#class and race/culture are a thing within queer culture

[joan-of-feminism]

Gender Is A Hierarchy, Not A Spectrum or Identity

Within the last decade, I’m sure that we have all seen something like this in a sociology class or just from scrolling through social media…

Queer theory is a postmodernist theory that has put forth the idea that gender exists on a spectrum as opposed to a binary. Important queer theorist, Judith Butler, says that gender is something fluid, always changing. Not only that, gender is also a performance. We do gender by how we act, what clothes we wear, what hobbies we enjoy. Queer theory says that gender is not tied to biology, it is socially constructed, and that, in theory, there can be an infinite amount of genders (Brown, 2019). While, I can definitely agree that gender is socially constructed, everything else that queer theory says about gender is a no from me. Here’s why I disagree and why I think all people need to think critically about what queer theory is really saying.

For thousands of years, femininity has been thrust upon females and masculinity has been thrust upon males. While some aspects of masculinity and femininity have changed throughout time and culture, some things have remained inherent about those constructs. Femininity enforces submission and weakness onto women. It puts women into the caretaking and child-rearing role based on their biological capacity to give birth. This keeps women dependent on men and prevents us from attaining social, political, and financial power. Femininity also sexualizes women, and causes us to become physically weak (foot binding, high heels, avoidance of gaining muscle mass, dresses and skirts which restrict movement). All of this because we are born female. We are put into the feminine gender because of our sex. As for males, they are put into the masculine gender. Masculinity enforces domination, leadership, and control. Due to those qualities, the masculine gender gives males social, political, and financial power, not just over themselves, but specifically over women. In essence, gender is the the imposed masculinity and femininity according to our sex, and one gender is put above the other. Society has created a hierarchy of gender where people who are given the masculine gender (males) are given power over those with the feminine gender (females).

Now of course, as a feminist, I am very against this gender binary/hierarchy, and many feminists in the 90s and early 2000s pushed back against this which is how queer theory started. The issue is that queer theory ignores the hierarchy part of gender. Gender is a social hierarchy just like race and class. In our white supremacist, capitalist society, white people unfortunately still hold power over other races, and the rich hold power over the poor. This same line of thinking applies to gender, because gender is a system that gives men power over women. Queer theory ignores/dismisses gender being a system that oppresses women based on our sex. Which leads to my next disagreement. Queer theory posits that gender is not actually tied to sex at all. This is a blatant lie. How have we decided for thousands of years who is put into the fem gender and who is put into the masc gender? We use sex. Females are put into the lower class of the gender hierarchy and males are put into the upper class of the hierarchy. So actually, sex and gender are intimately tied together. This is not to say that sex = gender. Gender, again, is a social construct of femininity and masculinity, but more than that, it’s a system of oppression that is based on sex. Now you could say, “well wouldn’t queer theory actually be good for women? It gets rid of the strict gender roles forced upon them?” Not true. It actually is dependent on gender roles and it implies that in order to get rid of oppressive gender, women can simply choose not to perform femininity. The issue with that is there is an abundance of research out there (and personal experiences of GNC women) to show that choosing to not be feminine doesn’t get rid of the social hierarchy that is attached to something we can’t change. Our sex. Queer theory of course says that sex is also a social construct.

“For Butler, the linguistic (discursive) norms we apply to talk about sex, sex organs and the body themselves create the idea of bodily sex (ibid.). Some theorists thus argue that the idea of male and female bodies with definitively different organs, hormones and chromosomes is an understanding that we have created through language and through the social meanings we inscribe on the body” (Brown, 2019).

Queer theorists like to argue that the only reason a body with testes, a penis, and flat chest is male, is because we as a society have all agreed that those characteristics make up a male body, that there is nothing innately male about that body. The same applies to the female body. The thing is, that just because us humans have the ability to categorize and name things found in nature, does not mean we constructed it. If it can be naturally observed, untouched by cultural ideas, then it is a natural phenomenon, not a social one. Humans were being born as males and females long before we had language or culture. Male and female are sexes found in many species, with or without understandings of gender.

Conclusion

So gender as a performance just doesn’t hold up. It reduces gender down to our actions, our clothing, etc… It is also dangerous, since it says that gender is not a hierarchy, but a spectrum of identities and outward expression. This causes feminists to ignore or dismiss the power struggle and oppressive systems at play between the sexes. The gender spectrum also relies heavily on oppressive gender roles and even perpetuates them. Take another look at the first two images from above. The first image shows gender as being a spectrum between traditional femininity and traditional masculinity. You are either a “Barbie” or a “GI Joe”. In fact, gender as a spectrum doesn’t get rid of gender at all. It doesn’t push back against gender norms or stereotypes at all. It simply says that there is a spectrum of gender between highly feminine and highly masculine. It is dependent on the two genders. It relies on the two genders to create gender identities that are a mix of the two. Queer theory’s gender identity relies on keeping this hierarchy alive, while simultaneously ignoring how this hierarchy puts men above women. Here is a quote and image I found that really sums up this entire post if some of you are still confused or if I just didn’t explain things that well.

“Gender is a hierarchy that enables men to be dominant and conditions women into subservience. As gender is a fundamental element of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984) it is particularly disconcerting to see elements of queer discourse argue that gender is not only innately held but sacrosanct. Far from being a radical alternative to the status quo, the project of “queering” gender only serves to replicate the standards set by patriarchy through its essentialism. A queer understanding of gender does not challenge patriarchy in any meaningful way – rather than encouraging people to resist the standards set by patriarchy, it offers them a way to embrace it. Queer politics have not challenged traditional gender roles so much as breathed fresh life into them – therein lies the danger.To argue that gender could or should be “queered” is to lose sight of how gender functions as a system of oppression. Hierarchies cannot, by definition, be assimilated into the politics of liberation. Structural power imbalances cannot be subverted out of existence – reducing gender to a matter of performativity or personal identification denies its practical function as a hierarchy” (sisteroutrider.Wordpress.com).

Sources:

Extra Readings that I think are helpful in understanding this topic:

Gender heriarchy and the social construction of femininity; the imposed mask by Kouadio Germain N’ Guessan

It’s not about the gender binary, it’s about the gender hierarchy: a reply to “letting go of the gender binary” by Jeanne Ward (especially page 291-294)

#gender abolition #gender hierarchy #gender critical #queer theory #gender is a performance #gender is a social construct #radfem ideology #radfem #radblr

[hussyknee]

Regular reminder that if you don't live in the Global North, nothing they have to say applies to the rest of us. Actually most things they say have little value anyway since the Global South and Eastern folks are afterthoughts to them, much less center us in their social justice.

- The USAmerican cultural hegemony has fuck all to do with us. Be aware of what they're trying to peddle you, but they have more power to harm and radicalise you than you have ever could to harm them. This applies to both the Western left and right wing. They are both equally racist, colonial and imperialist.

- Global North issues around capitalism, exploitation and piracy have nothing to do with us. Consumer activism might work to some extent over there idk, but if anyone brings it up over in the lands of the Black and brown people, you can laugh them out of the country.

- Their queer history is not ours. Congrats to Stonewall and all but that's just some shit that happened in the US. We need to dig past 18 different strata of cultural genocide and colonial garbage to mine our queer histories back into the light, and designing microlabel flags and fighting over colonizer language acronyms have fuck all to do with that either.

- Always pirate everything within reach. Save up and buy from authors and creators you really like (that's what I do – esp when it's a BIPOC creator), but people who can't afford to buy shit in the first place ain't stealing food out of anybody's mouths. Pirating is praxis and always has been since the days of the East India Company.

- Don't buy into the USAmerican theories of race. They aren't universal. "BIPOC" especially is a USAmerican specific term, it is not used in the UK or other settler colonies. Constructs of race and the tribal Other far predated European colonization; race as a colour system that exists today is simply one variation of it. The global apartheid against the mellanated takes many forms, histories and terminology. There are especially no "people of colour" in Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Polynesia. There are only people who live there, and "people of white".

Race is a fake, made-up conceptualization imposed by whoever has power within each region. It's ethnic, cultural and casteist, with no biological basis whatsoever. There is no uniformity, no universalism, no rhyme nor reason to any of it; the only people who know exactly who doesn't belong are the oppressors. I'm seeing concepts like "unambiguously black" floating around the terminally online Western left; any dark-skinned person of the Global South should split their sides laughing at it. Whites have no ambiguity on who the darkies are.

- Read, watch, listen to, play whatever the hell you want, just have the sense to pirate it, and to be very conscious about the narratives they try to smuggle.

- When the US and UK speak, listen with compassionate interest, offer what solidarity you can spare for their downtrodden, and then go back to reading and following your own fucking news. Focus on our own women's and reproductive rights, trans rights, queer histories, rise of fascism, militarisation, anti-blackness, class warfare, nationalist violence, imperialism etc. That is decolonization, that is emancipation from the Western cultural hegemony. Everything else is the bread and circuses of empire, in which both the left and right wing of the West are complicit.

We owe the Global North nothing more than we can each individually afford to extend to them on grounds of common human decency and compassion. Which is a lot more than they will ever reciprocate.

#racism #colonialism #western imperialism #american exceptionalism #american cultural hegemony #decolonization #lgbtqia #queer history #trans rights #us military #disability #ableism #women's rights #reproductive rights #fascism #global south #eastern europe #africa #asia #caribbean #polynesia #oceania #landback #indigenous sovereignty #anthropology #classism #elitism #capitalism #knee of huss #piracy

[vampire-wizard-solidarity]

i think a problem i have with most discussions of queerness in botw is the fact that, inevitably, gerudo (and everything that has to do with them) are brought up, and inevitably the racism and misogyny inherent in those elements is ignored, despite being massively important.

