tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73402829848554392462024-03-19T01:07:45.041-07:00Tiny Jean Jackets Everywhere Twitchingweird girl wisdom, wanting things from the worldtrishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08815968852427494542noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-47883768313814935792014-10-24T01:50:00.002-07:002014-10-24T10:02:58.422-07:00On the loss of tiny worlds, and San Francisco<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>So, in the last two weeks, SF lost a long term leader in the tenant movement, a progressive weekly, a Spanish-language newspaper, and one of the West Coast's only dyke bars. I am having some feelings...</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I ran into one of the youth I used to work with at drop in a few years back by the Main Library yesterday. She and her girlfriend had just moved back to the city. They were staying outside. I bought some tamales for all of us and we talked. Things had been good in Sacramento, she said. She was in school. She had a job. She had housing. She wanted to get those things set up here. I swallowed my cynicism, reminding her that no matter what she read in the news, City College was still enrolling. At the same time, I was thinking about how impossible this city must be for young queer people at this time. When I moved here ten years ago at 22, the city was good to me and my friends. I went to city college. Rent was a stretch, but if you fit enough people into the nooks and crannies of apartments, it worked. And then you had an apartment. And roommates who were looking out for you. And the city had a long history of queers and working class communities of color working together on anti-displacement and housing issues. There were lots of ways to get and stay politically engaged. Lots of art events, parties. A feeling of history, and of extended queer family.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Sometime in the last ten years of this experimental queer adulthood building, I grew up. I met my partner. We each sank several years into working with young people in the city. We had a baby--at home in our apartment on Folsom street. Now should be the time that I get to become some sort queer mini-elder, and where my relative stability can be of some benefit and support to younger queers in my life. Except that my partner, baby, and I still worry about getting evicted from our one bedroom apartment. And there are no young queers left anyway. At least not lesbians.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Walking around my neighborhood, the Mission and Bernal, it always brightens my day to run into young people I know, my partner’s students, or people I know through political work. But I also miss running into queers--old roommates, ex-lovers, lovers of ex-lovers. The last several months, I’ve been wondering what it means for me and my family that 70% of the queer people and 90% of the lesbians I’ve ever met in this city aren’t here anymore. What it means that I mostly only see those queers who do still live in SF at parties in the East Bay. I’ve been wondering how we collectively begin to move past the <i>only</i> conversation people are able to have at every social gathering I’ve attended for the last two years---<i>where am I going to live? What am I going to do to get through this?</i> I’ve been thinking about how queers in San Francisco already lived through an assault on their community a generation ago--except where last time people responded by banding together to care for the sick and dying and organize--we now respond by scattering ourselves more widely out across a handful of metropolitan areas, displacing others in the process, and internalizing a careerist and entrepreneurial orientation to our own lives--trying to learn, often poorly, how to carefully calculate the right kind of individual response. <i>Where will I live? What will I do for work? How will I pay my student debt?</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Guess what isn’t going to work? Trying to fight the forces of this historical moment that conspire to--for some of us, violently enforce, and others of us, incentivize--our assimilation into being self-interested individuals primarily invested in our own success by attempting to mount <i>the right kind of individual response</i>. I know what it is going to take is deepening our commitments to place, to organizing, and to sharing resources with one another. But there’s also another thing I think it is going to take: I think we are going to have to mourn. I think we are going to have to be really sad. Together. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I remember taking my best friend to the Lexington Club on new year’s eve during her visit to San Francisco many years ago. I was having a good time, but when I looked over at her she was quiet and weeping. All she could say was, “I didn’t know there could be this many lesbians in one place in public.” And that was how we’ve all felt about the Lex. I never hung out there with much regularity, but the fact that it existed referenced something much larger about the San Francisco we were living in. When El Rio became overrun with drunk straight people most nights of the week, the Lex existed. When SF Weekly ran an article about how awesome the backyard at Wild Side West is without so much as mentioning that it is a lesbian bar, everyone still knew the Lex was queer. When another queer person you knew told you they were getting evicted or bought out and leaving the city, there was still the Lex.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When Esta Noche closed, a club on 16th frequented by trans Latinas, and working class Latin@ queers and drag queens, this is all I could think: They don’t say that these places are actually densely packed tiny worlds. They don’t say how very hard people work to carve out these tiny spaces where the world can be seen and felt and experienced in ways that are different and profoundly important. These spaces weren’t birthed as the brain child of an arrogant young innovator with a fistful of start up capital. They were created through <i>so many</i> collisions of history. These worlds are important and vulnerable. They are very very hard to create and too easy to destroy. And when they are unmade, they don’t just go happen somewhere else. Something is broken.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Having to make some kind of legible case for the importance of these worlds is its own type of violence. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">And you know what else besides dive bars are harder to create than to destroy? Neighborhoods. Taxi and transit systems. Pools of highly trained teachers. And just because someone with money tells young white men that they can re-engineer everything from how we teach kids to read, to how poor people sign up for welfare, to how rich people give away the money that should have already been paid in taxes anyway, does not mean they don’t still have something to learn from the many women and people of color who have been laboring away in the midst of the supposedly anachronistic and pathetically ossified structures so despised by tech entrepreneurs. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">When will we stop pretending that access to wealth confers some sort of ipso facto moral status to a person or project? Or that everything that is destroyed in the pursuit of wealth is a necessary casualty on the path to a better world? How do we assert that just because you can build an app, you are not qualified to reorganize either our neighborhoods or our public systems that took generations to build?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I read an article last week where a ride-sharing exec dismissed regulations by saying that, “Sometimes the future is happening and you just have to get out of the way.” Since we are talking about the future, let's also talk a bit about history. Here is one piece: There was a lesbian bar on 19th street. People would go there and fist each other in the bathroom in an effort to try to figure out how to be a different kind of human being than a person could be just about anywhere ever before or ever again. Then it got turned into a cocktail bar for young men with money who felt they didn’t have enough places to be in the world. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’m sad, friends. And I daresay, that being sad, acknowledging the <i>value</i> of things that have come and are coming to pass is one act of resistance to the logic that the casualties of a narrowly-conceived, ethically bankrupt, historically untethered, and creatively impoverished version of progress are best left unremarked upon.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-20420375781401624562014-04-05T01:32:00.001-07:002014-04-05T01:37:29.526-07:00pant flightFrom <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/04/01/middle_school_leggings_protest_13_year_old_activist_sophie_hasty_talks_about.html" target="_blank">Talking with a 13-year old leggings activist</a>:<br />
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"<span style="background-color: white; color: #281b21; font-family: sl-ApresRegular; font-size: 15px; line-height: 27px;">They are the most comfortable thing, other than sweatpants. But you can kind of get away with leggings easier than sweatpants, because sweatpants make you look a lot lazier. Teachers don’t understand that wearing jeans almost every day of the school year can get uncomfortable. I just love the feeling of leggings." -Sophie Hasty, 13</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #281b21; font-family: sl-ApresRegular; font-size: 15px; line-height: 27px;">Also, 2004 waistband sci-fi:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #281b21; font-family: sl-ApresRegular; font-size: 15px; line-height: 27px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/dJ6DxyTPrlo" width="420"></iframe></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-34166040564797967762013-07-10T04:17:00.001-07:002013-07-10T20:38:49.752-07:00broken hearts can't be wild<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfDab_aj9o7RfxTMXN3IY7AMwazBMBNql3_H6r0a7cPzOC0Mmw8HfaFtuPIadhVU7X5XfYpxfOe8FMzdp6SApyMF1pcZmLDkC3cTJwptAW3VzKjqOjePcIDstoBcWhvEdijWeDvBdjGiI/s1600/03-horsegirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfDab_aj9o7RfxTMXN3IY7AMwazBMBNql3_H6r0a7cPzOC0Mmw8HfaFtuPIadhVU7X5XfYpxfOe8FMzdp6SApyMF1pcZmLDkC3cTJwptAW3VzKjqOjePcIDstoBcWhvEdijWeDvBdjGiI/s320/03-horsegirl.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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...Or, insomnia's contribution to the wealth of youtube horse-girl tribute videos<br />
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...Or, 'wild hearts and weird girls: an invocation for the occasion of my teenage best friend's lesbian wedding:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/mIJBubMn43o" width="420"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-29476797878179636742013-06-28T01:41:00.001-07:002013-06-28T01:48:42.599-07:00Enduring Enlistments: LGBT GI Resisters and Anti-War Veterans Navigating Contradictions (2012)And in honor of SF Pride selling out the anti-war legacy of the SF queer community by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride" target="_blank">maligning Bradley Manning</a> right before the biggest court martial in U.S. history AND <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/military_recruiters_set_up_shop_at_san_francisco_gay_pride_parade/singleton/" target="_blank">inviting military recruiters </a>to Pride this year, I'm posting this 2012 paper, originally prepared as conference remarks, on queer politics and GI resistance:<br />
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<a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Fh1GpYYN6NeDNMUkhnNm5ydzA/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Enduring Enlistments: LGBT GI Resisters and Anti-War Veterans Navigating Contradictions (2012)</a></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">Thanks to IVAW members and members of the Killeen/Fort Hood queer scene for helping us think, feel, and organize our way through these issues.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-41023886626781220902013-06-28T01:27:00.002-07:002013-06-28T01:27:16.750-07:00Pride and Prejudice: Race, Proposition 8, and the Neoliberalization of LGBT Politics (2010)In honor of the DOMA ruling, I am posting this paper I wrote in 2010 on the gay marriage and the neoliberalization of LGBT politics:<br />
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<a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Fh1GpYYN6NZ3Z2RnlKdFphWkE/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">"Pride and Prejudice: Race, Proposition 8, and the Neoliberalization of LGBT Politics"</a></div>
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Also, did I mention that I am so excited to be making a commitment to my love this Fall, and to be attending the commitment ceremonies/weddings of two of my gay bff's this Summer? <span style="text-align: center;">DON'T HATE. ORGANIZE.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-74932156347992543232012-09-17T16:40:00.001-07:002012-09-17T16:40:54.679-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>bernal hill message board.</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-43244597312066568252012-09-10T16:15:00.001-07:002012-09-17T16:43:40.415-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-65904728502256625942012-09-05T11:18:00.001-07:002012-10-02T08:42:42.229-07:00Ambivalent Post-Saturn Queers Seek Derridean Surf Instructor<i>Boots and Addy compose fan mail to their favorite postmodern astrologer and discuss the meaning of woo in our times.</i><br />
