#weird femme supremacy

[aishabellasbigblogofeverything]

If i may hope into your inbox rq to rant,i think there's a special kind of masculinazation queer black women go through specifically.There's this weird thing white cis wlw have where they automatically assume 'black women with a queer gender/orientation=masculine presentation' even if the bw in question is blatantly femme(remember the tomboy Megan Thee Stallion allegations💀)and it's highkey insane how they can't wrap their heads around the fact that black women can be girlypops and softgirls as much as any other queer women and i can only imagine how much worse it is for femme black trans women

Like for me i'm bigender and genderfluid along with being bi so i understand why people would assume i want to be masc on first meeting but a quick look at my blog or talking with me will make it very obvious i'm a dude but not the slightest bit masculine and that's absolutely influenced by my black womanhood but white woman fragility makes the idea of unlearning misogynoir 'scary'🙄Ntm my white trans girl friends have been way more normal about me and guys like me than cis girls so that adds to my opinion that transfem and black woman friendships are almost inherent and the overlap between transmisogyny and misogynoir.They think it's 'allyship' but the thing is almost no black woman ever asks to be masculineized

All of this is so true!!!

And then there's the fact that whenever you see Black wlw rep in media, they are almost always butch/stud or on the androgynous/masculine side, and while that does deserve rep, you hardly see femme Black wlw nearly as much, especially when they're paired with a non-Black or lighter-skinned Black girl who will almost always be the femme to their butch, it feels like Black wlw almost never get to be the feminine one.

A lot of white wlw I've seen tend to assume that Black wlw must be masculine, often so that they can be the more feminine one and it's unfair. Plus I feel like Black femme lesbians in particular face a DOUBLE form of femme invisibility that other femmes do not, because while femmes in general are read as straight or seen as having straight-passing privilege(which we do not), Black femmes often face both where we are assumed to be straight feminine girls or we are seen as not being "lesbian" enough because we're femme when Black lesbians must be studs. And it's unfair. And also I wish there was a term specifically for Black femme lesbians the way Black masc lesbians have stud, that was common and widespread, but I also just know that if a term like that did exist, then it would just be co-opted by non-Black femmes anyway, just like non-Black mascs try to do with stud.

I feel too that my femmeness is def influenced by my Black womanhood as well so I see where you're coming from. And I also agree that Black girls and trans girls(esp Black trans girls) should be friends because our oppression, although not identical, has a lot in common on the grounds that we are both denied womanhood by the white gender binarist society.

I wish this was a thing people talked about more, a lot of people act like femmes don't have any unique problems or that we are privileged for being straight-"passing" or having "so much representation" in media, when that is not the case and especially ignores the reality of being a femme of color, especially a Black femme who has to fight to be allowed to embrace her femininity and not be seen as man-lite due to white supremacy. I feel like only other femmes and butch lesbians care about our struggles but that the wider non-lesbian/non-wlw society doesn't? Especially with a lot of lgbt men/male-aligned people saying that the lgbt community has a "fear of/aversion to" masculinity which is complete bullshit(unless you're referring to butch/masc/stud women of course). But we need to start having this conversation! So thank you for bringing it to my attention!

[snffmutt]

hiiiii i guess i’ll post an intro thing :p im new here so forgive me if idk what im doing

you can call me mutt ❤️ i’m 21 and a femme lesbian. professional pillow princess! (<- virgin) he/him and nonbinary but for kink purposes she/it and cis. debating on how much i want to share on here but i’ll probably just use this as a little diary for when im hornyyy

primarily i’m into cnc and lgd but i don’t think i want men interacting w me anymore… girlcock and strap only please!!!!! i also luv pretty much any violent kink and i love love loveee public/exhibition stuff! edit to say i heart transfem supremacy. just discovered that term.

i also love lots of other stuff idk man basically hmu if you’re a weird freaky loser girl. not looking for anything serious though >_< i also don’t send pics but maybe i do if i like you enough. edit to say women and nonbinary ppl feel free to dm me for whatever! ❤️

limits are scat, ingesting vomit, bugs, and men ❌

[lightweaving]

Ino's Therapy Practice: Now Accepting Clients - A ShiInoHina fic

Yes, you read that right. Shisui, Ino, and Hinata in a threesome. My brain conjures up weird things when I'm sleep deprived and over-caffeinated.

This is the last of my contributions for @ino-supremacy's Ino Birthday Bash weekend, for the prompt Femme Fatale, and also the most unhinged.

No snippet this time bc it's nsfw af click the fic link if you want pure filth

Read it here

[uninspiringdyke]

this is my response to @femmeliarity​ ‘s post and @bloodstarvedbutch​ ‘s response, since klarissa me blocked ig. the post can be found here

1) calling this SA, even online, is an absolutely wild thing to me given NONE of what is described meets any definition of sexual assault. i’m assuming OP meant sexual harassment, but i’m not sure it meets any definition of that either

2) the fact this post includes nary a screenshot, or link, or whatever, indicates two things to me:

a) this callout post is based on very little actual evidence

b) i should take it with a grain of salt

and it’s very very weird to me so many people are commenting on this issue/reblogging posts about it without any actual concrete way for the rest of us who were not involved to see what was actually said. this is apparently a discord with several people (i’m guessing? more than 10?) and not a single person has come up with screenshots. not of the supposed messages to other people, not of instances where people were uncomfortable, none of the actual incident/context, none of the mods messaging each other about the decision to remove this person.

that’s...weird right? to everyone else? in a world where many posters are said to engage in leftist activism in a way that, at least in a way where we can acknowledge prisons and cops are bad, why are we using retributive measures?

3) “The allegations against that person sending an NSFW video to the server is completely fabricated.”

then what happened? what exactly did this person do?

4) “I have not spoken to this person or their partner, including through sending anons, but I did message with someone who asked about the situation, and told me they would try to make sense of it with them. “

Who? what did they say?

5) “This person and their partner have both made several posts about their removal from the group, each of which they had included this falsified allegation, or the narrative that we had them removed from another group, which neither are true.”

which posts? what did they say? which parts of the narrative are false?

6) “ I did not want to make a post of my own as neither of them seemed to be willing to listen, take accountability, and take the time to heal”

did you approach them? what did you say? what did they say? why are we assuming instead of just posting screenshots of what was said? i don’t need anyone to have URLs posted, even.

7) “ This person’s partner called my femininity as conforming to “tradwife aesthetics.” “

what’s the context here? tradwife is accurately described in the paragraphs below, but i’m confused about the application of that definition in this instance. jewish women and women of color (and jewish women of color) can also contribute to white supremacy--one is not exempt from aiding an oppressor merely because they are an oppressed class.

8) “I am sure many other femmes of color will agree, but we have to work extra hard for our femininity to be “acceptable” to white people.”

I agree this is true, but I am not sure of the connection between this and what was said earlier.

9) “I would never wish ill upon anyone and I understand this individual is hurt, but I hope they can heal, make peace, and move on.”

what healing do they need to do? how can they move on if restorative practices are not taken? how do they make peace?

10) it also seems, to me, strange to say in one post “we can understand that sometimes it can be hard to determine when someone has established a boundary or been made uncomfortable, so we wanted to be as clear as possible in our rules.” and then platform a reply to your post that says “ making callout posts because you got kicked out of a space where you made people uncomfortable and pushing multiple boundaries to be THE reason sfw rules were reinforced and expanded on.”

[bolding mine for readability]

people are going to be uncomfortable. that is life, especially in an online and explicitly political space.* these are also, i would say, not boundaries. they are rules. and that’s fine! but to say they are boundaries is incorrect and gives a false idea of how boundaries and discord servers work.

*i mean this in that marginalized identities are often political in nature + butch/femme are political identities

11) it is also weird when these are the tags left on the same reblog:

then how do you know what was said? why are you getting screenshots and we aren’t?

