#overwhelmingly queer spaces in both conditions

[elytrafemme]

posting actively anti KOSA stuff on my instagram account which i know is followed by at least one person who is explicitly pro KOSA... who i also work with...

[hussyknee]

Twitter feels like an even split between pro-Palestine supporters and the most horrific kind of racists, Zionists and white supremacists. Tumblr is by comparison overwhelmingly in support of Palestine. And yet the level of dehumanization, isolation, Othering and casual racism on here is so much more unbearable and suffocating than Twitter could ever be.

Tumblr wants to be seen as the anti-racist good guys on the right side of history while reinforcing the racist white supremacist western-centric status quo. Black and brown people are given platform under strict conditions of what values can be challenged and how far white comfort can be pushed. It's on Twitter that we have our own communities, our own power of advocacy, and a collective drive to interrogate and dismantle structures of power.

It reinforces what I have known for a long time— Tumblr's hatred of Twitter and TikTok is based primarily on refusing to tolerate the reality of equal representation, leftist action and racial justice. A true diversity of power and perspectives is messy, chaotic, conflict-driven and upends the sense of stability and space that can only come with a homogeneity of racial demographic. The majority of disenfranchised people understands that power structures and bureaucracies are built on purpose to exclude them — the poor, the sex workers, the incarcerated, the ghettoised, the disabled, the colonized. We have to fight to be heard, and our reality and political investment cannot be separated from the minority trauma that informs them. True equality entails not having to funnel that trauma through behaviour and ethics that makes their expression more palatable or considering of others; it removes all respectability politics and allows us to behave with the same unpunished toxicity that is unleashed on us by white and western people. Conflict, cacophony and having to tolerate the untempered emotions and self-interest of all groups is the price of true diversity and honest dialogue. It also primarily empowers Black and brown people and disempowers whites. In contrast, the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" on predominantly white-driven and Western-oriented spaces is a simply a neoliberal farce that requires us to perform our own humanity and ask validation from whiteness. This is why you see only the worst aspects and negative effects of Twitter and TikTok and use them to reject the the platforms wholesale while creating a narrative of moral superiority around Tumblr's relatively low levels of conflict and glossing over the receding presence of Black and brown people in its userbase.

Race is not a layer of oppression. It's the fundamental bisection that creates the underclass on which the colonial capitalist world order is built. It's the caste hierarchy of humanity; who gets to be labourer and profiteer, the exploiter and exploited, the worker and producer, the consumer and consumed, the masses and the individual. The living bodies and embodied lives. The experience of every other marginalization is shaped by its waters. White women and queers will neither understand nor share in the oppression of women and QPoC from both diasporas and the Global South. Even further, every marginalization becomes a weapon against BIPOC in the hands of its white demographic. Black and brown people of those marginalized communities will always only be a token and shield for their white counterparts, while being the workhorses behind their struggles.

It doesn't matter how many times you post "Free Palestine" when we know its only the product of your preoccupation with your own personal moral landscape. Politics based on egoism will always be eclipsed by threats to your material reality. This is why a userbase that spent its entire existence grandstanding against Nazis now cannot see Zionists as Nazis and begs people to participate in a political establishment that has revealed itself to be a genocidal white supremacist regime in the clearest possible terms. Fascism against its own enfranchised is the end stage of an empire that has begun to collapse under the weight of its war-mongering and now resorts to eating itself to survive. No amount of moral distance between yourselves and its machinery of death, no amount of scapegoating the lives crushed underneath it, will stop the roofs you sheltered under falling on top of you. This the truth that the colonized, enslaved and indentured people that built your house have lived all along.

[mxjackparker]

Let's talk about roleplayers exploring their genders and sexualities through roleplay!

Exploring queerness in the real world can be dangerous and have severe social consequences. Roleplaying as characters online can offer an escape from these conditions, where any bigotry is contained behind a computer screen or can be avoided entirely with roleplays constructed to eliminate homophobia and transphobia from the narrative.

((A breakdown of the demographics of roleplayers in terms of whether they're intersex, trans, gay, bi, asexual, and so on. From a sample of just over 1000 roleplayers, found from posts on social media and ads for a survey about online roleplaying on various sites.))

Roleplayers as a group are overwhelmingly likely to be LGBTQ+, and at a certain point we have to consider that they're so likely to be queer for a reason. It's the escapism and the opportunity to try out multiple ways of being perceived.

Here are the words of some queer roleplayers about exploring their sexualities and genders through roleplay:

"I roleplayed as trans characters long before I realized I was trans!"

"Online roleplay spaces were the first places I presented myself (both IC and OOC) as a man and gay, and being in that social space from a young age definitely helped me explore and feel more confident in that sense of self even when I thought of what I was doing as ‘pretending’ or ‘lying’ about my gender (and meant I gravitated into spaces with other young trans/gender questioning kids, as well as queer adults)."

"I'd tried writing as female characters, but didn't feel comfortable playing such characters for any length of time. I couldn't get past a sense of impostor syndrome that I wasn't doing a credible job writing as a woman. Frankly, I'd seen a lot of female characters written by male writers RPed as if their only experience with the other sex was from erotica and porn."

"RP allows you to assume any sexuality (or asexuality) and explore it creatively and also introduces you to new forms of sexual expression you may never have heard of or different ways of defining old ones."

"You get the experience of being treated like another person that’s maybe what you think you could be like in the future."

Please consider supporting the Kickstarter for OOC: Exploring Online Fandom Roleplay if this is a topic that interests you! You'll get way more insight into queer people and roleplay.

[casualbluebirdmentality]

this post is literally just me ranting about my own gender experience/questioning as an afab person.

(despite all the cws and tws, it's really not that overwhelmingly negative-- moreso just yelling my confusion into the void lol. i'm just really paranoid abt accidentally ruining someone's day by not tagging smth, hence the literal max 30 tags.)

you can read it if you want but if not,, understandable lol. either way, enjoy this picture of a quokka that i got by googling "cute animal":

...ok.

figuring out ur gender as an afab person is so weird, cuz it's like:

am I uncomfortable w my tits (always have been) for Gender Reasons, or is it the societal conditioning that they're sex objects/will make ME be viewed as a sex object if they're "too noticeable"?

is the visceral discomfort that I've always had (literally since childhood) at even the THOUGHT of having a period a Gender Thing, or is it the societal taboo that makes it impossible to speak/think about it?

do I like the idea of being perceived as masc for Gender Reasons, or bc I know it will make people take me more seriously and make me less of a target for abuse/harassment?

do I feel like a boy in disguise/an imposter when surrounded by other women/in female spaces bc I actually am more masc in my actual gender, or because gender roles and their "boyish interests/presentation" and "girly interests/presentation" have been so ingrained in me that it feels like if I don't match up with That Exact Image of being a very femme woman, then clearly I'm just not a woman at all? (/s for that last phrase)

(A more specific/personalized addendum to that last one: I've got a sister and we both did a lot of performing arts stuff VERY frequently growing up, especially as a duo, and whenever the roles were a boy and girl (which wasn't most of the time but still happened fairly regularly), I'd always be the boy bc she was more femme than me & always wanted to be the girl, whereas i didn't really care-- so like, was that because I'm inherently more comfortable as a more masc person? Or did I just not care either way at the time cuz I was a damn kid just having fun playing a role, and now from years and years and YEARS of doing that I've just conditioned myself into thinking of myself as "the guy one" when paired with a woman/surrounded by women??????)

And THEN for me personally, you throw in the fact that both Nate/ND Stevenson (creator of the first show that ever made me feel Seen as a queer person, to the extent that it broke my brain a little) and Elliot Page (right after/while playing his Umbrella Academy character, who was the only "female" character I've EVER felt I could truly relate to in such a full, overwhelming extent for some reason I couldn't name, and whom my friends at the time literally said "had big [my name] energy," without having been told anything about my feelings at all) BOTH came out as transmasc. So it's like,, am i transmasc? All Signs Point To Yes, pretty much. And I distinctly prefer when my tits are squished firmly against my chest, which sounds a whole hell of a lot like chest dysphoria.

