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frasier-crane-style · 6 years ago

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Elseworlds

Well, Tumblr isn’t dead yet and the CW-DC just did a big crossover, so I think it’s time to make fun of the CW........ for the last time.

Did you know Tim Allen actually ended Home Improvement after season 8 because he knew the show couldn’t maintain its level of quality and was on the way downhill? Tim Allen has more creative integrity than anyone involved in the making of Supernatural. Think about that.

Anyhoo, lots to digest! Largely, this crossover felt to me weirdly lackluster and obligatory, like the whole thing was just a trailer for the oncoming Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. It just felt unambitious, which is the last thing an ‘event’ like this should feel like. In fact, it felt a little like I imagine the result would be of filming a bunch of people playing DC Universe Online. We visit Smallville and see Lois Lane! We go to Gotham and meet Batman...’s cousin, and fight a breakout at Arkham Asylum, complete with Mr. Freeze...’s gun and the Scarecrow...’s fear gas. Then, we wrap the whole thing up with an Evil Superman, because God knows, DC never gets bored of that.

-Petty nitpick department: Batwoman just standing around on rooftops looks weird. Not only does it give the odd impression that she’s spent the entire time between episodes just, uh, standing, but c’mon--you’re supposed to crouch. Or at least hunch. Everybody knows that!

-Weirdly missed opportunity to have Ollie do the Flash narration, considering all the other opening narrations are futzed with.

-The whole thing is pretty much a glorified body swap--Stephen Amell is playing Barry Allen and vice versa. I can see how TPTB would be too pressed for time to explain a whole ‘nother continuity where Barry Allen became Green Arrow and Oliver Queen became the Flash, but still, it’s not as much fun.

-They also wholeheartedly borrow the thing of Ollie having to be happy to use Barry’s powers and Barry having to be mad to use Ollie’s ‘powers’ from the episode of Teen Titans where Raven and Starfire switched bodies. So, I guess, congratulations on making the central plot point of your crossover the same as a half-hour episode of a children’s cartoon.

-Remember that time Barry was too happy and too confident in his abilities, so his dad died?

-They got a good actress to play the Lois Lane to this Clark Kent, considering they both just look kinda awkward? His chin looks like he had a face transplant done and her nose looks like someone is constantly Photoshopping it.

NHHHA, He-Man!!

-Don’t do a callback to Smallville, show. Oliver Queen has now spent more time in costume as the Flash than Tom Welling did as Superman.

-Direct fucking hit when Oliver said that Barry couldn’t take a crap without getting a peptalk from his team, but on the other hand, Oliver can’t take a crap without Felicity wondering what it means for their relationship. “Oliver didn’t tell me he needed to go to the bathroom! Why wouldn’t he trust me?”

-I’m just saying, last season on Agents of SHIELD, pretty much every character was in a relationship--there was not so much damn drama. It’s a fucking body-swap plotline, guys. You don’t need to treat it like it could lead to someone’s divorce! Really, at this point, if you’re in a relationship with a crazy superhero, you should be used to it.

-(Although I suppose I’m a little hard to please here, since over on Legends of Tomorrow they suddenly expect us to care about Constantine rescuing the love of his life when we’ve seen their relationship for all of four seconds. But hey, like I said, Agents of SHIELD manages a happy medium and finds time for Ghost Rider to show up.)

-For the post-apocalyptic hellscape they make Gotham out to be, the police respond awfully fast to disturbances.

-”We’re on the corner of Burton and Nolan!” Groooooan.

-Ruby Rose, everyone: the Less Convincing Michelle Rodriguez. It’d probably a bad sign for how compelling Kate Kane is as a character that everyone would rather talk about where Batman is and why Batman would leave. And, speaking as someone who both watched Birds of Prey and The Dark Knight Rises--Rocky, that ‘Batman Retires’ plot point never works!

-(Is Batwoman even that popular a character to get her own spin-off? I suppose she’s ‘TV show’ popular, but still--I think she’s one of those Batfamily members that is somewhere behind Alfred but ahead of Ace, right next to Azrael. And I do think it’s hilarious that TPTB were insistent on casting a real, authentic lesbian!!!--and then immediately got complaints that they didn’t cast a Jew. Oh, Ziggy, will you ever win?)

-I don’t want to be too hard on Ruby Rose here. Yes, she doesn’t showcase anything other than one mode: Snide And Slightly Pouty (Stephen Amell ain’t winning no Oscars, but he can differentiate between Ollie As A Civilian and Ollie In A Halloween Costume). But the writing does her no favors in making a case for this character as being deserving of any amount of screentime, besides the fact that she dresses like Batman, the guy we really care about. She’s a heroine, as are featured variously in every Arrowverse show. She’s queer, as is Alex Danvers, Sara Lance, John Constantine, et al. She’s rich to the point of having unlimited resources, as are (sometimes) Oliver Queen, Barry Allen, Kara through her billionaire friends. She lives in a crime-ridden hellhole, as Ollie has done for several seasons. What makes any of this compelling? The Gotham setting? Arrow has already turned itself into an effective facsimile of that, to the point of having Ra’s al Ghul show up to make Queen into his son-in-law. Arkham Asylum seems completely generic, as does Wayne Tower. It’s all just a different part of Vancouver; who cares?

-Likewise, Supergirl, speaking to you as a TV show--you really should either be adamant that Kara is heterosexual or give her a weirdly flirtatious scene with Batwoman, but not both. I know you need, need, need to let the audience know Batwoman is a lesbian...

Pictured: The CW subtly letting you know about a character’s minority status.

But c’mon. We’ve been over this.

-Speaking of minority status, maybe it’s not the best idea to let slip that John Diggle is an AU John Stewart. Yes, there’s ten brothas in the DC Universe, and four of them are actually the other six. There are so few Negros on Earth-1 that they had to make Barack Obama into a superhero. The Batfamily has two black folks and they’re both related to Lucius Fox. There’s so few black people in Metropolis that Black Lightning knows who his father is!

Folks, the DC Universe is so white, the Black Lanterns are all dead. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even have black Kryptonite. The DC Universe is so white, even Black Condor is a honky. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even need a Justice League of Africa, they just have a Batman of Africa! The DC Universe is so white, the blackest guy on the Justice League is a refrigerator with one-half of a brother’s face on top of it. The DC Universe is so white, they named the black woman on the Teen Titans after a bug that’s half yellow! Now Milestone, the Milestone Universe is black. It’s so black, Aquaman is the most powerful superhero there, because he’s the only one who can swim!

(-I’m planning on being chased off of Tumblr like Indiana Jones after he snags an ancient artifact.)

-Would it be that hard for them to go to Arkham and run into the Ventriloquist or Orca or someone memorable, so long as they have access to the Batman toy chest? We got, uhh, Lady Who Can Pick Up Gun and Psycho Pirate I Guess? Like I said, unambitious. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler if they got someone from Gotham to film just one little cameo?

-Also, considering the sex scandal these shows have had, maybe it’s not the best idea to joke about their EPs being depraved maniacs? (Was Guggenheim the one who actually got MeToo’d? Because if so, Dude--Not Funny)

-The show had to character-shill Batwoman so hard that Ollie and Barry stopped being fear-gassed just to reiterate that she is too an interesting character in her own right! (If the characters have all heard of Batman, wouldn’t they have heard of Batwoman too if she’s been an active vigilante more recently?)

-But who cares about four unstoppable superheroes teaming up when we can find out how Felicity feels about her relationship? Just a thought--if you fight with your SO all the time about nearly everything, maybe you shouldn’t be in a relationship.

-Long story short, Doctor Destiny rewrites reality again to make Barry, Oliver, and Kara into supervillains in a world where he’s the hero. He also makes the other characters into pointless cameos, and weirdly gets criticized by Kara for... not giving himself a sex-change operation by becoming Superman instead of Supergirl? He doesn’t have gender dysphoria, Supergirl. I thought she was all about trans issues this season?