“would the gerudo let trans women in, or are they terfs?” neither, because making gerudo town a female only space isn’t an actual world building decision, and isn’t treated as such. everything about that storyline is done for the sake of a mindless consumption by an audience that isn’t brown, or queer, for that matter. multiple gerudo realize link is a man and all of them say the exact same thing: “oh? whatever, i don’t care”. no differing attitudes, explanations as to why they don’t care, how significant being female only is to gerudo, culturally, is not explored. the text deeply uninterested in exploring the implications of gerudo town as it exists, which is why it falls apart the moment you think about it:

if the gerudo are merchants, how come gerudo town, their merchant hub, is a gated community? how have they maintained their reputation as merchants when their main hub turns away half the customers? why are there are a ton of male merchants outside gerudo town trying to get in, but all of the women inside are presented as simply tourists, not even interested in selling or buying wares for the sake of business? if the gerudo have been like this since forever, why haven’t merchant groups got specifically female representatives to do business in gerudo town, and why is the bazaar so empty compared to the town, if it’s open to men as well, and also has several gerudo merchants?

and that’s just the surface level logistical problems, i think a very notable way to demonstrate the way the gerudo are treated in a uniquely misogynistic (and racist) way is the fact that botw has TWO monogender races. the gorons are also monogender, they’re all men, and notably they’re let into gerudo town, implying a difference in cultural perceptions of gender between the races. the topic of reproduction is never brought up with the gorons, despite the fact that daruk, one of the primary goron characters, has a direct descendant. the logistics of how this came to be are never brought up. for the gerudo, on the other hand, these logistics are a massively centred. they have a whole class for how to interact with men, several characters explain how women have to leave gerudo town at some point in order to find a man, and there are several gerudo women you can interact with that will react to link being a man in some way (including shyness, fear, apprehension). in contrast, no goron ever reacts in any special way to a woman, goron x hylian relations are never brought up, and gorons being a monogender race are a background detail that is treated as simply normal within the world, with only a minor implication of a pretty interesting piece of world building.

there are multiple quests involving getting a gerudo and a hylian together. notably, cross species relations between a gerudo and another race are never brought up. interspecies relations are only a topic of discussion when it’s between a hylian and a humanoid enough girl. only when a basically human man is getting together with an “other” girl.

the logistics of reproduction of a monogender race are only brought up when the answer is a narrative where an “other” race can be “consumed”, fetishised by a (usually white) man who is on the inside of whatever exists that is considered the “inside” in relation to the “other”.

notably, this also applies to the player, and the way they’re invited to get inside gerudo town: there are several men outside gerudo town, who are all presented as weird and creepy. you are invited to make fun of them in dialogue, laugh at the way they change their disposition when you approach them disguised as a woman, and you even basically scam one of them in a comedic side quest where you are not even given the option to humour the man or be sympathetic towards him. these men are presented as laughable and condemnable for wanting to get into a female only space with the intent to ogle women.

and yet, the player is invited to get into the very same female only space by lying. and sure, you can argue about link’s queerness all you want, but the fact is that he gets clocked as a man several times and doesn’t correct anyone or present any feelings that the gerudo town experience is more than lying. and sure, link’s, the character’s, intentions are pure: he wants to save the world, and that’s a noble cause, of course. he isn’t creepy towards any woman, and doesn’t express interest, let alone nefarious intent, towards any of them: all his dialogue options are fine and dont comment on anything weird and focus on the issue at hand.

and yet, you, the player, are not link. while link, the character, doesn’t express any interest in the women in question, the player is only invited to: the gerudo are designed to be sexualised. they wear heels and metal bras and all expose their abs despite none of that being practical. urbosa is, in most her cutscenes, deliberately is posed to be appealing, and i don’t think anybody in their right mind would say she isn’t designed to be sexy. the player is invited to consume them, in the same way the men outside gerudo town wish to consume them. and this is supported by the way a lot of fans perceive gerudo: a lot of people describe them as tall hot ladies, those they are attracted to and like because they are attracted to them.

so, in the end, the game invites the player to make fun of the men sexually desiring its race of brown women, while simultaneously inviting the player to do the exact same thing as them. in the end, they’re weird losers because they’re desperate to get even a glimpse of the female only space while you, existing in game as a man, are not a loser, because YOU get to be inside the “paradise” designed to be specifically sexually appealing to you.

#botw #breath of the wild #gerudo #orientalism #racism #media analysis #botw critical #loz #legend of zelda #i feel uncomfortable tagging thsi as my hot takes bc thsi is just. an analysis of racism in the video game #misogyny #queerness #anyway fucking critically consume the media you enjoy stop being stupid

[diddyrivera]

swerf (sex worker exclusionary radical feminism) - labor edition

so, i want to go ahead and make an essay here abt the term "swerf"; apparently a lot of you have heard about the term "terf" which stands for transgender exclusionary radical feminist (im pretty sure a lot of you know abt the term and are educated on it as to what i've seen throughout social media platforms), but this term of "swerf" can be a new one to a lot of you. it is a sister to terf and is intertwined with each other since it excludes transgender sex workers who are fighting for autonomy and agency since they're at the proportionate of getting unalived due to their identity and the work that they do. now that you know about the term "terf" which was coined in 2008 by a radical feminist by the name of viv smythe to describe it as the lack of queer theory within transgender and feminism critiques, im going to be making a whole essay about the term swerf as a way to educate yourself about all of the stuff anti-sex work activists have been spewing around throughout tiktok (i've dealt with them and they lack so much nuance with their sex work critiques)

so, the term "swerf" stands for sex worker exclusionary radical feminist (fascist), and it has emerged as 3rd wave feminism's intersectional approach to gender inequality; the term is to describe the lack of labor analysis and power dynamic analysis within sex work, sex education, and feminism critiques, and well yeah let's just say i've seen the term "swerf" being debunked and self-explained by a lot of radical feminists when in fact they're definitely missing the point about how the term actually works. a lot of the radical feminists that i've encountered tend to focus on the sex worker exclusionary radical fascist work of andrea dworkin, catherine mckinnon, melissa farley, sheila jeffreys, shulamith firestone, and so much more, who have collaborated with conservatives to push anti-sex work legislation to further exploit sex workers' autonomy and agency whilst they both focus on the neoabolitionist framework of sex work and kink / bdsm. i'll be debunking the tons of misconceptions that these people have made throughout this essay as a way to educate and humble all of the radical feminists who uphold such rhetoric that just further limits sex workers' ability to express freely of their sexuality.

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"we should support the sex workers, but not the industry they work in because of its misogyny and exploitation"

this argument has been popping up on my fyp constantly and a lot of people have told me this, and let's just say this argument lacks intersectionality because all of the other industries that exist under the capitalist state are misogynistic and exploitative as well. even if capitalism has existed after the patriarchy, there are industries including sex work that contained some sort of misogyny and exploitation under patriarchy (🍇culture, toxic masculinity, gender roles, has existed before capitalism), so what that means it's definitely possible that sex work will still exist because it has existed for thousands of years and the only thing that's stigmatizing the sex industry is through all of the paternalistic structures which harm minorities, especially women. with that come to kind, sex work is a symptom of the patriarchy and not the cause of it. stating that sex work is the cause of the patriarchy blatantly argues that if we can eliminate the patriarchy, we can eliminate sex workers, which is pretty icky because let's not forget that without the sex industry, there would be no sex workers, and let's just say it fuels the exploitation of sex workers, as to which part of it is that it fuels something the prison industrial complex, and i've seen this being talked about by a marxist feminist named angela davis over her books "women, race, and class" and "are prisons absolete?". she's also done an interview with someone about it and here's the source:

 also, this argument fuels anti-sex work legislation by law enforcement which also fuels the paternalistic structures which gets sex workers unalived. according to a 2021 article from guardian, 8 people, 6 of them who were asian women, were killed by a 21 y/o white man in an atlanta massage parlour building over racism, sexism, and anti-sex work ideology. there are also multiple articles about serial killers murdering sex workers, most of them coming from the 20th century. that's why the phrase "pro-sex worker, anti-sex work" as to acknowledge that the industry is harmful won't work because a lot of the issues surrounding sex work have to stem with the patriarchy (and capitalism as well since sex workers get financially discriminated under that economical system).

