Je suis un ananas

request from @outofmyowncharacter! (ft. Jean)

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Compact Object (Konpakuto obuje), 1962, by Nakanishi Natsuyuki.

"I miss Odysseus; my heart is melting. / The suitors want to push me into marriage, but I spin schemes... By day I wove the web, / and in the night by torchlight, I unwove it."

I made this feverish, unwinding loom for @youremysunshine8 's bday, since she is reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey.

It's made from an old painting frame with the canvas removed. I painted the wood a darker color and hammered in a couple hundred tacks, which I strung with white yarn.

The weaving itself took a long time, since I've never done that before and wasn't using a real loom, though I did make a make-shift heddle from a ruler. The meander is woven in soumak, which means you wrap the weft around each warp instead of just going over-under; this takes a long time but gives it a really cool dimension.