-Like, I don’t know, if a woman used a magic lamp to wish herself President, would anyone criticize her making herself a lady President instead of a man President?

-I guess it wouldn’t be Supergirl unless they crowbarred in an extremely awkward girlpower message where Superman and Lois agree that Supergirl/women in general are more useful than men, despite the fact that all Supergirl did was the exact same thing as Barry, while Superman and Oliver fought Dr. Destiny, and all Lois did was call in a bunch of men as reinforcements and then need to be rescued.

-But like I said about being unambitious--wouldn’t it be fun to see our heroes be forced to team up with a few supervillains to save the day? Instead, we just have Cisco playing a villain (something he’s done numerous times before). They get his help, have a weirdly poor showing in a fight against Jimmy Olsen, get Superman’s help again, yadda yadda.

-We also get Superman proposing to Lois Lane. Yeah, considering they’ve been in a relationship at least since Supergirl Season 1, she’s carrying his child, and they’re planning to move to an alien world together, yeah, I should think so? I know Superman probably isn’t a Republican, but does anyone think he’d be so blase about putting a ring on it? Hell, if nothing else, he should want to tie the knot before Ma or Pa bite it. Couldn’t they have just made it that he wants to renew his vows with Lois in a Kryptonian ceremony or some such?

#dc comics #arrow #supergirl #the flash #elseworlds

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auutintiug · 4 years ago

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“In her own words, Hoda Katebi is “a Chicago-based angry daughter of Muslim-Iranian immigrants,” author of the book Tehran Streetstyle, community organizer, and the voice behind the radical, political online fashion publication JooJoo Azad. Here, she speaks with Palestinian-American human rights attorney, artist, educator, and writer Noura Erakat, who has time and again stunned and stupefied the media in bold, brazen, sensibly unapologetic interviews. Katebi and Erakat’s conversation is akin to two streams flowing parallel to one another, embarking upon the surfaces and diving into the depths of politics, art, activism, identity, and gender norms, ultimately joining forces in the same body of water, not in competition but in support of one another—level and determined, headstrong, open to the elements.

—

Hoda Katebi: Do you think that all art is political?

Noura Erakat: I mean, I’m trained as an attorney. I’m hesitant to make such an absolute statement. Politics is basically the negotiation over scarce resources, and it’s the work that’s being done to actually negotiate that distribution. Art is expression, some sort of expression, any kind of expression, right? It’s a visionary aide. It’s a manifestation. That could be political in two ways: What is it that the artist chose to represent as opposed to anything else, and then how does creation implicate a discussion around the distribution of scarce resources?

I don’t identify as an artist because it’s political. I identify as an artist because I think that it’s a way of being. An artist is someone who can transcend an immediate material reality to be able to define yourself on your own terms, and to want to see the world on terms that may not yet exist. So those are the things that I think define an artist, which is not being bound by what is, but instead being in the constant act of creating what could be. A lot of the time it does come from people who hold privilege who say that they don’t want their art to be political or simultaneously call out Palestinians or black folks and say, “Oh, why do you always create political art?” It’s almost like my entire life. It’s triggering to you.

HK: What role does art play for you, and especially as a Palestinian, why is it important?

NE: So, I just want to be clear: I identify as an artist because I think that that’s the best way, because a lot of people see me, and they’re, “Oh, Noura’s a lawyer. Oh, Noura’s a teacher. Oh, Noura …” You know what I mean?

HK: Yeah.

NE: And I feel like rather than be defined by the actual profession, I want to be defined by the way I relate to the world in it. Me being an artist is not me defining my career or my productivity. It’s my relationship to time. I’m also identifying as queer, right? it’s not who you’re attracted to; it’s how you’re manifesting yourself in the world outside of binaries. I want to live.

I’ve written two plays, and I’ve fallen out of that—it’s a practice, like anything, and I haven’t been keeping it up. But last fall, the Kennedy Center invited the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, which I am a co-founder of, to curate a program for the Millennium Stage. I got to direct the program, which meant musical direction, light direction, you know, all the stage work, plus it’s a play that I wrote, and I directed the professional actress who performed it. It was actually such a miracle, because we only got to do one stage rehearsal an hour before the program started.

The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival began because in 2011, I had been co-leading something called the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and we had created a local chapter in D.C., and all of the work that we were doing as part of that network was, I thought, very reactionary. No to negotiations. No to these terms of the peace process. No to the split. I knew, I knew that that was not going to last because that’s not something that sustains. It creates a lot of toxicity.

On a trip to Toronto, I was speaking in Toronto and my good friend introduced me to her project, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and I thought to myself, oh my God. That’s it. We have to create something that will outlast the politics of rejection. We have to create something that lives on its own terms. So when I got back, I and two other women co-founded this project, and now we’re in our eighth year. It is not a Palestine film festival; it is a showman arts festival. Our whole purpose is to showcase the artists, whoever they are. You could be talking about your favorite color or your favorite candy or the way your mom screwed you over and still left it in your head. The whole point is to showcase the artist and all of the different media that they use, visual, performing, cross stitching, cooking, music, dance, the whole thing.

This is where we’re dreaming of the future. This is where we’re creating. Who are Palestinians? Who are young Palestinians don’t know anything about it? From what they feel, from what their family passed onto them—how are they expressing that? And that is the future of Palestine. We’re trying to cultivate the space where they can dream. What the diaspora looks like and what the community looks like beyond just, what are the political terms upon which this will be resolved? Instead it becomes a social question, more like, what do people look like? What does trauma feel like? What is joy? What is internal conflict? What languages do we speak in this space? It also becomes one of the best tools for mainstreaming the question of Palestine. We’re bringing out audiences that probably feel like the whole thing is toxic.

HK: Yeah, it’s like a language that transcends border and culture. You create really accessible work. So, how are you able to transcend that really difficult box that lawyers are taught to be sitting in?

NE: I went into law school because I wanted to fight, and I thought, if only we had these tools we could just reason through this, then we can get out of the binds that politics had created for us, and we’ll just reason through it through some arbiter. We just listen to each side, and we can figure it out, and in fact, that was a really jarring lesson, and one of naivety, and it’s become the source of inspiration for my forthcoming book, Justice for Some: Law in the Question of Palestine, which will be out in March 2019. First of all, I barely survived the damned thing, because it is the single most white, heteronormative, classist, stifling space—

HK: Say it.

NE: —you can ever imagine. It is basically where you go to protect and revere the status quo. My issue with law school is that you take that for granted. Nobody admits that that’s what it is, and you start to act like everything that you’re studying is objective when everything is so not objective.

HK: Everything that you produce, whether it’s academic in the legal industry, you’re coming from your particular perspective of the world. Oppressed or oppressor.

NE: True, but there’s a different kind. Let me give you an example. When you’re studying property law in the United States, all property law is built upon a logic of dispossessing native nations, indigenous nations in the United States. And here you are studying concepts like liens, trusts or estates, possession, but you never ever talk about, well, what is the root of this whole model? The root of it is the dispossession of indigenous nations. Or when we talk about criminal law: We want to talk about the death penalty as a jurisprudential matter, which means we’re just going to look at the case law, but we’re not going to talk about, how is it that the law itself and the way that the death penalty becomes instrumentalized is specifically to punish black people?

I had a really hard time in law school. I ended up getting a big award at the end, which was like a vindication, but I almost didn’t even go to my graduation because I was just like, this was miserable. Afterwards, I didn’t even take a traditional law job. I went to Berkeley Law, and after law school, I got a fellowship for something like 30, 35k. That’s insane for a recent law graduate, and then there was no such thing as working as a Palestinian-rights lawyer, so I had to create my own job. It was a coup to even get the fellowship.

I’m now in a place where I have some stability, but from the time I graduated until now, I came onto the tenure track in the academy basically hustling. Nobody wants to … It’s just a difficult story. I mean, you have to be crazy to be doing this work. If I wasn’t crazy, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.