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2. "liberal feminists are disgusting because they think sex work is empowering"

i've seen almost the majority of radical feminists disguising sex workers as inherently liberal feminists, but they don't realize that every single industry contains pros and cons, and that includes sex work, and with that being said, sex work doesn't need to be empowering for it to be considered a job. there are some people who would find it empowering and glamorize the sex industry while not even listening to the lived experiences / material realities of sex workers and ex-sex workers, but saying that all sex workers are liberal feminists because they find their job empowering while not even understanding the bifurcation of consciousness coined by dorothy smith into which you fall into this madonna-whore dichotomy that you experience the world as you do it and you are subjected to participate in the paternalistic structures that exist within society, just comes off as disingenuous because i've encountered sex workers who acknowledge the issues surrounding the industry they work in. by the way, if you can learn more about the bifurcation of consciousness, i suggest you buy dorothy smith's book "feminism & marxism: a place to begin a way to go" online, and also this theory is applied within this book titled "we too: essays of sex work and survival" which has a "bifurcating" excerpt within it →

"women suspended between our own truths and realities imposed upon us by men, are forced to reconcile the contradiction between the two. we have insight into patriarchal ways of knowing while sometimes also knowing that our empirical realities are much different. patriarchal ways of knowing further bifurcate women's consciousness by chopping us up into disgestible versions of ourselves - we are either madonnas or whores. we are either public property or the singular property of a man. of course patriarchal values do not just penetrate masculinity. people of all genders are suspectible to its charms. but for those of us who straddle identities of mother and whore simultaneously, the demand to bifurcate one's consciousness even more profound" →

"we must make space for the feminine self that is both agent and victim, empowered and marginalized, mother and whore all at the same time. we must interrogate space and language as static and as neutral. we must dismantle the imperative to squeeze women into a singular point of existence , whether that point is sexual or maternal or something else entirely. if we are coerced into choosing between mother or whore, then our complexity is whittled down and the beneficiary of that belittling of that belittling is patriarchal. if we are left out of conversations about violence, then it is assumed we cannot be victims of violence."

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3. "there is no way to make the sex work industry safe for sex workers, so sex workers need to be rescued from the industry to be liberated"

some of the radical feminists i've encountered have stated this under the guise of saying that they support sex workers, which is actually so hypocritical of them. there is this thing called decriminalization which is different from legalization, as to which decriminalization regulates the sex work industry as a business and reforms its horrors to better the workers, whilst legalization regulates the sex work industry as a business but never reforms its horrors talk about legalization being considered "backdoor criminalization". now, to decriminalize sex work, we must pass stimulus checks, universal business income, small biz relief, hospital funding, end racial profiling of sex worker people of color, end criminalization against queer and trans sex workers, offer sex workers safer therapeutic sessions, offer sex workers unrushed health checks, and so much more. also, if we're going to abolish all work, we have to decriminalize sex work and recognize that sex work is a form of exploitative work under capitalism just like any other work.

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4. "the sex work industry is where women and girls are being trafficked, therefore it's not work and we should get rid of it "

actuallly, there's no way to get rid of it since there are children being trafficked into other sorts of domestic labor such as the construction industry, the meat packing industry, the fashion industry, the film industry, the beauty industry, so what's really going on is the exploitative factors within the capitalist state. also, sex work is work that's exploitative under capitalism just like any other work, and we need to recognize that sex workers are laboring subjects and not victims and criminals. we have to get rid of capitalism since it exploits the worker, not sex work.

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5. "the nordic model helps sex workers from discrimination in the industry they work in"

i feel like people need to understand that the nordic model fails to realize that the sex work industry consists all sex workers and clients of all identities and not just all men being clients and women being sex workers, and that the framework of the nordic model is rooted down to bioessentialism. the nordic model is partial decriminalization bc it just outsources the exploitation of sex workers and clients, whereas sex workers would have a limited time interacting with clients, increase trafficking rates such as countries / states / territories into which implement the nordic model like sweden, ireland, norway, canada, etc

resources:

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5. "sex workers are selling their consent"

there's no such thing as selling your body, and i feel like when it comes to sex work, that perpetuates the narrative of sex slavery whereas if the sex worker is sold, the customer buys the product, and it doesn't work that way because you can't sell / buy consent. sex workers are selling a service, and the client pays for the service, just like other jobs. for example, the manager in that one barber shop would offer me a service to get a haircut then they would tell me the price if i want to get the haircut (they're selling a service), and my job is to grab my payment methods and pay for the services they've offered me. the same thing applies to sex work if i want to see someone perform such erotic practices or have sex with me.

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6. "it's disgusting how sex workers are utilizing their body"

if you really think that it's disgusting how sex workers are utilizing their body, you also think that it's disgusting how barbers, managers, construction workers, and makeup artists are utilizing their body. we utilize our bodies in different ways and a lot of radical feminists denying this by questioning how other jobs other than sex work have to do with sex are completely missing the point.

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7. "sex work is paid 🍇"

sex work is not the same as trafficking, and these two are conflated, it fuels anti-sex work legislation which still places sex workers into exploitation. sex work is a profession in which when you receive money or goods in exchange for consensual erotic services regularly or occasionally, whilst trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, and harbouring of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit. also, it's 🍇 if the sex act is nonconsensual, and it's sex work if the sex act is consensual.

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so, this is not all of the misconceptions that i've debunked since this is only the sex work labor edition, and i'll be making a part 2 and it's about the corn industry, which is part of the sex industry. i hope you're educated on this if you're new to learning about the term swerf and how it works, and if you're a radfem who constantly speaks over sex workers. :)

#feminism #intersectionalfeminist #intersectional feminism #anti terf #anti swerf #anti capitalism #intersectionality #feminist #eco feminism #anarcha feminism #marxist feminism #radical feminism #swerf #terf #sex worker

[lizbethborden]

I don’t get how academia is a psyop? Are you comfortable elaborating?

Sure thing

I'll admit I was probably being flippant when I phrased it that way but, academia is and always has been an arm of institutional power, functioning not usually to disrupt or alter society but to justify and reinforce existing social inequalities

Ibram X Kendi talks in Stamped From The beginning about how race science etc were developed, as academic theories, to justify chattel slavery after the system had already developed in the Americas

When systems of thought with a radical basis such as second wave feminism develop either in a grassroots or only semi-academic form, they become absorbed into academia and rendered functionally toothless because it is a conservative institution (not meaning in a right wing sense but in a preserving norms and status quo sense). Which is how we ended up w feminism as the useless thing we have it as today

Look at the field of evolutionary psychology as an example of an academic or "academic" field depending on how you see it, that is functionally an anti-civil rights backlash designed to weaponize science and scientific terms against women and racial minorities--obviously not all of the field is bogus but there's plenty that is

Queer theory also developed within academia and claims to have radical implications and functions and is used to excuse pedophilia, handwave gender inequality, and ignore material class oppression--check out Judith Butler for example. So in this sense academia is a psyop by claiming to produce radical work and radical action but in effect serving only to perpetuate and excuse our ongoing cultural system, and tricking people into thinking they're doing something revolutionary

Hope I've explained ok as I'm mobile and let me know if I can clarify

[bookshopsbizarreblog]

Nimona

Oh my gods what a show. I read the graphic novel back in high school, and so I was decently excited when I saw that it was being made into a movie. But I never could have prepared myself for what I just watched.

I was honestly expecting some inoffensive fluff. A fun summer watch with a bit of heart and some generic positive messaging. Maybe a few unexpected twists, but overall just something to fill the void of a day sans classes. And I am so glad I was wrong, because this film is an absolute gem.

Without spoilers, the themes in it ran so much deeper than anything I had even hoped for, to the point where I only recognized some of them from a gender studies class I just finished a week ago. There were literal manifestations of the internally destructive nature of normative social ideologies. There was cultural imperialism's casting of alternative modes of existence as inferior and transgressive. There were dominant narratives and how seeking to change them from within can all too easily get co-opted by pre-existing power structures.

And those are just the things related to a single uni class I just took which were big enough for me to point out.

Not everything in it gets directly addressed, and I wish that there had been more in the film about how class and race can intersect with all of those other dynamics and each other. The knights and their institute are white in both theme and skin tone, while many of the non-nobles have darker skin tones. The primary protagonist is from among them, and his appointment is a major inciting incident in the film. Again, trying to avoid spoiling things, there was a lot of possible set up there which didn't get fully realized. Some nods were made to it later in the film, but it wasn't the primary focus.

But even beyond all of those, there were more political critiques which did come across loud and clear. Chief among them being a rejection of the liberal notion of "removing the bad apples." Nimona is deeply concerned with systemic critiques and even subtly advocating the notion that sometimes systems need to be torn down before equity can be had. Well, I say subtly because initial advocacy for such is deliberately a bit over the top and hyper-destructive, while the ending heavily implies it without outright stating it. But the last "end credits scene" is literally an 'A' in a heart, soooo....

Anyways, I absolutely loved Nimona, and if you like queer themes, chaotic shapeshifters, social deconstruction, progressive messaging, sci-fi knights, gays who remain unburied, or even just gorgeous animation, then you'll probably like it too

#nimona #nimona film #nd stevenson #gender studies #lgbtq #queer shows #lgbtq rights #systemic change #systemic oppression #systemic discrimination #anti liberalism #animation #ballister blackheart #ballister boldheart #ambrosius goldenloin #nimona netflix #nimona graphic novel

[elipheleh]

Paris Is Burning

Continuing my series of learning about things referenced in the book, I'm looking at things Alex references when he talks about engaging with queer history. These are all tagged #a series of learning about things that are referenced in the book, if you want to block the tag.

Please note the following topics are metioned: murder, AIDS - and death due to complications, sexual violence, sex work, racism, queerphobia.

Paris is Burning is a documentary film, released in 1990, that focuses on the 1980s ball culture of Harlem (New York) and the communities of gay & transgender African-American &Latino people involved in that culture. It offers an exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the US at that point in time. The AIDS crisis was growing in severity, and impacted many of the people involved with the documentary. Many of them have since died due to AIDS complications - including Angie Xtravaganza (age 28), Dorian Corey (age 56), and Willi Ninja (age 45).