...Except that when I got a binder to try it out, threw a hoodie on over it, and looked in the mirror, it was just like,, weird. And a minute or so later when I caught my reflection in the mirror out the corner of my eye without thinking and my brain automatically perceived my chest as like, FLAT flat for the first time, it pretty much shouted "WRONG WRONG WRONG" and started clanging pots and pans until I took it off.

But, irl my nickname is a typically "male" short-hand (as in, someone reading it would assume it's a guy 99.9999% of the time) of my (feminine) name, and I much prefer it. So like I guess I'm just generically nonbinary... but I also really don't want to say that I'm not a woman? But that reluctance could just be reluctance at relinquishing what makes me "valuable" in society's eyes, or in accepting that I've "failed" to be what I was "supposed" to be. Or in losing my ability to "speak authentically" about things like sexism, even though I Know Full Well that that's not how that works, like, at all. So it's just... ????????????????????

The only thing I have been able to figure out is that I definitely want to be more buff and athletic, and definitely make my body at least a little more masc in that regard. So like, Buff Sword Lady definitely, at least. (I do quite enjoy swords. A lot.) So maybe I just want to be butch?

But I don't look like that yet, and it's so hard to figure this kind of thing out without actually being able to physically see yourself that way, without being able to actually feel it first-hand and compare. So I'm just, like, here, a fantasy writer doing muscle work-outs alone in my room every day, hoping that micro-dosing on jock culture will help me finally feel Right lmao.

[r-fenghuang-fanfiction]

Kpop Scandals

1.) So... I grew up with kpop (either GeeGee by SNSD, Haru Haru by Big Bang or GD's first solo are the oldest songs I remember getting into) and I've always had a fondness for it, both as a connection to my asian heritage/representation and as the only unapologetically 'happy' media I consumed, but...

I think there are a lot of people who look at it with rose tinted glasses.

It isn't wrong to love something or to need a coping mechanism, but the kpop industry is far from perfect. Like most entertainment industries, it hides more than it shows and definitely has a dark side. Just because the image you're being sold is peppy and upbeat, it doesn't mean there isn't loads of shady shit happenning behind the scenes.

People do ugly things for money and fame and external validation.

They're desperate and tired and pushed to the brink and incredibly, overwhelmingly HUMAN. They make mistakes. They choose 'success' over mental health and self-respect (a lot of people do).

Think of the people around you who work shitty, minimum wage jobs with no benefits because they have no choice and then extend their workdays to 72hr shifts and stick surveillance cameras in their faces and see how well they hold up and how long they go without making poor decisions.

That's what life is like for a lot of kpop idols except they get the added bonus of being constantly compared to each other and pitted against each other for profit and the entertainment of others (survival and music chart shows).

Capitalism is ugly no matter how much glitter you poor on it. Obsessive fixation is still obsessive fixation even if you call it 'being a hardcore stan' or a sassaeng.

You can't put people on pedestals and expect them to always be perfect and never show the cracks. If I did that to you, how long would you last?

We all joke that this idol or that idol is our 'baby', but none of that is real. That's a product that you're buying.

Maybe those people are being sincere, but you don't know them personally and no amount of convincing yourself that you can tell when they're being real or fake is gonna make it fact.

These people are strangers to you either way and your opinion on the image they've sold you is ultimately meaningless. Unless you saw something yourself, have access to a credible source (like a court ruling and a verified account from the actual parties involved) then you don't really know what happenned and are not qualified to make a judgement.

We're not prosecutors, we're spectators.

Don't assume that your 'oppa' is definitely innocent or so-and-so from that group you don't like is definitely guilty. You don't actually know.

2.) If someone is miserable enough that they turn to drug use of any kind in order to cope, they are probably better off taking the time away to recover and reassess. If something that you're supposed to love is physically or emotionally eating away at you and making you have suicidal thoughts, you need to take a step back and check in with yourself.

Sometimes the things that you cling to are the things that are the worst for you (cigarettes, toxic relationships, etcetera) and you need to reevaluate the amount of space they take up in your life.

If it's something you really can't live without, it is never too late to go back. You have the rest of your life (possibly as much as 120 years) ahead of you. It's okay to stumble and start again.

Pause.

Breathe.

Consider an alternate route.

(TBH, I'm pretty sure Hanbin could make it in the indie or underground scenes if he really wanted to.)

Sometimes the plan you have for yourself at the beginning isn't the one that ultimately leads to your goal. Sometimes goals change.

It's rough, but it can also be a good thing.

You might end up happier than you ever imagined you could be.

3.) There's way worse shit happenning in the world right now than the kpop industry getting a bit of a reshuffle. Aside from the sexual assault and trafficking cases and the deaths of JongHyun ad Sulli, none of the stuff that happenned is as drastic as the tabloids are making them out to be.

So, you guys had a couple of drug scandals? The U. S. Government is confirmed guilty of flooding at risk, lower income communities with highly addictive drugs in order to cripple their growth and economy; using trumped up drug charges to incarcerate massive amounts of Native Americans, African Americans and other people of colour in order to fuel private prison systems for profit and allowing major pharmecutical companies to promote the overprescription of lethal drugs so that they can be sold for 800% of their actual monetary worth.

And that's just the U. S., you wanna talk about Hong Kong and how 100 protestors supposedly committed suicide in just the last few months? Under incredibly suspicious circumstances?

Yes, kpop idols are people and people matter. Mental health and feminism and drug laws and queer rights and a million other things need a hard reform in South Korea and a lot of other countries right now, but don't lose focus on what the real problems are.

Instead of signing a petition to force your favourite idol back under the thumb of a company that already mistreated them, go petition for better labour laws in South Korea as a whole. Push for equal pay and reasonable hours and safe work conditions and living wages and to end the exploitation of people with mental illnesses and foreign workers.

Fight for real change, not band-aids.

[queernuck]

Becoming-Catgirl: Trans-Species Pidgins and Transgender Lives

In discussing the concept of a trans-species pidgin, a language or lack-thereof that defines communication, interaction between species in semiotic reflection, the means by which creation of and understanding of the “animal” as well as the treatment, both proper and improper, given to the animal is in assemblage with the structures of encounter and understanding, the process of mirroring of becoming-woman that is becoming-transsexual, becoming-transgender, then the resultant kind of becoming-animal that one alludes to in becoming-catgirl, one finds frameworks for differentiated, alterior understandings of the construction of subjectivity, of aesthetic affectations that have been incorporated into popular discourses of trans performativity, appearance, and the fashioning of a displayed transgender subjectivity. 

The late-capitalist character of the catgirl, her origins in the Y2K Aesthetics of anime and manga as received and developed by a millennial audience and created as a field for the subsequent “Generation Z” marked within certain marketing vocabularies, first the initial-consumption and the later repetition of that act of consumption seen in the marketing and consumption-production of a sort of American Otaku culture, the structure of manga and anime as part of a wider hyperreal aesthetic vocabulary called upon in American media, popular culture, and other means of expression, the way in which series such as Dragonball Z or Sailor Moon and later Naruto, Bleach, even more recently My Hero Academia, have engaged with certain structures of importance and affinity in a vital fashion. Dragonball and Naruto in particular enjoy a great popularity in Black American pop culture, as well as enormous popularity in Mexico as well as Mexican-American culture. Both the original consumption-production of media and the further consumption of this process by a largely white audience that passes into producing-production of a certain aesthetic sensibility located alongside the means to realize, produce, express it leads to a comprehensive and rhizomal knot of influence within otherwise arborescent structures of culture-production. Of course, this also is influenced by the means by which cyberpunk aesthetics integrated and echoed a kind of unsure process of looking toward Japan, a kind of codification of Orientalist disparities within aesthetic directionalities, lead to the understanding of manga as a space of the avant-garde, and in turn allowed for a certain sort of producing-production of interplay between artists globally who have been influenced by anime and are taking a new, schizoanalytic approach to the way in which anime aesthetics can be deployed. These languages of development can be seen in the overarching presence of anime in “net art” and various projects of contemporary design, echoing a kind of transition process out of childhood as represented by the animated, and into the supposed-maturity of anime, the characterization of anime as of-the-Other in a way that allows it to capture a certain sort of space of transition, as well as the way that it was often associated with vital ages of transition, the infamous “weeaboo phase” often occurring around the end of middle school and associated with numerous sorts of subjectivities (from those of queer theory to those of reactionary ideology, frequently found in direct opposition on sites such as twitter) providing a framework of development that is later important to the exact sort of realization, description of self, asserting and understanding of the body and its becomings, the molecularity of the body, the realization of subjectivity as linked to a greater-than-human, what Kohn evokes when describing the “all-too-human” and how this relates to the animal structure of experience within transness. 