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<b>How would you describe who our pomo astrologer is and and what she does?</b><br />
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<b>Boots:</b> A lesbian witch who wears a pirate jacket.<br />
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<b>Addy:</b> Yes, all of that and also the person who talked to us about how the Gemini twins are bowlegged and sassy booted, and that this is a critical refounding of butch/femme, and that actually, one of the belly buttons of the universe is where the gemini twin’s sassy boot sits in the sky.<br />
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[Our astrologer] is here to help us figure out how to be around for the turning of the ages in the right kind of way. I also think I’ve maybe described her as post-structuralist. The way she talked about the 'dude standardization project' and the foundation of the zodiac as a very relevant way of understanding the lives of people living in a world that would divide up the sky in such a way...It’s not only weird pomo times, it is the speech of someone who is invested in the political.<br />
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<b>Boots:</b> That is what was so fun about it, though, is that she was so clearly invested in the political and speaking on all of these different registers about astronomy and astrology and these different ways of seeing the sky, and that she seemed invested in all of them, and also the project of the universe beyond the sky. It was all about not needing those to fit together in any tidy kind of way.<br />
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<b>Addy</b>: Defying disciplinarity. It was as though until I heard her speak I had never thought of the zodiac as a structuralist framework. Of course, duh, but we don’t have to just choose between woo and air sign, academic woo. No, we can be discerning, critical with our woo. I felt like she was really speaking to this crew of wayward, thirty-something slash Saturn returns-ish ambivalent post-punk queers.<br />
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<b>Boots:</b> She really had her finger on the pulse. Is that what is happening in [the northern coastal counties]? Who else is employing her services.<br />
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<b>Addy:</b> Maybe we should open the post-university [up north].<br />
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<b>Boots</b>: Her number of registers of politicization of the zodiac and where we are traveling in life and where all of the planets have been situated in different historical eras. The ways we can politicize the looking of the sky.<br />
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<b>Addy:</b> It’s the idea of historicizing, but on a totally different register of time. It was this woo materialist, or woo historical materialist, understanding that is so how we need to talk about it right now. Women, the original Marxists. Witches, the original Foucauldians. There was also a real commitment to the terrestrial.<br />
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<b>Boots: </b>There is something key about that teaching us how to be in time, and teaching us to engage multiple planes of existence and attention. There is something about the way that I’ve engaged with metaphysics that feels like a bracketing, we are either uncritical or critical in a way that is flip. I detach from the level of criticism I use in the way I engage the rest of the world. I don’t engage with it as something to be interrogated, which would allow it to show itself in more interesting and generative ways.<br />
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<b>Addy:</b> Like a conservative interpretation of lesbian feminism's 'nationalist' impulses, the ways that woo is engaged with non-critically, that we treat it too tenderly. We are scared. We were closed off from it or it still marks a loss. But that is the kind of conservative 'decolonial' imaginary. To not engage with a critical refounding of what woo is and what we need woo to do. What is woo in our times, really? I think [our astrologer] opened up that it is possible to have a different relationship to time and magic and material and being than the one we usually get to engage with that still draws on skills we’ve been honing by being in the fucked up world that we are being in. Why are we tentative with woo?<br />
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<b>Boots:</b> It’s not that I’m tentative with the critique. It’s more about this feeling that I’m slightly uncommitted to the nationalism. Interested in the potential of such, but skeptical about the border-making practices, or the aesthetics or the way it’s configured etc. but I’m interested in the effects such nationalism might have the resources I or others might draw from it, such that I am side-stepping into the practices that I find intriguing, without being able to commit to the full-on political project. I am dabbling. I don’t feel the need to critique because I don’t take it seriously as something to critique, even though I do take it seriously.<br />
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<b>Addy:</b> We want a post-nationalist feminist world-making project that we are not just 'dabbling' in. What would it look like to embrace? Braid it into the strands we are pulling on to make meaning in the world. What would a relationship to woo that wasn’t handling it--relating to it with some kind of generational deference or over-carefulness? How could we wield it more meaningfully?<br />
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<b>Boots:</b> I think it’s about looking at what resonated for us listening to [our astrologer]. These ways of approaching woo in non-fundamentalist ways--in ways where there are multiple registers, not simply bracketed lines. I’ve been thinking a lot about irony and the general disappointment/dissatisfaction with hipster irony in the world. I read this thing that was a challenge to take irony seriously, at this level of reading things multiply, rather than that creating distance necessarily, to think about things as being more than what they say they are. That there is a relationship with meaning and intention and multiplicity that allows us to access ironic readings not as distance-making or emotionally distanced. I’m interested in a multiplicity of readings for woo that don’t demand distance, such that one can encounter the project not as nationalist nor anti-nationalist.
Because I think that’s the thing about dabbling. You are allowed to read things multiply such that 'this is how I’m reading it, this is how it really is.' 'This is what I’m going to say I think about it, but this is what I really think about it.' All those different ways of reading and narration.<br />
<br />
What I got out of [our astrologer's] talk was this ability to not create distance in multiple readings, but to take all of those readings seriously.
When she was describing how the zodiac was more of a spiral..these suggestions of other ways to imagine beyond the terrain that we are given. We can reimagine borders and still take seriously the work that they do. Take seriously the terrain they set out and how they demarcate themselves, how they are in relation with other models and structures. What they give to us, and what they don’t give to us. All these ways of taking things at their word, even though it’s not the final word.
What would that model of relating to woo be? Rather than, ‘I’ll take it, but I’m going to be skeptical about x, y, and z.’ Or to be really devoted to x, y, and z but to say I’m really skeptical about it because I’m afraid of how it might come across. But that involves not taking it seriously or not responding to the demands that it makes.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> I think about camp as this way of really loving things and putting yourselves in them and also totally not taking them seriously, so I think gay people are good at this. Being back in school and witnessing some of the cultural break downs between the gays and the people who don’t have much context for the gays has made me appreciate that difference. It’s one of the things I think is sad about taking everything so seriously.
I wonder what it’s like to make stake in the world and also re-think stake. To be open to a constant and incoming remaking of the idea of self-interest and what it is. I think gays are good at that, as a world-making practice, and I don’t know what that means in relation to the woo, but as people trying to embrace a piece or idea of our own 'history' in that, there is something a little bit more tender about how people handle that than just through irony. There is something very bittersweet about it.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> I’m with you, I think that gets at something with the lesbian nationalism. The woo provides a reimagining of worlds while still acknowledging its roots in, and it’s being a product of, the world in ways that are similar to gay camp. The sort of unicorn-ing of the world.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> You just turned 'unicorn' into a verb.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> That particular tenor of camp...its the tendency of kinds of humor and marginalization to come together in ways that are bittersweet, and hilarious and tragic and that reimagining worlds becomes possible through an against a hopelessness of the constrained world. And that the structures or the ways things are held in and confined, precluded, becomes visible because of that..and the magic is created in response to that.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy: </b>That is some thin air shit! People just folded meaning back in on itself a couple times and then invented a world.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> Absolutely. I mean, they did. And that’s not always obvious. It makes it extra fascinating and extra hard, because we see how tenuous and accidental and specific those sorts of makings were and how solid they are in their remakings of themselves and how hard it is to create resistances to those..whatever they are, I’m not quite ready to call them ‘accidents,’ but that set of possibilities that then became solidified. So other world-making practices are both tragic and hopeful in that way which I think is part of what’s going on in irony and gay camp--and I hope part of what’s going on in the woo.
<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> I feel like I’m seeing a shape right now but I don’t know what it is. I feel like its made out of soap.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> When you said that, I immediately imagine that Dial cheese soap. Because the moon is made of cheese.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy: </b>That’s what I’m saying man, just bringing it back around.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> Are you imagining a giant moon made of dial?<br />
<br />
<b>Addy: </b>It was a little more umbilical than that.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> Umbilical dial. Or cheese.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> Something about umbilical and cheese go badly together.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots</b>: A lot about umbilical and cheese go badly together.<br />
<br />
<b>What are [our astrologer's] three best qualities?</b><br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> Pomo-wisdom and Hilarious re-naming of things. Her aesthetic. She's got swag.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots: </b>Her coat is amazing. And she has an amazing demeanor! She talked for 2.5 hours straight with utter charisma. She was so chill and so on. A hard note to hit.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> Yes. Discerning and also chill-axed. We are all striving.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots: </b>But I want to back to re-naming, because it’s actually super important to these questions around what is woo in our time? <i>(Talks about collective tarot making process)</i> That question of categories--that questions need to be asked of categories, and some need to be hung onto, or at least we can hang our hat on them. And that’s what [our astrologer] got into. She offered another way to think about the universe, another way to think about the constellations.<br />
<br />
I always had a hard time remembering constellations, but now, all of the sudden, I remember the sassy booted twin. And the whole thing of making the body into that shape, so it’s not only a renaming and reimagining of the things we are seeing, but a demand to collapse the space between them, to rethink constellations as bodily, which was a connection to the historical stargazers she conjured up at the beginning. Making it a non-intellectual exercise to look and create a relationship to the cosmos.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> And the way she described looking as a way of making stories about their lives. Could we just do that too?<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> I think we are!<br />
<br />
