#positionality vs identity

[calamityquellerei]

positionality vs identity

making this post in response to circulating claims about "transmasc privilege" and a noticeable gap in some of y'alls understanding of oppression.

positionality can be thought of as the way society perceives and treats you, and what privileges you are afforded accordingly.

identity can be thought of as your internal sense of self.

for most people, the two do not line up perfectly. your positionality depends on what people immediately see, not what you tell them. your positionality may also vary day to day based on a number of factors including but not limited to the people you are surrounded by, the space you are in, and the positionalities and identities of those perceiving you.

privilege is based almost entirely on positionality, not identity.

a good example is the diversity within the transgender community. if you take three transgender men at different stages in their transition they will each have a different positionality. one may have the positionality of a gender conforming cisgender man, the second may have the positionality of a transgender man, the third may have the positionality of a gender conforming cisgender woman. the gendered privileges these three people are afforded are vastly different despite all three of them having an identical gender identity.

if you have the positionality of a certain marginalized group, you will be targeted with the same oppression as them whether or not you share an identity with them. the fact that you don't share the identity doesn't suddenly make that oppression go away. you can be oppressed based on a positionality that does not align with your identity.

if you have questions on positionality vs identity i urge you to reply to this post instead of ignoring the gap in your knowledge.

[nothorses]

im wanting to help give my cis friend who isn't internet poisoned a primer of whats going on re: current wave of anti trans masculinity and i was wondering if you knew of a few good posts to send them to start off with? or perhaps a compilation post of posts? there's a ton of posts made by us individually so it's kinda hard to gather all the info together by myself so im wishing to crowdsource it. they already know about baeddelism so i was hoping specifically for the most recent resurgence?

I don't have a ton on the current resurgence of baeddelism due to it's mostly on twitter and the bird app makes me actively miserable to be on.

the context I do have is amelia baeddelia (who you should be able to find on Twitter and Tumblr under that name; can't find my post talking about her right now but I'll look again in a bit) specifically, who, afaik, is the person who started said resurgence. I'd say most of the context needed to understand it is knowledge of the original movement, given it's literally just a rehash (but with even more gaslighting this time), but I think it's also largely backlash this time around- against transmascs speaking up in recent years- whereas the original movement sprung up with much less provocation, and seemed more like a natural next step in the radical feminism that had been growing in strength for a while by then. I could be wrong, though, I definitely was not clued into things myself at the time.

Which is just to say it's not the same now as it was then, though the fact that they want it to be makes it just as dangerous.

Idk! I don't have like a categorized list of posts for you on this, but maybe someone else knows of some good resources to start with?

[mizushidokoro]

Chapter 261 thoughts, sukugo, stsg/sgst, and why this update isn't an L for me actually

I think Yuta means well, and he genuinely cares about Gojo, but to frame his final decisions as becoming something "monstrous," I think is another example of Gojo being misunderstood, or understood for only part of who he is.

"Are you Gojo Satoru because you are the strongest, or are you the strongest because you are Gojo Satoru?" It's both, isn't it? Gojo's strength is as part of his identity, as is his humanity, but the two are opposed. Gojo doesn't have the luxury of being "selfish," to "seek meaning" for himself by carving out his own path the way that Geto does when he leaves, because a single misstep from him could upend the world. A Gojo Satoru who pursues his own truth, the way everyone else in the world does, is monstrous, and he's aware of the fact. That's the contradiction at the heart of his loneliness. He cannot realize himself, as an individual, without giving up on his humanity (meaning, his ability to connect with others as a human). But to preserve his humanity, his sense of belonging in the world, Gojo cannot pursue self-realization as an individual actor.

So Gojo stating he can't avoid becoming a monster and wanting to catch up to Geto who left him behind ... man that hurts me. Push meets shove, and he has to make a sacrifice. And Gojo chooses (or resigns himself, for lack of other options) to strength, the path of loneliness.

In what way does Gojo want to ''catch up''? To finally use his strength to chase after his own ideals, taking action, moral uncertainties & collateral be damned? I think that's the decision he makes when he kills the higher-ups w/o being certain it's the right thing. I think it's also in a very literal gay yearning way -- he wants to chase after Geto, the last person in his memory who could stand at the top with him and that he had a true connection with albeit for a short moment in time, because choice notwithstanding, it still remains that Gojo doesn't want to be alone.

For what it's worth, I don't think that means Gojo doesn't "care" about his students, fellow teachers, or humans in general. But he gives up his sense of "belonging with" -- instead of the form of attachment that is "love," his care takes the form of detached, unilateral "compassion," as a deity feels for its subjects.

So that's Gojo's state of mind when he goes into this fight vs. Sukuna, embracing/giving himself up to the loneliness that comes with unrivalled strength. But in the end he finds in Sukuna a distorted reflection of his own "monstrosity," someone who matches and in fact exceeds him in strength. Gojo finds someone who knows his positionality, who's powerful enough to witness him, give him the chance to just selfishly be, and go all out. Someone with the capacity to understand him, to whom Gojo can show his "love." Which Sukuna doesn't reciprocate of course (if only Geto were there!!! then he couldve had it all!!). But Gojo went out being acknowledged by someone who could finally understand him. He didn’t die alone.

I don't think the fact of Gojo's students using his body is tragic in a new or different way. Gojo's stated himself that he doesn't care what happens after he dies (paralleling what Sukuna tells Yorozu, also, another skg w), and I don't think they have much of a choice given the state of affairs, though of course it always hurts to be reminded of how detached and alone Gojo was. But after sitting on it for a while, personally, I feel like this chapter helps understand what Gojo says in 236, and takes the sting out of his death.

[amazoniantreestump]

✷ 𝓦𝓔𝓔𝓚 1 - 𝓟𝓸𝓼𝓲𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓽𝔂

𝒞𝓵𝓪𝓼𝓼 𝓷𝓸𝓽𝓮𝓼 ✶

Introductions! Our lecturer Holly Walker is a queer Pākehā creator, making conscious photographic works discussing the personal joys of being, all within the wider overhangs of colonial identity.

She also gets naked a fair bit for her mahi toi. Why? It's all about Embodied Practice - creatively tapping into the unconscious mind.

And as for the introductions of mine and others, we had these nifty forms to fill out and reflect on:

This first week sees the 'theme' of Positionality, a definition which, due to its breadth, Holly mapped out on the whiteboard as per classmate contributions.

