A Trip to the Morg

"I’m not J.J. Abrams, who’s ultimately responsible. I’m just his Asian puppet. Which, by the way, is..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:28:09 -0500

“I’m not J.J. Abrams, who’s ultimately responsible. I’m just his Asian puppet. Which, by the way, is also the title of my autobiography.”

- John Cho (x)

yo my heart is racing at the guts it takes to say something like this knowing full well what could happen. damn!!!!
(via strugglingtobeheard)

"Black women are, it seems, damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our collective singleness,..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:17:24 -0500

“

Black women are, it seems, damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our collective singleness, independence, and unsanctioned mothering are an affront to mainstream womanhood. But a high-profile married black woman who uses her husband’s name (if only for purposes of showbiz) or admits the influence her male partner has had on her life is an affront to feminism.

Wilson says that in the context of pathologized black womanhood and black relationships, Beyoncé and the Knowles-Carter clan “counter a narrative about our families that has been defined by the media for too long about what our families must look like and how they’re comprised.” Black women’s sexuality and our roles as mothers and partners have been treated as public issues as far back as slavery, even as family life for most citizens has been viewed as a private matter. Our nation’s “peculiar institution” treated human beings—black human beings—as property. And so, black women’s partnering—when and whom we partnered with and the offspring of those unions—were at the very foundation of the American economy. According to Jackson, “People would talk about black women’s sexuality in polite company like they would talk about race horses foaling calves.”

Like critiques of her sexed-up performances, response to Beyoncé’s recent pregnancy illustrates that black female bodies remain fodder for public gossip. Even with the devotion of mainstream media (especially the entertainment and gossip genres) to monitoring female celebrities’ sexuality, “baby bumps,” and engagement rocks, the speculation about Beyoncé’s womb stands apart as truly bizarre. Almost as soon as the singer revealed her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, there was conjecture—amplified by a televised interview in which the singer’s dress folded “suspiciously” around her middle—that it was all a ruse to cover for the use of a surrogate.

The HBO documentary, which chronicled her pregnancy, failed to quiet the deliberation. Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak proclaimed, “Beyoncé has never been less convincing about the veracity of her pregnancy than she was in her own movie…. We never see a full, clear shot of Beyoncé’s pregnant, swanlike body. Instead it’s presented in pieces, owing to the limitations of her Mac webcam. When her body is shown in full, it’s in grainy, black-and-white footage in which her face is shadowed.” There is, in this assessment, a disturbing assumption of ownership over Beyoncé’s body. Why won’t this woman display her naked body on television to prove to the world that she carried a baby in her uterus?

The conversation surrounding Beyoncé feels like assessing a prize thoroughbred rather than observing a human woman, and it is dismaying when so-called feminist discourse contributes to that. Feminism is about challenging structural inequalities in society, but the criticism of Beyoncé as a feminist figure smacks of hating the player and ignoring the game, to twist an old phrase.

”

- Tami Winfrey Harris, “All Hail The Queen?” Bitch Magazine 5/20/13 (via racialicious)

Tranny Power: Privilege

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:11:57 -0500

Tranny Power: Privilege:

trannypowah:

I’ve been seeing a spate of middle-class white trans people (women and men) starting “transition fundraisers” or “surgery fundraisers” because their health insurance denied them. I see this and I just fume, because I barely have the money I need to support my family, let alone pay for health…

janetmock: This is how I’ll always remember Whitney Houston,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:11:11 -0500

janetmock:

This is how I’ll always remember Whitney Houston, floating around in glitter with the voice of an angel.

Cinderella: It’s possible for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage. It’s possible for a plain country bumpkin and a prince to join in marriage. Fairy Godmother: And four white mice are easily turned to horses Such fal de rah and fiddle dee dee of courses Quite possible! Both: It’s possible! Cinderella: For the world is full of zanies and fools who don’t believe in sensible rules and won’t believe what sensible people say. Both: And because these daft and dewey eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes Impossible things are happening every day.

