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Intersectionality - Blog Posts
SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK 🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣
Some of y'all SERIOUSLY need better awareness and critical thinking, especially when it comes to POC characters; particularly this issue is more prevalent with black characters and women of color, and how you perceive and react to them.
It's shockingly and VERY concerningly common to see this issue occur and to see the lack of self-awareness or flat out willful ignorance to their own internal biases coming out into fandom spaces and their interactions with media. All too often, there is hypercriticality or malice lunged at POC characters, but their white counterparts or even white characters who are absolutely abominable with their views and/or actions get a pass or even end up with sympathizers trying to excuse their actions and views.
Not to mention, it's getting frighteningly more prevalent/common with the rise of right-wing talking points and ideology; at least here in the States.
We need to be aware and alert about this, and always view media and the analysis or reaction to media, INCLUDING OUR -OWN- VIEWS AND ACTIONS, with a critical and analytical eye. We need to question the "why" behind all of it instead of jumping onto and believing in first instinct.
i know of course that fandoms are not immune from cultural and societal biases but it still disappoints me that people in fandom will be blatantly sexist and racist and not even critically think about where exactly those takes are coming from
here's your friendly reminder that disability advocacy has to be intersectional!
happy disability pride month to BIPOC disabled folk!
happy disability pride month to queer disabled folk!
happy disability pride month to disabled women!
happy disability pride month to those with physical disabilities!
happy disability pride month to those with mental disabilities!
happy disability pride month to those with invisible disabilities!
happy disability pride month to those with visible disabilities!
happy disability pride month who are unable to work due to their disability!
happy disability pride month to those who are seen as "Not Disabled Enough"!
happy disability pride month to those whose disabilities arent recognised as a disability!
happy disability pride month to those who require any amount of mobility aids!
happy disability pride month to those with high support needs!
happy disability pride month to those with low support needs!
happy disability pride month to people who are demonised because of their disability!
happy disability pride month to literally every kind of disabled person!!
Nuclear Wasteland
The nuclear war had been over for two years, but the world was still a very different place. The few remaining cities were overcrowded and chaotic, and resources were scarce. Soot from all the firestorms still blocked out sunlight, while enemies might strike again at any time.
In one of these cities, a man named Adam was trying to board a lorry to get necessities for his parents and children, all of them on the autism spectrum like himself. He had been finding transportation for hours, and he was starting to get frustrated.
"I'm an autistic caregiver," he said to the soldiers guarding the lorry. "I need to get on board to get food and medicine for my parents and children, who are autistic too."
The soldiers looked bored. "We have many families with autistic children in this city," one of them replied.
"Please, I mean I am also an autistic person myself. My sensory issues mean I need to stay warm more than others as I fetch necessities for my family. I cannot be trekking in this frozen wasteland for too long."
"Ah, I hear you correctly now. But what's a person with special needs doing out in the open right now? Hunker down in your bunker and tell your family to run their own errands."
"No, no, you heard me correctly. They are also autistic."
"So your kids are the ones who're autistic?"
"I am, too."
The soldiers still didn't understand. "How can an autistic person be a caregiver?"
"It is difficult but necessary," Adam said. "Autism often runs in the family."
"Poor thing. The mother didn't survive the bombings? Get the kids' grandparents to help out."
"Like I've said before, they're autistic themselves. Their symptoms have been worsening with age. They're practically deaf to vehicle horns, and their bodies feel like rumpled bags of broken bones."
The soldiers shook their heads. "Come up with a more believable multigenerational sad-sack story, dude. I don't even know autistic people have girlfriends in peacetime, let alone in war and breeding till now. At most, you're either just autistic or just a caregiver and neither would make you so special," one of them said.
"Get your facts right before you cosplay autism. Autistic guys live in their own heads. They don't run all over the place for parents or kids," another chimed in.
"You can't get on board. Period."
Adam was starting to lose his temper. "I need to get on board!" he shouted. "My family is depending on me!"
The soldiers raised their guns. "Back off!" they ordered.
Soldiers further away, who were not even paying attention to them or Adam before, turned their heads and threw accusatory glances at him.
Adam knew that he couldn't argue with them. He turned and walked away.
Later that night, he was so worn out and frostbitten he huddled among trash bags in an alley behind a dilapidated power station, his chest heaving against the supplies. A string of fairy lights peeked out from one of the bags, its extinguished bulbs emptied of dreams.
