thatlitgirl writes an uber insightful post about queerness in Western Superhero media: The lies, the scars, the musculature.

Alan Scott, the once and future Golden Age Green Lantern, is gay, in the new DC Universe. Is there a maximum quota of queer people that they had to retcon his son Obsidian out of existence to fill? How tokenistic.

More importantly – this reboot Alan is a media mogul, a wealthy white man, in a genre where queer characters who aren’t wealthy white men get little enough airtime as it is.

The highest-profile character who doesn’t hit those buttons is Kate Kane, who is wealthy and white, but also a Jewish woman. Intan called it “homogeneous diversity”, which is about correct.

Even amongst well-off white women characters, who remembers Ayla Ranzz and Salu Digby? Then there is Renee Montoya, who is a B-list character; and her ex-girlfriend Daria Hernandez, another queer working-class Latina, has not made an appearance in ages. There is Karma, a Vietnamese-USAmerican displaced by war, on whose body has been projected objectification and fat hatred. And Mystique, whose gender/queerness is either ignored or used to titillate.

This applies not just to canonically queer characters, I feel, but also to the queering of characters in fanwork.

As I tweeted: “I wonder what Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark fics say about masculinity, dominance, and capitalism.”

The superhero genre was – once, long ago – fantastically subversive. It hasn’t been that way for a long time, of course, but I do blame the visibility of RDJ’s Tony Stark in the Jon Favreau films, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s, for telling and reaffirming stories about Western saviours in conflict zones and affluent saviours in urban ghettos.

Postcolonials Read Comics (And We’re Pissed).

Gail Simone depicted Singapore in Birds of Prey as a crime-riddled, totalitarian state inhabited by decadent drug lords. That’s not as bad as Marvel’s Principality of Madripoor, a parallel Singapore of authoritarianism and corruption eventually salvated by neo-colonial occupation; but that’s still better than in The Authority, where the fictional PRC destroyed the fictional Singapore in a secret nuclear attack.

Another interesting relationship between Singapore and superheroes: Ng Chin Han played the villainous Hong Kong accountant Lau in The Dark Knight.

[...] I want to see a Singaporean superhero genre that can amply offer critique on issues like race and gender politics in Singapore without relying on orientalist tropes or orientalised narratives of Asian political authority. [...] Asian political systems are either failed states or dictatorships, because the Orientals cannot be trusted to govern themselves. – A sign of how deeply we have internalised this discourse is evident in even homegrown criticism of the political system. I trust we can analyse and critique without resorting to such imagery, such portrayals.

Singaporean superheroes? I’ve been dreaming of this for years. If we postcolonials could take steampunk – with its intrinsic Victoriana – and subvert it, can we do the same for the superhero genre?

I could talk about the depiction of every non-western/developing nation in western comics. But I wouldn't end.

Willow is always amazing and you have to read it because I cannot quote it all: Transethnicity Claims, Piracy, Faeries & Appropriation.

The 1st thing to hit me, is how mocking this is to transgendered individuals, that their situation is seen as so damn 'science fiction', somehow, that something as mocking as 'Trans Ethnic' can be set up as part of any kind of conversation. 'So, you think you're not the gender you physically appear to be / were assigned at birth? Ha! I top you. I don't think I'm the ethnicity 'assigned' to me at birth/ that I appear as. And none of this having a damn thing to do with the modification of birth certificates so that NDN people could pass as non-native for a chance at a better life. None of this gets into black who passed as white, to try and life a better, safer life within a white supremacist state. None of this gets into trans racial adoptees and their personal conflicts of identity and how they feel vs how they're treated.

[...]

Cultural appropriation seems to exist, because in order to be white and in order to be USian, various peoples several decades ago decided to put aside their cultural and ethnic heritage in order to fit in. The less you showed some distinct aspect of your identity the more it supposedly meant you were leaving it behind to embrace your new Usian life.

So goodbye, traditions, language, clothing, manners, foods, songs and stories. And now here we are, a couple generations later, with a set of people who want something to belong to, but even in this day and age of Ancestry.com (for white folk) they're not going back to research what they gave up. And I don't know if it's because the attitudes to give it up and leave it behind are still strong, if sub and unconscious. They're instead reaching towards those peoples who've fought and struggled and suffered to hold on to anything at all. And reaching towards peoples whose suffering and oppression has formed a new culture and new identity within this 'new land'. So I suppose it's not surprising so many people want to be Native American - because how much more 'belonging' to this new land could one be? Or that they want to be 'Black' which is an identity that was created on these shores (well these and other places of colonialist import of slaves).

But history and struggle, accomplishment and identity, folklore, stories and song, foods, clothing and culture are not something you can buy in a store.

