A couple of years MAC did a collaboration with Rodarte, which was pretty fucking tasteless, to say the least, allegedly inspired by the ~ethereal landscape~ of the West Texas border region and included products with names like “Juarez” and “Factory”. Juarez is, of course, most famous internationally for the large number of women who have been murdered there, many of whom were employed in maquiladoras. MAC eventually withdrew the collection entirely and donated $100,000 to an organization to aid the women of Juarez; I’m not sure what Rodarte did, besides offer a lukewarm apology.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because when the MAC collaboration with Rihanna, someone actually said that RiRi Hearts MAC was as tasteless a move on MAC’s part as the Juarez collection. This was buried in a lot of other concern trolling about abuse victims that was and is occurring everywhere (this person was on specktra, but I don’t doubt other people have said the same thing).
What are we, tasteless, badly behaved, oversexed survivors too tacky for compassion, to make of this comparison?
1. Rihanna actually died that night and is now risen again to exploit her own death (Lipstick Lazarus effect).
2. Hundreds of dead Mexican women can be reduced to a single, poorly thought-out emotional appeal used to justify the dehumanization of another woman of color who is not behaving the way we think she should.
3. Both Rihanna and the women of Juarez are just metaphors; metaphors have no needs, emotions, or thoughts of their own, but cosmetic companies should not be so tasteless as to employ them.
4. Rihanna is a tragedy; the fact that she is still alive, still vibrant, still fighting, still being successful, is not something other victims of domestic violence can appreciate, because after all she is acting far too much like a victim of domestic violence, and that is repugnant.
5. There is no difference between dead women and live women, women who were murdered and women who are making their own choices; if you disapprove of how they live/die, they are taboo. Call it respect, but of course you mean respect for your own feelings, not respect for the women involved. (It’s about bad taste, literally no one relates to these women as if they are human beings.)
6. If you are not a Good Victim, you must be part of the problem.
7. If you are not a Good Victim, you must not be a person.
8. If you are not a person, you must eternally seek redemption and the forgiveness of anyone who demands it.
9. If you were victimized but are not a person and not seeking redemption, you must be that which victimizes you, and perhaps other people too.
10. Rihanna actually died that night, and what has risen is a monster undeserving of compassion or sympathy. Keep your wallets shut, say things that ward people like her away, make them feel less human so they will realize they are, in fact, less human, claim it is for their own good, they have no business feeling normal, they have no business living as though they have the right to emotions, mistakes, complexity, you know what’s best, and it’s not letting monsters like that into the light.
All very logical, based in love.
zuky:
Asian Women are ____________________
In response to the vandalism and hate crime at UCLA, VSU started a photo collage that mimics the signs that were posted on the VSU office and in Ackerman Union. We asked people to write what they thought Asian women embody. These were some of the responses
I noticed my last post (“Asian Women Are… none of your fucking business”) got some attention, so I wanted to put my reaction into some context.
I don’t want to derail a good thing. A response to the message on the VSU banner saying that Asian women are “white-boy worshipping Whores” [sic] was necessary. It was a hateful act of vandalism, and it definitely wasn’t funny.
As someone who identifies as an “Asian woman,” my body is constantly being defined by others. I’ve been told I’m not Asian enough, not feminine enough, or that I’m too Asian, or too feminine to be taken seriously. Or my eyes are this way so I can’t be this or that “kind of Asian” or that only half-Asians can be beautiful. Chinky, FOB, bitch— yeah, I’ve been called all those things.
I work in a Viet-women run open mic space, and more than once I’ve encountered men who feel they need to say something “as a man.” (This blog post, which I still haven’t received a response to, feels the need for a “male voice” in a description of a past event). I’ve heard men recite poetry using a woman’s body as a metaphor for whatever stand it is they want to take, including comparing a war-ravaged country to a woman’s raped body. I’ve heard men take on women’s voices, giving “voice to the voiceless.”
I come from a place of love and compassion and as someone who is and always will be developing her own craft when I say that I’m sick of this shit.
My body is not a meta-playground where you can talk about oppression with more oppression. Comparing my body to an object is objectifying my body.
