That these forms are conventions whose imaginary propriety serves a variety of religious and capitalist institutions does not mean that the desire for romantic love is an ignorant or false desire: indeed, these conventions express important needs to feel unconflicted and to possess some zone where intimacy can flourish. But in the modern United States, and the places its media forms influence, to different degrees, the fantasy world of romance is used normatively — as a rule that legislates the boundary between a legitimate and valuable mode of living/loving and all the others. The reduction of life’s legitimate possibility to one plot is the source of romantic love’s terrorizing, coercive, shaming, manipulative, or just diminishing effects — on the imagination as well as on practice.
“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.“— Arundhati Roy
If I wanted to give a gloried genealogy to sociology, I would say that, at bottom, the first sociologist was Socrates. Philosophers would be furious because they claim him as a founding father. But, in reality, he was obviously someone who came down to the street to ask questions, who went to ask an Athenian general what is courage, who went to ask Euthyphron, a pious man, what is piety, and so on. He was carrying out empirical inquiry, in a way … He was someone who tirelessly fought the equivalent of my enemies of today, or at least those whom I fight with the weapons of science, that is, the Sophists: people who speak of an unreal world while pretending it is real, who put the real beyond reach by enshrouding it in words that impress.
Someone once told me that any hatred—or maybe any void—felt long enough no longer feels like hatred, but rather like religion, or economics, or science, or tradition, or just the way things are.
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Derrick Jensen
That both normative and transgressive genders are made possible by
feminized labor has important implications for queer theory, in particular, which has often aligned the feminine with the non-queer, or the homonormative. Queer studies has embraced those utopic ways of life made most possible or necessary for masculine subjects – mobility, independence, extended identification with youth culture, grungy/alternative modes of consumption, risk-taking – and disavowed those ways of life made most possible or necessary for feminine subjects – reproductivity, caretaking, shopping, home-making, and safety-making (see Halberstam, 2005: 1–2). In contrast, to investigate gender labor is to reconnect these two seemingly distinct cultural and productive spheres; it is to see the ways that the construction of the former (the queer) has depended upon the latter (the feminine) – even, and especially, for assistance in enhancing its capacity to reject the feminine upon which it depends.
Most Black women still do not receive the respect and treatment - mollycoddling and condescending as it sometimes is - afforded White women. So when these Black women complain about not wanting to lose their femininity, they are referring to something quite different. The difference has to be understood in an analysis of how the classic “feminine characteristics” are viewed in relation to Black women.
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Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (South End Press, 1981), p27 (via radtransfem)
Just a reminder, ladies, that you may graduate from Wellesley, then Yale Law School, become one of the most powerful and influential lawyers in the country, then the First Lady of the United States, then a U.S. Senator from New York, come this close to being the Democratic nominee for president yourself, and ultimately serve as the Secretary of State, but you’ll always be a woman — an emotional, unhinged, woman.
You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.
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Junot Diaz (via Tatiana Richards)
Diet culture, even when it doesn’t involve surgeries or starvation or physical harm (although it very often does involve these things) is violence. Even the language of diet culture is about hurt: burn those calories, zap that fat, I’ve been so bad, no pain no gain, beat the hunger, crush the cravings, fight the fat, battle the bulge, waging war on obesity. See? All about the hurt. It’s no wonder then that some people seem to perceive fat acceptance as a new kind of danger. Some assume it’s a movement that promotes harm to one’s own body or to the health of others, or even to taxpayers. It doesn’t. It simply illuminates this fact: if there is a war on obesity, there’s a war on ‘obese people’ and those people have a right to resist. So we do, often by opting out of the war altogether and making peace with bodies. I don’t want to fight my body anymore and I sure as hell don’t want to fight yours, whatever size it is. In fact, I don’t even want all that rhetoric about fighting. Why are softer words (embrace, accept, listen) less utilized? Traits commonly seen as ‘feminine’ and therefore weak — like kindness – are actually some of the most effective mechanisms we have to use against fat-hate. It’s hard to sell diet pills to someone who’d like to be gentle on themselves, accept themselves for who they are, listen to what their body needs and embrace size diversity. And it’s hard to see how creating a world without diet pills wouldn’t be a win for feminism.
