HAPPY HOMOWEENNNN!!! Ok, my fave holiday ever. I was thinking this year i might go super glam bride of frankenstein, or maybe teen wolf, but I can't rightly steal that from Devo, or maybe tye-dye puppy. Anyway, hope you enjoy these videos. Elvira was a huge idol of mine growing up, I watched that movie probably a million times. Really dumb to see an icon of fierce femmeness co-opted by the straight cis male gaze. GRRR. Also trigger warning on the bug-out eye part of that elvira clip. So horrible when I see things I otherwise love have these shitty shows of heterosexism and racism. GRRR again.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
...?
My friend Devo sent this to me and it made me make the .....rrr? puppy dog face/noise. There are so many random things going on in this psa, but most of all, pot makes you gay? really? I mean...I know some huge queero smokeykitties, but seri, mtv, puhlease. And I guess they knew they couldn't get away with that, so they added the whole incest thing, so people can go, no dewd, seriously it's gross cause they're bros, not cause they're gay! Thanks MTV, yet again you are a beeming beacon of radicalism and hope for the younger generations. .... .
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Gook: John McCain's Racism And Why It Matters
I appreciated the post on RaceWire about the above video, and thought the points about the glossing over/suppression of dialogue around McCain's use of gook and it's use as a declaration of war, actual or implied, was spot on.
As you all can tell I've taken a little bit of a hiatus from posting recently, part of that is because of the horribly racist and transphobic house I was living in for about a month and a half when I first moved here to Philly. (The cat of the house was actually named gook and despite my insistent attempts to change it/refusal to call it such/attempts at dialogue, two of the housemates actively fought me on this.) Needless to say, I've moved out of that house and into one that is full of wonderful people filled with queer, trans, anti-racist radical love, and am excited to start posting again now that I am out of crisis mode.
My old roomates use of gook was pretty intense. When they saw my jaw drop at their first use of it they quickly followed up with an explanation "no, he's Vietnamese, it's ok." What kind of follow-up is that? Just to make sure that if I had any doubts that the use of the word was just a flook and not knowingly, aggressively racist (one of my housemates hadn't known the meaning of the word before I told her, a pretty big sign of privilege right there) they would be erased. I immediately saw that these people were identifying my whiteness, and expecting my support and approval of their racism because of it. So...after conversations about racism, false reclamation as an act of oppression ("we're taking the power away from the word, making it mean nothing," as if), focusing on the effect of a statement rather than the character of the sayer, two out of three of my housemates still did not budge. I eventually had to move out and one of the things that I took away from this situation was the importance of safe spaces. At the same time all this was going on, there was a whole lot of transphobic, internalized woman/femininity-hating garbage happening too, and the lack of any resting place was totally unsustainable for me, and ultimately made it harder for me to do any anti-racism work.
Questions for White Anti-Racism Allies: How can we turn around situations where people are unwilling to change their minds? What strategies have you found to work when the conversation closes down? What happens when "public-opinion" change hits a brick wall? What white anti-racism allies in present and past history can we look to as examples of these kinds of change?
Wholey Shit
HIII all, so I've had my first day of work at Whole Foods, and there were somethings that happened. y I asked my co-worker "So, do you know what personal gender pronouns are?" At first he thought I was saying that I wanted him to only use they/them when referring to other people in front of me./(why does everyone always think this? I've started playing grammar teacher, "wolfie has short hair, they are over there banging their head against the wall). Needless to say he also hadn't heard of the words transgender and genderqueer. At which point I thought, whoa...it's my first day on the job, and I also have to deal with educating you about a whole ton of shit? Great. I mean I expected this, but come on.
He was on the edge of asking me another question, his ignorance turning into near uncontrollable curiosity when he said: "I've never encountered any of this before, and I want to respect you, and maybe I don't need to understand you (put my stamp of cis approval on you) in order to respect you (ding ding! we have a winner!). YES, finally a cis person is telling me the magic words, "I will listen to what you want, rather than trying to force all the information I think I need and have a right to out of you, and then making my decision about whether to respect you or not." I mean, it took him 5 inappropriate questions to get there, but at least he came to it?/much faster than most people I've known. Thx for not asking that potentially offensive question, because lord knows that if judging from the last three "unoffensive" questions you asked me, including such favorites as "Is that your real name? How long did you know you were genderqueer? Is your partner...this way, too?" I would have keeled over dead. Btdubs, went to Harry's Occult Store after work, it toadally ruld.
My co-worker had just gone to harassment/discrimination trainings the night before, and apart from oddly enough not learning how to interact with trans/gender-variant folks without being oppressive, he learned that if you say "I'm not now, and never will, intentionally offend/discriminate against you based on your _____ identity" then you've just protected yourself from a discrimination case. Hurray. As I found out when I brought a sexual harassment case to Human Resources against Jim Patten at the Hampshire College Post Office, (shout out, bitter call out edition) all an oppressor/victimizer has to say is "But I didn't mean it that way" to get off free and clear. This obviously protects the oppressor by emphasizing the "good faith" character of the oppressor (who would intentionally oppress someone? answer: more ppl than I'd care to think of) and put blame and responsibility on the oppressed/survivor and how "sensitive" they are being/how it's their responsibility to educate whomever they encounter. At least it stopped him from asking that offensive question.
Anyway, what I wanted to say was, how can people like my co-worker get information about how to interact with trans people without me having to do a trans 101 every 5 seconds? I was really stumped until I thought, Oh yea...maybe the internet? All I can hope is that people go home and educate their damn selves. Thank god I've found a queer/trans house to live in. That's probably how I have the energy to write this post now. So apart from a co-worker asking me "no what's your real name" getting increasingly more aggressive as he continued to ask, and then saying "no, it's fine, I'll go find out on my own" Which, by the way, is super cool that he can, seeing as Whole Foods puts everyone's legal name on all the schedules that are put up around the
store/legal name, rly?...o that's funny that you spelled mine wrong... But it is nice to know that my roomate, the fox, was responsible for getting gender-neutral bathrooms for the customers (which are the only ones in the store I now use). Throwing up now officially over. Question: Baby steps? Answer: With a blow-torch and molotov.Next post will be more insightful I promise/hope. Just had to get that out.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
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