Positionality for the individual - and this is an overall lumping of the many additions to the map - comes from experiences, physical expression, behaviors, privileges, relationships, trajectory, and history.

I was able to contribute with the 'trajectory' (or more accurately, timeline) suggestion, being the placement of self in one's life story, to plan in the long term, which is a reflection of one's privelege to even hold certainty to the future.

We then had a class exercise to identify the ingrained characteristics inherited from dominant systems of oppression - preceded by identifying Western Dualism - the binary of one against the other; this vs that. This is the first of an expansive sphere of ongoing colonial practices, habits and traces to be outlined in this class.

Holly presented a lengthy list of colonial legacies, to which we identified what affected us. They were subdivided into white supremacist, settler-colonial, hetero patriarchal, and class-elite behaviors; all wholly shaped by the mechanisms of colonialism.

Identifying mine became a 'fun' little game of figuring out where the autism ended and the colonialism began.

Perfectionism: It's a common trait shared in artists and autists alike - and I always assumed mine came from autism. A further chat with Holly helped specific the nasty sides of it - perfectionism is dangerous when you're holding others to your standard.

Individualism: This one I could hold more accountability towards. I compare myself to others a LOT, and a lot of my desire to 'succeed' (itself a colonial hallmark) comes from a selfish one-upmanship.

Objectivity: The idea that something is, because it is. 'Objectivity' is undisclosed subjectivity, built upon the dogmatic adherence to assumption, and goodness ME it's been a challenge these past five years to begin thinking critically.

Controlling/Micromanaging: While intrinsically linked to perfectionism, I can better identify my personal traits of such. Micromanaging is anti-collaborative, anti-community and deeply individualistic - of which 'my' standard can only be attained if 'I' take control, it's a slippery slope of elitism, which ALSO is another colonial trait.

𝓡𝓮𝓪𝓭𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼 ✶

This week please start recording and contemplating the mapping and locating provocation in the brief. Spend time in your environment learning names, recording discoveries new to you about your location; refer to the brief to get you started. Start researching and considering ways in which you could visually represent  your relationship to your location and what you are learning. 

Catherine Delahunty - Becoming Tangata Tiriti

Delahunty outlines an experience at their first hui at a marae years prior - during which when it came to to introduce herself, presented herself as a "Pākehā mongrel", with ancestry in the 'British Isles'.

There is a lack of connection, which many Pākehā folk - myself included - can share to these origins.

"Usually, this ignorance isn’t uncomfortable, unless I’m on a marae or at a hui where, in effect, we’re challenged to bring our ancestors."

The general Pākehā ignorance towards ancestry stands against the the embedded tikanga of strong familial and ancestral connection in Māori community.

"In a sense, when the rest of us don’t know or don’t care about our own people’s past, it’s a way of demeaning or denying Māori their essence as Māori and, by extension, their rights as Māori. It’s as if whakapapa has no value. "In te ao Māori, you walk into the future while looking to the past, but many of us Pākehā have been raised to think the past is way behind us in that place we call the mists of time. "

So Delahunty, eyes fixed on the past, followed her ancestral "scraps" to Ireland and Scotland - both sharing an experience all too familiar of English terror, of a devastating genocide, of stripped rights and a shrunken tongue.

"The Highlands and the west of Ireland were a brief and gorgeous story for me, but, although it was ancestry, it wasn’t home."

The coloniser is still the coloniser - she could trace, with some broad stroke, her ancestral past in those lands, but here, she is tauiwi, and can neither claim her maunga, awa, moana or whatnot here - or back there - the experience is not hers to share; an not worth feeling sorry for, either.

"So, renaming places and claiming other ancestral relationships hasn’t felt right to me."

Delhunty ends the article with claims of her own - one of being Pākehā and tangata tiriti. To live here, but not assert herself - it's a complex and heavy introduction with generations of baggage and I won't even bother with concluding it.

RNZ -Land of the Long White Cloud | Episode 2: Inheriting Privilege

Jen Margaret - "As Pākehā, we don't have the tools to understand the 'now', as we don't understand our history"

Personal, Pākehā conflict of history - "...wanting it to be different than it really is"

Familial history of supporting Māori rights - her great great grandfather, for instance, was outspoken towards the representation of Māori in parliament; and on the flipside, was awarded two plots of Ngāi Tahu land for winning a race - the very land that the people he was supporting were fighting for.

Narratives - "...what I was needing/wanting my ancestors to be."

"Obviously I do stuff because I want to shift our understanding as Pākeha and our work to honor Te Tiriti. But within that, I don't step out of my Pākehā privelege."

[this-week-in-rust]

This Week in Rust 452

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

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Updates from Rust Community

Official

Announcing Rust 1.62.1

Project/Tooling Updates

rust-analyzer changelog #138

Release Rustlings 5.0.0

Rust on Espressif chips - 15-07-2022

Fornjot (code-first CAD in Rust) - Weekly Release - 2022-W29

HexoSynth 2022 - Devlog #5 - Signal Monitors and HexoTK Bugfixing

What's new in SeaORM 0.9.0

Slint UI crate weekly updates

This week in Databend #51: A Modern Cloud Data Warehouse for Everyone

Observations/Thoughts

How to speed up the Rust compiler in July 2022

How to setup a Wasm API for a CHIP-8 emulator

async let - A new concurrency primitve?

Extending SQLite with Rust to support Excel files as virtual tables

Pandas vs Polar - A look at performance

Improving “Extract Function” in Rust Analyzer - Dorian Listens

Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

When rustc explodes

Rust Walkthroughs

How Rust manages memory using ownership and borrowing

Integrating a Rust module into an Android app

Futuristic Rust: context emulation, part 2

Elegant and performant recursion in Rust

Getting Started with SeaORM

Making GTK keyboard on Rust

STM32F4 Embedded Rust at the HAL: PWM Buzzer

[DE] Kommentar: Rust im Linux-Kernel – handeln statt jubeln!

[video] Stop writing Rust

Miscellaneous

Rust Education Workshop 2022 Call For Participation

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is bnum, a library of arbitrarily sized fixed-size numerals.

Thanks to Isaac Holt for the self-suggestion.

