“I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker wrote. “Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us.”
When we read queer history we’re not only learning about those who came before us. When we listen to our elders we’re not only gaining wisdom. When we observe our braver peers we’re not only finding inspiration. We’re also faced with the reality that we exist because of these other people. Our experiences of queerness, as difficult as they may be, are easier, because there were others who lived before us.
Les femmes voilées, en d'autres termes, transgressent la norme sociale. Comme autrefois, le procès en sorcellerie qui leur est intenté repose sur la conviction intime qu'elles ne se contentent pas d'être qui elles sont: différentes. On estime qu'elles sont animées de mauvaises intentions envers le reste de la communauté.
Mais ne peut-on renverser la perspective, en se demandant si le rejet du voile au nom de la laïcité n'est pas un communautarisme déguisé en universalisme?
Les caractéristiques des personnes qui s’identifient comme bisexuelles ne témoignent pas vraiment d’une indifférence au genre des partenaires sexuels ou conjugaux, mais d’un élargissement aux personnes de même sexe d’une sexualité dont les personnes de l’autre sexe sont le centre.
Intéressant ce décalage entre déclarations et pratiques. C'est d'une manière similaire que je vis ma bisexualité : Mes pratiques sont majoritairement lesbiennes et c'est bien le lesbianisme que je porte politiquement et je n'envisage pas la moindre conjugalité (ni sexualité) avec des hommes cis bien que je puisse avoir parfois une forte attirance pour certains d'entre eux.
(Et comment s'inscrivent les personnes non-binaires et les hommes trans là dedans ? J'aurais pas assez d'un shaarlien pour l'expliquer, mais illes n'ont certainement pas un statut social et un vécu d'hommes cis)
We, as queer people, do our best to know as much about our own lived experiences as possible, and sometimes we forget that others are trailing behind, and not necessarily by choice. Societal changes are oftentimes felt much more strongly in metropolises than other areas, so can anyone struggling to keep up with queer liberation actually be blamed for that phenomenon? What happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt?
[…]
We must understand that being unsure isn’t the same as being unsympathetic, and that the true bigots aren't the ones taking the time to ask for our help.
Le réseau social indique en outre que « toute action prise à l'encontre d'une page ou d'un contenu est liée à la publication de contenus qui contreviennent à nos Standards de la Communauté ». Quels sont ces standards que n'auraient pas respectés les deux syndicats ? Facebook ne répond pas.
C'est vraiment triste de voir des gens détester la fiction à ce point alors que la littérature de fiction fait parti des meilleurs vecteurs de transmission d'idées.
C'est pas parce que « la bible est une fiction » qu'il ne faut pas la prendre au sérieux et qu'elle ne devrait avoir aucune influence sur nos vie au contraire. En tant qu'œuvre majeure de fiction il faut la prendre au sérieux et réfléchir à ce qu'elle transmet, comment elle le transmet et ce que les gens en retirent.
Sauf qu'en chiant sur la bible « en tant qu'œuvre de fiction » à « ne pas prendre au premier degré » en fait ça revient à chier sur la littérature de fiction.
Qu'est-ce qu'on est sensées pas prendre « au premier degré » aussi ? Ah oui, les jeux vidéos, sur lesquels on ne doit pas poser de regard critique parce que c'est juste un jeu vidéo évidemment ça ne transmet pas de valeurs politiques. Ou les films, c'est juste des films après tout, ça n'a aucune influence. Sauf Fight Club parce que Tyler Durden est vraiment un génie qui a tout compris à la décadence de la société.
In May, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez confronted Gilead, the makers of PrEP, about the pill’s astronomical cost. "The list price is almost $2,000 in the United States. Why is it $8 in Australia?" the senator asked Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “People are dying because of it, and there’s no enforceable reason for it.” (Gilead posted revenue of $3 billion off the once-a-day pill in 2018.)
Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.
[…]
A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power. Like most lesbians, I have found myself on the receiving end of approximately 100,000 drunk straight women bemoaning their orientation and insisting that it would be “so much easier” to be gay. Sure, it probably would be! That “men are trash” is not something I am personally invested in disputing. Yet in announcing her wish to be gay, the speaker carelessly glosses over the fact that she has chosen to stay attached to heterosexuality.
To someone unfamiliar with sex work, and the constant existential threats sex workers face, being a sex worker might seem like being part of an aspirational cool-girls' club. "Everything cool gets co-opted, and whores have always been the coolest people in the room," said Jacq the Stripper. Strippers working the pole or posing with stacks of cash on Instagram look cool, because strippers are cool, but co-opting sex work as a personal brand without actually being one isn't. "If you take our rhetoric, our style, and our organizing strategies without showing us actual support—and, yes, I mean money—you are part of the problem."
