#also repression is a relatable experience as a fellow queer

[inadequate-nefelibata]

Okay, so I like queer!Johnny and l@wrusso just as much as anyone, but lately I’ve been having some thoughts about the way media and fandom frames violence in men as an indicator of potential queerness. Particulary on the way this can sometimes change how people interpret classic macho behavior, such as misogyny or agressiveness.

Despite the stereotypes that exist about gay men being more feminine, there’s also this narrative in our culture that men who are aggressively masculine, especially if is in a way that’s harmful to others or themselves, are probably acting out because of repressed homosexuality or queerness. This is easy to observe in media: there’s the trope “Armoured closet man”, and Rantasmo mentions some examples in his video “The homophobic hypocrite”. And like he explains, this is  something people sometimes apply to real life situations. For example, I have a friend who is usually pretty chill about engaging in gay behavior with other dudes for the laughs, and one day he was discussing it with a friend and they were like “Yeah, we don’t care. Some people care too much about appearing gay and we know why”. This idea it’s not limited to men: you can also find it in Lily Singh’s video “A Therapy Session For Homophobic People” where the homophobic lady ends up asking her out. Those are the first example’s I could remember, but there are more.

I’m not saying it’s not something that happens. Obviously, being homophobic or being conservative about gender roles does not guarantee that someone’s straight or cis. We were all raised in a homophobic, heteronormative society, after all. I was, at some point, scared of being gay. And I understand where the specific connection comes from: sometimes when you’re guilty or ashamed of something, you lash out more easily. That’s why there’s such a complex relationship between repression in queer men and violence: if you can’t express your desires in a healthy way, that can lead to channeling those feelings into aggression, which is more “socially acceptable”.

So it’s not automatically wrong to make the connection. What’s been bothering me lately is how interpreting homophobic, misogynistic, or just generally violent behaviors as secondary effects of repressed queer desire sometimes suggest that homophobia or misogyny are not enough on their own. Just like my friends said that one time: if you’re a man and you’re homophobic, it has to be for a reason. And that reason is not that you live in an homophobic, misogynistic society that makes you hate queer or feminine people, it has to be something particular about you that makes you more susceptible to those ideas.

The thing is that this is pretty convenient for cishet, conventionally masculine, men. It ends up suggesting is that homophobia, misogyny, aggression or other harmful attitudes have actually nothing to do with hegemonic masculinity. It’s only when men don’t fit into this ideal that these toxic behaviors start leaking out. And it’s not just convenient for them as individiduals, it also absolves our culture; if it’s the result of a particular experience, we don’t need to start thinking too hard about how our gender roles affects us in general.

Which reminds me of a video I saw recently, by Lindsay Ellis. She’s discussing transphobia in film, but there’s this moment when she’s talking about the movie Psycho, and she mentions Ed Gein, the real life version of Norman Bates. Apparently, he was originally presented in the media as a man who had unresolved queer tendencies, which served as an inspiration for the character in the film. But. That was a lie. There was no evidence that this was actually true for Ed Gein. As far as everyone knows, he was a straight cisgender man who killed women. And she brings up this quote, from Richard Titthecott, “Of men and monsters”:

So, the video is specifically about the perceived relationship between serial killers, trans women, and how this relates to transphobia. And I was talkig about seeing agressively masculine men, so I know it’s not exactly the same thing. But I keep thinking about that and about what Rantasmo said on his video. He goes from talking about canonical homophobic queer characters to talking about real life situations. And he mentions how sometimes when a homophobic hate crime takes place, people start speculating about whether or not the killer in question is queer himself, often implying that maybe it wasn’t really an explression of homophobia, but an example of the self-destructive tendencies of gay people. What he concludes is that this idea of the “homophobic hypocrite” is often used to “push the responsibility of homophobia and hate crimes off of heterosexuals and on to the victims”. 

While these examples have to do with particularly strong forms of misogyny and homophobia, it’s not out of the question to consider how this relates minor forms of violence. 

All of this is just about Thoughts. I’m not going to reach any conclusion here, because it’s impossible. Especially when it comes to what is and isn’t a Good or a Bad headcanon or ship. Like I said at the beginning, those ships can be fun and can be interesting for many reasons.  I just want to think about the things that may be influencing my interpretations of a story without my knowledge. If we start to believe that just living in a world where you know that being a straight man gives you certain privileges over women and queer ppl is not enough to be hateful towards them, it becomes harder to hold privileged people accountable. Or to explore how those privileges work and why they are put in place. Obviously, there are many ways to talk about this topic, and people can be more than one thing. A man can be queer and misogynistic for example, both privileged and opressed. I don’t know.

Basically, I’m just going to end this post by saying that the idea that “queer interpretations of mainstream media are a way to expand the narrative and include ourselves in the stories we love, and these interpretations are often mocked or rejected by mainstream writers and audiences that think that labelling something as gay is insulting, so they often go against the current” can coexist with the idea that “interpreting homophobia, misogyny, aggression or other harmful attitudes as indicators of potential queerness can be pretty convenient for straight cis conventionally masculine men, and also the association between queer men and violence and self-destructive tendencies is really prevalent in mainstream media and in our homophobic culture”. ???

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

#cobra kai #queer stuff #karate kid #johnny lawrence #oh and as usual: my native language is not english. please let my know if something sounds weird #i don't know how to feel about this #that's the only conclusion i have #i guess i just keep comparing this to everything i feel about daniel and mr miyagi and all those movies that portray a more tender version #of masculinity and how they relate to queerness #and i've been feeling a lot closer to that lately #i still haven't recovered #at the same time i still #like those interpretations that are like #this man is clearly obsessed with appearing masculine so we don't know who he truly is #and also jeff winger is gay. i'm almost 100%. #also repression is a relatable experience as a fellow queer #but i just #i don't want to absolve misogynistic homophobic men is the thing

[lyledebeast]

Let me just preface this by saying that I have not seen Downton Abbey: A New Era. But, I have a few thoughts about what I’ve read of the spoilers relating to Thomas Barrow.  Those are below the cut, of course.

Honestly, the optimistic ending notwithstanding, it seems like a step back from Downton Abbey (2019).  

I was surprisingly elated by Thomas’s storyline there, not so much because of Richard Ellis (though I thought he was nice) but by the gay pub scene.  One of my my biggest criticisms of the show was the sense that somehow everyone had enough experience with gay men to immediately recognize that Thomas was one, yet Thomas only encounters one other gay man in the entire six season series.  In the first Downton Abbey movie, he goes to a pub full of men drinking, dancing, and enjoying each other’s company.  He’s wide-eyed with delight, and so was I.  Of course, there’s a raid while Thomas is there--it’s still Julian Fellowes writing this, after all--but the sheer volume of men present makes it clear these raids are a rare occurrence.  There’s homophobia, sure, but there’s also gay joy and gay community, two things the show never gave us.  And perhaps most impressive of all, it’s in York, and these are working men.  It’s not in London, nor are the men are shielded from consequences by their class privilege.  This scene is an assertion that even in an incredibly repressive culture, there were moments when regular gay men could be themselves and be happy together.

And then A New Era goes, nah.  If you want to have any chance of happiness as a gay man, you have to go somewhere that there is no homophobia (like that exists anywhere in the world, even today). And, of course, you need to luck into a filthy rich sugar daddy to get you there, and hope to God he doesn’t get tired of you once you’re in Hollywood, where you know absolutely no one except him.  Of course, that’s a worst case scenario, but I find it very ironic that Julian Fellowes, who spent six years putting Thomas through every possible traumatic situation a gay man in the early 20th C could face and insisting that he was just Being Honest About History, is relying so heavily on his audience’s optimism.

A final note, I really, really hate the way Fellowes shuts down the possibility of a continued relationship between Richard and Thomas by having Richard get married.