The means by which animality, monstrosity, and their measure from one another is part of a larger development within net cultures and their development, and in turn, what could be called a multispecies pidgin of catgirls is part of a certain kind of contemporary development of schizophrenic potentialities that radiates out from this. The multispecies is, of course, on display in a literal sense, the means by which the catgirl is a measure of a certain anthropomorphic tendency, between the simple aestheticization of the womanly body as catlike and the development of the cat body as human, as developed out of the human. Kohn’s description of selfhood, of the body, entails in part discussing the means by which one sees-as-another, sees as the predator does, how one enters into a kind of state wherein one becomes-animal not permanently, but certainly in a kind of transformative series of actions creating a phenomenology of the animal. In turn, this is paired with a process of learning the language of the animal, learning how one interprets the animal as dreaming, as interacting with other “selves” in certain arrangements and assemblages, which structure larger understandings of how the animal and human correspond. 

A sort of cultural importance of catgirl aesthetics is in part influenced by the way in which it creates the unobtainable, a kind of body that is expressed with a dual sense of selfhood that arises from the articulatory properties of the cat pair with the human, the means by which human acts of nonverbal communication are read onto and in turn repeated in an anthropomorphic turn when creating the catgirl. Fundamentally, through the catgirl, we assume and create a human phenomenology of the cat, a cat that thinks, understands, "knows" as we do, in the same fashion, as part of a discursive potentiality contained in part by cat-like-ness as a quality of identification and possibility. From here, the development of a catgirl, a human that retains the “cat-like” or a cat who can develop the self of the human, that mimics the human in a fashion that eventually itself becomes human-appearing, a becoming-imperceptible that connotes entry into the human, one understands greatly the appeal for a woman who has experienced a certain heightened sense of the violence of the masculine, of ideology of the masculine and its maintenance, the means by which masculine languages of the body are imposed upon trans women in their own presence, are made targets without even being understood as such, a kind of ironic privileging that is derided for representing a unique closeness to maleness, an intimate knowledge that leads to a point where a certain experience of misogynist violence is held uniquely among those who have been accepted as masculine or masculine-enough: the conditional acceptance of a woman who mirrors the becoming of a man enough to register as a certain sort of subject, the butch woman, the trans woman, the Frat Girl echo as subjects that reflect back the subjectivity of masculinity such that they will not critique the violence of misogyny they are presented with, knowingly or unknowingly. This leads to a status where certain women are pressured toward accepting a violent, dual inscription upon their bodies that recognizes them not as men, but as not-women, as impossible subjects for womanhood. The further addition of colonial demarcations of race as creating standards of acceptable embodiment and presence within communities (often born out of working class communities of color) such as these leads to a status where the cyborg-like development of the body is seen as the best means for reversing the disparities felt in everyday interrelation. For these women, specifically because of the violent demarcation of gendered subjectivity, they are denied the possibility of identification as a means of expressing the phenomenal, of describing a certain transcendent empiricism, a frame of semiotic relations that finds itself in the creation of assemblages of becoming and mirrored-becoming, a concerted similarity in regards to the structures of womanhood and a marked difference in their embodiment. Trans women, particularly, are denied this leads to the means by which an idealized body is crafted beyond simply the standard, but into an evocation of a beautiful monstrousness, a kind of mysticism of embodiment often inspired by the quasi-mythic, the imagined, late capitalist forms of folklore in commodity. The defiance, the means by which a certain critique of femininity is not allowed for trans woman, the trans feminine realized in differance from the feminine and a similar sort of transfeminine, one finds a kind of ironic acceptance of reality regarding the transgressive potentiality of never, of ontology: the outward structuring of the catgirl is specifically informed by aesthetics that are being ironically evoked in an intentional fashion, they are what the cat dressed in drag. This results in a knowing, intentional course of action wherein the aesthetic catgirl accepts impossibility, accepts an incongruity with one body of womanhood and a different realization of another, a Virtual body that happens to have cat ears and a tail. That so much of this involves acts of curation as consumption-production, a certain sort of producing-production that is a foundational aspect of understanding how characters and characteristics, affects of the catgirl, are structured from certain readings of catgirl characters involves looking both at the characters and their larger understanding in a kind of turn that acknowledges the status of the “trap” and the violence of transness as a kind of positionality when signified as such leads to a structure of reapporopriation that is on full display at many places within anime fandom. These acts of resignification, reterritorialization, are overwhelmingly similar in aesthetic affect to ones found within the gay signification found in the Furry fandom, where in place of the reading of the gay body, gay subject, that takes place there is a similarly enacted reading of the trans body. The counterpart in furry fandom, the use of homoerotic signifiers that are mapped onto an animal body in order to create a sort of hybridization, a purer realization of the homoerotic that goes beyond human, a very meaningfully cyborg-esque evocation of potentiality regarding the body and imagined bodies, extends even into acts like fursuiting, where an object takes on the subjectivity of such a body. Similarly, some trans women take on aesthetics of the unknowing, of the notion of the so-called “trap” deployed in conceiving of trans women or possible-trans-women, in order to express themselves. For this, the use of “traps” as examples of trans women, that is, the use of characters given maleness (such as in Re: Fate or Fate: Zero) and resignified as trans women is part of how trans womanhood is realized in relation both to these media accounts and more general structures of transness. Often, there is a sort of “reveal” at one point or another where the character is presented as-male, counted-as-male, and this is intended as a restructuring of the character within maleness. However, a refusal of this, a new means of realizing catgirls as contained within structures of desire and flows of desiring built around trans embodiment and the violence visited upon the body in order to enforce it, leads to the acceptance of catgirls as a kind of symbolic stand-in within trans subjectivity.  Catgirls are a lesbian phallus figure, born of a repressing-desire realized and resignified out of the pornographic while retaining the singularities of pornographic acts, of the possible-pornographic, where one finds the origin of a certain acceptance among trans women of their status and potential for identification. Certainly, most invocations of the catgirl are in an exchange of desire that specifically mirrors and is realized alongside lesbian desire, considering how many trans women specifically realize themselves as lesbians specifically because of how sexual expression is only a small fragment of lesbian experience and moreover is bolstered by the means in which the phallic structure of desire, the psychoanalytic account of lesbian subjectivity, is formed by a continual vanishing of the phallic center, a lack of culmination in the sort of phallogocentric ideation of the relations-of-relationship, a differentiated and occasionally resignified presence of dynamics of top and bottom standing in as approximations of flows of phallogocentric desire, but only understood as such in relaying the potential-sexual, as a means of expressing not-uncommon relationships in an all-too-common heteronormative, phallogocentric vocabulary.