TLDR: we need to change the culture around behavior changes on tumblr, but also queer spaces broadly. the more this continues, the more we will see posts like this one, and situations like this one, which can (and will) explode.

[vtori73]

Controversial but... I think everyone should stop being weird about what bi+ people do when it comes to their life. Example 1, many will take issue with bi people who only are interested in having sex with women... I really really REALLY don't care what you have to say but it's basically none of your business and should just move on and just leave that person alone if you have such an issue with their sex/romantic life.

Now yes, some who are like this are dealing with heteronormativity and such but that's not up to you to decide and demonizing/writing off everyone who is only interested in sexual relationships is just BAD, it's wrong and it's probably why you hardly see JUST aro people who are open/out about their sexual orientation because of how DEMONIZED they outside/within the queer community. Sure plenty of gay people are more open about sex, and things like casual sex and such but like MANY also still hold up puritanical values surrounding sex that they may or may not realize are derived from Christianity & also probably white supremacy because tbh they go hand in hand a lot so it seems pretty likely.

Some may argue that demonizing critiquing bi women who only like women on a sexual basis has nothing to do with demonizing aro's but it usually does because of the basic idea a lot of phobic people have is that just wanting to have sex with someone and nothing more = treating people like sex objects/playthings and that these types of relationships are not valid or have any value. Tbh though I don't think most people make a distinction and are arophobic as well but idk there might be some who feel this way.

Anyway continuing even then the only real reason to call someone out for this kind of thing is if they truly are treating people poorly and that only if the people they have dated speak out and say because otherwise you are making giant speculations about someone else's life. Why do you all assume that these kinds of people aren't upfront about what they want? Why is suddenly a call for concern when it only comes to aro's/bi+ people like we don't know how to honest and open about what we want unlike literally everyone else that exists on this damn planet.

Sure there are a decent amount of people who aren't but those people are assholes and could be of any gender or sexual orientation, it is not at all limited to aro's and mspec people who have preferences for sex only relationships towards 1 or more genders. And, no, a woman wanting to just have sex with another woman/femme only doesn't make them automatically misogynistic but you questioning them about their own boundaries for what relationships they get into/pursue and pushing their boundaries on it SURE is! Especially since this is something I only see randomly brought up with bi woman, never bi men, proving to me that this is just another terf/radfem talking point because they can't help being bimisogynistic. And, also, just because YOU look down on sexual only relationships doesn't mean everyone does or feels the same way you do bout them so maybe learn to be less judgemental and critical of others just because of personal feelings?

So anyway, long story short but like... maybe be normal about other people's sex lives??? If you are not involved with them the why tf does it even matter to you?

But, also also also if they are being regressive maybe still hold some empathy so long as they haven't hurt other people too badly (aka those who aren't abusers) because maybe just MAYBE it's wrong to jump on & attack people who haven't had the chance to grow and learn from being conditioned by heteronormativity & such because we all talk about it & how awful it is but could give a crap about the people who in present time are suffering from it which just seems supppppppppeeeeeeerrr hypocritical to me but what do I know?

[soupbabe]

not sure if this falls under requests but im curious what you think the danoverse characters’ favorite songs would be : )

What Music Dano Characters Would Listen To

I love this idea omg,,will be indulging in every Dano character I write for for this omg

Warning for obvious Klitz favoritism lmao

Dwayne Hoover

- Edgy 2000s teen starter pack right here, definitely has notable bands like Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, and System of a Down

- But his favorite genre is definitely folk punk; he enjoys the raw feeling of it all and he feels as if he can really connect with the lyrics more

Klitz

- Admittedly, trying to find a good solid genre/song for Klitz is difficult

- So he gets two recs

- Quite literally it's stuck in between Britney Spears or Kimya Dawson

- He's definitely embarrassed to admit that he's a fan of Britney, refusing to have any merch for her in fears of a nosy tripod. But if a Britney Spears song played on the radio, he'll fight like hell so no one can turn the station

- Definitely got into Britney because he used to have a crush on her

- Whereas he listens to Kimya openly, constantly having her music on as he studies and it compliments the calmer aspect of his personality well

Louis Ives

- Oh she's a sucker for music from 40s-60s, the fuzzy quality is sure to get her daydreaming in no time

- Especially if they're tooth rottingly sweet love songs, her ultimate weakness <3

Calvin Weir-fields

- I believe in CAKE stan Calvin supremacy; it just has a lot of laid back vibes and they're pretty catchy. He definitely keeps a couple of CDs in his car

Hank Thompson

- Oh Hank's music taste is weird (affectionate)

- I can see him loving They Might Be Giants. They're so fun and unashamedly weird, it's right up his alley

Eli Sunday

- Eli's music doesn't stray away from his religion; he finds great enjoyment in hearing the organ play and the songs from a church choir

- But he also finds himself nodding along to a lot of faith based bluegrass, but he also doesn't mind the typical song about simple country life

- Sorry no rec for this one, I'm not too familiar with either genres </3

Jay

- Biggest one out of left-field: Jay listens to pre 9/11 country music. The genre before it got oversaturated with blind patriotism and posers

- He always liked a lot of counterculture music, but unlike everyone else in ALF, he simply couldn't get into the harsh guitars and too in your face approach of punk and other rock subgenres

- He supports the message, but he prefers something with more of a steady beat and twang to it. Don't be surprised to find him listening to folks like Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton

Edward Nashton

- Edward is a very simple man actually, choosing to listen to nothing but classical instrumentals and Catholic songs that remind him of his upbringing

- They're genres that keep him focussed on his day to day and remind him what he is fighting for

- He keeps his religion close to him, sometimes if you catch him becoming too entranced in his activities he'll start singing along

[59writes]

STRAY KIDS - THEY LET YOU DO THEIR MAKEUP BEFORE YOU GO OUT

another one from the discord archive lol. ngl this used to be a MLT so it might be worded weird but w/e

anyways this one is cute. daily reminder to, at some point in your life, sit in someone’s lap and do their eyeliner. thank

short and sweet :)

BANG CHAN

he’d do it as a joke. it’s basically just a joke to both of y’all. he plays the part too and acts hyperfeminine and y’all end up in tears. it’s great. also you know this mf is built so he’ll do shit like check out groceries or smth in a tank top and you’d be dying of laughter in back cuz the cashier is looking at this buff ass man with sparkly eye shadow. 10/10. also he does your makeup when you do this. he’s been getting better, be proud. he’s figured out pencil eye liner!!!!! he is not to be trusted with anything liquid tho. not after The Incident. JSJDDJDJ

MINHO

pretends to resist and whines the whole time but clearly loves it. he’s a bad bitch like are you kidding he’d have a great time. he always manages to smudge something or fuck it up but it still looks rlly cute.

CHANGBIN

nooooo hes gotta be a bad boy!!! absolutely not. actually he caves BUT ONLY a little eye shadow or lip gloss or some shit. whines when u call him cute. he is cute. you eventually break him down enough for him to let you do his eyeliner (!!!) and oh my goddddddd. changbin in eyeliner supremacy don’t @ me. please date me /hj

HYUNJIN

wouldn’t make a huge deal about it, he prob goes out in light makeup sometimes. it wouldn’t be a fuss you’d just chat while u did his eye shadow and then you’d go out. simple and domestic. he looks great don’t @ me. ok better than great. idk any words that are better than great I’m a bit hung up on Hyunjin in general. hhhhh men

JISUNG

Bitch he’d do this on his own. if you bring it up he’s like “yeah makeup night fuck yeah��. LMFAO. if y’all are going out he’s gonna do his own makeup but almost never lets you do it. he will whine about how it’s weird and different and how you’re “poking his eye” but it’s a good time all around.