[...] But whoa. Looking at the terms 'Trans Ethnic', however, makes me feel as if minority/non dominant/colonized culture and societies are somehow as mythical and unreal as fairies, dragons, and spiritual wolves and bears - because ANYONE can decide that's who and what they are and decide to pick it up and somehow 'live by it'. And while you cannot disrespect fairies and dragons, and disrespecting wolves or bears gets you murdered and dead - disrespecting non dominant ethnicities happens, is real, is hurtful and painful and dehumanizing and devaluing.

If your inner self is a water dragon, well, whatever. That's your thing. If your inner self is black? Fuck you. There have always been assholes (particularly teenagers), dressing in certain clothes, copying certain slang, listening to certain music and claiming they were down with __insert ethnic minority here__. New age dressing it up as 'Trans Ethnicism' doesn't change the asshole badge.

[...]

I said I'd talk about Trans Ablism / Trans Disablism, and I will. Disability has a culture, it has many in fact. Deaf culture, isn't blind culture, isn't the myriad wheelchair cultures, isn't invisible disability culture, isn't chronic illness culture, isn't ... the list goes on. Those cultures too? Came out of struggle and strife, dedication, hard work and more. They were created to sustain the myriad peoples who're involved in them. They have their dark ass times, their deprivations and horrors, their triumphs, their moments of weeping for joy and of pain. There are institutions, schools, lock aways, slurs, words, language, music, dance, art, etc, and yes they were all created - some of them only a couple hundred years old. But they? Are REAL. You don't get to go shopping for them either.

Cause this shopping people are doing, has nothing to do with learning the history of anything, it's just another type of entitlement. It's grubby grabby hands. It's trying to fill some lack and hole with someone else's inheritance. It's grabbing someone else's sandwich cause they dealt with the jeers and kept their food, and you threw yours aside.

Always brilliant deepad has a great post: On JLF, Rushdie, but also, On Violences. I think you should read it all because I cannot quote it enough.

As totemic bineries go, Valentine's Day vs. right wing religious fundamentalists is just about as irksome as Salman Rushdie vs. right wing religious fundamentalists. I saw Valentine's Day being cooked up in India as I was growing up along with Archies Gallery and the desire to market greeting cards; it's an festival imported by capitalist marketeers that is embarassing in its conspicuous display of materialistic measurement of heterosexual conventional romantic relationships. Of course no one should be stoned for wanting to flaunt pink heart-holding teddy bears. (Of course, Salman Rushdie should not be threatened with any form of violence.) It's just a little wearying, though, to be asked to make Valentine's Day a symbol, when having a conversation about gay rights, or honor killings, or polyamorous relationships, or marital rape with the average person who wants to buy a greeting card for their sweetie is an exercise in verbal violence more often than not. And Salman Rushdie, defender of rapist Roman Polanski and U.S.'s war against Afghanistan, advocate of declaring Pakistan a terrorist state, and disparager of all post-colonial vernacular writing is hardly a poster child for the virtues of a self-righteously unrestricted tongue.

One of the posters designed for flashreads has a quote by Salman Rushdie: "Free Speech is the whole ball game. Free Speech is life itself."

The hubris of such a sweeping statement does not appeal to me, not when people are fighting to liberate their bodies from physical violence, not when they weigh their words against the impact it will have on their life, and choose silence, or obfuscation, or tempered disagreement because they know that death of words is not actually the same thing as death of a living, breathing body, whether that is of a loved one or one's own.

[...]

Ah yes. The benevolent white USian church ladies who feed the starving children in 'Africa'. From the book donation guidelines at Books for Africa and The Book Bus, it seems that there is a pressing need to send books written in English and published in the U.S. and U.K. thousands of miles across to those deprived, needy children, though nothing says that maybe what those books say about race, and class, and nationality and normativeness is really important to think about.

I've known what its like to be yearning for books, but I've also known what it is like to yearn, while surrounded by books, for ones that represent people like me. I can't speak for the child I was, but the adult I am is happy to have not been exposed to some of the more virulent books I know about now back then, when I was more desperate and less discerning.

[...]

I defend the rationality of being offended by a misrepresentation of what one holds sacred. I defend the right of those in the marginalised, threatened or oppressed position in a hierarchy to challenge and question and reject those ideas and stories that reinforce the injustice being done to them.

But no matter how much value I may want ascribed to non-physical violence--be it economic, ideological, legal or cultural--I do not wish to downplay my rejection of physical violence. In the hours it has taken me to write this, I scroll up and compare my kneejerk irritation at the JKF Rushdie imbroglio to the aching empathy I felt for Rashid in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, exiled from the source of his stories. Free speech and it's consequent debates around book banning, censorship and the like is one thing. But bodies imprisoned or exiled because of threat of violence, translators stabbed, defenders beaten;** this is wholly more absolute injustice. I consider the written word sacred enough that though I have felt the desire to do damage to a book, I could never imagine ripping, or burning or physically harming even the most loathsome text. How much more sacred then, is even the most antagonistic human soul, the source for those words, enshrined in a fragile and totally irreplaceable body.

A banned book may be resurrected, a dead person cannot be.

