thought dump

Joshua Caleb Weibley has a brutal review of Jenny Holzer's show at the Guggenheim, and it made me go back to see where she lost the plot. I think it was around 2008-9 when 1) a lamp collab with FLOS, Baccarat crystal, and Philippe Starck showed how she had literally nothing good left to do with her Truisms; and 2) she then pivoted to video.

For a topic that has received as much coverage as it has for 6 months to have granted the American public no more wisdom than a coin toss, obfuscation has to be intentional. In press conferences, public appearances by elected officials, and news reports alike, the Israeli death toll has been emphasized and eulogized countless times while the Palestinian death toll has been questioned, denied, minimized, justified, and alluded to in when possible only the vaguest terms.

This of course, loops back to the OG point—what made Shrek a movie of universal appeal? To the point where it has become so memeable it was inducted into the Library of Congress as a culturally significant work to America??

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

-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.

But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.

Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.

It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.

This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces. 

It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.” 

yes, in AMERICA, men are driven to not touch each other because of societal homophobia and toxic masculinity.

however it would actually not fix the inherent problem of seeing any physical affection as romantic or sexual to simply destigmatize homosexuality.

You gotta understand that in the 50s, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and every “sign” of homosexuality a symptom. An overemotional man was very much a hallmark trait of homosexuality, so men moved away from expressing emotion to make themselves “less like the gays.” There was a whole MOVEMENT in the 60s and 70s for men not to show emotion, to be stoic and hard when raising their children that really only seemed to ease as we started to understand more about child psychology and sexuality as a spectrum.

The reason why you can’t express yourself properly is because your grandparents thought it was gay to be emotional, and raised your dad like that. Because homophobia. It’s a cultural hangover that appears today in many forms, often within things as commonplace as “expressing emotion” and “developing same sex friendships”.

This movement towards positive male expression is incredibly new; recent within, what—the past thirty years? It’s certainly gained traction since then. But thirty years isn’t enough to undo the negative associations gained from hundreds of years of homophobia, of “hating girly men who have feelings.” You can’t just pretend that your experience is the only one in the world, millions of people have come before you. Think about it in the context of human life rather than what you can see in front of you today.

And look—this isn’t to say you hate gay people. Quite the opposite bro. I’m saying the system hates gay people and therefore has made it impossible to have experiences that are “tangentially gay”—like the situations you described in your original post. You may not be thinking that way, but you can bet that there are fifty men around you who are. Fuck, I just saw a TikTok post where some dude admitted he thought gay marriage was a mistake. Do you think you could express your emotions fluidly to a man like that?

You gotta understand that in the 50s, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and every “sign” of homosexuality a symptom. An overemotional man was very much a hallmark trait of homosexuality, so men moved away from expressing emotion to make themselves “less like the gays.” There was a whole MOVEMENT in the 60s and 70s for men not to show emotion, to be stoic and hard when raising their children that really only seemed to ease as we started to understand more about child psychology and sexuality as a spectrum.

The reason why you can’t express yourself properly is because your grandparents thought it was gay to be emotional, and raised your dad like that. Because homophobia. It’s a cultural hangover that appears today in many forms, often within things as commonplace as “expressing emotion” and “developing same sex friendships”.