I hate the implication that a gay man marrying a woman indicates that he has at once and for all time abandoned the notion of ever being in a relationship with a man.  Many, many, many queer people were married before same-sex marriages and civil partnerships were legally recognized, sometimes to each other for . . . the sake of convenience! To present a gay man marrying a woman at a point in history when men were prosecuted for sexual relationships with each other as cowardice is reprehensible.

I also hate that Thomas apparently, Once Again, needs the wisdom of a straight person to help him understand The Way Things Are for Gay Men.  Give it a rest, Fellowes.

#downton abbey a new era #downton abbey spoilers #thomas barrow #richard ellis

[charcubed]

mild Leverage Redemption spoilers in this post

–––

Society if season 2 of Leverage Redemption includes an arc for Eliot being bi, and we find out that part of the reason why he's estranged from his dad is/was homophobia, and it's all another piece of a glacial slow burn to explicit OT3 as s1 seems to have perfectly set up in an ideal world, and Breanna ends up giving Eliot gentle queer-to-queer advice.

I would kill to have some kind of iconic beautiful thoughtful scene where Breanna kind of nudges Eliot in the direction of figuring himself out and being willing to take a leap and accept what Parker and Hardison have been silently offering for 10 years!!! She could be the factor that finally breaks that unaddressed standoff. (Neither Parker or Hardison being that person for Eliot in this sense would make sense, because they can’t push, especially considering how close they are to the Situation and what they know they personally want.)

I think it could be a very interesting and very powerful role reversal of sorts, too… and an illustration of the way The Queer Experience™ differs by generation. There’s often emphasis on how Breanna’s millennial experience influences her worldview (and it’s fucking relatable), and one of those things mentioned in The Jackal Job is that things have improved for us queer people so much in the past couple of decades. “Oh darling girl, you’re so young. You get to live with so much less fear. Things weren’t always that way.” That aspect of Breanna’s character could be brought to the forefront and contrasted with Eliot. 

Eliot, who repressed his bisexuality as a form of survival. Who grew up in a conservative town and was in the military during the height of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Whose few-and-far-between encounters with queerness were maybe shrouded in secrecy and the silent understanding that it couldn’t ever be imbued with deeper meaning. Who was in a profession that denied him softness, let alone queerness. Who is two and a half decades older than Breanna, and got so used to living with those fears that he also fears opening that door even to himself after this long.

Breanna is the definition of secure in her queer identity, and we’ve seen it in action now, too. Having Eliot reconcile with the fact that he’s never had that luxury, for a trillion different reasons across the course of his upbringing and the life he’s lead… and having that be seen and understood by a fellow queer person who’s always lived in much less fear (or different ones), and is a living example of how much better things have gotten, in their shared safe space… and having him open up even a tiny bit in that regard to someone (who isn’t one of the two people his feelings about queerness and love are tangled up in)… I would perhaps cry lmao.

She could give him courage. She could give him simple yet effortlessly earth-shattering advice. She could teach him something in a very unique way. She could even perhaps casually open his eyes to the the idea that yeah dude, polyamory is a thing, and it’s getting more accepted and known by the day. Maybe they even end up having clients who are poly as a gateway to the idea in the realm of Leverage canon!

[screams softly]

Society if we get to have nice things!!!!!!! Is this meta? Is this a fic summary? Who knows I’m just in my feelings

#leverage redemption #leverage #leverage ot3 #breanna casey #eliot spencer #LISTEN I HAVE NOT STOPPED THINKING ABOUT THIS SHOW FOR 48 HOURS NOW #hhhhhhhh #like they could do the thing! they could do this thing RIGHT! THEY REALLY COULD #WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY #manifesting this....

[straydaddy]

Also, btw about why a lot of writing I've done here has had characters expressing internalized homophobia or experiences of very obvious trauma from living in a heterosexist society...

...I'm not glorifying or fetishizing queerphobia of any kind.

Back when I was writing that content, I was a closeted genderqueer trans man who forced myself to repress who I am. I'm also bi and so far the only men who make me feel loved and appreciated as a man, have been other trans men bcs they're not blind to the trans experience. (Cis men tend to be, and they're attracted to me in a way that makes me dysphoric). I felt ashamed for having that kind of preference, bcs I feared it could be seen as seeing my fellow trans men as some kind of not-men. I like men, my tastes in cis+trans men are also identical. I only have trouble feeling safe or understood with cis men bcs they don't know the trans experience.

I've lived most of my life in semi-rural small shithole towns in Finland, where people like me are invisible and unheard of.

So when I wrote about queer characters experiencing internalized self-hate and trauma from not being accepted, I heavily project on them. I'm not a cishet person fetishizing queerphobia, I am a queer trans man who has experienced that shit very intensely myself.

I can't relate to the "everyone is gay and happy" narratives because that was never my life. I write about characters loving people who'll never love them back, I write about characters trapped under the facade appealing to cis+hetnormativity craving to be seen, craving to finally experience real connection. That has been my life for years.

I'm sorry if my writing has made anyone uncomfortable. But hopefully this gives you some context to what's the appeal I see in it.

[artemissarrows]

SOTUS The Series: Patriarchy & Queerness As Redemption

Okay, it’s been a little bit! But I have certainly been consuming a lot of queer content I need to discuss. First up is SOTUS The Series! It’s a Thai boy love (BL) show about an engineeing college that has a super-intense hazing culture. One of the freshman (Kongpob/Kong for short) stands up to the hazers who make them do endless squats and such….and ends up falling in love with the head hazer (Arthrit). It’s a romcom so you probably know where this is going.

I *hope* this goes without saying, but HAZING IS NOT OK and should not be lifted up as a normal part of a university experience. It is abuse, full-stop. One of the yuckiest things about the show for me is how the administration is totally and completely fine with it. People who are invested in the hazing culture (and, frankly, the showrunners) try to make the case that it teaches teamwork and problem-solving and stuff like that. Not really! More importantly, it’s incredibly damaging to participants and there are a lot less harmful ways to teach those lessons, if they’re really so important.

We could just leave it there--on a surface level, it’s honestly pretty enjoyable. The two leads have pretty solid chemistry and are quite believable (at least until the very end, when they’re equally as awkard three years on. But as my partner Mx. Arrows pointed out, they are painfully awkward engineer nerds on top of everything else, so maybe that’s actually realistic. Anyway.) It’s funny. It’s heartwarming. It’s gayyyyy. The supporting friend characters are also kind of fun and I like them.

But there are some other noteworthy things going on here that I’m interested in teasing apart, and which I’m not entirely sure the show intended. Let’s do that! Lots of spoilers after the cut (but again, it’s a romcom, there’s only so many things that can be spoiled). Note that I have only watched Season 1, I know there’s another season.

It’s about the patriarchy.

The more I thought about it, the more it seems reasonable to see the SOTUS (hazing) system as a useful dramatization of the patriarchy. When I say “the patriarchy,” I mean a system of dominance that gives men power over women; SOTUS also privileges older people over younger, straight people over queer people, etc.etc.. Here are some of the ways that we can see this system of dominance playing out in the structure of the hazing system:

The SOTUS system is run by men, exclusively. There are 6 or 7 head hazers, and they are all men

They belittle, berate, and punish their younger charges for doing things like looking the wrong way, singing slightly out of tune, or questioning their authority to mete out dubious punishments for nothing at all

It’s quasi-military, with uniforms for both the hazers and the freshman, and endless drills and the blind loyalty and authority that comes with military order

Women who are not freshman are present in the second tier of hazers, beyond the men. They are ancillary to the men, and their helpers. In particular they are the medics: they ensure that the hazers can assign their punishments etc. while also ensuring that it doesn’t get too out of hand and that no one gets hurt too badly. Without their assistance, the men could not do what they do, and could not enforce this system.