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Call for Participation

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

@CAD97 is collecting examples of unwind-safety bugs

pyo3 - run_closure and drop_closure unsoundly drop payload on panic

miniz_oxide - println!() can cause panic outside catch_unwind()

axum - Add an example for a GET-or-HEAD handler that special-cases HEAD

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ockam - Diagnose Cannot drop a runtime ... error in rust nodes

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Updates from the Rust Project

416 pull requests were merged in the last week

add Nintendo Switch as tier 3 target

implement for<> lifetime binder for closures

allow destructuring opaque types in their defining scopes

allow unions with mutable references and tuples of allowed types

always create elided lifetime parameters for functions

do not error during method probe on Sized predicates for types that aren't the method receiver

add Output = expected type trait obligation for known binary operators

fix drop-tracking ICE when a struct containing a field with a significant drop is used across an await

fix ICE in named_arguments_used_positionally lint

fix spans for asm diagnostics

emit warning when named arguments are used positionally in format

better error message for generic_const_exprs inference failure

lower let-else in MIR

miri: optimizing Stacked Borrows (part 2): Shrink Item

use ICF (identical code folding) for building rustc

utilize PGO for windows x64 rustc dist builds

replace_bound_vars fast path: check predicates, don't check consts

borrow Vec<T, A> as [T]

final derive output improvements

fix last let_chains blocker

stabilize let_chains in Rust 1.64

stabilize core::ffi::CStr, alloc::ffi::CString, and friends

stabilize core::ffi:c_* and rexport in std::ffi

stabilize future_poll_fn

document and stabilize process_set_process_group

rearrange slice::split_mut to remove bounds check

add provider API to error trait

add new unstable API downcast to std::io::Error

add #[must_use] to Box::from_raw

implement fmt::Write for OsString

UnsafeCell blocks niches inside its nested type from being available outside

hashbrown: fix double-drop in RawTable::clone_from

cargo: allow '.' in workspace.default-members in non-virtual workspaces

cargo: fix nested workspace resolution

cargo: normalize path for cargo vendor output

cargo: stabilize --crate-type flag for cargo rustc

cargo: stabilize -Zmultitarget

rustdoc: avoid inlining items with duplicate (type, name)

rustfmt: fix/comments inside trait generics gets duplicated

rustfmt: remove useless conditional compilation - 2

rustfmt: add skip_macro_invocations option

clippy: add repeated_where_clause_or_trait_bound lint

clippy: add std_instead_of_core, std_instead_of_alloc, alloc_instead_of_core

clippy: add new lint obfuscated_if_else

clippy: fix mismatching_type_param_order false positive

clippy: fix for branches_sharing_code

clippy: improve while_let_on_iterator suggestion inside an FnOnce closure

clippy: move format_push_string to restriction

clippy: box_collection: raise warn for all std collections

clippy: change applicability type to MaybeIncorrect in explicit_counter_loop

clippy: unused_self: respect avoid-breaking-exported-api

clippy: match_like_matches_macro does not trigger when one arm contains conta…

rust-analyzer: add simple support for completion item details

rust-analyzer: add str_ref_to_string fix

rust-analyzer: automatically instaciate trivially instaciable structs in "Generate new" and "Fill struct fields"

rust-analyzer: fix extract variable assist for subexpression in mutable borrow

rust-analyzer: support negative, char & bool const generics

rust-analyzer: go to implementation of trait methods

rust-analyzer: super:: completion at crate root and module depth aware

rust-analyzer: don't show qualified path completions for private items

rust-analyzer: fix VSCode status bar tooltip not showing the error messages

rust-analyzer: fix imports being inserted before doc comments in inline modules

rust-analyzer: fix unresolved proc macro diagnostics pointing to macro expansions

rust-analyzer: stack overflows and wrong type inference of associated type shorthands

rust-analyzer: support generics in extract_function assist

rustup: revert "Set RUSTC and RUSTDOC env for child processes run through the proxy"

rustup: improved warning message for System-Rust-override

rustup: correctly propagate subshell failures in rustup-init

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

A rather rough week for compiler performance with regressions outweighing improvements by a considerable margin, in particular in real world crates. To add insult to injury, the biggest regressions came in rollups which make it difficult to trace the cause.

Triage done by @rylev. Revision range: b3f4c311..8bd12e8

Summary:

mean max count Regressions 😿 (primary) 1.5% 4.0% 176 Regressions 😿 (secondary) 1.8% 6.4% 147 Improvements 🎉 (primary) N/A N/A 0 Improvements 🎉 (secondary) -1.6% -4.1% 9 All 😿🎉 (primary) 1.5% 4.0% 176

7 Regressions, 5 Improvements, 3 Mixed; 4 of them in rollups 48 artifact comparisons made in total

Call for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization. The following RFCs would benefit from user testing before moving forward:

No RFCs issued a call for testing this week.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear on the above list, add the new call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

Rolling co-lead roles for T-compiler

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

RFCs

[disposition: merge] RFC: resolve crates.io source replacement ambiguity

Tracking Issues & PRs

[disposition: merge] session: stabilize split debuginfo on linux

[disposition: merge] do not mark interior mutable shared refs as dereferenceable

[disposition: close] Tracking issue for #![register_attr]

New and Updated RFCs

No New or Updated RFCs were created this week.

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The long compile times where all responsibility is taken away from you is infinitely more effective than submission patterns in BDSM, where the graceful rustc takes over and all you have to do is wait until they tell you that you're a good person and that everything is alright!

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[goblin-milque]

watched one tiktok about positionality vs identity and it resolved so much of my Gender Angst. fuck gender but i understand that my avatar is a woman and i'm not trying to cater to ppl when i say idgaf abt pronouns, i'm just not interested in projecting my identity onto her. my personal truth is not universal.

[kmgeog2260]

During this course we have looked at various aspects of human geographic research. In this write up I will address three things I know for certain about human geographical research, three things I am still confused by, three things I know about myself as a geographic researcher, and lastly three things I still need to work on as a geographical researcher.

The first thing I know for certain now about human geographical research is that although it does consist of mostly qualitative methods, there is still very many different styles and methods of collecting data and conducting research. Prior to this class I had seen qualitative and quantitative as very black and white, quantitative being solely numerical and qualitative being solely thoughts and ideas. Qualitative research is complex, and not only does it look at tangible aspects of humans and human interaction but also discourses, identities and most importantly place when it comes to human geographic research (Hay, 2005, Chapter 1). It also has a well-developed range of techniques such as ones we have looked at and ones I have used in my blogs. These include observational studies, interviews, case studies, oral histories, focus groups, literature reviews and many more.