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:28:00 -0500

"Agapism is a deontological system of ethics consisting of one simple command: in every situation, do..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:21:56 -0500

““Agapism is a deontological system of ethics consisting of one simple command: in every situation, do the loving thing, whatever that may be.””

- http://moralphilosophy.info/normative-ethics/deontology/ (via bunny-burrows)
Would it be possible that the most loving thing to do is to tear them apart?

Six Actors Who Could Have Played Khan Noonien Singh: Shahrukh...

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:28:33 -0500

Six Actors Who Could Have Played Khan Noonien Singh:

Shahrukh Khan

Sendhil Ramamurthy

Hrithik Roshan

Naveen Andrews

Ajay Devgan

Aamir Khan

lati-negros: floricanto-desnuda: pocproblems: I hope he...

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:33:29 -0500

lati-negros:

floricanto-desnuda:

pocproblems:

I hope he learned a lesson from this.

i don’t care; i’m completely amused and so is she *s

daily acts of subversion

hahahahaha

amazing

Letters For Our Community: Hold Up

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:49:19 -0500

Letters For Our Community: Hold Up:

lettersforourcommunity:

I’d like to call a time out, a process point, if you will.

I’m frustrated because I don’t feel like I can add my opinion to the actual debate of race and drag because the conversation has been derailed by the focus on specific organizers’ identities, especially Morgan’s.

While this…

This has been one of the most stressful weeks of the year. Holy mother of Pancakes. So I’m...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:04:57 -0500

This has been one of the most stressful weeks of the year. Holy mother of Pancakes. So I’m helping to organize a town hall discussion in Austin around some problematic drag performances. And its been a fucking shit show. The first few days after we posted the event and started advertising, it was all civil. People were calm and collected.

And then I posted my open letter.

And then all of the sudden, we are witch hunters. We are making assumptions of identity. We are being unfair and making space unsafe. Never mind that their racist actions make us feel unsafe. Never mind that when we try to call them out they get defensive, call us names and brush us off.

Its so frustrating to me that you need to be gentler then gentle when calling white people out on their racist shit if they are even gonna pretend to hear you. God forbid you make them feel “unsafe” and “uncomfortable”. Nevermind the fact that they have been doing that shit to us for fucking centuries.

And goddamn it, I have been on my best motherfucking behavior. I have been so good at being polite and phrasing my responses in such a way that aren’t “inflammatory” (although we all know that nothing I say will ever not be inflammatory and who is the arbiter of that). But I’ve been really good to not sound angry. I’ve really stretched so that I don’t start fires.

But of course, the fire has been raging for centuries. The only thing I did was bring it into the light

And then! When I share that I had felt threatened by one of the queens, they come out and victim blame me and call me a liar.

I’m just so fucking done.

this bitch was/is my idol.

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:53:00 -0500

this bitch was/is my idol.

omg femmespiration

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:45:13 -0500

omg femmespiration

Fun thoughts

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:19:19 -0500

lettersforourcommunity:

Matt Smith here. Not friends with any of the performers, organizers, or facilitators. Didn’t even know there was a drag controversy until this week.

Disclaimer: I mention some of the examples others have shared about what may be problematic in a performance. I’m not crusading against the performers. Even if I think you did something problematic, I don’t hate you.

I’ve been thinking about what makes a performance offensive, oppressive, whatever.

It’s not whether or not it pokes fun at some oppressed culture. We can all think of funny comedy like that.

I also don’t think it’s just when someone pokes fun at some oppressed culture without being a member of it… or that being a member of it automatically makes it all okay. Minstrel shows weren’t okay.

I think it’s about whether the performance humanizes oppressed people or dehumanizes them. Under the status quo, oppressed groups are dehumanized – reduced to a set of stereotypes. That’s why so many women seeing a black guy will clutch their purses, or why my father-out-law came to meet me for the first time fearing the worst. (The worst for him was promiscuity, and he was relieved to find we didn’t have a harem of half-naked men at the apartment. We made them all go home until he was gone.)