The head hazer, Arthrit, also uses sexism and homophobia as weapons to enforce control and order. Of course, he’s aware that the structure of SOTUS is headed by men. But he also taunts the freshmen in these ways too. At the beginning of the year, the hazers demand that the freshmen fill books with upperclass students’ signatures. In exchange for his signature, Arthrit demands that May, a female student who asks him, give him her number and take her picture. She’s clearly uncomfortable with the interaction; it happens in the lunchroom and she’s one woman who’s the object of the male gaze of 6 or 7 seniors. In that same scene, Arthrit also harasses Kong in a homophobic way. Again to get his siguature, he forces Kong to shout “I like guys!” three times loudly, and then to ask something like 10 male students if they’ll be his boyfriend. (He then doesn’t give his signature.) Mind you, this is something like day 2 or 3 of school in the show.

Arthrit is one repressed dude. More on that later.

It’s Also About Cycles Of Abuse

We’ve established that the SOTUS is all about dominance and control based on gender and other heirarchies--but that’s just the system in one particular point. What happens to this system over time? That’s where we get into cycles of abuse, and how SOTUS harms not just the freshmen who are on the receiving end of the abuse, but also harms the hazers themselves. Let’s look at Arthrit, the head hazer/one-half of the lead couple.

He’s an extremely homophobic and self-hating gay, at least to start with. Per above, he actively promulgates homophobia. He’s also deeply uncomfortable with expressing affection toward men, and Kongpob in partiuclar--though apparently fine with grabbing Kongpob’s shirt when Kongpob stands up to him during a hazing session. When they share their first kiss after Arthrit finally confesses his feelings, Kong tries to hold his arm and hand and he keeps shoving him off. Then they go on another date, where they meet a fellow student at the movies and Arthrit lies and says it’s not a date. (This is not the first not-not date they’ve been on together...this is not at all relatable. Not at all ^_^) Anyway, it takes him and painful time to do that.

He is a seriously repressed and emotionally stunted person, and being the head hazer is a major part of why. As head hazer, he berates the freshman, he enforces order, he snaps at them, he plays games where he makes them humiliate themselves for his attention and benefit. He is comfortable ordering people around. But when it comes to being in touch with his own feelings, he’s hopeless. It takes him forever to realize he has feelings for Kong. He’s deeply confused about it, up to the very second he kisses him. His friend Knott literally has to tell him to talk through difficulties with Kong and not let them stew. He spends most of the show running away from Kong, hiding from Kong, or otherwise finding ways to not open up to him. It would be funny, if it weren’t deeply sad.

Friends, this is classic toxic masculinity. At least his friend Knott has his head on straight and gives some decent advice.

I honestly get the sense that Arthrit is a quiet, introverted, and smart guy, who felt like he was forced by duty to become the head hazer, the one everyone looks up to. Even when he’s with his hazing friends, he seems aloof, apart, and alone. But guess what: he made that choice himself! When he’s sick--because he ran 54 LAPS IN A DAY for a hazing challenge--we see that he’s into comic books, and action figures. We learn that he also gets good grades, so is obviously smart. And even when he talks to his friend--the former head hazer who recruited him--about his feelings for Kong, his friend tells him, “be tough.” (His friend also implies that he hasn’t dated much...no surprise there.) Sigh.

Are we meant to envy Arthrit, feel sorry for him, or both? He’s at the top of the social structure of the school, but he doesn’t seems particularly contented, and in fact seems disconnected. He’s the person who seems to have it all, but has nothing. I’m somewhat curious if others share this reading of him as a discontented bully who longs for human connection.

We can also think about the succession of the head hazers, and how the head hazer before Arthrit chose him, and how Arthrit chose Kong. The one before Arthrit chose him because when he punished Arthrit for speaking out by telling him to greet a banyan tree for three whole hours, Arthrit did it. Then Arthrit chooses Kong because he speaks out and heckles Arthrit. It’s super interesting to me, but I think the thing is to identify people who have strong enough feelings about the system--and care enough--that speak out and therefore demonstrate leadership skills. They then turn those feelings of rebellion back into the system and coopt them. Toward the end of the show Kong starts to feel more invested in the hazing system and I was hoping that he would try to reform it; he doesn’t seem to that much. Kong says that he likes the teamwork and problem-solving aspects of hazing; he could do those things as head hazer and take the abuse out, but he doesn’t. Cooptation.

It’s Also About The Redemptive Power Of Queerness And Queer Love

This says it all.

They’re at a party, and someone asks Arthrit if he and Kong are dating. He says, “so what?” and throws his arm around Kong’s shoulder--and Kong seems pleasantly surprised that he’s able to do this publicly. This is just ugh, so beautiful, and Krist/Arthrit acts it so incredibly well. It’s truly the first time we see Arthrit truly, hugely, bashfully smile, in the whole show. It’s always been a sardonic smile, or a joke at someone else’s expense. But here, he’s just experiencing happiness and joy, even if he’s still quite shy about it and can’t look people in the eye while he hangs his arm over Kong’s shoulder. Queerness as redemption is a trope I wish would become a thing!!

PS, here are some screenshots of Arthrit making fun of Kong’s food habits. Enjoy the fluff <3

#sotus #sotus the series #krist #singto #krist x singto #lgbtq #gay #queer #kongpob #kongpob x arthrit #arthrit

[star-anise]

So. I’m currently reading Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey, since it was finally released on audiobook this year. Re-reading, in fact; reading these books as a 31-year-old therapist instead of a starry-eyed 13-year-old. 

I ranted the other night about the book's depiction of Elspeth as "spoiled" instead of "abused", and @feathersescapism (as part of the post's excellent and thoughtful contributions) said this about Mercedes Lackey:

It’s so effing messy for me because like on the one hand she saved my life. She was the VERY first place I saw loving, validated, celebrated queer relationships and ironically Vanyel was the first time I saw an example of someone who was angry and hurt and messy and bad at people and bullied but not a passive victim be portrayed as fundamentally loveable. As in fact valuable enough, worthy enough to be PURSUED, even, to have someone make the effort to get past his hostile defense behaviors. That was priceless to me. Unfortunately it’s like….it was water when I was dying of thirst but it turns out it was water laced with heavy metals that then did a lot of long term damage.

Which is partly just a concentration thing; if you are drinking from many wells, having one be poisoned won't damage you as much overall. But if it's your only source of water, even trace amounts get dangerous. And, well, we were Eighties babies, mentally ill queer kids with access to small-town libraries who ducked guidance counsellors who pushed conformity as the path to happiness.

So I just found a scene that I think really shows that Lackey was writing from a specifically 80s understanding of psychology, before we knew almost anything about trauma; as considered today, it's bad practice on multiple levels, and can point to some of the underlying problems with the Valdemar worldview.

TW child abuse, child neglect

So in this part of the book, 13-year-old Talia, who was rescued from her awful abusive life among the Holderkin by a giant magical horse, is settling into her new life as a Herald-trainee. She attends classes during the day, and then sleeps in her own room in a dormitory wing of her fellow trainees. Her teachers know that she displays all the symptoms of an abused child, and that she's from an extremely insular and rigid culture.

Her teacher, Teren, asks her to stay after class, and she does, wary and panicked because she doesn't know what's going on. He explains that the Heralds sent a letter back to her family to explain that her disappearance was because of the magical horse choosing her as a future Herald, and they get half-taxes that year and she's going to be very important. Her family, however, replies to say only, "Sensholding has no daughter Talia." Because she ran away instead of staying and getting married, she is disobedient and bad, and therefore totally shunned by her entire community.