<b>What do we need that [our astrologer] might be able to support us with?</b><br />
<br />
<b>Boots: </b>This is [back to] the relevance question.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> I need other ideas of time, or of ‘victory’ to sustain work for justice. Kind of like we were talking about earlier [in a previous conversation]. Not what is right or legitimate in this exchange, but what are responses that open up the conversation, that open space to imagine other ways of responding to one another? I think those are questions I have in relation to our movements. What are ways of noticing space for intervention on speech or discourse? How do we recognize the openings when our concepts of justice and the future are not fixed? What are the tools we use to frame and reframe and negotiate with one another our shared values with respect for difference, and--I hate the word ‘innovation’ because we live in the Bay Area--but on some level, innovation? And I just don’t feel like we have that.<br />
<br />
I think the spaces where people often went to think about those things, as imperfect and often disappointing as they were, are increasingly diminishing. So far we mostly have reactive responses to that. What is a response to neoliberalism and to everything we need to be learning right now in terms of the spaces we used to labor and make meaning in our lives that are no longer open or available--what are the openings within that? What is a response to that that is not about being like, ‘look I told you so?’ but a response that fundamentally continues to open up more spaces for being with one another in ways that are just and possible?<br />
<br />
I don’t know. I mean, I feel bitter. I really do. I don’t want to lose the powers of discernment. I don’t want to be just a surfer, but that’s why I’m learning to surf because discernment comes easier for me. It’s so easy, living in places that make themselves over so quickly and that are so expensive, to just roll around and think ‘it’s not like it used to be.’ It’s kind of like our earlier conversation about radical queer politics which is running on 70% nostalgia for a time that a politics of transgression was more meaningful and this idea of a perfect queer left that never ever existed and so now people are just busy being bitter, and talking shit, and that’s kind of what it is, you know? What’s on the other side of that?<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> I’m curious though, what do you think is under the bitter, if anything?<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> It’s that these fuckers don’t even enjoy themselves. They have miserable lives. It is like getting a big fucking tick. What do you think?<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> My question to myself when I’m feeling bitter is: 'Is that a feeling of loss? mourning? disappointment? disconnection?' I think that there is, more often than not--it’s a feeling of subsumed rage. Just really tired rage. I need to have a bit more energy if I’m going to stick with this game of living and resisting. I guess that’s why I ask myself, where is the bitterness coming from? What is that? I’m clear that it doesn’t serve me or anyone else or building another world. I want to understand it’s origins better and it’s trajectory better to figure out other ways to be in relationship with it. Maybe that is too therapeutic sounding.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> Well, I don’t think it’s only therapeutic because it doesn’t sound like you are just trying to fix it, but to ask what it should do. I think, for me, it is mourning more than anything. And moving through a world in which so many people refuse to mourn. Where the spaces we built to figure out how to do that together are being systematically destroyed. Spaces of being where we could imagine responses together no longer exist and we are supposed to file out into the world as individuals who are all self-calculating, like, ‘What do I need to do?’ And that’s supposed to be progress! It just feels like there is a fundamental social contract that has been violated. The idea of what surplus and progress are supposed to be and be used for. It just really gets to me.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> So what we need [our astrologer] to do is provide us with a restored social contract! Or space for restoration beyond the bitter, or at least a space for mourning...<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> mourning the displacements of neoliberalism. Okay, well, concisely, leftists need a critical astrologer.<br />
<br />
<b>Boots: </b>I think a critical astrologer who has a warm relationship with the cosmos and its cruelties.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> A Nietzchean astrologer?<br />
<br />
<b>Boots:</b> Not quite that bad. I don’t think [our astrologer] did it in a way that was so direct, now listening and talking to you after and our conversations about our need for spaciousness. There’s a way that how she frames the cosmos was a metaphor for that. And that didn’t involve some fictional perfectionism of the universe. Not this sort of importing of the other-worldly as a pinnacle of us. It wasn’t an idealization of the universe. Nor was it an idea that we can in some fundamental way universally represent the universe, but this idea that in this grappling with the grandness and potentially deadliness and the weight of the temporality that it presents in this very hopeful and very disappointing way, that that is part of what gives us the space. To use that understanding as a resource to imagine specificity and generality at once. History and future at once. Or historic and present-future at once. As a tool, as a metaphor, as a muse in a way--being able to engage in the sky or the cosmos gives us a kind of concrete and abstract metaphor for space. For an opening that we are asking for.<br />
<br />
<b>Addy:</b> So, maybe more like a Derridean-surf-instructor-astrologer for leftists?<br />
...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-12298790153657267252012-06-06T12:04:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:17:04.117-07:00nut farming<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsUiieFNFBptl3H4EOTuWDcgMYjglaWV2uyRlPaDqr0Cl8icIlLCscEeSoWo9vK1mpEZL1ujRvTM-HWLRpiNkMHX7ZBeAbcHQ6q2sEaG8bNtVfMA_hvqsIZGxMmqD7WG8cW7qhOec1BwY/s1600/rosescreen.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646433596694105682" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsUiieFNFBptl3H4EOTuWDcgMYjglaWV2uyRlPaDqr0Cl8icIlLCscEeSoWo9vK1mpEZL1ujRvTM-HWLRpiNkMHX7ZBeAbcHQ6q2sEaG8bNtVfMA_hvqsIZGxMmqD7WG8cW7qhOec1BwY/s400/rosescreen.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; height: 234px; width: 400px;" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-29315891178812968802012-04-18T19:35:00.004-07:002012-10-02T08:43:04.473-07:00The Community That Grinds Together, Stands Together: Notes on Zumba and Grindr as Organizing Tools in a U.S. Military TownWhile consuming four varieties of Girlscout cookies, Ry and Addy roundtable about the use of cruising apps and aerobics classes as strategies for overcoming army-town alienation. Both are queers from the Bay Area organizing around GI resistance and servicemember rights in a U.S. base town where Ry is stationed as an active duty soldier.<br />
<br />
A: I feel like Zumba is one of the only places I go engage with norm-times women, and I feel sort of undercover. I’m pretty pumped about it, you know? And I had this fantasy that if I spent a long time in [this town] it would be a way I could have lots of conversations with army spouses. <br />
<br />
And I was really excited that some ladies from Zumba came [to the outreach center], ‘cause, its like, what’s the ask of people [in our movements]? What are we offering in terms of community and community building? Does it speak to the things we actually come together for in an alienated world?<br />
<br />
R: That’s one of the activities that people pursue when they have time and are looking for community. But you tell me, do people just show up and do their thing, or are they there to, you know, meet people?<br />
<br />
A: Well, when I took my dad [to Zumba], I realized there was this whole community around there it I wasn’t accessing ‘cause I was showing up being too disciplined about it. Obviously, I want to be doing it with other people or I would be doing it in my living room, but I really get in a zone about it. When I took my dad, I was a little jealous because he’s not that good but everyone wanted to talk to him and hang out with him. I realized I should be talking to people more. When I came to Zumba [in this base town], it was like: ‘Oh, let’s explain why we are here.’<br />
<br />
As a space, I feel like people are coming together ‘cause they wanna use their bodies--together in community, which I feel is inherently a space that makes us want more from the world and is about political possibility.<br />
<br />
R: Oh sweetheart, you may be analyzing this too much.<br />
<br />
A: But look at all the 80’s fight-the-man fight-the-power dance movies.<br />
<br />
R: Yeah, okay. I see a relationship.<br />
<br />
A: So the connection I see between Zumba and Grindr...<br />
<br />
R: Yeah, oh god, okay...<br />
<br />
A: Its a way people actually come to be together in an alienated world, to figure out how to be bodies in the world together. We don’t really get that in the privacy of our own homes, and I think that is partly what our politics need to respond to. What we want from one another: to be bodies in the world together and then bodies that also stand up for each other, maybe.<br />
<br />
R: Yeah, I mean, Grindr was created because it was supposed to be more of a social network, like a Facebook for gays. An app. It was the first of its kind. And I guess need dictated utility. It just became something else. I don’t know, because of the nature of gay men looking to find each other with GPS (laughs). But other forms of Grindr have grown from that, like Jacked and Scruff. Half a dozen that are pretty popular. It’s funny, I didn’t even realize ‘cause I thought they were all, like, equally slutty, but I was dating a boy for a while, and he was all: ‘What the fuck are you doing on Grindr?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. It’s a habit. I wanna talk to people.’ And he was like, ‘Thats what Jacked is for, not Grindr.’ And you can really tell the difference.<br />
<br />
So I see it being a thing for people who are struggling with identity and how to connect with people in the world. There’s a feeling of connection because there is someone behind [the app]. There is that relationship, a sense of belonging. I have a feeling that people use Grindr that way too. They use it in a number of ways.<br />
<br />
I talk to guys in my [army] unit who are like, ‘I don’t know how you have so many people to hang out with.’ I mean, every weekend, before we deployed, I’d be hanging out with AA people or the gays. This was even before I knew the [regional gay group] existed. But when I was on guard duty, I realized that was the biggest thing these guys envied. They were like, ‘How do you do that?’<br />
<br />
A: Do you think that’s the root of some homophobia, straight people are jealous that gay people have so many friends?<br />
<br />
R: Possibly. It’s like the party is in the other room. Something is going on and they aren’t invited. I have the benefit of not having to conform to anybody’s perspective. If I wanna fucking wear a dress and walk down the street, I’ll feel fine. I can do whatever the fuck I want, but they are subjected to the standards of their gender roles. And that’s confining and I’m sure it can be frustrating at times. Its like, homeboy wants to get a pedicure--they wanna do that too! Or get a manicure, and they feel like they can’t do that! Towards the end of Iraq, they started coming to me and being like, ‘When we get back to the states...’ And that’s all you talk about the last three months, anyway. We decided we were going to go to a spa together. <br />
<br />
A: I’m just thinking about [this town]. Its really hard to meet people here. There are really low home prices. There are these big houses. There’s this total premium on private life, plus people being confined to what kinds of relationships are appropriate and mature to have, where you are allowed to get your needs met, like you were talking about. There really aren’t spaces designed around people meeting each other, building friendships, being in public together. With these cruising apps, do you see that people are at home or do you encounter them and cruise in public?<br />
<br />
R: More the prior. You cruise online when you are out and about. Almost never are you already on the road and you meet someone and hook up. Maybe at a club or a bar. But not in [this town]. <br />
<br />
A: Do you think there would be more public cruising spots if not for these apps?<br />
<br />
R: Oh yeah, there used to be more truck stops and back trails and bushes and I think that’s a part of the GLBT community that’s tragically being forgotten. I’m not sexually attracted to that, but there’s something to be said about meeting someone in person and deciding to have sex with them versus doing this whole cruising online process. I’ve walked these soldiers through the same thing. I taught all these soldiers how to cruise online. <br />
<br />
A: You did a tutorial?<br />
<br />