Another thing I now know for certain is that human geographic research requires the consideration of ethics and self-reflection. There is a moral imperative to this research where the concern of welfare, respect for persons and justice needs to be incorporated (Hooykaas, Week 3, 2021). These ethical issues arise because of the social nature of human geographic research, in any of the methods listed above you are collecting and interpreting social information (Hay, 2005, Chapter 2), therefore ethical issues can arise before, during or after the research process. I know and understand now the importance of this.

Lastly, human geographic research requires a deep and well documented analysis to ensure rigour and the best possible answer/outcome to your research question. While conducting qualitative research it is not always the case like in quantitative research where the numbers speak for themselves, therefore we must ensure rigour, meaning we need to establish a high level of trustworthiness to our work. To ensure rigour, it requires careful research design and thoughtful planning which will ultimately create trustworthy and dependable research (Hay, 2005, Chapter 6). As the researcher I learned the importance of careful and well thought out design through the digital storytelling project.

The first thing I am still confused by in human geographical research is making informed choices about research design and development. I understand that there are many different styles and methods to geographic research, but I am still unsure of which is the best to use and when. Another thing I am still confused by is after the data has been collected how to filter which responses to use and which information is the best information. In other words, I am still confused on what happens next in research. Lastly, I am still unsure of how to critically assess the strengths of the sources to evaluate how much information is enough. I think that with time and more practice these aspects of human geographical research will make more sense to me.

As a human geographic researcher, I know for certain that I understand the importance of ethics in a research project. I was able to develop this skill throughout the blog posts and the storytelling assignment. Going forward if I were to conduct a research project, I would like to use collaborative research methods, which involves getting input from both insiders and outsiders of the problem being studied (Hay, 2005, Chapter 3). I think that coming from an outsider position in research has some major downfalls and effects to the research being done and raises ethical issues between the researcher and the participants.

This brings me to my next point, that I know for certain that I have and will bring with me an invisible backpack that comes from a place of privilege. To be critically reflexive is a process of self-conscious scrutiny as a research throughout the entirety of the project (Hay, 2005, Chapter 2). Being a white woman raised in Canada, I need to remind myself of the privilege that I come from before, during and after the research process. I will need to ask myself how and why I am doing whatever research I am involved in as well as constantly be looking at the social relations being enacted and influenced by the research I will conduct.

Lastly, I know that using the technique of coding while organizing my research is a good tool for me to use. Prior to this course while trying to find information from literature online I found it very hard to organize information and my thoughts. The knowledge of hierarchical vs. flat, and inductive vs. deductive coding, (Hay, 2005, Chapter 18), going forward will help me organize information and come to a better answer to my research questions.

Areas that I have learned about myself as a geographical researcher that I need more time developing are creating a grounded theory, removing myself from the research and writing/ presenting my qualitative research. Creating a grounded theory is an inductive method where the purpose is to generate information on the most important themes up front to gain a solid understanding of the topic, then looking at the specifics to help answer the research question (Hay , 2005, Chapter 18). I as a research tend to jump into my question too quickly and then end up with a lot of information and time spend in topics that don’t relate to my question. As a researcher I also find it difficult to remove myself from the research write up. Third person and nominalization create more formal research but often I try to add my own thoughts and ideas when they are not needed (Hooykaas, Week 9, 2021). Lastly, while putting my research together to present it I need time to develop better ways of presenting my work. I need to balance the use of objective and subjective knowledge, learn to write in a third-person narrative and reflect my positionality (Hay, 2005, Chapter 19).

Sources:

Hooykaas. (2021) Course Notes for GEOG2260- Applied Human Geography

Hay, I. (2005). Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography(4th ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9780199010912/cfi/0!/4/4@0.00:0.242

[miseriathome]

There is just no way for a perisex (non intersex) person to become intersex, because intersex variations are present your entire life, from birth onward. [ ... ] Perisex people can never physically gain an intersex condition.

This is incorrect, insofar as intersexuality encompasses disorders of sexual development.

You could be born with all the “proper” and congruous gonads, dangly bits, chromosomes, and hormone profile, and you could still end up being understood as intersex down the line because of any of the following or more:

Surgeon messing with your genitals in an unnecessary/highly inappropriate way

Extreme exposure to external/environmental sex hormones (or hormone blockers!) which screws with sexual development

Acquired issues with hormone-producing/interacting organs

Cultural shift in the prioritization of certain biosocial sex markers, and thus a reevaluation of the “peaks” and deviations in the bimodal sex distribution

To frame perisexuality as some kind of innate and non-fluid marker even undermines why language has shifted from dyadicism to perisexism; the entire premise of the term perisex is to highlight just how fraught of a sociopolitical position that is. Perfect conformity to an ideal norm is absolutely impossible, and thus the focus of intersex activism in its most current iteration is identifying the privileging of proximity to those norms and the punishment of deviance from them. The “line” between intersex and perisex is socially constructed, as are both of those categories individually.

In the same way, the line between intersex and transgender is also socially constructed. There is actually plenty of good reason for people to conflate the two, namely that mainstream cultural frameworks do not recognize these as being meaningfully distinct experiences. The activism, development of language, and discussion of experiences surrounding both intersexuality and transgenderism are by and large niche. The distinction between the biology of sex and the sociality of gender does not come from mainstream institutions or the fundamental organization of our society any more than the distinction between any materialism vs immaterialism.

Within a framework that has identified and disentangled gender from sex, non-consent from conscious transition, sure it’s absolutely baffling that somebody could conflate intersex with trans. But the existence of that framework is not a given and, unfortunately, cannot be assumed. Identification is powerful and necessary work, and to take it as a given would be a detriment to activism.

And that’s not even getting into the tenuousness of intersex vs trans as it related to non-Westernism and to people of color. That’s not getting into variance within “the” binary of sex or gender (there are actually many binaries!) which falls along racial, cultural, religious, nationalistic, sociopolitical, or historical lines. “Failed performance of gender” and “successful performance of gender” are not mutually exclusive states of being, but rather can overlap and coexist simultaneously, for example.

And that’s not even getting into the tenuousness of non-consensual vs voluntary, or developmental vs non-developmental. There’s a whole world of sex marker body modification, sex marker trauma, medical malpractice, and acquired disability that exist post-puberty as well, in which there is no sufficient cognitive schema to describe those instances of sexual incongruence and non-normativity.