Documentarian Jennie Livingston interviewed key figures in the ball world, and the film features monologues from many of which addresses their understanding of gender roles, subcultures of both the ball world and the queer world, as well as sharing their own life stories. It also provides an introduction to slang terms used within the subculture, such as house, mother, shade & reading. Interspersed with this is footage of colourful ballroom performances. The documentary also looks at how AIDS, racism, poverty, violence, and homophobia impacts their lives. Some of those involved became sex workers to support themselves, at great risk to their safety - one member is found strangled to death, seemingly by a client. The 'Houses' of the ball culture provide safety and security to those disowned by queerphobic parents, as well as those largely ostracised by mainstream society.

The documentary did have some criticisms - notably for reinforcing stereotypes, having a white filmmaker, and for not properly providing compensation - but it has remained important as a depiction of ball culture, the most prominent display until Drag Race began to popularise the concept to a wider audience.

-----

Ball culture - also known as the Ballroom Scene/Community, Ballroom Culture or just Ballroom - takes its origins from a series of drag balls, including those organised by William Dorsey Swann (the first person known to self-describe as a drag queen) in Washington DC, during the late 1800s. These drag balls were masquerade themed and took place to defy laws which banned people from wearing clothes of the opposite gender. Many early attendees were formerly enslaved men, and the events were held in secret. While balls were integrated during a time of racial segregation, non-white performers regularly experienced racism from the white judges and performers. This prompted Black and Latino performers to create their own spaces within the subculture, and the modern culture grew out from Harlem in the late 1960s, spreading to other major cities soon after.

The structural and cultural issues facing the community in 1980s New York - including poverty, racism, homophobia, as well as sexual violence and AIDS - didn't stop Ballroom from thriving, acting not only as an escape from real life but also offering those involved a support system that was not often present in other areas of their lives. The culture included a system of 'Houses' - headed by an elder queer person (although often not much older than those in the family), either a 'mother' (mostly gay men or trans women) or a 'father' (mostly gay men or trans men) - which would become a surrogate family for young queer Black and Latino youth who were estranged from family, homeless, and/or struggling to get by. House members would often take on the surname of their house parent, and the houses would compete together in balls - often with a specific style identifiable as belonging to that group.

Drag ball culture works to resist the dominant cultural norms people experience from wider society. The performers create a space to challenge gender roles and heteronormativity through subversive outfits, slang, and actions. It gives them a space to feel supported and to work through their abuse they experienced as members of minority groups.

The balls not only provide a community, but also provide spaces for education. Aware of the prevelence of AIDS and the lack of support, in 1990 the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) launched the Latex Ball to distribute health information to those involved in ball culture. Offering free HIV testing and prevention materials, it attracts thousands of people from around the world and is still active to this day.

-----

The importance of Paris is Burning continues to grow as the years pass. It was a rare film that focused on the lives of queer people of colour, whose charisma and humanity shines through in their witty to-camera interviews and their fierce routines and performances.[source]

Sources: Wikipedia - Paris is Burning Guardian - Burning down the house: why the debate over Paris is Burning rages on Vanity Fair (archived) - Paris Is Burning Is Back—And So Is Its Baggage Janus films - Paris is Burning Wikipedia - Ball Culture Rolling Stone - Striking a ‘Pose’: A Brief History of Ball Culture All Gay Long - A Brief History of Modern Ballroom Culture Shondaland - The Psychological and Political Power of Ball Culture

Additional Reading: Paris is Burning, 1990

#elio's #elio's meta #a series of learning about things that are referenced in the book #long post #alt text added #rwrb #red white and royal blue

[scribbleymark]

"It’s time for queer communities to abandon the hierarchy of trauma that supports acephobia with the myth that asexuals do not have 'enough' trauma related to our sexual identity to be considered queer. Trauma is not a factor by which queerness should be measured. In fact, I argue that queerness should not be measured at all. If our goal is to arrive at a reality in which none of us have to endure or die from queerphobic abuses—whether institutional, individual, interpersonal, structural, public, or private—then these abuses should not be such a significant part of how we regard queer identities. If we largely define queerness by whether or not we experience these abuses 'enough' to be considered authentic, what room does this leave us to embrace our queer identities outside these abuses, especially when our collective goal is to dismantle them altogether? Is a queer child who grows up loved and affirmed in their queerness any less our comrade than the queer child who grows up hated and suppressed for theirs? Would we not welcome them both with open arms?

Excluding asexuals from queerness under the belief that we do not experience discrimination and trauma 'enough' only serves to reproduce the same harms as cisheteropatriarchy. Being subjected to and harmed by compulsory sexuality, rape culture, and acephobia is traumatic, and the denial of this works to obscure the very ways in which asexuals have been harmed by people within queer communities. Allosexual queer folks have absolutely been spectators to asexual queering; they have even been participants in moments where we have been queered because of our relationship to sex, attraction, and desire. Acephobic exclusionists must hold two opposing ideas at once in order to maintain their dissonant belief system that if asexuals are not discriminated against in the same ways and to the same degree that they are, then that discrimination either cannot count or must not exist at all. They hold this belief even as they themselves actively participate in that discrimination, and even as they acknowledge that the discrimination faced by other queer folks can and does differ across gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and more.

So I ask: What exactly is the connective tissue between the experiences of those who call ourselves queer? What is the distinct criteria that supposedly disqualifies asexuals from being able to claim queerness or even exist in 'LGBTQIA+' spaces, despite the presence of the A in the acronym? Is it discrimination, invalidation, and violence based on their sexual or gender/sex variant identities? Is it failing to perform heterosexual or cisnormative social scripts and being ostracized for it? Is it institutional mandates and unwritten rules that don’t take their sexuality or gender/sex into consideration, or are specifically designed to other people like them? Is it having their very existence and the validity of that existence up for constant debate? Is it feeling invisibilized in mainstream media and cultural artifacts because the relationships or gender/sexes depicted therein rarely, if ever, reflect their own experience with these things? Is it feeling largely isolated and distinctly barred from being able to relate in social settings where the conversations operate on the assumption that everyone involved has a universal experience with sexuality or gender/sex, and that experience is typically a cisheteronormative one?"

-Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality

#sherronda j brown #aphobia #refusing compulsory sexuality

[gudbooks]

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Buy The Fifth Season here

"LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket—except his face, because he is afraid of the dark—and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She’s old hat at this by now.

What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.

And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:

He wasn’t. Not really. But now he will be."

REVIEW

Book One of the Broken Earth series, The Fifth Season is a wonderfully rich, dystopian sci fi book with strong touches of fantasy from Black author N.K. Jemisin.

The world-building here is epic.Jemisin weaves a tale of three women protagonists struggling to survive in a world in which the natural world itself is an enemy.

They live on an unstable planet whose violent eruptions can only be controlled by people born with special magic called orogenes (see our three main characters).

Where they live, in the Stillness, rather than being considered saviors, orogenes are feared, shunned, killed or enslaved by the world's elites.

Toxic as their planet already is the people of the Stillness live in fear of a "fifth season" that might bring earthquakes and eruptions so severe that they will mean the end.

There are recognizable themes here - oppression, cultural conflict, racism, enslavement, environmental degradation, yet also love, hope, family and resilience.

"The Fifth Season" can be a hard read because it is heavy at times, drops you straight into the story and uses second person present tense throughout.

However, the story and compelling characters push you along as well as Jemison's prose which is clear and almost lyrical.

There may not be an instant click but the story that unfolds is worth waiting for. Most readers say their investment began and things began to coalesce for them fifty to eighty pages in.

While I'd class this as high or epic fantasy-sci-fi, unlike what we'd find in many books in this category, here we have queer characters, a well-drawn polyamorous relationship, "found families" and people of various races and genders. Black characters are centered -- refreshing as this tends to be a rarity in this genre.

Big ideas breathe in this novel.

Buy The Fifth Season here

BOOK BLURB

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter.

Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance.

And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night.

Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

Buy The Fifth Season here

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N.K. (Nora Keita) Jemisin, a Black American woman, lives and writes from Brooklyn, New York. She's a graduate of Tulane University and the University of Maryland.

Jemisin was the first author to win the prestigious (science fiction) Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years with the Broken Earth series of which this book is the first, as well as the first author to win for all three novels in a trilogy.

"But another thing I tried to touch on in the Broken Earth is that life in a hard world is never just the struggle. Life is family, blood and found. Life is those allies who prove themselves worthy by actions and not just talk. Life means celebrating every victory, no matter how small."

Quote from N.K. Jemisin from her Hugo Award acceptance speech for the Broken World trilogy

BY N.K. JEMISIN

The Broken World Trilogy

The City We Became (First book of the Great Cities Trilogy)

The Inheritance Trilogy

#book #booklover #reading #readmorebooks #bookworm #read #bookish #booknerd #bibliophile #bibliophilelife #bookshelf #bookaholic #buybooks #alwaysreading #reader #bookcommunity #mustread #epicreads #bookstack #booklife #bookreviewer #bookreviewblog #whatimreading #bookreviewers #review #bookishlove #goodreads #booklr #blackbooklr #bookblogger

[rileys-archive]

diaspora is survival : let the dystopian morning light pour in

this is an edited version of an autobiographical essay i submitted for my pan-african geography class where the prompt was

"Using the excerpt from Stokely Carmichael’s Ready for the Revolution as a model, write a short autobiographical essay describing your own experience of “diaspora as survival.” How, in other words, did you end up here in Vancouver and at UBC? While you should describe as much as possible the migrations of your own family, you should also try to include references to those important historical markers of labor, history, race, colonialism, migration, and gender that are referenced by Carmichael." the purpose of me publishing this essay on tumblr is so i can cite it for another class, michael if ur reading this i hope u enjoy it !! i omitted some details i wasn't comfortable posting on the internet (aka not doxxing myself). also if the capitalization seems funky, it's intentional !!