My identity is not limited to who I choose to date, nor is it defined by blanket statements of positive vocabulary. I like the last picture, of the one who says that “Asian women are my family.” Asian women are my mother, who busts her ass every day to make sure my dad stays alive; my sister, who helps to pay my parents’ mortgage; my grandmother in Vietnam who I may never see again. You know, individuals.
I am an Asian woman. I think too much and work too hard and sometimes I’m too tired to deal with people. I’m deeply flawed and working on it. My family is sacred. My body is off limits. I have a voice, and I’m not afraid to use it, but it doesn’t mean I have to all the time.
I’m an Asian woman and I’m none of your fucking business.
Well said. Asian women are the reason I exist, my ancestors, creators, shapers, teachers, elders, aunts, sisters, nieces, peers, colleagues, friends. Asian women are irreducible to any catchphrase.
(via nuestrahermana)
and the OTHER thing I had feelings about today is that today MAC announced that it is doing a makeup collection with Rihanna, and every fucking place I went to read about it was full of comments from sanctimonious wastes of carbon who announced (without a hint of irony!) that they just cared too much about victims of domestic violence to support Rihanna, who is obviously a bad role model, a bad decision maker, an ally to a bad man, a user of bad drugs, and speaker of bad words, a wearer of bad clothes, a bad, bad victim who failed to meet their strict guidelines for sympathy and who is therefore a pariah forever more
they just care about the issue of domestic violence so much, their love is too pure to be tainted by the likes of her
i just wish them all bodily harm, I do
Since I got disgusted and fed up with the fact that people behind the porn blogs who keep following me & other latina’s are sending sexually harassing messages and doing stalker behavior by going through archives, liking any post with us or latinas in general in them and reblogging individuals pictures on to their porn blogs… I wrote THIS POST
I have had a surge of porn blogs and more specifically fetishizing racist porn blogs begin to follow me & one of my pictures (a simple picture of how I cut my own side bangs which shows just my face and bangs) got picked up by a blog called latinaslovers and it seems to be getting a lot of track backs to my blog.
Latinaslovers is one of the blogs I called out originally for their fucked up behavior. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of the stalkers I am getting are coming from them specifically:
[Image: an image of a trackback link from latinaslovers tumblr of a picture of me on their porn blog]
Including the ever so creepy kazxxx (who I would sincerely appreciate if you all would report along with me):
[An image of kazxxx from Kansas with IP address: 50.26.92.34]
[An image of their location not zoomed in at its fullest ehem. Shows they near Wichita, El Dorado and Augusta in Kansas, U.S.]
who last night followed me after stalking through my entire archive and liking any posts of me including a video I made specifically for the chronic illness community about my new years goals and wants for my health & life
[Image of only a few of the posts he clicked through and liked through my blogs archive, specifically looking for ones with pictures of me and any person that looked latina]
This is the kind of harassing and specifically race fetishizing behavior porn blog owners are doing.
This is the type of issue reclaimingthelatinatag has been attempting to change.
Sadly, the people who run these porn blogs think that Latina women are simply sex objects regardless of what we are doing in our ho-hum lives or that our blogs are just that: our own and should not be linked to their porn blogs.
I think one of the problems is that some folks talk about these blogs as if they are stand alone and have no owners. There are people and many times cis men behind these blogs who are responsible for this predatory behavior.
It is harassment and if you’re fed up with it, take that step to throw these people’s shit out for everyone to see.
I refuse to be harassed in to not having a blog or staying quiet about this. I know I am one of many Latina’s whose had this issue.
What I would love for you all to do is:
1. block and report for harassment the following blogs: kazxxx, latinaslovers, thicklatinasbest, latinlover89 , and the ever so fucked up evergleam who reblogged my video talking about being chronically ill & my new years resolutions to his porn blog (Latina’s who have had similar experiences, feel free to add to this list)
2. Please consider signal boosting this since I’ve noticed we tend to do a better job amongst ourselves to take action because waiting for Tumblr staff can be more than a pain.
If you are a Latina who needs help in installing a good ISP tracker contact me.