HK: What has got you through?

NE: I kept pushing. I kept being a lawyer. I went back to school, and I kept writing like a lawyer. I kept appearing on television like a lawyer until more recently. I think until last December, when I started to appear on TV and in public spaces, a little less as an attorney and more like as a human being and a Palestinian, that, I think, was a major turning point for me and for people receiving me, because when I’m talking as a lawyer, you know, I’m basically trying to be removed from it, just making the argument and letting it stand, but when I step into my skin as a Palestinian, as a human being, it’s me.

I’m still going to use logic as my primary communication tool, and everybody has a different way they like to communicate in public. Some people like to tell stories. Some people like to move you, just really deeply move you and rally you to fight and believe. I think logic is really compelling. I do it in the same way when I’m in my classroom. I don’t ever tell you what exactly to believe. I want to give you enough facts and information for you to make your own decision. That’s so much more powerful when you have to engage with me and do the work with me. You have to think about it.

For me, legal practice basically means that I’m an advocate. Because what is human rights advocacy? There’s no courtroom. What does it mean, then, to be a human rights attorney? It means that I am making a case in the world of public opinion. That’s my courtroom.

HK: What got you out of bed every day during this period? Were you also doing art at the same time, or did art come later?

NE: I was producing art while I was in law school as a writer. I dabbled in poetry, but I did the theater work. My first play is based on oral histories that I collected.

I’m in the West Bank in 2000, when the second intifada begins. I’m a student at Hebrew University [of Jerusalem], which was a whole story unto itself, but I’m the only student at Hebrew U that is a Palestinian and living in what’s known as the West Bank. And so basically, school gets shut down, because the intifada has started, and I had come eager to do an oral history project. I thought it was going to be about young girls and women. I started traveling to interview families of the slain, of the killed, and to get the stories of those killed, and so I collect all of these stories and come back. I transcribe them, and then I turn that oral history project into a revolving monologue, which is like a one-act play for about an hour where you get to hear almost all of the stories being told by the characters themselves as they’re describing their loved one who’d been killed.

So, I write that while I’m in law school. I produce that. I direct that. It takes its own life, and it’s performed in different places. I then come to do another monologue, but this time it’s a one-woman show, and I perform that one everywhere. And that was it. That space just killed my creative spirit.

HK: Do you see yourself within the legacy of any artist that you look up to? Whose tradition do you feel that you belong to, if any?

NE: The first person that comes to mind is Arundhati Roy.

HK: Bae!

NE: Right? Here is this woman completely committed to revolutionary justice and transformation but who is expressing herself also as a dreamer, as a novelist, and as an essayist, and so I really like that. It’s these visionary women who are immersed and accountable to a base and to a movement. They don’t see themselves as above or as being revered. They see themselves as being a part of something bigger than them. What you’re seeing in their work is homage to it, paying respect to it, and creating space for it.

HK: Situating yourself in the West as a site of knowledge production in academia, which is heavy orientalist, perpetuates a lot of racism, the same ways that you mention about the law. What are your experiences there, and what made you become an educator?

NE: I think in everything that I’ve done, I’ve always been an educator. Even as an activist or when I’m leading workshops at different universities from before I got into law school. The difference about entering the academy is now you’re producing knowledge in a way that’s refereed and becomes subject to academic and scholarly scrutiny. A lot of circumstances pushed me into that field, and also because I’m increasingly unfulfilled by the legal practice, which I find is so hampered by the question of politics and by political issues. I’m increasingly frustrated with the limitation of the law, but also more curious about it. Why is it working in this way? What is it about the law, what is it about politics? And so these became scholarly inquiries that push me out, like make me more disenchanted with being a lawyer.

Once I’m in the academy, now it’s like a whole different set of challenges. It becomes the most stark when people of color talk about justice issues that are difficult conversations. So, if I was talking about FGM and the Muslim community, I don’t think people would receive me harshly. It might even be kind of okay, because I’m not challenging the establishment. But being of color, producing knowledge that is counter-hegemonic is when you raise a lot of flags, and immediately people begin to question whether you’re an academic or an activist. It’s one thing if somebody was studying these things. It’s another if you’re invested in them and studying them. That’s been a really difficult challenge, how to toe that line.

It’s a lot of unknowns, like you’re saying. For me, I’m leaving the choice to myself. I write about what I find the most interesting, intriguing, because that’s what’s the most authentic, and that’s the work that I do best, when I enjoy what I’m doing. But there is great risk in doing the work in that way. I feel like that’s the risk that’s worth taking. I want to know that I spent all the time I had breathing, able-bodied and able-minded, to produce the work that I thought was critical and necessary, rather than produce the work that I thought was going to help me climb some sort of career ladder.

HK: Because at the end, you always get exposed anyway.

NE: Maybe it’s about getting exposed, but I feel like it’s between you and yourself. What is it that you want at the end of the day? What is going to make you happy? So, yeah, I’m taking a risk, but everything else that I’ve done has been a risk. Right?

HK: Yeah. And with all of these risks, what are the joys of being an educator?

NE: Oh my God, the students. There’s so much tremendous joy. There’s so much tremendous joy in their capacity and their imagination and their passion, and the community that they create with one another. In finding folks who want to create an alternative world based on a place of love and a place of vision and a place of hope and a place of faith. All of that is joyful. I believe that the revolution will be full of joy. I know the revolution to be full of joy. It’s also full of tremendous heartache, but we already know that, right? But when we fight, we don’t just fight because we’re sad and because we’re angry. We fight because we believe we can. We believe we can. We believe we should.

HK: And we have no choice.

NE: We believe we are better. And that’s so joyful.

HK: And that also takes me to the very last question that I’ll ask: What is the world that you’d like to see?

NE: Well, there’s the really nerdy answer, which is to see a world where if we are to have governments, the governments are to be run by people for the sake of people, where profit is not a determinative logic, where the distribution of wealth is not concomitant with some neo-liberal equation of productivity and earnings and market formulations, but rather based on need. That’s a world that I would love to live in.

I would like to live in a world where we’re actually honoring the earth. We are depleting this earth at such a fast rate, at such a disrespectful rate, that we’re not going to have an earth to even divide by the time we figure out how to get along with one another and get over our human conflict. That’s why billionaires are trying to figure out their exit route to Mars and life elsewhere. Environmentalism isn’t this side thing. It’s central to everything that we do, and it’s entwined with indigenous justice as well, people who have already told us how to treat this earth and how to make it sustainable.

HK: That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything that you wanted to say that we didn’t get to touch on?

NE: One of the things that made me most excited about the invitation by Suited, the first thing I thought of, was that I wanted Rami Kashou to dress me, because I saw him on Project Runway and he didn’t identify as a Palestinian. I knew he was Palestinian, but he was just out there being a designer, and in watching him, I found freedom. I thought, that is what freedom will mean for Palestinians, when they can just be in the world and not have to be defined by our fight. We can just be defined by whoever we want to be. “I’ve been fangirling you for 12 years. You want to dress me?” So we meet, and he dresses me, and if you notice … I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos.

HK: I haven’t.

NE: It’s like artwork. Literally the only other person who’d worn what I wore for this photo shoot was a mannequin at a museum. It is exactly what I envision the future of Palestine to be, which is taking our tradition and our history and our past, but not going back to it or being stuck in it. It’s taking it and creating something absolutely new and visionary. It’s Palestinian futurism, and it was … that is such a central piece of the photo shoot, of this story, of what art is doing, of my own vision of: What does it take for us to create these new futures? And at the heart of it, it means not being afraid to dream.

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unhingedthinking · 7 years ago

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Strap yourselves in guys, I’m about to analyse the shit out of this argument™

Just for those of you who took one look at the title and went nope. here’s some tl;dr.

The author

The author is a rector for an Anglican church and holds a PhD in theology. Now this article was written a couple of years ago, but has resurfaced in the wake of our shitlord extraordinaire™ government deciding that the best life decision (rather than you know, do their actual job) was to hold a non-binding plebiscite to see if the Australian public thinks LGBTIQA+ people should be allowed to be married with that actual terminology.

