A catcall is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The purity myth is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The fetishization of female purity in a world where catcalls are an acceptable form of communication telegraphs one thing very clearly:
“Women, stop sexualizing yourselves—that’s our job, and you’re taking all the fun out of it.”
The sexualization of women is only appealing if it’s nonconsensual. Otherwise it’s “sluttiness,” and sluttiness is agency and agency is threatening.
Silence is the best reply to a fool.
The “I” that approaches the text is itself already a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)… . Subjectivity is generally imagined as a plenitude with which I encumber the text, but in fact this faked plenitude is only the wake of all the codes that constitute me, so that ultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes
The shift in nomenclature toward an “LGBT” community, rather than a “queer” one, marked the beginning of a new phase in the social history of sexual and gender identity politics in the United States. It represented a retreat from the more radical concept of alliance, resistance, and rebellion by the different groups against the same oppressive structures in the dominant culture and the adoption instead of a liberal model of minority tolerance and inclusion—sometimes amounting to little more than a “politically correct” gesture of token inclusion.
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Susan Stryker on the tokenization of transgender people in the retreat from “queer” of the 1990s.—Transgender History, 2008, pg. 137 (via artemariposa)
Susan is just phenomenal.
(via anthropologeist)
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My horror and my happiness, my capital and my gains, my hope and my idiocy, my falsity and my fairness, my deformity and my energy, my revolt and my appeal, my exaggerations, my accuracy, my memory, my grief, my embarrassment, my exuberance, my despondency, my ridiculousness, my overdose, my money, my dads, my penury, my failure, my maternity, my murder, my betrayal, my funeral and my trial, my gossip, my perversion, my revenge, my forgiveness, my entrance, my finale, my authorship, my punishment, my sentences, my tragedy, my escape, my vanity, my labor and my estate, my beach and my boys, my summertime and my eternal spring, my, my, my, my (AAAHHH) elations!
Repeat after me:
I am not a problem
to be solved. Repeat after me:
I am worthy I am worthy I am
neither the mistake nor
the punishment.
You have my permission not to love me;
I am a cathedral of deadbolts
and I’d rather burn myself down
than change the locks.
So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures - white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture -una cultura mestiza- with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.
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Borderlands-La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa (via fronteriza)
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