Adam started to imagine the fairy lights powered on, glowing underwater and on the tiers of a musical fountain buttressed by statues of mythical guardians, but quickly punched himself in the head, the way his class monitor, flanked by bootlicking underlings, repeatedly did to him all those years ago. Why couldn't his identity be neat and simple? Be either the stereotypical autistic tech genius or a typical family man. Have either so-called autistic interests in some scientific or mathematical field or the skill to deceive himself and abandon his passion for interior design from the beginning. What sort of rational person would care about art and decoration when radiation was in your only meal of the day while tank guns pointed everywhere?
If he could just switch his interests and match them with economic logic as readily as nerds in old clips solved Rubik's Cube in a split second, he would be the one launching the stealth planes that must be gliding overhead right now, not a pathetic hitchhiker of a military lorry. His family would be cloistered away in one of those underground enclaves for the super wealthy, with all the aides and sitters they needed.
The red hazard sign on the drab wall opposite seemed to be glaring at Adam: We told you so. No, rewind that a second. How marvelous his aesthetic mind still had the luxury to judge the appeal of the power station, as if a red sign on some royal blue background could order food to automatically march into stomachs.
Adam's train of thoughts came to a halt. He had a brainwave.
Years later, a group of journalists felt like they were stepping into a dream as they navigated an office space filled with art and soothing music. There were little bulbs in shades of purple everywhere, glowing in the low-light conditions its creative employees preferred to work in. In the depths of the office were laboratories and showrooms with magenta lights in various stylistic arrangements. Below the lights were lettuces, cabbages, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes and many other crops, some of which looked healthier than those grown under the sunlight of the pre-apocalypse years. The chlorophyll hungrily absorbed the different combinations of red and blue light tailored for the plants. The greatest value a design firm could bring to indoor agriculture, though, was optimization of lighting and area usage under the varying and challenging space conditions of post-apocalypse dwellings. Adam was feeding stomachs one fairy light at a time.
The old question popped up. "What's the secret to your success?"
"I don't have a convenient, pared-down identity," Adam replied simply.
Credits
Story concept: Human
Story setting: FierceOcean @ Character.ai
Text: Mostly Human + some AI input
Images: Mostly Character.ai + some Human input
References
Liang, Y., Kang, C., Kaiser, E. et al. Red/blue light ratios induce morphology and physiology alterations differently in cucumber and tomato. Sci. Hortic. 281, 109995 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.109995
Sabzalian, M.R., Heydarizadeh, P., Zahedi, M. et al. High performance of vegetables, flowers, and medicinal plants in a red-blue LED incubator for indoor plant production. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 34, 879–886 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-014-0209-6
Winstead, D.J., Jacobson, M.G. Food resilience in a dark catastrophe: A new way of looking at tropical wild edible plants. Ambio 51, 1949–1962 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01715-1
Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K. et al. Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nat Food 3, 586–596 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0
Among Wakanda Forever's many MANY achievements is its superb indictment of white feminism. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' character is the classic superficially "empowered" woman in a high-level corporate job who does nothing to empower any other woman--who in fact only seeks to infiltrate and sustain the same colonial patriarchy that oppresses most of the world for her own benefit. Contrast this with the true feminism of Wakanda and Talokan, where women are not only on equal footing with men, but play an active role in creating and maintaining societies that would have no room for such backwards notions as misogyny in the first place. Wakanda Forever is a masterpiece.
Great stuff. It's amazing how love is a universal experience across diverse cultures and societies.
Allah Loves Equality - A Voice for LGBTQIA+ Muslims & Minorities
🌈☪️Allah Loves Equality is a revolutionary campaign that was started by a Pakistani Gay Muslim Activist Wajahat Abbas Kazmi The campaign amplified the voices of marginalised womxn including Queer womxn,Pakistani LGBTQ community as well as LGBTQIA+ muslims.Hashtag #AllahLovesEquality has been trending since 2016.The campaign gain both supports & criticisms. Through his campaign,wajahat wanted to spread the message of TRUE Islam,wanted to end hate & bigotry within muslim societies.The message of ''Allah Loves Equality'' was spred across the continents.A documentary film by the same name was directed by Wajahat Abbas Kazmi to documents the lives of queer muslims in Islamic State of Pakistan🇵🇰 It was a very courageous thing that he has done.Like A jihad for Love,Poshida:Pakistan's Hidden LGBT, Allah Loves Equality film abled to show Pakistan's underground queer & sexual minority.