FELIX

dude he’s said he likes femme stuff before, would totally get really excited and you’d prob fuck up a couple times cuz he’s wiggling so much lol. he simply would not care! you eventually call him down enough to get a Good Ass Look on him and he just. mwah a gift from heaven. He loves rlly extra looks too and sometimes begs you to recreate some wild Instagram post or something. he’d do it himself but he’s SO BAD AT IT LMAO

SEUNGMIN

wouldn’t hate it but wouldn’t do it voluntarily for a very very long time. he just doesn’t like full makeup looks ig? Won’t whine about it and kinda just pretends it’s not there. whines every time you look at him and get excited over his makeup tho LMFAO

JEONGIN

would be rlly shy about it but would eventually forget it was on and relax. He’s not the biggest fan of makeup but he likes that you think he’s pretty and that’s good enough for him to do it every once in a while. gets flustered when u call him cute or handsome or reach up to fix his smudged eyeliner or something.

side note: I just wanna know why one of my birds does Not Give A Shit about any of his toys but loves trying to make friends with the water bowl. not the food bowl though!!! they look the exact same, but just the water bowl!!!! like king the sound of you trying to kiss plastic is terrifying

birds r wild man

remind me to get y’all an obligatory birb pic :)

[messengerhermes]

Dear trans folks, The world will find enough ways to take us apart and make us feel ugly. Do not do their work for them.

In particular, I am addressing other trans mascs, especially white trans mascs, because I notice we have a tendency to take the "self deprecation" chapter out of the white cis masculinity handbook and run with it. Now, I could get sidetracked pointing out the ways white cis men use self deprecation as a form of power to get people to fawn over them and avoid accountability while also seeming vulnerable and harmless, but that is another horse in another race. I could also get sidetracked on the ways in which white trans mascs perpetuate harm against trans mascs of color when we start howling about the hideousness of trans masculinity, because said howling blends up with the ways racism demonizes and dehumanizes Black and brown bodies for deviating from white supremacist beauty standards, but trans mascs of color will speak to this with far greater understanding and nuance. So I will name that white supremacy and colonialism are also in play here and not go down that rabbit hole. (And no, I'm not saying self deprecation doesn't show up for trans women and nonbinary trans femmes, but a) that from what I have seen, takes a different form in terms of actions and expression. and b) I'm not trans femme have not lived that experience and am sure as shit not gonna holler from the other neck of the woods about what that wide umbrella of people should do to love themselves better) Back to why I am hollering for trans mascs specifically to think twice before they crack jokes about being "sewer rats," scrunkly, hideous, goblins, etc. Who does it serve to call yourself ugly out on the internet for all the world to see? Who does it serve to generalize your own body image feelings to all trans mascs? Because it's not helping you, and it's not helping that person in the closet over yonder who's terrified stepping out will mean becoming untouchable. Dysphoria sucks ass. Trying to figure out how you want to be and look in a world that is unkind and often outright violent to gender nonconformity is hard, scary, and sometimes sad. The more you feed the pain of these places, the harder it will be to leave them and feel the good parts of transformation. I'm not saying don't acknowledge your dysphoria and body image struggles. But I'm saying think about where and how to acknowledge them. Making TikToks and Tweets and Tumblr posts that frame trans masculinity as an ugly weirdness feeds transphobia and frankly is like lobbing a rock at other trans mascs who might stumble upon that shit in their feed. I've sucked my teeth many a time in the last couple months because I came across some human who was going through it and decided to denounce themselves and us all as ghoulies. I get it. I'm at a stage in life right now where I'm working through a new bubble of really bad body image and dysphoria shit. Some days I go through half my wardrobe just trying to find something that lets me look in the mirror without flinching. It hurts. It's hard. What helps me isn't taking how I feel about myself and making it a truth about me, or people of a similar gender. What helps is talking to people who are also on the sad boi trans bus and being like "The Weather Is Fucking Bad Man." (Find them on forums, at support groups, at meetups. Share with the trans friends you have) Because half the time I'll get the echo back of "Ohhhh same same same, this is shit. What're you doing about it for you?" And then we share. We share what's helping us and what are the things that hurt. We talk about our fears about how others will treat us about how we'll treat ourselves. We talk about our hopes, of how we want to be understood, feel witnessed, be held by ourselves and others. And I recognize I'm neither ugly, nor alone. I am forging myself into the person I want to be, shaping my body like clay. And that can never be ugly.

[l0rd-0f-c0ws]

you might've already talked about them but I'm new here so I haven't seen it (also I think you asked me the same thing on my old sideblog lmao) but WHAT ARE YOUR 2012 CASEY JONES HCS >:)??

AHHHHHHHHH HI!!! THAT WAS ME YESSSS!!!!!!!!!!

I'm going to have to put this under the cut because it is quite long

This mf is Trans for sure, my personal hc is specifically trans femme enby (she/they Casey supremacy)(also those are the pronouns I'm gonna use in the rest of this), but trans masc Casey is also very good

She is bi ace and polyam and dating April and Donatello and very happy about it :)

She had a lot of internalize shit that they both helped her through and she was always there to lend an ear when they needed it

During the farmhouse arc is when they first came to terms with the fact that they are bi and it slowly dawned on them how much they had in common

From there it turned more into a crush after they started hanging out more

Casey had started questioning her gender after her and April switched bodies, but it wasn't until after the farmhouse arc that she started to research what that could mean and find the words that really fit her

I hc she REALLY likes plants and stuff but that is something she keeps Very secret

She got her love of botany from her mom who had been working to get verified as a master gardener

(I'm definitely not projecting directly with my life with that one, my mom is 100% not the reason I like plants....)

And because I do this with every character that I like, their from philly <3

Her family moved to New York a bit after her mom died

Their dad isn't a terrible dad, but has a lot of fucked up shit that he forced onto Casey without realizing and I think after Casey came out to him, he started working through it

She really likes kids and taking care of them, which stemmed from her taking care of her sister a lot as a kid

She lost her teeth after she tried roller skating for the first time and face planted straight into the pavement

She was really embarrassed about it for a long time and felt really weird about open mouth smiling, but when she started watching hockey and stuff and seeing how cool these guys were and they lost teeth too? She felt a lot more confident it

Her and her dad bond over hockey stuff :)

Because of my philly hc I can make it so she goes to my local rock camp for girls and gender expansive folks because I love it there and I want to write a fic where her and April go to the event they just had that I went to because I had so much fun there :)

Casey would play the bass and sing (much to most people's surprise, they're a pretty good singer)

I don't really have anything else right now cuz it will just end up with me doxxing myself with my projections

[foreverthesoniag]

I’ve never prioritized my sensuality because I was taught that bodies like mine ( brown, migrant, round, non conventional, short, bilingual, with “weird” last names, and thick accents and thick thighs) are not meant to be celebrated ... even more so we are not meant to love our bodies .. we are not meant to affirm our own bodies . It has taken me years to be here - in alignment with my body , to find myself attractive and sexy, to find myself beautiful, and sensual and ... and sometimes it’s hard to do so because of all the things I have to unlearn. I’m unlearning fat shaming, unlearning ableism, unlearning “good immigrant” narrative...everything I see around me also uplifts specific bodies , a particular immigrant, a particular poet, a certain type of femme and gender non conforming body. So it be hard. But I’m here - I vow to honor all my genders, all the curves , all the beauty I am. White supremacy has taught us to find even ourselves undesirable. But fuck that shit, I’m one hell of a good looking sexy PapiFemme !! Day 2 of #sensualselfiechallenge by @evyan.whitney , prompt by @ethereal.1 . #gendernonconforming #latinx #artist #poet #qtpoc #queer #migrant #femmesofcolorvisibility https://www.instagram.com/p/BnZZxuKH3F_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=19t3waam7ya35

[fitnesshealthyoga-blog]

New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/jessamyn-stanley-fat-yoga-moving-beyond-body-positivity/

Jessamyn Stanley + Fat Yoga: Moving Beyond Body Positivity

Learn how Jessamyn Stanley has proven to the world that anybody can do yoga.