And that dehumanization is beneath all kinds of discrimination. We’ve all internalized oppressive bullshit. We all act on that internalized bullshit in varied ways, often without being conscious of it. That’s lot of the racism in today’s world. (If you don’t already know all this, tell me and I can show you where to find tons of evidence.) We either help break that down, or we’re complicit in perpetuating the status quo.

When white frat boys throw a blackface party, they’re treating race and racism as nothing but a source of entertainment. Nothing more serious than that. A minstrel show does the same – letting people feel okay about the stereotypes they’ve internalized and the reality of an oppressed community. The message is there’s no big deal, nothing serious to see here, just good for a laugh.

If someone says that a performance portraying her own community made her feel suddenly alienated, alone, and betrayed by the people laughing around her, that’s a good sign the performance was dehumanizing the oppressed group. If a bunch of ignorant guys in the audience point and laugh at the “crack whore,” that’s another clear sign of dehumanization.

And not to say that was the performer’s intent. Maybe even it was intended as a humanizing performance, and somebody completely misunderstood the message as “haha, a crazy crack whore.”

Similarly, when the imagery used for publicity is a chola behind bars, maybe that image was created by somebody who grew up in that culture and makes fun of their people with love. But the image on its own still pushes the same stereotypes that dehumanize latinos/as. And if the art doesn’t convey the love and humanize even as it pokes fun, that’s where things start to feel offensive, unsafe, racist, oppressive.

For these reasons, I find it less problematic when someone makes fun of their own culture. It’s more likely to be done and conveyed with love, in a way that’s palpable to everyone. But that’s not automatic. It could just as easily become a minstrel show.

The audience matters too: If someone’s performing for their own community, I’m less worried about dehumanization. But if you’re performing for the general public, where people don’t have that shared experience of the culture, the risk of dehumanization is far higher. And there are some people/crowds a humanizing performance would be lost on, just because they’re not in a place to get it.

So for me, there are two questions. One, is the performance coming from a place of love and common humanity, or just making fun of someone’s culture or plight? And two, will the audience have an experience that breaks down the oppressive BS we’re all spoon-fed in this society; or will they experience the art as license to (continue) not see(ing) us as people, and relating to us as some “other”?

la selva sangrará esta noche…

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:17:49 -0500

la selva sangrará esta noche…:

inriri:

you have obviously never been anything but a cis white middle class male in a society that functions by shitting on anyone who isn’t

these are the kind of people in steampunk that make people not want to be a part of steampunk

nospockdasgay: nievie: arachnis-deathicus: Gonna quickly...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:35:30 -0500

nospockdasgay:

nievie:

arachnis-deathicus:

Gonna quickly throw in an epic quote I found on this article.

KJKJ: Gene Roddenberry, with balls of brass, got up on national tv and said, “hey people, if a geneticist took all the best DNA from planet Earth and put it together to make the best human the world has ever seen - he wouldn’t be a white guy.”

This is why I find the casting of a white actor in this role to be so repugnant. They are not whitewashing an Asian role, they are saying that the best genetic material that the entirety of this world and it’s diversity has to offer….still comes from a white guy.

Reblogging again for that

Omg yes

wait wait wait wait wait. So they ask for transparency, and you give it to them. They ask who is...

