dan-draper:

imsoofuckingsad:

Remember, you can disappear into the woods whenever you want. You’re an adult.

tempting

neuroticpantomime:

lovewitch2016:

lovewitch2016:

nekoladyproductions:

lovewitch2016:

just want to say that countries like sweden and austria deporting brown and black gay men and forcing them go back to uganda or afghanistan or other nations that kill and jail people for being gay because those men don’t “look or act feminine/gay” is a blatant example of racialized homophobia. and this is why i keep reiterating that orientalism is dangerous for lgbt people of color, why i keep saying that homonationalism plays such a huge role in the oppression of lgbt people of color – and i say this bc it’s not just cishet whites who spread these homophobic and racist stereotypes about what “looking gay” entails, but it’s also white gays who back them up by talking about how “inherently homophobic” nonwhite / nonwestern people are, and how nonwhite / nonwestern people are “failing” to live up to some gay Gold Standard of appearance / gender non conformity and gender expression / gayness itself. fuck all white people, gay or straight, for putting the lives of nonwestern lgbt poc and nonwhite lgbt refugees at risk. 

I’m sorry but WHAT THE FUCK IS GOIN ON??

Sweden is deporting an openly gay Ugandan football player back to Uganda, which is a country that criminalizes homosexuality and where gay people can be killed for being out. This is very similar to when Austria rejected a gay Afghani teenage boy’s asylum petition on grounds that he didn’t “look or act gay, so he’d be fine in Afghanistan”. Essentially both incidents highlight the how state violence, racism, imperialism, and homonationalism all coincide to oppress LGBT people of color / LGBT immigrants and refugees / LGBT nonwesterners. 

I also want to say that yes it absolutely is the fault of the countries of origin for being violently homophobic, but 1) in Uganda’s case for instance, growth of homophobia within the culture came about as a result of white / Western christian missionary propaganda (many Christian missionaries still go to post-colonial nations and in addition to trying to convert local populations they obviously spread homophobic rhetoric) and 2) we absolutely shouldn’t try to justify or minimize the very real danger of homophobia and its perpetrators in nonwestern countries by blaming everything on colonialism, but the fact remains that these countries haven’t been able to cultivate the types of LGBT rights movements we see in the west because colonialism stifled that growth and progress. Like you can clearly see how overtly homophobic western countries still are, and most of them never experienced colonialism or imperialism – and so if even they have taken this long to have solidified LGBT rights movements, imagine how long it will take a country that only gained independence within the last 75 years. 

I would also argue part of Afghanistan’s violent homophobia is born from relatively recent imperialist efforts; the US-backed mujahedeen overthrew the secular socialist efforts at play and eventually mutated into the Taliban, locking the country in reactionary politics, violence, and instability for decades now.

manic-napi-dream-girl:

Not to be a contrarian prairiean but even indigenous people who didn’t have technologies/structures which surpassed european standards at contact and impress by modern day standards still deserve respect. My ancestors were impressive in that they lived with a positive impact on the land, even though they didn’t build permanent houses or anything like that. I refuse to be judged by eurocentric ideals of inventiveness and accomplishment.

fulltimehabibti:

fulltimehabibti:

sweden deporting an openly gay football player to uganda after years of persecution from ugandan press and authorities and who will absolutely be murdered on the spot just like his ex… bc his story was “too vague and not believable”

there’s a price on his head. he’s openly gay. his boyfriend comes to all his matches and practices. his ex boyfriend is DEAD bc they got outed.

fuck migrationsverket. support Partick Mulyanti.

tw: homophobia, suicide

please take a moment to sign the petition letting Patrick Mulyanti stay or keep him in your thoughts. He’s considering taking his own life if he gets sent back to Uganda.

https://www.skrivunder.com/utvisa_inte_oppet_homosexuella_patrick_till_uganda

plinytheyounger:

Moby Dick reception experiences, part #2, was that a English PhD student I knew at university came up to me at the bar to chat pretty much unpromptedly about his Moby Dick dissertation, which was about whether the text of Moby Dick, itself, could be considered as written on the surface of a whale, and then said to me very earnestly: “and thinking about this book, I realise I’ve had a very privileged life. I’ve studied a lot, I’ve travelled, I’ve eaten good food…but what I’ve never done is suffered. I want to know real suffering…I want to go somewhere and experience, genuinely experience suffering….do you have any ideas about how I should go about it?”

“written on the surface of a whale” would be a very limited edition 

molly-ren:

glumshoe:

I’ve had this noir detective character I’ve been toying with for a while who has everything but a central mystery to solve, and I have been promising myself every day that I will keep robots out of her story and make it a good and proper gay noir tale.

Well. I just had an idea for a very good mystery that would suit her character well. But it’s got robots.

Look @glumshoe I am going to be the bad influence here and say that if indie comics has taught me anything, it’s that any story with robots is EXTREMELY GAY.

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH NOIR+ROBOTS

wtfhistory:

historicity-reblogs:

notyourdamsel-in-distress:

fabledquill:

kogiopsis:

Why Gender History is Important (Asshole)

roachpatrol:

historicity-was-already-taken:

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important. 

“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants

I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating. 

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?

Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.

None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.

READ THIS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Girls,_Some_Hats_and_Hitler

There was a memoir, published in the 1980s and rediscovered
a few years ago, by a woman who’d been a milliner in Vienna – a review of the
book a few years ago rather unkindly describes her fiancé in terms something
like “a handsome and charming man with the self-preservation skills of a dodo.”
Luckily she eventually managed to drag him out of Austria and using every
contact she had in the fashion world, got them to England (where he ended up
interned for the duration of the war, but at least he survived.)