Bossy Femme!

Let me tell you another story (I should have died)

Once, long ago, I was far from home and I felt very ill. I went to the doctor. The doctor said I had a tubal pregnancy and that there was a very real possibility that I could die from it. I said ‘but I am on a highly reliable method of birth control’ and the doctor said ‘these things happen’ and I said ‘yes, I suppose they do.’ The doctor I saw referred me to Dr. [redacted], who gave me an abortion and saved my life. Dr. [redacted] was very nice and so were all the OR and hospital staff.

They saved my life. (I should have died.)

I see people claiming that killing abortion providers, and clinic staff, and administrative personnel, should be called ‘justifiable homicide.’ I see people calling for the death of Dr. [redacted] and other abortion providers in the news almost every day. (I should have died.) I see those people continuing to work even though it is dangerous, even though it can be fatal to provide people with fairly basic health care, and I think, I should have died.

I should have died.

I should have died.

I think, you are saying, I should have died. I should have died, is what you are telling me.

Someone, please. Tell me how this is ‘pro life.’

02/16/11

[image is of a pink hanky with “femme - brains & beauty” embroidered on it.]

thecupboard:

garconniere:

clairebearstare:

So cute!

this triggers so many feelings…

most of the very hurtful/manipulative things people have said to me that have stayed with me are that i am “too beautiful” to be as smart as i am… or something along those lines. that i have some self-esteem/self-loathing issues because for the longest time i did not like what saw in the mirror whereas the people around me and strangers did, and told me whether i wanted to hear it or not. that being intelligent (and taken seriously) and being beautiful (for female-identified folks) are two things that are diametrically opposed. you’ve got to pick. the end.

a few years ago, someone who came into my life suddenly, seemed wonderful and like a great new friend, but quickly pitted my best friend and i against each other. he took me aside, said “you and your best friend are a great team! she would be nothing without you, you bring style and beauty and sass.” he took her aside and said “you and julia are a great team! but she would be nothing without you, you are all substance and smarts.” i suddenly suffered terrible jealousy and anxiety, because she won all sorts of activist awards and i felt like no one noticed all of the work i had done over the years. i kept on finding myself convinced that people would just remember me as the one who wore pretty dresses and had a nice smile, but all the credit would go to my best friend. what about my work? my efforts? didn’t i deserve to be told i was articulate, intelligent, not just pretty and good at making nice posters?

in the end, we both got burned, bad, by that fucker. a two month whirlwind courtship/friendship only to find he had been deceiving us for ulterior motives and his own delusions of grandeur. i hated myself for letting myself be charmed by him, but it was nice to not have been alone through that shit. my partner at the time was just as deceived and disappointed when this fucker turned out to be a manipulative bastard, and my best friend and i got drunk and laughed about it on several occasions.

my 5 years with that best friend ended badly, and i think we both still hurt over it even though apologies have been made and years have passed. i think back to that time where she was made to believe she was the substance and i was the style, and how hurtful that was for both of us. you must be one, or the other. you can’t be both. i don’t know if either of us ever let that go.

in short, what i learned from that experience is these stupid fucked up gendered dichotomies need to be dismantled or they will become toxic and take over your life. i think that is what i love about being femme and queer… today i feel this is the only space where i can embrace being critical, gorgeous, sexy, and all for myself. i can have brains and beauty. if you reclaim the slurs people throw at you, it will only make you stronger. i’m brains and beauty.

fuck yes.

julia, that is all very important & eloquent. i remember all the years of trouble you’ve had to go through to know this stuff, & i wish it didn’t have to happen. & i remember that dude - fuck him. ugh ugh ugh.

to further this discussion, i’m reminded of s.e. smith/meloukhia’s post, “I don’t need beauty”, about, well, just read it, everyone, okay? [trigger warning - mentions motivations behind anorexia]

from the post:

The thing about formerly stigmatised identities is that they are very hard to repurpose and claim and one of the reasons for this is that people insist on stripping you of your identity, over and over. Fat people are constantly told they ‘aren’t really’ fat or they aren’t like ‘those’ fatties over there when they are proudly trying to wear that label. Us nonbeautiful people, whatever you want to call us—ordinary, ugly, plain—are told ‘oh no, you’re beautiful’ even as we are, perhaps, struggling with our identities and wanting to own them and identify them and claim them. I don’t want to be beautiful and this is a concept so alienating to people that I think it frightens them. Who wouldn’t want to be beautiful? Isn’t that the goal we all aspire to?

02/15/11

“

One thing which I will note about idea appropriation is that it seems to follow recognizable and established patterns, and that these patterns usually take the form of appropriation of ideas from people living in marginalized bodies. The words of nonwhite women are used by white women without credit, the words of people with disabilities are used by able folks, trans* ideas are taken up by cis people like cis people invented them, LGBQT experience is appropriated without a hat tip, and of course intersectionality raises things to a whole new level; look at the white LGBQT civil rights movement which ignores the work of people of colour who fought, hard, in the early days of gay civil rights, for example.

me (and my last pointed Tumble of the day)

01/31/11

Hrm, where have I seen people talking about the flaws with ‘love your body’ rhetoric before?

meloukhia:

Oh.