If you have information on how to track stalkers & block IP’s for good and would like to add it to this please feel free to do so!
stop fucking reblogging me and following me & other latinas
Since you all got booted out of the latina tag your new thing is to stalk around latina’s by following them & reblogging any picture you find of them including something like “hey look I cut my own bangs!” and then that gets reblogged by other fetishizing racist porn blogs and creepy fuckers show up in our inboxes saying all sorts of sexual harrassy things
That tag doesn’t belong to you pieces of shit so get the fuck over it
Stop being cowards & accept the fact that PEOPLE are fed up with your bullshit
We want to be able to keep our own blogs peacefully
And not be harassed for not wanting to be fetishized and stalked
*Yes, I have tagged some of the shit stains on here because you don’t deserve to be anonymous
![supertwitchsavestheday:
I wonder how many people reblogged this not knowing the amazing book it’s from…
I need to read this book…
so I did in fact google this image, because it’s pretty and I like pretty art, and discovered it came from Habibi, a graphic novel I had always passed on because it appeared to be a novel about Arabs written by a white dude. but then I was like, “maybe I’m being presumptuous and he does have some ties to the culture, let’s look into this more.”
Nope.
Although the book is informed by his previous work, Blankets, which autobiographically explored Thompson’s Christian upbringing and beliefs, Thompson conceived Habibi as part of his desire to better understand and humanize Islam, and focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic cultures, in contrast to their vilification.
Not a promising start. Let’s see what else Wiki has to say:
Habibi takes place in the present day, albeit in a fictional “Orientalist landscape”, which Thompson conceived in order to create a sprawling fairy tale that would allow him to depict a clash of the old world and the new, while allowing him to avoid depicting guns or warfare.
Hmm.
Michel Faber of The Guardian praised Habibi as “an orgy of art for its own sake”, and calling Thompson an “obsessive sketcher” whose artwork he categorized with that of Joe Sacco and Will Eisner. Although Faber lauded the book’s visuals and its message, he found both its length wearisome and its treatment of sex to be problematic, in particular the repeatedly sexual cruelty visited upon Dodola, which Faber felt caused the story to fold in on itself.
WELP
…Creswell took fault with the book’s depictions of racism and sexism, and its apparent exotification of the Muslim world without differentiating between fact and fantasy, saying, “It’s often hard to tell whether Thompson is making fun of Orientalism or indulging in it…Thompson the illustrator is…apparently unable to think of Dodola without disrobing her…it is a conventional sort of virtuosity, in the service of a conventional exoticism.”
Nadim Damluji of The Hooded Utilitarian called the book “an imperfect attempt to humanize Arabs for an American audience”, taking issue with Thompson’s ignorance of the Arabic language, his depiction of Arab culture as “cultural appropriation”, and the revelation in the later chapters of a modern, Westernized city in proximity to a primitive harem palace typified by sexual slavery. Though Damluji expressed awe of Thompson’s technical skill, and found his artwork “stunning” and his ideas derived from his research “fascinating”, he observed that Dodola and Zam arrive are given depth by contrasting them against “a cast of extremely dehumanized Arabs”, and summarized the work thus: “Habibi is a success on many levels, but it also contains elements that are strikingly problematic…The artistic playground [Thompson] chose of barbaric Arabs devoid of history but not savagery is a well-trod environment in Western literature….The problem in making something knowingly racist is that the final product can still be read as racist.”
so no, no, I’m not going to read it at all, thank you](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mejms6U54F1qfxl56o1_500.jpg)
I wonder how many people reblogged this not knowing the amazing book it’s from…I need to read this book…
so I did in fact google this image, because it’s pretty and I like pretty art, and discovered it came from Habibi, a graphic novel I had always passed on because it appeared to be a novel about Arabs written by a white dude. but then I was like, “maybe I’m being presumptuous and he does have some ties to the culture, let’s look into this more.”
Nope.
Although the book is informed by his previous work, Blankets, which autobiographically explored Thompson’s Christian upbringing and beliefs, Thompson conceived Habibi as part of his desire to better understand and humanize Islam, and focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic cultures, in contrast to their vilification.
Not a promising start. Let’s see what else Wiki has to say:
Habibi takes place in the present day, albeit in a fictional “Orientalist landscape”, which Thompson conceived in order to create a sprawling fairy tale that would allow him to depict a clash of the old world and the new, while allowing him to avoid depicting guns or warfare.
Hmm.