Christopher Dougherty

Jessamyn Stanley would like y’all to stop calling her a yogi—please and thank you. The 31-year-old yoga teacher from North Carolina, who once shamelessly peed her pants in Savasana rather than leave the room while teaching a hot-yoga class in London, has been struggling with mild celebrity since people started recognizing her in Whole Foods and the airport and the DMV and sometimes just walking down the street.

“It’s weird to be the fat kid that thin kids want to know/befriend,” -Jessamyn Stanley

Christopher Dougherty

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

“Aren’t you that yoga teacher from the tampon commercial?” they began asking after she starred in a U by Kotex Fitness ad for menstrual pads. “Hey, aren’t you that yogi from Instagram?” It can sometimes feel relentless. And while it’s true that Stanley’s Instagram account (with 400,000 followers and rising) is populated by pictures of her, often in her underwear, practicing difficult yoga poses, she says the fame and other forms of ego candy that fuel social media are greatly at odds with the yogic lifestyle she’s trying to live. So will everyone just chill and let her live it?

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

See also Jessamyn Stanley Gets Real About Motivation + Fear with Beginners

Like it or not, Stanley has attracted a massive amount of attention in what feels like a few short years. Since 2015, she’s been recognized by countless media outlets such as Forbes, Bon Appétit, and USA Today—and last year she became the go-to yoga spokesperson for the New York Times. Her podcast, Jessamyn Explains It All, is recording its second season, and she’s about to launch a Web series, in which she’ll tackle taboo, politicized issues such as the legalization of marijuana and the shortcomings of monogamy. (Her first guest will be yoga teacher and fellow body-positivity advocate Dana Falsetti.)

Stanley realized there was an opportunity to showcase a real yoga practice to the world.

Christopher Dougherty

Stanley believes people are paying attention because they aren’t used to seeing a fat black woman tackle tough asana, the American yoga space being—in her words—“deeply rooted in white supremacy.” She’s uncensored in her critiques of modern yoga in the West and of forms of oppression and body shaming she calls “patriarchal white-centric beauty standards.” She calls herself fat constantly—in her Instagram posts (“It’s weird to be the fat kid that thin kids want to know/befriend,” she wrote in August); in her 2017 book, Every Body Yoga; and in conversation—as a means of taking back ownership of a term generally reserved for shaming those it describes. To that end, she’s a one-woman visibility crusader, dismantling expectations about what a yoga body looks like and encouraging more people who don’t generally see themselves reflected in the yoga space to come along.

See also 5 Ways You Can Use Your Yoga Practice to Improve Your Body Image

Stanley started her Instagram account not to become the poster child for fat yoga, but to solicit feedback on a home practice she’d started in 2012. Like so many yoga practitioners, she says she never truly felt comfortable in a public yoga class, squeezing herself into the farthest back corner of the room wishing to be invisible—the very opposite of what she stands for today. But back then, she was insecure and a little lost, having dropped out of grad school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, so she began a yoga practice from the safety of her own living room. She utilized Yoga Journal’s pose index and online classes from Kathryn Budig and Amy Ippoliti, documenting her progress online. “But the response I was getting from people wasn’t a lot of feedback about my practice, it was more people being like, ‘Oh, my god. I didn’t know fat people could do yoga,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Why do you think that fat people can’t do yoga? Fat people do all kinds of stuff all the time.’” That’s when she realized her unique opportunity to broadcast a real yoga practice, “scars and all,” she says.

Armed with a highly articulate voice, a powerful social platform, and a whole lot of attitude, this yoga teacher and New Age thought leader has declared to the world that anybody can practice yoga.

Christopher Dougherty

By the time she attended a 200-hour yoga teacher training (YTT) in Asheville, North Carolina, in March 2015, she had amassed a sizable online following and interest from the press. In January of that year, People ran a story about the “self-proclaimed fat femme” who, with 29,000 followers, had become a “yoga star on Instagram.” In the piece, she discussed her plan to crowdsource the money she needed to attend YTT later. “There’s obviously a need for this,” she said at the time. “People are thirsty for someone who looks like them—or at least who doesn’t look like everybody else—to show them what to do.”

But as we sit across from each other eating churros and sipping on lattes one October morning in Durham, where she lives with her partner and three cats, she tells me she never aspired to become a yoga teacher at all. “So many people were asking me to do it,” she recalls. “But I didn’t understand why I needed to be the one to teach.” Instead, she’d thoughtfully respond to her fans by researching and suggesting Jessamyn-approved teachers in their areas. It wasn’t until her father, who had disapproved of her foray into yoga “from the jump-off” offered to help fund her training that she began to take teaching seriously. “My parents do not have $3,000 laying around,” Stanley says. “For him to be so emphatic, I realized there were bigger forces at play.”

Stanley has kept a dedicated home practice for the past seven years.

Christopher Dougherty

Stanley says her life could be neatly divided into pre- and post-YTT. “During YTT I had a number of experiences that cracked open my soul,” she says. “I was able to see so many things I’d been hiding from myself, and I understood that the way to teach people would be to genuinely live this practice and to shed light, as much as I can, on the spaces that are ugly and dark and complicated, and reflect that to the people. For me, that’s what teaching should be. Rather than being a career choice, it’s a mission. A call to action. Something to drive purpose in life. When I left training I was like, ‘OK, now it’s time to reach the people who have asked me to reach them.”

See also How One Yoga Teacher Reclaimed Her Healthy Body Image in the Face of Shaming

And she does. Stanley spends nearly every weekend on the road teaching classes in regions where she’s been beckoned by students who are hungry for her brand of off-the-cuff honesty and brazen practice style. “She definitely has a take-no-prisoners approach that I deeply admire about her,” says yogalebrity in her own right Kathryn Budig. “I think we’re entering a phase where people want fewer platitudes and more honesty, and she delivers any message that she wants to give with no frills, completely unadulterated.”

Stanley’s tattoos serve as a reminder to practice what she preaches.

Christopher Dougherty

Stanley’s ultimate goal is to make more body-diverse classes accessible to anyone who wants them—and to those who don’t yet realize that we all need them if we are ever to truly embrace what yoga is all about. Her new yoga app, The Under Belly, will launch early this year, helping to make her classes available to anyone with a smartphone or computer. Stanley realizes that this alone requires a certain amount of privilege, but she says she’s doing the best she can. She’s got bills to pay, too.

On our last day together, I ask her about some of the tattoos that adorn her arms like sheet music. One of them is the state motto of North Carolina, Esse quam videri, Latin for To be, rather than to seem. “She’s not about what things look like or being a yoga poseur,” says Sage Rountree, co-owner of Carolina Yoga Company, where Stanley once had a teaching residency. “She focuses more on being real than trying to project the image of being real.”

A comfortable home is the backbone of Stanley’s practice.

Christopher Dougherty

And that’s exactly why Stanley would like everyone to stop calling her a yogi. True yogis, she says, live in a state of perpetual detachment—from material possessions, from worry, from judgment. “It would be outrageous and outlandish to say I’ve found a way of dealing with, and releasing, attachment like that,” she says. But hey, she’s working on it. 

See also Is Social Media Wrecking Your Body Image?

About the Author Lindsay Tucker is a senior editor at Yoga Journal.

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[criticsofcolour]

‘The Hive City Legacy cast on prioritising people of colour and disrupting the overwhelming whiteness of theatre’ by Tenelle Ottley-Matthew

Something special often happens when black women come together and take up space. I have told myself this for years, even though I was unsure of how to articulate this when I was younger. Almost every day, I am reminded of the power of our many voices and stories. They rile me up and fill me with a plethora of emotions including, but not limited to, joy, hope, validation, sadness and anger.