R: I was like: ‘Hey, you have to get some pics going.’ It was pretty interesting. But it is an isolation thing. Especially with the internalized and the general homophobia around here. A lot of people will stay home and lay in bed and cruise Grindr and just go through different apps and different people, and then choose to meet up in the privacy of darkness and someone’s home. <br />
<br />
A: How did you decide what to put on your Grindr profile?<br />
<br />
R: So, Grindr only lets you put your basic stats. You know, height, weight, age, and then what you are looking for: dating, relationship, one on one sex, group sex. And then it has room for a bio, that is like, a twitter-size paragraph. I put on mine “community organizing, GI resistance, activism, and SEX.” That’s what it says: GI resistance comma space, community organizing comma space, activism comma space, and I’m always down to fuck. Or something like that. It’s like very clear, you know?<br />
<br />
So why did I do that? I guess just to have a presence. To say, ‘This shit exists here.’ Its an exposure in case anyone gets interested or wants to get involved or has a spark--that would fuel it. Its also a filter process. Who am I going to be seeing? Just like the TV. Have I told you why I put that there? <br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">(The only television in Ry’s apartment is a broken vintage model with a quote from Orwell’s 1984 that says something like, “bend lower, that’s right, comrade” painted in white across the screen).</span><br />
<br />
A: To see if someone recognizes that 1984 quote.<br />
<br />
R: Then they are more than just a fuck. Or its, like, an emotional fuck, more than just getting off.<br />
<br />
A: That’s a really interesting bar.<br />
<br />
R: A lot of people are like, ‘I don’t get it.’ And then I’m like, ‘1984.’ And they are like, ‘What’s that?’<br />
<br />
A: So that’s how you weed out people who make jokes in their ‘books’ section on Grindr? So, have you ever gotten cruised for politics?<br />
<br />
R: Yes, well, on [gay military list]. Today, I posted “if anyone wants to get involved...” I asked if anyone was interested in working to better servicemembers lives. LGBT BAH [basic allowance for housing], so I kind of described some of the things that would relate to [that group]. So I had two people contact me through email about this, and if you’ll notice, this person [offered a place to crash]. (laughs) At the same time, somebody else said let me come up there, and that all his friends live in the dorms. So he was suggesting, ‘I kind of need a place to stay.’ And I was like, ‘yeah sure.’ And those are two people who even if they didn’t pass the TV test, they would probably have the intellectual curiosity to figure out what its about.<br />
<br />
A: Yeah, its interesting how on this kind of social media, you have exchanges organized more around shared interests and politics. Sex would be secondary. And at the same time, on Grindr you are repping this other [political] stuff. But there, sex would come first and maybe somebody would recognize the 1984 quote when they came in. <br />
<br />
The first time I met you a few months ago, we talked about how its possible to feel agency in those moments, in [casual sex]. How sex can be a space of freedom, where we get to use our bodies differently or cast off ideas of how they are supposed to be used and what they are supposed to be used for. And then, thinking on that after talking to you recently about the importance of tattoos or piercings when you can’t switch up hair or wardrobe because of [army regs]. <br />
<br />
It’s cool to think about how you can rep on your Grindr profile the idea that coming together to fuck would be a a political moment and that politics belong there. Broaden the idea of what conversations belong there. I feel like those spots are few and far between. The parts where we actually do what we want to do with one another.<br />
<br />
R: I really do think there is something magical about Grindr. I-- (<span style="font-style: italic;">both laugh</span>). But there really is. And I’m addicted to it. I’m not addicted to, like, the application or the sex, but these interactions with people. And getting this context. Being raised west coast and being out here now. So there are things that are amazing about it. Not everyone on Grindr is in the military, which means there are locals. Or if they are in the military, it probably means they came from somewhere else. So we have this total cross section of people from all over the country, especially people of color and people from poverty--who enlist more.<br />
<br />
Living in the bubble of the west coast, Portland and San Francisco, then being exposed out here, I just love to go in somebody’s house. I like to go in and look at someone’s library and maybe I might completely judge the shit out of them, but try to get a more clear sense of that person, how do they, like, organize their shoes? Where do they get their artwork? Is this all IKEA shit, or what? In a shallow capacity, but also on a deeper level.<br />
<br />
I love to pick people’s brains. I’m serious! I wish the experiences I’ve had, walking into a stranger’s house and getting to know them on some level, I wish I could share that with the world in some way. ‘Cause I have the liberty of asking almost any question and they’d answer it, pretty honestly. I think its just like the nature of where we met, the assumption that we are going to have sex is already made. You’ve already gotten pretty far, so there’s no need to impress somebody. The walls that people build up around themselves on a regular basis, to protect themselves and whatnot are just different in that situation. The situation where you are like, ‘We are here to have anonymous sex.’ <br />
<br />
And I get to see a part of people’s lives. I get to see through those walls for just a moment, and that is what I am addicted to, getting to see a glimpse of somebody’s heart, a glimpse of whatever essence. Just, try to analyze that a little bit. And I get to do that with people from all over the country. Its an opportunity I never would have had if I had stayed out there, on the west coast, without getting some exposure to what this country is.<br />
<br />
A: Do you feel like Grindr, and just pickup culture in a place like SF is more uniform? Who you are gonna come across and who you are going to find, versus who all is having gay sex in a military town?<br />
<br />
R: Well, its very clear if you are cruising on Grindr in a big city like that, you are just cruising for sex. Sex, yes, no? But in a place like this, there develops a small town atmosphere. Even if its just extremely shallow, just getting off, there is that thing. Like, ‘Maybe this could be something.’ Because you know homeboy is probably not going anywhere for awhile, And you are probably not going anywhere for awhile. There is that transient atmosphere. In and out of the military. In and out of post. Then deployments and moving to different installations. But there is a little more invested into it than in big cities.<br />
<br />
A: Like a hope of camraderie?<br />
<br />
R: Yeah, exactly. Like, you have a little more interest in somebody.<br />
<br />
Should we talk about how to utilize that for a [political] outreach tool?<br />
<br />
A: I mean, you already have used it for an outreach tool, it seems.<br />
<br />
R: Yeah (<span style="font-style: italic;">laughs</span>), I know.<br />
<br />
A: It seems like a lot of the successful political outreach here is secondary outreach [not the formal outreach]. To some extent, a lot of that is happening through these gay social networks and apps, which is important to notice. It makes sense. Who are the people who are not only marginalized in the military, but are also into hanging out with one another outside of that space? Like you described, people in your unit who wanted that, but there wasn’t a model. There’s not a model for how to find and form and maintain meaningful relationships outside of certain structures.<br />
<br />
R: But that’s Zumba, right? That is the formula I tell these kids [in my unit]. I’d be like, ‘Well, what are you interested in?’ And a lot of times, they’d be like, ‘I don’t know.’ Which is depressing. But I would challenge them to find out whatever they were interested in...and find a community around it. Do you like guns? Do you like shooting? Do you like, fucking, rock climbing? Go find it. Even these kids [I just got done eating pancakes with at IHOP] tonight. They were talking about all this anime stuff that was way over my head. Then they started talking about Magic the Gathering. I was like, ‘Hell yeah, that’s my shit.’ That’s what I’m talking about, right?<br />
<br />
A: But how do you take it a step further? Maybe we should have a Zumba-thon fundraiser for our work.<br />
<br />
R: You are so into it. I can’t judge. I’ve never done it.<br />
<br />
A: Well, its weird. Its this culturally appropriative dance aerobics form that you would think is, like, ‘oh great, we are incorporating every dance on the planet and turning it into this patented way to make ladies skinny.’ But what I realize when I go, is that its pretty different than the rest of the gym or even group aerobics classes. There’s so much camraderie. Its mostly women of color in the classes, in California and [here]. I do feel, and I don’t mean to be a fundamentalist, but there is something to having spaces that are about being free to move it in different ways, experimenting, and doing that in a non-judgmental atmosphere. I hear people talk about weight and fitness way less in Zumba than any other fitness thing I’ve done. It feels like its more about going and being in presence, in body with others, and I feel like that is a special thing for a bunch of women to come together on that basis. It’s of benefit to most sentient beings, but also, just, sisterhood is powerful. (laughs) <br />
<br />
R: Do you think a lot of those parallels are there with yoga? Because that [has worked for the outreach here].<br />
<br />
A: Yeah, that makes sense. All sports have their own culture to them. What is the idea of what we are trying to achieve? With Zumba, the vibe of what people are trying to achieve is not just ease and presence but fun and joy and play. People are nice to each other. Here, Everyone rolls their strollers in and there are eight year old and four year old girls doing Zumba on the sidelines.<br />
<br />
Also, I have my own feelings around, like, never having become a dance protege. Not that I could be, but why didn’t I take more dance classes as a younger person before I busted myself up? It’s expensive and hard to break into as an older person, but you can just go to Zumba all the time. It might be mediocre, but we can be mediocre together.<br />
<br />
R: You sold me, I’m sold.<br />
<br />
A: And it did work for outreach. If [this town] has hipsters, its those ladies. Well, not the young hipsters. You were hanging out with them tonight [at IHOP]: the army brat, magic card-playing bey-bey queers. The Zumba ladies are women of color in their early 30‘s to late 50‘s. Excited about poetry slams and writing and are, like, all up in the library happenings here. The instructor really seems to be the nexus of this lady social scene.<br />
<br />
R: Alright.<br />
<br />
A: We’ve really done some social mapping of this town.<br />
<br />
R: Well, its, like, marginalized communities, those groups: gays, people of color, immigrants, typically come together more. People unify with one another under oppression. So, how can we help that process and also make it more about ending that oppression, rather than dealing with symptoms?<br />
<br />
A: That’s why I was excited those kids [the IHOP queer youth] showed the other night and I hope they come to poetry. I was like, you all are working it out in the world. I want you to have space to do that and I want there to be spaces that connect that process of looking for community to politics.<br />
<br />
But also, alliance between communities. When we started talking to [the Zumba ladies] about our work, the thing they brought up was concern for LGBT soldiers. Well, first of all, they thought I was an army wife. I was told later. Talk about my self-image-concept being off--and this is to say nothing bad about army wives--just that I have, like, knuckle tattoos, you know? But even in talking to me and thinking that, it got brought up multiple times that they were invested in the existence of queer people. Zumba ladies.<br />
<br />
R: I think that’s rare. You may have found an anomaly.<br />
<br />
A: It’s possible, That’s what I’m saying. Its all coming together at the off-post Zumba class. I also went to a free yoga class there, and it was kind of amazing because the teacher was post-army and had this super-official, dead-pan way of saying things like, ‘I’m sending rays of light and love to you right now.’ There were, like, moms and adult daughters doing yoga on sleeping bags while disaffected teen daughters texted in the back. Just zany lady times with endless partner poses and giggling. At one point, we did this move where we all held each other’s legs in a line and the teen got called from the back of the room to hold the leg of the lady at the end of the line. So she was there, holding her leg and texting. And that’s what it was: like, we are all in this together and it is weird.<br />
<br />