The all-too, the all-too-human of Haraway, the all-too-common collapsing of the languages of difference alluded to by Kohn in his effort to expand the anthropological beyond the human, to study the linguistics of what he describes as the trans-species pidgin, leads to the sorts of points at which the construction of a body that is marked from birth by the Virtual, by a specific sort of capitalist eternity, the late capitalist acts of identification and deprivation that define the differentiations of the first and third worlds, the marking of gendered sexes and the sexing of gender as a kind of Western hegemony and the ensuing “enlightenment” of accepting an expression within hegemony leads to a complicated series of attempted expressions of desire which manifest in unpredictable fashions under schizophrenic structures of identity-formation given by late capitalism. The creation of the individual, of exactly what makes the individual-qua-individual possible, the creation of an individual as an artifact of class, is vital to the kinds of violent collapses of identity that take place around trans women, and the joyful restructuring of them in the image of the catgirl.

[baroquespiral]

So I finally read this sequence, AKA Yudkowsky does the moral of Evangelion And it’s pretty fascinating because it touches on all the points @philsandifer was trying to make about/around Yudkowsky in Neoreaction A Basilisk... raises the same objections and endorses the same values... and immediately people start debating the merits of pickup artistry in the comments.

Which sort of resonates with Promethea’s criticism of Sandifer’s resolution, and sort of resonates with the reasons I kind of hate most (thematic) Eva-knockoffs of the formula “your neurodivergence/queerness/trauma is artistically fascinating, but in the end you have to learn to love yourself, perform your gender correctly and Get The Girl (as if she had no more say in the matter than she ultimately does in the masturbation fantasies this is supposedly the alternative to)”. But hanging over the whole thing is the question of what the fuck is a catgirl. (I have to say, Yudkowsky is the last person I’d expect to have the same concept of catgirls as the /r/socialism mods.)   Another commenter suggests Yudkowsky replace “catgirl” with “fembot”, which I think is the correct TVTrope for “nonsentient romantic partner”, and suggests Yudkowsky has already subsumed Actually Existing Catgirls under the category of “furmod”.  A furmod, in this definition, is a purely cosmetic body modification, “scarcely different from wearing lingerie”. For many people, this is all a catgirl or catboy’s feline features are or need to be: floating signifiers that attract ambient erotic charge, moe points in database space.   But most of these moe or fetish points once had content, even if the otaku’s strategy for dealing with sexual contradiction (the topic of the Sequence) is to evacuate it: maids belong to a social class, school swimsuits are worn in an institution, etc.   The content of the catgirl image, especially when I encounter it in anime, is that while fully sentient, they behave a bit like at least some stereotype about cats.  Interestingly these aren’t quite identical to the conventional straight desires people will necessarily admit to, at least outside of a culture that has a concept of gap moe: the general extrapolation plays towards a wilful, playful and yet comparatively disinterested sexuality, the specific implications of which I’ll probably post about one of these days.  As a rule, animal-people in fantasy since long before they were fetishized are a combination of human and animal psychological and physical traits, and it is on this basis - that of a sentient nonhuman romantic partner - furry or catgirl fetishes evolved.  The key insight is that sentience is not identical to the modern human array of social and evolutionary conditioned behaviours, and a two-player sexuality could still have radically different rules.  This is why the furry community is so overwhelmingly queer - but sexual contradiction opens enough space even within normative heterosexuality, as Yudkowsky observes, to fit two whole new gender-subspecies: “sweet sexy catgirls” and “darkly gentle catboys”.   The catgirl problem is actually a much more vexing, Yudkowskian one (wasn’t @inferentialdistance talking about it lately? but I can’t be assed to find those posts): what if for a posthuman sentience, contradiction (sexual or otherwise) could actually be optimized away?   In other words, what if the danger to interpersonality as we know it is the original Human Instrumentality? but note that I qualified this with “as we know it”, which brings us to the pickup artistry in the comments.  biologically or socially, we do not come unconditioned (what would unconditioned consciousness even mean?)  insofar as the social plays a big, I’d personally bet bigger role in shaping sexuality than the biological (as if the two could be extricated), we are not even ethically free of responsibility for shaping each other’s desires to an extent that could absolutely distinguish social reproduction from catgirl-engineering.  broadly speaking, the sexual modes Yudkowsky like many others criticizes as contradictory (he, like the PUAs in his comments/most cishet men, experiences this contradiction as a “needlessly frustrating” resource imbalance: others experience it as rape, gay-bashing, fat-shaming etc.) are optimized to reproduce the institutions of heteropatriarchy and capitalism.  if we are to have a remotely coherent argument against genetically engineering sentient catgirls, it would seem, it must be intersectional.

even Cordwainer Smith, who was CIA and probably knew something about MK Ultra’s horrific attempts at optimizing people IRL, wrote an Instrumentality better as allegorization of extant social reality (particularly, class) than extrapolation of a future one. and even taken literally, I think the takeaway from Cordwainer Smith (or Steven Universe, or being gay, or most things that deal with this question) is mostly that the problem would resolve to something like the present one.  sentience as we define it is overdetermined and always-already in contradiction with the single determination, or at least generates the possibility of such: perfect optimization will funge against sentience to the point that we’re either back at the “nonsentient romantic partners” starting point or our own.  the fantasy of perfect convergence of sentience and desire-fulfilment, according to that poaster who doesn’t like Madoka, is another otaku strategy for dealing with sexual contradiction, yet one that can only be expressed in reality as violent domination “a few psychological nudges in both sexes—to behavior and/or desire—could solve 90% of the needlessly frustrating aspects of relationships for large sectors of the population, while still keeping the complexity and interest of loving someone who isn't tailored to your desires” is a large part of the conventional feminist solution.  (not only does Yudkowsky define catgirls the same way as /r/socialism, he provides the exact same alternative!)  of course, the demand to optimize yourself - the Tumblr moralism that seems to strain as fervently as an ascetic religion against experienced “human nature” - does not solve the problem of contradiction.  while perhaps necessary in a fallen world, it only gives us the comfort of a coerced consent, a kind of Augustinian tautological reversal of ontological unfreedom.  indeed, mere sexual collectivism even at its most intersectional struggles to distinguish itself in meta-logic from the “community of women” that Marx refuted which is why it’s still worth thinking about catgirls because while different sentient desires will probably never be optimized into perfect harmony, they will continue to differentiate.  and the best, or at least most ethical and funnest, way I can think of to reduce the harm done by sexual contradiction is to encourage - with a feline aloofness and sense of play - that differentiation and profusion - through abstinence and perversion, deepening and broadening, socioeconomic levelling, wireheading and bihacking and niche-identifying and if we are ever at a point as a society where we can do this without expecting fulfilment of our creations, creating until the totality of desires approaches the threshold of a Deleuzian multiplicity without contradiction i.e.

Q U E E R  C A T P E R S O N  C O M M U N I S M

[shesgottawatchit]

The Color Purple (1985) dir. Steven Spielberg

Queering Black Patriarchy: The Salvific Wish and Masculine Possibility in Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple

Candice M. Jenkins

Family has come to stand for community, for race, for nation. It is a short-cut to solidarity. The discourse of family and the discourse of nation are very closely connected.

—Paul Gilroy, Small Acts

In her 1989 essay "Reading Family Matters," Deborah McDowell examines a pattern of hostile critical responses directed toward a "very small sample" of contemporary black women writers by some black reviewers and critics, mostly male (75). 1 McDowell describes the critical narrative employed by these figures as a black "family romance," the creation of a "totalizing fiction" of community wholeness—a fiction which, if realized, could rehabilitate a fragmented and painfully complex racial past (78). Gesturing toward the overwhelmingly masculinist ideology of black cultural nationalism, whose disciples she posits as the most powerful proponents of this family fiction, McDowell writes: "[T]his story of the Black Family cum Black Community headed by the Black Male who does [End Page 969] battle with an oppressive White world, continues to be told, though in ever more subtle variations" (78). Indeed, part of the increasing "subtlety" of such narratives is their extension into broader spheres of cultural influence than the putatively "political" arena, including the space of black literary production and analysis.