How he positions support for same sex marriage

Now the argument that is being made here is that the current debate at the time (and let’s be frank, still is) is that the major argument for the yes vote is that “well all of our countries that we’re pals with (and some we’re not so chummy with) have passed it, so it’s about time that we passed it too.” Basically the en vogue argument. It’s apparently fashionable to give equal rights to people so we should totally hop on board for that reason alone. The dude actually defends the government not passing it by comparing a survey saying “hey, same sex couples should have the right to marry and the majority says so” to a survey that says “hey most people want capital punishment.” I mean, both are technically a death sentence if you squint really hard, just the fact that one’s a little more permanent and the other is ideally far more amenable to a happy and sustainable life. He basically makes the argument that the only reason you haven’t heard the argument for against same sex marriage is that those who are pro are lobbying and shouting too loud for sensible no arguments to be let through.

And here’s his argument

His main argument (and I’ll give credit, it’s a well reasoned argument), is that we shouldn’t support marriage equality because it simply isn’t “marriage equality.” It’s something that’s entirely different.

In order to offer the status of marriage to couples of the same sex, the very meaning of marriage has to be changed. In which case, what same-sex couples will have will not be the same as what differently sexed couples now have.

It will be called marriage, but it won't be marriage as we know it. It won't be "marriage equality": it will be an entirely new thing.

Getting in a side dig at Bill Shorten (because that’s apparently still something cool for conservatives to do as well). This is how he defines marriage:

As we now understand it, marriage is not merely the expression of a love people have for each other. It is, or is intended as, a life-long union between two people who exemplify the biological duality of the human race, with the openness to welcoming children into the world. Even when children do not arrive, the differentiated twoness of marriage indicates its inherent structure.

Now, I didn't pluck this definition from the sky, nor is it simply a piece of religious teaching. It is the meaning of marriage that emerges from all human cultures as they reflect on and experience what it is to be male and female. It is only in the last 15 years that anyone has seriously thought differently.

According to this guy, a child is the “tangible expression of our two sexedness”.

Now if you’ve been following along with my general blogging regarding gender, sexuality, queer, or post-queer theory (yeah, i’m deliberately separating them because the academic in me needs to), you’ll have already seen that I’ve already talked about the whole limitation of seeing biology as “two sexedness”. But that’s not really what I want to choose to focus on for the purpose of his argument, as that’s not the crux of his stance.

The stance in which his argument falls within the notion that marriage is simply a signification of two people (in his argument of opposing sexes, utilising essentialist constructions), life-long commitment to the rearing and nurturing of children. He then uses this notion that because of this, the argument for same sex marriage has no standing as by revising the meaning of marriage to be one that does not include the “two sexedness” and having the goal of a “tangible expression of our two sexedness” in that marriage, same-sex couples are only ‘married’ in the name of it, rather than the act. It’s simply a choice of word rather than an official commitment.

And my favourite part, here’s why that particular argument is outdated (and, quite frankly in my opinion, wrong)

This discourse is particularly interesting if you place it within a Focauldian lens falls within the power relations surrounding the exercise of bio-power, or in layman terms exercising power over the practices of reproduction and life. The author only deems a marriage legitimate if the couple are having the intention to copulate and rear children in the understanding of heteronormative idealism. It is playing into the morality clause that children are only able to be sufficiently raised with both a mother and father figure who fulfill sufficient masculine and feminine roles in the development of the child.

Now let’s break that apart. If we forget the whole religiousness and “two-sexedness” sections of the argument for a moment (I’ll fold them back in in a minute I promise), let’s look at the other factors:

The structure of the family unit is quite a bit diverse from what it was deemed 15 years ago as by the author’s statement of the argument for redefining marriage. The nuclear family is no longer the sole viable option for people in contemporary society. Single parent families, same-sex families, foster carers, legal guardianship between family friends, polyamourous familial structures, groups of people raising children together, the list is pretty much inexhaustible.

Considering the fact that technology has significanlty improved to the point where we can have IVF, stem cell research, donors and surrogates as viable options for same sex couples to have biological children, they still have the ‘intent to begin a family’

Research actually demonstrates that there’s not really a discernable difference between children raised in a heterosexual coupled relationship to that of a homosexual, but then again, that depends on how you interpret the data of the study.

If we go back to contemporary understandings of gender theory, all individuals interpellate and enact various constructions of masculinity and femininity in their everyday lives, and therefore having both cisgendered male and female essentialised constructions of masculinity and femininity are not necessarily required within the rearing of children, as these constructions are also interpellated through socialisation within institutions such as schools and the wider societal interactions.

Adoption and foster care is literally a thing (albeit some structural and functional barriers within the institutions that manage such services still prevent nonheteronormative couples from accessing such services successfully - but that’s another matter entirely).

To put it in a simpler way, understanding the intent to start a family as solely biological between a woman and a man having sex is quite frankly antiquated in its construction and does not reflect the contemporary understandings of familial structures. In fact, it’s a limitation on children as it doesn’t allow them to experience or perceive the diversity of relationships outside of their own familial unit, which can generally lead to them being more accepting of difference and being a less shitty person in general.

Let’s move back to the religious side of the debate, which is that marriage is defined similarly in “all cultures” - despite there being evidence of those of a third sex (agender or intersexed) in many civilisations and cultures that defies the “two sexedness” argument. By religious standards, sure if you want to define marriage as being between a man and a woman, by all means that’s your own perogative. I’m an atheist so it does not bother me either way. However, as the author actually defines in his argument, this is legislation we are talking about. Legislation refers to the state, which is separated from the church (and therefore religion). It is state marriage that we are referring to. If a church does not want to marry two people because they are same sex, that’s their issue. We’re talking about defining marriage between two people (regardless of sex) as a legal right for all. Yes civil union is similar in its construction to state marriage, and yes they are recognised as such in many situations. But here’s the thing. We’re not fighting for something that is similar.

The word marriage itself has power.

It has a status within society that a civil union is just not on par with. “My husband/ my wife” are revered in our monogamously centric society as a life goal that everyone should strive to attain. It opens a door to a social standing that you’re perceived to be in a stable, committed relationship that is accepted by society. You are in a position, like the author states, to have children and raise them to be decent and well intentioned active citizens. The fact that it is a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman (if we’re being essentialist here and ignoring the existence of intersexed and nonbinary individuals like much of this debate seems to do) shouldn’t really matter in this day and age if we’re basing our definition of marriage on the notion of the intent to raise children. If they want to do it, then who gives what’s going on between their legs or in between their sheets. Quite frankly, they’re not going to make their children gay, like how every heterosexual couple only raises heterosexual children *cough*.

Finally, let’s consider the fact that the author is opposed to the notion that a lifelong commitment without the intent of raising children is an empty promise. I’m sorry, but why isn’t the act of willingly committing yourself to one person for the rest of your life not enough? Why do we have to bring children into the matter? Is it really so bad that some people decide that either they don’t want to have children or do not perceive themselves to be capable to raise children to have that commitment to one other person recognised by the state within the eyes of the law? I don’t think so.

Let’s wrap this ramble up

Basically whilst his argument is logical and has an academic merit to it, he is basing his evidence in outdated models of the familial unit, and blurring the lines between the state and the church in order to define his points, particularly by bolstering his viewpoint from a westernised religious standpoint on the definition of marriage. Asking for marriage equality, whilst on the surface, only appears to be wanting to have equal rights to something that is not possible under the current definition of marriage is senseless. Language is constantly evolving and changing, and redefining the word to suit contemporary understandings of how relationships and the commitments within those relationships are perceived and valued is not only a good thing, but something that should be at the core of the foundation of being a decent human being to those who live a life that is diverse from your own.

