Klimt’s famous “kiss” on the walls of a devastated building in Syria
so, today we, russian queers, may become "extremists" by decision of russian supreme court and thus our existence will be silenced and erased. any queer activism will be impossible for us. I don't know what to do anymore. I was heartbroken when they passed the laws about "gay propaganda" and transgender people, now I'm just numb. I don't want to escape. I just want to live safely in my own country.
please hear us.
They banned transition in July. Today they're banning LGBTQ+. They declared LGBT+ an extremist movement. All the people who are themselves are now a “movement”, and the organizations that help them are “extremist”. There's no way back as they already banned it.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/30/russia-supreme-court-bans-lgbt-movement-extremist
Spotify wrapped is normally released on a November 30 or December 1 but this year it was released on November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People- a day which it was asked for people to increase their social media posts about Palestine to help call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead it is now being overshadowed by people posting about Spotify wrapped…
Sometime in the 2000s, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.
i do fundamentally agree with the idea that stuff like 'man' and 'women' dont have to be mutually exclusive, people can identify as whatever they want, and gender is there to be played around with as much as anyone likes. but i do feel like we're seeing a trend amongst some subsets of people where they can't hold those beliefs and Also accept the fact that as it stands 'woman' is still a very real and important political class of people. like it really would be great if we were in a place culturally where gender categorizations werent very politically relevant. but they clearly are. and i feel like a lot of people in an attempt to find an understanding of gender that makes them more comfortable have subconsciously kind of abandoned a framework that calls for a structured women's lib movement.
and it's like, on one side you have large swathes of the population who still aren't fully sold on the whole 'women are people' thing. and then on the other side you have a group who correctly understand that the whole gender thing is pretty bullshit. but then, instead of using feminism as a platform to try and build towards a world that reflects those ideals politically they have just kind of retreated fully into idpol and abandoned the scraps of the feminist framework to the radfems to re-appropriate into. fucking. nouveau phrenology.
it just sucks man it feels like we're sort of at an all time low in regards to public interest in meaningful feminism that i've witnessed in my lifetime.
this all really ties into my feelings about the "Lesbians Can Date Men!" discourse a lot because at the end of the day i truly do not care what identity people use for themselves and am much more concerned if our actual political beliefs line up. but from a political standpoint i do think it is necessary for women's lib to have a word that means 'woman who is unequivocally not romantically or sexually interested in men' and if that word isn't going to be lesbian then i really don't know what it is.
As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.
The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.
This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.
Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.
The idea that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of racial/national conflict is, further, literally just the fascist viewpoint. These conflicts, when they do exist, are conflicts between categories themselves created in support of political-economic class conflict, which predates and preempts them. Seeing Nation and Race as the most fundamental drivers of history, the essential blocs of society, is, again, the analytical model of fascism.
"Colonialism and imperialism have always tried to foment conflicts in order to divide and conquer. In the case of Palestinians, as [the Lebanese LGBT group] Helem concluded, “[T]he rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders should not be placed in competition with the long struggle of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian LGBT people, for self-determination, for the right to return to their homes, and the struggle against apartheid and the occupation of their lands.
Today we see how the imperialists—the U.S. to Israelis—use the experiences of women, of gays, of transgenders as pretexts for imperialist war. The white supremacist ideology replaces the colonial claim of “bringing civilization,” into imperialist claims that they are “bringing democracy.” But Washington and Tel Aviv have brought ruthless reactionary occupations to the Middle East.
...
And I will be with you on the day that we tear down the colonial garrison state of Israel and Palestine is free from this racist, theocratic, apartheid imperialist occupation—the day when all those who planted the olive trees will taste the fruit of freedom.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!"
-- Leslie Feinberg (she/zie/hir), Jewish and Transgender theorist and author of Transgender Liberation, in 2007 invited to speak in Hafia by Palestinian LGBT organization Aswat [x]
perhaps one of my hotter takes as a queer person but i’m never coming out again. you can figure it out or live in pure ignorance but either way it’s not my problem. the worst thing society ever tried to teach us was that coming out is an obligation. it’s not. it’s a privilege for you to know the depths of who i am, my sexuality included.
