Respectful Child

they say that if you live long enough, you see the same fandom discourse again and again…if you look into my eyes… you can see that they’re dead

Mandy: You’re so green! Jasper: This is my territory, can’t you see it? Mandy: Right. Jasper: I can become invisible any time. (Squats down in the bush.) Mandy: Invisible any time? Hahaha!

Credits: Mandy Wei’s instagram

花漾年华 (FKA Astro Bunny) - 在_崩坏之后 (After Destruction)

New comic! (link to comic)

Sorry this one’s a little late.

Trans people have to walk this really fine line with respect to acceptable gender expression. Deviating from what is considered ‘normal’ for their gender results in the credibility of that gender being called into question in ways that just don’t happen with cis people.

(while this happens with all trans people,  I’m going to focus on trans women for this post)

The truth is, while feminism is making awesome inroads in creating space for women to adopt a range of gender expressions beyond what social norms of ‘women’ have prescribed, so often that only applies to cis women. Trans women who ‘break’ femininity are regarded as essentially  'letting slip’ their ‘actual gender’.

This is a symptom of the fact that trans people are largely still considered to be ‘acting like ’ their gender - ‘acting’ being the operative term. People see their gender as being something that sits upon a deeper truth - some less genuine, something deceptive.

There’s another side to this, of course, for trans women who adopt non-transgressive expressions of femininity - they’re accused (often within the feminist community) of reinforcing stereotypes, damaging the image of women.

So there’s really no way to win. Trans women who conform too much are essentially accused of being in bad drag, trans women who don’t conform enough are accused of a lack of commitment to their gender.

Before there was fry bread, there were sage, white pine, chokecherries and wild buffalo.

Before Europeans unloaded wheat and sugar cane and introduced beef to Turtle Island, Natives hunted and fished. They planted potatoes, squash and corn, and they flavored their food with purslane, rose hips and dandelion.

That traditional diet, or what Chef Sean Sherman calls the “pre-colonization diet,” is the bedrock for a new restaurant set to open this fall in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Sherman, who is Oglala Lakota, plans to use only indigenous foods in the restaurant, which he has appropriately named The Sioux Chef.

Gina Rodriguez To Those Saying She’s ‘Not Latina Enough’

Kumail Nanjiani

For the last eight years I have defined myself, in part, as front woman for the band Ohbijou. After some commercial and critical success, extensive touring and hundreds of live shows, our band has decided to go on “hiatus”. Though humbled, warmed and inspired by those who listen to the music we make and create an audience for our craft, we are tired. As our farewell show nears, I have been spending time sorting through an archive of experiences with the band and our audiences. I am sorting through many feelings, mostly feeling sentimental but also interrogative. My relationship to Ohbijou’s reception is also one of ambivalence. I have been met with complicated responses from critics and larger audiences due to my race, gender and sexuality. I can’t help but feel sadness for the ways my body been inscribed as a performer. I can’t help but feel tired by the ways that my brown, performing body comes into contact with the multicultural sensibilities of Canadian audiences. I am frustrated by the ways that my Asian-ness and my sexuality have been at times hidden and at times showcased to support notions of an “inclusive” Canadian multiculturalism.

    Despite a passion for writing and performing, it feels impossible to continue to create music in the form of Ohbijou. Despite adoration for my bandmates and the sweet fans and listeners who support this project, we must stop now. When we formed, we were a group of friends enjoying learning new instruments and sounds together in my basement. It is difficult to locate all of the reasons why I feel resent for a relationship that I have invested so much time, money and emotion in. I am disheartened by the years of unquantifiable work that have resulted in growing anxieties over how to create a sustainable future. Our initial intention, and one we continue to hold dearly to, was to produce social change through music. It has always been important to us to support local initiatives that aim to take care of the city in which we live. In our own ways, we will continue to do so. There is a larger conversation to be had about the labour of producing music and the changing patterns of consumption in the contemporary moment. Outside of the safety of commercial success, as the internet changes our interactions with music and consumptive patterns, it is a difficult existence. It is difficult to support and tour with such a large band.

  There have been many moments where our band has been sutured to notions of multiculturalism. The media has often referred to Ohbijou as “multicultural”. In an article written for a college weekly the author describes us as: “multicultural in both influence and membership.” We have also been introduced on the radio as the “multi-culti” band. This association is a polite way of saying that not all of us are white, which is the usual configuration of bands in Canada. Attendant to this proclamation is often a conflation between our bodies and the sound of our music: our music becomes a multicultural sound, or is referenced to as “world music”, which is a slippage of reading raced bodies. In a newspaper article our band was also described as “a Toronto pop orchestra of mixed race”.” Why was it important to describe us as a band of “mixed race?” We were “exotic” when compared to the normal configurations of Canadian bands. Our cultural and gendered make-up has become intrinsically important to how some media makes sense of us. This is tiring.

  An ambivalence surfaces when moments of pride in our work and its reception collide with well-intentioned but racist consumptions of our music. Ohbijou has been fortunate to tour through out North America, Asia and Europe. We were lucky to book a show in a beautiful botanical garden in Brussels, Belgium. After playing our music set to an attentive audience, I was confronted by two young Belgians:

  “You played a really great set tonight.”

“Thank you so much, we really appreciate you being here.”

“We could really hear the Asian influence in your music.”

  I was surprised and confused by this response.How did our performance, our ‘sound’, communicate Asianess? We were an orchestral pop band that played pop songs. In the novel What We All Long For Dionne Brand writes:

  “People stand and sit with the magnetic film of their life wrapped  around them. They think they’re safe, but they know they’re not.

       Any minute you can crash into someone else’s life…”

  Brand captures why it is necessary to think with transnational trajectories, as we seek to understand our encounters with strangers. How have constructions of otherness confined my work as a musician to a single narrative? I played Asian influenced music because my body was read as Asian, not because of the sound, or the melody or the instruments. My Filipino body was collapsed into a particular sound and mode of expression.