(<span style="font-style: italic;">We transition to updating the online member profiles of left organizations we belong to be more explicitly queer, while eating so many Thin Mints and Trefoils).</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-62890073751895633932011-11-18T19:27:00.000-08:002011-11-18T19:33:48.152-08:00refusing to 'do our jobs'i'm really tired of people questioning the legitimacy of #occupy protesters based on whether or not they have "jobs." raising, feeding, housing, transporting, entertaining, healing, and teaching people, and looking out for the wellbeing of other living and non-living beings are "jobs" that tend to be poorly paid when they are paid at all. moving around electronic sums of capital may be a way of making money, but it is of no social and ecological value. inventing new (and legal) technologies of stealing working people's money by getting them to invest everything they have into loans for their primary residences, then taking that, then taking their public money, and otherwise doing the "work" of making sure states are designed to function and intervene on your behalf, is not a "job." people should not be telling others developing capacities for direct democratic engagement to get jobs. they should tell the people on wall street to get jobs.<br /><br />i lost two public sector jobs in late 2010/early 2011. one building social support with and connecting homeless lgbt youth with substance abuse treatment and another in youth and community led hiv prevention initiatives. those programs just don't exist now and so i worked unpaid in many of the same capacities through last july. i really resent the ongoing question about employment status, since its so clear that part of what is being protested is that there is no correlation between how to be ethical or socially useful and how to get paid in this society and that people are upset about unemployment! i'm so tired of armchair critics writing about how there is no nuanced economic analysis at play in the protests. all people are revealing is how their sense of political and social possibilities have been scorched and shriveled by the blazing sun of neo-liberal anti-thought and collapsed in on themselves in a kind of rigid grammatical daisy chain that will eat itself and the rest of the earth alive before stopping to consider that we might not have a ton of time left on this planet and that maybe there are possibilities for living and valuing life outside of a nearly self-willing system that has grown into a kind of golem stalking the landscape and extracting its fuel in surplus and human and non-human misery. i mean, i don't mean to get really crimethinc here, i'm just saying, we really need to shift the terms of debate and start talking really critically about capital. if we are all 'just doing our jobs,' no wonder the idea of people not having jobs is so scary. let's just really expand and blow up the idea of what it means to not do our jobs, okay?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-82618519795333991112011-06-11T21:21:00.000-07:002011-06-11T21:25:11.851-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho41S5Ya5MK95nomNCgGEQkOV02wRgTxtPW9WYmBj1oiyBFUfhJ9mwA9cGjNTYRk4-hUhN6qxUPC_Gd-RAQhprbMaCnzCMzEQq_MvT_-sErGpW9xkAkBb2dCmh4XMuAFBE4gL6xyd_WWM/s1600/photo.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho41S5Ya5MK95nomNCgGEQkOV02wRgTxtPW9WYmBj1oiyBFUfhJ9mwA9cGjNTYRk4-hUhN6qxUPC_Gd-RAQhprbMaCnzCMzEQq_MvT_-sErGpW9xkAkBb2dCmh4XMuAFBE4gL6xyd_WWM/s320/photo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617183955587001986" border="0" /></a>mirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03122843604430678857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-78771651572032383292011-04-09T17:39:00.001-07:002012-09-05T12:15:34.935-07:00taking care of business in the gay bay, staying one step ahead of the yelp-pocalypse.a lot is up for me right now. this city and the rest of it.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">one.</span> my girlfriend, who is a high school teacher is dealing with some intense collisions between homophobia and racism staged through a shit-show of multiculturalized admin fumbles that assume a liberal tolerance of homo life but not without re-amassing racist assumptions, compounded through a general abdication of administrative responsibility that relocates the onus of dealing with bullshit onto basically, the queer dealing with homophobia. without being able to say too much about this, it's just really infuriating to watch white admin treat homophobia among staff of color as anachronistic, and the views and actions of people of color as external to the liberal, whitened, multiculturalism of an institution and its progress rather than <span style="font-style: italic;">dealing</span> in a way remotely becoming of their salaries. the good news? my gf has serious skills and dedication and worked with all involved to reconcile this in a way that is accountable to her students, herself, and the people she works with, <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> manages to locate overcoming homophobia somewhere on the terrain of <span style="font-style: italic;">shared commitments to justice</span> rather than alienating, liberal progress narratives.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">two.</span> i’ve been spending some time sorting through effects and responses with a friend who was trans-bashed in the mission last week. while on the one, the ability of this friend to politicize and direct responses, locate healing and transformation <span style="font-style: italic;">in a world</span> while at the same time not forgetting herself and her own needs is teaching me a lot by example. at the same time, i am feeling aware of the eagerness of a gay-stablishment to make an example of the city’s competent application of anti-hate law enforcement strategies that can locate all problems of queer safety with a few, easily pathologized and criminalized <span style="font-style: italic;">bad characters</span> without lending acknowledgement of the (compounding) issues that put queers--no less trans women--at risk, starting with the same increasing criminalization and policing. <a href="http://sidewalksareforpeople.org/">hello, sit/lie?</a> yet, i’m realizing that no great ideas about community-determined responses as alternatives to state responses to violence seem to capture the fact that sometimes <span style="font-style: italic;">the state just responds</span> without request, and with serious constraining effects on our ability to determine our own responses. btw, for info about supporting this friend, check <a href="http://miatumutch.tumblr.com/post/4371527928/lets-support-mia-today">here.</a><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">three.</span> i’ve been looking for apartments. in the mission district, where i’ve lived for the last five years. my own race and class privilege, as well as having been pretty stable in an apartment with good neighbor and landlord relations for several years, have insulated me from the rental-market side of the ongoing epic of san francisco becoming a sanctuary city for the rich. the long and short of it is: <span style="font-style: italic;">we've been rejected for lots of apartments and haven't moved.</span> maybe this isn’t so strange, but as someone who has never offered to lay down so much for rent, i really had no idea how cut-throat this process was, or that when one actually agrees to pay what they ask and qualifies, that you can still wind up without an apartment again and again. <br />
<br />
this is generally how the terrifying process has gone so far: mercury willing, receive craigslist and padmapper alerts through a certain mobile apple device all day. read lots of ads that note their preferred proximity to google shuttles and new restaurants. call all decently affordable options immediately. show up at odd times for open houses lasting 15 minutes alongside a dozen other people and turn in exhaustive printed portfolios that include everything but a copy of our birth certificates. cringe as all white, all straight (no exaggeration) couples and dot-com workers show off offer letters from pay pal, apple, google, and zynga, tell their love-at-first sight stories from undergrad days at elite colleges, and talk endlessly about their appreciation for the sf 'cultural scene' to prospective landlords. get rejected again and again and feel ambivalent slash awful over compounding circumstances of who is already <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> among these white, professional-class, childless couples (we are among these) <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> being the only queer couple slash being women who work in the public sector and don’t make dot-com male-earner wages <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> want to live in a neighborhood where we work with young people slash that queer women have lived in for some thirty to forty years but realizing instead we are getting rejected for apartments that have no heat.<br />
<br />
it is producing some intense ambivalence about being here for me. i feel super connected to this city, politically invested, involved in the lives of young people i work with, and able to think experimental queer adulthoods (i have earthquake plans that include people a gay mini-generation younger). i want to live here (why i don’t move back to oakland is a whole separate reflection). on the other, the apartment hunting and my recent practice of coffee shop studying alongside start-up workers have left me ultra-aware of how this city is increasingly (okay, its been going on for a minute) designed for this set of people that move through the world as though they were constructing <span style="font-style: italic;">one endless, giant, offensive yelp review</span>. (munira sent me a <a href="http://abeastinajungle.blogspot.com/2011/04/tempest-without-body.html">really good example</a> of this today re: the terrifying and amazing Lemi Ponifasio dance performance we saw on thursday). there’s a lot to love, but i can’t help but sometimes look around, survey the damage, and think, <span style="font-style: italic;">“shit is hitting the fan, and i’m going to be stuck alongside people whose worldly relations function like a yelp review? am i sure this is this a good idea?”</span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL7tiIHL8HBxRRCvXo10U6tBEDzZVeqEsjqmfsjs4I5sfZ6Jxh49onnhOB824gTUVkFQ_-XWrbcDWKlEeNg-kh-6zlPdAUqssW58pJf_fIRUkyEWAAM79U_i0k3mZaOm3gUvoRBV9i-Wc/s1600/4088075866_aff9b3ecbe_z.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593755904879743266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL7tiIHL8HBxRRCvXo10U6tBEDzZVeqEsjqmfsjs4I5sfZ6Jxh49onnhOB824gTUVkFQ_-XWrbcDWKlEeNg-kh-6zlPdAUqssW58pJf_fIRUkyEWAAM79U_i0k3mZaOm3gUvoRBV9i-Wc/s400/4088075866_aff9b3ecbe_z.jpeg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
i suppose part of what commitment looks like is intervening on the same evaluative and consumptive impulses by sticking around for what needs to be done. which is why i’m feeling inspired these days by long time queer activists like <a href="http://www.avicollimecca.com/">tommi mecca</a>, who after so many years of seeing the remaking/dismantling of a queer politic in this city are still out there, working for housing justice, mobilizing folks, and building meaningful connections with young people. <br />
<br />
which brings me to <span style="font-weight: bold;">four</span>. the twitter deal. a bunch of folks have already spoken well to this <a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/avimecca/2011/03/16/sfs_twitter_deal_is_queer_removal">being a queer issue</a> as it literally declares a redevelopment zone for new businesses to settle tax-free in the tenderloin, home to so many residential hotels--housing, among other people, lots of queer seniors and poor trans people. worse, this deal was cut by some of among the city’s <a href="http://www.sfbos.org/index.aspx?page=11324">most progressive supervisors</a>, scared into a twitter tax break by the company’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/technology/04tax.html?_r=1&ref=sanfranciscobayarea">threat to pull out of the city</a> on account of not being able to justify the expense of payroll taxes. zynga also threatened to do the same. this is a tax break that will cost the city tens of millions of dollars. like, neoliberalism is so totally pervasive that even some of the most progressive in city government can’t imagine anything better in this moment than massive trickle down schemes that rob the city and displace residents of the last affordable neighborhood with even more dot-com employees guided by mobile devices towards the holy grail of good cocktails.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNt1uVt_WXd6M_VfAsawK_vZ_IzSJrb2aa5OY3_EAysFWLezpZEkKWk9RosoRtr62K-8tjV_UwXUSuo0yzUdAzOa0vkbJtIapFFvHEQihwymMHyWKjLm7J5dKmb_UHFV-6FtCIVtLcL9w/s1600/recession_gentrification.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593756861940133842" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNt1uVt_WXd6M_VfAsawK_vZ_IzSJrb2aa5OY3_EAysFWLezpZEkKWk9RosoRtr62K-8tjV_UwXUSuo0yzUdAzOa0vkbJtIapFFvHEQihwymMHyWKjLm7J5dKmb_UHFV-6FtCIVtLcL9w/s400/recession_gentrification.jpeg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<br />
and, long as i've been sitting on this post, f<span style="font-weight: bold;">ive, six, seven, eight</span>: nursing hip bruises from a cop confrontation following an attempted banner drop in support of the far-too-long-closed queer youth space at the eureka valley rec center at the <a href="http://ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=5642">castro "townhall,"</a> which was actually more like watching 15 (all male) talking heads explain their revenue shortages for 2 hours....high stakes kinda epic confrontation with a queer basher at a crowded party...the possible closure of longtime leatherbar, the eagle, in exchange for some condos...and some hardship over the (possible) virtual-to-actual transitions of hypothetical babies that helped land april an eighth plague of (internalized, in this case) homophobia.<br />
