistani immigrant, nerdy fan-fiction writer, and a compassionate human being who simply wants to help others in need!

From Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3 by Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Carlos Gómez & Adam Gorham.

[canisvesperus]

Here's a question it thinks and asks about often that you can totally ignore:

what are some significant things that are common in veganarchist spaces that more spaces should adopt, and

what are some of the biggest issues in veganarchist spaces where they could learn from other spaces?

Hey there,

Big questions! Here’s what I think.

One thing I have always appreciated in veganarchist spaces is a frequent willingness to deconstruct explicit and implicit biases of all kinds. Nonhuman animal suffering is often an afterthought or a non-issue in other anarchist and leftist spaces, especially those that are rampant with class reductionism. To most veganarchists, concern for very basal and widely normalized forms of oppression opens the door to truly reexamine and continuously reevaluate their thoughts and behaviors across the board. Nothing is too “ridiculous” or too “inconsequential”. For example, the first time I ever heard somebody else speak on youth liberation, it was in a veganarchist community. Unfortunately youth liberation is a topic that is ridiculed by many self-proclaimed radicals who cannot conceptualize autonomy and personhood as something worth respecting in anyone who is unlike themselves and their peers. Saneism and lookism are also frequently discussed, similar situation. Concepts that are considered fringe in other spaces are more likely to be lended consideration in a serious manner, intersectionality is a massive priority, and generally they are more functional, more informative, more liberatory environments for human people of intersecting identities as well as the nonhuman people whose experiences are in many cases informed by collateral effects of human-on-human discrimination. Our experiences are tightly intertwined and this is considered to be a vital tenant informing the opportunities for our collective liberation.

Mainstream veganism is populated by a significant portion of “apoliticals”, single-issue activists (including genuine unabashed bigots), green capitalists, and generally an emphasis on consumer activity over all else in terms of praxis. I cannot overstate how much these types need to open their minds to comprehensive anti-oppression politics. Some of the attitudes in the mainstream undoubtedly influence vegan anarchist thought and it’s essential that we stay aware of how liberalist veganism for example may affect how we approach veganism. I’m going to be completely honest, a lot of human people I know are not knowledgable enough about nonhuman animals themselves, which leads to frustrating debates with respect to non-native species and the the best ways to go about acting as allies to them and to native species alike. Likewise, there is occasional misinformation circulated with respect to nutritional and climate science that we should not allow to go uncriticized. This is also a wider issue in vegan communities— I don’t see enough evidence and fact-checking for popular claims. Science is not the enemy. It’s vital that we work with accurate data for honest problems to find solutions that work for all of us.

I would also say that there is often too strong of an emphasis on insurrectionary activity and not enough attention given to the long-term recovery and support for emancipated nonhuman animals. This does tie into the issue of freeing farmed animals yet leaving them to fend for themselves in a foreign environment. I realize there are very few of us and we are not a wealthy demographic, but I simply do not see enough support for our sanctuaries. There are repatriations to be made for those sanctuary members; we cannot abandon them. Direct action is important, yes, but caregiving is just as important. I suspect some folks are overcompensating for the prevalence of “cute animal” media content in mainstream communities. We should prioritize an appreciation for nonhuman animals as they exist as individuals and unique cultures beyond their struggle for liberation. This in no way detracts from serious conversations about their liberation. Not every discussion and narrative about trans, brown, autistic, humans should be centered around suffering, and this should apply to every person, including those of other species. We need to celebrate their joy too, and have genuine investment in their self expression and daily lives. And I definitely don’t believe that my human peers don’t care about that, after all I would say many veganarchists are “animal lovers” and “nature lovers”—it’s more so an area they must improve upon and learn about from other spaces. There’s a fine balance to be found but in doing so it would be to the great benefit of our nonhuman peers.

I hope this is insightful! My apologies for the late response; my inbox is very full and I’ve been quite busy with my studies.

[seraphbliss]

wait i'm back on this cause i woke up pissed. white queers idolize black trans women and that glorification denies them their personhood. it's very similar to the smolbean-ification of (white) trans men in how it turns the entire group into a caricature that cannot be criticized or taken seriously. queer spaces already villianize masculinity enough, and i think that a lot of wider society's fear and avoidance of black men is reflected if not magnified in the queer community. specific to my own frustrations with the online transmasc community, there is a genuine disregard for black men. the same men who led grassroot movements that eventually led to the current sphere that lets these guys safely argue about whether cavetown or noahfinnce is a better artist. the attitude for white transmascs seems to be that they can't grasp that being transgender means that, to properly advocate for yourself, intersectionality is key. like they can't focus on transphobia and racism at the same time. online transmasc communities feel post racial in that sense because of how casually exclusionary they are of black men. i just sit out of a lot of discussions because they never consider that most shit they talk about doesn't apply to black guys—see especially aesthetics and terminology like tme. they do not understand black people and therefore do not understand gender expression and dynamics in the black community. what subverts norms for us is just being clockable to them.