Wajahat Abbas Kazmi campaigning in Pride March of Italy 🇮🇹🇵🇰🏳️🌈
Turkish Gay muslim model is holding #AllahLovesEquality
#AllahLoveEquality in Europe's first Muslim LGBTQ+ Pride 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈☪️
A Queer Palestianian holding #AllahLovesEquality in Jerusalem Pride.
Filipino Muslim Filmmaker Rhadem Musawah marching with #AllahLovesEquality 🇵🇭🏳️🌈
U.S. Just Threatened To Restrict Aid To Ghana For Passing Anti-LGBTQ Bill!
Context: This explains how the U.S has no real intention of the liberation of queer communities but likes to pretend it does by playing the white savior.
If your feminism doesn't include Iranian and Afghan women, then you're not a feminist.
If your feminism doesn't include women suffering in highly patriarchial societies, then you're not a feminist.
If your feminism doesn't include honour killing victims, then you're not a feminist.
If your feminism doesn't include women suffering at the hands of a zealot religious ideology, then you're not a feminist.
If you support women who want to wear the hijab, but don't support women who don't want to wear it, then you're a morally corrupted person.
// this video needed to be shared here too..
I’ve seen several posts (and a lot of reposts of those posts) talking about the misogyny in rap music produced by men, and while I think that having a conversation about misogyny in entertainment is incredibly important, I also think it’s important to think about why we’re focused so heavily on demonizing rap music in particular.
A lot of mainstream music produced by men, regardless of it’s genre, has the same messaging of misogyny, rape culture, sexism, etc. If you read a lot of the lyrics of popular club/dance music especially, it’s hiding in plain sight. However, in a world in which white is the norm, we’re used to hearing that type of messaging disguised underneath the soothing, fun loving, catchy melodies sung by familiar voices so we sing along without thinking about the words leaving our mouths. Rap, while it’s still a very popular genre, goes against that familiar, comfortable habit of hiding lyrics and is very straightforward, and therefore our condemnation increases because it forces you to interact with the lyrics instead of shutting off your brain.
I don’t advocate for a lack of critical thinking or criticism for the genre, in fact I’m asking for the opposite. Is Rap truly the worst genre for misogyny? Because I could, and am, arguing that abusive lyrics hidden in songs that play over the speakers at every establishment (and especially around children) with no issue, is just as bad if not worse. Genres such as Country, which is just as full of misogyny, are treated with a kind of “roll your eyes and get over it” attitude. We treat it as a joke, if we acknowledge it at all. Those silly, backwards folk living in a cornfield town don’t know any better, really.
Socially, we also forgive and forget about male violence much quicker when the man is white. I’ve watched people blow up angrily about a white man’s crime and after 6 months it’s forgotten to the point nobody remembers it when I bring it up. However a black man in that same situation will have his disgrace last years longer. This is not me advocating in any way for everyone to get the white man treatment, but for everyone to have an accurate social reaction to the crime itself without the person’s race tainting how we view him (and by extension, those in his racial group).
Rap, while it has some serious bad apples now, has an incredibly important cultural history of pushing for social change that other popular genres in the world today do not, and it’s ironic to me that it is now seen as the most morally corrupt and oppressive genre. Associating the entire genre solely with low intelligence (both in the artist and the audience), general moral failing and filth, and a backwards view on society when there are so many rappers who have pushed for social changes harder than any other musicians, when you do not similarly condemn other musical genres, is unfortunately a case of internalized racism.
I will reiterate once again that I am not in any way saying that anyone or anything should get off scot-free or without deep criticism. Pointing out an unfair balance in how we condemn groups of people is simply that, pointing it out. I think we need more criticism but I think that criticism needs to be nuanced, complete, and informed. I would also urge you to look into smaller or more underground rappers/rap movements because there is a lot to enjoy and many good people to support when you’re able to get past the big names that do well for a reason. The majority of our culture today is misogynistic so misogynistic lyrics appeal to the general masses, and people who refuse to fall under that group don’t end up as famous as those who do.
[Edited to hopefully make my point easier to understand bc I was getting several reposts that seemed to be taking away a message I didn’t mean to put across]