The idea of “taking up space” is one that has been increasingly encouraged by and for those belonging to oppressed and marginalised groups. Taking up space means different things to different people. Within the arts, taking up space can perhaps be tied to increasing the representation and visibility of underrepresented groups and people from those groups telling the stories they want to tell in the way they want to tell them. In an age where words like diversity are often thrown around in public discourse without much substantial meaning or intent behind it, the current interest in black women’s experiences and stories can sometimes feel like a trend. It’s almost as if the music, film, TV, theatre and book publishing industries are eager to get a piece (and some profit?) of the ever-endearing #blackgirlmagic pie.

The last couple of years have seen a noticeable increase in the number of theatre productions, particularly among smaller, indie theatres, addressing black British identity and experiences and what its like to be a black woman in Britain. In 2018, shows such as Queens of Shebaand For A Black Girl at Camden People’s Theatre left a major impression on those who were fortunate enough to see them (including me). Likewise, the more recent, much-talked-about and much loved seven methods of killing kylie jennerat the Royal Court had a huge impact on its audience during its run at the Royal Court, and no doubt it will long afterwards.

In a similar vein to the aforementioned shows, Hive City Legacy is a masterful and refreshing theatre production that explores what it means to be a femme of colour today. One that proudly centres and celebrates black and brown women. Hive City Legacy defies both genre and stereotypes with a near-perfect blend of hip-hop, spoken word, comedy, dance, acrobatics and much more. It tells the stories of nine femmes of colour, played by cast members Aminita Francis, Rebecca Solomon, Krystal Dockery, Farrell Cox, Dorcas Ayeni-Stevens, Koko Brown, Elsabet Yonas, Shakaiah Perez and Azara Meghie. It’s the kind of show that immediately makes you feel at home as a black woman or woman of colour. This, as I found out from the Hive City Legacy cast, is very much what those involved in the show hoped to achieve. By appealing directly to people of colour, they hoped to somewhat disrupt the overwhelmingly white, middle/upper-class spaces that theatres often are.

As Koko Brown puts it, “We invited people [of colour] in by putting it out there on our social media and saying, we want women, brown women, black women, black non-binary folks, black trans folks to come and see this. We don’t just go, ‘Hey the cast is full of black people. How cool?’ By saying ‘We want you here. You are wanted in this room. You are needed in this space.’”

All cast members are aware that the nature of Hive City Legacy is bound to make some audience members, particularly those who are not people of colour, feel uncomfortable. This, they agree, is something those people will just have to deal with for an hour. After all, it’s merely a tiny taste of the discomfort they all feel in their lives, navigating this world as black and brown women.

“…there are plenty of times in the show where we refer to things that, if you’re not a person of colour, you’re probably not going to understand…and that’s not my fault!” Amanita Francis states matter of factly, immediately prompting audible agreement and hearty laughter. “There are plenty of majority-white shows that I go to see and there are references that I don’t get and that’s fine on their side. We’re catering to the audience that we want to cater for and that’s people of colour.”

The nine-strong cast of Hive City Legacy seems to have built a solid, sisterly bond between themselves and the rest of the creative team. It’s a bond that no doubt began to form in the early stages of the unconventional audition process. They effortless laugh and banter among each other and sometimes finish each other’s sentences. “Everybody that has taken part in devising this and making this happen has been a woman of colour, or at least, it’s been a woman,” says movement artist Elsabet. For Elsabet, Hive City Legacy is the first time she’s worked solely alongside women. It’s an experience that has changed her outlook and given her a renewed sense of self-belief.  “…between last year and this year, I’ve taken so many more risks when it comes to creating work and I feel empowered to trust myself as a leader.”

2019 is the second year that Hive City Legacy has blessed The Roundhouse. The show opened for the first time in summer 2018 following a casting call that was put out online in search of performers. For a show that contains a multitude of performance art forms, it would be correct to assume that the cast was put through their paces and expected to keep an open mind throughout the audition process. The women were asked to do “random” things like give themselves a superhero name before showing up to the audition to perform lip-sync. “We had to sing for our lives!” recalls Krystal Dockery as the other cast members erupt into laughter. Krystal offers some of the show’s stand-out moments, thanks to her masterful twerking and burlesque numbers. The cast also participated in a catwalk, took part in a speed-dating exercise, learnt choreography with Yami Lofvenbergand came up with creative responses to a Maya Angelou poem. While it was intense and off-the-wall at times, it was an audition like no other, as Krystal explains. “I’ve never been in an audition that was so supportive. It was weird… it felt like everyone was rooting for the other person which was incredible.”

Talking to the cast, it’s clear that there’s a strong rejection of the single story and narrow representations of black women and women of colour. One of the aims of the show is to remind the world that there is no one way or right way to be a femme of colour while highlighting the challenges they continue to face in 2019. “It’s like challenging the patriarchy all the time. Challenging white men, white fragility, white supremacy, all of that shit. We’re out there constantly challenging it by just being ourselves - and by performing as well - by doing things like this [Hive City Legacy] which we should alreadybe getting but we’re having to fight to get these opportunities,” says Shakaiah.

While the show has certain aims and messages it hopes audience members will take away, the deeply personal aspects of a show like Hive City Legacy means that it’s highly unlikely that two people will react to it in the same way. Koko Brown puts it perfectly. “I think the show has multiple messages depending on your background, where you come from and what bits resonate more with you. There’ll be a message you get that the person sitting next to you won’t get and vice versa… It’s a really personal thing.”                                                                                                                              

Ultimately, this is the beautiful thing about Hive City Legacy. Boy, do the performers know how to put on a dazzling and electrifying show. They command your attention with their talent and individual skills, yet they connect with their audience on an emotional level in a way that feels incredibly effortless and authentic.

I’ve known for a long time that something special often happens when black women come together. That special thing isn’t always easy to describe or communicate but it certainly looks like the nine Hive City Legacy performers dancing their hearts out and revealing their various layers and complexities on stage. Collectively and individually, they exude that special, magical thing that is powerful and meaningful beyond words.  

Tenelle Ottley-Matthew is a writer from London with bylines in Huck, gal-dem, Pride magazine and more. She will soon be working in book publishing.

Twitter: @misstenelle / Blog: tenelleottleymatthew.com

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: REH Foundation Awards, Arthur Machen, Tunnels & Trolls, Terry Pratchett

Writing (Kairos): Last night I stopped by the Superversive SF live stream to discuss my new book Combat Frame XSeed: Coalition Year 40. My gracious host and the enthusiastic chat brought up lots of tantalizing questions about the mysteries I’ve planted in the series thus far. I addressed those questions and gave additional clues to those mysteries, which will be revealed in Combat Frame XSeed: CY 40 Second Coming.

We also embarked on an in-depth discussion of plot and pacing. I contend that the latter is derived more from character than from sentence and paragraph level mechanics. See the video for a full explanation and a mini writing clinic.

  Awards (REH Foundation): Congratulations to the REH Foundation Award winners! The winners were announced at a ceremony at Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas on June 7th.

Atlantean — Outstanding Achievement, Book (non-anthology/collection)

Winner: DAVID C. SMITH – Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography (Pulp Hero Press)

Finalists: FRED BLOSSER – Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengence (Pulp Hero Press) DON HERRON and LEO GRIN – Famous Someday: A Robert E. Howard Biography (The Cimmerian Press).

  Fiction (Patheos): Machen (The Great God Pan) has had an enormous influence on horror literature. He is a HP Lovecraft without the overt white supremacy and Stephen King with interesting ideas: both tip the hat to the Machen (as they should). Not surprisingly for someone who has poked around in the scary attics and basements of the Christian past, Machen ends up with a more elevated view of sin then one finds in someone like CS Lewis, who experimented with the occult briefly, but had too much philosophy to stay there for long.