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

[Notes of a Native Son – James Baldwin]

I’ve always been a bit of historian, how could I not when my own history, my own stories, have been hidden from me. To be Indigenous in a country that treats my people as a history, as no longer present, means being a historian of my own culture is a form of resistance. It doesn’t fit with the settler colonial canadian logic for my people to have a history or culture. Everyday I resist this occupation by remembering, by recreating, and continuing anishinaabek ways of living. And if Audre Lorde says, “the personal is political”, then much of what I write (both for academic purposes but also creative projects) will involve the politics of being a disabled Afro-Indigenous queer/two-spirit person living in an occupied state. Simply put, I write as a Nakawe, a citizen of Tootinaowaziibeeng, in Musqueam territory. I write from the belly of the beast and it can hard to avoid the drops of acid on these pages. 

How do you know your history? I’m not saying “ask your mom to cite her sources” but how do you know if what you’ve been told about yourself, your family, community, etc is true? I don’t believe one’s truth and what is fact are the same, at least I haven’t lived a life like that. Thus I’ll start where life starts, with the one who brought me into this world. I was born in oskana kâ-asastêki to my two adoptive parents and my biological mother tracy-lynn. I was adopted at birth, many who aren't familiar with the foster care system (the modern way canada monitors Indigenous children’s whereabouts, since the final residential school closed in 1996) would think that being adopted at birth was a good thing, I don't know if it was. You're likely wondering where my biological dad is… well that makes two of us. During conversations with her social worker she admitted to not knowing the father and regularly having casual sex with men of different ethnic origins, naming white, Indigenous, Black, and Filipino. Thus my adoptive parents (Tracey and Arlon), assumed I was Filipino based on my looks. Although strangers did occasionally throw Black microaggressions towards me, older white women wanted to touch my black curls and I was a girl who wanted to be ‘polite’. 

For the first 18 years of my life, it was my truth that I was Filipino. The guilt of my lack of connection from my Filipino friends eventually brought me to study the language as a teenager. Wanting to know what region of the Philippines my father was from lead me to doing a DNA test around age 18. Discovering the truth, for a short period of time, resulted in a what felt like a cultural crisis. I finally felt comfortable in one of my ethnic backgrounds (comfortable enough to get a tattoo of the Philippines flag within a knife, image above) so realizing the rarity of situations like this and not being able to find help online terrified me. After learning basic Tagalog, growing up with Filipino friends, and even embarking on a double major of History and Asian Studies, I had found myself in a very strange circumstance. You can find thousands of articles giving advice on how to come out as gay or transgender (as I had done so at 11 and 12 myself), but nobody really comes out as African. Honestly, I was scared that people would think of me as a liar or fraud. Like the pretendian equivalent of being Black. If the truth came to light, people would think I was intentionally lying about my race. At the same time, I was scared that if I said I was Black, but provided no proof, I was just some annoying leftist trying to claim a marginalized identity. It felt like being called to fight in a war where I'd lose on either front. 

As strange as it sounds, I can’t imagine my life without my queerness. Growing up with two older siblings that came out as queer before me allowed 11 year old me to develop language to understand myself and others. If I weren’t queer, I don’t know if I would’ve been introduced to philosophies of identity and history. Gaining a sense of self, a sense of pride in who I am and the communities I’m a part of, was integral to me discovering feminism at a young age (roughly age 13), leading me to learn from Black and Indigenous feminists/communists, many of whom I cite today in teacher education. The most important life lesson being queer has given me is that I don’t need to “know” myself, know what exact labels and identities suit me at any given moment, I just need to live. For example, I don’t inject testosterone because I feel at my core I’m a man (I don’t) or because I feel a need to prove my masculinity in a biological way (I don’t), I do it because I like the way it makes my body look. In a very Gen Z way, I decided to fuck around and find out. Thus when I had my cultural identity crisis, I realized I could just identify as mixed Black/Ethiopian/African. In the same way there’s no “true trans” person, there’s was no way for me to “truly” be African. I just am. 

As mentioned, I learnt about social justice issues and movements relatively early which was integral to my own identity development. Through learning from revolutionaries like Kwame Ture who stated “​​We're Africans in America, struggling against American capitalism. We're not Americans” and “a fight for power is a fight for land. [...] Our land is Africa. America's not our land, it belongs to the American Indians and we have a right to stand and take a moral struggle with them.” I felt empowered to describe myself as Afro-Indigenous, to bring my two sides together as one whole. Diaspora is survival can mean a lot of things at different times & places but here, it meant a member of the diaspora empowered another diaspora to take up the family name of African, within my mixed background. The name survived its travels. This is my favourite term for a few important reasons. Firstly, I’m acknowledging the lands I’m from. Both the ties I have to Africa as a diaspora and Indigenous reflecting my Turtle Island upbringing. Secondly, I’m not identifying with a colonial state as terms like Indigenous Canadian or Black Canadian would suggest. Lastly, I’m not playing into the settler idea of blood quantum. A soul cannot be divided into percentages.

It feels wrong, embarrassing even, to say I envy the classmates of mine who have the privilege of being one call or text away from a family member that can answer simple questions. I only know what someone, I assume a social worker, felt was worthy of documenting. I didn’t learn that my maternal grandmother’s brother roger was forced into multiple residential schools from tracy-lynn or her mother rita, I learnt from a fucking hydro company. How colonial dystopian is that? Hydro Manitoba did a study of the land they intended to put pipelines through, consulting the nation which neighbours my own. My nation is Tootinaowaziibeeng First Nation, physically within Treaty 2 territory but a signatory of Treaty 4. I’ve lived most of my life on Treaty 4 land, i.e. the land stolen from the Métis (michif), Cree (néhiyaw), and Ojibway (anishinaabe). My adoptive dad Arlon is a descendant of the first British & French settlers in the region and he didn’t know which Indigenous peoples lived on the land that makes up our family farm-turned-acreage until I told him. To him, the land was always in the family and was empty before, owned by the canadian government that gave it to his family. As a socially anxious young adult he was set up on a dinner date with my adoptive mom, Tracey. She was also from a white farming family, her childhood home being just 2 km down the road from where mine still sits today. Growing up she embraced the cuisine of her German ancestry, that was all her mother taught her. If I remember correctly, she’s mostly German, but had Jewish family survive the Holocaust, becoming refugees to Canada after leaving the Netherlands. I’m unsure if they were Dutch Jewish, I never asked. Despite having 3 known sides of family, I’ve always been distanced from them in some way. When I was young my mom told me the reason we didn’t spend time with distant family was because they were “mean” to her. As a teenager I learnt “mean” actually meant racist, they were upset with her for adopting an “Indian” baby.

Like Toni Morrison, much of my own literary (and musical) background comes from autobiographies. Now that I think about it, I’m surrounded by autobiographical creations. I can prove this on the spot by looking down at my phone next to me, Spotify open, playing Boujee Natives by Snotty Nose Rez Kids, a hiphop duo from Haisla First Nation. That song is on my ndn rap playlist, below it is my hiphop for sexy ppl only playlist which contains only Black/African rappers. I hit shuffle on the playlist and Malcolm Garvey Huey by Dead Prez comes on, ironic as I get to read works by/about these exact historical figures for this geography class. If I look into my backpack next to me I’ll find Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and Creeland by Dallas Hunt (Swan River First Nation), both autobiographical works to an extent. That’s just my immediate surroundings here at a cafe near my house, I typically exist near a shelf of autobiographies at my two library jobs, as well as at home in East Van.

Where would I go? If I wrote an autobiography what section would they put me in? Would it still be autobiography if so much of my family knowledge comes from government documents like an adoption act or residential school records? Would my Indigeneity render it a historical work? If I have to rely on historical evidence to make a guess, does that make my life a fiction? Assuming an Indigenous category exists, who makes the decision on whether I’m too Black to belong? Perhaps I’ll write a biomythography like Audre Lorde. The sisters have it figured out this time, I know where’d I go. 

If past you were to meet future me, Would you be holding me here and now?

[Historians – Lucy Dacus]

References :

Afromarxist, “What's in a Name? ft. Kwame Ture (1989)” YouTube, video publication date 27 October 2019, https://youtu.be/OGcl359SMxE?si=T_bs5PKLBZuUYwZ0

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. 

Chakasim, Neegahnii Madeline. “Pretendians and their Impacts on Indigenous Communities.” The Indigenous Foundation, May 10 2022. https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/pretendians-and-their-impacts-on-indigenous-communities 

HTFC Planning & Design & Manitoba Hydro. “See what the land gave us” Waywayseecappo First Nation Traditional Knowledge Study For the Birtle Transmission Line. December 2017. https://www.hydro.mb.ca/docs/projects/birtle/appendix_c_waywayseecappo_tk_study_final_report.pdf 

Lucy Dacus. Historians. Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore. March 2, 2018. Matador Records, digital streaming.

Books / music mentioned

dead prez. Malcolm Garvey Huey. June 22 2010. Boss Up Inc., digital streaming. 

Hunt, Dallas. Creeland. Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2021.

*Maynard, Robyn. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017. 

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: Crossing Press, 1982.

