visiblevoices - Tumblr blog

[visiblevoices]

A GREAT discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery.

How to Solve It, George Pólya

[visiblevoices]

The cultures of people of color are either packaged for consumption or called upon to fill cultural and spiritual voids of Eurocentrism.

Michael Vavrus

That shit blew my mind and made understanding cultural appropriation way clearer for me. 

(via isanah)

[visiblevoices]

I am not superwoman. My mother is not superwoman. My mother’s mother is not superwoman. I am, we are, soft. Can shatter. Crumble in your hands. Our survival does not mean we prosper. We are like other women but unlike them. So do not tell us we can handle anything. We only seem like superwoman, a figment of your imagination, because you have forced our lives to be perpetual labor with only seconds of relief. If we carry the world on our shoulders and the children on our backs, what are we but your glorified mules slapped with guilt praises of perseverance and strength. Our bones and our blood and our sweat have built the wealth of nations. Our burial should not be the first time we rest.

Yasmin Mohamed Yonis (via ethiopienne)

[visiblevoices]

When you find yourself drowning in self-hate, you have to remind yourself that you weren’t born feeling this way. That at some point in your journey, some person or experience sent you the message that there was something wrong with who you are, and you internalized those messages and took them on as your truth. But that hate isn’t yours to carry, and those judgments aren’t about you. And in the same way that you learned to think badly of yourself, you can learn to think new, self-loving and accepting thoughts. You can learn to challenge those beliefs, take away their power, and reclaim your own. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen over night. But it is possible. And it starts when you decide that there has to be more to life than this pain you feel. It starts when you decide that you deserve to discover it.

Daniell Koepke (via internal-acceptance-movement)

[visiblevoices]

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood

 Audre Lorde

[visiblevoices]

Even though men and women are presumably exposed to common liberal arts curriculum and other educational programs during the undergraduate years, it would seem that these programs serve more to preserve, rather than to reduce, stereotypic differences between men and women in behavior, personality, aspirations and achievement.

Alexander Astin

[visiblevoices]

To finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the path toward visibility

Mitsuye Yamada

[visiblevoices]

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas

Mona Caird, 1892

[visiblevoices]

women leave school crammed full of interesting historical facts and elegant Spanish subjunctives, proud of their ability to study hard and get the best grades, and determined to please. But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change, and they don’t realize it. They slam into a work world that doesn’t reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners. The requirements for adult success are different, and their confidence takes a beating.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

[visiblevoices]

When it was announced that the 2014 Whitney Biennial would involve three different curators, none of whom work at the museum, each organizing his or her own exhibition on a separate floor, this seemed a canny assessment of the current condition. No more teamwork, no more institutionally sanctioned judgment, no more full-time salaried employees. Instead, we were offered the specter of three distinct personalities—all of whom are white, well known, and highly regarded for work done outside New York—which set the stage for an exploration of contemporary curating as much as of the state of artists’ studios. In this regard, the exhibition did not disappoint, as it permitted a fairly gimlet-eyed view of things: three different groups of artists (with no overlap!), three different modes of presenting the work in the catalogue, and three nominally different sets of aesthetic and/or political concerns. I say nominally because, in truth, I came away from the exhibition thinking that it privileged similarity over difference—an experience that confirmed my nagging sense of the paucity of, dare I say, “rigor” within the contemporary curatorial field.

Helen Molesworth

[visiblevoices]

Appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly toward others

Official definition of the California task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility, 1990

[visiblevoices]

The differences between the cultures of these two small nations have complex and deep roots: the British versus the French as colonial powers; an individualized Protestantism versus a hierarchical Catholicism as very different overlays on African spiritual traditions; and perhaps most important, the self-fulfilling prophecy of any system once it is entrenched. Because we tend to treat others as we have been treated, a trustworthy system leads to more trust, corruption leads to more corruption, violence to more violence. But all these factors can be summed up in the frequent cynicism among the poor of Haiti and the obsessive need for display among its rich rulers, contrasted with the sense of personal efficacy, irreverence and pride among the people of Barbados: in other words, the marks of low and high self-esteem.

Gloria Steinem, Revolution From Within

[visiblevoices]

It is confusing. Why do so many seemingly normal people sexually assault children? One study indicates 34 percent of offenders are family members, 59 percent acquaintances. Upward of 94 percent are male, with 30 to 50 percent of abusers still children or adolescents themselves. “Not all people who abuse are the same and not all of the reasons they abuse are the same,” says Joan Tabachnick, a national consultant on offender treatment. “Some people are sexually attracted to young children. Some abuse because they have access to children and are drinking, depressed, jealous, or just need comfort. Some are developmentally delayed and don’t understand the implications of what they do. Some are psychopaths. Some have grown up in a culture where the signs of sexual abuse are ignored and somehow justify to themselves that it is okay.” What we do know, says Tabachnick, is that the cost of sexual assault is huge, both socially and economically. We know that when an organization or a community—whether college campus or elementary school or church group—creates a culture of accountability, where sexual assault is talked about and not tolerated, where inappropriate behaviors are discussed and addressed through organizational policies, and people are educated about healthy sexual development—people are less likely to offend.

Catherine Buni, Teaching Kids About Sexual Assault

[visiblevoices]

If you work on political emotions, one of the things you have to deal with all the time is the pedagogy of emotion. Aesthetics is one of the few places we learn to recognize our emotions as trained and not natural. Fear is natural, but the objects that make you afraid emerge historically. You get entrained by the world. When you’re born, all you want is food, and by the time you’re eight, or by the time you’ve been in primary school for awhile, or whatever, you have feelings about citizenship, you have feelings about race, you have feelings about gender and sexuality. You’ve been trained to take on those objects as world-sustaining perspectives. That interests me. So for you, what looked like a conflict between institutional attachment to the world and intimate models of attachment are not to me in conflict at all but are a part of the problem of imagining and living attachments to lifeworlds.

Lauren Berlant

[visiblevoices]

The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.

Jack Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure)

[visiblevoices]

A woman-of-color who writes poetry or paints or dances or makes movies knows there is no escape from race or gender when she is writing or painting. She can’t take off her color and sex and leave them at the door or her study or studio. Nor can she leave behind her history. Art is about identity, among other things, and her creativity is political.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras — Creative and Cultural Perspectives by Women of Color  (via jalwhite)

Very true

(via blackorchidd)

[visiblevoices]

"Don’t you find it odd," she continued, "that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try."

Ethan Hawke, The Hottest State