  Cinema (Jon Mollison): Terry Pratchett has an impressive gift for stringing words together.  The man could make the back of a cereal box interesting to read.  His brain works in strange ways that follow clever paths, a trait that helps him paper over the thinness of his works’ overall plots and characters and underlying worldview.  That wizardry doesn’t lend itself to translation to the screen, particularly when the producers of said translation choose to translate Pratchett’s words literally.

  Fiction (DMR Books): Mundy’s comments in the Camp-Fire, along with his portrayal of Caesar in the first two installments of Tros of Samothrace, ignited one of the most remarkable controversies in the history of American fiction magazines.  The readership of Adventure split into groups that were for and against Talbot Mundy’s views on Caesar and the Camp-Fire was where their opinions were aired.  A number of writers and historians came down on one side or another of the issue and the Caesar controversy grew to fill the entire space of the Camp-Fire.

  D&D (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, the new D&D Adventure/Campaign from WotC is now out, and it’s an interesting return to days of old. How old? So old that when the last time these adventures saw the light of day, TSR was still run by Gygax and the Blumes.

What they’ve done here is take one of their lesser-known classic adventure series and expanded it into a book-length campaign by the addition of several related adventures that had appeared in DUNGEON magazine over the years.

  Fiction (Shiver in the Archives): In September 1966, a previously unpublished short story “Forms of Things Unknown” by C.S. Lewis appeared posthumously in his collection Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited by Walter Hooper.  It was later collected in The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977), also edited by Hooper.

  Cinema (Wasteland and Sky):  Welcome back to this series of posts where I try to nail down what exactly inspired me to write what I do. This is my personal Appendix N of art that has stuck with me. More than a favorites list, I’m focused first on what really attached itself to what I do. This hasn’t been as easy to compile as I would have thought.

As the years have gone by I’ve been watching less and less of the old boob tube or spending money to stare at a bigger screen.

  Adventure (M D Paust): “Wow! What a book!” So shouted W. M. Krogman in the Chicago Sunday Tribune of Kon-Tiki, saying the aforementioned exclamation could easily comprise his entire review. But he went on anyway gushing, “It has spine chilling, nerve tingling, spirit-lifting adventure on every page and in every one of its 80 action photographs. It is the fiction of a Conrad or a Melville brought to reality. It might be added that the writing is of itself worthy of either pen.”

      Fiction (Frontier Partisans): Summer of 2019 was already shaping up pretty damn good in the world of Frontier Partisans literature and cinema, what with a Deadwood movie, the return of Yellowstone and a mountain of research books to read. But this piece of news blows the whole thing up: Craig McDonald’s tale of Hector Lassiter and the Punitive Expedition is hitting the streets in July.

  RPG (Jeffro Johnson): One of the big changes in the new edition of The Fantasy Trip is that Steve Jackson has recanted on the old rule that IQ provided a harsh upper limit on the total number of spells and/or talents a character could have. The reason is… under the old advancement system there comes a point where attributes get ridiculously and pointlessly high.

  Robert E. Howard (M Porcius): Tarbandu’s recent blog post about Spanish artist Sanjulian reminded me about my acquisition back in February of 1979’s The Howard Collector, edited by Glenn Lord, for which Sanjulian provided the cover painting of an axe-wielding muscleman freeing a scantily clad woman from captivity in some dimly lit temple or other place of unspeakable deviltry.

  Fiction (Old Style Tales): There is something carnal and lascivious about these torch bearing sirens with their come hither faces and their glistening jewelry. Le Fanu employed such subjects in “Ultor de Lacy,” “Carmilla,” and “Laura Silver Bell” – femme fatales, victims of the supernatural, who leer out of the darkness with just enough attention (light) cast onto their beauty the lure us towards the darkness that engulfs them. But none of these stories contains quite the potency or indecent revulsion as the tale that bears Schalcken’s name.

  Pulp Magazines (Pulpfest): In June 1929 there were over a dozen air-oriented magazines available on the newsstands. Gernsback was riding a popular wave with AIR WONDER STORIES, a pulp that would tell “flying stories of the future, strictly along scientific-mechanical technical lines, full of adventure, exploration and achievement.”

  Fantasy (DMR Books): Carter is perhaps best regarded for his pioneering early critical studies of the fantasy fiction genre. These include works like Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings, H.P. Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, and Imaginary Worlds. While some of the scholarship particularly in the former two lacks rigor, Carter was working largely without precedent in the very early days of fantasy, before the latter existed as a defined genre.

  Pulp Magazines (SF Magazines): The reason I picked up this magazine was that the Herbert Best novel The Twenty-Fifth Hour had been recommended to me as one of the works I should consider reading for the 1940 Retro Hugo awards in the novel length category.1 Ah, I hear you say, but this is a 1946 magazine, so what is going on? Well, as I am sure most of you already know, Famous Fantastic Mysteries was a magazine that specialised in reprints.

  Games (Table Top Gaming News): Today on the platter we have: New Warbus Available From Puppets War, New Tactical Command Table From Kromlech, Orcs in Shorts Metal Minis Up On Kickstarter, Buy 3 Get 1 Free Sale Going On Now at Kraken Dice, New Late War Accessories Available From Battlefront For Flames of War, Undead Miniatures Up On Kickstarter, and Mighty Lords Miniatures Up On Kickstarter.

  Sensor Sweep: REH Foundation Awards, Arthur Machen, Tunnels & Trolls, Terry Pratchett published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[cedarrrun]

Jessamyn Stanley is so over white-centric, consumer-driven yoga. Armed with a highly articulate voice, a powerful social platform, and a whole lot of attitude, this yoga teacher and New Age thought leader has declared to the world that anybody can practice yoga. And she’s not afraid to show us how it’s done.

Learn how Jessamyn Stanley has proven to the world that anybody can do yoga.

Jessamyn Stanley would like y’all to stop calling her a yogi—please and thank you. The 31-year-old yoga teacher from North Carolina, who once shamelessly peed her pants in Savasana rather than leave the room while teaching a hot-yoga class in London, has been struggling with mild celebrity since people started recognizing her in Whole Foods and the airport and the DMV and sometimes just walking down the street.

“It’s weird to be the fat kid that thin kids want to know/befriend," -Jessamyn Stanley

“Aren’t you that yoga teacher from the tampon commercial?” they began asking after she starred in a U by Kotex Fitness ad for menstrual pads. “Hey, aren’t you that yogi from Instagram?” It can sometimes feel relentless. And while it’s true that Stanley’s Instagram account (with 400,000 followers and rising) is populated by pictures of her, often in her underwear, practicing difficult yoga poses, she says the fame and other forms of ego candy that fuel social media are greatly at odds with the yogic lifestyle she’s trying to live. So will everyone just chill and let her live it?

See also Jessamyn Stanley Gets Real About Motivation + Fear with Beginners

Like it or not, Stanley has attracted a massive amount of attention in what feels like a few short years. Since 2015, she’s been recognized by countless media outlets such as Forbes, Bon Appétit, and USA Today—and last year she became the go-to yoga spokesperson for the New York Times. Her podcast, Jessamyn Explains It All, is recording its second season, and she’s about to launch a Web series, in which she’ll tackle taboo, politicized issues such as the legalization of marijuana and the shortcomings of monogamy. (Her first guest will be yoga teacher and fellow body-positivity advocate Dana Falsetti.)

Stanley realized there was an opportunity to showcase a real yoga practice to the world.