Phoebe Bridgers. ICU. Phoebe Bridgers, Marshall Vore, & Nicholas White. June 18, 2020. Dead Oceans, digital streaming.

Snotty Nose Rez Kids. Boujee Natives. May 10 2019. Independent, digital streaming. 

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011. 

*Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 

sources with * were in the original essay but omitted from this version

#original writing #academic essay #uhh #personal essay #autobiography #history #pan africanism #indigenous #indigenous writer #black academia #first nations #native american #creative writing #actuallyindigenous #ojibwe #ojibway #ojibwa #i love how many spellings exist lmao it's hell #saulteaux #nakawe #anishinaabe #treaty 4 #prose #indigiqueer #queer #queer writers #uhhh #im running out of ideas #trans writers #riley writes

[dead-loch]

Esmaa Mohamoud, To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat (exhibition)

"Mohamoud draws on the modern industry of professional sports, which she equates with a covert form of neo-slavery. The London, Ontario-born artist transforms athletic equipment and symbols to illustrate pervasive, discriminatory behaviours and attitudes based on race, class, gender, and sexuality. She examines collective and individual struggle, focusing on the homogenization of bodies within high-level athletics, and the enforced play out of competitive violence between Black subjects. Through sculpture, photography, video, and installation, she investigates how high-level athletics operate as sites of corporate profit and discrimination.

The dozen artworks in this exhibition consider a variety of concerns. Mohamoud’s appropriation of basketball jerseys within Victorian-era ballgowns, for example, complicates the sport’s fraught relationship with queer, gender-fluid, and female identities. Reconstructed football equipment, including branded black leather footballs and African wax-printed helmets, celebrate cultural plurality through their exuberant, diverse designs, while also protesting the staged enactment of Black violence for entertainment."

One thing that can't easily be shared but was easily my favourite piece in this exhibition was a video/projection installation titled From the Ground We Fall, which had Nina Simone's Ne Me Quitte Pas on repeat playing over it. The video is a performance set in a field, where two players (football in this case) are connected by chains and each of them are trying to run in opposite directions, meaning they continually pull each other backwards. I would go up to close out the exhibition and just stand in the small room that housed this piece, watching and listening. The projection took up 3 walls, which meant you were surrounded by the activity. (it's been a couple years and I couldn't find confirmation of the song, but I'm fairly certain it was Ne Me Quitte Pas. If you know better, lemme know and I'll edit!).

"The explicit frustration and lack of progress shown in the video expresses the ubiquitous presence of racism throughout North American society. The activity mirrors a common situation in disenfranchised communities within marginalizing systems, wherein community members are often pitted against one another."

Source: Esmaa Mohamoud | Art Gallery of Hamilton

#I used to share lots of local art so here I am again #like a million years ago but #esmaa mohamoud #sculpture #installation art #basketball #photography #football #black artists #canadian art #ralph ellison

[donveinot]

[bobnitido]

Stanford’s Ralph Richard Banks on AP African American Studies, Culture Wars, and Critical Thinking

The introduction of a new AP African American Studies course became part of the culture wars after Florida’s Governor DeSantis threatened to ban the class in his state. The College Board appeared to give in to political pressure after the official framework was made public on February 1, and topics such as Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations, and queer theory were deleted from the curriculum. (Some of these subjects were included on a list of topics that educators could suggest to students for end-of-the-year projects.) Here, Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks, co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, discusses the new AP course, the importance of critical thinking—and finding a way to consider all opinions to get away from no-win culture wars.

The college board has been developing a new AP African American course over the last decade and it has been a piloted this year at certain schools. Can you say something about the introduction of this new AP course?

I think the idea of having an AP class for African American studies is a good thing. That is a good development because our nation has long struggled with recognizing the centrality of the African American experience to the American experience, in terms of history, culture, politics, law, literature—whatever your focus. We have, in many ways, long denied the centrality of the African American experience to the American experience. And recognizing African American studies through the AP program is a step in the direction of fully integrating the Black experience, or the African American experience, into the American experience. So I think this is a positive step. It’s a good thing. And students of all races will benefit from having the option to take an AP course and an exam in African American studies.

I understand it’s very popular already in the pilot stage. I read reports that faculty have had to add courses because they’ve been oversubscribed. So, there’s, I think, a hunger for this.

Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks

And I think that’s a really good thing. For too many years, there was neither a demand nor a supply of courses that focused on the African American experience or the lessons that the African American experience has to teach us about American history, law, and culture. Alex Haley, the author of Roots, is said to have remarked about our nation, that we all live in the same house, but stay in our own rooms. That’s a good description of the problem.

When I was in school, for example, there was not very much mention of issues particular to the African American experience in our courses. We might touch on a little bit here and there on race issues, but most of my involvement with authors like James Baldwin or Richard Wright or Langston Hughes, or the Harlem Renaissance and the great Black poets, most of that exposure actually came outside of school. I read James Baldwin, and for that matter, Malcolm X, on my own before I ever encountered him in the curriculum. We would have a better educational system if students could get more of that information within school rather than having to go outside of school to learn about these important issues.

Truth is a slippery thing, isn’t it, particularly when people are coming from such divergent viewpoints and cultural experiences?

People have different ideas about precisely what should be taught and what constitutes adequate coverage of any particular issue. When my oldest son was in elementary school, they talked about the Civil War and the ending of slavery, but they never talked about the demise of reconstruction and the rise of segregation, which we thought was a really grievous oversight. The Civil War ended slavery—but then about a decade later, the North capitulated and turned the South back over to the same people who had been in charge of slavery. You would never know that from what my child studied in school. Yet, I can also understand why the teachers did that; this was 5th grade, after all.

While praising the introduction of this AP course, which might prepare students for more rigorous African American studies at the college level, do you think issues of Black history should be incorporated into the general history curriculum so that all students benefit—not only those who qualify for AP?

We sometimes treat the black experience as though it is peripheral to the American experience, when in fact it is central. I wrote a newspaper article long ago now, the headline of which was Black History is American History. And the point of it was that while Black History Month, (which started as Black History Week), is a good thing, the ultimate endpoint should be that we have issues of Black history fully integrated into American history. That should be the endpoint, to understand the extent to which the central issues involving the nature of our democracy have played out in a racial context, because the struggle with racism has defined our nation. We’ve been struggling with racism since the very beginning. African American Studies is a step in the direction of the full integration of the Black experience into the American experience.

There has been some controversy about Florida Governor DeSantis and his railing against this new AP course. The College Board released an official curriculum that, by news accounts, has been revised, stripped of much of the subject matter that angered DeSantis and conservatives, including critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

What people seem to be doing is taking positions based on their identity, rather than their knowledge of the facts, whether they’re DeSantis or one of his supporters or one of his critics. That said, the appearance here is that the College Board made a decision for political reasons, rather than substantive, pedagogical, or curriculum-oriented reasons. And that’s a bad thing.

But I should also say that the fact that the outcome here, if it’s politically motivated, may be a bad outcome, doesn’t mean that the concerns that prompted the criticism by DeSantis are wholly illegitimate. And this is what I think people miss. There may still be some legitimate reasons that are giving rise to proposed amendments, some legitimate things that people are reacting to. This is not a debate about what’s true versus what’s false. It’s a debate about the ways in which teachings of history can create narratives about society. Evidently the narrative of the nation embedded in the prior version is something that DeSantis and others were opposed to because it created a sort of orthodoxy about the nation that they could not support.

So, you think that in teaching this subject, academics need to be sensitive to varying perspectives?

Yes. I think that’s a legitimate concern frankly. Education has multiple functions. One of the functions is to acculturate people, express some sense of civic identity, sort of answer the question: What kind of nation are we? These are the kinds of issues that are at play here. And we have always had a struggle about that question. When I was a child, I learned the narrative that Black people had been oppressed in the past, by slavery, then they were freed by Abraham Lincoln, who was this great white man. Then there was a Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King and Lyndon B. Johnson came together and passed these good laws. And now everything is fair and square. That narrative is one that as a Black child, it puts you in an odd position because the implication is that all of these Black people who live in these ghettos and who are impoverished and disadvantaged, they’re to blame for their own disadvantage because according to the narrative, things are fair and square now.

So, one can easily object to that narrative, but I can see why people would be upset about replacing that narrative, with some other narrative that says, “America was racist from the start, is still racist now, and the racism of society is the answer to the question of how to explain and account for racial disparities and inequalities.” It’s legitimate that people would be upset about that narrative as well. Replacing one simplistic narrative with another simplistic narrative is not the way forward.

What we need is to be able to embrace the paradoxes of our history and of our present. With slavery, for example, we need to recognize that while slavery was a bad thing, it wasn’t a new thing; there had been slavery in many different parts of the world, including parts of Africa. What made America special was this idea of individual rights and liberty, which enabled opposition to slavery and eventually its abolition. We should be able to acknowledge that there’s something real to that aspiration, to have individual rights, to have individual liberty, and to allow people the opportunity to not be confined or diminished based on who they are. So that’s a wonderful aspiration. But then it’s also true that the attempt to reconcile that aspiration with the reality of slavery contributed to this really pernicious idea of Black inferiority and this sort of culture where people use the idea of Blacks being inherently or innately inferior as a way to reconcile the reality of slavery with the aspiration for equality. That’s all a complicated story, and that’s actually the kind of stuff we want a curriculum to embody.