Michel Faber of The Guardian praised Habibi as “an orgy of art for its own sake”, and calling Thompson an “obsessive sketcher” whose artwork he categorized with that of Joe Sacco and Will Eisner. Although Faber lauded the book’s visuals and its message, he found both its length wearisome and its treatment of sex to be problematic, in particular the repeatedly sexual cruelty visited upon Dodola, which Faber felt caused the story to fold in on itself.
WELP
…Creswell took fault with the book’s depictions of racism and sexism, and its apparent exotification of the Muslim world without differentiating between fact and fantasy, saying, “It’s often hard to tell whether Thompson is making fun of Orientalism or indulging in it…Thompson the illustrator is…apparently unable to think of Dodola without disrobing her…it is a conventional sort of virtuosity, in the service of a conventional exoticism.”
Nadim Damluji of The Hooded Utilitarian called the book “an imperfect attempt to humanize Arabs for an American audience”, taking issue with Thompson’s ignorance of the Arabic language, his depiction of Arab culture as “cultural appropriation”, and the revelation in the later chapters of a modern, Westernized city in proximity to a primitive harem palace typified by sexual slavery. Though Damluji expressed awe of Thompson’s technical skill, and found his artwork “stunning” and his ideas derived from his research “fascinating”, he observed that Dodola and Zam arrive are given depth by contrasting them against “a cast of extremely dehumanized Arabs”, and summarized the work thus: “Habibi is a success on many levels, but it also contains elements that are strikingly problematic…The artistic playground [Thompson] chose of barbaric Arabs devoid of history but not savagery is a well-trod environment in Western literature….The problem in making something knowingly racist is that the final product can still be read as racist.”
so no, no, I’m not going to read it at all, thank you
(via which-witch)
And for anyone who has not seen it, full details in the Galway ProChoice Statment:
http://sharrowshadow.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/galway-pro-choice-statement-re-the-death-of-savita-praveen/
For Release: Woman Dies in UCHG after Being Denied a Life-Saving Abortion
On Sunday the 28th of October, Savita Praveen died at UCHG after being denied a termination which would most likely have saved her life. She was 31 years old, married for four years and hoping to start a family.
If legislation is not introduced immediately, more women will die. Under the X Case ruling, women in Ireland are legally entitled to an abortion when it is necessary to save their life. However, legislation has never been passed to reflect this. It is the failure of successive governments to do so that led to Savita’s death.
Savita was first admitted to the hospital on October 21st complaining of severe back pain. Her doctor initially told her that she would be fine, but she refused to go home. It became clear that her waters had broken, and she was having a miscarriage (spontaneous abortion). She was told that the foetus had no chance of survival, and it would all be over within a few hours.
However, her condition did not take its expected course, and the foetus remained inside her body. Although it was evident that it could not survive, a foetal heartbeat was detected. For this reason her repeated requests to remove the foetus were denied. By Tuesday it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. She had developed a fever, and collapsed when attempting to walk. The cervix had now been fully open for nearly 72 hours, creating a danger of infection comparable to an untreated open head wound. She developed septicaemia.
Despite this, the foetus was not removed until Wednesday afternoon, after the foetal heartbeat had stopped. Immediately after the procedure she was taken to the high dependency unit. Her condition never improved. She died at 1.09am on Sunday the 28th of October.
Had the foetus been removed when it became clear that it could not survive, her cervix would have been closed and her chance of infection dramatically reduced. Leaving a woman’s cervix open constitutes a clear risk to her life. What is unclear is how doctors are expected to act in this situation.
Rachel Donnelly, Galway Pro-Choice spokesperson stated:
“This was an obstetric emergency which should have been dealt with in a routine manner. Yet Irish doctors are restrained from making obvious medical decisions by a fear of potentially severe consequences. As the European Court of Human Rights ruled, as long as the 1861 Act remains in place, alongside a complete political unwillingness to touch the issue, pregnant women will continue to be unsafe in this country.”Sarah McCarthy, Galway Pro-Choice member said:
“Galway Pro-Choice believes that Ireland must legislate for freely available abortion for all women. Deaths like Savita’s are the most severe consequence of the criminalisation of abortion, yet it has countless adverse effects. We must reflect long and hard on the implications of Savita’s tragic and untimely passing, and we must act to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again.”For more information please contact Galway Pro-Choice on 087 706 0715 or Sarah McCarthy on 085 7477 907
Is this real? I’ve had e-fucking-nough of misogyny within the animal rights movement (fuck, within every movement)! This is disgusting. Boycotting Lush as well as animal-testing cosmetic companies. Just, how can they even think this will get people to care about animals? “Oh, people don’t care about animals, so how about we take a member of another group no-one cares about (women) and create some torture porn!” Sickening. I feel sick.While I am very much against animal testing and eating animal products- why is it always women being depicted as animals in these protests? Skeeves me out.“A young woman was restrained, force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a high street shop window as part of a hard-hitting protest against animal testing.