the way white queers ascribe sainthood to Black trans women and completely ignore Black trans men and Black nonbinary people has convinced me more than anything else that they really truly don’t care about any Black trans people beyond wearing us as a little badge they can show off to prove they’re The Good Ones

[feralfungii]

Small rant

terfs rly are some of the most misogynistic pieces of shit out there and they seem totally unaware of the irony of it. Claiming to be feminist but then the moment someone dfab is like "i dont identify as a woman" theyre like "OH YOU POOR CONFUSED LITTLE GIRL. You clearly have been so terribly misled and tricked!!!! Not to worry, I know you are incapable of critical thinking or making your own decisions in life, so I'M here to tell you your business, to dictate what you do with your body, and to tell you how you, as a woman, should behave!!!!"

Like wow yeah youre such a feminist, trying to dictate what other people do with their bodies and lives and telling them they don't know any better. That's definitely not at all anything like our society's tendency to tell dfab people they're irrational and reactive and don't know what they're talking about and cant be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies.

Terfs are like the pro-lifers who insist theyre feminists - they don't understand that feminism is more than just "yeah i dont think dfab people should live to be subservient to dmab people" or "men suck" or "women are angels and goddesses who can do no wrong." You arent a feminist just because youre a cis woman who's full of herself and raging at people she doesn't consider to be her equals. Feminism is such a huge and nuanced thing and it drives me nuts to see people directly undermining what feminism actually is while insisting to be championing it.

Also, any real feminist would be unabashedly supportive of trans women, that's just a fact. Real, actual feminism is not based in sexist fake science, it's based on "the way we as individuals and as a society treat people needs to be considered in context of many layers of intersectionality, privilege, oppression, and every nuanced thing in between. No one's experience and life should be invalidated and taken from their control based on gender, race, religion, class, or sexuality."

Insisting on gender roles and specific gender presentation and policing of other peoples bodies, harassing and bullying people who dont conform to your personal preferences... I cant think of anything less feminist than terf ideology. There is nothing more harmful to the true purpose of feminism than their weird self-righteous misogyny and transphobia. There is nothing more insulting to the spirit of feminism than to totally invalidate anyone else's personhood and identity based on sexist gender ideology.

If you think that chromosomes and genitals are deciding factors of who people are, who they're capable of being, and what they're capable of doing, you have a lot of internalized sexism to work through. If you think someone's entire life needs to be dictated by their gender, you also have a lot of internalized misogyny and sexism to sort through. You cannot claim to be fighting for women while excluding people who are also suffering under the system feminism is supposed to be fighting against (spoiler alert, the system is run by a bunch of old rich white guys, not by trans people who want to be able to use the public bathroom without getting literally attacked) and also promoting and spreading the same hurtful, hateful rhetoric that people have always used to say women aren't really people. They will literally parrot archaic gender ideology from times when women weren't fucking allowed to vote and claim they're feminists, it's absolutely nonsensical.

Im sure many of them dont actually believe in their own righteousness and just hide behind the smokescreen of feminism so they can use it as a defense when theyre called out for abusing and harassing people. They can just say it's in the name of feminism. They're not abusing and ostrasizing marginalized groups because theyre bigotted! Oh no, not at all, they're just soooo feminist.

But im sure there are also plenty who are genuinely just... women who have been deeply hurt and are lashing out at oppressed groups and minorities in some attempt to offset the sense of helplessness that comes with the fact that so much of their pain is being caused by people in power. They cant punch up high enough for those people to even notice, so they punch down instead. And they get the temporary feeling that they're doing something to counteract whatever or whoever hurt them, that they're helping a just cause by hurting the big bad scary trans people who are clearly the driving force behind the mistreatment of feminine people in our society, and then any time they might have an inkling of "Am I hurting people who are already suffering?" they can turn around and be assured by their echochamber that no, you aren't, because the transgenders aren't people, their suffering is faked to invalidate the suffering of "real" women, and your actions are beyond reproach because the other terfs all agree youre in the right

Cause, yknow, people who dehumanize entire sections of the population and want them eradicated or controlled can usually count on others of that mindset to be able to objectively identify when they're being hateful or going too far. Groups that shamelessly take pride in being "radical" while targeting minorities, who seem to base their victories on "how much harm can we cause to the people we dislike," and whose talking points often seem to be scarily along the lines of eugenics, conversion therapy, or straight up eradication of real people are usually totally reasonable and rational and definitely in the right. Not hateful or bigotted at all.

I get that they hate trans people but man they really fucking hate feminism too for people who include it in the name. Feminist should never have been used to describe such evil.

[valsedelesruines]

Intersectionality is an oppressive force to individual identity. Categorization and agglomeration through these intersectional groups tends to homogenize the person based on criteria relevant to our current socio-political climate.

[technoccult]

Criptiques and A Dying Colonialism

Caitlin Wood's 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people's perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is "a daring space," designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there's no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations. The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers' first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.