Now... all of this isn’t to say that I think “intersex” is a meaningless term or that anybody and everybody should adopt it if they so choose. I want to emphasize that intersex is a politicized positionality, that the self-adoption of an intersex identity is often a political decision, and that the political nonetheless has weight. Being socially constructed doesn’t make identity any less relevant or meaningful. So ultimately, I agree with the conclusion of the post I’m quoting, which is that conflating non-binary transition with “transitioning to intersex” is an incredibly gauche move. It’s true that such an act, done thoughtlessly, can be appropriative (in the sense of “taking and owning without understanding”), can obfuscate very real systemic problems, and can be incredibly disrespectful and invalidating of the personhood of classically-recognized intersex people. But such an argument doesn’t need to be hinged upon very arbitrary and vaguely exclusionary qualifiers for what intersexuality is and why its attributes are innate.

(And for posterity, the reason why this is its own post and not a reblog is because after a long deliberation, I’ve decided that it’s not my place to derail what is mostly a reasonable and compassionate argument. But since my own positionality within intersex/perisex and trans/cis paradigms is so fraught and so heavily complicated by the absolutism I’ve identified in the original argument, I do nonetheless feel that this critique has a place and should be voiced. Poststructuralism is a good practice and we only benefit as activists when we borrow from its tradition.)

[deniigi]

academic screeches at sky and gives unhelpful uni-level writing advice below

what I need, friends, neighbors, countrymen and countrymen-adjacent, is for my students to stop using the following phrases in their goddamn essays.

“nowhere else in X is there a better example/ there is no better example of X than”

“clearly/obviously”

“of course”

I’m going nuts people. I could be grading a perfectly reasonable essay and then the student will throw one of these bad boys in there and immediately, I have to take off points for Style/Presentation.

Like.

No. Nice fucking try. But no.

This is what the media/popular culture thinks academics sound like. But this is only what shitty, pretentious, stupidly privileged academics sound like and when an undergrad student swaggers in trying to talk like this, I immediately think that they are 1) super fucking privileged, 2) trying way to hard to sound smart to compensate for a lack of actual argument/evidence, or 3) don’t know what formal tone means.

You get points off for all of those, including the first one, not because of your privilege, but because in almost all situations, these phrases denote a lack of nuanced thinking and argumentation in the statement that follows (the only exception is when you use ‘of course’ to provide more specificity, nuance, or a counterexample to your argument, but even then, there are better ways to do this). This privileges a certain worldview which, at university level, I expect you to start thinking outside of.

I say this not to demean anyone’s writing but because it is absolutely infuriating to read a paper written by an undergrad student that is essentially talking down to me, rather than laying out a compelling argument to me as an equal.

And my reaction to that is ‘honey, you read maybe one paragraph on this topic that I am getting a doctorate in. So I’m gonna need you to stop talking to me like you wrote the book I’m reading rn.”

I would much, much rather a student give me a very direct piece of work that has some flaws in argument than to pretend through these phrases that their argument is somehow watertight. If all of the information was the same in both papers, I would still give that first paper a higher grade because it demonstrates a formal, academic tone.

And while I’m here, I’ll just say. “Formal” doesn’t mean “asshole” tone in academia. It means that you use the active voice and present information directly and clearly, rather than using literary language or unnecessarily complicated sentence structure and word choice. It means that you utilize citations, clearly identify the author of an argument, and address their argument and ideas without using overtly loaded language that dismisses it based on your own personal opinions of that idea/argument.

A difficult one of these is ‘racist’ vs. ‘racialized’ in historical writing. So like, many histories are racist and many  historical actors were racist. I’m not arguing that. But if you call a depiction ‘racist’ in your analysis, that’s not good enough. ‘Racist’ is actually a hugely vague term when you think about it. It connotes a wide range of different behaviors. And a lot of the time, when students call something in history ‘racist,’ what they are actually doing is saying ‘this text is not worth examining because it is problematic.’

And that is exactly the opposite of how academics think of problematic texts. Text and representation are important precisely because they are problematic. They reveal multiple layers of discourse and narrative that way, which we need to examine and work through in order to see where these ideas come from, how they are used, how they are spread, etc.

So if you’re working with a racist text in my field, at least, I would expect a specific definition of what you mean when you use the term ‘racist’ (i.e. racist depiction = a derogatory representation of person of another race. Racist language = language which utilizes derogatory imagery, slurs, stereotypes, discriminatory ideas, etc.) And it can be difficult to do this because it’s a whole lot of words and can feel super repetitive, so the word ‘racialized’ is helpful here in that you can use it to say ‘this thing that I am talking about uses concepts of race based on social hierarchies’.

This not only gives you some distance between yourself as the researcher and the subject at hand so that you don’t have to defend your identity and positionality at ever single turn, but it shows understanding of the system of discourses that underlie racism.

And that is what I am looking for when I grade.

[nothorses]

A crucial part of the conversation around transandrophobia is the distinction between personal identity and sociopolitical categorization; or, to borrow one of my least favorite made-up grad school words, "positionality".

"Positionality" refers to where you exist in relation to power. It's "white" vs. "person of color" or other race-related classifications, it's gender, orientation, socioeconomic class, ability, "fat" vs. "thin", and whatever other axes of power you can identify.

"Personal identity" is how you choose to describe yourself; the words you prefer, the specific labels that make sense or feel right to you, and the words that may technically describe you, but that you don't want applied for any number of reasons.

The difference between these two things is why, for example, "bi" might technically describe pan people as well, but a lot of them don't actually identify as bi; and why, at the same time, a lot of statistics around bi positionality- the specific oppression that targets bi people- also apply to, and include, pan people.

The issue is a lot bigger than this, and there are a ton of arguments within the queer community based around the conflation of these two concepts in one way or another ("don't call it the queer community" comes to mind). But the one I'm interested in here is the way this impacts transmasc discourse, specifically.

There's a particular confusion that happens with trans people's identity vs. positionality in queer discourse. Cissexist society says that trans people's identities don't matter; that they do, and also should occupy the position of whatever gender they were assigned at birth. Position determines identity.

The common argument to this is to just flip it the other way around: trans people's identities do matter- and that those identities determine positionality.

This makes sense, to some degree:

Trans people face transphobia: identity = trans, therefore position = trans.