As McDowell goes on to note, Alice Walker has received more than her share of black (male) critical attack for disrupting this notion of family romance in her fiction; at least in part, that attack has been in response to the 1985 film adaptation of Walker's novel The Color Purple by Steven Spielberg, which brought a great deal of additional publicity to Walker and her work. Walker, accused by various critics of being unduly influenced by white feminists and of harboring animosity toward black men, seems to have written herself out of the so-called black family embrace, even out of the black community as a whole, by "expos[ing] black women's subordination within the nuclear family, rethink[ing] and configur[ing] its structures, and plac[ing] utterance outside the father's preserve and control" (McDowell 85). In other words, Walker's work (along with the work of such writers as Ntozake Shange and Gayl Jones, who have been similarly criticized) deconstructs a black family romance and represents unequivocally the ways in which "traditional"—and traditionally idealized—family structures can endanger black women both physically and psychically, largely because of the patriarchal power that such structures grant to black men.

Perhaps even more significantly, however, Walker's writing, and particularly her 1982 novel The Color Purple, also engages in a project of "queering" the black family, reshaping it in unconventional ways that divest its black male members of a good deal of power, thereby reconfiguring the very meaning of kinship for black sons, brothers, and especially fathers. 2 Indeed I invoke McDowell's essay, and the generally masculine critical furor to which it refers, at the opening of this essay on Walker's The Color Purple because I believe there are crucial connections to be made between the ways in which Walker's text calls for a queering or refashioning of family dynamics and the manner in which Walker herself, as author, has been scripted by a black (male) critical establishment as a delinquent daughter who has strayed from the black family fold. Not only do Walker's characters repeatedly find ways to subvert the shape and order of the heteronormative, patriarchal family, but in many ways [End Page 970] Walker's authorly body functions as an apparent source of subversion or betrayal in its own right, imagined by her critics to be waging treacherous assault upon a mythologically unified black community.

"Imagined" is, of course, the operative word in the foregoing sentence; nothing in Walker's published reflections on the filming (and resulting criticism) of The Color Purple suggests that her intention in writing this novel was to betray the black family/community. 3 Instead, what is at stake here is the behavior assigned to Walker by her critics, the motivations and loyalties she is assumed to hold, in short, the writerly persona grafted onto Walker's not-so-willing body by an act of critical storytelling. We might say, in fact, that Walker's writerly body is subject to interpretation in the same way that the narrative body of her fiction is. Indeed, the conclusion of "Reading Family Matters" cautions against the ways in which black women's "bodies" (in both senses of the term) might be reduced to the terrain upon which white and black men enact a struggle for power and control of the literary landscape.

While McDowell's point is well taken, my interest in drawing such a link between Walker's authorly body and the textual body of her novel is to call attention to a different set of issues entirely—namely, the gendered and sexualized complexities that underlie the black drive toward a patriarchal "family romance." The power of this drive, and the particular vehemence of critical responses to Walker, has to do with the manner in which patriarchy's hierarchalized kinship structure has generative consequences for black (hetero)sexual subjectivity—and particularly black masculinity. Disruptions of this kinship structure, such as those effected in Walker's novel, thus have the potential to unsettle black gender difference, even to render it incoherent. If, as Michael Awkward has suggested, "monolithic and/or normative maleness" is conventionally defined by the "powerful, domineering patriarch" (3), then a family in which men no longer dominate is a family in which masculinity itself is called into question.

This challenge to heteronormative masculinity is precisely why Alice Walker herself is imagined as a kind of racial turncoat for her portrayals of black men—not merely, as McDowell suggests, because these portrayals present black manhood in a supposedly negative light, or simply shift the focus of black fictional narrative away from the black male. In fact, it is the radical reshaping of the family effected in Walker's novel that [End Page 971] leads to her rejection by the black (male) critical establishment; Walker's transformative revision of black domesticity in The Color Purpleaccomplishes no less than the emptying of "black masculinity" as a term, insofar as that term has been dependent upon an assumption of black men's authoritative role in the family sphere.

In other words, Walker's refashioning of the black family "queers" the very notion of the potent black patriarch. Her text goes beyond simply representing an absent father, one who has abdicated from the legitimate seat of patriarchal rule; nor does it portray merely a father inadequately fulfilling the requirements of his (again, assumed rightful) authority. Indeed, both of these possibilities evoke what Sharon Holland, following Hortense Spillers, identifies as "fatherlack": "the idea of a dream/nightmare deferred [. . .] an inevitable and unattainable fatherhood" (387). For Holland, the cultural trauma of this lack—or the difficulty of fulfilling what Spillers names the "provisions of patriarchy"—is a "founding and necessary condition/experience of what it means to be black" (387). In this schema, the very concept of black patriarchy becomes a conceptual impossibility, precisely because of a fatherly absence contained within the cultural signifier "black."

I would differentiate the queered black father of Walker's novel from Holland's idea, however. Walker's subversive transformation of the black family, and of the black father, responds more to ahistorical fantasies of black patriarchy (erected, perhaps, as a defensive response to fatherlack), of which the black community harbors many. As Ashraf Rushdy notes, "African American intellectuals espousing black nationalism have long argued that the family represents the site for the development of the black nation" (109); for nationalists, "those families representing the race can form a nation only when [. . .] patriarchal power is evident" (110). Ultimately, it is in playing with, literally queering, such patriarchal fantasies that Walker's novel invites hostile critical scrutiny, for by the conclusion of the text, Walker's black family contains a possibility far more bewildering than the father's absence: a father who is present, but nonetheless no longer dominant or even interested in domination. It is no wonder, then, that Walker's narrative is viewed by many critics as an affront to black community wholeness, for it posits a community without a (male) leader, a masculinity without even the desire for what has traditionally been understood as masculinity's hallmark: power. [End Page 972]

READ WHOLE ARTICLE: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/21729

[zayrickyear2jh]

13/12/19 BA2a Research: Session 4 The nightmare city and the urban laboratory

Plot Summary: Chapter 3

We meet Dr Jekyll at last. A large, well made smooth-faced man of fifty, although

In this chapter - Jekyll reassures Utterson he can be free of Mr Hyde whenever he wants. He says it’s a private matter and he asks Utterson to let is sleep. He calls Dr Lanyon hide bound, meaning narrow minded.

Plot summary:The Carew Murder Case Chapter 4

Nearly a year passes peacefully.

The Hyde commits murder. HIs victim is Sir Danvers Carew, a respected member of parliament.

The events witnessed and somewhat strongly described

Consider the careful setup

Before the coming of the ever-present fog, the night was cloudless and brilliant lit by a full moon. Why might the full moon be important to mention?

Stevenson writes in rapturous terms:

The maid servant sat at her window and fell into a dream of musing.

Carew appears to her as an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair and a very pretty manner of politeness

The moon shone on his face as he spoke

Such an innocent and old world

Hyde

A great flame of anger

Broke out of all bounds

Ape like fury

Why do you think Stevenson sets up the murder scene in such a romantic way? Its the contrast between the elements of good but evil. The scene represents tduality in action.

The association of Carew with innocent and beauty makes the violence more shocking by contrast.

It has the effect of turning Carew into a martyr-like figure. His death can be seen as symbolic.

Utterson exhibits his usual self-control (ego; reality principle)

He is ever the gentleman: refusing to draw hasty conclusions.

Uttterson travels through the chocolate-coloured fog towers Soho, accompanied by the police, to Mr Hyde’s lodgings the witness has identified him. It seems to Utterson like some city in a nightmare.

Mt Hyde has done a runner but the policeman is optimistic. Several thousand pound are found in Hyde’s bank account: surely the man will call to collect  it. All they have to do is lie in wait for him.

So the chapter ends on a cliff-hanger with a clear hook to chapter 5.

Carew ‘accosts’ Hyde with ‘a very pretty manner of politeness’

What might Stevenson be hinting at here?

Elaine Showalter calls the novella a fable of findesiecle homosexual panic. She notes that working class men of the ear were sometimes seen as erotic object by their aristatic superiors.

Hyde is classless rather than working class this itself would have been disturbing and bewildering.