She didn't realize she was weeping until a single hot tear splashed on the paper, blurring the ink. She regained control of herself immediately, swallowing down the tears. [...] It was odd, but when she'd chosen to run away, their certain excommunication hadn't seemed so great a price to pay for freedom; but somehow now, after all her hopes for forgiveness had been raised only to be destroyed by this one note-- Never mind; once again she was on her own--and Herald Teren would hardly approve of her sniveling over the situation. "It's all right," she said, handing back the note to the Herald. "I should have expected it." She was proud that her voice only trembled a little, and that she was able to meet his eyes squarely. Teren was startled and slightly alarmed; not at her reaction to the note, but by her immediate iron-willed suppression of it. This was not a healthy response. She should have allowed herself the weakness of tears; any child her age should have. Instead, she was holding back, turning further into herself. He tried, tentatively, to call those tears back to the surface where they belonged. Such suppression of natural feelings could only mean deep emotional turmoil later--and would only serve as one more brick in the wall the child had placed between herself and the others around her. "I wish there was something I could do to help." Teren was exceedingly distressed and tried to show that he was as much distressed at the child's denial of her own grief as with the situation itself. "I can't understand why they should have replied like this." If he could just get her to at least admit that the situation made her unhappy, he would have an opening wedge in getting her to trust him. [...] "I'm going to be late--" Talia winced away from the outheld hand and ran, wishing Teren had been less sympathetic. He'd brought her tears perilously close to the surface again. She'd wanted, above all other things, to break down and cry on his shoulder. But--no. She didn't dare. When kith and kin could deny her so completely, what might not strangers do, especially if she exposed her weaknesses? And Heralds were supposed to be self-sufficient, self-reliant. She would not show that she was unworthy and weak.

What I took away from this book, at 13 and during most successive readings, was that the fault in this situation is Talia's unwillingness to trust Teren and break down. It is her inability to open up emotionally to her deep, vulnerable feelings that causes problems. I suspect that my reading is not terribly far off the narrative's own perception of the central problem. In the 1980s, psychology was very based around the individual, the dance of the id, ego, and superego. Talia's problem is that she has an overactive superego, which prevents her from expressing her natural feelings in a healthy way. She uses unhealthy coping mechanisms, which must be overcome to achieve health and full congruence with her feelings. This runs very much on the catharsis model, where emotions build up like a boil, and must be lanced; once someone "vents", they feel better.

Now, at 31, and trained to help vulnerable 13-year-olds, I can see a lot of differences in how I'd assess the problem now. The trauma field especially has come to understand that humans are essentially relational beings; our brains are born in relationships. We function best in relationships. We need, more than anything else, to feel connected and understood. And then, above that: we are beings in brains and bodies. Our consciousness is limited by the hardware it runs on. If our body is dedicating all its resources to fight-or-flight, we cannot be rational, logical thinkers. We need to understand how to regulate our own emotions, both by personal actions and through relationships with others, to achieve health. It takes repeated, patterned practice to master the skills of understanding and moderating those emotions. Coping mechanisms may be unhealthy, but as I was taught in grad school, "All psychopathology was adaptive once." If you're going to take away someone's unhealthy coping mechanism, you need to have first replaced it with something healthier.

So looking at this scene now, I can point out that Talia represses her emotions instantly because in her family of origin, she got beaten up for crying. Her teachers have already observed that she has the defensive and startle-reactions of an abused child. It should not be very hard for Teren to put two and two together and think: She has been systematically trained to view emotion as unsafe. 

He could, at this point, make the rules of their current situation clear: "It's all right to cry. You don't have to put on a brave face for me." This would let Talia know that she won't lose support or status if she cries. But that assumes, frankly, that she can cry; that the experience of being vulnerable in front of another human being wouldn't be too overwhelming, perhaps terrifying, for her to bear. He could also validate that, and let Talia know he sees her and understands. "It'd be all right if you let that guard down, but it looks like you've got a lot of experience with dealing with hard knocks. If you ever do want to talk about it, I'm here."

It's important for him not to try to force her to show feeling the way he thinks she should. He doesn't actually know that it's safe, or that he's safe. Traumatized people need, more than almost anything else, to achieve a measure of control over their own emotions and bodies. They need to be able to make themselves calm when they need to be calm, and not to be ambushed with sadness or fear out of the blue. It should be, more than anything, Talia's decision of when and where to express her emotions. Is bottling it all up unhealthy for her? Oh, probably. She might get depression later this month, or heart disease in 40 years. But being forced to cry when she's not ready to can leave her feeling violated and retraumatized, right here, right now.

The thing that makes crying comforting for most people is that they have a very deep pattern etched on their brains: They cry, someone comforts them, their pain recedes, they feel calmer. It's the pattern of a thousand hungry wakeups as a baby where someone was gentle and kind and fed them. It's skinned knees kissed and broken toys mended. But Talia probably doesn't have that; her experience of crying has been that she's punished and abused for it, and as an infant whose mother died in childbirth, she probably wasn't adequately nurtured either to build those good associations in the first place. Crying just takes her into a deeper place of loneliness and self-hatred. So for her to soothe herself, she might need to be taught very basic ways of doing that--to take a break, to do something she loves, to get a hug from a friend. Her traditional reaction has been to mask her emotions, and to self-isolate and let those feelings of pain and alienation swamp her.

What he could even do, as I sometimes do as a therapist, is respect that repression as a way of coping and roll with it. If someone can only bear the most glancing reference to their trauma? Then glance. Use black humour or obvious irony to acknowledge the situation without engaging with its emotional depth. “So, you know, no big deal. I bet that’s what you’ve always wanted.” So long as it’s paired with other kinds of real caring--especially useful, immediate help and close emotional attunement--that’s not out of place.

One thing he seems to have assumed is that of course, if your family is awful and devastating, you get to take the morning off to cry. I can only assume that's why he's pushing her to cry at the end of class, when she has another one to go to right after. But she might not know that. Certainly her familyexpected that if they did something awful and devastating, Talia needed to get back to work as soon as possible. Teren doesn't discuss this, and I think it's important; Talia goes to something like four other classes, has lunch, and reads for an hour before she finally gets to do anything relevant to taking care of her emotions. Implicitly, the idea that schedule and routine supercede emotions, and that emotional work takes second place, gets reinforced by the system that thinks it's "saving" her.

The other thing traumatized people struggle with, next to control, is connection. Trauma is hugely isolating; it reroutes resources away from the parts of the brain that foster social connection, so people literally lose track of anyone who might be loving and supportive, and it's hard to make ordinary people understand what you're going through. This is part of why Teren showing Talia all his distress isn't really good for her; he's overloading her still further with natural empathy for his emotions, increasing the weight she has to carry mentally, but not reinforcing her connections. He doesn't remind her that other Heralds are her family now, nor does he give her help in how to reach out to anyone.

Who might Teren remind her of? As much as he's taking on the role of The Person She Can Be Emotional To, he's hardly ever in her life; this is the last day of their week-long class where he met her for one hour a morning. He could encourage her to talk to one of her regular teachers, including his twin Keren, who teaches her equitation, or the cook, in whose kitchen Talia is most confident and in her element. If her dormitory had older Heralds who lived there in a kind of supervisory or mentoring role, spending hours of unstructured free time with the trainees, he could direct her to one of them. He could even direct her to her age-peers, with whom she lives, who might not be the most emotionally attuned but certainly seem to be the group with whom the Heralds expect her to do most of her emotional bonding.

Or he could--now here's a thought--suggest she spend the rest of the morning with the magical psychic horse who can beam rays of love and devotion directly into her brain.

But he doesn't. It is only after Talia has attended classes on history, geography, mathematics, etiquette, and archery, eaten lunch, read for an hour, and cried in the back of the sewing room, that she finally sees her magic horse. And she does feel a bit better! But by then, her major adrenaline has worn off, and with it the ability to etch memories deeply into her brain; the first hours after her shock were spent ignoring her feelings and being disconnected from people who didn't notice she was in pain, thus reinforcing all her old traumatic impressions.

