INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM

I didn't realize it until recently, but I've always seen love as something requiring sacrifice, selflessness, patience, and generosity- to ask for nothing is to be the best person I can be, small and quiet and never in the way, always happy and helpful, self-sufficient and present when desired.

It's only as an adult, now, that I'm beginning to see the selfishness of wanting nothing.

I cut my friend's hair in my kitchen the other day. They wanted a trim and I had the skills, so I offered, and was genuinely excited when they stopped hesitating over "bothering me" and took me up on it. It was a peaceful afternoon, and we had tea and chatted for an hour or more.

My brother and I shared popcorn at the movies a while ago. When I came time to pay, I pulled my card out like a wild western sheriff and slapped it on the machine before he could fight me for it first. The satisfaction was delightful.

Someone called me crying on the phone the other day. Kept apologizing for disturbing me at work, talking about how they were bothering me on my lunch break. I was telling the truth when I told them that really, I was flattered and honored and relieved, knowing that if they were hurting I would know, that I didn't have to worry in silence. It felt good to hear them slowly come down, and to know that they knew it would be better soon, and to hear them laugh wetly on the other end. We're getting together for a visit next week.

It's hard to need things, if you've trained yourself not to. It's hard to want things, when you don't know how to want anymore. Trusting people is difficult, and so is relying on them, but I don't know where I'd be without the people who rely on me.

I've heard a lot of people say, "Nobody will love you unless you love yourself". I've had a lot of thoughts about it. It's not right, but it's not wrong, either, I think.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... I've always taken that to mean, "You will not be lovable until you develop a positive view of yourself as a person".

Now, I think it's sort of inside-out.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... because nobody can show their love to you in a way that you can accept until you treat yourself kindly, and learn what you need, and what you want, and how to ask for it, and then give that vulnerability away.

Love, for me, is someone I ask for a ride to the airport. Whether they end up doing this or not is irrelevant.

like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive

why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people

why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants

why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.

[...]

There is so much that will have to be relinquished, so much we will have to give up, so much we will have to let go of. So much. So much violence will be done to ourselves, and we are tired of being violated. But, too, so much to gain, so much life to live, so much love. We would only be doing violence to the violated stitches of our subjectivity. This is all to live in a different world, right here, other than it has been said to be. For abolition does not launch us into outer space where we terraform another place; abolition stays here while simultaneously disallowing here to be here. We will be not what they said we are. What might arise is da Silva’s “radical shift in . . . matter and form,” a trans/figuration in other words, where we look and act differently. Like, we literally change our matter and the form that matter takes; we’d be doing some sci-fi–type stuff in this world. Imagine ourselves as we cannot be, until we imagine ourselves precisely as that—what we cannot be, as what we have not been permitted to be, as what has been said to be impossible. Imagine ourselves, just that, not as anything. Maybe we cannot be whatever we want, but we can certainly not be what we are.

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism.

We cannot anticipate subjectivities to come, or even rightly call them “bodies,” because it accosts our agreed-upon requirements for sufficient identification. Indeed, the subject as it might come, as it might emerge, cannot be known beforehand and thus might always—out of definitional necessity—be castigated for its inadequacy, its wrongness. But it is this gesture of subjective wrongness that we must embrace if we are to engender the onset of radically reorienting what might be.

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism.

There might have been more courses on that in later years, but as I said, fuck microfiche

MICROFICHE MENTIONED

but yes. when I lived in London I went to LOTS of museums. I love museums and it was so nice to live somewhere with lots of museums. and it was always so so interesting to see how the educational placards etc framed things. what they said and failed to say.

Pulling this out of the tags because I think something people keep either flinching from or excusing is funding related bias in museums.

A museum is expensive to found and expensive to maintain. The foundation - of any museum but ESPECIALLY the big name European (and American) museums - is explicity done as a show of power and legitimacy for colonial governments. Their power to obtain the items, the prestige of displaying them, the legitimacy granted by holding the evidence, the knowledge, the artifact, etc.

A museum provides a public service of access to knowledge and mental enrichment for visitors, but implicitly part of the public service it provides is also that of prestige. Of being the lucky civilised public who are civilized because you have access to things like museums. Of class signaling within the public to other parts of the public by what degree of access you have to the museum: private events, opening nights, your name on a plaque, your name on a wing...

To the extent that a museum recieves government funding, that funding pays for the museum as a public service to the extent that its existence as a public service is a point of prestige and legitimacy to the government.

To the extent that a museum relies of private funding - which is often heavily - that funding is often paid for in prestige to the funders, which means the museum must maintain itself as an institution that funders vie for the acknowledgement of - not just an institution that provides a service they feel charitably is valueable, but an institution that they feel uplifts their value in circles of the wealthy and influential. In order to continue existing, the museum must trade in the currency of prestige.

Depending on the tastes of your local billionaires, this might afford more or less leeway. Depending also on the social fashions of the time for self-effacing or virtue signalling of various sorts among the rich, and the current direness of the government funding situation.

Many people who work in museums have a LOT to say about the role of museums, some of which is quite interesting, and in some circumstances they are allowed to say it and to put it out there through the museum and its curation and displays.

But the museum, for its survival, always reserves the right to pivot away from saying anything difficult or complicated like that. It maintains a practice of always thanking donors lavishly, and always naming the private collectors who allow their property to be displayed for public view. And not commenting on the notion of private ownership or the nature of the aquisition or anything of that sort. Not even on objects that have come fully into the ownership of the museum. Because it jeapordizes too much to open that topic overtly within the display.

There is a strong disjunct between what happens in museum scholarship and what makes it to the display. And I understand it's a triumph sometimes to get certain things across that gap, and I don't disvalue that. So I understand a certain amount of vocational frustration from people who are trying to get things across that gap, who know in excruciating detail what the museum could be.

a shore was covered with starfish left behind by the retreating tide.

One man was throwing them back into the sea, one by one.

Another man watching him said,

“It won’t make a difference. There are thousands.”

The man picked up another starfish and threw it into the water, then said,

“It made a difference to this one.”

This is not a story about the sea.

Or about starfish.

It is about the way people choose

not to become spectators.

Societies do not collapse because harm is abundant,

but because they convince themselves that the individual does not matter.

Every civilization that survives

does so because ordinary people

refuse that idea.

They do not save everyone.

They do not change the world all at once.

But they protect something more dangerous:

I used to take my kids once a month

to visit families in our neighborhood facing hard times.

We gave what we could sometimes with quiet support from friends.

Giving never felt like a burden

Our neighborhood was destroyed, our home, our work, our life.

Now, we are the ones standing here,

quietly hoping someone will choose

not to walk away this time.

This is the seed of ethics,

Enas and Mohamed and their beloved children, Layan, Sarah, Adam, and baby Amir—these individuals are each a whole world.

he starts giving a speech about how we’re going to destroy the entire british empire and end colonialism once and for all and we’re going to start a new self-governing society outside of the constraints of imperialism and I believe him

I have several centuries of hindsight on my side, but I still listen to this man in 1715 saying he’s going to end the british empire and I think yes you will! 

and of course, Flint’s ability to rouse and rally people to his cause, to talk them around to his side, recurs over and over throughout. to a point that elevates him near godhood. but you never think, oh that’s not realistic. you never think, why are they listening to him. you never think, yeah okay but if they just acted rationally then—

because you. sitting on your couch. in the 21st century. even with the full knowledge of history and also the plot of black sails because you’ve seen it before.