sorry my mama said i cant be friends with people who dont wash their hands after peeing
white lgbt ppl dont know how much trouble theyve caused for us -_-
white lgbt ppl will constantly have to be informed about racism and nonwhite issues bc they're only ever friends w other white people, speak over lgbt ppl of color when it comes to representation and problems in media, not acknowledge when white supremacy feeds into intracommunity bigotry. and then say things like "the lgbt community shouldn't be at odds with each other! 😤" i don't know if you guys know how big a split there is between you and us at the best of times
white gays can reblog this if u can keep ur mouth shut
full offense ya’ll don’t have to announce you’re white, very white savior-y, just reblog the post and stop trying to use people’s struggles to make yourselves look good
The online / real world dichotomy reflects an idealist understanding of the internet as being purely the realm of idealism - of abstract ideas and networks disassociated from the value generating activity of the "real world". The realities of Facebook tracking and monetizing every aspect of our online and offline activity and 4chan smoothly transitioning from producing memes expressing reactionary beliefs in an insular community to real world atrocities have definitely challenged this once very popular conception that the internet exists outside of and therefore cannot exist in tension with the material world.
I think this dismissal of the internet as a site of real activity between large groups of people served to obfuscate the rise of the alt right. While their 2015-17 activities seemed to suddenly escalate out of nowhere for many people there were signs of such a movement developing for years before they became a major cultural force. But teenagers telling "ironic" Holocaust jokes and spreading Hitler memes wasn't considered to be a major problem until Donald Trump even though this was clearly how such ideas were able to cement themselves into the youth culture of internet savvy petite bourgeois white men in the first place, through groups normalizing certain kinds of language and politics as a basis for recruitment into more hardcore neonazism. This isn't a conspiracy, many of these groups have openly admitted to this strategy of using humor as a testing ground for more extreme positions. If you're willing to laugh at a rape or Hitler joke then maybe you'd be more accepting of other practices being the logic and we've seen that it clearly works. It has been an effective recruitment strategy. People the whole world dismissed as either meaningless trolls or an irrelevant minority faction for several years were actively building a base of mass support they could use as a springboard for real world organizing and doing it openly in front of us for years. It helped launder their crimes.
Happy pride month to Chad and Ryan from High School Musical
we need stuff in the media that denormalizes platonic affection between men and lets them know its gay af to have friends
The more lesbian literature you read and the more authors you become familiar with, the more you’ll be able to see just how many of them are completely unacceptable to terfs, swerfs, and all of the other ghoulish bottomfeeders that have been flapping around since time immemorial, and just how much lesbian art and history they have to cauterize and denigrate in order to build their shitty little sandcastles.
Joan Nestle, founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives? Unacceptable. Adores trans people, trans expression, let trans women join the archives, did so much writing on lesbian as a third sex, goes into raptures when she describes the first time she heard Leslie Feinberg speak. Leslie hirself? Anathema. No one thought terfs were more full of shit than hir. Ze went to bat for Cece McDonald until hir dying day. Judy Grahn, dyke poet laureate, who wrote that being transgender was the beginning of “a vast evolutionary step”? Get out of here, traitor. Willyce Kim, the first Asian lesbian poet to be published in the US, with her glorious, punchy, powerful, genitally dubious erotica centered on the sacred history of sex workers in the lesbian world? Setting a bad example; traitor. Minnie Bruce Pratt? Delusional traitor. Ivan Coyote? Became a traitor as soon as they decided they were no longer comfortable with going by she. Jewelle Gomez, author and director of the Horizons Foundation? Traitor. Stormè Weber, two-spirit poet and professor? Barbara Smith, who fought to include minority sexualities when the mainstream gay and lesbian movement left them behind? Guess.
And I love that long quote I found from Joan Nestle about Dworkin, it says it all:
“I think many of the women who turned into sex thought-police were truly concerned about violence against women, and had their own horrible experiences: a very deeply experienced vulnerability and a frustration with how to make this culture responsive to the well-being of women. Those are their best motives. But I think they took the wrong way. I think that what came in there was perhaps a lack of exposure to other sexual energies, to other sexual ways of being. And there were some women who just are fervent, who are arrogant in their sense that they think they know how to protect women. I'm thinking of women who make careers out of stimulating an anger we all feel, and that anger and that pain is where they've decided to make their culture. And I've decided to make a culture out of another side of it, which is sexual exploration and celebration. And I think both sides are needed. I felt the censorship coming from their side, not from my side. Andrea Dworkin's books are all in the Archives. I would never say, 'Keep her books off the shelf.' But they would say, 'Keep Joan's books off the shelves.'"
the time of “cool girls” is over, it’s mean bitches time
we need a word that has the punch that bitch does but that men arent comfortable throwing around