#this is gentrification of the queer community whatever the fuck that means

[maretriarch]

nothing like a 100,000 note post to tell you how deeply deeply unradical and uncontroversial something is

[magicianmew]

Low magic, gender, ceremagi, a big clusterfuck pie...

So this is something that has been gnawing away at me for damn near the entirety of the time I've been firmly planted in my practice, but especially since the whole this-is-douchecanoe thing went down (they're not worth my tag).

A few days ago I reblogged this post, which talks about how this-isn't-sparta is clearly coming from an occultist background, and seems to be embodying all of the sexist, ableist, elitist, and dogmatic crap that we've come to know and love from a particular and unfortunately vocal segment of that community.

But then this happened.

These practices within themselves are very male-centric. They seem more left brain than right. More confrontational than accepting.

Wait, what?

Now, I am not trying to call anyone out at all here. I ain't mad. I just wanna unpack this a little bit and actually look at it. 'K? I’m only using this because it's a convenient and ready-to-hand example, but the mindset is absolutely everywhere in the magical world.

Why do we as a community view low magic as being an inherently a "feminine" and "illogical" branch of magic? Why do we view it as something that is yielding and disorganized and void of the sort of study that can go into ceremonial magic? Even the people who practice it seem to accept this stereotype, even as they're surrounded by books and attempting some extremely punishing hedge work for the 34928057498th time.

I actually don't know. Because none of that is remotely true, in my experience of practicing primarily low magic.

Also note: I continue to refer to it as "low" for the same reason I continue to self-identify as "witch." In both cases, it's a practice usually associated with the underclass, which is an important part of the history of these practices. And I don't want to erase that. It keeps me humble. Anyway...

Let's talk about low magic. Folk magic. Po' people magic. Community magic.

Obviously there are thousands of different varieties of low magic -- several just for every culture in any given era. But they share a few broad things in common.

Firstly, they have an absolutely vast knowledge base. In order to effectively work most historical or true traditional forms of low magic, you need to have a working knowledge of botany, geology, history, cooking, distillation, the food web, migrational patterns, astronomy...

Learning how to perform the full body of work of most low magical traditions literally requires a full interdisciplinary education, fam. They involve a shit-ton of left-brain thinking, knowledge acquisition, and logical work. I have learned more about science from my practice than I did from my formal education, ok?

Even if you try to whatabout modern, novel forms of low magic, it still stays true. A tech witch, for example, might require a damn near photographic knowledge of the grid of their city and a couple of different coding languages, in addition to several of the disciplines above.

Let's keep something in mind, here. Low craft is the mother of modern medicine. The magician and the healer were the same person throughout most of history, and if you look back on what few ancient low magic books exist, you will find medicinal concepts that we still use to this day.

Low craft is, and has always been, a deeply research- and knowledge-based way of working. It couldn't possibly have given birth to something as expansive and world-changing as medicine if it weren't.

What is different about low magic compared to ceremonial, and I think where this concept of it being "less disciplined" comes from, is that low magic is performatively flexible. Because it is a craft developed and used by people with unpredictable access to materials, time, or places, it is meant to be adapted to a non-ideal situation pretty much on the fly. That is exactly why it has such a vast body of knowledge behind it: because the more you know, the more ready you are to do the work you need no matter what situation you might find yourself in.

Ceremonial magic is, well, what it says on the box: ceremonial. And because the experience of watching a ceremonial working seems much more procedural than watching a low magic working, people have somehow concluded the low magic involves less knowledge. That is not remotely true. The knowledge just comes in at a different point in the process, i.e. how they even got to the point of doing a working at all, when they had nothing but a spoon, two pennies, and a waxing moon at their disposal.

Hell, low magicians even adapt ceremonial magic. Hoodoo workers know all about the Seals of Solomon, and they make them work beautifully even without the usual prescribed ceremony.

Now let's talk a little bit about these... gender ideas. This is a whole complicated ball of icky, slippery worms.

