Proud to be Imperfect

FIRST POST! 

i say this with no hyperbole whatsoever

she literally worked for the nazis and benefitted from jewish shareholders in chanel being sent off to concentration camps when their share came into her possession

parisian consumers actually refused to buy a lot from her own ranges after 1940 because she was an infamous collaborator but british and american consumers kept on buying them and continue to glorify her

hey guys!! I thought id share this really cool app if any of you need help with math??

the app is called photomath and if you don’t understand how to do a question, you can take a picture/write up the equation!!

Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it - there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.

The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society. 

Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves - normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.

Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.

The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation - to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table - and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation. 

(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)

Sacajawea: If Not For Her, We Could Be Saluting the British Flag

She was actually born with the name Poi Naipi (Little Grass Maiden). She and two of her friends (Nai Nukkwi, Patsu Naipi) were kidnapped by a hostile band of Hidatsa, who had a strange practice of replacing their own dead children with the children of other tribes.

Poi Naipi’s “adopted” parents didn’t like her much so instead of sending her home they freaking sold her to a drunken French guy named Charbonneau. This man was bastard incarnate. To put this into perspective: He had once been stabbed in the face in Manitoba when he was caught raping a young girl there. At this time, being forced to marry him, Poi Naipi was about 9 years old. And, he already had one other child bride.

He was very abusive, he drank a lot, and at some point Poi Naipi started calling herself Tsaikka Tsa Wea. It means in our language, “One Who Carries a Burden.” You see how this got corrupted to Sacajawea over time.

At one point on the L&C expedition Clark caught Charbonneau beating Tsaikka Tsa Wea and her newborn son. Well, Clark and Lewis beat the crap out of Charbonneau and told him to knock it off. Later, after the expedition, Clark paid for Tsaikka Tsa Wea’s son to go to school and live in his home.

That’s not even the cool part though. As an older woman Tsaikka Tsa Wea said “To hell with this, I’m going home.” This was a pretty big thing to do, understand that she had practically been raised by her abusive scumbag husband and it is very hard for women who have been systematically abused since childhood to learn to stand up for themselves, especially against their aggressors. But, she did it. Traveling all by herself, she found the Northern Shoshone encampment on Wind River, where Chief Wusik-He was with some Eastern Shoshone (and some Western at the time) (this would later go on to be the permanent Eastern settlement, those guys are still out there today). She was reunited with her brother, who by that point had been named Daigwani of the Northern Shoshone. Everybody welcomed her home, her friends, her family, and she broke down crying to hear them call her their “Lost Woman” (Wadze Waipu). For her resilience and cunning she was appointed the personal advisor to Wusik-He. As a very old woman was buried with the name “Chief Woman,” later her son and her nephew were buried on either side of her. Those graves are still there on Wind River today.