signal

Chay Magazine, a new Pakistani publication (Having observed in Pakistani society, a disturbing tendency towards fear and shame around issues of sex and sexuality - that is to say, around a normal human interaction - the founders of Chay Magazine feel that sex and sexuality should enter the public discourse.) is looking for submissions, and just plain looks good.  Via Muslimah Media Watch.

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This outing of young men by an over-controlling principal is just horribly painful to me.  It makes me sad and angry and I hope they’ll be okay.  I also feel for all the hetero couples  who were also outed.  These things can be dangerous also for young women, and even men, depending on their family situation.  One of the young men was also dropped from a rebuilding trip to New Orleans because some faculty were afraid he might “embarrass the school” or engage in “inappropriate behavior.”  What the fuck, people.  Seriously.  Grow up.

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Read me clearly: there is no point to feminism if it does not actively address its racism with its agenda. There is no point to feminism if it does not address its racist history, racist matriarchy, racist icons, racist literature, racist imagery, racist publications, racist presence. To claim we’re all female and unite under one cause of gender does. not. work. History never lies. This model has left more marginalized women in the road than we can count. Why the dichotomous split between gender and race, as if we live separately from the strands of our hair to the color of skin to the anatomy of genitalia.

  …from myecdysis

This above is something I’m thinking about a lot in the last few days.  Someone in another blog said that anti-racism doesn’t really go anywhere if you don’t have close friends who are people of colour, if it’s not real to you.  I can see how that statement might be true in a general sense, maybe, but I don’t find it true for me.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have many friends in general.  Maybe it’s because many of my daughter’s friends are people of colour.  Maybe it’s the neighborhood I live in.  Or maybe it’s just me and my flailing hypersensitive idealism.  But the success of feminism, to me, is meaningless if racism is not also conquered.

I don’t want to live in a world where people are discriminated against because of their skin colour.  It’s anathema to me.  I cannot feel passionately about feminism anymore without also being passionate about anti-racism.  I know that I am as immersed in racism as I am in patriarchy, and that I am awash in privilege.  Like a fish in water.

I may not have close contact with people of colour on a daily basis, but I have to live with myself.  And until I am doing the right thing, and I am convinced that this is the right thing, I can’t do that comfortably.  Call it the Princess and the Pea, if you will, but I can’t sleep with that lump in my feather bed.  I don’t want to give up my nice feather bed, but I will if I have to, or I will make room for others, because what good is it to have comfort if people all around me have so little?  Haven’t you ever nearly stopped breathing from the flash-moments when you realize how hard the world is for others, how much terribleness is going on, how much unfairness and wrongness there is?

This idea of untangling oppression into threads and solving one and not another at any given time is counterproductive, I think.  A lesson is a lesson.  The recognition of privilege, the paths of activism,  the making of apologies, the calls for change, all of these things are universally applicable processes.  Yes, we can do it all at once.  It may feel like a slower process, and people mouth about ‘diluted resources’ and such, but that’s really bullshit.

What is progress if it comes at the expense of others?   How can resources be ‘diluted’ if more people are bending to do the work.  It feels like feminists are building a house that’s missing two walls.  “We can’t work on those walls, we have to make these ones first, and if we stop working on these walls, we’ll fall behind!  The elements will undo all our work!”  How does one propose to put a roof on a house with only two walls?

I’d go so far as to say one wall.  The front of the house.  The facade.  And all the while middle/upper class white feminists are building the facade and landscaping the lawn, we return every night to our own homes, safe and sound in  our privileged beds, ignoring the fact that people all around us don’t have roofs over their heads at all.  But we still want them to come work on the new house.  The front of it.

It’s a shitty analogy but it’s all I have right now.  This isn’t some brilliant screed.  It’s me trying to say that as a middle-class academic disabled queer white girl I’m not content with how things are going — in my own head (until recently) as well as outside of it.  And even if all I can do is listen to others and paw through my own insides, then that’s what I’ll do.  I’ll make coffee, I’ll clean toilets, I’ll post links, I’ll confess my fuckups, I’ll try and change me as much as I can, I’ll keep my mouth shut, I’ll speak up, whatever I have to do to work it all out, because I don’t like it this way.

Is the resistance to an equal devotion to anti-racism — hell, the redefinition of feminism to include anti-racism by default — because white feminists have to stop being right and go stand over by the white men they’re struggling against when it comes to addressing racism?  Is it because being called on ‘fraternizing with the enemy’ is that painful?   Is  it threatening?  Is there a sense of losing the moral high ground?

I don’t know.  I can only speak for me.  I’m not good at group activities.  I’m probably a lousy feminist.  I like a lot of things I ’shouldn’t’ like.  I’m a carnivore.  I like violent video games.  I like a lot of music videos.  I write un-brilliant queer porn.  I’m pretty clueless.  But I don’t like this anymore.  It has to change.  At least *I* have to change.  I promise to do about half a million things wrong along the way, so don’t hold your breath waiting for epiphanies over here.