Jacqueline Traide was tortured in front of hundreds of horrified shoppers in a bid to raise awareness and end the practise.
The 24-year-old endured 10 hours of experiments, which included having her hair shaved and irritants squirted in her eyes, as part of a worldwide campaign by Lush Cosmetics and The Humane Society.
The disturbing stunt took place in Lush’s Regent Street store, one of the UK’s busiest shopping streets.
Jacqueline appeared genuinely terrified as she was pinned down on a bench and had her mouth stretched open with two metal hooks while a man in a white coat force-fed her until she choked and gagged.
The artist was also injected with numerous needles, had her skin braised and lotions and creams smeared across her face.
Passers-by were gobsmacked to see Jacqueline, a social sculpture student at Oxford Brookes University, forced to have a section of her head shaved.
The gruesome spectacle aimed to highlight the cruelty inflicted on animals during cosmetic laboratory tests and raise awareness that animal testing is still a common practise.
The Humane Society International and Lush Cosmetics have joined forces to launch the largest-ever global campaign to end animal testing for cosmetics.
The campaign, launched to coincide with World Week for Animals in Laboratories, is being rolled out simultaneously in over 700 Lush Ltd shops across forty-seven countries including the United States, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Russia.
Lush campaign manager Tamsin Omond said: “The ironic thing is that if it was a beagle in the window and we were doing all these things to it, we’d have the police and RSPCA here in minutes.
“But somewhere in the world, this kind of thing is happening to an animal every few seconds on average.
“The difference is, it’s normally hidden. We need to remind people it is still going on.”
For more information about the campaign, visit www.fightinganimaltesting.com”
WTF
This is porn, ok. Seriously, it looks like porn and tons of sick males out there will masturbate to it.
Those pieces of shit are all getting off on it. Does anyone seriously believe that anyone would stop animal testing / using those products because of this?? What a load of crap.
For as long as I women are viewed as animals I don’t have the energy to give a flying fuck about actual suffering animals.
“Jacqueline appeared genuinely terrified as she was pinned down on a bench and had her mouth stretched open with two metal hooks while a man in a white coat force-fed her until she choked and gagged.”
YEAH WELL NO SHITBoycott Lush forever. This is fucking disgusting. How dare they?
Oh hey I was just about to buy some more overpriced Lush moisturiser. Not anymore.
Gee, I wonder why these freaks always inflict their violent, painful, degrading ‘activism’ on naked women?
On the article where I found out when this happened, a helpful comment points out that she’s not naked! A skin-toned stretchy jumpsuit in no way looks anything like a naked body or is meant to evoke a naked body so if you ‘eroticise’ this you are a pervert. And if you are triggered by it due to the history of sexual violence at the hands of men that you have disclosed and you see obvious similarities with this man torturing a woman who is supposed to appear naked in ways that men torture women in porn, then you’re a ‘sadist’. It’s just complete and utter coincidence that they didn’t use a clothed man as the subject.
Lush even went on to defend this…
[removed the photo, you can click through to any of the responses to see it]
A Halfbreed’s Reasoning: The Annual Halloween PSA to Moniyaw Who Didn’t Learn Last Year,
For the most part I have been staying out of the ‘native’ tags on Tumblr because they give me a migraine, but I ventured there and it was a dark pit of racist despair. Then I thought to myself, “why in hell is there such an influx of dumb ass people?” then I remembered, “oh yeah, Halloween.” That special time of year where NDNs everywhere grit their teeth and close the blinds, because it’s just a matter of time before you see some person with a chicken feather headdress and acrylic war paint smeared across their rosy cheeks. Now, dear, Moniyaw, I want to veer away from the usual “wow that’s really racist and disrespectful you really shouldn’t put on that faux buckskin bustier and buy that plastic tomahawk” and I really want you to look at the picture of this woman:
Take a good, long look into her eyes.