So I’ll agree that this guy is not being a bigot in his approach to the debate (as it is rather civil I have to say), it’s just that his information and perception of contemporary discourses of social reality are being ignored in favour of his own ideology of what marriage should be.

#auspol #same sex marriage debate #not going to lie i did enjoy a little bit of foucauldian analysis #you could also do the same with pastoral power #but biopower works better for this argument

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honeybadgerradio · 7 years ago

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Scaring Sons Into Suicide – Polecat Cast 115

Mattress Girl returns! Urban Dictionary! Wonder Woman! All this and more on this week’s Polecat Cast!

Show Notes:

Urban Warfare By Mike J.

Founded in 1999, the website Urban Dictionary has served as little more than a fun way to waste. The site allows users to add and define words or phrases, some of which more contemporary dictionaries wouldn’t dare touch. Other users then vote up or vote down these newly defined words with the highest voted ones winning the honor of being displayed more prominently than it’s rivals. Since it’s launch Urban Dictionary has become a good source for picking up cutting edge internet slang. At one point, IBM decided to upload the entire Urban Dictionary to their supercomputer Watson, but after the machine began swearing incessantly, the new lexicon was promptly removed. The Urban Dictionary has also become an unlikely battleground of sorts recently in the battle for men’s right’s. Several of the more controversial definitions such as misogynist, rape, feminism, and MRA have received popular definitions that many feminists do not approve of. It seems that not being content with ruining the Oxford English Dictionary, feminists have now set their sights on doing the same to the Urban Dictionary. But where it was much easier to make the Oxford English Dictionary kowtow with pressure from feminist in academia, the fight against Urban Dictionary won’t be that easily won.

Source: http://www.bodyforwife.com/mens-rights-activists-have-taken-over-urban-dictionary/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/26/dictionarygate-twitter-feminists-force-dictionary-to-review-sexist-definitions-of-nag-and-bossy/

Rape Victims Shouldn’t Like to Relive Their Rapes By Max Derrat

More famously known as Mattress Girl, Sulkowicz is back in the news, topping her past maniacal exploits. Originally, Sulkowicz proclaimed she was raped to her University, and when they decided that the evidence was against her (not that there was a lack of evidence, but that the available evidence was AGAINST HER) she proceeded to carry around a mattress for her senior year as a form of art and a form of protest. Then she did a video re-enactment of her rape online, titled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (French for “this is not a rape).

Now, she’s doing BDSM as performance art. At the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, she presented a piece called “The Ship is Sinking”. She describes her piece in her own words: “[I chose] to have a white man tie me up while wearing a business suit with a Whitney necktie, while I wear a Whitney ISP thong bikini.” “We’re acting out this sadistic-masochistic relationship between the institution with all of its financial power, and this program that wants to be political but can be really because it’s being tied up by this institution.”

As her performance started, the aforementioned white man, named Master Avery (who happened to be a professional dominatrix), started to insult Sulkowicz by saying things like, “Your boobs are too small”, and “You can’t even stand up straight.” He tied knots around several parts of her body for 45 minutes until she was completely tied up to a large wooden beam. Using a pulley system attached to the ceiling, she was lifted from the ground, purposefully trying to resemble the woman often seen at the front of a ship.

Then Master Avery started hitting her with a belt. Avery at one point asked if anybody wanted to participate, and one man from the audience volunteered. He proceeded to slap her across the face.

In respect to the purpose of her performance art, Sulkowicz said the following: “Historically, performance art has been a very important medium for women of color and queer people. There’s an accessibility to it, it’s the only art form that doesn’t cost money. Then there’s also that women, people of color, queer people, we live embodied history.” “My body already carries material in it just because of the way I look, it’s embedded in my skin. White men have the privilege of entire institutions built for their paintings… these paintings are very often abstract. You have people like Pollock splattering a bunch of shit and then saying it’s art. It doesn’t say anything political and in fact, that actual political statement it does say is: ‘I’m a white man and I can do whatever the fuck I want and make a ton of money off of it.”

Source: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mattress-girl-emma-sulkowicz-is-backand-channeling-her-rage-through-bdsm

ENOUGH With This Wonder Woman Bullshit By Max Derrat

You know that really innocuous, unimportant women-only Wonder Woman screening thing? People are apparently still talking about it for some reason, and it’s mostly because people are making so much out of it, on both sides.

One of the people fanning the flames of this intense reaction is Heat Street writer Stephen Miller. He bought a ticket to this “women-only” screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, New York, and posted a picture of his receipt on Twitter. He expressed a desire to not cause a scene, and replied the following to anybody expressing anger at his choice: “I’ll be enjoying the film with the ticket I purchased.” He also pointed out that kicking him out specifically on the grounds of sex or gender identity would be illegal. It doesn’t seem like Miller is doing this to make any positive statement. After all, in his Twitter feed, he constantly refers to the Wonder Woman movie as the “Chris Pine superhero movie.” To conclude, one Twitter user named @Bro_Pair wrote the following in response to this: “Some men lay down their lives battling white supremacists on the streets. Others demand admittance to the women-only Wonder Woman screening.” This is clearly in reference to last Friday’s Portland murders. The Daily Mail classified the murderer in this case as a self-avowed Nazi supporter, when minimal research concludes that any supposed ties to Nazi’s were disproven as false flags by the murderer to discredit Trump voters. Anybody else tired of this yet? Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4549842/Man-provokes-fury-ticket-women-WW-screening.html

Anti-Stealthing Law is Anti-Men By Mike J.

On May 16th, California assembly women Christina Garcia introduced a new rape law that would seek to punish the ill-defined and nearly unprovable act of “stealthing”. Stealthing, for those not in the know, is the act of intentionally removing or tampering with a condom during sexual intercourse. Stealthing, Christina Garcia argues, is just another form of rape. The problem with adding such a clearly flawed and biased addendum to the currently existing rape laws would be many. It would be very hard if not impossible to prove such a case as condoms can break due to improper usage or age. It creates the possibility for false allegations against men by women who have become pregnant by accident. It also says nothing on the topic of women who would tamper with contraceptives to become pregnant, despite a male sexual partners wishes. Assembly women Garcia is no stranger to pushing these ill-conceived amendments to current rape laws. In August of last year she helped pass an amendment that would make any form of an alleged non-consensual act be defined as rape. Sadly, this new law, like those before it, seems likely to pass given Governor Jerry Brown history with approving every new rape law amendment put through by congress.

Source: http://menslaws.com/index.php/2017/05/28/california-amend-rape-laws-target-men-stealthing/ https://a58.asmdc.org/press-releases/rape-definition-ca-include-stealthing http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB701

Scaring Sons Into Suicide By L Kemlo

An Illinois family is claiming a school discipline meeting scared their son into suicide. Corey Walgren, 16, jumped to his death in January, less than three hours after meeting with school officials and police at Naperville North High School.

The meeting was about an alleged cellphone recording of a consensual sexual encounter with a female classmate. Corey had no criminal history and had never been in serious trouble at school. Corey’s parents claim the school officials questioned him about “child pornography” and threatened to have him registered as a sex offender. According to the Chicago Tribune, Corey’s mother thinks the school wanted to scare him straight, “instead, they scared him to death.”

According to the Tribune it does not appear any pornographic images were found on the teen’s phone, but it did contain a file with audio of the sexual encounter. Apparently, the female classmate in the recording alleged that he may have played it for his friends. Records of the meeting show police did not intend to pursue charges, but wanted to handle the matter in a way that ensured Corey understood the seriousness of his actions and how it affected his classmate, who was described as “mortified” in the police report.

After the meeting, the school had contacted his mother but Corey left school grounds and walked to a nearby parking garage, where he jumped to his death. His parents plan to sue the school district and the police department.

Sources: http://nypost.com/2017/05/23/family-says-school-discipline-meeting-scared-son-into-committing-suicide/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-naperville-north-suicide-20170522-story.html

Check out the latest Honeybadgers episode.