<br />
finally, i’m working on a group project at school that is really challenging me to carve out space to talk about the political consequences and possibilities of the lives we live without dismissing the political realities and histories that form those lives in the first place. realizing that even though we may be able to trace the intersections in the lines of power that criss cross, perpendicularize, and paralell in their pummeling of varied and related <span style="font-style: italic;">‘us’es</span>' that it does not mean we always know what to <span style="font-style: italic;">say</span> to each other about this when we try.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-59465173571264644642011-03-15T12:05:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:17:27.133-07:00the olympic rings of the mind<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwAnNMjNmrD5frPaJRHvmrDC5aeRhmCcgHcGRnGG6ItHvnTMfs1BrraG_y8zg1oq9GawzgHiMf_hbUxClWzwtTXk5DkvOqAt1QQwzbahXzx9gUtH1ragPNCttFPhIg7KXh-3t5ryaakTw/s1600/Olympic+ring-shaped+bicycle%5B2%5D.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504397741484290626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwAnNMjNmrD5frPaJRHvmrDC5aeRhmCcgHcGRnGG6ItHvnTMfs1BrraG_y8zg1oq9GawzgHiMf_hbUxClWzwtTXk5DkvOqAt1QQwzbahXzx9gUtH1ragPNCttFPhIg7KXh-3t5ryaakTw/s400/Olympic+ring-shaped+bicycle%5B2%5D.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 296px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 394px;" /></a><br />
jung's olympic rings organize all knowable information and humanly achievable athletic feats into mysterious cosmic yoni matrix vessica piscuses that can be used as the basis for forming perfect pentograms that will keep evil away forever, ok?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-26950359389938854212010-10-25T01:22:00.000-07:002010-10-25T01:23:31.408-07:00strictly hard.<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/X-ngsFdN64Q?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/X-ngsFdN64Q?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-66865821757430489732010-10-06T00:34:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:04:50.967-07:00It Gets Better-mentThe queer youth suicides this month have been a serious cause for reflection. For sure, they’ve been an occasion for many of us to look at the violences and despair we’ve survived, especially as once young people lacking any meaningful safety net. Probably the best known response to the suicides this month has been Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign. I certainly see the effort of a huge number of adults that have made videos for the campaign as an attempt to reach out to the unknown and inaccessible not-yet-here-queer youth that seem to only become visible once they show up in a news article about suicide. The “It Gets Better” videos mean to let these youth know that they are not alone, and that homophobia and transphobia are sometimes survivable. <br />
<br />
As I considered making one of these videos, these questions came to mind: <span style="font-style: italic;">What is it, exactly, that we hope to accomplish by making videos detailing our own histories of violence and harassment, especially when the intended audience already well knows of these? Do we, as adults, still feel on some level alone and unable to effect these experiences beyond the retelling? What is the role of internalized homophobia in convincing us that we do not have real capacity to take care of people, maybe even people younger than us?</span><br />
<br />
I understand that queer lives are often structured in such a way that we usually don’t know tons of much older or younger folks. This by no means means that we don’t otherwise have the power to make changes in the world that make sexual and gendered difference more livable, and that when we consider how to do this, that young people should not be at the center of this question. And so, I have a suggestion: let’s not simply view the loss of these lives as a chance to remember all we’ve been through. Let’s use that very remembering as a chance to reconnect with a sense of all the work that still needs to be done in the world, and that we have the means to do.<br />
<br />
Much of the “It Gets Better” campaign seems to assume all will be well if LGBTQ youth stick it out long enough to leave their communities of origin. In other words, safety will become available when a young person has the means to move to a city or neighborhood with a large LGBTQ population and can reorganize his/her/their/zir life on the basis of an LGBTQ identity, trumping ties to family, community, and place--an exchange that might turn out to have unreasonably high costs to youth of color and immigrant youth. It is presumptuous that an LGBTQ identity should or will become the organizing principal of every LGBTQ person’s life. Even as I am grateful for a life in the queer cultural and political spaces of San Francisco, I believe there are losses that accompany such a shift.<br />
<br />
And how should these young people find the means to live apart from the support of their families? Besides rising unemployment, the last few years in California have seen a massive defunding of state-funded higher education. The number of eligible high school graduates in the state getting accepted to the CSU and UC system is falling, as out of state admissions rise. Poor, working class, and some middle class youth who are admitted may find their families cannot afford the new tuition hikes. LGBTQ youth who lack family support are not considered for independent financial aid for six years after high school graduation. And after the transfer of 800 billion dollars of tax payer aid to wall street, there is no serious relief planned for the unmanageable student debt that saddles so many young people post-college.<br />
<br />
For those LGBTQ youth who do come to San Francisco, the video campaign’s assumed promised land, they may find a city with no dedicated LGBT-safe shelter, an LGBT Community Center with no dedicated youth space and a youth program which only recently avoided a 100% budget cut, a Castro recreation center which began charging fees for use of the dedicated youth drop-in space, a mayor that can imagine nothing better to do with young people with no place to go than to criminalize them for being on public sidewalks, and a Castro business sector ready to elect a supervisor that supports the same Sit/Lie ordinance.<br />
<br />
What I mean to point out, is that the conditions in which “things got better” for some LGBTQ adults in the video campaign have changed, even as they never applied to everyone. What I also mean to say, though, is that there are things that can be done. Things we can do to “make it better.” And that many of these things are not only about reaching out to the individual youth who might refer to youtube in a moment of desperation (though even after all I’ve said, that’s a fine start). Many of the things we can do involve taking seriously the role of adults in making a more livable world for young people and building youth capacity in this regard. This would include prioritizing access to public education, stopping increasing criminalization of youth, seeing the institution of anti-bullying curriculum (not criminalization), and supporting spaces for LGBTQ youth to build relationships, and understanding these as high priority LGBTQ issues.<br />
<br />
Sit/Lie: http://www.standagainstsitlie.org/<br />
Questions about the youth recreation campaign: adele.c2p@gmail.com<br />
Questions about LGBTQ shelter project: Tommi at Housing Rights CommitteeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-30963610879869418792010-08-11T23:11:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:07:05.379-07:00From the lost files of Portland hipster weeklies:<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5EMI8avVRpOUVE0QDMCh6PibFxUjCAP21FBksAaaV5CbekazUnzQ7lVj4tyuKnS26I7uXS3xfRxN1XJPR0VCf6mJF1DW4WR59H1vnUpYA4BAbambuVzybZFUabUcvYAC5cEka0MyrwZk/s1600/girlbiker.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504403871353621538" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5EMI8avVRpOUVE0QDMCh6PibFxUjCAP21FBksAaaV5CbekazUnzQ7lVj4tyuKnS26I7uXS3xfRxN1XJPR0VCf6mJF1DW4WR59H1vnUpYA4BAbambuVzybZFUabUcvYAC5cEka0MyrwZk/s400/girlbiker.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 228px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<a href="http://tinyjeanjacketstwitch.blogspot.com/2009/07/underdogging-tale-of-bittersweet.html">Underdogging: A Tale of Bittersweet Bicycle Revenge</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-59055677766406638312010-08-11T22:21:00.000-07:002010-08-11T22:45:49.580-07:00wire less.Today I'm thinking about cords and cordlessness.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy_SMun4yNY-m3SC8XoQtKf6P4eWK5syotfTL6_wyVVD4LZm5OVo183aGaAvF8wFFJOanMWbuK48bLw5QzA13M_HVCoS1Ei-RrnxXUCciWx8Go8-_cvXIFMxtnaIAWW9fmukYPJ6u0JO4/s1600/1wire.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 380px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy_SMun4yNY-m3SC8XoQtKf6P4eWK5syotfTL6_wyVVD4LZm5OVo183aGaAvF8wFFJOanMWbuK48bLw5QzA13M_HVCoS1Ei-RrnxXUCciWx8Go8-_cvXIFMxtnaIAWW9fmukYPJ6u0JO4/s400/1wire.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504392647071481714" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinvF7Y9atra54sjTNs_7jtiKUyLsFx-1Jh14x4znWh-_vP6qUt4cXNpEiz656IFZXAndeJU6sH9AWDmcoxWob2ocsnG3UcJuXgHp24HnpdiWh0Sy_FZZWo26KoK0ndStFMimNWNPgxSxs/s1600/2wire.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinvF7Y9atra54sjTNs_7jtiKUyLsFx-1Jh14x4znWh-_vP6qUt4cXNpEiz656IFZXAndeJU6sH9AWDmcoxWob2ocsnG3UcJuXgHp24HnpdiWh0Sy_FZZWo26KoK0ndStFMimNWNPgxSxs/s400/2wire.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393116001014114" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Ym_tyurxcG3fQgkVzE_ZDAXTDaxrMOtIuv9V-UuwbGVMiVrGUBnU-mi22rbggdy_EMInPJoVth0jWswD-itVhyphenhyphenznNU4O2T9Z3DxdPu_Rb4x5X0vKbFktN2PV_hRQjKBKnozlvCXOCSw/s1600/3a.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 263px; height: 350px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Ym_tyurxcG3fQgkVzE_ZDAXTDaxrMOtIuv9V-UuwbGVMiVrGUBnU-mi22rbggdy_EMInPJoVth0jWswD-itVhyphenhyphenznNU4O2T9Z3DxdPu_Rb4x5X0vKbFktN2PV_hRQjKBKnozlvCXOCSw/s400/3a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393722366166482" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq59hBwTJ9tbkanUn640j2FN-AMMley29jmvtW2JhKrofgp5Z6PzqcIlkXJhdBfOjPgaPFl3u0CclIVjvrkxiIydQXJKtthusfpOXAoKtFFytojN3kAP2vQNgXTESJfFEXzUkvClrxCow/s1600/376815408_ab8414807f.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 257px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq59hBwTJ9tbkanUn640j2FN-AMMley29jmvtW2JhKrofgp5Z6PzqcIlkXJhdBfOjPgaPFl3u0CclIVjvrkxiIydQXJKtthusfpOXAoKtFFytojN3kAP2vQNgXTESJfFEXzUkvClrxCow/s400/376815408_ab8414807f.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504394917607843794" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUdDPgu9Ipt_7FLrKskTki-vv9t5uroWnAQJ47N3r-9_bRztUx8nX8hlBrTm8_MoAP65_eaQAmNxw4BG_Yn4C8vT1P-6NlLZrGmZTkrqXdccQFh-WJX5dLmPTl8x0c3v3KxyZrnXEFQo/s1600/3b.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUdDPgu9Ipt_7FLrKskTki-vv9t5uroWnAQJ47N3r-9_bRztUx8nX8hlBrTm8_MoAP65_eaQAmNxw4BG_Yn4C8vT1P-6NlLZrGmZTkrqXdccQFh-WJX5dLmPTl8x0c3v3KxyZrnXEFQo/s400/3b.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393541898667922" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKUa8Q0aWDVaf9E8EXeoDyQ3Cw4nb4SL9OyC1Tm6mdWR5FoVd0IEF4uXbXuicB4IO3QU_SMgWsU480OonGLSj9ReNbNy964whfMC7MpmcLQ2MW5EfOvkNFrAXkeNV0UxRL5VoWVQEy3OM/s1600/5wire.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 265px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKUa8Q0aWDVaf9E8EXeoDyQ3Cw4nb4SL9OyC1Tm6mdWR5FoVd0IEF4uXbXuicB4IO3QU_SMgWsU480OonGLSj9ReNbNy964whfMC7MpmcLQ2MW5EfOvkNFrAXkeNV0UxRL5VoWVQEy3OM/s400/5wire.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393424431858258" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK1CzNHHoxUuIgYqHBHmoGyIeec2fquT_eI7MEW5uv6Fewgqd-mwQkHEQGSHj7Zhtdy9tjMwuimwoK1FM-eP3Xtp0Qu-k1vbSBeWccQYpmQRP9tX1b9iD4GI46nC6rMPsMB7VP8152ODg/s1600/6wire.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK1CzNHHoxUuIgYqHBHmoGyIeec2fquT_eI7MEW5uv6Fewgqd-mwQkHEQGSHj7Zhtdy9tjMwuimwoK1FM-eP3Xtp0Qu-k1vbSBeWccQYpmQRP9tX1b9iD4GI46nC6rMPsMB7VP8152ODg/s400/6wire.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393340572780338" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEWi3uU8Zc5QWkvow8dfY9dc53uJ7gQ3jnpS_Xdu9RBJLtdYjStM1KyYHY9hB9ZBgZQ0ODLhmKnO0-1SRockxNgmahyk4iHnwG_BfydiS4x5_Mcfu3-bgSCqg3MOCqPYHKCLb6BU4hJu8/s1600/2237640909_1284422703.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEWi3uU8Zc5QWkvow8dfY9dc53uJ7gQ3jnpS_Xdu9RBJLtdYjStM1KyYHY9hB9ZBgZQ0ODLhmKnO0-1SRockxNgmahyk4iHnwG_BfydiS4x5_Mcfu3-bgSCqg3MOCqPYHKCLb6BU4hJu8/s400/2237640909_1284422703.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504395088529798034" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmh9ZtuUfBw_7ZdCMmQVo7tZbAiHqymvIr-AfDbbUwEHOrzXqot6Eq4H6IhT85i4C05DqPLj9CmolZePK9bUEiVCdZUna5AfX2yxmHRFl39sRld6KUi53TtIrEBl0o1hLe-Ju-Ip-Wgvo/s1600/rejoicecomb.