Now I want you to look at these women:
The first image of a murdered Saulteux woman named Pamela George, she was dispossessed of her land in Saskatchewan and moved into Regina where she worked as a sex worker to provide for her children. She was brutally sexually asaulted and murdered by two white college aged males. Those other women? Those are some of the missing and murdered Indigenous women who have been assaulted and murdered on the streets of Vancouver. Not pictured here, is a Cree woman who the news papers called ‘A Squaw named Rosalie’. She is another Native woman who was murdered by a white guy.
Now, what do the tragic murders of these women have to do with your Halloween costume?
Every thing.
You see, when you dress up as this:
this:
or even this:
You are not only being disrespectful and racist, you are aiding in the sexualization and devaluing of Native women’s bodies. This is a stereotype Indigenous women have been battling since contact. The bodies of Indigenous women have been Settler men’s playgrounds for centuries, not because Indigenous women wanted it, but because of the power they exerted/exert over us. Historically, governments would withhold rations for reserves until they obtained access to the bodies of Native women, the Northwest Mounted Police (pre:RCMP police force in Canada) would turn their backs when Indigenous women would tell them what was happening, sometimes even exploiting starving families for their own access. You see, the sexualization and devaluing of Indigenous women has been a ploy for dispossession and domination by the Settler-Colonial state in order to gain access to our lands, our resources and destroy our communities. The branding of Indigenous women as ‘whores’, ‘licentious’, ‘squalid’ aided in the formation of the stigma and stereotypes that still haunt and influence the everyday lives of Native women. These costumes are a continuation of this. These costumes are a product of this ideology: the same ideology that allowed white men to have their way with Native girls since the 19th Century. When you put your body into the costume, the identity, of a ‘sexy Indian princess’ you are perpetuating the same idea, you are aiding in the continued sexualization of Indigenous women, the same devaluing. This devaluing of the bodies of Native women is what allowed the murderers of Pamela George to be given a minimum sentence, because they were young white men with a future, and she was nothing but a ‘Native prostitute’. This perpetuation of this ‘squalid squaw’ stereotype, is the reason that those missing and murdered women go unrecognised and unoticed by the general public and the cops that were supposed to protect them. When you wear these costumes, there are real life consequences that effect the lives of Indigenous women everywhere. When you put on those costumes, you are allowing the continued dispossession domination, assault, sexualization, disrespect, racialization, and colonization of Indigenous women and Indigenous communities.
All I am asking you, dear fellow Halloween-goer, is to think critically before you wear your costume. And if you choose to wear your racist costume, when someone calls you out on it,listen. Even if you think it is ruining your night to sit there and listen to a person tell you why you are hurting them. Because I can guarantee that they only ruined your night, but you ruined so much more.
all speculation and nonsensical bullshit. That woman was already sexualized, she was a hooker. and the rest were women who were natives and got murdered, how the fuck is that correlated with Halloween costumes. find me a single peer review study supporting the link between sexy native costumes and rape and murder among native women. do think the killers saw sexy native costumes then went ham killing natives? no. of all the essays and articles supporting this agenda of hyper political correctness this has to be by far the stupidest. there is no proof for any of your claims you simply show two ideas then twist them for your own agenda. something a creationist would do.
I told myself I wasn’t going to engage in any arguments with my post, but this one hit too close to home.
First of all, I think it would be important if you thought about why Pamela George was a sex worker, or why the other missing and murdered women were sex workers or in the situations they were in.
I reccomend you read “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George” by Sherene H. Razack, this will help you understand the connections I am making in this article between sexualized images and the sexualization of Indigenous women. Please pay close attention to how Razack discusses zones of “respectability” and zones of “degeneracy” within cities. This will explain why these women were engaging in survival sex work in ‘seedy’ neighbourhoods. Razack will also discuss a lot of the discursive reasonings I am relying on for my argument. You will understand the “squaw” paradigm Indigenous women face, and understand how these hypersexualized frameworks are constructed into mainstream consciousness of Indigenous women’s identity.
After you read the Razack piece, please read “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” by Sara Ahmed. You might have to re-read this piece again, it is quite dense and hard to understand the first time around. Though this paper does not explicitly deal with Indigenous women, it does discuss how People of Colour are relegated to certain zones of society because of whiteness as a construct of power. It will make clear a lot of what Razack is discussing on a deeper theoretical level.