So the book sets up a recurring number of incidents where Talia's loneliness and isolation is reinforced by the world around her; where no one provides her the necessary scaffolding to help her build bridges with other people and develop the skills to be healthier; and then, as happens throughout the series, when something bad happens to her, she is blamed for being so isolated and repressed. 

When I was 13, I had no framework to understand any of this. On the schoolyard, I'd been taught many of Talia's lessons about the dangers of showing weakness, and in the classroom, about the importance of repressing emotions; I used her as an emotional model. (Later in the books, Talia lbecomes an Empath and Mind-Healer, which hugely impacted my decision to become a therapist.) But then, when her loneliness turned into defencelessness and her lack of emotional control turned into instability, the narrative said it was her fault for not being healthier. And so I thought: Yes. It is completely reasonable to provide a young person with no emotional support at all, and then get mad at them for being fucked up.

And so there's lead in the water.

#staranise original #therapisting #valdemar revisited #child abuse tw #child neglect tw #trauma tw

[hypomanicsatanicpanic]

saw a 15 year old lesbian comment on reddit that “most” lesbians realize they are gay earlier than 15....  LOL. 

For what it’s worth, I really hope that most gay and bi femmes are realizing who they are attracted to earlier than I did: hopefully, the prevailing culture is less toxic/homophobic/biphobic, there are more accessible resources to learn about diverse sexuality, there’s more representation in the media. 

But I also think a lot of us "older" folx ended up repressing/ not recognizing our attraction to women until somewhat later in life than 15. 

I didn't actually realize that until I was attracted to women until 23/24. I was just starting to question a bit at 20, but I wasn’t sure about it until a few years after that. I’ve only ever had sex with one woman, one time. A majority of my life past the age of consent (which was 16 in my state) has been spent in a monogamous sexual relationship of some sort with a cis-het man- and being the Type of Person who is in that kind of relationship really enforced this sense of being A Straight Type of Person. That, along with a whole truckload of internalized biphobia (You’re not a Real Bi if you’ve never been in a relationship with a woman! You’re not a Real Bi, because Bi Women Do Not Exist- you’re Clearly A Poser Who Gets The Attention Of Men By Pretending To Be Interested In Women, Even If You’ve Told Zero People You’re Interested In Women! You’re Obviously Going Through A Phase. You Can’t Be A Bi Woman While Being In A Relationship With a Cis Het Guy). I still struggle with that sometimes, being in an open/ poly relationship with a cis guy is different, and I’m dating women and NB folx, but the persistent, shitty, biphobic question is still there, bouncing around- can you actually be a real WLW if you have any ongoing sexual or romantic relationship with a man?

I think part of the reason it took so long for me to figure out what attractions I have was that there was no WLW frame of reference for the first ~18 years of my life. In high school, there were no "out" lesbians, bi people, NBs, or transpeople; only one very flamboyant gay dude (who was bullied by pretty much everyone), and one very not-flamboyant but not closeted gay teacher (who was bullied by the administration, by students, and by homophobic parents). There was certainly no sex ed to speak of (yeah, we did sit in a room while we were shown drawings of reproductive organs, and told that condoms were not 100% effective and that the pill was risky and that having sex would definitely make you Teen Pregnant).  Being bi or gay was so far out of the parameters of possible Things You Could Be presented to my peer group that I literally didn’t recognize feelings of attraction when I had them...which in turn led to a whole lot of unfulfilling and shitty sexual experiences later on. It’s like when you consistently are forced to eat more food after you are full- you lose touch with your appetite, and that fucks up your eating habits.  

Even people in cis-het relationships were not really much help in explaining attraction. The straight girls I knew were dating people because they thought they were a "cute couple" or because there was social pressure to do so- nobody openly talked about attraction or sexual feelings they were having beyond- "He's soooooo cuuuuute!" or “he’s got GREAT eyes!” or “He’s sooooo hot!”. Nobody talked about what cute or hot actually meant, it was just assumed you’d know what that meant, because you thought so too. I actually thought that the reason I never agreed that boys were cute is because I just didn't find the right one that I was attracted to-- that the people my friends were into were not my type, not that the men who are “my type” are very much more an exception to a rule that excludes most men than a rule to which there are exceptions. I regret that I was never confident enough to tell the girls who’d make that kind of comment that I didn’t get it.  At least in my experience, teenage gay and bi femmes really didn't have any kind of open existence in the early 2000s and 1990s, especially not in the conservative place I grew up. I suspect this is also true of the rest of the US--If you think of Mean Girls as an (exaggerated) portrait of what was going on in high schools at the time, you can clearly see why being a big-L Lesbian like Janis (who also fulfilled nearly every goth/art-kid/non-conforming asshole stereotype) was not something that a lot of young people in my community (pretty affluent, very academic and preppy, pretty rural, a lot of South- and East Asian -immigrants) could relate to. There was no real sex ed, definitely not sex ed that even mentioned lesbians (!), or sex that was done for reasons other than procreation.  Actually, the Mean Girls representation of sex ed was pretty spot-on.

 Also, Janis's character didn't go very far to actually talk about her attraction to women, or what that was, or how she experienced it... there were just rumors flying around that she was lesbian, which everyone seemed to think of as a bad thing, for reasons that were never explained. I don’t think I saw another representation of lesbians in the movies (and can’t recall any in books, with the possible exception of Tamora Pierce books, where I think it was subtle enough I mostly didn’t pick up on representation that did exist). Sure, I conceptually knew that Ellen was a lesbian, but had no idea what the fuck that actually meant, other than that she was Different, and in the abstract Liked Women. I don’t think I saw a picture of her holding hands or hugging Portia until I was 20 or so. 

 Anyway, in my circle of (mid-to-late-twentysomething) friends we joke that L/B femmes goes through delayed adolescence because everyone is still trying to figure out how to talk to women and ask people out on dates into their mid-20s. Or, you know, they’re already married.   Not sure how to end this post, but  1) representation is REALLY important in children and YA works as well as in adult works 2) bi femmes exist, and shouldn’t have to prove shit to anyone 3) queer discourse is fucking important.  4) a lot of us are late bloomers, and that’s ok. sometimes it’s not safe to bloom early.  5) hopefully not everyone in the future will have to be a late bloomer  6) inclusive sex ed is important  7) lots of love for my fellow midwestern queers

#personal post #lgbtq #lesbian #bisexual #wlw #mean girls #ellen #tamora pierce #representation #growing up #teen years #sexuality #delayed adolescence #late bloomer

[the-affectiveturn]

Affect theory is a nonlinear general description of material interactions, an attempt at more objectively describing the energies that are transmitted between individuals, objects and events, regardless of the binary process of labeling and categorization i.e. ‘living/non-living’, etc. The contingency of affective states seems to both actively inscribe and re-inscribe subjectivity onto individuals which subsequently shapes how they perceive their somatic responses or body-based feelings. In other words, it is the source for what the mind then translates into emotionally descriptive content, causal relations, broadly defined historical trends and forces, cultural mores from orthodoxy to taboo. As a result, affect can encompass all the processes within and without, not only the human body and mind, but all exchanges of energy that we experience as: political movements, religious ecstasy, economic transactions, chemical intoxication, the rally, the rave, the evocative sermon or a hit song. Our circumstances and perspectives are all products of feedback loops, internal narratives that made external through social relations and material conditions. We are not consciously striving for some desired end state but are possessed by desire itself, a node in a series of chain reactions, a cascade of forces that are beyond mere categorization we are a part of these processes regardless of teleology.

This paper aligns with William James’ theory of affect, according to Gregg and Seigworth, James’ notion of affect occurs in the following sequence: “(a) I perceive a lion; (b) my body trembles; ( c) I am afraid. In other words, the body perceives itself perceiving the trigger of emotion, which sets off movement (trembling), and then gets named as a cognitive state (fear)” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 77) It exists a priori to feelings, thought, action, movement, etc. and is always in flux/progress. As Professor Pasqua pointed out in the lecture on experience, William James understood religious experience to be “something temporary, that can’t be put into words, […] and it is passive in the sense that something external is enacted upon them” (Lecture 2020 Pasqua, Harris). For James experience is inherently subjective, however, when an individual labels or cloaks their experience with the religiosity of dogma and ritual only then does it become a religious practice.

