Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Your identity is a slur

marbleflan:

I’ve been really preoccupied mentally with this ‘queer is a slur’ thing going around. I’ve seen a lot of ppl explaining the histories behind queer and its reclamation by queer folks, but I wanted to riff a little bit about the reasons, for me, that reclamation makes sense as a reaction in the first place.

When I was a young gay, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I remember there being one slur I heard a lot that I don’t really hear anymore. I don’t know if this was just an Alabama thing, but pretty much every gay person I knew had heard or used this word at some point and lots of str8 folks used it too: flamer. 

It was short for ‘flamboyant’–used primarily to describe gay men. I cannot even begin to describe to you my loathing for this word. Not only did I just fundamentally think it sounded stupid, I hated that: (1) it was consistently used to gender-police gay men, because of course acting flamboyant was all about not being sufficiently masculine; (2) the idea that to be acceptable queer folks need to hide their queer ways and act like str8s is distasteful; (3) str8 ppl would sometimes mis-define by claiming that it was because “gay people would burn in hell”; (4) gay men used it against each other as much as str8 ppl used it against gay men.

One of my best friends back then was a guy named Josh. Big, cuddly, sweet, I-dare-you-to-no- love-this-guy Josh. There was nothing particularly effete about Josh’s appearance, but he was not remotely interested in the trappings of masculinity; one of his many affectionately given nick-names was “Spirit Sparkles.” Josh often referred to himself as a flamer–he took a lot of pride and pleasure in the term. Sometimes he would introduce himself that way to other gay kids we met. It was a really aggressive stance, because it flipped the tables on anyone who wanted to use the term pejoratively. 

What I mean to say is that in a situation where one person called another a flamer as a derogatory term, you’d have to pick the term apart and point out all the things wrong with it: “Hey, you shouldn’t use that word because it implies that there’s something wrong with acting gay and anyway how does someone act gay that doesn’t make any sense, and also it sort of implies that men who have feminine attributes are wrong and that’s gross.” On the other hand, to embrace the term was to signal that everything deemed ‘bad’ by its use as a slur was in fact a source of pride. Moreover, it put the other person in the position of having to say what was wrong with being flamboyant. In this way, this act of reclamation was a Gordian knot solution–rather than untangle the term, reclamation allowed Josh to cut through all the bullshit.

One of the persistent problems with terminology in the queer community is that there are no words for us that haven’t been at one time or another a slur because for an enormous chunk of our history in Western culture the dictionary definition of who we are was itself imbued with negativity. Even the word homosexual was a pathologized medical term for a psychological disorder until 1974. In this context, reclaiming slurs as markers of pride is one of the only courses of action open to us: and, in fact, this is one of the key concepts in Pride parades. They sprung up in the wake of the 1969 Christopher Street Riots as an explicit way of saying to str8 communities: these people you denigrate the most (drag queens, transgender individuals, POC) in the gay community are a source of pride for us. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere. 

My identity is a slur. What I do and what I am are offensive to people. I cannot escape this, but I can embrace it. I can take pride in the very aspects of myself that others find perverse. I can–and I do.

(via windbladess)

iwasawas-strings:

legolokiismighty:

theprettiestboy:

sillysadskeleton:

mazarinedrake:

Donald Trump is exactly the kind of person that Jesus would have thrown out of the temple and beaten with a stick, and the fact that so many self-identified Christians want to put him in office tells you pretty everything wrong with white American Christianity. 

Because Jesus had authority at temples and beat people.

I 100% can’t tell if you’re joking here but he actually did chase people out of a temple at least once for using religion for their own selfish gains, complete with literal table flipping and improvised whips

So really it’s not that he would have trump thrown out as much as he would storm in and accuse him of turning his father’s house into a den of thieves before upending a table on his head

Dude, Jesus not only chased them out, he broke stuff they were selling, let loose all of their animals, and fucking flipped all the money-changing tables.

Jesus 100% would have been chasing Trump out with a table leg.

Canon Jesus 10000% better than fanon Jesus

(via littlestartopaz)

thoodleoo:

yknow i get why we make such an effort not to use words like gay and lesbian and bisexual for historical figures because their societies didn’t necessarily have those exact ideas of sexuality and it’s an important thing to remember but at the same time i’m a little cautious about that argument 1. because it’s never used when we call people from history straight and 2. some of these people are really fucking gay. like. alexander the great, after hephaestion’s death, crucified hephaestion’s physician and destroyed the nation of the cossaeans as a sacrifice to hephaestion, whom he wanted to divinize. hadrian deified his male lover antinous and had so many images of him made and left around the empire that every time we find one we’re like oh what do you know, another fucking antinous bust. sappho wrote lines like “that laugh, it sets the heart in my chest to flutter” about women. like shit son that’s gay.