‘Blackmaile’s Charter’

-Known as the Blackmailer’s Charter’s this was the piece of legislation that led to arrest of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

Urannian- The word homosexual wasn’t used in English til 1892 in a translation of a German sexology manual Psychopathia Sexualis. Victorian mainly used the word Uranian for them, this actually meant having a female psyche in a male body. Ironically the 1885 act helped create the concept of a homosexual identity.

The duality of Rober Louis Stevenson

Stevenson himself was a man of contradiction

Effeminate but straight

Wealthy but dressed down )stuffy with bad teeth)

Born to strictly religious parents but lived a bohemian life as an adult.

Played at being lower class but exploited upper class connection.

Not conventionally handsome, he was said to have mesmirizing eyes and drew many male admirers including folklorist Andrew Lang and novelist Henry James. Stevenson appeared to enjoy the attention of his male admirers. And, whether he intended it or not, Uranian men of the era did find sympathetic undertones in his work. To use mourned parlance, could this be a type of queer baiting?

There is no biographical evidence that Stevenson himself experienced any same sex attraction, but Claire Harman suggest.

Social Taboos in Gothic horror

Jekyll and Hyde: The Gothic revival.

Stiles notes the Gothic conventions of Stevenson’s novella: the nocturnal settling, the theme.

The birth of Gothic horror

Horace Walpole’s dream Castel of Qtranto

Place and time

Power/Sexual power

Note how Walple’s The castle of otranto was also inspired by dream.

Key features of the Gothic

Wild landscapes vs improsonment. The re-emergece of the past within the rest.

Fascination with obscene patriarchal figures figures

Explores the limits of what is is to be human: internal desires or forces outside your control.

full of perverse weird and dangerous kinds of sexuality.

The vulnerability of women in the 19th century

The Gothic genre had scope to explore the lives of the 19th century woman.

The genre often depicts the triumph of young women over seemingly impossible forces.

If you’ve your story female protagonist you may like to explore the tropes of Gothic horror in your critical analysis.

The Uncanny

Gothic horror is all od uncanny moments.

Figures that are not quite human such as dolls, waxworks, automat

Strange, mysterious, unsettling, unnerving, unearthy

Meaning Un heimlich means un-homely

Therefore we don’t feet at home with the uncanny or the home is somehow transformed or changed.

No one can ever quite describe Mr Hyde. A prolonged state of uncertainty.

J and H was fascinated with clockwork autumata. Could be a potential

Tip: If you’re writing a horror film, try making it personal: use your own fears and phobias to make the terror.

And harness the power of the uncanny by focusing on dread and apprehension rather than outright horror.

main it unhomely: unsettle the viewer with sinister hints a radio that turns on by itself a child’s toy that is not where you left it, a writhing maggot in a piece of fruit.

Make it un-secret: show us something that shouldn’t be shown.

Give the view time to feel the fear: You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time.

Birth of the city/the urban Gothic

Jekyll and Hyde is seen as the first Urban Gothic novel.

In the mid 1800s huge numbers of people left the country for an excited new life in the city. But many had to live in slums with no sanitation. Disease was rife. Young children worked in factories or cleaning chimneys.

London was the largest city in the world, totalling 4 million inhabitants in the 1880s’. Stevenson chose it as the setting for his ‘urban gothic’ tale but some critics argue it’s real settling is Edinburgh, where Stevenson grew up.

The evil within..

In the tale 19thC Gothic novel the threat is no longer some external force. Instead the evil is sinuously curled around the very heart of the respectable middle-class norm’ This made it more frightening because it made the evil inescapable.

Middle-Class Victorian had a great fear that sexual depravity and other kinds of moral decay would pass from the nocturnal world to the safe space of the home.

Like a district id time city in a night mare ( The Carew Murder Case)

They grew less interested in the wild landscapes of traditional Gothic, and focused instead on the new landscape of the city: an equally appropriate source of desolation and menace.

By identifying and exploring that obsession through art and literature, they sought to control and contain it.

This fear is made visual in Jekyll and Hyde through symbolic use darkness and fog.

The urban labaratory and the strange science of the mind.

The primary figure at the heart of most Victorian fin de siecle texts is the scientist and during the fin de siecle what the scientist tends more and more to dabble.

Questioning boundaries: science, pseudo-science, and the occult.

The greatest pace of advance and change in the fields of science and medicine led Victorians to necessarily suspend disbelief: unlikely things might easily turn out to be true.

As a result the gap between science and the occult was much narrower in Victorian Britain than today.

The dual brain

we’ve already seen that hypnosis suggested the possibility of a hidden self. This concept was reinforced by the victorian theory.

Left brain is seat of logic and reason

Right brain is emotions

Women and savages were strong in the right brain. Hyde is describe as ape-like

Sergeant F: the uncanny quality of the double

In 1875 the Cornhill magazine published the case study of a brain damaged French soldier Soldier F.

Sergeant F was male, and his condition was caused by a wound the battlefield. But the dual or multiple personality was almost overwhelmingly a female condition and still is today its known as Dissociative Identity.

Stles theories that small, puny, right brained Hyde has something of the victorian feminine about him: emotionally unstable.

Victorians also believed that your personality could be read in the shape of your skull.

The Victorian era saw a huge divide between rich and poor, and in essence these types of belief enabled upper class Victorians to feel okay about their unequal wealth.

Phrenology

Developed by Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, this pseudo-science made the claim that your personality and character could be recognised by the shape of your skull.

The Profession Sickist

In letter he described himself as a professional sickest. As a result, much of his work was written in bed.

Strange case of Jekyll and Hyde

The Lancet = medical journal

Jekyll is both physician and patient, call into question the legitimacy and objectivity of scaentific case studies.

As a professional sickest its likely the Steenson experienced it.

Film to watch - The burke and Hare murders

[caveartfair]

At “Made in L.A.,” 33 of the City’s Artists Aim to Depict the State of Our World

Performance view of EJ Hill (in collaboration with Texas Isaiah), Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria, 2018. Photo by Chisa Hughes. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Every two years since 2012, the Hammer Museum presents a survey of art made in Los Angeles, the central hub of the West Coast art scene. The recently opened fourth iteration—which, as in past versions, gives a snapshot of the city’s art production and includes a diverse array of local artists, both transplants and long-time Angelenos—comes at a particularly unstable moment.

In 2017, thousands of wildfires tore through California, turning millions of acres of land into scorched earth. A few dozen people were killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced. It’s not surprising, then, that two of the artworks in this year’s “Made in L.A.” evoke the state’s vulnerability with fire. The dancer and choreographer Flora Wiegmann’s Reduction Burn (2018) sees a group of dancers dressed in the colors of flames and embers fluttering and swirling, seemingly tracing the shape of a blaze and embodying a state of flickering uncertainty. And James Benning’s installation Found Fragments (2016) features footage of a 2016 Sierra Nevada fire slowly turning a forest floor into ash.

Untitled Red #5, 2015. MPA Hammer Museum

The environmental threats that face California and the rest of the globe—climate change, pollution, fault lines—surface with some frequency across “Made in L.A.,” but this exhibition is more spark than inferno. It features 33 emerging and mid-career artists that live in Los Angeles, but hail from seven countries. Several will be familiar to New York audiences, including Christina Quarles, whose queer, elastic bodies appeared in the New Museum’s recent “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” and The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Fictions”; Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose figurative paintings featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; and Aaron Fowler, whose multimedia, maximalist installations are currently filling the windows of the New Museum.

Co-curators Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale said at the press preview last Friday that the artists were chosen with no overarching theme in mind, except that the work responds to our current moment. In a period of political chaos, impending climate catastrophe, and social upheaval—and no small amount of tumult in L.A.’s art world—the cumulative response from the included artists feels less angry than melancholic. A survey show need not be didactic, but this one is best when it invites a shift of perspective, as in the work of MPA, whose jumbo pair of generic red sunglasses are cut in half, with one side appearing on the wall of the Hammer’s courtyard, the other in a gallery. They are installed on either side of a fissure-like red line that runs along the gallery floor, evoking L.A.’s proximity to the San Andreas Fault. An accompanying cryptic arrangement of green and red objects and wall markings includes a bullseye that suggests either a source of vision or the epicenter of an earthquake.