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breakingtheglasses · 7 years ago

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Scaring Sons Into Suicide – Polecat Cast 115

Mattress Girl returns! Urban Dictionary! Wonder Woman! All this and more on this week’s Polecat Cast!

Show Notes:

Urban Warfare By Mike J.

Rape Victims Shouldn’t Like to Relive Their Rapes By Max Derrat

Then Master Avery started hitting her with a belt. Avery at one point asked if anybody wanted to participate, and one man from the audience volunteered. He proceeded to slap her across the face.

Source: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mattress-girl-emma-sulkowicz-is-backand-channeling-her-rage-through-bdsm

ENOUGH With This Wonder Woman Bullshit By Max Derrat

Anti-Stealthing Law is Anti-Men By Mike J.

Scaring Sons Into Suicide By L Kemlo

New Honey Badger stuff

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imericwat-blog · 7 years ago

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The Fire Next Time: Reflections on the LA Uprising

In April, UCLA organized a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1992 LA Uprising, or sa-i-gu. Much of the conference (as well as the mass media, in the days leading up to the anniversary) was preoccupied on whether and how much have changed in the last quarter century. The conference organizers invited me to discuss how the way we approach sexuality has evolved since the early 1990s, specifically why there seemed to be progress in the political discourse around sexuality, as opposed to, say, race or immigration status. They wanted to know whether the challenges I had as a queer Asian and Pacific Islander (API) activist twenty-five years ago were the same as they are now.

Some might assume that the challenge of being a queer API activist in the early 1990s was about finding acceptance in the broader API community. For me, it was more about figuring out how to be political within the established LGBT API community.

Let’s put this into historical context. Organizing among LGBT APIs as a singular, coherent and collective identity was a relatively new phenomenon at that time. The first organization by and for LGBT API people in Los Angeles, Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays, was founded only in 1980. A few more organizations came along later. By the early 90s, numbering over a dozen, they were at best “teenagers.” And like most teenagers, they were still trying to figure out who they were.

The queer API activists I talked to at the time often bemoaned a lack of political space where we could bring all of ourselves to. While these organizations provided a crucial space for people to come out (especially those who had been marginalized by the white gay community), they were not usually a hotbed for progressive activism. The early model of organizing was premised on the idea of safe space - that is, creating a space where queer APIs could become comfortable with themselves and accept who they were. It was a self-empowerment model, but it was also a closed and insular space that didn’t encourage advocacy or direct action, except for the few in leadership who were out.

The 1992 Uprising politicized many of the progressive queer APIs in my generation. We found ourselves in broader struggles, like immigrant or workers rights (which was where I cut my teeth as an activist) or environmental justice. Many of us worked our day jobs at API-serving or progressive organizations because there weren't many paid gigs to be a professional queer API.[1] It actually forced us to think intersectionally.

There were opportunities for us to experiment bringing the LGBT API community into our political work before, during or after the 1992 Uprising: from Pete Wilson’s veto of AB 101 in 1991; to Prop 184 and Prop 187 in 1994; to Prop 209 in 1996; to welfare reform in 1996; to Prop 227 in 1998,[2] as well as various workers' campaigns locally, etc. The 1990s was like a best-of compilation of conservative assaults on gains made by immigrants, people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. It probably felt not so different than what young activists are feeling now - except what we experienced in one decade just happened in the first hundred days of a presidency. On the other hand, while it might have been challenging for my peers in the 1990s to convince others how these attacks should be treated as continuous battles in the same war, it's easier to embrace intersectional politics nowadays when all the venoms are spewed from one person.

What finally pushed the LGBT API community into frontline activism was same-sex marriage, specifically Prop 22 in 2000. And it changed not so much because the LGBT API community started to move away from the safe space organizing model, but more because our straight allies in the API community stepped up. One of the first press conferences against Prop 22 in our community was organized by progressive Korean American organizations, like Korean Resource Center and Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (now Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance), as well as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (now Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAAJ-LA).[3] They worked shoulder to shoulder with queer API leaders to push back the conservative elements in our community. When API Equality established its office in Los Angeles, I think it was very strategic of them to ask AAAJ-LA to be their fiscal sponsor and position themselves in that civil rights conversation.

In the final years leading up to the 2013 Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized same-sex marriages in the U.S., the battle was primarily fought by lawyers and judges. The marriage equality victory ironically illustrated the limitations of campaigns that are driven by a single issue as well as the civil rights strategy that relies heavily on the judicial system, especially when that strategy is divorced from a grassroots movement. While the courts were slowly turning their wheel of justice or even after they declared any ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional, many organizations that had worked on this issue were struggling to find a new identity. They, as well as the foundations that supported them - had to pivot and find a different way to engage their respective community and to keep their base from slipping into complacency. Many of them had a hard time harnessing the energy that had led to this victory to build a broader movement.

API Equality-Los Angeles - strategically or not, I couldn't say - approached the marriage equality fight as more than just a legal or political struggle, but also a cultural one.[4] Whether it was building relationships with ethnic media, working in coalition with other progressive groups in different struggles, documenting the lives of early LGBT API pioneers in Los Angeles, or organizing the largest contingent in the Lunar New Year's parade in Chinatown year after year, API Equality-Los Angeles has a broader vision of changing the discourse of sexual minorities in local immigrant communities. It is a vastly different framework than the safe space organizing that took place in the 1990s. In fact, while API Equality-Los Angeles is having some success in normalizing sexual diversity in places that didn't want to have these conversations, the safe-space organizations have either disappeared or suffered steep decline in membership since the turn of the century.

Thinking and acting intersectionally is a key to longevity. This is not a new idea. When I was a young college student, I learned from the writings of lesbian-of-color thinkers, like Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa, that our multiple identities could be a source of power, a bridge between communities.[5] We see young queer people of color taking leadership roles in campaigns that are not strictly queer, such as police suppression, undocumented immigrant rights, health access, etc. Their solidarity has already left an indelible influence in progressive movements.

This is a small but illustrative example. I’m on the board of Khmer Girls in Action now, which organizes Cambodian youth in Long Beach. I’ve met at least a couple youth leaders who are queer, and it’s great to have this progressive space for them. Every time I’m at a meeting with youth leaders at KGA, I’m asked to not only introduce my name and my affiliation, but also my preferred gender pronouns. And I’ve encountered this in other community spaces, too, even those that do not work on gender identities. I think it’s a sign of progress that a simple change in the way we introduce ourselves is challenging our assumptions about gender (though the ritual could become rote). It's also an indication on how today's activists see our various struggles in the same space. Young people have a different relationship with intersectionality than we did 25 years ago. I don’t want to romanticize or sanitize their struggles, but I do think it’s something worth exploring and leveraging in our current political climate.

[Enkone, 1992 Civil Unrest ‘Peace Treaty’ (2017) - Photo taken at the Community Coalition, cocosouthla.org.]

p.s.

As I sat through the UCLA conference on April 29, 2017, the persistent question of whether things have changed in the last 25 years became more and more unsettling for me. It's an impossible question. To say "yes, things have improved" is to do disservice to a community that continues to live under the threat of surveillance while their very economic reality is being ignored. To say "no, things have stayed the same (or gotten worse)" is to discredit all the good work that community leaders, members, and activists have done to thrive in an impossible environment. I felt the people who asked this question wanted a more definitive answer, but no response could be reduced to a pithy sound-bite.

The yearning for a definitive answer has to do with wanting to know if anything like the 1992 Uprising would happen again. (Of course it would. It wasn't the first in U.S. history, and it wouldn't be the last.) And the question seemed to come from mostly people outside of the Uprising's flashpoint in South LA - namely journalists and academics.

Days before the UCLA conference, The Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University released a study based on a survey measuring attitudes towards civil unrests. This is a survey that they've conducted every five years since 1992, but this is the first time since 1997 that the number of Angelenos (6 in 10) thought another riot is likely increased. Early analysis indicated the spike was driven by millennials, who were too young to remember the Uprising (if they were born at the time at all). Pundits were further puzzled by another statistics that showed the perception of race relations had actually improved. If we're getting along, why the pessimism about the inevitability of another civil unrest?