(via wildehacked)

many mothers

fuckyeahisawthat:

I already reblogged a thing about Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron and the contrast between how they deal with motherhood, infertility and what it means to be a woman.

It’s surreal to think that these two movies came out just two weeks apart from one another in the US. In a way I feel a little bit sorry for AoU, because it would have looked like a perfectly okay summer blockbuster if Fury Road hadn’t come barreling down right on its tail and smashed all our pathetic lowball expectations to flaming shards in the sand.

When AoU came out, I had a lot of discussions with people about Natasha’s plotline. Because my gut reaction was certainly a massive eyeroll that the one female Avenger’s deep, dark secret is that she can’t have babies. But also, it’s not like a story about a woman who underwent forced sterilization is something we shouldn’t care about. (And in the US, this is a particular form of restriction of reproductive rights that’s disproportionately affected poor women of color.) And if she internalized the line that was fed to her, that she couldn’t be both a killer and a mother, that certainly doesn’t make it her fault.

But it still frustrated me, and my frustrations were really, really well articulated by this article. You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s excellent. But this is the relevant quote:

There’s nothing wrong with stories about women who are housewives or stories about women who struggle because they were forcibly prevented from having kids as a condition of whatever mission they chose to undertake. The problem is that with so few women in superhero movies, each of these portrayals stands not only for the choices Whedon made, but for all the choices he and many others didn’t and don’t make. The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it’s another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don’t. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn’t she?

These, for me, are scarcity problems. They are problems because there are so few opportunities to show women in action blockbusters that I tend to crave something very much capable of moving discussions of what those portrayals can be like forward.

…Scarcity will always drive us back to these same conversations about how every woman carries the obligation to represent What This Director Thinks Women Are For, and absolutely no answer to that question will ever be a good answer.

I think this is an interesting discussion in the context of Fury Road, because, intentionally or not, the movie takes on the scarcity problem in a couple of different ways.

On the most basic level, it gives us lots of women. In a context where studies have found that even background crowds in movies are on average only 17% women, Fury Road is FULL of women. Young women. Old women. Women who are disabled. Women who are physically strong and as skilled with weapons and vehicles as any of the men in their world. Women who are not physically strong but fight anyway. 80-year-old women who ride motorbikes and talk about all the kill shots they’ve made.

Look at the shot at the top of this post. Twelve women on screen at once! That’s more women in a single frame that some movies have speaking parts for.

Max may have his name on the title card, but he spends the movie surrounded by women. Team War Rig starts out as one man and six women; later it’s two men and five women; then it gets supplemented by a bunch more women in the third act. It’s almost an exact flip of the 20% rule of thumb, where one woman for every four men seems normal.

But Fury Road deals with the scarcity problem in another way, too, one that I think is particularly important given the film’s content. It gives us six women all reacting to the same circumstances of slavery and sexual violence, and allows them to have different, individualized, and sometimes contradictory reactions, all of which are presented as valid.

So we have Toast, who counts bullets and loads weapons, who hacks off her hair to spite Joe, who grabs his gun at a key moment and gets pistol-whipped for it, who spits on his corpse when he’s dead. Angharad, who self-injures, who uses her status as Joe’s favorite against him, who can be fearless, or reckless, with her own body, but also clings to nonviolence even when that tactic has limitations in a violent world, who stops Furiosa from killing Nux, but then pushes him out of a moving vehicle seconds later. Capable, who holds onto kindness, understanding and compassion, despite all the violence around her, who trusts Nux when Furiosa is pointing a gun at him and growling, “Get out,” and proves to be correct in her instincts. Dag, who retreats into her own head, but is often the first to sense danger, who hurls insults at her abuser, and also at Max while he’s pointing a gun at them. Cheedo, who gets scared and tries to run back to the person who hurt her, but then later uses her perceived fragility as a weapon. And Furiosa, who holds on to her rage even as she fights her way up the ranks to become Joe’s trusted lieutenant, and finally uses it to end him.

And none of these reactions are treated as better or worse or right or wrong or the correct way to be a survivor of violence. It’s okay to be angry; it’s okay to be kind; it’s okay to be scared. Because there are so many women in the movie, each one of them gets to be a unique character instead of an avatar of What This Director Thinks Women Are For.