Trans women face misogyny: identity = women, therefore position = woman.

But it also concludes:

Trans men identify as men: identity = man, therefore position = man.

"Tans male privilege" is the notion that trans men, upon identifying as men, instantly gain access to the position of maleness.

But this is easy to poke holes in; telling someone you identify as a man doesn't stop them from seeing you as a woman, and that's kind of a vital function of transphobia in the first place. In fact, doing so would immediately subject you to transphobia.

So people think: okay, if trans men don't occupy the position of "man" because they identify that way, what does that say about trans women? Does that mean trans women do occupy the position of "man", despite identifying as "woman"? Does that mean they don't occupy the position of "woman" at all- and therefore cannot be subjected to misogyny?

Obviously, that's also not true! Trans women do experience misogyny; this is a well-documented fact.

And so do trans men.

And that adds to the confusion: if trans men experience misogyny, does that mean their position = woman? (And isn't that just what TERFs believe?)

The problem here is twofold:

We're still conflating identity with position- we're just arguing over which one determines the other.

We're ignoring that "trans" is itself a position. Trans people don't necessarily occupy the position of either binary gender; we are often just seen as "trans", and placed in that position.

This position is also a little bit unique in that it's particularly mobile: society doesn't want to acknowledge that this is a valid way to exist, and so the existence of the position is denied as much as possible. Trans people are, as a result, often categorized as "women" or "men" depending on what's convenient: if the transphobe in question can subject them to misogyny by categorizing them as a woman, or if they can paint them as "dangerous" by categorizing them as men.

If we can understand that position doesn't necessarily determine our identity- our actual gender- we can understand that trans women are both exactly as much women as cis women are, and that they occupy a very different position, and have very different experiences.

We can also understand, through these ideas, that trans men can identify as trans and as men, and that these identities don't necessarily determine position. Trans men don't occupy the position of "man", even though we identify as and are men.

We can also understand that trans men also aren't necessarily women, even if we do sometimes occupy the position of "woman", because every trans person can occupy that position if and when it's convenient to transphobia. The same is true of the "man" position and trans women.

[goodinthisworldworthfightingfor]

~~spoilers for Frozen 2 below~~

When I went to see Frozen 2, I was really impressed by the song “Show Yourself” -- I think I liked it even better than “Let it Go” (blasphemous??). I wanted to think through a comparison of these two songs, the emotional centers of each show.

On the surface, they both seem like they’re about Elsa’s self-empowerment (”I don’t care what they’re going to say” vs. “You are the one you've been waiting for “). However, I think it’s the musical elements that really make “Show Yourself” say something different -- particularly through the instrumentation of the line “show yourself.” As the verse builds up to the first chorus, the music suddenly drops out before the chord’s resolution and Ela’s voice is unaccompanied as she sings the title line, “Show yourself.” To me, this foregrounds the vulnerability of searching for relationships. To initiate a relational call-and-response, you have to start with the difficult acknowledgement that you are not fully complete on your own -- a hard thing to admit especially if you’re afraid that the other party will not reciprocate. The instrumental accompaniment immediately follows like a metaphorical exclamation point--or a response to Elsa’s call--underscoring her longing and foreshadowing the other voices to come.  She has let down her armor enough to acknowledge the hole (mirrored by the hole in the accompaniment) and invite someone else’s voice into her identity quest.

After the mysterious voice responds to her call, she sings the verse & chorus again. This time when she reaches the pivotal line “Show yourself,” the instrumental line doesn’t entirely cut out -- the cascading piano melody stays with her as she calls for a relational connection, mirroring the accompaniment of this other voice that has joined the song. She is growing to realize that asking someone to run/sing alongside you isn’t a sign of weakness (something that Anna has been trying to tell her for literally two movies). Though at this point in this song she is still out of step--mirrored by the syncopation of the dominant instrumental lines--she is no longer completely alone in her melody. 

Next, she is joined by her mother and chorus of others as they singing the song from her childhood that ties into her cultural heritage. As they sing the chorus for the third and final time, Elsa and her mother sing the line “Show yourself” and “Grow yourself” together. We realize that this song about so much more than her own self-discovery or even her relationship with her sister. In this part of the song, she is performing her positionality in her family and in the larger communit(ies) she belongs to (”I am found”). Unlike “Let it Go,” Elsa is starting to step outside of the self-centric solo genre that aligns with dominant (patriarchal) narratives about individuality and acknowledge that she doesn’t *want* to be self-sufficient--she needs these other voices in her story. 

Then, the last time she sings the line “Show yourself,” she sings it alone and without instrumentation, but immediately followed by a chorus of singers. This shows how her own individual voice fits into a larger story -- connecting her past (what she was born for), present (this moment of realization) and future (”throw yourself into something new”) to the larger stories that she is learning and joining. She finally understand the lesson that she couldn’t reach in “Let it Go”: that she *does* care what “they’re” going to say, now that she knows who the “they” is. In finding her community and joining the choruses of her communities, Elsa is finally able to embrace the past and open the door to discovering herself.

[mackadesiac]

WTF is Self-Care?

I love Tumblr for the community that has open and honest conversations about self-care. I’ve spent some time thinking about what self-care is, how I define it, and how it’s different than indulgence. While I love logging on here and seeing honest, transparent understanding of self-care, here’s what I often hear from other grad students:

“I need to study, but I ended up watching Netflix. But ya know, self-care.”

“I went shopping because, like, self-care.”

“Sleep isn’t a priority.”

“Self-care has been co-opted by white women.”

Basically, there are a few different things I see. Self-care is posited as spending money on your external self, a sign you’re not “truly” woke, or indulging impulses.

Self-care is the act of caring for one’s and providing for one’s physical and psychological needs (Beauchamp & Childress, 2001). This is where it gets tricky though-what is a need and what is an indulgence? What actually makes someone a better graduate student? And how can we balance self-care with not being “woke” enough?

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Impulse vs. Care: I struggle with wanting to indulge my impulses in the name of self-care constantly. I think that spending a few dollars here, there, everywhere will alleviate stress, make me feel better, only to look at my bank account and get in a more stressed situation. For me, that's the biggest challenging in enacting self-care: what is actually caring for my whole self (financially, physically, psychologically), and what is a quick fix?