A prominent scholar who has made significant contributions to the area of affect theory is Sara Ahmed, a self-defined “feminist killjoy.” Someone who raises their voice to call attention to uncomfortable truths about racism, misogyny and inequality to challenge the status quo and encourage others to question their privilege. Achieving her doctorate at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, (opting to resign from her position as professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London as a protest against alleged sexual harassment by staff against students and is currently an independent researcher). Her most important works include “The Promise of Happiness” and “The Cultural Politics of Emotion” with their focus on her expansion of affect, feminist and queer theory in alignment with critical race theory. In Sara Ahmed’s “The Promise of Happiness,” she explains, “affect aliens are those who are alienated by virtue of how they are affected by the world or how they affect others in the world” (Ahmed 2014, 164.) This is exemplified in one of Hillary Clinton’s speeches during her run for presidency in 2016 when she described half of Trump supporters as “deplorables” (Reilly 2016.) Clinton is a socially and regionally insulated political elite, who, here, ignores the suffering of a large demographic of white working-class Americans who have seen their fortunes decline for decades since the onset of neoliberal capitalism. She embodies an ideal of an American that they know they cannot trust or even aspire to be, an “American Dream” that they’ve been locked out of, without the access to power, education and resources to rescue them from despair. Instead, they channel the emotions of anger and revenge against these “globalist elites” as a method to articulate their love for their fellow abject countrymen and rage against their misfortunes in the de-industrialized “rust-belts” abandoned by capital for overseas investment, along with those in “fly-over country” dominated by corporate agricultural monopolies.

Leaning this against Ahmed’s case study in a “Cultural Politics of Emotion,” involving the Aryan Nation as seen through an intersectional framework, one may consider their white privilege, but they have been disenfranchised by their class status as they have no ability to integrate their position into financial or political power. Instead, these outsiders express and seek to challenge their impotence by coalescing into a racial supremacy group to feel protected and dignified. This can be leaned against the more recent demagoguery of Donald Trump and QAnon who provides a unified energy to people who feel left behind. The Aryan Nation’s ideological narrative is the classic fascistic reactionary model of a pure racial body infected by a devious interloper, i.e., the figure of the Jew, a monolithic entity that deliberately seeks to undermine them and is fundamentally manipulative, granting their organization moral legitimacy by challenging this imagined enemy, feeding their grandiosity and providing a cause to unify against.

Looking at affect theory in a different light from James, The Immanent Frame contributor, Jessica Johnson refers to Brian Massumi’s remarks about the power of laughter and anger to “interrupt a situation”, they represent a nervous energy that can neutralize or defy the signs and signifiers of what has been established as the ordinary procession of cultural events, especially regarding power relations (Johnson 2020.) Again, looking to recent actions associated with this particular demographic, Donald Trump’s ability to channel anger along with his use of humor, with a talent for mockery of the ordinary procession of what passes for political discourse provided comic relief for those who experience a similar feeling of disdain.

Moreover, Robert Sharf admits that there exists “residue in all conscious experience” (Sharf 1998, 97.) This means, we must recognize our biases that have been formulated through socio-political, economic and cultural narratives that create “baggage” that is carried throughout one’s life much like historical weight. It is similar to what Ahmed discusses when she states, “This is what I would call the rippling effect of emotions; they move sideways (through “sticky” associations between signs, figures, and objects) as well as backward (repression always leaves its trace in the present—hence “what sticks” is also bound up with the “absent presence” of historicity)” (Ahmed 2014, 120) Affective economies are paralleled by and interact with material relations as well are structured through narratives, the mythology of nationalism or “a fantasy” that it is the white subject who “built this land” (Ahmed 2014, 118) fuels racial purity and frames the world in a reactionary tribalism where they seek power, other racial groups in the host nation are described in a manner that characteristically undermines them. Ahmed refers to the “discourse of pain” where the logics of white supremacy channel into hegemonic narratives that seek to uphold power in an affective economy where the concept of whiteness is normalized and aggrandized while all their “bad feelings” of inadequacy are projected on racialized groups, which helps cement the bond between white nationalists from the logic of white supremacy and their fear of erasure. These logics are upheld by the affective economy of fear, bad feelings as well as the connections they feel within their in-group, in response they manifest a call to form a political organization where they could imagine power and be free from the corruption of the world. It is a kind of cult that seeks purity that cannot be found in our society, they seek a world where they protected by their national status against “globalist” competition and are provided with opportune conditions to minimize the deleterious effects capitalist competition has on local communities.

Sara Ahmed's depiction of affective economies speaks to the way fear and insecurity travels through culture via feelings which spread white supremacist anxieties as cultural contagion. Misconstruing who the enemy is due to the “stickiness” of oppressive logics. Trump matches their disdain, inciting an emotional connection, he speaks to the disposed white working class, thus stirring the affective reactions of those subjects who are marked as “white,” finds subjective power in pitting oneself against the notion of the other. “Together we hate, and this hate is what makes us together” (Ahmed 2014, 118.) They are united by the feeling of being either left out of the “liberal elite” media bubble and disdain for the professional media class that does not sympathize with the erasure of their bonds to their ideas of nationhood and their place in it. So individuals are encountered with various ideological structures and then they find associations they find that the thing that they identify with and the myth that that they have based their lives around is somehow impossible or has been taken from them. “Hate is economic” (Ahmed 2014, 119) the abject “patriots”, settler-colonial subjects who accept the mythos of the frontiersmen who lives off the expanse of the freedom of the West has been made to feel the contraction of that freedom due to the extractive nature of the market and their dislocation from the elite who decide where to invest and who matters in the national discourse dominated by these distant elites who share none of the same cultural assumptions, so that the enmity is natural but then takes on a mythical status through ideological conspiratorial projection that essentializes the other and gives narrative to the disconnect between these insider/outsiders.

To conclude, affect theory can help us to be more objective when critically approaching religion, cults and right-wing conspiracy culture. By viewing these phenomena as investments of energy for those involved, we can be more sympathetic and objective when discussing these movements that would otherwise typically just garner disgust and further alienate us from our fellow citizens, to help counteract division and encourage empathy.

Works Cited

“Affective Economies.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion, by Sara Ahmed, Routledge, 2014.

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2011.

Pasqua, Christina, and Jennifer Harris. Experience. Experience, 6 Oct. 2020, Toronto, University of Toronto.

Reilly, Katie. “Hillary Clinton Transcript: 'Basket of Deplorables' Comment.” Time, Time, 10 Sept. 2016, time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/.

Sharf, Robert. “Experience.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 94-116. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

[rustandyearnings]

Calling In, Take 2: Power, Accountability, Movement, and the State

In the winter of 2013, I wrote a piece titled, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.” Over the next four years or so, this piece would become the bane of my existence. Let me explain.

This piece sort of exploded – I was receiving emails and messages that the piece was really resonating with folks doing justice work across all types of communities. It was true and probably is still true how tired we all are of the constant worry that we cannot make mistakes – not even among those who we call friends, family, and/or comrades.

There have been numerous challenges that have arisen since the publication of this piece. The first is that it was so wildly appropriated by white people to rationalize or justify their own racist behavior. It’s been wildly appropriated to push away valid critique of racist or otherwise oppressive behavior. I remember as Ani DiFranco was being called out for playing music at a slave plantation, that white lesbians were quoting “Calling In” to tell Black women and women of color that they shouldn’t be critiquing Ani (or other white people) in such a harsh way. I don’t think I need to offer any more examples on how this piece or this concept has been misconstrued to mean, “I can do whatever I want and you have to be nice to me.”