Bradley was one of her friends. He belonged to a group of boys who I only ever saw together. One of them had a credit card. At some point after we met, they used it to pay to see me naked on the internet. On that day or soon after, Bradley told his friends that he was going to have sex with me. “He wants to fuck you,” one of them said. This was the way things were. If a boy said he wanted to fuck you, you were supposed to feel flattered.
Butch/femme is a subculture with no strict rulebook, though there are commonalities within the expression of each identity. Butch women often embody what we traditionally regard as masculinity, wearing short hair, loose clothing, trousers and shorts -- think Orange Is The New Black’s Lea DeLaria or Lena Waithe. Femme women tend to embrace femininity; dresses and skirts, make-up and perfume -- more along the lines of Portia de Rossi or, if you’re into Glee, Santana Lopez.
Despite misconceptions, being femme is not about trying to ‘pass’ as straight. In fact it's far from it. In donning femininity at least partially for the gaze of other women, femmes are able to reclaim a kind of womanhood that’s too often automatically equated with heterosexuality. Similarly, the rejection of feminine gender norms by butches is intrinsically radical: it empowers lesbians to renounce patriarchal standards of beauty, giving them relative freedom to present in whichever way they feel most comfortable.
A 2,554-word essay that aims to explore how to survive a patriarchal capitalist system that forces publications run by young(ish) women—even seemingly wildly successful ones, with robust communities that mourn these losses loudly and vocally—to shut down in spite of their popularity, completely ignored three publications that might have, each in their own way, answered a piece of the thesis question. This article was not the first to completely ignore lesbian and queer women's media when pondering women's websites; it was one in a large compilation of disappointments, as yet another feminist writer I admire did not acknowledge the work queer women's websites do.
The nature of fandom seems to have morphed in the past decade. In the old days of sci-fi conventions and Bobby Sherman fan clubs, fandom was a subculture reserved for the very young or the very obsessed—or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, the very stoned. As fantasy and comic-book franchises have taken over the entertainment industry, nerd culture has become mainstream. Now that couch potatoes have social media, they have risen up and become active, opinionated participants. As a result, movie studios and TV showrunners have to cater to subsets of diehard devotees, who expect to have a say in how their favorite properties are handled.
We live in a society where female ways of being are still commonly viewed as second-best, where too much feminine energy can be an obstacle to being taken seriously, where women are expected to conform to stereotypically male communication patterns and expectations in order to have a career and real power. Too often it’s a choice between embracing who you really are and getting what you want in life.
An entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”.
The U.S. and UK governments are expected to sign a treaty in October that will force social media platforms based in either of the countries to “disclose encrypted messages from suspected terrorists, paedophiles and other serious criminals” to police in the other, according to the Times of London.
Comment tu peux transmettre le contenu de messages chiffrés que tu n'es pas sensé pouvoir déchiffrer ? 🤔
Oops.
C'est toujours triste de voir un rêve s'évaporer à tout jamais comme ça.
It’s a survival mechanism, especially as someone with depression and anxiety, to try to ignore and normalize the dehumanizing experiences I have to move through in order to live. If I were to allow myself to be bothered by quotidian microaggressions and invalidations and othering, I’d maybe never leave the house.
Some writers map their sentences metrically, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables with scansion marks as if notating a musical score. Some even work out the stresses before they fill in the words. The rest of us just have a foggy sense that a sentence needs an extra beat. But we still know that a sentence is not just what it says but how it says it.
The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained. More than twenty years ago, a group of Italian men set out to debunk that idea.
La nomination de Tristan Nitot servira d'abord à redorer le blason de Qwant dans la presse et les médias, mais également à éliminer de la direction de l'entreprise la seule personne susceptible d'essayer de pouvoir tenir tête à Léandri.
« Nitot est tout sauf un administratif ou un opérationnel : c'est un speaker, hors sol et totalement sous la coupe de Léandri. Son rôle : danser devant les journalistes, nu s'il le faut. »
Here, Dugan and Fabbre share portraits and words from 12 of the 88 people they connected with along the way.
There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself. After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and entertain has melded with a desire far more cynical: to be liked, quantifiably, for an idealized version of myself, at a rate not possible even ten years ago.
The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years.
Je crois que les réseaux sociaux nous ont niquées. On doit pas être cablées pour s'exprimer constamment devant des milliers de personnes qui s'expriment elles aussi constamment par milliers devant nous. C'est trop de pression pour notre cervelle.
Dating. Am I good at it? What qualifies as good at it? For me, dating was always about the effort. I put effort into my dates under the (gargantuanly misguided) notion that effort nets result. I do my hair and makeup, pull a lewk, and put on my optimism and positivity panties before walking out the door. I ask thoughtful questions and come prepared with morsels of information gleaned from their profiles so as to ensure my dates never feels void of conversation topic or connection. I put my best effort forward, because I believe — sorry, believed — dating is an activity worth the effort.
Direct communication is the best because when you clearly voice the truth about what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling, you maximize the likelihood of being understood.