pictures, politics & geekery

Rosa Luxemburg, Die Juniusbroschure

Which is what I’m contending with tonight, as well as the Frolich bio.

Growing Up Gay and Transgendered in Appalacia, Alex Hannaford.

The Atlantic, April 30 2011.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

I loathe Nietzsche. smh smh but I’ve always found this bit interesting. Such a perfect expression of the intellectual/artistic elites=passion/purity equation.

Steven Moffat, in The Scotsman  (via michaelbush)

Oh.  (via ruvy)

…this is making me not want to watch my favourite TV show. Thanks, Moffat, you misogynistic, racist, classist, dickfuck.

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whoa.

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This quote is even more awful than I remember it being. And I know one person in the notes mentioned that this is actually from a seven-year-old interview, but the thing is that Moffat’s treatment of gender, sexuality and relationships (not to mention class and race) in both Doctor Who and Sherlock is pretty decisive evidence that he still believes this crap, whether it’s Moffat-as-narrator’s fixation on Amy/Karen’s appearance and sexual activity, Sherlock’s horrendous treatment of the women in his life being played for laughs, or Rory’s entire personality. Not to mention a ton of other things I don’t have the energy to list right now.

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EWWWWWWWWWWWW (via tinyfist)

In addition to being disgusting, his comments are wrong. In general, everyone does better in a relationship, but most studies show that heterosexual men benefit more from long term relationships than do heterosexual women. They’re happier, healthier, and live longer. Heterosexual men also tend to do worse, after the loss of a partner than do heterosexual women, who can live for decades as a widow, productively and happily. That’s not even touching on his laughable ignorance of social construction, or his little fantasy about the chains of marriage, which hey there, men don’t try to avoid but actively seek out. It’s like he lives in a lad magazine.

Rachel Maddow, (via The Frisky)

I think it’s worth noting that Maddow is speaking from a position of relative privilege (of which I suspect she’s aware). Not everyone has the luxury of being able to “come out”, and queer folks who are further marginalized because of socioeconomic status, disability, geographic residence, and religion (just to name a few factors) may feel particular pressure to make symbolic statements, but they’re also the ones who face the greatest repercussions for leaving the closet.

I myself have a lot of openly queer friends from college, but Harvard was a very tolerant place (not perfect, but definitely a bubble compared to the real world). Not that we’ve graduated, we largely live in yuppie neighborhoods in Boston, New York, and metropolitan areas with significantly higher rates of sexual diversity than your average American town. The threat of bias, bullying, or even violence is still present, of course, but the latter is never something that any of my friends are actively concerned about. (And even some of them aren’t entirely out to their family or friends.) So, when we look at someone who doesn’t have the same advantages, who may not be able to access accurate information about sexuality, who hasn’t grown up with positive queer role models or mentors, the task of “coming out” is much more complicated than simply swallowing one’s pride. Until the world is an entirely safe space — and let’s not kid ourselves about our “free and democratic” nation, because there are many areas of America that do not count as such — I don’t think there can be an expectation that queer folks have a “responsibility to [their] own community” to come out, especially when that community is fragmented across racial, geographic, economic, and national lines and when the mainstream face of gay rights* serves a very specific demographic that is largely unaffected and unconcerned about the mental and bodily harm done to queer people with less privilege.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the gay rights movement in America is specifically concerned with gay rights, usually those of very privileged people. It is not a queer rights movement no matter what it purports to be. (Actions speak louder than words, HRC.) As I once stated on the blog:

While I do consider myself a queer ally, I’ve become rather disenchanted with mainstream queer activism, which emphasizes sameness and commonalities rather than empowering their constituents to embrace the ways in which their identities reveal to them the injustices of our society. Mainstream queer activism (that is, what most people call the “gay rights movement”) is concerned largely with an educated, gay, and male constituency and is focused on the attainment of straight privilege. More radical queer activism has historically emphasized differences and criticized major lobbying groups, like the Human Rights Campaign, for encouraging assimilation rather than revolt. Rather than advocating for the dismantling of marriage contracts and the military industrial complex, these organizations spend millions upon millions on same-sex marriage advocacy and the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. That’s hardly what I would call social change.

The whole “coming out” narrative is a big part of increasing the social acceptability of queerness, but for it to be effective, it doesn’t hinge on coast-dwelling, Ivy League grads outing themselves. Rather, it would require those individuals in communities of little queer visibility to literally risk life and limb in order to make a statement. I’m not comfortable suggesting that this symbolic action is worth taking, especially as queer people get left in the dust by the mainstream movement, which is concerned not with smashing the state, but with achieving symbolic victories and forging alliances while being more than happy to throw under the bus those who don’t fit their neat narrative of happy, coupled, and gay yuppiedom.

(Can you tell that I’m completely disgusted with the direction this movement has taken?)

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LOVE LOVE LOVE the commentary
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FANTABULOUS commentary. I think it’s incredibly telling that Maddow calls her community “gay”. That’s not my queer community, that’s for damn sure; assimilation and conformity, participation in the civic death machine and marriage complex? no thank you.

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Reblogging for the wonderful commentary.

The CIA • In an Earth Day posting to their website. The fact that the CIA actually said this is much funnier than any joke we could hope to make, so we’ll just let it stand. source (via • follow)

Aw, bless.