There's two concepts going on here:

That ceremonial magic is "male."

That "male-ness" is confrontational and intolerant.

Ok. *rubs temples*

It is undeniable that ceremonial magic is dominated by men, and it always has been.

But that does not mean that low magic is "a woman's practice." That is not even remotely true, and it never has been.

Low magic has historically been communal. In many places, it still is even now. Practitioners have always been both male and female. Sometimes they held different titles, sometimes they didn't. Usually, deference was simply determined by age and length of time practicing, not gender or anything else.

As a matter of fact, magical practice was one of the few places where we continued to see relative gender equality even after patriarchy began to take over many societies in the world. Magic continued to be a practice of merit and communal assistance, not something where your gender decided your competence or your station in the magical community.

From Britain's cunning folk to black root doctors, both African and diasporic, both men and women have always been magic workers in low practice, and there is little to no evidence of them disrespecting each other, or assuming one's magic is inferior to the other's because of their gender alone. There is no black man who ever wanted to cross a root working woman, I guarantee you!

Ok. So now let's tackle this "male-ness is confrontational and intolerant" thing.

No. Toxic masculinity is confrontational and intolerant.

So then why do we see that particular problem more often in ceremonial magic, which has always been a male-dominated practice?

Because ceremonial magic is not just male-dominated. More specifically, it is dominated by white, Western, higher-class men, who are also usually straight and virtually always cisgender. Let's just get that right, here.

This isn't a problem with "male-ness." It is a problem with the people at the very top of the kyriarchal totem pole, and it's the same problem we always see with this group of people, whether we're talking about Congress or gentrification. It's no different.

Ceremonial magic has historically been the property of powerful, wealthy men who were part of the ruling class. From popes to aristocrats, the development of ceremonial magic has grown directly from that power system.

"Male-ness" does not dictate one's personality. "Male-ness" does not inherently make one intolerant of other people. Unexamined, unchecked privilege is what does that. "Male-ness" means nothing other than the state of occupying a male-identified gender and/or body.

The strong and persistent community of men that has always been present in low magic alongside their female counterparts is no less male. And we shouldn't degrade the potential and decency of men who work at these things by assigning them a personality without even examining it for truth first.

We also really need to stop defining everything feminine as yielding, weak, or illogical -- the implicit opposite of the strong, dominating, and procedural "male" practice. It doesn't lift up women to define their work and their encyclopedic knowledge as being somehow lesser or weaker like that.

I know that, most of the time, people don't mean it like this because it's just beaten into our heads to think of female-ness this way, to the point where all of us will, at some point, just parrot it back without even thinking about it (me included), but it's a back-handed defense at best. We need to acknowledge the power, knowledge, and work of the magic women do. We need to get better at examining those assumptions within ourselves that their work isn't as good.

Just as a general concept, we need to stop trying to shoe-horn the gender binary and its tired stereotypes into the way we see ourselves as magic workers, and the way we see our magic. That’s as true in low magic as in ceremonial.

And finally...

I can pretty much hear all the ceremonial magicians who are mad as fuck at me right now and ready to bang away at their keyboards about how they're female or disabled or queer or whatever.

Ok, stop for a second.

I know.

'K?

I know that. I know there are lots of you coming from less privileged backgrounds, struggling for the spoons to do your work, etc.

And I really hope you're going to use that to take back ceremonial magic from that ugly history, and turn it into something that's for everyone and works equally for the magical empowerment of all people.

You can totally do that, now that we have this here thing called the internet. And I follow several people who partake in problematic practices with the specific intent of re-envisioning them as something better. Great. Wonderful. Please do that.

But in order to do that, you have to recognize the roots of where it came from. You can't tackle these problems by pretending they don't exist, just like you can't be an ally to black people without acknowledging the problems of whiteness.

It's not personal. It's a fact of both the historical and present-day climate of that community.