Internal vs. external: A lot of time self-care is billed via hashtags and social media accounts as face masks, haircuts, and shopping. But that leads to the problem of only hitting that physical aspect of self-care. I feel the need to push myself beyond just applying a mask, to “What will make my mind happy too?”

Privilege vs. Necessity: Ok, I’m writing this from the perspective of a nonwhite, cisgendered, queer woman, in a relatively good financial state. I come from a privileged background, and I have family that has the ability to bail me out if I ever get into a hard spot. I know that often time self-care becomes more of a trend, taken away from calls from prominent Black feminists who billed self-care as a need for Black women to take care of themselves (I see you, Audre Lorde). I agree with this completely. I know that often times, people see self-care as a trend, not something that some people need to survive. We should always recognize privilege and our positionality. That being said, I get upset when I hear people calling other people out for using the term when unnecessary. You can have white privilege and still be dis-privileged through other identities, such as gender, and ability. We shouldn’t discount people’s experience without knowing their whole story, just as we should be aware of the history of it, and focusing on re-defining self-care so it is inclusive and still pays homage to the women of color who brought it to our attention. Basically, “self-care” is not mutually exclusive from “being woke.” That being said, I do think there is a tendency to whitewash self-care, as well as feminize it that needs to be addressed. Type in “self-care” in a stock photo set, and you get a lot of external, white women sipping tea. Where are the men? The people of color? Different sexual orientations? We all need to take care of ourselves, and representation matters.

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

TL;DR: Self-care is complex, and it’s hard to truly take care of yourself vs. falling into the trend. But let’s try.

[mariacallous]

An English-language podcast is part of a trend of Yugo-nostalgia spreading to younger generations and abroad.

Like many things from the Balkans, “Yugo-nostalgia” defies simple explanation.

A combination of the words “Yugoslavia” and “nostalgia”, the term might at first appear to refer to little more than a harmless, wistful longing for socialist Yugoslavia by some people living in its former constituent states. Yet, Yugo-nostalgia is a complex and ever-evolving phenomenon.

When the phrase was coined in the early-1990s, it was as a term with largely negative connotations, used by nationalists to disparage those with a hankering for the federalist past.

Today, Yugo-nostalgia means different things to different people: according to Dr Milica Popovic, a political scientist specialising in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies at the Central European University in Vienna, it could be “counter-identity” to the prevailing narrative; an alignment with the values of anti-fascism, solidarity and internationalism that were central to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; even a sort of “safe space for ambivalent emotions”; or a simple longing for a return to better, happier times.

There are different facets to it, too – commercial, memorial and cultural. And research has suggested it tends to exist least in states like Slovenia and Croatia where the process of nation-building has been most successful.

“In my research, we have identified two key elements influencing Yugo-nostalgia,” says Popovic. “One, of course, is the generational lens, the positionality depending on which generation we belong to. The second element that is always crucial for understanding Yugo-nostalgia is the political positionality – the content of Yugo-nostalgia is coloured by the political identification we carry,” she explains.

Yet whatever one’s definition of Yugo-nostalgia or reason for indulging in it, it has certainly outgrown its roots. And with the arrival of an English-language podcast, Remembering Yugoslavia, it’s also going global.

Sounds of the past

Peter Korchnak, creator and host of “Remembering Yugoslavia”, launched the podcast in 2020 as COVID-19 began shutting everything down. With this project he filled his time doing something he loved – writing, design, production – about somewhere he idealised. “A passion project”, is how he describes it.

“I’ve always been drawn to the region as both an interested observer and a friend of the people,” Korchnak tells BIRN in a phone interview from his current home in Astoria, Oregon.

Over 60 episodes (and counting), Korchnak explores the memory of a country that no longer exists, examining complex issues related to socialist Yugoslavia through multiple viewpoints from people who address different facets of whatever topic is being examined.

From looking at Yugoslavia as an alternative political project (Podcast Episode #12) and examining Serbian historical revisionism (Podcast Episode #23), to comparing two of Yugoslavia’s most famous women in Jovanka vs. Melania (Podcast Episode #54) and the enduring appeal of the country’s first car, the Zastava 750 or Fića/Fićo (Podcast Episode #57), the episodes cover a multitude of subjects in a reportage style, often positively though sometimes with an ironic detachment.

Korchnak himself exemplifies the complex, often incongruous nature of Yugo-nostalgia. Born in 1976 in what is present-day Slovakia but growing up in what was then Czechoslovakia, Korchnak never visited socialist Yugoslavia. “I have no connection, no family ties to Yugoslavia, which tends to surprise people. In fact, I never even went to Yugoslavia when it existed,” he admits.

Instead, Korchnak, like many Central Europeans of his time who were suffocating under particularly repressive and colourless Communist regimes, looked on Yugoslavia and its people as models for a brighter, more prosperous future, and revelled in its culture as an immediate way to make that feel real. For example, an album released in 1999 by Yugoslav musician Goran Bregovic and Polish singer Kayah, a blend of Balkan and Polish folk, reached No. 1 in Poland and sold over 700,000 copies.

“People from Yugoslavia were much better off, they could travel, they had better passports that were accepted all over the world. Compared to us, they were rich – and they knew it,” he recounts. “To me as a kid in the 1980s, Yugoslavia was a place where the sea was unbelievably blue, the ice cream was great, you could buy jeans – a paradise!”

After the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the previous way of examining the country gave way in the noughties to the study of the memory of that country. “I was able to compare what happened in the region with how my country was torn apart – I just became fascinated by it.”

New demographic

To Korchnak, the global reach of his podcast illustrates how people still identify with the “spirit” of Yugoslavia.

While 53 per cent of listeners to his Remembering Yugoslav podcast are from Europe, 35 per cent are in North America and 7 per cent in Oceania (probably most in Australia). By country, 28 per cent are located in the US, 20 per cent in the UK, 7 per cent apiece in Canada and Australia, 5 per cent apiece in Germany and Serbia, 4 per cent in Croatia, and 2 per cent apiece in the Netherlands, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sweden, Slovenia, and Austria. The total is now over 150 countries.

“What is really interesting is to see an element of Yugo-nostalgia that is a phenomenon not only existing in the post-Yugoslav space, but also abroad. And when it exists abroad, it does not solely exist among the ex-Yugoslav community; we notice Yugo-nostalgia in communities that did not live in nor identify themselves as Yugoslav,” says the CEU’s Popovic.

