June 2013
“Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities “reinforce the gender binary.” In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans folks and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender isn’t some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.”
—Julia Serano, “Performance Piece,” from Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation Ed. Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (via browngirlinterrupted)
“EQUALITY” scream the white gays with LEGALIZE GAY blazoned across their chests and “NO BLACKS NO ASIANS NO FEMS” blazoned across their grindr profiles
“Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper self-care so you can get your nose back to the grindstone. Sickness, disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which we might come together.”
—CWC Texts : Recent Features : For All We Care – Reconsidering Self-Care
“The political context in which cultural symbols exist is important. Cultural appropriation happens — and the unquestioned sense of entitlement that white Americans display towards the artifacts and rituals of people of color exists too. All “appropriation” is not merely an example of cultural sharing, an exchange between friends that takes place on a level playing field.”
—Decolonizing YogaBeyond Bindis: Why Cultural Appropriation Matters - Decolonizing Yoga
May 2013
“While fashion showcases a variety of sexual attitudes and lifestyles (the industry is pretty open in terms of queer identities, BDSM play, exhibitionisms, etc.), such polymorphous perversity is only sanctioned for those with a very specific body type. My teenage favorite, Carine Roitfeld’s Paris Vogue, may have shown girls who looked like boys and boys who looked like girls doing all sorts of things with each other, but the boys and girls within her pages all looked more alike, as boys or girls, than I or my best friends and lovers do to any of them—that is, they were all very thin, very tall, impeccably groomed and mostly white, while we are all so diverse.”
—Forever 69: Fu*k the Commodification of Sex by Fiona Duncan
“
I consider that Kechiche and I have contradictory aesthetic approaches, perhaps complementary. The fashion in which he chose to shoot these scenes is coherent with the rest of what he his creation. Sure, to me it seems far away from my own method of creation and representation, but it would be very silly of me to reject something on the pretext that’s it different from my own vision.
That’s me as a writer. Now, as a lesbian…
It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.
I don’t know the sources of information for the director and the actresses (who are all straight, unless proven otherwise) and I was never consulted upstream. Maybe there was someone there to awkwardly imitate the possible positions with their hands, and/or to show them some porn of so-called “lesbians” (unfortunately it’s hardly ever actually for a lesbian audience). Because — except for a few passages — this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theater, everyone was giggling. The heteronormative laughed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.
I totally get Kechiche’s will to film pleasure. The way he filmed these scenes is to me directly related to another scene, in which several characters talk about the myth of the feminine orgasm, as…mystic and far superior to the masculine one. But here we go, to sacralize once more womanhood in such ways. I find it dangerous.
As a feminist and lesbian spectator, I can not endorse the direction Kechiche took on these matters.
But I’m also looking forward to what other women will think about it. This is simply my personal stance.
” —Julie Maroh’s thoughts on the film adaptation of her graphic novel, Blue Is The Warmest Color (via filmmemory)
DYING TO SEEEEEEEEE THIS FILMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
“Femme is a personal identity, but it’s also a political one….It questions the idea that there can be too much: too much blush, too much tulle, too many holes in your short shorts, too much calling out of racism, too many discussions about neocolonialism. Femme is resistance.”
—~ Elise Nagy, “Exploding The Limitations: What Being a Femme Means to Me,” inourwordsblog.com (via queerintersectional)
“There is little precedent for fat androgyny. Generally our androgynous icons are svelte and lacking in secondary sex characteristics. David Bowie, Tilda Swinton, Katherine Hepburn; these small-bodied, predominately white figures of androgyny have created an aesthetic with little room for deviation. This means that for those of us with bodies that do not conform to traditional standards of androgyny, we are often misread and misunderstood, even in queer spaces.”
—Fat Queer Tells All: On Fatness and Gender Flatness - By Allie Shyer (via cassket)