The second challenge actually has a lot more to do with my own political development than external factors—how it was being read by my community or how it was being used by those inside and outside of my community. In the four years since writing this piece, I regret to some extent not writing more about the relationship we have to each other in movement versus our relationship to each other and that relationship to the state – the apparatus which seeks to and often succeeds at dividing, repressing, and conquering (literally and metaphorically) us.

I have become regularly frustrated by some of the contexts in which “calling in” has been used or named. It’s less about people annoying me (because people annoy me a lot) or some idea that I am the arbitrator of what “calling in” as an accountability practice or process actually means. It is actually more about the individualistic ways we think of accountability, power, and our relationships to each other. In many ways it is not surprising that we conceptualize ourselves as simply individuals. We are born into this world by ourselves (unless we’re a twin or a triplet, or something, but you get my point), we experience much of the world with only ourselves (even if many of our experiences involve others), at night we fall asleep and wander into the dream world on our own, and when we die – and we all die – we die alone.

We take the reality of the human experience as being both terrifyingly and rewardingly lonely and compound it with the deadliest economic, political, and social system in existence, capitalism, and most of us end up having a lot of shit to unpack around our individualism, and specific to this context, our understanding of harm and repair.

So what does it mean to hold each other accountable in a world that is incredibly messy? In a world where we don’t have much to rely on but the reality that things are incredibly messiness? That isn’t to say that there aren’t topics or issues where we are capable of drawing a clear line. We know how to do that – that’s why we have vibrant social movements.

But we have to start figuring out the space that exists between ourselves and our communities, our communities and the movement, and the movement and the state. Not only do we have to start figuring out that space, we have to do this in a way that is honest, transformative, and real.

I don’t think that I can say this enough: we are human beings and we have our shit. We carry with us the traumas we experience from early ages, that we don’t start developing different coping mechanisms for until later in life. For some of us, it is much later in life or it is never actually dealt with at all.

Being in movement has taught me that movement brings together the maladjusted weirdos of society who have decided or have been led to doing something about their own and others’ maladjustment. When I say “maladjusted” I am capturing a pretty broad stroke of people who are, by the standards of this system and society, not fit to be a part of this system and society. We are rightfully upset, uncomfortable, and angry. In most aspects of our lives – at our jobs, in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods, and most public spaces, including those that are allegedly democratically elected to represent us, we do not belong nor do we have power.

Movement is where we have power. Movement is where those of us who have seen the most fucked up shit; have made a whole lot out of the nothing slapped to us by capitalism; have had to endure the incredulous crimes against humanity, whether it be gentrification or police brutality, homelessness or addiction, incarceration or unemployment; have once believed that we might not survive another day have managed to find others, to find a way, and to fight for our right to life every day.

The power we have in movement spaces is beautiful, transformative, and sometimes (and increasingly so) threatening to those who have power over us. But the power we have can sometimes fuck us up. Let’s be real. Sometimes we get power and suddenly no one is a friend, it’s only foes. And it’s especially foes if not everyone agrees with us. Sometimes we get power and we become stagnant, we start operating in the interest of preserving our own power, instead of remembering why people’s power means anything to begin with: we have to build with other people to win. Our fingers tight as a fist are much stronger than they are a part. Our arms linked are a much stronger barricade than our shoulders alone in the cold. The harmony of many voices is much louder than just one.

The movement gives us power and we start acting like calling out greedy politicians and corporate profiteers or politicians who want to rid the world of queer and trans people is the same as calling out our cousin who makes sexist jokes at the family reunion or even a fellow organizer who takes up a lot of space as a white person. These are fundamentally different relationships. Our relationships to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as pillars holding up a destructive and deadly system is fundamentally different than our relationships to the human beings who have to survive these systems. 

The state is an oppressive force that seeks to cultivate division and thrives on our disconnection and alienation from each other. Let’s try our best to not feed it with our harms and grievances as if it could help us resolve them.

Our movement is, in many ways, fighting to confront the state. We are disrupting the institutions and systems harming our people. Our movement is not mechanized with an oppressive ideology; we are not weaponizing ourselves toward profit; we are not propping up fake democracy to make the rich more comfortable; we are not fighting to dispose of our people, leave our people behind or for dead. If we are truly building our movement to confront the state, we’ve got to stop treating each other like the mistakes we commit are the same heinous crimes that the state commits against our people. We are all capable of causing harm but we can’t operate as if the harm we cause to each other is the same as what we experience from the state. Often, the harm we cause to each other happens in the process of trying to build a different world.

Somewhere along the lines, the idea of “calling in” was put in opposition to “calling out.” I don’t believe that such dichotomy exists, since I think that our accountability should be more rooted in our understanding of power, to each other and to the forces that seek to exert power over us, than rooted in our individualism and selfishness about who gets to be right and who is wrong.

But ultimately, whether you want to call in or call out, let’s all try to be on the same page about who our shared enemy is – and it is not each other. I stick by a lot of what I originally wrote in that piece in 2013. Movement building is about relationship building. And it’s also about nuance. In the piece I elaborated on how we use our relationships as the basis for determining whether we "call in" or "call out." I’m still less interested in how we label our processes for holding each other accountable and more interested in the process itself. Some questions that I would pose to folks when they are deciding how they want to deal with an oppressive situation are: what is the depth of the relationship I have with this person? Are they someone I consider an acquaintance? A friend? A comrade? What values do we share (if any) and what are they? 

There are deeper political questions that should inform how to hold people accountable, too -- because everything is political and more importantly, because everything requires us to think of ourselves within the context of a broader society. Our society necessitates harm in order to thrive and it can either continue to thrive or be delegitimized based on our responses to harm. We live in a real society of disposability. We talk about it a lot but I think sometimes we forget how entrenched we are in it. When we talk about the prison industrial complex, we are talking about a world that puts people in cages for the rest of their lives because of an accountability system where the state arbitrates who gets to make mistakes and who doesn't. The structural violence carried out by the state shapes and informs how we relate to each other interpersonally.

Lately I’ve been returning to the fact that we are human beings. This kind of statement is obviously a little oversimplifying. We are human beings who are greedy, selfish, cruel, unforgiving, vengeful and also deeply feeling, compassionate, remorseful, creative, apologetic, loving, and caring. Some of the human beings on this earth commit viler nastiness than just being human – we know that this shows up in our communities and in the broader world as sexual, emotional, and physical violence, all tied and connected to capitalist exploitation and oppression: white supremacy and anti-blackness, transmisogyny and homophobia, islamophobia and xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism and more.

I'm not saying that there is never harm nor that we should martyrize ourselves to minimize the harm we experience. I'm saying we should remember we have all caused harm, have the propensity to cause harm and if causing harm or making mistakes were the basis for whether or not we maintain community with each other instead of our humanity, our dignity, our aptitude for change, and our belief in a radically different and better world, we'd have no community. And probably just as scary, if not more, we’d have no movement.

There is no perfect way to deal with harm or conflict. We are trying our best to maintain our relationship to each other and ourselves in a world that is routinely dehumanizing, under a system that doesn’t care about what we mean to each other. But we should care about what we mean to each other.

As a queer and gender non-conforming person of color, a migrant from Viet Nam, and a communist, what keeps me alive is the fact that everything changes – that in fact, everything must change. When something has stopped changing, it’s dead. If there’s nothing that is useful from this piece, any of my (largely unoriginal) musings on power, accountability, movement, and the state – I hope at least that we can all remember and respect that everything changes. That this be a gift we do not take for granted, that this be a gift we give to each other in service of a better world, a world where not only are we capable of transforming but one that our transformation made possible.