As people with direct memory of Yugoslavia die off, Korchnak notes, remembrance of the country changes its character and nature through existence in younger generations.

“I hear a lot from people who were born in that generation after Yugoslavia ceased to exist. All they know is from their parents and grandparents, or through studies. To them, these topics and my podcast is a way to explore and reconnect with that heritage,” says Korchnak. “That was a surprise to me, I never expected to reach that demographic of listeners.”

On what he has learnt in the two years since he began the podcast, Korchnak says what stands out the most is “how complex and rich and diverse the country, the area and the region was and is, in terms of stories and people’s experiences.”

As such, he isn’t worried about running out of ideas for the podcast anytime soon: “Not only do I have my own ideas that would last another four to five years, but people keep coming to me with suggestions all the time. So, no matter how long the podcast lasts, I don’t think I’ll have time to do it all.”

[takeajournalwithme]

September 20th, 2022

Identities are ascribed vs. self-selected; differences between how society defines you vs. how you define yourself, what you learned about identities from unwritten/unspoken rules, from institutional & cultural socialization, and from ways you were rewarded or penalized for following dominant societal expectations/scripts for identities.

Which identities most salient to you related to your own positionality?

Which most hidden or unexplored? 

I think some of the identities that have the strongest position in my life are my racial identities which include the food and music, and the language we have with one another (AAVE). My identity as an introvert is another one that I've come to realize is more important than I realized it was. Around the age of about 24, I had a personal shift in my religious beliefs which was a big part of my identity. So I would say my religious beliefs (or a lack thereof) and spirituality have become a strong position in my life.

One that I believe is really unexplored is my childhood experiences. Though I've had a pretty good upbringing, there have for sure been some unexplored moments of traumatic experiences that I haven't had the courage to explore yet, honestly. I think one that is truly hidden or unexplored for me and I think for a lot of people as well as the identities of gender identity, sexuality, and social roles. For a very long time societies have had a clear-cut definition of these identities, and even though nonconformance has always been around I feel more recently we've been coming into a reemergence of not the "normal."

[hazardous-waste-containment]

In addition to wanting to establish a theocratic ‘halachic state’, Kahane tellingly once declared:

[The Jewish people's] chosenness is not a racial or national thing, but based on the chosen mission, i.e. it is a people that was given a sacred law, the Torah, and an immutable destiny to live and uphold the Torah so as to serve as a light unto the nations. [..] All that happened, happens, and will happen goes according to a divine plan at the center of which stands the Jewish people.

The Revisionist Maximalists, meanwhile, displayed what Joseph Heller calls a ‘secular messianism’, a quasi-mystical revolutionary nationalism that, although drenched in the rhetoric of messianic salvation, was not interested in religious law nor in obeying a divine plan. Jewish particularity had to do with a Darwinian struggle against national enemies, rather than metaphysical chosenness.

Even less religiously Jewish was the fascism of Yonatan Ratosh, who combined militarism, corporatism and revolutionary nationalism with ‘Canaanism’ - an attempt to revive a primordial, pre-biblical ‘Hebrew’ identity and bring about the civilizational rebirth of the entire Middle East. He saw Judaism as a rootless, subservient product of the Diaspora, unbecoming of a great nation, and hence was interested in resurrecting ‘Canaanite’ polytheism.

Square in the middle (of Kahanism vs Canaanism) we find Avraham Stern, an ex-Revisionist who went on to found Lehi, a much more radical and militant Zionist sect that twice sought to collaborate with Nazi Germany, at one point proposing a totalitarian ‘Kingdom of Israel’ as an Axis client state. Stern's fascism was rooted in ‘living space’, blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism, and a cult of force and self-sacrifice, but part of his vision of Jewish rebirth was the construction of a Third Temple to inaugurate the new age. This seems most comparable to the Falangist belief that the rebirth of the Church would accompany the rebirth of the secular Spanish state.

Closer to Kahane - apparently having directly influenced him - was Lehi member Israel Eldad, part of a triumvirate that led the movement after Stern's death. Eldad incorporated Stern's anti-Arab, militaristic fascism into a Jewish fundamentalist framework: Jews are divinely chosen, the Temple Mount is the center of the universe, and the rebirth of the Kingdom of Israel will bringing all of humanity closer to G-d.

While we're here, there's also the interesting Third Positionism of Nathan Friedman-Yellin, Eldad's Lehi co-leader who sought to align with the USSR and with Third World national liberation movements, in addition to pursuing a left-wing economic program domestically and presenting Arabs as noble comrades in the struggle against Great Britain (albeit still denying Palestinian identity and advocating territorially ‘maximalist’ Zionism).

Interesting to note that Jewish fascism isn't theocratic/fundamentalist by default despite having a religiously-conceived ‘ingroup’, the religious streak in Kahanism was a historical contingency as Kahane was a rabbi coming from a Religious Zionist political tradition. Jewish fascism in the interwar period didn't have that element; both Achimeir's Revisionist Maximalists and Stern's Lehi had their roots in the secular right-wing Zionism of Jabotinsky.

[neoliberal-dog-blog]

Reflecting on nearly half a semester

It would be an underestimation to say that this semester has flown by. Looking back, though it seems little time has passed, I am struck by how much ground we have covered in this course. I feel like I am finally moving toward a tangible grasp of a more “complete” view of globalization and how it takes form in different realities. Of course, gaining these perspectives has hardly been a linear process. Through elucidating the dynamics of globalization that produce contemporary realities, I feel as if we have gone on a journey within ourselves, challenging hegemonic systems of knowledge and thus being given the capacity to self-reflect on our own positionality in a world of conflicting identities. What is clear so far is nothing is as transparent as it seems. I am especially interested in contradiction as a key component of globalization, taking shape in binary oppositions such as developed vs. developing, or time-space compression vs. expansion. . Emphasizing the necessary importance of working outside binary oppositions may help to disentangle how these contradiction within the global cultural economy operate and how they take effect in the daily lives of those in various places around the world. It is clear that to most effectively accomplish this, we, through our work, must reject the bounded nature of knowledge and work to move beyond a two dimensional view of the world. Taking special care to evaluate the “sites” of contradiction in the global cultural economy (through our past texts and those to come) will hopefully continue to disentangle the complex web of relations that define our world today. I hope to use contradiction/“sites” of conflict as a framing point for my upcoming midterm paper (more details to be fleshed out).