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 364px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmh9ZtuUfBw_7ZdCMmQVo7tZbAiHqymvIr-AfDbbUwEHOrzXqot6Eq4H6IhT85i4C05DqPLj9CmolZePK9bUEiVCdZUna5AfX2yxmHRFl39sRld6KUi53TtIrEBl0o1hLe-Ju-Ip-Wgvo/s400/rejoicecomb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504393255609828402" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-61004086362596594062010-06-05T02:08:00.000-07:002010-06-05T02:09:53.656-07:00birthday week.tonight i'm thinking about loose grips. holding lightly. kid gloves with the world and its coming. camp as beyond orientation; as roaming, placeless, sincere appreciation for being within and alongside. queer not as orientation, or location but as a light-holding and regard of now-ness, memory, objects, bodies. thinking about how i was taught growing up the importance of a having a 'good' handshake, a firm handshake. to look in the eye. to grip tightly. locate. this symbol of erasing history so equals can meet. equals who know how to give a good handshake. if we took each other's hands loosely, what would we be leaving space for?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-59863696391195040602010-05-12T23:49:00.000-07:002010-05-13T00:21:32.378-07:00Pastry Jaunte: A Celebration of the Precious and the Perverse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLdJ451gMxYVJfDixJ8zC0SOcqPoFwOzXIayLvpqRfPBZ73oItHy2Aq5ujyNq8I9TGsoT4d5NpObub7BBWkx029sZ88v7_Mc4lUqVd2a9mrT57oT6_ssCWY0xEKWrGBB23xdoFAqtJzLo/s1600/SCN_0007.jpg"><img style="display:block; 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margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMphv-jwRSOFKwfYyuthzP4qulzeUXBUFGypAg0y6UMp9AU_yb61YHFvqpNav4wIpAEgKz1f-LsESh3PGjzsN_SeY-KGdt0ORf5NJ5DPA1leJaHHHmE7sLsbukdg80JPHPxhiYgYafLXo/s400/633865117_5294f05f94.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470646691048454290" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGoSPlmKpdf9rL5wVkEWw1zMpwvitS8ct1YyIqwuaYPVjZpJg0lj-ToH3NyaR-BE3Mj3V2uoGJRDl1rYAWdQL5LrUTyGXJETb2gBS_uEtiB0RV-ClrJ8N_gyjFBeY-72PNkxbhbsYIGtI/s1600/the+episode+4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGoSPlmKpdf9rL5wVkEWw1zMpwvitS8ct1YyIqwuaYPVjZpJg0lj-ToH3NyaR-BE3Mj3V2uoGJRDl1rYAWdQL5LrUTyGXJETb2gBS_uEtiB0RV-ClrJ8N_gyjFBeY-72PNkxbhbsYIGtI/s400/the+episode+4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470645947504201282" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2n2E7H9xOKEZ2y5GeRxIeHxagh6zDBPkB5hpt9d3F1tApP5O4fTbJCH-jmX_O0J61uJfpkc7Cv3ai5hCJ9TWTl19mqSbDGrOjtmVlNrCFl8QTgq2tX52s1ohcr0jzfZNeCVrwAdPkMAk/s1600/06:eat-it..jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2n2E7H9xOKEZ2y5GeRxIeHxagh6zDBPkB5hpt9d3F1tApP5O4fTbJCH-jmX_O0J61uJfpkc7Cv3ai5hCJ9TWTl19mqSbDGrOjtmVlNrCFl8QTgq2tX52s1ohcr0jzfZNeCVrwAdPkMAk/s400/06:eat-it..jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470646169177013010" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-48530732583517273572009-08-05T01:50:00.000-07:002009-08-05T01:59:48.110-07:00Chrysaora fuscescens<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2-0Yq0YjsJy5_wtlOLMy3W6DIOJd8JUMKePFJjgOghA5T1iQiTwWjOZ6cpw2AefBIkhX9ukBMO790rrGWUZ-hFutkHMEK5WHzMp077pKMhTfneEdnL2ZG4fHQJfebX-3VKeiXPKJUwLs/s1600-h/2612502694_884dae5a5d.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2-0Yq0YjsJy5_wtlOLMy3W6DIOJd8JUMKePFJjgOghA5T1iQiTwWjOZ6cpw2AefBIkhX9ukBMO790rrGWUZ-hFutkHMEK5WHzMp077pKMhTfneEdnL2ZG4fHQJfebX-3VKeiXPKJUwLs/s400/2612502694_884dae5a5d.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5366401002012656642" /></a><br />Last week I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I might lost myself for a bit while watching some male seahorses tether themselves to seaweed fronds and each other, nuzzling their very pregnant bellies together. But for the most part, I was able to keep my wits about me until I came upon the lit tank of Pacific Sea Nettles.<br /><br />I love jellyfish. As I knelt inches from the glass, watching their pulsing and undulating forms move through my field of vision, I began to feel as though my heart was filling with a mysterious fluid and beginning a slow rise up through my throat. I began to drown from the inside out. <br /><br />I knelt there for so long that one of my shoes broke. I had the vague sense at some point that it would be good idea for me to leave, but didn’t feel I had any command over the strange mammalian, land-dwelling body that I found surrounding me.<br /><br />As I began to breathe myself back, I felt at once a deep sense of belonging to the earth and also a profound sense of being alien, ethereal. What were the odds that I would get such a chance—to inhabit this place—in this way—and alongside such creatures? I watched the jellyfish and understood that they were very much doing their job of performing the curious and delicate mystery of being alive on this planet. And this, in turn, made me want to do my respective job on the other side of the glass just as beautifully.<br /><br />To be of the earth and to be human is an incidence so rare, so random, so fragile, and so precious that it warrants only one possible response from us: <span style="font-style:italic;">to do it well</span>.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oCJwHogXtKE&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oCJwHogXtKE&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-8444813409486228762009-08-03T01:11:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:06:39.256-07:00Closet Jock Steps Out<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2WtzHGqktDpR4_W7nZZmqr6bB9vIGt0kfhDB81abx1i1lML3FWL-5UF9e9A7mZaLAUpdsI6WHSuDeittWVOENi8VlPlNRMp9sY9YNrfzOdiHra5mX-w6Au8MHB74hcuS4NkDCKNxqsY/s1600-h/highres_1601583.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365651828668697858" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2WtzHGqktDpR4_W7nZZmqr6bB9vIGt0kfhDB81abx1i1lML3FWL-5UF9e9A7mZaLAUpdsI6WHSuDeittWVOENi8VlPlNRMp9sY9YNrfzOdiHra5mX-w6Au8MHB74hcuS4NkDCKNxqsY/s400/highres_1601583.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 288px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
I feel in some strange respect that today was the day I made final peace with my own inner jock. If there is no other way to know for sure, I am going to openly write here about my deepest darkest secret-jock secret, which is my love of the indoor rock climbing gym.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it’s become a little easier with age. When I first moved to the Bay Area, my current roommate and I occasionally fronted to friends we ran into on weekends that we had just woken up—like normal gays in their early twenties would have—rather than admitting that already by lunchtime we had woken to consume something made in a champion juicer and ridden bikes for several hours in the Oakland hills. <br />
<br />
When my roommate and I began regularly wearing bike shorts, we could not longer pretend we were some bike punks who had decided to meander around a bit beyond our point to point business. Then we moved in together and developed a special “camping crate” that would be ready to go at 5pm on Fridays, and finally fully embraced the title of ‘weekend warriors,’ if only privately.<br />
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These days it’s hard to predict what lefty or post-punk queer or random hipster I might run into in a spinning class. My secret-jock life has been not-so-secret for a long time, partly because I do a poor job of concealing it, but also because the juice that makes for a secret expires as my peers begin to think more about self-care strategies in their own lives.<br />
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So today when this woman asked to interview me about my membership at the rock gym for her cultural anthropology class, I wonder why I found myself prefacing every response I gave her with some disclaimer about being totally liminal to the culture of the climbing gym. The fact was, I had woken up at 8am on a weekend to “beat the crowd” at the climbing gym. More importantly, this is far from extraordinary in my life. So why did I find myself explaining my own misgivings with my secret sporty side to a random woman who already was so excited about the rock climbing gym that she felt compelled to do some sort of bizarre research project on it?<br />
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The whole thing is so absurd, I can only see this strange interview as an opportunity to recognize and perhaps purge some of my own internalized jock-phobia. So to answer one of her questions and come out of the closet: <br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">I own more than one pair of sport-specific footwear. I love indoor rock climbing. And I really love bicycling. They have done nothing but provide me with opportunities for enjoyment, growth, and presence and in return I have refused to acknowledge our bond in other important areas of my life. Worse, I think historically this had to do with a need to disidentify with things that are lesbionic (or otherwise unhip) and this is unacceptable.<br /><br />I love climbing and bicycling not just for giving me the chance to move my body, but I love them because of what they teach me about my body in relation to the world. Both lend me a new perspective on dimension—on the surfaces of my habitat and the way my body is placed within them and can potentially interact with them.<br /><br />Rock climbing and bicycling make me highly aware that the world has texture to it, and so fundamentally shift the way I experience what it means to move in the world (I imagine some people feel this way about their iphones). They teach me there is complexity at every scale of observation—that however I try to move through my days here, there is always enough to pay attention to--always things worth noticing and showing up for, fingers outstretched, heart open.</span><br />
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Next, I am going for dual-element sporting. I am going to windsurf. I am super excited and I'm not taking any shit for it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-78997770490549232792009-07-30T23:36:00.000-07:002012-09-05T12:07:28.630-07:00Underdogging: A Tale of Bittersweet Bicycle Revenge<span style="font-style: italic;">This is the second in a series of bicycle-related postings I plan to do.</span><br />
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I’m not really sure that I believe in revenge. It’s such a vast and tangled mess of wrongdoing we are up in the middle of. I figure we are better off honoring what’s been lost and arriving at more radical visions of justice out of that grief than we are spending our time calculating and meting out precise portions of punishment. I do care a lot, though, about whatever keeps the fight in people, and what that fight looks like, and I think for that reason I have a lot of respect for at least the <span style="font-style: italic;">desire</span> for revenge. <br />
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For the most part, when we strike out in singular, uncoordinated acts against someone or something that actually has enough power over our lives to deserve it, it often lands us in more trouble. Revenge isn’t reparations. It isn’t justice. It doesn’t honor what’s been lost, and it doesn’t systematically hold oppressors accountable or particularly change the conditions in which they do wrong.<br />
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I do sometimes wonder if there’s a value to symbolic acts of revenge. And if that value is for the person who gets away with it, or for all the people who don’t. Then again, maybe it just makes for a decent story now and again. For your consideration…<br />
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When I lived in Portland, I had days where I’d find myself feeling inexcusably bored, uninspired, old, or just like I was forgetting what it meant to live somewhere where the mood-swinging adolescent landscape of the west coast was ready to throw some sort of seismic tantrum and reinvent itself any minute. I always felt this was a good occasion to ride my bicycle up one of the teen acne patches that dot the area in the form of extinct volcanoes in order to see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boJ2BT50kFs">the world below</a>.<br />
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Mount Tabor is one of those spots. It is the namesake of a mountain in lower Galilee that is the alleged site of the transfiguration of Christ, the event by which the senses of Christ’s apostles were transformed so they might be able to fully perceive God’s glory. The volcanic cinder cone in Oregon does have giant and artistic uncovered reservoirs carved into its side which house a large part of the city’s water supply. Mostly, though, it functions as a poop-covered off-leash area for southeast Portland dog-walkers and sports a too-grand statue of a dead Oregon newspaper editor.<br />
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It is a good spot to ride a bike to. And so it was, that one day in 2002 my housemate Tuesday and I decided to take a picnic there. As we crested the top, we were surprised that instead of the usual yuppies flirting over purebreds, the park was filled with hoards of drunken bike messengers having some sort of drunken race. <br />
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As we rounded the corner on our bicycles, surveying for a picnic space that wouldn’t set us on top of littered cans of PBR and fixed gear bicycles, we were spotted by one particularly obnoxious, drunken messenger. Not recognizing us as being of the six female bike messengers in the city at that time, he began screaming a series of sexist epithets at us to get us off the pathway because we were apparently blocking his race by being too slow and female. <br />