Extend that to all of filmmaking, and to all the many kinds of identities that are underrepresented on screen today. That’s how you deal with the scarcity problem.

(via windbladess)

daddycavanagh:

Every time a neurotypical person suggests “just make a list” to someone who has add/adhd they owe every person with add/adhd 500$

(Source: transboyurameshi, via hellsatmyfeet)

buffdolls:

indianajjones:

bana05:

brightindie:

Don’t invite me anywhere last minute I enjoy doing nothing so I need to know ahead of time if my plan to do nothing needs to be changed

This is legit and people don’t realize it.

“hey what are you doing?”
“nothing” 
“oh great! so you are avaliab-”
“no you don’t understand. I’m doing nothing.” 

I have learned the following:

“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Why? What’s up?”

Then you have the entire space of their answer to come to terms with potentially doing something, or come up with a better thing to say than ‘nothing’.

Alternately, I find that answering with ‘relaxing’, totally conveys the right mood and people then generally reply with, “ohhhh I know that feeling, no problem, go relax!”

This might genuinely change my life.

(Source: indiedreams, via johanirae)

Arnold is still playing the terminator at 70, Stallone is still Rambo at 65, so why do we need a new Xena: Warrior Princess? Lucy Lawless is only in her 40s, ffs.

chandri:

chandri:

textualdeviance:

Reminded of people saying Katee Sackhoff, Katheryn Winnick, and Anna Torv are “too old” to play Carol Danvers becase they’re >35.

RDJ is 50, assholes.

Okay, this is the sixth time this has crossed my dash and I could no longer resist: 

Carol Danvers is a Colonel in the United States Air Force. The average age of USAF officers, full-stop, is 35*, and only 14% of all USAF officers are younger than 26*. The average age of a Colonel is 49.** Even if we assume they’re introducing an earlier-career Carol, a Lieutenant Colonel averages 45** and a Major 39**, so technically just about every actress I’ve seen suggested is more than a decade too young for the role.***

Not that that’s out of the ordinary for women on screen, who are routinely cast as younger than is even remotely feasible for their stated professions, particularly in military stories (unless you count Star Trek, though since a) the human lifespan in the Federation is drastically longer than ours and b) THAT IS A SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET IN THE DISTANT SOCIALIST UTOPIAN FUTURE it’s probably not super-relevant; the closest-to-reality portrayal - Stargate won awards for its faithful representation of the USAF - I can actually think of right now is Sam Carter, who makes Major at ~32, Lieutenant Colonel at 36 and full-bird Colonel at 39, BUT THEN AGAIN she is part of a super-rarefied secret program and one of the four smartest people on the planet so adjust for sanity.****

Anyway tl;dr: Hollywood’s ageist/sexist casting double standards are ridiculous and offensive and bad for verisimilitude which is something you’d think an industry founded on convincingly portraying the fictional would care more about, Dear Hollywood, Katee Sackhoff and Katheryn Winnick are great but I would prefer it if you cast a more mature lady as Carol Danvers, please and thank you, obviously I would prefer Amanda Tapping because then you could cast Claudia Black as Jessica Drew and I would EXPIRE FROM JOY but I can learn to live with disappointment.

—

*From the Air Force Personnel Center website.

**These particular statistics are from 1997, but I cannot imagine age ranges have changed as much as gender distribution; someone feel free to correct me. As I understand it, mostly promotions are based on years of service, so they’re unlikely to have changed much above Captain. Consider, too, that USAF officers generally have a shit-ton of advanced education in addition to military training. 60.8% of officers have advanced or professional degrees and 48.6%* have master’s degrees and anybody hoping to make Colonel one day is all but required to have a master’s degree (or equivalent). So assuming you’re being sensible and getting that out of the way up-front while maybe the USAF will pay for it, that’s - start at age 18, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree - your average starting age for active, post-degrees service would be 22-24 depending on what combo of education/training you go with. PROBABLY NOT A LOT OF 25-YEAR-OLD CAPTAINS IS WHAT I’M SAYING.

***All of this is, of course, irrelevant if they do something unpardonably stupid like write out Carol’s military backstory, in which case of course I will burn down the fucking world and salt the earth.

