There you have it folks!
Not only is Donald Trump a bigot, but now he is also a sexual assailant. Continue reading
culture
On the ‘trans race’ argument people use to try to invalidate transgender identities
Before anything I’m going to start of by pointing out that I’m trans but I’m white. So my space in talking about this will come largely from the fact that I’ve had many people including my father try to invalidate transgender identities by saying “well if trans race identities aren’t a thing then I’m sorry transgender identities can’t be either.” So this is mostly coming from a place of defending my own identity but also calling out racism. But since I don’t actually experience racism or understand all of the complexities of this topic I invite this to be a discussion and something people can add to via comments.
So often I hear this argument that tries to invalidate transgender people, and a large response in retort to this attitude is “well you just can’t compare them because they’re different things.” I totally agree with this and it is in fact the reason. Unfortunately, for some, it’s not enough to understand. So in order to justify my identity and also keep people from muddling race and gender, I’ve thought about it a lot and decided to share my reasoning so far in explaining why we can’t simply equate the two. Continue reading
People of Color Can’t Jump (In Hollywood)
Have you ever waked through a mall and felt either insanely targeted or extremely ignored by retailers? Does it ever feel like the 21st century is a mess of physical & “psychological warfare in the form of advertising” (Esmail, 14)?
If so, that’s usually a valid reality that is not only encouraged by managers within stores, but also executives and shareholders at the top of many film studio corporations and companies. Continue reading
Alright, Let’s Be Honest America: Black Women’s Bodies Are “Inappropriate”
Too early to bloom
As a young girl, I started undergoing puberty quite soon. It began at 8 years old to be exact, such that, without medical intervention, I could have gotten my period by age 10. Alarmed, my parents scrambled to find a solution that would both conserve my innocence and manage the unruly growth that didn’t fit the proper timeline.
Playing Games for Control
The dinosaur
I play a lot of games. Video games mainly but overall, if it’s a game I’ll try it. This goes back many, many, years to when I was a kid and fascinated by the old brick of a GameBoy I got at a flea market for $5. Despite my long running fascination, I’ve never given much thought as to why I love them so much. There are lots of fairly surface-level reasons, like the characters, the art, the gameplay itself, or the community and bringing friends together. While those are all well and good, I feel like there might be more, especially when it comes to the games that myself and others get really obsessed about.
I love my fuzz
Hello! I am a mammal!
I have never particularly enjoyed shaving. Growing up, its importance was never stressed. In fact, my mom would tell me she was happy it was winter because it meant she didn’t have to shave — the impression I got was that she didn’t really like to do it, herself. When I was a preteen, she bought me razors and shaving gel, but didn’t pressure me to use them, and shaving didn’t seem to be a rite of passage among my peers, the way buying a bra was. I was in no rush to do it myself. Continue reading
Gifs, Emojis, and Avatars: Self-Expression on the Internet
The internet creates a strange liminal space where we must invoke our bodies in order to represent ourselves. In the absence of facial expression, body language, or verbal description, one can express emotion and identity with other methods, like pictures, gifs, and emojis.
This video talks about how people on the internet often represent themselves through pictures, gifs, and videos. They caption or tag it with the phrase “Me RN” meaning “Me right now”. Even though these gifs or pictures are taken from shows, movies, or places that don’t relate to the user, through their abstraction and decontextualization people can appropriate these images to create themselves in webspace. These images capture a feeling or mood that can be difficult to evoke on the internet because it would require long descriptions, finesse of diction, and/or visual depiction that’s not possible or desirable to pull off.
In a similar vein, emojis are abstracted images used to represent emotions and ideas in internet liminal space. However, emojis differ from things like reaction images in that they are designed by the owners of the webspace themselves. Whereas reaction images derive from a third-party source and can be easily manipulated to suit the user’s needs, emojis are dependent on its creators. We could assume that while reaction images derive from a bottom-up appropriation of culture, emojis represent a top-down system that is limited by the ideology and resources of website owners and creators.
However, I’d like to think it’s more complicated than that. We cannot characterize website owners and creators as from the “top” and users at the “bottom”, when many creators derive from lower or middle class backgrounds and found their work through their own funding or crowdfunding. Users can be creators and creators are also users. Thus, while some of the same privilege systems are recreated on the web, we cannot assume that this is always true.
That’s why I believe that the internet represents an amazing new space for people to represent themselves and perhaps create new identities away from everyday restrictions.
“You’d look perfect if you got double-eyelid surgery”
I was sitting out on my grandma’s porch when she decided to tell me that I would apparently look perfect if I got double-eyelid surgery.
Speaking Up for the Selfie
The Day I Taught My Mom How To Take A Selfie (2006)
I am proudly, unabashedly, fond of selfies. Even before the advent of the camera phone and the digital camera, I was taking pictures of myself on film — the anticipation of what would come back from the lab always excited me. It’s amazing to me that we can so easily create images of ourselves, and the fact that our ability to do this is, historically speaking, Kind Of A Big Deal, is never far from my mind.
Continue reading
Unruly Bodies 