What about this idea that in teaching sensitive topics, students should not be made to feel bad. Is that a legitimate concern?

It is. I’ll give you an example. I’m a parent of three boys, and they have been in environments where people were teaching about gender, and they talked about it and presented readings about it in a way that would make boys categorically feel that they are the embodiment of toxic masculinity, and that whatever gender inequalities we have in society, they as boys are responsible. I wouldn’t want my son in a class like that. It would make him feel bad for things that other people who are men have done. Admittedly there’s a fine line between creating intellectual challenges for people and assaulting their identity. And so, when white parents say, “Oh, you’re branding my child a racist,” or making them feel responsible for racial atrocities throughout history, I don’t dismiss that out of hand. I take them at their word that they are concerned about that, and that’s not an illegitimate concern.

Florida is one of many states that now is restricting how teachers can talk about topics like race and sexual orientation and the governor has taken measures to exert control over schools and books that can be read. Threatening to ban this AP course is taking this to another level, isn’t it?

As an academic, I am never in favor of banning words, ideas, concepts. I just think that’s a bad idea, full stop. Academic freedom in the university context is certainly a principle that’s close to my heart and I think we need to genuinely embrace that and be all in on that. And in high schools as well, with juniors and seniors, you should be able to grapple with complicated issues involving politically, socially charged controversies. And teachers who are teaching AP courses should be professionals who have some knowledge of the area and can present complicated issues where there are big debates about how to interpret history or how to analyze an issue. The key is to keep the focus on the debates, the differing views, rather than try to assert some truth of the matter.

At the same time, you think there’s room for varying viewpoints in the academic tent?

The hard thing that we need to do is to recognize that sometimes other people can have different views, different sensitivities, different sensibilities, and that their views, sensitivities, and sensibilities can be legitimate. Just because someone’s on another side politically, that should not empower you or make you feel it’s appropriate to completely reject the legitimacy of everything they’re saying. You should try to understand where they are coming from and how they might see the issue and how they might experience it. And only when you do that, are we going to actually be able to move forward on these issues and get away from this culture war that leaves us all worse off.

I’m teaching critical race theory this spring, and I plan to teach the course more as a theologian than as a priest.. If you’re in a class with a priest, he’s presenting the truth about the world. The doctrine is the truth. It’s not to be debated, it’s not to be quarreled with. You may question it, but only to eventually get to its truth. And if you are resisting the truth, once it’s been made plain, then you are a sinner. That’s the perspective of the priest. The theologian, in contrast, says, well, here’s the doctrine, and here’s the view of adherents to this doctrine. But here’s some criticisms of that doctrine. And here are some questions about that doctrine. The job of the theologian is to try to help you understand the doctrine, not to make you a believer in the doctrine.

So, there’s too much preaching on campuses and not enough room for debate and critical thinking?

Academia is a place, outside of the hard sciences where there are facts about the actual world that are indisputable, where we need to be theologians rather than priests. This is just another way of saying that in the world we’re in now where information has been democratized in the way that it has, and everyone can access Google and so forth, education is less about information, because people can access information anyway. Education really has to be about critical thinking. And that’s the great strength of American universities, and to some extent American education. We need to double down on that and really embrace critical thinking, which by definition means you’re engaging different perspectives, different viewpoints, and you’re seeing where they fit, where they clash, what the evidence is in favor of one side versus the other, all that sort of stuff. That’s what we need education to be about. And so, if we have an African American studies course that engages critical thinking, that’s a great thing. If we have an African American studies course that imposes an Orthodox view, about what’s quite true in American society, that’s actually not such a good thing.

Ralph Richard Banks (BA ’87, MA ’87) is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, and Professor, by courtesy, at the School of Education. In addition to his many journal articles and opinion essays, he is the author of Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. His book, The Miseducation of America: The Crisis of College and the American Dream, is forthcoming in 2024.

from Legal Aggregate – Stanford Law School https://law.stanford.edu/2023/02/08/stanfords-ralph-richard-banks-on-ap-african-american-studies-culture-wars-and-critical-thinking/

source https://bobnitido.wordpress.com/2023/02/09/stanfords-ralph-richard-banks-on-ap-african-american-studies-culture-wars-and-critical-thinking/

[sharingmythoughts2022]

24 Privileges

I do not have to rely on SNAP benefits to buy food.

I have access to public and private transportation.

I attend higher education on scholarship.

I access mental health services.

I feel safe in my home environment.

I usually don’t have to evaluate people’s treatment of me based on my race.

I can consume foods from other cultures without being harassed.

I can count on receiving pain medication when I am injured.

I have a stable job where I am respected and valued.

I could buy new clothes rather than secondhand if I wanted to.

I have knowledge of social expectation in higher income circles.

I can go on vacation multiple times per year.

I can move about the world without worrying about whether the physical space will accommodate me.

I was born without an obligation to participate in religion.

I can vote.

I do not have to worry about background checks.

I can hold a bank account.

I am free to travel outside of the country and return.

I do not have to defend my right to own land.

I do not fear losing my culture or traditions.

I can trace most of my family tree back a few generations.

I don’t have to fear being rejected from locations or events due to my appearance.

I can always count on traveling via airplane without fear of racial profiling.

I feel comfortable openly contesting injustice when I encounter it.

One thing I’ve had to come to terms with in terms of my privilege is that the complexities of oppression can determine varying levels of privilege. For example, within the trans sphere, someone can be oppressed for being trans, but less oppressed if they “pass” as cis. I don’t pass very well as either gender, so I’m on the less privileged end of white trans people. So privilege is unquantifiable but also incredibly important to understand. 

I really realized within this exercise how hyperaware of class I am. My experiences early on with money in my family really made an impact on me, and throughout my life I’ve always tried to find my specific position in the class pecking order. Class is a mobile thing, and both my inherited wealth and my habits culminate in my level of privilege. I also get to choose where and how to spend my money, which can always be a method to uplift others.

I also deeply considered people who are losing or have lost elements of their culture due to colonization or other forms of oppression. The attempted eradication of community and understanding has irreparably damaged so many communities, and most of these can’t be recovered. I have the privilege of knowing most of my family tree, of knowing where we’ve lived and who we associated with, of knowing some of the languages and food of my ancestors. Many people don’t get that, because we’ve erased it.

As someone who has struggled with Identity more recently, I’ve begun to wonder if I have a culture, and whether I should participate in that or not. The root of finding culture is to find community and understanding, and I’ve had to debate whether I necessarily need a preordained culture to feel those things. I found the writing on whiteness as a blank slate extremely profound, and as a white person who feels like the only condition of white culture is oppression, that makes finding my place hard. I’m trying to move past villifying myself for being white, but now that I’ve pushed that identity of inherent harm away, I’m not sure quite where to go. My mom’s Chicano heritage, even though I barely speak Spanish and I’m white? My dad’s racist Ohio heritage, even though they stand for everything I’m against? I ultimately decided to become a part of my activities and my relationships. I don’t deny being white, that would be counterproductive, but now I’m sourcing my culture from other things: I am a food service worker, I am a dumpster diver, I am a middle sibling, I am a queer person, I am many layers of ancestors that chose their paths in order to get me where I am.

McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexuality, and Disability.” edited by Karen E. Rosenblum and Toni-Michelle C. Travis, McGraw Hill Education, Seventh Edition.

[thequietsoliloquy]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

I'm a lesbian with a heart of gold.

If the answer matters to you, please refer to Contrapoint's youtube video "Shame". Her words perfectly conveys my own experience, minus being transgender.

That being said, I think your ask is a good opportunity to have an important conversation here:

The concept of the Gold Star lesbian shouldn't exist, and for one simple reason: only lesbians with enough love and support around them can claim that title. At the basis of it all, a Gold Star lesbian is a woman who has the privilege of living in an environment where she is neither expected nor forced to have sex with a man. Too many women are pressured into being with men, if only by being shamed into it. Too many women are taken without their consent. Being a Gold Star Lesbian is just another way of saying "I grew up safe enough not to bother with men".

Let me add to that this question: what is a man? A person with a penis? Is a lesbian who has sex with a person who has a penis not a gold star lesbian anymore? And what about lesbians who enjoys sex with a strap-on? Is penetration on the list of no-no also? The concept of Gold Star lesbian doesn't stand as much as it once did, because it refers to a harsh binary of the sexes. Therefore, it erases non-binary/trans identities from the conversation. I love women, and that love includes non-binary/trans women, with or without a penis.

If the question refers to strictly cishet men, then again, Contrapoint's video.

Joking around about being or not a Gold Star Lesbian with people we trust, or even on the Internet with other lesbians and queer people, that's one thing. It's funny. We know we're in it together. Being asked out of the blue by an anonymous person on the Internet? Of course you might very well be a lesbian/queer yourself, but the question is intrusive, as well as a stark reminder that I did not grow up in environment where I could naturally grow and love myself as a lesbian. And that makes me sad, because I could have been a proud lesbian for a little over a decade now if I had. Better late than never, isn't it?

