A Determined Connector of Fiction Through Themes

"A cishet person must have made this, no queer person would ever portray queerness in this way."

"This artist must be white."

"No SA victim would ever handle the subject in this way."

"No woman would ever write women like this."

"This creator is obviously neurotypical. Everyone with autism/ADHD/depression understands-"

Nope.

People who make these blanket statements are very frequently proven wrong when the creator comes out as a member of that group. And even when they aren't proven wrong, even in cases where the creator isn't from the group in question, actual members of the group who don't fit whatever arbitrary criteria are being expressed will see these statements and feel excluded and erased.

Not everyone in your group is going to share your experiences. No single individual gets to personally decide what does or doesn't count as a "valid" expression of trauma or being part of a particular group, and creators are also not obligated to out themselves in order to "prove" their validity.

If something doesn't resonate with you, all that means is that it doesn't resonate with you. You don't have to like it. But you don't get to decide what it means to someone else.

this is so important

Yesterday, Columbia University brought in New York police arrest over a hundred students who were occupying the campus in solidarity with Palestinians. In response, a much bigger wave of student demonstrators occupied the university. On the night of April 18-19, the encampment continued, stronger than ever.

You can follow updates from their Telegram channel here:

https://t.me/cuadencampment

Students—you can do this, too, wherever you are. The governments of the United States and Israel are not going to stop the genocide in Gaza unless we compel them to.

Paul Newman as Andrew Craig The Prize (1963) dir. Mark Robson

JANE RUSSELL and ROBERT MITCHUM in His Kind of Woman (1951)

Sunset Boulevard (1950) dir. Billy Wilder

TWILIGHT ZONE (1959-1964)

im noticing that for a lot of americans “free palestine” has been an ideological motto and symbol rather than them actually believing in their heart that freedom is attainable and necessary

palestinians deserve the right to be able to travel freely in our homeland. to even visit our homeland. for us to have citizenship and rights to our own country. to grow our plants. practice our religions. live without fear that our children can be kidnapped by israeli forces on their violent whims. to not have our life savings poured into building a home for our families that are torn down without real warning by israeli bulldozers. to no longer be refugees. like this is real life. this is real.

we don’t want to be reduced to a never ending slogan. we want to put down our need for resistance. to rest & to live.

gonna start a schoolhouse rock review blog in which i rate individual songs on a scale of "incredibly catchy and would show to the children currently in my life and those to come" to "this song actively erases the genocide of indigenous americans"

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, famous Palestinian Feminist Scholar, talks about the violence of forced incarceration of martyrs, the disrespect of their bodies, sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and children, and the continued violence Jerusalem Palestinians face as part of the ongoing genocide.

For those who are inclined to academic analysis of state violence, I really recommend listening to this interview. Shalhoub-Kevorkian talks about her theories regarding Palestinian dehumanization, especially as it pertains to televised genocide.

She also talks about the academic violence she faces as a Palestinian academic in Israeli society.

"Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested at her home in occupied East Jerusalem last Thursday, April 18, on charges of “serious incitement against the State of Israel” and held in a Jerusalem police station. According to her family, while in detention there she was shackled and subjected to severe interrogation under torture for hours, incarcerated in a freezing, urine and cockroach-infested cell, prevented from sleeping, yelled at and intimidated, and denied essential medication. Anyone who followed the torture debates around Guantanamo, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq will recall precisely what the function of such methods of sensory deprivation is: to reduce the prisoner to a psychological state of terror such that they will confess to whatever their interrogator wishes them to admit.

As Shalhoub-Kevorkian has herself documented, such violence is the norm in Israeli jails. Fortunately, an Israeli court declared on Friday that her arrest was unlawful and that the police had failed to find “substantial evidence to support the severity of the accusations or to indicate [her] involvement in further offenses.” Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was released, but her ordeal is far from over. The terms of her release stipulated that in addition to paying a bond, she would have to “attend” a further interrogation. That interrogation will take place tomorrow Thursday, April 25, behind closed doors and without legal representation.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s arrest and violent interrogation marks an escalation in a sequence of harassment, intimidation, and attempts at censorship that has been ongoing for years, but which intensified after “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” shook Israel’s sense of security on October 7. Her own institution, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she is among the most eminent professors, holding the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and in the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, has been profoundly complicit in the campaign of intimidation that has seriously endangered her life, as a Palestinian resident of occupied East Jerusalem who lives among fanatical and violent settlers. In October, the administration of HUJ wrote to her requesting that she step down from her post at the University as a result of her signing a statement, previously published in Mondoweiss, by childhood researchers and students calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Not only did they pressure her to resign, but they also took the extraordinary step of making public an employment-related letter that would normally have remained confidential as a personnel matter.

The inevitable consequence of their public statements has been a tirade of death threats and trolling on social media, such that Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian has had to go to campus — where both professors and students are openly armed — protected by a phalanx of her students. In March, the administration followed up by suspending her from teaching on security grounds, a decision eventually rescinded after an international outcry from scholars around the world. Her arrest in April followed hard on the heels of the University’s very public harassment and targeting of her scholarship on political grounds, a fundamental violation of internationally respected conventions of academic freedom that Israeli universities have constantly invoked to protect themselves from the global movement for academic boycott."

A man and woman at a soul dance club on McClellan Street in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1974

Photo: Peter Turnley

my name's cougar but my friends call me mountain lion and my mama calls me puma and today's my first day at big cat high. i'm so nervous i hope they don't realize i'm not panthera >ܫ<

emo cheetah jughead smoking behind the school: it's hopeless, catamount. they'll never see us as 'real' big cats... us outcats gotta stick together -ﻌ•

not pictured is the goth clouded leopard girl who bought the cigarettes w her fake id

i hope that the discussion about student protests does not get reduced to "privileged rich kids faffing around at an ivy league school." setting aside that tenuous claim, over the last week, protests have erupted over the entire country. a few days ago, riot police beat, pepper-sprayed, and arrested NYU faculty shielding students; protests started at the university of southern california when the admin cancelled the valedictorian's speech; encampments appeared at the university of southern carolina, UT dallas, the university of maryland, the university of new mexico, IUPUI, virginia tech, the university of virginia, the university of illinois, the university of north carolina — chapel hill, the university of pittsburgh, uc berkeley, the university of michigan — ann arbor, MIT, emerson, tufts, the university of rochester, rice, swarthmore, the new school, vanderbilt university, with students arrested; students protested or walked out at miami university, northwestern, temple, the 5 claremont colleges: pomona, pitzer, scripps, harvey mudd, and claremont mckenna, stanford, washington university in st louis, students were arrested at ohio state, students were confronted by riot police at cal poly humboldt, after which they occupied campus, students were arrested at the university of minnesota — twin cities, after which faculty walked out; and yes, there are protests at the other ivies, most notably yale, with students facing mass arests after encampments, but there is also an encampment at brown, protests appeared at cornell, princeton faculty issued a statement of solidarity while students are preparing an encampment, and harvard banned the undergraduate palestine solidarity committee. there are thousands of students who are protesting for palestine across the entire country, facing harassment, arrest, and suspension in return

Denzel Washington being an absolute whore in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (1993)

Joseph Cotten in SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943)

Burt Lancaster c. 1933.

Jewish women and children in Djerba, Tunisia, 1955.