Nearby, Charles Long has installed what resembles a forest of possessed theme park props: severed tree trunks; chopped-up penises that smile mournfully. One puffs idly on a cigar, a phallic cousin to the fleshy smoking blobs of Philip Guston. Long’s bizzaro, surreal imagining of the patriarchy’s last gasp connects male supremacy to environmental damage, and includes nods to the male greats of art history—Edvard Munch’s screaming face draped like a Salvador Dalí clock over the arm of a tree; Alberto Giacometti’s standing woman transformed into a long, slender dick that rises from wheels like his famous Chariot (1950). A light glow emanates from this strangely alluring graveyard of wilted masculinity.

Still of James Benning, Found Fragments (Scorched Earth, Ash 01, RED CLOUD), 2016. Courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

On the Hammer’s sun-filled terraces, Lauren Halsey’s white tomb, which visitors can circumvent and enter, might give an equally doleful or elegiac impression, except for the inscriptions and images on its surface, which are a contemplative and celebratory tribute to the artist’s own South Central L.A. community—a neighborhood that has been wracked by rapid gentrification. Images of her family and friends are carved into the temple’s surface alongside storefront signs and what appear to be the names of local organizations—real or fictional—like The Black Women Coalition of Neighborhood Developers. Images of spaceships hover over Egyptian hieroglyphics, boomboxes, and pharaoh masks, connecting this part of Los Angeles with an ancestral past and future. Later this year, the installation will become a permanent fixture in the city when it goes up on Crenshaw Boulevard, at the site of an African market where Halsey spent time as a child—guaranteeing a solid anchor and gathering space for the local community.  

The issue of contested land materializes elsewhere in the exhibition—for example, in Mercedes Dorame’s exploration of her community, the Tongva people, who are one of L.A.’s founding indigenous cultures. This theme often continues to intersect elsewhere with personal narratives. In a vault-shaped gallery, EJ Hill has installed the abstracted trappings of an American college sports field, replete with a lawn, running track, and what appears to be an oversized, insurmountable hurdle. The walls are lined with photographs—shot by his collaborator Texas Isaiah—that document Hill running around each school and institution he ever attended in Los Angeles, including UCLA. On a mock winner’s podium at the back of the space, Hill will stand for the duration of the exhibition, posed in front of a neon sign that roughly matches the outline of his body. It reads: “Where on earth, in which soils and under what conditions will we bloom brilliantly and violently?”

The piece, Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria (2018), expresses the vulnerability and perseverance of one (black) body and soul in the face of the (white) systems, institutions, and sporting rituals that shape the United States—and the physical and emotional effort required to stay afloat in an environment where the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against people of color.

Installation view of Lauren Halsey, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project Prototype Architecture, for “Made in L.A. 2018,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2018. Photo by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The presence of bodies in this biennial—a thread that Christovale pointed to at the preview—continues in the work of the exhibition’s oldest artist, the 97-year-old Luchita Hurtado, some of whose paintings turn her naked body into an undulating desert vista. In a series of Georgia O’Keeffe-esque compositions, Hurtado portrays herself seen looking down from a standing gaze. The Venezuelan artist was associated with Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Remedios Varo when they all lived in Mexico, and clear influences of Surrealism and mysticism are laced through the work.

Occupying its own gallery on the Hammer’s ground floor is Gelare Khoshgozaran’s Medina Wasl, Connecting Town (2018), an installation that meditates on the place of the Middle East in the American consciousness. The centerpiece is a video in which a camera roams over generic expanses of desert and navigates the adobe huts and buildings of Medina Wasl—a fictional town built on a military base in Southern California. (Akin to a Hollywood film set, it roughly takes the shape of Iraqi and Afghani desert landscapes, and is used for soldier-training exercises.) Voiceovers incorporate interviews with American war veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in other scenes, a cursor moves over digital maps of the desert terrains, suggesting an insidious flattening of countries to little more than icons, boundaries, and other de-personalized approximations. It brilliantly conveys the uncomfortable convergence of war, fiction, and entertainment that allows colonialist attitudes to thrive.  

The works in “Made in L.A.” are good at connecting certain dots and telling moving personal narratives. But for those looking for a forceful, noisy rebuke to this morally abject moment in American history, this isn’t it. Yet there is quiet strength here, despite the relatively down-at-heart atmosphere that persists in the galleries—a feeling of running in circles, of searching for terra firma, accurately reflecting the mood in a country whose problems feel endless and multiform.

from Artsy News

[humanauction]

The Weather Report 7 - week ending 29.10.17

the weather in Baghdad will be cooling down rapidly over the next few weeks. daily temperatures will be a slightly chilly 28C - 32C (79F-87F). precipitation will hold fast at 0%, the wind will drop to 7mph and humidity will top out at around 34%. by European standards it’s actually going to be lovely weather, with most people down to only two costume changes a day (compared to the 7+ of high summer). so it is going to be t-shirt and shorts by day, polo shirt and chinos in the evening. as we enter the winter season, the Baghdadis are gearing up for their annual Start-up weekend with investment opportunities from all over Iraq coming to pitch their ideas. it really is a buyers market at the moment - you’d be crazy not to invest.

Baghdad Start-up weekend - Powered by HUMAN AUCTION



Meanwhile, elsewhere…


ASIA - CHINA: the 19th annual Communist Party Congress - with over 2,280 delegates because in china that is only the vital people - were “asked” if they wanted to enshrine Xi Jinping's name in the country's constitution. now this in itself might not seem so important to us here in the civilized west. firstly, who cares about china, right? secondly, who cares about communists, right? and thirdly, if we don’t even expect our own governments to win by a majority or ask the people who they want running the country then why should we care about China doing it, right? whilst all of those are valid positions, the reason it matters more is because the person “asking” the congress about enshrining Xi Jinping's name in the country's constitution was… you guessed it - Xi Jinping. guess what else happened? it passed overwhelmingly.

Literally EVERYTHING is made in China these days

EUROPE - UK: Holocaust memorial to steal glory over other memorial at Victoria Tower Gardens. the Buxton Memorial - representing the abolition of slavery feels particularly ignored. which is ironic given the higher than ever number of people actually enslaved right now, worldwide. The Burghers of Calais also feel like this glory-chasing by the Jews (“so, what, NO ONE else died in forced labour camps in enormous numbers during WW2?”) will mean people have less time for burgers. preferring to avoid confrontation, the passive aggressive sculptures/memorials have started their own, closed, Facebook group to discuss their options. the goat with kids by the small stone wall is already back in therapy, having taken quite a hit to their confidence at being so much smaller than the other statues. the whole family are hoping to relocate to an as yet unnamed European city “we were looking to leave before Brexit anyway” said the smaller of the kids “this just helped reinforce that decision”. the 1930 statue of (suffragette) Emmeline Pankhurst by Arthur George Walker has been sulking all week. she posted a :’-( face on twitter, put “perturbed & betrayed” as her “how are you feeling today?” status of her Facebook public profile, and, just this morning, threatened to leave social media all together on her tumblr blog to “try and make a difference the old-fashioned way”. plans are already progressing for the protest campaign. a live stream on Twitch is confirmed - chaining as many feminist statues and memorials as she can muster (and she sure can muster) outside parliament. 11,045 people have clicked “Yes” they will be attending the Facebook event “Victoria Tower Gardens Rally” with 29,432 “Maybe”, 7,366 “I Wont Be Attending” and over 15,000 replies of solidarity. the Testicular Cancer Memorial has been approved by all parties however.

