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one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

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Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory

Follow for more Batshit Moments in Australian politics!

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Columbia University students at the Gaza solidarity encampment reading Wisam Rafeedie's The Trinity of Fundamentals and Ghassan Kanafani's The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (ph. Ian Bartlett).

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春のこもれび

sunny day

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thinking about how 4chan users overuse of the slur 'fag' to refer to each other eventually mutated into the word functioning more like a suffix used to denote a callsign, '[identifying detail]-fag', in lieu of people identifying each other by names, and how because of this gay guys would refer to themselves themselves as 'gayfags' when they needed to clarify that they were indeed actually gay when referring to themselves as faggots

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Me: damn this situation I'm in sure isn't ideal, what am I gonna do about this

Suicidal Ideation Man who lives in my brain: perhaps I have a suggestion ☝️🤓

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decomposition

lenticular riso prints!

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Octopus takes an interest in a human sitting by the rocks | source

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Macro photographs of butterfly and moth wings (2017) by: Linden Gledhill

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there is family everywhere for those with guys to see

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thinking of this

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check this out

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the wizard and his brother

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"cops are called because students aren't allowed to shut down campus" more lies! first of all, campuses aren't getting shut down: students can get to wherever they need to be—if they can't, it's because of the cops. but over the last few years, graduate students did thoroughly shut down campuses with strikes. columbia was again a notable center of labor action, with a 10-week strike during which TAs, discussion sections, grading, and any other graduate labor was cut out, grinding courses to a halt; sporadic picketing shut down access to campus. columbia took illegal measures by threatening to suspend all graduate students, but at no point were any cops called. other key graduate strikes took place at nyu, the university of michigan, and temple university, with no cops called despite other intimidation tactics by university administrations. this is not to mention hundreds of sit-ins, die-ins, encampments, and other protests that take place yearly across the country with no notice. yet tents honoring palestinians is just cause to unleash the police?

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I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

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SEVERANCE HIVE WE BACK UP