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:32:42 -0500

wait wait wait wait wait. So they ask for transparency, and you give it to them. They ask who is organizing it and what the purpose is and all of that, you tell them. And they still aren’t satisfied????? So done with this fuckery. Meanwhile, Queerbomb is never asked to release a list of organizers. Meanwhile, we are held to much more rigorous standard than anyone else. Why? Because we are speaking truth to power and they hate that. They will do everything in their power to undermine and invalidate our position.

nueva-bordena: queeraztlan: biyuti: because part of what radfems (and even white trans women)...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:01:35 -0500

nueva-bordena:

queeraztlan:

biyuti:

because part of what radfems (and even white trans women) want us to think

is that the ideas radfems have

somehow exist in a vacuum

or that their claims on transmisogyny and trans women can be isolated and removed

leaving behind a reformed radical feminism

^^^Like really. What’s with all of that “radfems/transphobic feminists aren’t real feminists” shit. Ask any trans woman who experienced the consensus “real feminism” just like ten years ago. Are we to believe that magically TWoC are at the top of their agenda, and the last 40 years doesnt matter, and feminists are now the answer to transmisogyny?

Just cuz they’re disowning Cathy Brennan now and think about us once a year? Meanwhile, ”(white) vagina supremacy! All (cis white) bodies are beautiful! (Vaginal) sex positivity!” Like that’s also in a vacuum separate from TWoC?

I can kick it with a lot of feminists. Feminism gives me a good framework to understand my oppression. But its been 40 years since TWoC started your pinche queer revolution, and we’re still waiting for your real feminism to save us. Get your shit together and remember who died, and are still dying, for you. Remember whose deaths your ideologies and communities are founded on.

And that one day is basically just them tallying how many of us have died. It’s not a day devoted to building up the TWOC community, or celebrating our accomplishments, it’s this condescending ritual that is so rote its insulting.
I didn’t want anything to do with feminism when I was younger because of all the stuff I read on Trans message boards online. There were tons of messages about white transwomen (because that was who dominated those spaces) no being allowed in certain spaces or facing discrimination because of ideas feminism put forward. What changed my mind, at least for a while, was reading Borderlands/La Frontera my freshman year of college. So now I have complicated relationship with feminism where the majority of my friends are feminists, and I often say I’m a feminist as a kind of shorthand, but the transmisogyny and racism that pervade feminism basically lead to me avoiding feminist spaces.

Also, you’re totally right on how ridiculous they get around bodies. I remember this one white feminist recommended I read “Cunt” because it was a good book and it was basically a hundred pages of white transmisogyny.

We need to stop waiting for feminism to do anything for us. I think the only people who are actually capable of helping #girlslikeus are other #girlslikeus, and we need to get all of our resources together and focus on helping ourselves. We get consumed by other communities and by helping communities we share part of our identity with (I don’t think I phrased that well, but like, as a personal example, me doing tons of work in cis Chicano/a places or helping cis Queer people at the expense of helping TWOC), and if we don’t organize for ourselves no one will. Even though that’s going to be incredibly difficult. :/

I also think its important to make the distinction between feminism and womanism/mujerista. Like, feminism for me is white folks looking at Native ways of being and stealing that shit and slapping on white supremacy and transmisogyny.

Mujerismo, for me, is about women of color taking back our Native ways of being. Its intersectional and made by women of color, for women of color.

biyuti: queeraztlan: biyuti: because part of what radfems (and even white trans women) want us to...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:48:27 -0500

biyuti:

queeraztlan:

biyuti:

because part of what radfems (and even white trans women) want us to think

is that the ideas radfems have

somehow exist in a vacuum

or that their claims on transmisogyny and trans women can be isolated and removed

leaving behind a reformed radical feminism

^^^Like really. What’s with all of that “radfems/transphobic feminists aren’t real feminists” shit. Ask any trans woman who experienced the consensus “real feminism” just like ten years ago. Are we to believe that magically TWoC are at the top of their agenda, and the last 40 years doesnt matter, and feminists are now the answer to transmisogyny?

Just cuz they’re disowning C**y B***n now and think about us once a year? Meanwhile, ”(white) vagina supremacy! All (cis white) bodies are beautiful! (Vaginal) sex positivity!” Like that’s also in a vacuum separate from TWoC?