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After the resulting confrontation, we decided to climb down the hill a ways and picnic away from the brodeo that was happening atop the park. Tuesday and I settled into the tall grass and wondered at how bicycling could be both so totally and fundamentally good for our lives and also regularly force us to contend with such bullshit.<br />
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This incident happened at a time in my life when I was particularly fed up by <a href="http://tinyjeanjacketstwitch.blogspot.com/2009/07/summertime-has-me-not-only-revisiting.html">bike dudes</a>. I would have liked to be earning a living as a messenger, but of less than a tenth of the messengers in town at the time were ladies, and every girl I’d known who had gone into the biz had quickly quit. Worse, I was on a racing team with an extremely chauvinistic coach who would intentionally withhold information and resources unless I and other members of the young women’s team performed all kinds of domestic labor like shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundering bike jerseys for the young men’s team in exchange for our coaching.<br />
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As Tuesday and I sat discussing our woes, a chocolate lab bounded down the hill and took a shit inappropriately close to our picnic. We looked around and realized how thoroughly surrounded by dog shit we were, and also at once noticed a hearty-looking stick lying next to where we were seated.<br />
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I don’t even think we really talked about it. We both just knew what had to happen. When we ascended the hill again, I had the two foot branch in my right hand. The chocolate lab’s poop had turned out to be the perfect consistency for our purposes: firm enough to stay attached to the stick, but easily spreadable.<br />
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After an hour of shot-gunning a can of beer with every lap, the messengers were still amidst their ‘last man standing’ race. Dudes were weaving around the track recklessly, and our man stood in the middle, near the very spot he had cursed us off of. Tuesday rode ahead to check him out and make sure we weren’t mixing him up with some other guy in a khaki jacket and black beanie with a PBR in each palm. <br />
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With her nod as queue, I took off riding. As I neared, I braked with my free hand and slowed enough to roll and drag the stick across his back before dropping it in front of the dude's feet. Tuesday and I heard him scream and saw a bunch of guys mounting their bikes as we started off down the mountain. <br />
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The next time we looked back, we were full force into our descent. We braked hard to take a sharp switchback that would lead us into deep southeast. Pulling bikes and bodies up against the side of the switchback, we held our breath and went unnoticed by our pursuers, who caught up and continued barreling forward down the straight drop back towards central city.<br />
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We spent a lot of the rest of the afternoon watching our backs and cutting a wide path around town to get back home from the far side of the mountain. We weren’t sure how to feel, but agreed we felt like we’d scored for a team we didn’t know we were on until then. <br />
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Two weeks later, the local weekly printed an anonymous explanation of our actions with a graphic of a devil-horned girl on a cruiser wielding poop on a stick. People would bring up the article for months afterward and Tuesday and I would grin at each other in private agreement, feeling I think, that it wasn’t exactly our victory to claim.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgMGAoPytIb3QIzSPtnxEH-aTBJQJ0GUrJsWoSQWqpkOY0-ITgeGHQZsduwFSSeY8yNQu6_U-ysyz6ngJw4xSYvX19h5W1yH4fvDULb4GsZyXtV6-6o7g7S_8e4EOqpbt9rW2J_7zKzrQ/s1600-h/DogPoopILOVEU.img_assist_custom.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5364513334583764594" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgMGAoPytIb3QIzSPtnxEH-aTBJQJ0GUrJsWoSQWqpkOY0-ITgeGHQZsduwFSSeY8yNQu6_U-ysyz6ngJw4xSYvX19h5W1yH4fvDULb4GsZyXtV6-6o7g7S_8e4EOqpbt9rW2J_7zKzrQ/s400/DogPoopILOVEU.img_assist_custom.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 254px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7340282984855439246.post-41542412866420473132009-07-30T00:56:00.000-07:002009-07-30T01:12:56.487-07:00Multi-Cultural Competency, Non-Profitude, and Moving Beyond Career Development for White Service ProvidersI’ve been participating in series of white subgroup meetings within a non-profit I work for, which has been leaving me sorting through ideas about the potential of working around anti-racism and organizational change in the social work field and non-profits more generally. It wouldn’t fare well for me or the trust of the group to process it publicly here, so I’ll keep my reflections general. I feel like no matter what criticisms I may have, I am responsible to show up to take a critical look at racism within any organization I am a part of and this means being ready to engage other white people with openness and sincerity, even if I’m having a rough time with how those conversations get choreographed...<br /><br />Trainings in “multi-culturalism” and “diversity” within the corporate world have been widely critiqued as a means of diluting an anti-racist ideology into something that is expressly non-redistributionist; i.e., not about actually redistributing power or wealth or critiquing the ways that white supremacy structures the distribution of power within our world or within our organizations.<br /><br />In the non-profit world I see another version of this, which is usually framed as “multi-cultural competency.” I have many concerns about it, but see it as important work. Whether clients of color are going to end up too alienated by experiences of white supremacy within an agency to access services there is obviously a big deal. The skills of individual clinicians do matter in this context, but I’m also concerned about the direction that training around “multi-cultural competence” can take in the very white-dominated mental health field.<br /><br />White anti-racism is rightfully and frequently critiqued for over-focusing on the beliefs and attitudes of individual white people. While “multi-cultural competency” training for service providers often strays dangerously close to this, I do believe that the cultivation and engagement of anti-racist commitment among individual white clinicians is important as it affects their ability to recognize the harm and violence white supremacy produces in the lives of their clients, provide more relevant support, and think carefully about ways that racist domination is reproduced within the clinical relationship. Recognizing the value of this training has helped me to have patience and respect for the work of the white sub-group, but I’m still left with as many questions about how exactly white clinicians should be engaging issues of anti-racism, white identity, and cultural competency within their practice, and what level of institutional support should be lent to this work over, say, more organizational/redistributionist and less individualist-oriented anti-racism work.<br /><br />It is easy to imagine that providing institutional support for the individual anti-racist “development” of white clinicians is scarcely more than free career development for white folks in an industry that is already stocked with a shocking number of white professionals (The California Board of Behavioral Sciences says about 74% of licensed clinicians are white. A friend who is in MFT school told me 94% of Marriage and Family Therapists are white!) And while I’ve made an argument for why I see such work as important, I think without a focus on anti-racist organizational transformation, it pretty much becomes free professional development for white clinicians.<br /><br />In my time as a white non-management level worker in the social work field, I’ve seen how having smart things to say about racism combined with actually having white skin privilege secures my upward mobility within the field. Having white people who say all the right things—who can develop, implement, and export a model for anti-racist organizational development without actually having to give up any organizational power is a great way of maintaining the secret handshake between whiteness and middle class professionalism. Without a structural critique of who is running non-profits, it’s not clear whether “multi-cultural competency” trainings make non-profits more likely to be run by people coming from communities being served, or whether they make middle-class white people feel better about hiring each other to make decisions about running direct-service organizations.<br /><br />Generally, the field of professional social work exists because poor communities are denied the means to meet their basic needs. A lot of the work in the field is done by working class people of color and young white people who are then supervised by white professionals. Ultimately, our agencies answer to the foundations and government contracts that fund us. <br /><br />So what does it look like to approach issues of “multi-cultural competency” among clinicians who are often doing good work and make their dollars within the middle of these contradictions? I don’t mean to sit on the sidelines and suggest that the problems within the field and are too big to approach or that attempts at addressing white supremacy within social service agencies are meaningless where they fall short. As a white person, separating myself from other white people engaged with anti-racist work within my organization would be a particularly nasty and destructive way of engaging these complications and reinforce the idea that the orientations and analyses of individual white workers are the locus of anti-racist work. Rather, I’m suggesting that paying attention to our context and staying engaged with the questions are important in order to not allow anti-racist work to be reduced to confessionals or a veiled form of career development that ensures the upward mobility of white clinicians and further cements white people’s positions of power within the industry.<br /><br />So, the big question in spaces devoted to multi-cultural competency seems to be: “<span style="font-style:italic;">What are the assumptions and forms of cultural arrogance that I carry into the room with me in my work as a clinician?</span>” Here’s a quick list of questions that are floating around in my head that I want to hear in these spaces as well:<br />• If we assume we aren’t going to think, talk, or train our way out of racism, what do we see as our goals?<br />• How can our work in this group be accountable to the people of color working group?<br />• Who is in this room? What positions do they occupy within the agency? If most of the management team are white, who is guiding a process of creating “multi-cultural competency” within the organization? <br />• <span style="font-style:italic;">How will we know that that work is being done</span>? Who do we answer to about how that work is happening? <br />• What if white people need to give up power within the organization? Is there safety for non-management level workers to propose this kind of idea within the room?<br />• What’s up with the board?<br />• Are there ways white supremacy plays out in who is tracked for promotions and management?<br />• For white non-management level workers, what are the reasons you would feel justified in taking a management position if one was offered to you?<br />• What communities are being served across our programs? Are there ways that racism is reflected in the way we prioritize our material, staff, and supervisory resources across our programs? Do we prioritize resources for the same programs we are most likely to present to funders as examples of our work?<br />• Why is the larger field of mental health clinicians so white-dominated? How might this affect the perceptions and experiences of our services in the communities we serve? <br />• How can we support communities we are serving in getting needs met that might also be addressed by our services? (In my position, I think a lot about prioritizing supporting social programming where queer youth can develop ongoing relationships)<br />• What are justice issues we take on right now and how do we determine those as the priority for our organization? What are the major issues we see affecting the lives of our clients? What would it look like for our organization to take on supporting racial and economic justice campaigns affecting the lives of our clients? What supportive role could our organization play, particularly in local campaigns? (To hear about a longtime LGBTQ org that is undergoing major restructuring, check out <a href="http://www.cuav.org/">CUAV’s strategic plan</a> to shift to centering issues of de-carceration and transformative justice in working to end violence in queer communities?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1