****I will not pretend that the overwhelming majority of my casual knowledge of American military ranks does not come from Stargate or my over-researching because I was writing Stargate fic at the time. Whatever.*****

*****I am so sorry about all the confusing asterisks. My footnotes aren’t even funny like Pratchett’s.

P.P.S. HOW DARE ANYONE EVEN SUGGEST RECASTING LUCY LAWLESS SHE IS THE FLAWLESS AND ETERNAL WARRIOR PRINCESS OF MY HEART AND IF YOU THINK IT’S HARD TO GET PROMOTED ABOVE THE ZONE AS A LADY IN THE REAL WORLD IMAGINE HOW LONG IT TAKES TO BUILD A TERRIFYING REPUTATION CONQUERING SWATHES OF GREECE IN AN ERA BEFORE COMPUTERS OR AIR TRAVEL FIGHT ME OH WAIT NEVER MIND XENA WILL TAKE CARE OF THAT FOR ME

With rumours circulating re: Brie Larson (who is 26) being considered for Captain Marvel, I see it’s time to post this again, because honestly, the research is done and I don’t want to go and do it again.

The thing is, I know they’re going to do it. They’re going to cast someone who is younger than I am to play a character who by all rights, in accordance with her experiences, should be nearly a decade my senior. Even if they write us up a Carol who is a decade earlier in her career than in comics canon (not that that’s any better), 26 is still too young to play a Major, or a Lieutenant-Colonel, or even, IMHO, a Captain, anywhere near convincingly. 

I have a problem with the possibility that this suggests, that they’re writing a Carol who is over a decade younger than the majority of our current cast of white male superheroes, rather than their contemporary. I have a problem with the likelihood that this will mean that her rank will be inferior to the characters that have a rank. Honestly, I have a problem with Carol Danvers calling anyone Sir (especially Captain America), which is partly my thing but honestly is mostly in keeping with her character. And I have a real, serious problem with the outside possibility of them ignoring/wiping out her decades of military service.

I won’t lie: I will watch this movie. Probably more than once, because let’s be real: I’d just be too pathetically grateful that they’d made it at all to do anything else. But I will also criticize the fuck out of anything that disrespects Carol’s history and what she represents. 

I mean… if they ever actually make it. I try not to pay too much attention to “updates” on “progress” any more. It’s just too frustrating.

(Source: mysharona1987, via yea-lets-do-this-shit)

robotlyra:

Sometimes I feel like unhinging my jaw & screaming at the entrenched establishment “HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT WE ARE ALL BROKE?” Because 9 times out of 10, when a “millennial” does something weird, untraditional, or otherwise confusing to previous generations, the core reason is because we’re broke, thus the old ways are not accessible to us, so we’re using new stopgaps and alternatives. An “obsession” with phones/social media? It’s a cheap way to socially connect when many of us are pressed for time due to work or can’t afford to go out. A fixation on food? It’s the last comfort splurge we can feasibly afford, when vacations and the like are not an optipn. A resistance to large life milestone acquisitions? Can’t afford houses, cars, raising children. Weird craft/homebrew/DIY hobbies? Trying to save money, or spin some profit in whatever way can be managed. Widespread cynicism, anxiety and depression? We literally have to take up group fundraising collections for things like emergency expenses, rent and medical care. We’re broke and it’s slowly driving us bananas.

(via clockwork-mockingbird)

Anyway

kaylapocalypse:

The only good thing to emerge from this Hydra!Cap trash is the acknowledgement of american comic’s rich Jewish history.

Jewish people did to comics the same thing black people did to  American music.

They rolled up in here, looked around like  “is this the best y'all could do?” Then sat down with their pens like “Don’t worry, we got u fam” and *muffled rap music in the background* 

So yeah.

This is horrible, but you know what Jack Kirby WOULD be proud of?  Two generations after WWII, Millions of children  crying out at antisemitism, educating themselves about antisemitism  and not letting this go unchallenged even though we have so much less systemic power than the people creating the media that needs to be challenged.

 Because Kirby might be dead and Cap might be Hydra, but we don’t care, we’re still punching ol’ Hitler in the jaw. 

And we’re still following that kid from Brooklyn who just wouldn’t quit. 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

On Nazi Captain America

fireboltinsky4:

Okay everyone. So while we’ve all been indignant and disgusted by Nazi Cap, the fact that his creators are Jewish, and that it goes against everything Steve Rogers was meant to stand for, there’s a few things the writers completely and utterly missed.

Now, I want to come out and say that I am not Jewish and that I am not trying to make this trivial to them. I think that it is abhorrent and I am completely, utterly shocked they would violate a character like this. I am not happy.

I also have yet to read the comic and, frankly, I’m not going to buy it. I won’t give Marvel money for this shit. What I have is what I’ve taken from tumblr and my own research, so take this with a grain of salt.

So while the fact he is now a Nazi and has never been, apparently, a good person, there is something important that I wanted to focus on.

