The shitty things we do to each other in the queer community

Diary of a Lipstick Terrorist

How call-out culture verges on the abusive and how the language we use around conflict enables us to push out members of our activist communities at will.

When I moved to Toronto two years ago, I immediately fell into a friendship group of femmes and other queers, largely thanks to the welcoming persona of one of the group. I was invited to parties and had femme friends I felt comfortable around for this first time in my life. I had a pretty good social life, pretty fast.

And then, about three months later, it all fell apart. I started dating someone who would later become my partner. This person had gone on a date with one of my new friends two days prior to meeting me. Later my friend asked me to stop seeing them, and I refused.

A week later, I found myself blocked on Facebook by another friend…

View original post 1,089 more words

Self-Love Amidst Marginalisation

Media Diversified

by Somayra Ismailjee 

This piece is for every woman who suffers at the hands of a white supremacist, cissexist and ableist heteropatriarchy, and for every woman who has suffered at the hands of colonialism and continues to suffer at the hands of Western imperialism.

This piece is for marginalised women. For women of colour. For trans women. Queer women. Gender non-conforming women. For women of religious minorities. Disabled women. Women who have suffered trauma or illness. Migrant women, who know the pain of leaving homes and the strength it takes to build new ones. Indigenous women. Displaced women. Women who have seen poverty and violence. Women abroad facing exploitation by our own corporations. Women seeking asylum, waiting indefinitely in barbaric conditions imposed by our own governments. Working class women. Homeless women. Single women. Polyamorous women. Married women. Women who are waiting for the right to marry…

View original post 531 more words

Your Feminism is Probably Bullshit…You Should Clean That Up

hoodfeminism

Patricia Arquette’s onstage comments from the Oscars were a meme before the show even finished airing. She was lauded for speaking up for equal pay for women, and bringing up the “Women earn 78 cents to every dollar a man earns” which sounds really awful. But which men? Which women? The answers of course are to a white man’s dollar and that white women make that 78 cents, while Asian women make an average of 90 cents to that dollar. Black, Latina, and Indigenous women make substantially less from 65 cents all the way down to 54 cents. So it’s important to talk about equal pay in a context of the reality that some women are making substantially less than others. And that white and Asian men and women earn more than many other groups including Black, Latino & Indigenous men. If we’re going to talk about equal pay in…

View original post 981 more words

53 important life lessons from Australian music of the ’90s

Ah, the ’90s.  Liz and Stephanie both came of age in that magical decade.  We have fond memories.  We both learned a lot from ’90s Australian music, and we thought it was time to share those lessons.

If this post has a theme song, it’s Kimbra’s “90’s Music”.  Obviously.

For the purposes of this post, 2000 is absolutely part of the ’90s.  YES, WE ARE INTO THAT LEVEL OF PEDANTRY AROUND HERE.  Well, Liz is.

1. At some point in its existence, every single share house in Australia will have “Accidentally Kelly Street” as its theme song. (“Accidentally Kelly Street”, Frente!)
2. No matter how great your post-punk ’80s synthpop homage is, a deliberately incorrect apostrophe in your band name will ensure you’re a one hit wonder. (“Cry”, The Mavis’s)
3. Thanks to that one montage in Heartbreak High, “Only When I’m Sleeping” will always seem melancholy…

View original post 1,432 more words

what should white people do / all the kindness I can afford

The Reality of Representation

areejnur

AREEJ NUR

“There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always though isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died  I would make a couple of mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”- Junot Diaz    

It is no secret that the most famous journalists, politicians and ‘experts’ in Australia are white. We know Australian…

View original post 1,047 more words

Beyond the Pros and Cons of Trigger Warnings: Collectivizing Healing

andrea smith's blog

Beyond the Pros and Cons of Trigger Warnings: Collectivizing Healing
Andrea Smith

When I used to work as an anti-violence crisis counselor full-time, a counselor in another agency confided in me that she was currently being battered by her partner. She did not want anyone to know, however, because she feared losing her job. “People won’t think I have my act together enough to be in this movement if they know what I am going through,” as she explained why she did not think she could tell anyone. She was part of an anti-violence movement that she did not feel would support her. She had to address this violence on her own.

I was part of a larger collective that organized human rights/legal training for Native boarding school survivors. Frequently, survivors would drive literally hundreds of miles to attend at considerable expense because they really wanted this information. But when…

View original post 986 more words

Why Is There So Much Slash Fic?: Some Analysis of the AO3 Census

Why Is There So Much Slash Fic?: Some Analysis of the AO3 Census.

First placement

Three days into my first nursing

placement I got the chance to do Obs. for real (not just on other students, friends, housemates etc.). A lady was unwell, unfortunately, vomiting a couple of times. I, and another student working the afternoon shift, took temperature with a

tympanic thermometer (goes in the ear, which is supposed to give a more accurate reading as it’s closer to the hypothalamus, which is responsible for regulating the body temperature, and beeps when it’s got a reading), counted respirations, took blood pressure and heart rate, and observed the test for blood sugar levels. Afterwards, I filled in the obs chart. The first of many, I’m sure.

The 6 Most Shockingly Irresponsible “Fitspiration” Photos

Reembody

The Reembody blog, up to this point, has been a thoughtful exploration of human movement, a subject about which I am extremely passionate.

Today, however, I’m mad and I’m going to tell you why.

I have been planning a blog post for a while on fitness misinformation, and it was originally going to be the same kind of thoughtful deconstruction found in my other installments. But then I read this and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever found in my newsfeed: so beautiful, in fact, that the rest of the health and fitness propaganda floating around Facebook like turds in a pool started to really, really piss me off.

So thoughtful deconstruction has been postponed for another day. Instead, we’re going to take a good look at a few of those turds and get pissed off together because, when someone preys upon your insecurities in an effort…

View original post 1,993 more words