Lady Sparklefists

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

-begin transcript

Here's a word that every queer person should know: homonationalism is not the name of my new synth-pop album. It's a concept from sociology that acknowledges how queer people are used in conversations about global politics.

Homonationalism is when we use LGBT rights as a yardstick to judge how "moral" a society is. It's short for "homonormative nationalism"—say that five times fast—and it was first coined by Jasbir Puar to describe how the US presented itself as LGBT-friendly to contrast itself to "homophobic" Muslims during the War on Terror. It can also be applied to other contexts, like the way we talk about homophobic countries in Africa or the Caribbean while ignoring the role of European colonialism in those regions.

Put a finger down if you've ever heard something like:

You know being gay is a crime in Ghana, right?

Those Middle Eastern countries are so backwards. Do you know what they do to gay people over there?

Oh it's so weird. [Looks around as if hearing something from outside the room.] My neighbor's dog is going crazy...

You know you've lost the plot when you're talking about homophobia among Muslims, when white American Christians are the ones who made gay marriage illegal, ignored the entire AIDS crisis, and to this day don't have any national policies regarding conversion therapy, a trans-panic defense, or the forcing of trans women into men's prisons and vice-versa.

Barbados just became free of British rule this week; we should not be shocked if they have some homophobic policies.

And while I obviously believe that a more moral society is one with robust protections for queer people, LGBT rights can't be used to judge other countries, to make us feel better about bombing them.

As an aside, I live in Connecticut, an American state where it gets dark at 4pm now, and where LGBT rights are actually pretty good. We were one of the first states to institute gay marriage, transgender health care is part of our state insurance, and we're just generally more legally protected here.

And yet while legal support is very robust in our state, there's very little cultural support. Homophobia and transphobia in day-to-day life is roughly as bad as any other part of the country, and we have no gay cultural infrastructure. Only enough gay bars to count on one hand, and no known queer meeting spaces otherwise. It's obviously not as bad as living in a place where being gay is a crime, but it's still pretty lonely out here.

So for a variety of reasons, I don't appreciate queer and trans people being used as a pawn to further Islamophobia, anti-African sentiment, and general xenophobia. Mainly because it's racist and ignorant; many of these countries have a long, rich history of queer and trans and nonbinary identities before white European colonizers showed up, but also because western "acceptance" of LGBTQ people is very conditional and very limited in terms of material and legal protection.

White supremacy wins when we pit queer people and people of color against each other. We need international solidarity and an acknowledgment of colonialism to achieve equality and equity.

I’m not subjected to the same prejudices and stereotypes that bi women are: I have been called frigid and broken and an eternal virgin because of my lesbianism, but never have I been subjected to the “faking it for men”, “insatible cheater” and “never satisfied with just one” stereotypes. It’s not my experience to soldier through expectations of hypersexuality and doubts about my love being faithful or my orientation even being real, and I will never be in a situation where my partner might be a man or straight. Sure, bi women and lesbians share the attraction to women, but I won’t ever understand what it’s like to experience attraction to both women and men, and I won’t feel the need to sit on a fence or become alienated from my community because of the sex of my partner.

But what I do share with bi women is how hard realizing our love for other women in the patriarchal and heteronormative society is. We’ve felt the same yearning, we’ve longed for love between women in a society that doesn’t always even recognize the existence of such a thing, a society where women are pressured to center their lives around men and be sexual objects instead of active agents. The stuggles we are subjected to stem from the same root, our same-sex love. We’ve all feared homophobic discrimination and violence against us when we’re with our girlfriends, we’re all fighting the battle to make people see our relationships with women just as full, good, real and serious as straight people’s, and we all feel the pressure to “not give in to our deviant inclination and just be normal”.

