#dialogue-queered

28 Feb 2023

Folks,

after-zeno’s brother blog, @dialogue-queered, remains ‘terminated’ after a month - most likely a triggered algorithm - so time for me to give tumblr a rest - including this blog-  until/if it is restored.

Thanks for your understanding.

An unholy combination of capitalist imperatives, prudery, and contempt for tumblr’s user communities have badly damaged the tumblr brand - most likely with all its user communities, not just queer ones.

Note: Please remember to log-off for all of 17 December!

D-Q will remain indefinately on tumblr as an archive, but the latter has been migrated to wordpress, and it may be replaced by a site there. Watch this space.

For now, fitfully, summer has arrived in Australia and the southern hemisphere, and so l will be taking a few weeks off. This will also allow me to assess how things play out at tumblr.

A heartfelt and joyous thanks to viewers and fellow tumblr bloggers who have enlightened me, and, in many ways, contributed to D-Q!

Theme 1: Winter in the southern hemisphere, and the recurrence of the southern lights

Early June saw the posting of a link to a brilliant social history and scientific exploration of the solar storms associated with the Aurora Australis courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The snowy landscapes of the influential Eugene Von Guerard were also referenced.

Theme 2: An array of queer-related art but also beautiful ‘blankets’ of colour and abstract art.

D-Q is determined to share queer art of all kinds across the gender spectrum, and through this to link to journeys like those of Chelsea Manning.

Whimsies of fashion were featured – the attitudes of queer dandies and their pleasures in attire as identity; and,  also images suggesting bodies in movement in whimsical clothes.

Yet, a note against consumerism was sounded as a new type of conformity under late cultural capitalism through reflection on the stark John Bracks painting: ‘Collins St, 5pm’.

Theme 3: Significant anniversaries related to indigenous issues in Australia.

Not only was it the 25th anniversary of the High Court of Australia’s historic Mabo decision recognising pre-colonial land ownership rights, ie ‘native  title’, but it was also a month in which peak indigenous consultative bodies called, afresh, for a new legal settlement between the settler-derived national and state governments, and indigenous peoples, in the form of a formal legal treaty.

Theme 4: Issues of climate change.

The defection of the Trump administration from the Paris Accords demonstrated both a hankering for the past, but also short-sightedness in relation to not only new, significant, energy industries but the wider impact of rising carbon emissions.

It is important to note that the politico-economic opening against climate change within the US existed because the Obama administration had no sustained policies for reindustrialisation, especially in depressed regional economies in the US, or in the least, no capacity to fund and deliver such policies.

I should also note in passing that Mr Trump’s behaviour as President deserved continued notice.

Theme 5: Anniversaries of the Tianamen Square massacres.

Significantly, this anniversary, now, is followed by a visit to Hong Kong by President Xi Jingping in July  in circumstances where Beijing demands the removal of any evidence of the marking of the 4 June 1989 events.

In honor of China’s democracy movement, l provided the full text of a 2009 court statement of Liu Xiaobo, an intellectual, and leading figure in the 1980s Democracy Movement in China. This statement was used as his 2010 Nobel Lecture when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Theme 6: Public Libraries and the Public Sphere

Another significant feature this month centred on public libraries as exemplars of secular, democratic civic spaces and dialogue, and key forms of social property. These are one of the great legacies of that cross-fertilisation between liberalism and socialism variously described as social liberalism, or social democracy or democratic socialism. Commitment to the best values of the public sphere and its overlap with knowledge and expertise-generating segments of society remain central in the era of ‘fake news’.

Theme 7: Birthday of Marguerite Yourcenar, Novelist

D-Q celebrated the birthday of the late Marguerite Yourcenar, sagacious author of a favourite historical novel, ‘The Abyss’. Yourcenar is perhaps better known for her thoughtfully researched ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’.

Theme 8: Identities

The month finished with reflections on identities in the world whether political or social, and identities within – of emotions, and subjectivities – or as George Sand called it – the roar that lies the other side of silence.