Testicular Cancer Memorial Proposal - absolutely fine

AFRICA - TANZANIA: 13 people were arrested for promoting homosexuality, which is a crime in the east African nation. normally promoting homosexuality would consist of fabulous shoes, a nice flat, possibly some flirting… in gay strongholds like Brighton, Tel Aviv or San Francisco and if you are SUPER lucky - maybe even a blowjob. sure, in Tanzania it includes these things, but it also covers taking part in a public meeting to discuss challenging a law stopping private health clinics from providing HIV and AIDS services. and not one of those unenforced old-school laws we forgot to nullify. three South African lawyers were among those arrested, and were subsequently deported because, according to Lazaro Mambosasa, “Chief” of Dar es Salaam police,  “they were promoting homosexuality”. The arrests come a month after Deputy Health Minister, Hamisi Kingwangalla, publicly pledged to "fight with all our strength against groups supporting homosexuality in our country”. the Tanzanian government, keen to drive their people back into the stone age at full-speed, has banned imports of water-based lube (because only queers use lube) and drop-in centres serving key populations at risk of HIV. both are essential to the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. all this as Tanzania faces environmental disaster due to deforestation, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and general environmental destruction. the main GDP contributing industries - mining, fracking and agriculture are to blame, and this is a very real problem when they; account for 50% (24% agriculture + 26% industrial) of the GDP; make-up 85% of exports; half the population are employed in these industries and half your electricity comes from natural gas. Add to that 34% of the population living in poverty, and  18% of all electricity generated was either stolen or lost due to transmission/distribution issues last year and you have the ingredients for a perfect storm. but yeah, consenting sex between men is bad.

Gay dogs - banned in Tanzania

EUROPE - DENMARK: From January 2018, cannabis will be legalised as part of a four-year trial. patients will be prescribed cannabis if the treatment fits the diagnosis according to the Copenhagen Post. however many horticulturalists are choosing to ignore the requirements to legally apply for a license as they “will be a very complicated set of rules" to grow the plant,and stoners don’t like complicated. or licenses. or rules. 13 companies queued politely to apply for licenses to grow marijuana. the Danish government deny (remember what it means when a government confirms something unequivocally?) they have made it prohibitively complicated/expensive for the average Jane or Joe. not only that, but they claim it will be easy and cheaper to use cannabis in many medical cases. currently, legally or illegally, the price of marijuana in Europe is, £10 - £20 ($13 - $26/€11 - €22) a gram for “buds” of varying quality and around £50 - £100 ($65-$130/€56-€112) a gram for concentrates (BHO, shatter, isolater, etc…).  but Lars Tomassen, director of Danish Cannabis claims under current legislation it would cost some 6,000 krone (£715/$935/€808) per patient a month - EVERY MONTH!? to “adequately” treat the average patient”? this has led some to question just how much it would actually cost to comprehensively treat the average patient. also the likelihood of life-long treatment e.g.rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson disease… is unlikely as the bill runs into the millions. several sources are now suggesting that the government is attempting to price normal horticulturalists out of the market and thereby maintain their absolute monopoly on the drugs trade themselves. which is crazy talk, i know. maybe a long time ago we may have done that. one time, maybe, but it isn’t normal practice and the last time anyone did that… Afghanistan was occupied. by… yes, ok, by us, but to be fair the heroin is a lot better now than it was in the early 2000’s.

Denmark - might not need any more weed

SOUTH AMERICA - GUIANA (FRENCH OCCUPIED): Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the French-occupied colony was marred by pitched battles between protesters and police in on Thursday (26.10.17). it went on for a little while and got quite exciting. anyway, apparently it was “unclear why the local population were upset”, said some French people we know through AirBnB. most nations would love to be colonised by the French, and yet this honour seems not to be what the French Guianans were looking for. everyone knows that countries colonised by the British, French or Spanish - some several hundred years ago - were/are the lucky ones. not only did they get to stay in their own country, probably, but they also reap the rewards of their chum/overlord’s other… “interests”? then petrol bombs, tear gas, blockades and industrial action (aka going on strike) gripped the small country, and in particular its capital, Cayenne - where spicy food was invented. the French authorities were proper moany, and got unwittingly drawn into a game of verbal tennis.

France to Serve

“there is no reason for this kind of behaviour” they said. “apart from significant social deprivation” the locals said.


0-15

“you have jobs and the same conditions as French citizens” they said. “we have 23% unemployment. double that of France” said the locals.


0-30

“we are including you in our space program” they said (they launch rockets etc into space from French Guiana). “money is being poured into Guiana” said the locals “for prestige space projects”


0-40

adding the “welfare of ordinary people in French Guiana has been near-totally neglected”

GAME - F. G. F.G. to serve.

some, mainly the Guianans, argue that French Guiana should be granted full independence like all the, every single one, other South America country previously occupied by a European one with better weapons. France disagrees, refusing even to recognise it as a country and instead calling it the second largest region of France by land area. it is also, somehow, the largest outermost region of the European Union (of which it is part). however that works...

Macron’s wardrobe choice - pissed EVERYONE off

Have a sunny week,

HA


@humanauction


[haneenspacesreflections-blog]

reflection #1

Throughout this week I’ve learned a lot about the history of SAAC and the ways in which major student organizations have functioned alongside each other in the past. One of the first thoughts I had after the initial activity in which we were meant to reconcile the different issues between the organizations was “Damn, this is really hard.” The mechanics of maintaining a harmonious balance between organizations with different goals, different objectives and different communities in mind sound overwhelmingly difficult. However it also brought about the ways in which “-isms” and other internalized forms of oppression manifest in these student run spaces. One thing that struck me was when the guest speaker mentioned that QTPOC approved MSA to be a SAAC organization, however MSA did not support QTPOC (I hope I understood this correctly).  As a member of the MSA I found it deeply troubling because I immediately knew that this was most likely a result of the insidious cissexism/heterosexism that manifests in Muslim communities. It reminded me of the ways in which my community consistently devalues the lives of queer folk, rejects them from their communities (popular rhetoric includes “you can’t be queer and muslim”) and entirely erases them from the scope of supposedly religious motivated social justice endeavors. Dismantling heterosexism/cissexism apparently isn’t part of the social justice narrative that Muslims boast the Quran embodies and it’s deeply troubling to see how that mentality plays out in real life decisions about solidarity. For members of the QTPOC community to literally approve MSA as a SAAC organization and say “Hey you deserve a space here and have a right to exist” and to recognize the humanity of Muslims only to have the Muslim community respond back with “we don’t really care about y’all” is absolutely embarrassing! Like, I’m thoroughly embarrassed and I’m tired of one dimensional ‘it’s all about me’ solidarity that permeates in Muslim communities. I don’t get how you can rally in the streets against Islamophobia and the devaluation of Muslim bodies but simultaneously not give a fuck about queer folk. I’m really not here for it! Leaders of Muslim communities have the nerve to say “our liberation is intertwined” and then do some ugly homophobic/transphobic fuckshit behind the scenes! Fuck outta here! I really didn’t mean for this to manifest into a petty MSA callout post but I really feel the need to hold my community accountable and it’s really exhausting because I know that it’s going to take probably /generations/ before cissexism/heterosexism are even recognized as legitimate daunting problems in our community rather than some kind of uncompromisable religious principle (the Quran does not endorse cissexism/heterosexism but the musty ass dusty ass old ass “Islamic” scholars that monopolize mainstream interpretations of the Quran throughout the Muslim world do). And of course I also hold myself accountable as a cis woman and the ways in which I uphold transphobic/cissexist rhetoric that have been instilled in me via. religious/cultural conditioning. As someone that identifies as queer (not openly) it’s suffocating to feel invisible in your own community and it sort of just reinforces the importance of intersectional social justice. To be black, queer, femme, and muslim all at once is wild and in all four of those spaces I experience some form of violence which is why actual, real solidarity matters.

As for the -isms workshop, I found that I knew most of the content from the powerpoint. I did learn new terminology such as heterosexism and cissexism however. I still use them interchangeably with homophobia and transphobia because I have yet to really understand the differences/implications of both sets of terminology. I hope to learn that in the future.