Like the fact that Steve Rogers would have NEVER been chosen by HYDRA in the first place.

Let me tell you guys about something–Eugenics.

This was a big deal in the 20s and 30s. Google it. The short answer is this: the perfect race. The desired traits. The perfect human being. Sounds familiar, right? Hitler used it for his Aryan race. Blonde, blue-eyed, tall (i.e. what he wasn’t). We ought to know about that.

Well, here’s the thing–it started in the USA. Well, not completely. The idea of Eugenics has been around since Plato. But the idea that people who weren’t “perfect” should be removed from society became pretty big in the USA in the 20s. Hitler borrowed the principals of it from the US. You’ve heard of the Kennedys. The oldest daughter was sterilized against her will, lobotomized, and locked up. Don’t believe me? Look it up. This was common. It was common through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. It was repealed in 1972. People who were mentally ill were locked away and sterilized. When it became too expensive to house those people, they government shut the program down and those people who had been locked away were suddenly homeless because no one wanted them. Hitler got his Nazi Youth from the USA, people.

Back to the topic at hand.

Steve Rogers was Irish and most likely Catholic. Click here and look under “early life”.

Remember little orphan Annie? With her cute little red hair? Yeah. That means she’s Irish. Not a big deal right? Everyone today loves the Irish. Being Irish or part Irish nowadays is, well, cool.

Yeah, no, not back then. The Irish were hated. You did not advertise the fact that you were Irish back then because you would be beat up. Annie was made an Irish girl because she wasn’t wanted. That reboot in 2014? Annie is now African American because they are among the children who are adopted the least, nowadays. HYDRA would not take Steve Rogers in simply because he was Irish. But hey! It gets better.

Steve Rogers wasn’t healthy.

See, Eugenics only works if the desired people are healthy. You don’t want unhealthy people. So Steve, with his asthma and his heart conditions and his color blindness and his partially deafness … well. Yeah. HYDRA would have left him and his mother to die. His father is now a drunk in the comics, right? Drunk Irish. They would have been tossed for that. His mother was single. She worked instead of remarrying. Tossed for that.

So this woman who took Sarah and Steve in an indoctrinated him into HYDRA? Nope. Wouldn’t have happened–not even out of the “goodness of her heart.”

Also, literally the only people stopping Steve Rogers from being institutionalized and sterilized were Sarah and Bucky. When Sarah died, Bucky would have kept Steve out (MCU, for those fans.)

Steve is a good person. He would have been more loyal to Bucky than anyone else. That’s the MCU. In the comics, well … I guess Steve would have found a way to stay out.

So HYDRA would never have looked twice at poor little Steven G. Rogers. They simply wouldn’t have. He wasn’t “perfect.”

Personally, I think some of the reason why Steve was chosen for the serum was not only because he is a good person, but also because he was the exact opposite of what the Nazis and the Eugenicist considered desirable. It was sort of a “Fuck You” to the Nazis.

So while it’s horrifically offensive that Cap has been turned into a Nazi and that, suddenly, half his character no longer makes sense (Thor’s hammer? The fact he provably has no prejudices? The fact that he would have turned out like the Red Skull if he had been a bad person when injected with the serum?), it’s historically inaccurate. There is no way some Eugenicists would have looked at Steve and told him he was destined for greatness. There is no way a Eugenicists would have taken pity on poor, unhealthy Irish folk. There is no way a single mother and her sickly kid would have been accepted into the Nazi fold. There is no way Steve Rogers would have been indoctrinated into the Nazi ideals. He would have never been chosen in the first place.

The writers are completely ignoring history and completely ignoring the time period. The events and the people’s ideals played an ENORMOUS role in Steve’s life. The writers literally do not understand just what that time period was like. They threw everything out and ignored it. Not only have they done a disservice to the Jewish, Catholic, Romani, and Homosexual (and every other group that suffered under the Nazi reign–while 6 million Jews died, the total death toll was 12 million) communities they are doing a disservice to the USA’s history, both good and bad.

This is a problem. Sure, Steve Rogers as bisexual would be great. But this? I don’t care what anyone says. If someone tells you this is no big deal, tell them they don’t understand the cultural and historical impact this has. This comic may be lost in the recesses of time, but it still exists, now.

Some people may still remember the 20s and 30s, but there’s a century between the rest of us and that time period. Most of us can only know that era through history–and this is why the writers should have done that time justice. People often learn more fact through fiction than they do in school. This was an injustice.

And writers?

Only a handful of people ever saw Steve’s worth, andHYDRA was never one of them.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)