Also, I reccomend reading “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture” by Rayna Green and “Changing Women: The Cross Currents of American Indian Feminine Identity” by Rebecca Tsosie. Another great one to read is “Their Spirit Lives Among Us: Aboriginal Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver Emerging into Visibility” by Dara Culhane.
These papers should help you understand my connections between imagery, such as costumes and the sexualization, abuse and ideologically constructed identity of Indigenous women.
Now, for some broader explorations in what I mean by Settler-Colonial power structures and concepts such as dispossession from land, please read “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire” by Cole Harris. Now, this one is a little off topic but the author, Coulthard, gives a fantastic description of Settler-Colonial power structures in Canada specifically and it’s definitely worth a read to gather a deeper understanding: “Subjects of an Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada.
Very tentatively I suggest checking in Michel Foucault’s theories of power, discourse and knowledge. There are some problematic elements, but it will help you understand how discourse is related to knowledge and how this is related to creating power.
So, I wouldn’t say there isn’t any proof for my claims; I would definitely say there’s more proof for my claims than creationism.
(via noteleanor)
Everyone needs to watch this video, left, right, center, apathetic—it doesn’t matter. This is the very essence of rape illiteracy that is still being fought in 2012.
Share with everyone. You never know who needs these words the most.
I love Melissa Harris-Perry and this is incredibly powerful.
“When we survive sexual assault, we are the gift.”
Brought me to tears.
You need the text of this letter. Man… Melissa Harris-Perry for PRESIDENT.
Dear Mr. Mourdock,
Sometimes I still flinch when I’m touched a certain way, even if it’s the loving embrace of my husband. I can’t stand to watch TV shows where rape is the central plot line. Even some seasons of the year are harder for me. Those of us who are sexual assault survivors call these triggers. We spend our lives — the lives we lead after the attack — avoiding and managing these triggers.
A congressional debate shouldn’t have to come with a trigger warning. But apparently, Richard, yours should. Because in Tuesday’s debate for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat, you said this Tuesday night during a debate in New Albany, Indiana.
“I believe that life begins at conception…The only exception I have, to have an abortion, is in that case of the life of the mother. I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
Rape and sexual assault are complicated experiences for survivors. Some of us fight, kick, scream, and resist at every moment. Some of us eventually give in to save our own lives or to manage the horror. Some of us know that what is happening is rape, others of us just know it is wrong, but don’t have the words to describe why. Some of us push the memories down and try to forget, others of us battle openly with the nightmares and scars every day. There is no one right way to survive. There is no one right way to feel.
As we heal, we learn not to judge ourselves or to judge our fellow survivors, because we learn that judgment can wound as deeply as assault. If a woman finds herself pregnant after a rape, we do not judge the choices she makes.
I am descended from American slaves. I have foremothers who found themselves pregnant with children whose birth increased the wealth of the very man who enslaved and raped them. Somehow, through the angst and misery of that experience some of those women found a way to love and embrace the children they bore from rape. So I do not doubt the compassion or judge the choice of a survivor who carries a rape pregnancy to term.
But the whole point is choice. Consent. You see, Mr. Mourdock, the violation of rape is more than physical. Rapists strip women of our right to choose, of our right to say no, of our right to control what is happening to our bodies. Most assailants tell us it is our fault. They tell us to be silent. Sometimes they even tell us it’s God’s will. That is the core violation of rape– it takes away choice.
Richard, you believe it is fine to ignore a women’s right to choose because of your interpretation of divinity. Sound familiar?
Let me explain something to you. When we survive sexual assault, we are the gift. When we survive, when we go on to love, to work, to speak out, to have fun, to laugh, to dance, to cry, tolive, when we do that, we defeat our attackers. For a moment, they strip us of our choices. As we heal, we take our choices back. We are the gift to ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation when we survive.
Now let me say this very clearly to you Mr Mourdock, and to all of your shameless endorsers: we did not survive an attack on our consent just to turn around and give up our right to choose to you. Not without a fight.
Are you sure you want to have that fight?
Sincerely,
Melissa
I love this woman.
: sigh :
(via marshlights)