Read the rest of Criptiques and A Dying Colonialism at Technoccult

[gerination]

Required reading for anyone interested or involved in authentic, person-centered care. Paramount to this concept is personhood: according the person with dementia (PWD) agency, maintaining their dignity and respect, and prioritizing their psychological and physiological wellbeing. 

The teal cover book, Dementia Reconsidered, Revisited is a more recent version of Tom Kitwood’s original.

[adrestianflames]

A quick PSA on the Roe repeal and antisemitism:

Religion did not take away the right to vote to abortion in the US. Christofascist evangelism did. Judeo-Christian values did not lead to this decision, because Judeo-Christian values do not exist.

Judaism does restrict the right to abortion. Fetuses are not considered to have souls or personhood. Banning abortions is considered to be an infringement on Jewish liberties, and Jewish congregations are already filing suits to legally protect our religious freedom and right to abortion. [1] [2] [3]

You will see the Right suggest that America is a "Judeo-Christian" nation, and that this decision by the Supreme Court is in line with "Judeo-Christian" values. They did this with Uvalde, and they're doing it with Texas' succession. In response, you will see anti-religious and likely culturally Christian atheists blame the wrong targets. Leftists will rally against all religion. They will rally against Jews. Some of them have been aching to-- anti-Israeli sentiments breed antisemitism like wildfire, even among anti-fascist, pro-minority communities. [1] [2] [3]

On the other side, the same Christofascist Right that claims to support Judeo-Christianity is using this incident to revisit blood libel, the conspiracy that Jewish people kidnap babies to eat and use for blood sacrifices. We have already seen this used by Christian nationalists against Jewish women who support abortion. [1] [2]

Obviously, focusing on protecting people with uteruses in red states is the first priority right now. There are a dozen other top priorities surrounding abortion right now. But please remember that Jewish people are about to get stuck in a very uncomfortable middle ground. Jewish people will face hatred from the Right because they think we eat babies. Jewish people will face hatred from the Left because they think we're responsible for the religious ideals that led to the repeal. Neither of these things are true.

Please remember to practice intersectionality in your activism. Reblog this post. Educate others who fall into the pitfalls of anti-religious hate. Speak up to protect and defend Jewish people in your community. None of this will distract from pro-choice advocacy.

[rareblackcat]

I think that part of this also applies to the black community too.

Our humanity had been denied for hundreds of years. People fought, died, and spent their whole lives scientifically providing that we are in fact human. That our bodies are the same as our white counterparts. And that any differences you see come from the way we've been treated and natural evaluation.

We've been denied personhood too. Our culture has been dumb down and bastardized to nothing (especially in the u.s.) Our brains said to be less then than white peoples. We aren't as smart, as sophisticate as them.

And this sacrifice should be honored and acknowledged but it shouldn't fully define who we have to be. We are more then just black. And you see this isolation a lot in the black community. Anything not considered black is immediately dismissed. And this phenomenon is understandable. No one wants to be like their oppressors or abusers. And no one wants to lose a part of their culture by mixing it with something else.

But we're hindering our growth as living beings by forcing ourselves into this little box of blackness. We can be black and enjoy being black and also be queer, nonhuman, an anime fan, alternative, like other music genres, ect. (Though things like anime and nerd stuff is more normal nowadays) Intersectionality exists for a reason!!

I am a black person who is also a cat, an anime fan, dresses alternatively, and like pop!

I feel like I don’t see a lot of trans women in alterhuman spaces, in therian spaces, in my spaces, now this could be just me but hear me out…

Why?

I feel like it’s becuase of this intersection of misogyny, transphobic narratives, and the need to be “digestible”

As a trans woman it becomes apparent that you need to “put the effort in”, you’re a predator if you look like a “man” or if you look like anything but a perfect woman.

If you want to not be lumped in with the // “bad trans people” the gals who don’t medically transition, the gals who “don’t even try” or whatever, the picked out members of our community who neoliberals quickly label a “straw man that doesn’t exist” when in reality no, trans people have a massive range of appearance and expression// if you don’t want to be lumped in with them then you need to be perfect.

To be an animal is to reject that, you become somthing not normal, not standard, not beautiful in the eyes of others. You become a straw man, the people that neoliberalism is fast to forget, “no one actually identifies as an animal, that’s just transphobia” is half the picture, I’m the other half.

So trans girls can’t be part of that picture, can’t be abnormal, as women we are held to a far too high standard, as trans women we are held to a standard even higher, and as animals we destroy all those standards all together. It’s “giving up” no longer being some sort of digestible cis normative being

I don’t wanna bash t girls who have that goal, it’s just that the goal that is often pushed on us, I think means a lot of us are scared to explore divergent queer spaces becuase if we do, then in the eyes of the public, we’ve given up.

Stay safe everyone, and if any trans girls are seeing this, stop pretending to be somthing you’re not, whether that be you pretending your ugly, pretending your a man, or pretending that you’re still fully human. Live true

Love you guys, and I hope this doesn’t go over like a lead balloon