44 notes &

i’ve consciously chosen to resist essentialism in all forms because i have personally witnessed how that mindset perpetuates violence. hell, biological determinism hurts women more frequently than anybody else. transfeminism is pushing the feminist movement forward to stretch our understanding of the variations within the category of “woman,” and that is only making feminism stronger. cis feminists like myself only benefit from listening to the stories of others who have been targets of gender violence. because when we bear witness to the struggles of others, we learn better strategies of resist multiple forms of oppression in our daily lived experiences. If there’s an intellectual equivalent to making one’s heart go pitterpatter — making one’s brain/mind go all clickety, if you will — this would do exactly that. I am so lucky to know and work with this person.

36 notes &

The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young black men. And it’s killing Newark.” In 2001, Booker told CNN, “you have incarceration rates in this country now that are outrageous…you aren’t really solving the problem by just throwing people in jail.

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It should not be possible to be antiracist without being against oppression. Yet race-liberal hegemony has been so effective that today in the United States everyone is antiracist, and yet oppression is banal and ubiquitious. We live with it, accepting the idea of racialized no-go zones in cities and new vulnerabilities to premature death for disposable classes; we eat it, consuming bananas harvested by dispossessed Indians in Honduras who work under the threat of gunfire and grapes picked by migrant laborers who are hunted by the same people who enjoy the literal fruits of their labor; we pay for it, supporting militias in Iraq that stake their territorial claims on women’s bodies; we study it, publishing research showing that human trafficking is more pervasive than ever and that under the curent system blacks will never gain wealth equity with whites—findings that receive scant hearing and generate less uproar. The unifying power of state antiracisms has become our stumbling block. Although they put white supremacy in permanent crisis, having been made to work for U.S. global ascendancy, and, now, neoliberal sovereignty, have dematerialized antiracism to the degree that dematerialized antiracism is now disintegrating the collectivity of social life. Once, civil rights activists were red-baited as communists for trying to desegregate lunch counters and schools, and today the accusation of socialism is launched against the concept of the public good itself… Racialization procedures must turn round, so that instead of legitimizing processes of accumulation so extremely uneven that the lives of some must appear without value, racialization—in the sense of the differential worth of human beings—will signal the necessity of altering material conditions. In order to accomplish this two-way rearticulation of the empirical and the epistemological, the materializing cultural power of reading, teaching, and the humanities must be harnessed. ‘Otherwise,’ to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘who crawls into the place of the ‘human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even [or, now, precisely] in the name of diversity?’

2,478 notes &

And recognizing that our male dominated culture is fucked up doesn’t make you a self-hating man, either. When I first heard Bikini Kill, it was fucking thrilling. Hearing someone lash out against dominant sexist attitudes wasn’t exciting in some sort of “oh good for women, they’re standing up for themselves,” type of way. It was liberating to hear someone take on those traditional expressions of masculinity, because I hated the ways I was expected to act as a man. I hated the toughness and numbness that was expected from men, because I wanted to be able to express my emotions without fear of ridicule. I hated the predatory way that men acted towards women, because I wanted to be free to have meaningful relationships with women. Likewise, I hated the homophobia, because I wanted to have meaningful relationships with the men in my life. I see men around me all the time who refuse to show any signs of vulnerability for fear of appearing feminine, and they tend to cut themselves off emotionally from the world. It’s fucking sad. I see men all the time who only view their relationships in terms of conquest, and I can’t think of one of them who has a healthy emotional life. Breaking down ideas around male superiority and masculinity is absolutely in mens’ best interests. In a punk context, I can say with certainty that the scenes I’ve visited that were the most gender inclusive have always been the most exciting and thriving music communities. There’s nothing to be gained for men in maintaining the boy’s club.