And most importantly, both lesbians and bi women love women. We love women like no other loves women on this planet. We are women who love women and want to have everything with them; we want a woman to kiss and hold, a woman to share a life with, a woman to make love to, a woman to know us through and through and become a family with. That love is the same and the fight for that love is the same, and we share the possibility of dedicating our lives to women alone in this world, and we all inherit the history of women before us who have carved spaces for themselves to do just that.

As a lesbian, bi women are my sisters both in love and arms. We share the great gift of love for our own sex and our differences are diversity in our community, something to respected and valued and learned from. We teach each other and help each other to grow into better people. I love my bi sisters, we are united by love, understanding, resilience and pride.

A gibbon walks amid models of vehicles at a zoo in the park of miniatures in Bakhchisaray, Crimea.   REUTERS/Alexey Pavlishak

Make Britain Chips Again.

view on DeviantArt

“I can’t play karuta anymore. All 100 cards look completely black to me now”.

or Taichi as i see him after all the angst we’ve been through - wounded almost to death yet standing up straight. Oh god this guy is gorgeous even in his deepest pain T_T

So yeah give me more angst, moooar! *disperses the ash of her kokoro*

The tanka in the right corner is the 69th poem of the Hyakunin Isshu, and i put the rest ramblings about poems under the cut:

Why do we say that capitalism must be “dismantled”?

You’ll hear phrases like “Smash the state!” “Eat the rich!” and “Smash capitalism!”

And, yes, of course, but… :)

However relevant those sayings are, our work must be careful, highly organized and above all planned.

Because capitalism and all of its associated systems are not discrete, abstracted entities we can attack independently.

It is a structure, like a complicated machine with many thousands of working parts…

And right now it is connected to absolutely everything.

If we do this… [picks up huge hammer and smashes the machine]

Then a lot of vulnerable people will die.

The machine was built and improved and redesigned and patched over the course of generations. It is very good at its intended purpose, which is ultimately to generate profit.

Every human being alive today relies on the byproducts of the machine to survive, without exception.

The machine’s engineers want it to keep working like it does. In fact, they want to optimise it.

That will kill all remaining life on Earth.

So, we must destroy the machine, quickly and carefully

We must examine its deadly programs and mechanics and replace them with alternatives we built together.

The engineers don’t want us tampering with the machine.

However, we make it run…

So we can make it STOP. Together.

How will YOU help us to safely dismantle the machine?

iww.org

homework is fucking bullshit

this person is almost certainly onto something, but the other factor (or maybe the mechanism by which it’s achieved) is that teachers are asked to do more and more and more shit for larger class sizes. And they literally can’t fit it all into the day. 

Schools (in modern Western context) used to do like, the three Rs (reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic) and maybe some songs, maybe some local crafts, maybe whatever the teacher was interested in. If you wanted a Well Rounded Education, with literature and languages and history and music and philosophy, you literally had a governess or tutor who could do that shit one-on-one or one-on-siblings or, later, you went to a really posh school for rich kids. And even 50 years ago, when general schools were definitely a thing, they were mostly aiming to prepare kids to be literate and numerate adults, not send every kid to higher education.

And now we’re like, okay, well, everyone should go to school (good) and be taught in groups (okay) and everyone should have the chance to go to college (good). So here’s 30 children in a room (uh oh) and one teacher (oh no) AND they should learn reading, writing, maths, literature, languages, science, geography, history, civics, sex education, maybe music and art and crafts, maybe home economics and woodwork, plus do 40 minutes of exercise, plus maybe a bunch of prayer and religious education, plus half of those subjects should be taught through project-work and group-work which take longer, plus everyone in the class should matriculate to higher education, plus there are at least a handful of kids in the room with disabilities or neurodevelopmental differences who may or may not be assessed or diagnosed or supported. And this one teacher is supposed to do all of that in fewer hours than a full time job, plus take the roll, answer a million questions, mix things up for festivals, do fire drills, etc.

Expectations for what school should provide to children in terms of education has massively expanded (good) but all those expectations are just landing in an increasingly overburdened and understaffed school system (very bad).