The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerrilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the War on Drugs, it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks that were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.
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Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (via therecipe)
Heather Davis: What is it about love that makes it a compelling or politically interesting concept?
Michael Hardt: One healthy thing love does, which is probably not even the core of it, but at least one healthy thing it does, is it breaks through a variety of conceptions about reason, passion, and the role of affect in politics. …
Lauren Berlant:….. I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality. The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.
The question of duration is also important in this regard because there are many places that one holds duration. …. As a formal relation, love could have continuity, whereas, as an experiential relation it could have discontinuities. When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land you’re probably going to fall, or hurt your ankle or hit someone. When you’re asking for social change, you want to be able to say there will be some kind of cushion when we take the leap. What love does as a seduction for this is, and has done historically for political theory, is to try to imagine some continuity in the affective level. One that isn’t experienced at the historical, social or everyday level, but that still provides a kind of referential anchor, affectively and as a political project.
Interested inalternatives to the Prison Industrial Complex? Check out what what this Chicago-based youth project is doing to promote alternatives to calling the police. Great stuff.
I thought this was very well-written and informative.
I’m always saying “I’m sorry for what white people have done to you/continue to do to you” but I don’t always follow that with a solution to the problem at hand.
Time to change that.
Omg, I want to print this out and throw them everywhere, especially at school, so many people do these things and don’t understand that racism is at lot more subversive than someone just spewing racial slurs
The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional settings to manufacture social punishment and human suffering. Beyond addressing the convergences between private and public power that constitute the intersectional dimensions of social control, this Article addresses political failures within the antiracism and antiviolence movements that may contribute to the legitimacy of the contemporary punishment culture, both ideologically and materially.
here’s a roundup of the maps of “North American indigenous territories” I’ve seen on tumblr in the last two weeks. please note the following:
save for the second one, none of them are dated. “pre-contact” is not a date. “colonial” is not a date. the first could mean 1500 or 1850 or anywhere in between. the latter could be any one of those dates, all the way up to the present. an ahistoric map is an uncontextualized map which means it is an essentially useless and ignorant map.
they all contradict each other. which one is right? they were all drawn by white academics, so it’s hard to really know, huh?
they all have major flaws and inaccuracies. there are at least 500 different tribes in N. America—none of these maps save the second to last one have that many listed, and that one is of Northern California alone!
Academics and cartographers will lie to you and say that it’s hard to know which lands belonged to whom in the “pre-contact days.” This is a reflection of their unwillingness to dialogue with indigenous peoples and knowledges than it is actual existing information, because you can bet Native peoples know which land is theirs.
They’ll legitimate “estimations” and “generalizations” for the sake of “general knowledge” that “indigenous peoples were there.” That’s part of a larger colonial narrative that tells us it’s okay to belittle indigenous histories and knowledges for the sake of ignorance produced by that same colonial narrative.
Finally, they’ll hide behind industry-granted authority grounded in objectivism—as if colonizers could ever be objective about the lands they’re colonizing. In the words of Fanon, “for the colonized person, objectivity is always turned against them.” This authority is granted by colonial institutions of power that actively works to the detriment of indigenous peoples and legitimates epistemic and material violence from academics and professionals. There is no such thing as objectivity, much less an objective map.
Aside from formal reservation boundaries, there are no maps in existence which adequately represent indigenous territories of North America (and even reservation boundaries are complicated and changing, and don’t include unrecognized tribes). What does indigenous territory mean? Is it legal landholdings? Cultural areas? Linguistic areas? Historic areas, and if so, from which time period? The only way to account for the multiple and varied iterations and meanings of “indigenous territories” is to create maps of extremely small areas, working from indigenous knowledges and histories. They would have to be something like 20x60mi on each page, and even then would require multiple iterations, taking historic change, varying definitions, and varying narratives into account (many boundaries are contested or overlap!). The final project would be a whole series of massive atlases.
Maps are an assertion of power. Think carefully what kind of power you’re perpetuating when using maps like these. For more information and to see other posts I’ve written on the subject (including the use of generalization & linguistic area maps), see these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