We need to acknowledge that people like this-are-donut are pretty common in that community. And in order to make it a better space for you, it's to your benefit to fight back against that degradation of other people just as much as we do in the low magic community. I mean, let's be real, those people don't respect you any more than they respect me. What do you gain out of defending them? Nothing. If you won't do it for any other reason, do it for you.

To those of you already cleaning house, thank you.

To those of you who are gonna say my community has problems too, yes, I know. Name me one time ever that I've denied that or not come out against it whenever I see it, from racist crafters to Nazis in paganism. So please just... don't. Today we're talking about ceremagi's laundry. I talk about mine plenty, ok?

So anyway.

TL;DR If you're a low magician of any sort, your knowledge is just as deep and hard-won as that of any ceremonial magician. Stop accepting the premise at face value that it is somehow a lesser practice.

We also need to stop associating low magic as being "for women." Low magic has a rich history of gender inclusion, and in some societies even LGBT inclusion. Men have shown themselves perfectly capable of working peaceably with us. There is no reason they can't in ceremonial magic just as they have in low magic.

In the spirit of the holiday, let's try to keep this productive. I've really tried my best, here.

Happy Ostara for my pagans buds, and Happy Easter for my Christian witches. Have a good'un.

[fagesque]

this post is fucking stupid. nobody is calling the mcelroys queer unless they don't understand the word. this makes it sound like OP doesn't understand this article, linguistics, or the "queer is a slur" debate. Do you think queer has been gentrified or do you think it's a slur? If you think it can be both, why don't you think it can also be a meaningful personal identifier?

Queer is an established academic term. Queer is an established slur. Queer is an established identity. Queer is an established umbrella term for the whole LGBT+ community. Words can have different definitions exactly like this, it happens all the time.

Saying that queer has unambiguously been gentrified, that nobody is using its original meaning, and especially using this article (which is about how the mcelroys draw attention to gender nonconformity, yet never think of poc) as proof, is such a distinctly white take. It shows you don't understand what gentrification is, and that you aren't involved in and, frankly, don't care enough to learn about modern poc queer culture. Why do you pay more attention to the white people who are using it one way, than to the queer poc who are using it in the same radical way we have been for decades?

If this post was just about you not wanting to put "queer" in your fucking carrd or whatever, then why did you make it? Why did you feel the need to add paragraphs of clarification? The only function this actually serves is to make queer people feel bad about the langauge they use to describe themselves. It doesn't justify anything, it doesn't make anyone think about anything meaningful, it doesn't change anyone's mind.

the next time somebody asks me why i dont use queer as a personal identifier im going to show them this

[rustandyearnings]

Calling In, Take 2: Power, Accountability, Movement, and the State

In the winter of 2013, I wrote a piece titled, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.” Over the next four years or so, this piece would become the bane of my existence. Let me explain.

This piece sort of exploded – I was receiving emails and messages that the piece was really resonating with folks doing justice work across all types of communities. It was true and probably is still true how tired we all are of the constant worry that we cannot make mistakes – not even among those who we call friends, family, and/or comrades.

There have been numerous challenges that have arisen since the publication of this piece. The first is that it was so wildly appropriated by white people to rationalize or justify their own racist behavior. It’s been wildly appropriated to push away valid critique of racist or otherwise oppressive behavior. I remember as Ani DiFranco was being called out for playing music at a slave plantation, that white lesbians were quoting “Calling In” to tell Black women and women of color that they shouldn’t be critiquing Ani (or other white people) in such a harsh way. I don’t think I need to offer any more examples on how this piece or this concept has been misconstrued to mean, “I can do whatever I want and you have to be nice to me.”

The second challenge actually has a lot more to do with my own political development than external factors—how it was being read by my community or how it was being used by those inside and outside of my community. In the four years since writing this piece, I regret to some extent not writing more about the relationship we have to each other in movement versus our relationship to each other and that relationship to the state – the apparatus which seeks to and often succeeds at dividing, repressing, and conquering (literally and metaphorically) us.