I can kick it with a lot of feminists. Feminism gives me a good framework to understand my oppression. But its been 40 years since TWoC started your pinche queer revolution, and we’re still waiting for your real feminism to save us. Get your shit together and remember who died, and are still dying, for you. Remember whose deaths your ideologies and communities are founded on.

omg. YES

Honestly? it has all the stench of an accountability dodge

because if they call them ‘not real feminists’ then they have no responsibility to deal with them

Yeah, whenever folks are like “OMG thats not real feminism” I’m just like, but uhh… It is. Transmisogyny is at the very heart of feminism. And you can’t be one without the other, in my opinion.

Whenever white queers cry about reverse racism I just...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:10:50 -0500

On Rewriting Narratives

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:35:24 -0500

trannypowah:

As many of you know, Boston has a LGBT Film Festival. Held over many days and in many different theaters, the festival screens films that celebrate and shed light on the queer experience. And while most of the films are centered around white queers, there were a number of films that featured QPOC only cast. I saw one of those films. It’s called Leave It On the Floor. The program billed it as a black gay musical inspired by the groundbreaking documentary Paris is Burning. There were gorgeous boys and sickening queens, voguing and lots of singing. And, for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was the perfect mix of campy realness and torrid love affair drama.

About half way into the movie, however, one of the characters dies. I’m sure you can guess what her identities were. She was a poor, black, trans woman. And this really, really bothered me. And while she wasn’t murdered, she died in a car crash, it still frustrated me. She was also the only character in the movie to die. Why is it that many, if not most, portrayals of black and brown trans women in the media have them dead? Without fail, when a trans woman of color is introduced into a film or TV show they are dead before the end of the movie. Even in the news, we never hear about the victories or successes of trans women of color. We only hear about their murders, if we hear of them at all.

On top of that, the protagonist of the movie was kicked out of his home for being gay by his mother. Her character was completely one dimensional. She was callous, completely unremorseful that she was sending her kid to the streets. She verbally assaulted and insulted the protagonist for being gay. She was written in such a way that her only defining characteristic was her hatred for her son. She was the perfect caricature of the homophobic Black mother.

The reason for this is because that is the narrative that society has given to us. The script, if you will, that is given to all trans women of color. We come out, we get kicked out of our homes and we are killed. Since PoC, apparently, have the patent on homophobia and transphobia, there is no other result to our coming out. Communities of color are the most intolerant of queerness and gender diversity. (Let alone the fact that people of color are more likely to be queer)

What is particularly egregious about this instance is that the writer and director of the film were both gay white men. These two men were not only operating from two of the worst of QPoC narratives but they were also doing so with complete lack of analysis as to why they are problematic. It is an extremely sneaky form of racism because for all the audience knows, this film was a production by black queer and trans* folk for black queer and trans* folk. The cast was entirely black. And this makes it easy for the audience to miss the implicit racist stereotypes.

We need to be rewriting this narrative. We need to take our stories into our own hands and rewrite it to reflect our own lives. We need to be telling our own stories for ourselves, for others like us. We need to stop blindly accepting the messages that white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and capitalism would have us consume. We need to start telling stories that demonstrate our lived lives. We need to write poems, short stories, plays, screen plays that celebrate our identities, that reflect our experience has survivors. We need to make art and space that is meaningful for us. That accurately represents us. I’m not saying that we should erase the hardship that surrounds our lives because that would be just as bad. What I am saying is that we need to be talking about our victories, our loves, our hopes, our accomplishments.

What I am saying is that we need to rewrite the narrative so that we become human and not just corpses.

My story used to end with my early death at the hands of transmisogyny . I had no doubt that it was a question of when, not if. And that is because I accepted the narrative given to me. I won’t lie to you; I still often worry about that and I know it is a very real possibility. But it’s different today. I know that I am given that narrative so that I give up before the fight has even started. And I know my story might still end up that way, but I am determined to make sure that it isn’t a certainty. I am determined to rewrite the ending so that women that come after me can have hope.

I am determined to rewrite my narrative for myself.

-Morgan