Right.

I always love it when people blatantly rip off my work and don’t even have the decency to drop a cite mentioning their inspiration.

If you haven’t read these two posts by meloukhia before, you probably should. Because they are very very good. And if you *have* read them, you should try citing them, okay? The internet doesn’t get to be the site of the 4th wave feminist revolution omgz if we’re gonna plagiarize each other.

01/31/11

this ain't livin': Today in Irk: Podcasts and Transcripts

And it irks me to see people now relying on crowdsourced transcripts made by people who really really like content and want to share it but can’t until it is transcribed. Transcription work is time consuming and taxing and there’s a reason it costs money, because it is work. When your content is inaccessible and other people have to make it accessible for you, you really ought to be paying them. Because what they are doing is work.

I try to caption/provide transcripts/lyrics for things on tumblr, but it isn’t always feasible for me to do so. At those times when I have to choose between posting something knowing that it’s inaccessible or not posting something, I look at all the notes on a post (sometimes hundreds of notes!) and wish that somebody out there had taken the time to do some of this transcription/captioning, too. When things come captioned/transcribed it is like a little luxurious holiday to just hit “reblog” and have that be that.

01/29/11

College Students:

itsthefirstday:

adorianmode:

meloukhia:

You should be extremely concerned about the fact that the accused shooter’s former educational institution is freely releasing information about his record there, including things like this:

After he was suspended, Mr. [Redacted] and his parents met with administrators, who said he would require a mental health clearance if he wanted to return to college.

Aside from reflecting a lack of respect for privacy, this also means that in the event someone at your college feels like it, information about your academic record can apparently be freely released, including potentially compromising information that might make it harder for you to find work, get housing, receive government benefits.

Release of information about you is ‘in the public interest’ if you are a scary potentially crazy person. Remember that.

And then wonder why college students with mental illness are so reluctant to seek treatment or help.

Terrifying? Terrifying.

Fuck.

Thanks Meloukhia for this reminder.

(via terrorbull-deactivated20110707)

01/9/11

I am a feminist, and Naomi Wolf does not speak for me

01/7/11

“

Understanding science isn’t just about knowing how to balance chemistry equations or understanding the various theories about evolution in detail. It’s also about knowing how to set up a critical question and how to respond to that question, how to evaluate information you are presented with and synthesise it in a way that makes sense to you. How to test knowledge and how to query information to arrive at a deeper and more complete understanding of that knowledge. How to argue, too, how to break down the components of a statement or theory or dataset and talk about them in a clear, constructive way.

Critical thinking skills are taught in the humanities as well, but many people aren’t much more literate in the humanities than they are in the sciences, wouldn’t know a thesis if it bit them in the behind any more than they would recognise a rigorously tested hypothesis. This contributes to a lack of understanding about the world around us; when you have trouble getting a grip on how to evaluate and think about information, it makes it a lot harder to understand things large and small, political and otherwise.

s.e. smith’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Science” is worth a read all the way through

11/30/10

this ain’t livin’: I Don’t Mind If You’re Straight, So Long As You Act Gay In Public

peerpleasure:

this ain’t livin’: I Don’t Mind If You’re Straight, So Long As You Act Gay In Public

Why is it that members of the QUILTBAG community are taken to task for being ‘too…’ while heterosexual people are not? It’s a pretty clear function of privilege—people don’t challenge behaviour they see as ‘normal’ and heterosexuality is read as ‘normal’ despite the fact that very few people are actually purely heterosexual, as the Kinsey Reports helpfully demonstrated. Normalising expression of all sexualities rather than just one would make society of a hell of a lot safer for everyone and I don’t see anything ‘too gay’ about that.

I note that the sexuality of gay men in particular is often perceived as threatening. They are either deemed too sexually aggressive or they are deemed too flouncy and flamboyant for polite company. Policing gay men’s sexuality has really harmful effects, both on gay men and society. Plenty of people are flouncy and flamboyant. Being a man who is flamboyant does not make you gay, but thanks to stereotyping and policing, femme men are often assumed to be gay. If they aren’t, well, ‘it’s only a matter of time,’ people say sagely while nodding their heads. A man who chooses to wear dresses or skirts now and then, to dress in women’s clothing, is presumed to be gay because he isn’t performing heterosexual masculinity to the satisfaction of everyone around him. Men who play with their gender expression and sexuality are deemed frightening and scary and they must be shut down; they’re ‘in your face’ and we can’t have that.

I agree that this type of pressure is bullshit. However, as a queer-lady-with-a-boyfriend, I gotta tell you that I DO experience the pressure to queer-it-up from within queer communities, as tho my own assertion of my queerness is not enough. & I am tired of feeling like this experience is one that is somehow unimportant because the majority of queer folks feel pressure to be straight-appearing. Guess what though? I get that pressure too, even moreso because straight people think I’m straight. Biphobic catch-22s are awesome! Yuck.

11/18/10