In the spirit of change, I acknowledge that four years from now I might write a totally different piece, depending on where the forces of this gruesome planet are, depending on the tenacity and resilience of humanity, I might write a take three. But for now, I hope that I’ve done some justice to those who I am fighting alongside with each and every day, whose mistakes I share in, whose vision I believe in and co-create, whose wisdom, commitment, and revolutionary optimism reminds me that healing, being free, and almost anything is possible.

#ngoc loan tran #calling in

[robinsoncenter]

[Qsc_asuw] SPRING! Newsletter Week 1

Welcome to Spring    Quarter! <3 

QTBIPOC    Artist Spotlight of the Week: 

Vienna Rye is a 27 year-old artist    / organizer based in New York City. They use art as a catalyst to    confront and uproot settler colonialism, racism, capitalism, and    patriarchy. 

The Queer    & Trans People of Color Alliance (QTPOCA) will    be meeting this Friday (Location TBD)!

   Support arrested Chinese    labor activists!    (Monday, April 1, 2019) 1PM - 3:30    PM @ Red Square at UW    Seattle, Washington 98195   

We, as Parisol, USAS and allied groups, write to you asking for your         support in protesting the disappearance of labor activists in China.         In recent months, government crackdowns on factory organizing have         resulted in a wave of arrests and disappearances on students and         activists. The climate is highly repressive at this time. Across the         ocean, we will not let these injustices pass in silence. Please join         us on April 1st in Red Square for a speak out at 2pm, call-ins to the         US Chinese embassy asking for immediate release of these activists,         and postcard writing to Wei Zhili at the Shenzhen detention center         directly. Please read here for more insight.

   Magical Negro: a reading    by Morgan Parker    (Thursday, April 4, 2019) 7 PM - 9 PM

Hugo      House 1634 11th Ave, Seattle, Washington 98122   

Join         acclaimed poet Morgan Parker as she reads from her latest collection,         MAGICAL NEGRO.   

MAGICAL NEGRO (Tin House Books, 2019) is an archive of Black    everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of    ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs.    Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal    narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both    the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.      ABOUT THE AUTHOR    Morgan Parker is the author of THERE ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAN BEYONCÉ    (Tin House Books, 2017) and OTHER PEOPLE’S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT    (Switchback Books, 2015). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House,    the Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of    Hip Hop, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, and more.    She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts in    Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem    graduate fellow.        ACCESSIBILITY    INFORMATION:   

The         new Hugo House is fully ADA-compliant. If you require specific         accommodations, please contact us so that we         may assist you. 

    There         are gender-neutral bathrooms. 

    Public         transportation: The         new Hugo House is a short walk from the Capitol Hill light rail         station and the First Hill streetcar (Broadway & Pike-Pine stop)         and within a half-mile of many buses, including routes 8, 10, 11, 43,         49, and 60.

    Parking: A pay parking lot is         available nearby at the Greek Orthodox Church at 13th and Howell, or         at Seattle Central College’s Harvard Garage at 1609 Harvard Avenue.         Street parking is also available but not guaranteed. The garage         beneath Hugo House is for tenants only. 

   Alchemy Poetry Featuring JOY MA    (Tuesday, April 2, 2019) 7:30 PM - 10    PM @ Alchemy Poetry 

1408 E Pike Street, Seattle,    Washington 98122

Alchemy is a curated performance art space that elevates    voices that are often silenced. Performers in our community focus on the    brilliance of storytelling by offering personal stories and reflections    that are socially relevant.        JOY MA is an emerging, interdisciplinary artist who delves in media    including but not limited to performance, experimental music production,    DJing, and writing. They are passionate about bridging the arts, historical    research, and community organizing for racial, economic, and gender    justice. JOY MA reps the South Side of Chicago and the planet Jupiter’s    moon, Ganymede, all day every day. They are musically influenced by Chicago    house, juke, and footwork style tunes. You can win their heart by bringing    vegan deep dish pizza and flamin’ hots to the turn up.        $5 Admission    ALL AGES    Limited Showcase    Mic Spots        Every first, third and sometimes fifth Tuesday of the month at 7pm, we    call on two featured performers and a showcase mic at Lovecitylove.        ACCESSIBILITY    INFORMATION:   

Entry         door to LoveCityLove is at least 32 inches wide

    Restroom         is single stall. 

    There         is a grab bar installed in this restroom, clearance measures         TBD. 

    There         are 2 couches, and 20 folding chairs available in the space. We ask         that the audience prioritize folks that need to be seated during the         show. 

    Parking         is paid street parking, or there is a paid lot on the east side of the         building. 

    We         are located near bus routes 11,12, and 2 and 0.4 miles away from the         Broadway and Pike Streetcar stop. 

   Queer Staff Narratives    (Friday, April 5, 2019) 5:30 PM - 7    PM @ ECT

Come         hear UW LGBTQ Staff share their experiences growing up queer, their         present lives, and their advice for students (LGBTQ and ally alike)!         The event will conclude with a panel where students will have the         opportunity to ask the speakers questions. 

   6th Annual DREAM Banquet    (Saturday, April 6, 2019) 4 PM - 7    PM @ UW "wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ" Intellectual House    La Raza Student Commission and constituents invite you to the 6th Annual    Dream Banquet!     

Table          (8 people): $400

     General          Individual tickets: $60

     UW          Students: $30   

You can purchase tickets in the following website:    https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dream-banquet-tickets-59559489035    

Storytelling Strategies for Dismantling Racism

(April 11, 2019 - 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM)   

Storytelling         is an ancient human technology meant to encapsulate information and         build connections. We are all capable of sharing our stories and more         importantly, to witnessing and hearing each other with openness and         compassion.  

·            Facilitators: Nikkita Oliver (featured) with youth    storyteller, Azura Tyabji, Natasha Marin, Fleur Larsen, and Bert Hopkins.

+ Bios Available Here: https://ssdr-apr2019.paperform.co/

How can we strategically explore and dismantle problematic    racial structures in our organizations using our own personal stories?

During this training, facilitators will guide participants    in the following:

+ Exploring institutional narratives and the structures.    + Practicing deep listening, especially with regards to the language of    power & privilege.    + Role-play for navigating difficult conversations.

Join us in this training to explore how storytelling can be    used to develop concrete strategies to help individuals and organizations    actively engaged in anti-racist work.

Register at the link below:    https://ssdr-apr2019.paperform.co/

   Let’s Talk is a free    program that connects UW students with support from experienced    counselors from the Counseling Center and Hall Health Center without an appointment. Counselors    hold drop-in hours at four sites on campus:   

Mondays, 2-4 PM, Odegaard Library Room 222

    Tuesdays, 2-4 PM, Ethnic Cultural Center Room 306

    Wednesdays, 2-4 PM, Q Center (HUB 315)

    Thursdays, 2-4 PM, Mary Gates Hall Room 134E   

Let’s Talk offers informal consultation – it is    not a substitute for regular therapy, counseling, or psychiatric care.    To learn    more, visit letstalk.washington.edu.        The HUB’s front entrance is wheelchair accessible and the common area is to    the right of the main desk.    An all-genders restroom can be found at the 3rd floor, down the hallway    from the Q Center. Gender binary bathrooms with multiple stalls can be    found on each floor of the HUB.    The HUB IS not kept scent-free but we ask that you do not wear    scented/fragranced products (e.g. perfume, hair products) or essential oils    to/in the Q Center in order to make the space accessible to those with    chemical injury or multiple chemical sensitivity. 

Thank you for being a part of our community <3     We are so glad that you are here, and we are so glad to get to know    you!     Have questions about the QSC? Just want to get involved? Find our office    hours online at hours.asuw.org.    To hear more from the QSC be sure to like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter & instagram to stay up to date with all queer and    trans related happenings on campus and in Seattle!         With love,     Mehria Ibrahimi, Outreach & Engagement Intern. 

#events #qsc #qtpoca