Stanley believes people are paying attention because they aren’t used to seeing a fat black woman tackle tough asana, the American yoga space being—in her words—“deeply rooted in white supremacy.” She’s uncensored in her critiques of modern yoga in the West and of forms of oppression and body shaming she calls “patriarchal white-centric beauty standards.” She calls herself fat constantly—in her Instagram posts (“It’s weird to be the fat kid that thin kids want to know/befriend,” she wrote in August); in her 2017 book, Every Body Yoga; and in conversation—as a means of taking back ownership of a term generally reserved for shaming those it describes. To that end, she’s a one-woman visibility crusader, dismantling expectations about what a yoga body looks like and encouraging more people who don’t generally see themselves reflected in the yoga space to come along.

See also 5 Ways You Can Use Your Yoga Practice to Improve Your Body Image

Stanley started her Instagram account not to become the poster child for fat yoga, but to solicit feedback on a home practice she’d started in 2012. Like so many yoga practitioners, she says she never truly felt comfortable in a public yoga class, squeezing herself into the farthest back corner of the room wishing to be invisible—the very opposite of what she stands for today. But back then, she was insecure and a little lost, having dropped out of grad school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, so she began a yoga practice from the safety of her own living room. She utilized Yoga Journal’s pose index and online classes from Kathryn Budig and Amy Ippoliti, documenting her progress online. “But the response I was getting from people wasn’t a lot of feedback about my practice, it was more people being like, ‘Oh, my god. I didn’t know fat people could do yoga,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Why do you think that fat people can’t do yoga? Fat people do all kinds of stuff all the time.’” That’s when she realized her unique opportunity to broadcast a real yoga practice, “scars and all,” she says.

Armed with a highly articulate voice, a powerful social platform, and a whole lot of attitude, this yoga teacher and New Age thought leader has declared to the world that anybody can practice yoga.

By the time she attended a 200-hour yoga teacher training (YTT) in Asheville, North Carolina, in March 2015, she had amassed a sizable online following and interest from the press. In January of that year, People ran a story about the “self-proclaimed fat femme” who, with 29,000 followers, had become a “yoga star on Instagram.” In the piece, she discussed her plan to crowdsource the money she needed to attend YTT later. “There’s obviously a need for this,” she said at the time. “People are thirsty for someone who looks like them—or at least who doesn’t look like everybody else—to show them what to do.”

But as we sit across from each other eating churros and sipping on lattes one October morning in Durham, where she lives with her partner and three cats, she tells me she never aspired to become a yoga teacher at all. “So many people were asking me to do it,” she recalls. “But I didn’t understand why I needed to be the one to teach.” Instead, she’d thoughtfully respond to her fans by researching and suggesting Jessamyn-approved teachers in their areas. It wasn’t until her father, who had disapproved of her foray into yoga “from the jump-off” offered to help fund her training that she began to take teaching seriously. “My parents do not have $3,000 laying around,” Stanley says. “For him to be so emphatic, I realized there were bigger forces at play.”

Stanley has kept a dedicated home practice for the past seven years.

Stanley says her life could be neatly divided into pre- and post-YTT. “During YTT I had a number of experiences that cracked open my soul,” she says. “I was able to see so many things I’d been hiding from myself, and I understood that the way to teach people would be to genuinely live this practice and to shed light, as much as I can, on the spaces that are ugly and dark and complicated, and reflect that to the people. For me, that’s what teaching should be. Rather than being a career choice, it’s a mission. A call to action. Something to drive purpose in life. When I left training I was like, ‘OK, now it’s time to reach the people who have asked me to reach them.”

See also How One Yoga Teacher Reclaimed Her Healthy Body Image in the Face of Shaming

And she does. Stanley spends nearly every weekend on the road teaching classes in regions where she’s been beckoned by students who are hungry for her brand of off-the-cuff honesty and brazen practice style. “She definitely has a take-no-prisoners approach that I deeply admire about her,” says yogalebrity in her own right Kathryn Budig. “I think we’re entering a phase where people want fewer platitudes and more honesty, and she delivers any message that she wants to give with no frills, completely unadulterated.”

Stanley's tattoos serve as a reminder to practice what she preaches.

Stanley’s ultimate goal is to make more body-diverse classes accessible to anyone who wants them—and to those who don’t yet realize that we all need them if we are ever to truly embrace what yoga is all about. Her new yoga app, The Under Belly, will launch early this year, helping to make her classes available to anyone with a smartphone or computer. Stanley realizes that this alone requires a certain amount of privilege, but she says she’s doing the best she can. She’s got bills to pay, too.

On our last day together, I ask her about some of the tattoos that adorn her arms like sheet music. One of them is the state motto of North Carolina, Esse quam videri, Latin for To be, rather than to seem. “She’s not about what things look like or being a yoga poseur,” says Sage Rountree, co-owner of Carolina Yoga Company, where Stanley once had a teaching residency. “She focuses more on being real than trying to project the image of being real.”

A comfortable home is the backbone of Stanley’s practice.

And that’s exactly why Stanley would like everyone to stop calling her a yogi. True yogis, she says, live in a state of perpetual detachment—from material possessions, from worry, from judgment. “It would be outrageous and outlandish to say I’ve found a way of dealing with, and releasing, attachment like that,” she says. But hey, she’s working on it. 

See also Is Social Media Wrecking Your Body Image?

About the Author Lindsay Tucker is a senior editor at Yoga Journal.

[rexylafemme]

infinite deaths lead to infinite transformations

i recognize lately that there's this lingering sense of failure & loss & sadness living in my body, existing just out of frame in my thoughts (meaning, i guess, i don't give real space, attentive space to), having specifically to do with [said in bratty, tongue-in-cheek, big big air quotes] "my identity," "my body." 

the other night i was on the phone with a dear kindred friend of many years, was responding to something she said and i said, "if i were you, that would make me feel really bad. i mean, if i were a human being, that would..." i stopped and then we both started cracking up. freudian slip. in the moment, i'm not quite sure what i meant, but it felt like i really meant it, really natural to say. not being a human being is a sense i have about myself, i think because humanness is defined by things that are fundamentally exclusive of my experience, how i see myself, how i think, how i move through the world, what my body is. also, trans people just ARE mythical creatures.

anyway, whatever. i don't "exist" technically, but i do exist actually. and also, we have always existed, we-- trans people [which i use as a really broad, inclusive term to include all of the figures who never are/were able to claim that term, all of the figures for whom it does/did not exist, all of the figures it is/was robbed from, all of the figures who it is/was rewritten out of] have always existed. we are not new.