To me, it's a mistake to think that race relations caused the 1992 Uprising. It certainly didn't help, but it wasn't the primary force behind the unrest. Never mind that the day before the Uprising, gang factions agreed on a truce without any help from the LAPD or public officials, and the gang truce held for a long time after 1992, despite skepticism and sometimes outright sabotage from the LAPD. Yet the media - as well as many at the conference - still mouthed the same infamous question first uttered by the bewildered Rodney King, "Can we all just get along?"

The problem with framing the Uprising as a race relation problem is that it lets white supremacy off the hook. Most people take King's question to be one concerning Blacks and Koreans, and sometimes Latinos, because of where the pandemonium broke. The framework pushes whiteness above the fray, like the police force who stood on the periphery watching South LA burn on that fateful day, and leaves it unquestioned.

If we see the Uprising as a response by a community that was over-policed but under-invested, the study results wouldn't seem so surprising. In the age of police impunity (which spawned the Black Lives Matter movement) and bleak economic outlook for young people (especially non-whites), why wouldn't the Uprising happen again? (If it happened in Ferguson, why would Los Angeles be exempt?)

If pressed for a short answer to the question, I'd say, Yes, things have changed. To paraphrase another King, the arc of moral universe is long and not straight. A quarter century is not a long time. We have made gains. We don't recoil for too long if we suffer setbacks, but neither would our more powerful enemy. They come back stronger - just witness the 2016 election. We have to respond in kind. And this is why, depending on which section of the timeline you dissect, it could look like one step forward, two steps back.

I was reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow as I prepared my remarks for the UCLA conference. Her explanation of the interplay between progress and status quo is instructive here. Alexander traced the progression from slavery to Jim Crow laws to the mass incarceration we have today, as evidence of white supremacy's persistence. Slavery might have been abolished at the end of the Civil War, but those in power created legislation ("black codes") that declared any former slaves a "vagrant" if they couldn't produce any proof of employment. Once arrested, they were hired out to plantation owners as a source of cheap labor. These black codes were the precursor to Jim Crow laws. As the mid-sixties saw the end of Jim Crow, white supremacy had to find a race-neutral way to contain the African American population. They found it in the War on Drugs, which disproportionately targets Black and Brown youth for drug offenses (even though the rates of drug use and sales were similar across the races). This not only led to mass incarceration of unprecedented number of people of color, especially (but not limited to) young men, but also doomed their chances of a productive livelihood after their release. In fact, the high rates of arrest and conviction of young men of color for drug offenses do not reflect higher drug use in these communities, but inequitable practices in both the law enforcement and criminal justice systems.

If millennials in Los Angeles felt that another civil unrest was inevitable, it probably had more to do with this kind of suppressive environment rather than their inability to "get along" with each other.

Alexander was also critical of the civil rights community, who had stood rather silently as "tough-on-crime" politicians ramped up sentencing for minor nonviolent crimes and instead focused their resources on more "sympathetic" causes (like affirmation action). When we play "respectability politics," we inevitably sell out the most disenfranchised among us, because, like economics, rights don't trickle down. It seems to me that if we want to avoid another riot, we should stop picking the lowest hanging fruit and start addressing our mass incarceration problem.

[David Hammons, In the Hood (2016) - Photo taken at The Underground Museum, http://theunderground-museum.org.]

[1] One notable exception was HIV/AIDS work, but even AIDS activism was becoming mainstream by the 1990s, notwithstanding the militant tactics of ACT-UP.

[2] AB 101 would have outlawed discrimination against LGBT people, which Pete Wilson agreed to support during his campaign for governor but would later renege on that promise once the legislation reached his desk. Prop 184, or the "three strikes initiative," mandated a sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment to anyone who committed a felony for a third time, even if it was a nonviolent crime. Prop 187 would have prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing non-emergency health care, public education, and other public services. Though it was approved by voters, the initiative was declared unconstitutional by the state courts and was never implemented. Prop 209 rolled back affirmative action in public universities. Prop 227 eliminated bilingual education in public schools.

[3] This is primarily in response to the collusion between mainstream conservatives and the religious (especially Christian) segments in our immigrant communities to stall the movement towards marriage equality.

[4] By "cultural," I don't mean the culture of specific ethnic or national identities. I mean the kind of cultural work that seeks to win hearts and minds.

[5] The 1992 Uprising was one of the early political events that spurred me into community work. The following year I was organizing the broader API community against Proposition 187. Ignatius Bau wrote a wonderful essay on this struggle that highlighted the importance of thinking and acting intersectionally, and how the outcome for Proposition 187 could be different, if we were allowed to see the different parts of ourselves and others in this struggle. That essay was published in Q&A: Queer in Asian America (edited by David Eng and Alice Y. Hom, Temple University Press, 1998).

#submissionlimbo #losangeles

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supporthosechi · 8 years ago

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Our Third Visit

Home again, whatever that means exactly. Moving for most people is terrible because it involves putting a bunch of small things into larger boxes, carefully wrapping delicate items—heirlooms, art, instruments, televisions, anything which is not really designed to be packed into a van or truck or other vehicle and moved any distance. It also can mean uprooting oneself, which obviously cuts both ways: no more favorite diner down the street, no more garden in the back, no window which catches the light in the morning just so, no paint on the walls which has been redone to suit moods or fancy, no immediate physical access to friends, family, and work left behind, all to be exchanged for comparable or better versions.

Our LeLe’s move shares variations on many of these characteristics. She moves from maximum to medium-minimum security, from 2000 fellow inmates to 500, from a facility housing people who will live out their natural lives within to those who will be there nine years or fewer. She leaves behind an ex-partner to become “fresh meat” at a new facility. She sacrifices friendships and a place where anything might be obtained to one where inmates are far more cautious and the state’s control is more ironclad. She cannot bring her paints, for which her nails have (temporarily) suffered, but the kitchen has a fryer and not everything is made of soy, by dint of which her skin has immediately cleared. She exchanges the promise of contract work to reduce her sentence, the possibility of working with animals or cosmetics for a kitchen job which pays next to nothing (from 15 to 20 to 30 dollars a month as she moves up the ranks, rapidly), and layoffs in prison labor which do not allow her sacrifice herself to menial labor to move towards swifter release. It’s a new place and there’s not much going on. We sometimes think of our jobs, our relationships, our apartments, the very contours of our lives as prisons, and it sometimes feels as if we move from one to the next. Alisha Walker’s situation has in some ways actually gotten worse with this move, and I can tell, and it tears at me, which in turn makes me feel dumb, because it tearing at me does nothing for her.

It is hard not to imagine what it was like for her arriving as we do, pulling through a proper town and into a different sort of stone and barbed wire hell. There is a funny little hut with some tables at the entrance and I momentarily lose track of where I am, thinking: “this would be a nice spot for Alisha to sit with her family.” The presence of the eerily immobile guard standing beneath a strangely folksy, wooden sign proclaiming “Staff Only” quickly dispels that notion. These are places of utmost control and power over, and any person who leaves them not wanting to smash, kill, and destroy after serving their time is either an incredible model of restraint from whom we all could learn that lesson at least, or else has had their spirit so utterly broken that it must take many soul-searching hours to find themselves anew outside. This being our first visit, we brace for different regulations and novel layers of arbitrary command to fight through to gain entry. We are not disappointed in this expectation. Our first time through the double glass doors finds paperwork and, interestingly, more people of color behind one desk than we saw at the entire facility at Logan. We are informed that one of our membership’s attire will bar her from entering, despite it being identical to what she wore on our last visit, and so I run back to the car to find something else she might wear, to no avail. After a trip to Target to buy something less revealing than thick black tights and a hooded sweatshirt (the dead cops t-shirt is fine, mind you), we make our second attempt, now being told that we need a second form of ID each, which I dutifully return to the car again and procure. The third try reveals that the hooded sweatshirt cannot be worn in, nor can my cardigan. When we finally make it through the metal detector, we’re left to peruse the scenery outside the gendered shakedown rooms, then left again to our own devices until we realize we can walk into the visitation room on our own accord. The distance from the visitor’s entrance to the building to the door behind which we’ll spend the day with our friend is perhaps thirty feet, entirely indoors. This is emblematic of an entirely different, arguably even more nefarious affect of the Decatur facility.