#ask #lesbian #wlw #gold star lesbian #queer #lgbtq+ #concepts that shouldn't exist anymore #but are still fun to laugh about with friends and people who understand #ace lesbians who never had sex with no one should be platinum stars #question I almost chose not to answer to but I think the reasoning has some importance #queer theory #intersectionality #class and race/culture are a thing within queer culture #let's not forget about it

[writingwithcolor]

Jewish author writing about antisemitism; should I include racism too?

anonymous asked:

Hi! I'm a white Jewish person who's writing a story set in a fantasy world with a Jewish-coded culture. It's important to me to explore antisemitism in this distanced setting, and explore what the Jewish diaspora means to me. I have a lot of people of color in my story as well. I don't know whether I, as a white person, should include racism in a story if it isn't necessary, but I also don't want to erase the aspects of many mildly/moderately assimilated cultures that are affected by racism, and I also don't want to imply somehow that antisemitism is a more serious issue than racism, which is obviously not the case. I was thinking that bigotry might be more culture-based rather than ethnically or racially based, but again, I'm not sure how or whether to write about bigotry against cultures + groups based on cultures + groups that I'm not a part of, and people of color in the story would obviously have their own cultural elements. Is acknowledging bigotry necessary?

It's okay to focus on antisemitism

Other mods have important advice on what exactly might be helpful or applicable to include in your story and how. I want to take a moment with the anxiety you express that focusing on antisemitism and not talking about other types of xenophobia will imply to your readers that you think antisemitism is “more serious” than other forms of bigotry. I hear and honor that anxiety, especially since “Jews only care about Jews” is a stereotype that never seems to go away, so I’m going to say something revolutionary:

It’s okay to center Jews in a story about antisemitism.

There, I said it. But I’m not making the case that you shouldn’t include references to or depictions of other types of bigotry in your story. There are a lot of great reasons why you should, because of what it can do for the complexity of your characters, the depth of your worldbuilding, or the strength of your message about the nature of xenophobia, diaspora, etc.

- How your non-Jewish-coded characters react to the things they experience can affect whether they sympathize over or contribute to the antisemitism at the heart of your story.

- How other types of xenophobia do and don’t manifest in your world can help explain why your world has antisemitism in the first place, and what antisemitism consists of in a world that also contains other minorities outside of the fantasy mainstream culture.

- Including other real-world xenophobia can help you set your antisemitism in context and contrast to help explain what you want to say about it.

Both your story and your message might be strengthened by adding these details. But if you feel the structure of your story doesn’t have room for you to show other characters’ experiences and you’re only considering doing it because you’re afraid you’ll be upholding a negative stereotype of yourself if you don’t, then it might help to realize that if someone is already thinking that, nothing you do is going to change their mind. You can explore antisemitism in your story, but you don’t have the power to solve it, and since you don’t have that power you also don’t have that responsibility. I think adding more facets to your story has the potential to make it great, but leaving it out doesn’t make you evil.

- Meir

Portraying xenophobia

As someone living in Korea and therefore usually on the outside looking in, I feel that a lot of people in Western countries tend to conflate racism and xenophobia. Which does make sense since bigots tend to not exactly care about differences between the two but simply act prejudiced against the “other”. Sci also makes a point below about racialized xenophobia. I feel these are factors contributing to your confusion regarding issues of bigotry in your story.

Xenophobia, as defined by Dictionary.com, is “an aversion or hostility to, disdain for, or fear of foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers”. You mention “thinking that bigotry might be more culture-based”, and this description fits xenophobia better than most other forms of bigotry. Xenophobia can be seen as an umbrella term including antisemitism, so you are technically including one form of xenophobia through your exploration of antisemitism.

I understand your wariness of writing racism when it doesn’t add to the plot, especially as a white writer. Your concerns that you might “erase the aspects of many mildly/moderately assimilated cultures that are affected by racism” is valid and in fact accurate, since exclusion of racism will of course lead to lack of portrayals of the intersections between racism and xenophobia. I want to reassure you that this is not a bad thing, just a choice you can make. No one story (or at least, no story that can fit into one book) can include all the different forms of oppression in the world. Focusing on one particular form of oppression, particularly one you have personal experience with, is a valid and important form of representation.

You also comment that you “don't want to imply somehow that antisemitism is a more serious issue than racism”, but I honestly feel that doesn’t need too much concern. Much like how queerness and disability are two separate issues with intersections, racism and xenophobia form a Venn diagram, with large intersections but neither completely including the other. A story focusing on autistic characters that doesn’t also have queer rep doesn’t imply queer issues are less serious. Likewise, a story focusing on antisemitism doesn’t imply racism is less serious.

I am slightly more concerned that there might be an accidental implication of antisemitism being a more serious issue compared to other forms of xenophobia. Of course, exploring antisemitism alone is completely valid representation, and there’s no need to go out of your way to try and portray other forms of xenophobia. A microaggression or two, or maybe a mutual bitch out session with a gentile but marginalized friend should be enough to show that antisemitism isn’t more (or less) serious compared to other forms of xenophobia.

-Rune

Avoiding racialized xenophobia

I think one thing you have to be careful with here is racialized xenophobia. Are your characters of color getting disproportionately more xenophobia than your white characters? You might be falling into the trap of racialized xenophobia, which falls under racism, which you want to avoid. An example would be “all Chinese scientists are untrustworthy, but not you, you’re one of the ‘good ones.’” Although this is technically xenophobia, it is also racism.

--Mod Sci

In the case you choose to include even small snippets of other forms of xenophobia in your story, attempting to portray xenophobia without the complications of racism can be a difficult process when they often go hand in hand (especially to a Western audience). So here are a couple of suggestions I have of portraying xenophobia without racism.

First and the simplest method is portraying xenophobia between people of the same race. For example, there is definitely xenophobia against Chinese and Japanese people in Korea, but it would be difficult to claim there is a racial component when all of us are East Asian. (Something you might want to be aware of here is intersections with colorism, where even within the same race, lighter skin and other more westernized features are considered more desirable. I suggest looking through our colorism tag for more details)

Another idea is to include microaggressions for specific cultures rather than something more broad. For example, calling Korean food stinky because kimchi has a strong scent is specifically xenophobic against Koreans, while commenting on small eyes can be directed against Asians in general.

Finally, while antisemitism is a form of ethnicity-based xenophobia, it is also a form of religion-based xenophobia. Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus can absolutely be xenophobic against each other with no racism involved. Should you choose this method, particularly if religious xenophobia is only shown in a shorter scene, I suggest you try and avoid portraying any of the above religions as the Bad or Oppressive ones. As a Christian I will unironically tell you that Christianity is a safe choice for a religiously xenophobic character, as we’re far less likely to face backlash compared to any other religion, and inspiration should unfortunately be overflowing in real life.

-Rune

Other forms of ethno-religious oppression

Here is my TCK perspective as someone brought up in diverse environments where there are often other axes of oppression including religion, ethnicity and class:

Racism and xenophobia can definitely be apples to oranges, so creating a universe where racism no longer exists or has never existed seems doable to me. Perhaps in your fantasy world, structures that buttress racism, such as colonization, slavery and imperialism, are not issues. That still won’t stop people from creating “Us versus Them” divisions, and you can certainly make anti-semitism one of the many forms of xenophobia that exists in this your story. Meir has hinted that your reluctance to declaratively show the harm of anti-semitism indicates a level of anxiety around the topic, and, as someone non-Jewish but also not Christian or Muslim, my perspective is as follows: I’ve always viewed anti-semitism as a particularly virulent form of ethno-religious xenophobia, and while it is a unique experience, it is not the only unique experience when it comes to ethno-religious xenophobia. I think because the 3-way interaction between the Abrahamic religions dominates much of Western geopolitics, that can be how it looks, but the world is a big place (See Rune’s comments for specific examples).

To that effect, I recommend prioritizing anti-semitism alongside other non-racialized forms of xenophobia along ideological, cultural and class-based lines for both POC and non-POC characters. Show how these differences can drive those in power to treat other groups poorly. I conclude by encouraging you to slowly trace your logic when depicting xenophobia towards POC characters in particular. Emphasize bigotry along axes of class and ideology, rather than traits linked to assumed biologically intrinsic features. Ultimately, I think recognizing commonalities between forms of ethno-religious oppression as a whole will help make you more comfortable in depicting anti-semitism with the seriousness it deserves without feeling as though you are trivializing the experiences of other groups.

- Marika

Worldbuilding ethnically and racially diverse cultures

As has been mentioned by other mods, I think it’s completely fine to focus your story on antisemitism and not portray other forms of bigotry if that’s the focus and scope of the story you want to tell. My fellow mods have also offered several valuable suggestions for writing about “culture-based bigotry” in general if that’s what you want to do, while making sure it’s not coming off as racially based. One element I can add is that from a worldbuilding standpoint, it will also help to have your fantasy cultural groups be ethnically and racially diverse. After all, this was common historically in several parts of the world, and depending on which cultures you’re basing your coding on, you could absolutely have fantasy cultures in your world that include characters we would read (according to our modern-day standards) as white, and others that we would read as people of color, within the same fantasy culture. All these characters would face the same culture-based bigotry (such as xenophobia or religious oppression), even though they are read by a modern audience as different races.

As a note, the reason I say “read as” and “according to our modern-day standards” is that the entire concept of whiteness as we know it is very specific to our current cultural context. Who is and isn’t considered white has changed quite a lot over time, and is still the subject of debate today in some cases. Your work will be read by a modern audience, so of course, you need to take into account our current understanding of race and the dynamics surrounding it. However, it’s also helpful to remember that our modern racial categories are fairly new in the context of the many millennia of history of humankind, and that they are certainly not inevitable. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking a fantasy culture has to align itself entirely with modern-day racial categories.

- Niki

#Asks #fantasy #worldbuilding #anti semitism #xenophobia #racism #Judaism #Jewish