anyway, whatever. this quieted, stifled, devastated feeling of loss/grief/sadness/failure. though i wrote an article about it, i've never actually grieved testosterone. grieved taking it, grieved what i would not have not taking it, the death of the possibility. that my decision to stop was motivated by a number of things we aren't really able to talk about with pride, gusto, ease. [who is we in this sentence, all my non-human, trans self-states (?)  strung together through this thread of my life, the life i didn't ask for but i have anyway and try to appreciate tho it seems widely the Reality i live in, am called Human or not-Human in, doesn't appreciate me often-- tho i have a lot of really amazing loving people in my life far and wide, and, yes, have fought to carve out space to be seen in, acknowledged in, appreciated in [not just for trans-ness] however fully or un-fully, however full of truths or lies.]   i'm fucking crazy-- i identify that way, probably ahead of any other thing i am other than being poor and white, i am crazy before i am trans, i am crazy before i am anything that defines what my body is bc who cares and who knows but me [tho i recognize the political importance of identifying my body as something, i guess, even when it is nothing, feels like it or i am outside of it mostly or effectively it is treated like nothing, by me, others, lovers, the state, etc], i am crazy before i am queer-- if even i am that, having always had an ambivalent relationship with that term given its evolution as this annoying and unfortunate category that recycles exclusion and problems of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, gatekeeping, rules for how to be, who to fuck/love/be close to and how, how to look, what to wear, what to like, builds institutions whose foundations are based in all of the above, etc. how quickly we forget how poor crazy black, brown, and white people radicalized the word queer, how it became Queer, trademarked by judith butler et al, liberal arts colleges, universities, research journals and then further used to silence, reject, consume, criticize, murder-by-complicity poor crazy black, brown, and white trans and queer people. rageful yawn! [so boring, so anger-producing, so over it]. and all of this so then jill soloway can make "the best tv series of the century"  [so says a white cis old dude w/ money named sparrow to my trans coworker who gets fed up with him after he says something like 'oh your name is different than it was a few months ago, that's so interesting. no one changes their names anymore unless they're transsexuals" and then they were like "yeah that would be me." "OHHHH TRANSPARENT IS THE BEST TV SHOW OF THE CENTURY," sparrow says in response. sparrow, who said to me, as many before him have and many after will: "YOUR name is rex? YOU? it's so WEIRD, YOUUU have that name???! wow, who would've thought!" cuz being a grown-ass white man self-named after a fucking bird isn't weird at all. transparent, yay, the tv show about US, that's not really about US. and i watch it so i guess i'm probably a hypocritical asshole, but i am starving for some representation. anyway, whatever. i'm probably crazy and poor before other things because crazy and poor provides the wash over which everything else i live is experienced. crazy, poor, grieving this synthetic steroid i experienced as poison in my body and brain. this thing i can't have that i want. this toxic thing. toxic because it erodes away my vag, toxic because it could destroy my liver, toxic because continued use over time could pose all these extreme health problems, but who knows really! cuz, why would we study that?! and when we do study it, why would we focus on the multiplicity of bodies and spectrum of people who approach HRT?! toxic because i am a crazy poor person with a lot of health problems to begin with that i don’t talk about and i probably would develop all the like, weird anomalous issues that "most people just won't ever have to worry about"! [most people is... ? ]

toxic because i lost all track of how i related to myself, how i felt, or what i even wanted while i was on it. i know what i want and what i like [about what it gave me]: more hair everywhere [yay!], androgynizing body shape [awesome!], growth in my underwear [i don't really know what to call what in-betweenness is going on there, cockette i say to myself but that feels maybe too campy for general use and not sexy however fitting and hilarious. anyway, it's cool and fun!], androgynizing voice [sometimes sultry, sometimes pubescent, sometimes girly, fran fine as a man laugh, excellent]. and the goal was always androgynizing, was always becoming something else, not one thing. tiresias, venus as a boy, dionysus, whatever.

but so i am sad because i can't move forward with those things that i like. the embodiment. and embodiment for me, as a crazy poor person, is constantly difficult. am i ever even in my body, do i have one, what is it good for, why. i moved further away from a sense of even desiring "masculinity" when i started t. that was a gift, to realize my desire wasn’t about acquisition of “maleness.” i just wanted all the things i described above: the physical changes that for whatever reason signify "maleness" or "trans-maleness" and therefore told people that's what i wanted because i wanted those physical attributes. i don't wanna be a man or a trans man. man, not something that i ever felt like. boy, dude, male, maybe, some hybrid masc/femme thing, cross-human.  i definitely didn't want the head-hair loss/thinning, which happened and put me into a neurotic, severely gender-NONCONFIRMING frenzy. i can't lose my hair i can't lose my hair. call it femme vanity, i dunno or really care, a bitch isn't gonna be bald, that's it, not ok not possible not happening so that also informed my decision to stop t, tho i didn't really admit it. i won't say i didn't/don't want the "he" pronoun, sometimes. i want them all. i'm greedy and excessive and i don’t like being limited. i want to be what i am: a mix, a shapeshifter. one angle i look like one thing, one angle another. the reason people stare at me all the time: bewildered, upset, confused, looking for clear markers. staring at my crotch or into my eyes, my face, working out their assessments. judging what i'm wearing against my facial hair against my makeup against my voice against an absence of breasts against my name against my...

anyway, whatever. i am sad because i can kinda have all of those things: more hair, more androgynized body. if i try hard enough. if i have enough time and money. because i could see a nutritionist and an herbalist specializing in trans health [they exist if you can pay to see them!]. or alternately, i could DIY it, buy all the herbs in the androgynizing herb regimen i came up with through research, and i could take them every day for... forever if i wanted, or for however long i wanted to, based solely on my desire to do it. not if i wanted, if i could. but i don't have the money. and i can't. and i could do all the exercises that would androgynize my shape. if i had the time and the energy. if i could get my shit together enough. if i weren't cycling in and out of housing insecurity since i returned to nyc and even before and through my whole life. if i weren't, some days, just able to do the bare minimum for myself, if i weren't racked with body pains somedays from a combination of: the things i do to my body that are bad for it [binding], not being able to sleep, work, running around, having a sick, sensitive body, the ways i carry stress in my body and where. if i didn't have problems prioritizing myself. if i weren't afraid of the structure of my exercise and nutrition regimen evolving into eating disorder and unhealthy obsession like they have before. if i weren't crazy.

it becomes about all the things i am always failing at that i can't do much about other than be patient and accept the material/systemic/emotional limitations that frame my life. back to poor, back to crazy: why i can't move forward at the speed that i would like to with my "transition." crazy means i can't be on t without being crazier and more sleepless and more in trauma self-states. crazy means i sometimes can't live up to my own structures and routines for my own health: body, mind, spirit. poor means i can't go to the trans nutritionist, the trans herbalist, buy the herbs and have them all the time. and i'm trying so hard to get that money, to do that. or, i'm trying so hard to be okay with not having what i want, what i need. remembering it's not my fault. there's nothing i can do about it. but that's not really a consolation so much as it is another reminder of my powerlessness to shift certain realities that affect not only me, but so many other people i care about, or people i do not know, everyone who should have everything that they want and need, regardless of who they are and what they can afford materially/socially/politically.

and i am grieving for all the knowledge we have lost and is not widely accessible. because tho i may not have the evidence or may not have done all the research, i fucking know people have been "transitioning" naturally and through magic for as long as people have existed and throughout all cultural contexts, whether trans-ness has been exalted (and it has, throughout time) or demonized/criminalized/driven underground. our mythological selves.

[halifaxnoise]

TONIGHT at @khybercentre — Is Riverdale your Netflix flavor of the month? Your guilty pleasure? The best thing you've ever watched? Do you hate/love it? Do you think the screenwriters use a weird amount of alliteration? Do you think that gritty TV is tired? Do you think the show centers boring + toxic masculinities in harmful and frustrating ways? We wanna hear about it! Come watch an episode of Riverdale/ eat snacks/ meet new pals/ laugh/ roll your eyes into the high heavens where **spoiler alert** Jason Blossom is. The screening will be followed by a moderated group discussion that will unpack themes such as: -Commodification + depoliticization of feminism -Exotification, fetishization, and devaluing of BIPOC femmes and BIPOC femme brilliance -Anti Black racism and white supremacy of Riverdale High -Sneaky misogyny disguised as softness and "bromance" -Archie Blandrew's boring, white, entitled masculinity -Girl-next-door/ party girl dichotomy -Sexualizing and misrepresentation of mental health -Queer baiting -Erasure of asexuality -Upper-middleclass gaze on deep & violent class divides ***This event is a PWYC-5$ to fundraise for the The Khyber Centre for the Arts*** Access Notes: The main entrance to the space is up 2-steps from the sidewalk on Hollis St., however there is the mall entrance further down the block outside on the same street is open during the day until 6PM and can be used for ground level entry. There is not a button to press on the door for it to open automatically but there will be signage available and a volunteer stationed there to open the door if needed from 7:15-7:45. There is an all genders wheelchair accessible washroom (1 toilet - down the hall and to the right) and gender neutral washroom stalls (3 toilets 1 urinal - up a set of 10 stairs and to the left). Subtitles on screen. Event is PWYC and snacks will be provided. Childcare available upon request! If you have any questions or concerns, please contact: volunteer@southhousehalifax.ca http://ift.tt/2qoqXQK