I have become regularly frustrated by some of the contexts in which “calling in” has been used or named. It’s less about people annoying me (because people annoy me a lot) or some idea that I am the arbitrator of what “calling in” as an accountability practice or process actually means. It is actually more about the individualistic ways we think of accountability, power, and our relationships to each other. In many ways it is not surprising that we conceptualize ourselves as simply individuals. We are born into this world by ourselves (unless we’re a twin or a triplet, or something, but you get my point), we experience much of the world with only ourselves (even if many of our experiences involve others), at night we fall asleep and wander into the dream world on our own, and when we die – and we all die – we die alone.

We take the reality of the human experience as being both terrifyingly and rewardingly lonely and compound it with the deadliest economic, political, and social system in existence, capitalism, and most of us end up having a lot of shit to unpack around our individualism, and specific to this context, our understanding of harm and repair.

So what does it mean to hold each other accountable in a world that is incredibly messy? In a world where we don’t have much to rely on but the reality that things are incredibly messiness? That isn’t to say that there aren’t topics or issues where we are capable of drawing a clear line. We know how to do that – that’s why we have vibrant social movements.

But we have to start figuring out the space that exists between ourselves and our communities, our communities and the movement, and the movement and the state. Not only do we have to start figuring out that space, we have to do this in a way that is honest, transformative, and real.

I don’t think that I can say this enough: we are human beings and we have our shit. We carry with us the traumas we experience from early ages, that we don’t start developing different coping mechanisms for until later in life. For some of us, it is much later in life or it is never actually dealt with at all.

Being in movement has taught me that movement brings together the maladjusted weirdos of society who have decided or have been led to doing something about their own and others’ maladjustment. When I say “maladjusted” I am capturing a pretty broad stroke of people who are, by the standards of this system and society, not fit to be a part of this system and society. We are rightfully upset, uncomfortable, and angry. In most aspects of our lives – at our jobs, in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods, and most public spaces, including those that are allegedly democratically elected to represent us, we do not belong nor do we have power.

Movement is where we have power. Movement is where those of us who have seen the most fucked up shit; have made a whole lot out of the nothing slapped to us by capitalism; have had to endure the incredulous crimes against humanity, whether it be gentrification or police brutality, homelessness or addiction, incarceration or unemployment; have once believed that we might not survive another day have managed to find others, to find a way, and to fight for our right to life every day.

The power we have in movement spaces is beautiful, transformative, and sometimes (and increasingly so) threatening to those who have power over us. But the power we have can sometimes fuck us up. Let’s be real. Sometimes we get power and suddenly no one is a friend, it’s only foes. And it’s especially foes if not everyone agrees with us. Sometimes we get power and we become stagnant, we start operating in the interest of preserving our own power, instead of remembering why people’s power means anything to begin with: we have to build with other people to win. Our fingers tight as a fist are much stronger than they are a part. Our arms linked are a much stronger barricade than our shoulders alone in the cold. The harmony of many voices is much louder than just one.

The movement gives us power and we start acting like calling out greedy politicians and corporate profiteers or politicians who want to rid the world of queer and trans people is the same as calling out our cousin who makes sexist jokes at the family reunion or even a fellow organizer who takes up a lot of space as a white person. These are fundamentally different relationships. Our relationships to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as pillars holding up a destructive and deadly system is fundamentally different than our relationships to the human beings who have to survive these systems. 

The state is an oppressive force that seeks to cultivate division and thrives on our disconnection and alienation from each other. Let’s try our best to not feed it with our harms and grievances as if it could help us resolve them.