The entry desk is opposite a giant set of plaques devoted to employees of the month and retirees, each of which is clearly hand-carved, burned, and painted as if we were in a backwoods hunting lodge such as one might find just a few miles away from town. There is one calligraphed sign for “Warden,” one for “Guard on Duty,” and a variety of smaller ones for the time clock and a key rack. There is a hand-etched lithograph commemorating a mother and children reunification program, to help reintegrate ex-offenders, which is distastefully hung next to a prison-staff lotto game of some variety where officers can put in their names for a monthly drawing for cash prizes. I’m uncertain which is the more disingenuous of the two. The guards interact with us in a generally saccharine tone (“It’s always more complicated the first time, sorry.”), wholly opposite the gruff, put-upon affect of the previous set. I detest them and their complicity in this system, and I do not want to muse on this being a better work environment than the previous facility, that they get on better with each other and perhaps even the inmates, I want them to feel the full gravity of the despicable institution in which they are cogs, and I want them in turn to be as miserable as possible as they help make this needless societal scourge for the women inside.

But this is not the place for any more of this particular screed. I am privileged to see and hug and laugh with and hold and update a friend who has gotten closer and closer, and I want to know she is as all right as is humanly possible in a place designed to rob her of her humanity at every turn.

We know each other a bit better now. Alisha knows which one of our troupe she’ll have wild parties with and learn about the tough edge of the anti-fascist struggle when she gets out, which one will take her to tiki bars and teach her about the subject position of being a queer femme and all its responsibilities and travails, and which one will laugh too hard in spite of himself at all her jokes and make sure she’s well-fed when she needs home cooking with her Chicago family (I’m the last one, if you were wondering). LeLe is her usual combination of vivacious hilarity and genuine interest in what we are up to on the outside. As has been the case throughout, some of our mail has gotten through (all her birthday cards) and some, infuriatingly and arbitrarily, has not (two of our members’ last letters), so there is some general updating to be done on our end. But we are, as anyone would be, curious about our friend’s move, and it is safe to say Alisha is at least a little wistful for the, shall we say, woolier world of Logan, a place better suited to her bawdy, mischievous, and social personality. In short: our girl is bored. But I am reminded more acutely in this visit also: our girl is easily but deeply funny. She tells us about the first set of clothes she got at the new facility, the crotch and thighs stained (“somebody had like a toxic vagina or something! Just burning through!”), and how she soon found that there was no fashion scene to keep up with here. We comment on how clean the clothes she has now look, and how she has clearly lost back some weight from the—marginally—better food and find that she’s wearing her “special occasion” polo, pristine and white, and her pair of shoes from Logan that “nobody else got.” At the old facility, she’d be altering clothes and getting the new garb whenever it came in or else risk ridicule, which would result in mouthing off, which consequently would result in something worse. We comment this sounds like high school all over again, and Alisha’s eyebrows go up as she busts up laughing: “It’s worse than high school! They’re criminals! You get your ass beat!” She tells us about the sort of pranks unique to a place where people are already on edge but used to certain routines which mark out the time. There is the regular practice of lining up to receive prescription medication, which LeLe naturally thought was worth crying wolf at, at least once: “MEDLINE!” The effected inmates, of which there were many, all piled out of their cells to line up for drugs, furious at the false alarm. When one of the older inmates got especially angry, Alisha responded with the natural question of the nonplussed prankster: “You mad? Are you big mad or little mad?” knowing full well this would be the end of the incident. In this “minimum security” place, loaded with contradictions, the restrictions regarding fighting and sexual relationships are vastly harsher than the previous: either will get you cited and likely put in solitary confinement, in the hole.

We ask her a few questions on behalf of a reporter friend who is doing a profile on Alisha, one of which we already have a sense of the sad answer to, but ask anyway and receive a classic LeLe answer.

“How are you passing the time at Decatur?”

(slight pause) “Dyking out!”

She goes on to explain that she is “talking to” three people, but there are ten more interested. We get into a discussion about how “everyone is gay” on the inside, because there’s nothing else to be. As mentioned before, she has been separated from the partnership she had begun to build at Logan, which we assume would be difficult, but as it turns out, not for the reasons we guessed. Suffice it to say, Alisha had her heart broken while she was still at the last facility, subjected to the same sort of amplified betrayals that anyone who offers up herself to another, who feels she has forged a connection through the harshest of obstacles, who takes a calculated risk knowing separation is immanent, would find themselves susceptible. The classic coping mechanism of “needing to spend some time alone” is drawn into brutalist relief in a place like this where one is at once in a uniquely profound solitude and at the same time never more than ten feet from another person or fifty. Alisha proclaims she is “manic depressive,” a diagnosis about which we are all concerned and interested in how it is made and treated in this environment. It turns out that a formal diagnosis has never been made, and Alisha explains how there is no intermediate state for her, she is either hyperactive and excited, sociable to the point where she kids with the guards in the dining hall and pushes buttons just to get some kind of reaction from the subdued and tamped-down inmates, or else utterly depressed. Not just sad about her lost girlfriend, the absent opportunities which were available to her at Logan, her missing family and friends, the wrongful nature of the system which reminds her daily it would have simpler if she had just died that night, but a purer, simpler low, resultant from the basic realities of being a giant spirit and personality cordoned off and hidden away from the society she would choose and which would, I am certain, choose her.

The time is more real now, she says it and I can see it, because this will be the final destination before release. She bargains with us for all the things she would give up to be able to step outside, or do anything positive for herself at all, and then we hit the crux of the matter. Alisha tells us she is not used to—and at this point, there’s no reason to think she’ll ever get used to, which is fine—having to ask for everything, and being powerless to help those she cares about. Among the myriad motivations for doing sex work, the at least potential command over one’s income, how often and what sort of work one wants to do, was clearly foremost for our girl. Her mother, brother, sister, and new nephew need her, not simply financially or even emotionally but—and I do not use this term lightly—spiritually. Anyone who meets Alisha and finds favor with her would comprehend this sort of need; she is magnanimous not because she is a saint but because it is clear that when she cares it is wholesale and not easily vacated. She will never become accustomed to be so dependent on, having to ask for things from, her mother, having to be shaken down to use the bathroom, finding nearly every step, of which there are only so many which can be taken anyway, requiring official and explicit sanction.

It does no real good for me to soften the situation in these reflections: our dauntless survivor is hurting, each next forced renegotiation of her dignity and creative power taxing the underground wellspring of strength from which she draws. The tiny gold cross she wears around her neck borders on satire; this is no cloister for the likes of Alisha Walker, and there’s no spiritual quest or fulfillment concealed within. Just the full, indifferent weight of the state’s corporal fetish borne down on a young woman full to bursting with creative potency. I, insignificant and impotent in the face of such forces, have two options, with only the first being at all viable. Either LeLe will emerge from this place, sooner than later, intact and excited to make good on all the plans we make every next visit, or I do not want to go on existing in the world which not just allows but applauds her forced sacrifice.

Alisha is disappointed that one of our members does not eat red meat, having raised cows in her youth and, accepting this reality, turns to me in mock-frustration:

“Aaron, please tell me you eat steak.”

I do, LeLe, I do, and I don’t know if it’s going to taste right again until you’re on the opposite side of the table from me for the first time.

-AH

#justiceforalisha #freelele #sexworkiswork #rightsnotrescue #survivedandpunished #alishawalker #prisonabolition #visitinglele

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