Our movement is, in many ways, fighting to confront the state. We are disrupting the institutions and systems harming our people. Our movement is not mechanized with an oppressive ideology; we are not weaponizing ourselves toward profit; we are not propping up fake democracy to make the rich more comfortable; we are not fighting to dispose of our people, leave our people behind or for dead. If we are truly building our movement to confront the state, we’ve got to stop treating each other like the mistakes we commit are the same heinous crimes that the state commits against our people. We are all capable of causing harm but we can’t operate as if the harm we cause to each other is the same as what we experience from the state. Often, the harm we cause to each other happens in the process of trying to build a different world.

Somewhere along the lines, the idea of “calling in” was put in opposition to “calling out.” I don’t believe that such dichotomy exists, since I think that our accountability should be more rooted in our understanding of power, to each other and to the forces that seek to exert power over us, than rooted in our individualism and selfishness about who gets to be right and who is wrong.

But ultimately, whether you want to call in or call out, let’s all try to be on the same page about who our shared enemy is – and it is not each other. I stick by a lot of what I originally wrote in that piece in 2013. Movement building is about relationship building. And it’s also about nuance. In the piece I elaborated on how we use our relationships as the basis for determining whether we "call in" or "call out." I’m still less interested in how we label our processes for holding each other accountable and more interested in the process itself. Some questions that I would pose to folks when they are deciding how they want to deal with an oppressive situation are: what is the depth of the relationship I have with this person? Are they someone I consider an acquaintance? A friend? A comrade? What values do we share (if any) and what are they? 

There are deeper political questions that should inform how to hold people accountable, too -- because everything is political and more importantly, because everything requires us to think of ourselves within the context of a broader society. Our society necessitates harm in order to thrive and it can either continue to thrive or be delegitimized based on our responses to harm. We live in a real society of disposability. We talk about it a lot but I think sometimes we forget how entrenched we are in it. When we talk about the prison industrial complex, we are talking about a world that puts people in cages for the rest of their lives because of an accountability system where the state arbitrates who gets to make mistakes and who doesn't. The structural violence carried out by the state shapes and informs how we relate to each other interpersonally.

Lately I’ve been returning to the fact that we are human beings. This kind of statement is obviously a little oversimplifying. We are human beings who are greedy, selfish, cruel, unforgiving, vengeful and also deeply feeling, compassionate, remorseful, creative, apologetic, loving, and caring. Some of the human beings on this earth commit viler nastiness than just being human – we know that this shows up in our communities and in the broader world as sexual, emotional, and physical violence, all tied and connected to capitalist exploitation and oppression: white supremacy and anti-blackness, transmisogyny and homophobia, islamophobia and xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism and more.

I'm not saying that there is never harm nor that we should martyrize ourselves to minimize the harm we experience. I'm saying we should remember we have all caused harm, have the propensity to cause harm and if causing harm or making mistakes were the basis for whether or not we maintain community with each other instead of our humanity, our dignity, our aptitude for change, and our belief in a radically different and better world, we'd have no community. And probably just as scary, if not more, we’d have no movement.

There is no perfect way to deal with harm or conflict. We are trying our best to maintain our relationship to each other and ourselves in a world that is routinely dehumanizing, under a system that doesn’t care about what we mean to each other. But we should care about what we mean to each other.

As a queer and gender non-conforming person of color, a migrant from Viet Nam, and a communist, what keeps me alive is the fact that everything changes – that in fact, everything must change. When something has stopped changing, it’s dead. If there’s nothing that is useful from this piece, any of my (largely unoriginal) musings on power, accountability, movement, and the state – I hope at least that we can all remember and respect that everything changes. That this be a gift we do not take for granted, that this be a gift we give to each other in service of a better world, a world where not only are we capable of transforming but one that our transformation made possible.

In the spirit of change, I acknowledge that four years from now I might write a totally different piece, depending on where the forces of this gruesome planet are, depending on the tenacity and resilience of humanity, I might write a take three. But for now, I hope that I’ve done some justice to those who I am fighting alongside with each and every day, whose mistakes I share in, whose vision I believe in and co-create, whose wisdom, commitment, and revolutionary optimism reminds me that healing, being free, and almost anything is possible.