The creator made a statement on Tumblr, which I think is sensible enough and deserves to be mentioned. Tell me what you think:

I should mention:

Haruka is in a qipao because a Chinese friend specifically asked they be put in one. We’ve been thinking about changing it for a while reagardless of that.

Edits are actually free. That’s why the initial cost of the images is so high. You did not want to see these characters in the edits that weren’t shown.

Any people complaining about how the characters aren’t trans* enough can get themselves to a damn stadium.

[...]

It’s amazing. People know we aren’t a major company, but they expect much more from us than they do any major company. They talk shit about how they reblogged something…uh, we aren’t on tumblr ALL DAY. There is no way we could see every reblog. That’s why we ask people to send EMAIL.

You reblog something on a massive site that only leaves the last 15-20 reblogs on a page and expect us to spend all day searching for critique instead of actually working on the things people claim we’re not working on?

Jesus fuck, we’re not heaven, we’re not god, and we’re NOT omniscient. SEND A DAMN EMAIL. Everyone’s who sent an email with critique has gotten a response, along with severe thanks for actually giving us something we can be sure to read. Reblogging and complaining we didn’t see it is essentially being angry with us for not doing exactly what we shouldn’t be doing…not working on the fucking game and spending all day digging around tumblr for things to reply to. Y’all ain’t new to tumblr. You know this shit gets mad busted and makes things disappear, and yet you expect us to magically…control things we can’t possibly control. Right. Gotcha.

About the “anti-white we don’t let white people on the team” shit. Uh. The PoC writer thing we put up is because at that point in time, MOST of the writing team was white. And we wanted to balance it out. Once again, people talking shit when they have no fucking clue.

As far as “OMG AAA GAME ON SUCH A TINY BUDGET!!!” We’re aiming high. Perhaps not AAA-level, but we’re aiming as high as we can. The POINT of this project is to aim high. Because there’s nothing like this at a high level.

In other post, Riley says is not their intention to do business, but to create something that could be inclusive enough. What do you think?

Nina says it best about the shit on Glee's latest episode.

Okay. I don't understand what the shit is happening with The Arkh Project. It's a shame the only game that looked inclusive enough is coming to this, but the more is coming out about the creator, the worse is looking.

I don't know. What do you people think? This is sf_drama, so the discussions are called "wank" and A LOT of the comments are a mess, but there ARE some qualms we shouldn't ignore.

ETA: Okay, frankly, the comments are making me distrust the whole post. A lot. Fucking shit ignorant people who have never heard the term Muxe before. So it's obviously ridiculous! And Two Spirits is such a stupid concept for these weeabos. I want to kill.

ETA 2: yeloson shared a better source describing the problems with Arkh (it doesn't have all the disgusting stuff going on at sf_drama). Talks about the strange stuff with the business transactions. It doesn't bode well.

Via laurus_nobilis:

What's Wrong With #FirstWorldProblems.

I don't like this expression "First World problems." It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion's technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don't wake up with "poor African" pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is--quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

Nativos son interceptados en la Terminal de Ómnibus por la policía y llevados a cuartel militar.

So. This is what happens. A group of Indigenous people come to the capital and are intercepted by police and taken to a military facility. Because they arrived to protest.

This happened here.

Now, save me from the assholery of the middle/high classed non-indigenous people I know and FB contacts (and non-contacts, there is this racist, UBER ANNOYING guy in my school who fancies himself an intellectual, believes is better than everyone, is SO ENTITLED that everyone has to heard him/ read him because he loves European culture and has an obsession with me reading every shit he writes, even when I already deleted him from my contacts, man, I just need to vent againts these kind of assholes because everybody in my rl LOVES THEM) who believe is THEIR RIGHT to have a park... without indigenous people. Because "indians make it dirty."

Of course, they don't care and won't move a finger about the racism, the classism, the awful conditions in which indigenous people live and how are abused in this country. But they want a park for themselves. And "Indians abuse of the park!" Even when most of these assholes won't even put a feet in that park in most of their lives. Mind you, they live in other cities and stuff.

Also. The Municipality PUT BARS in a public Park just to keep protesters away from it. Protesters who are indigenous people and Sin Techo who inhabit the park until someone from the government carry out their pledges. (Ans you imagine, middle classes are bothered that poor people are living in the park.)

This is the kind of shit that is very Latinoamerican. Which means, it's not really different from every other place.



The pic despicts the "Valle de Cauca's (Colombia) most powerful women in the formidable Sonia Zarzur's Hollywood-like [*] Mansion, in Cali's Beverly Hills."

*Hollywodiense: kinda shows how our standards are.

So, we have the black maids in the background, being completely decorative to the Powerful White Women. In their Mansion.

And we even have the "you are just looking for racist things!" argument from one of the Powerful White Women.

Seriously, I don't even want to translate it:

“Son niñas que nos trajeron el tinto y el jugo, nosotros nunca nos imaginamos que hubiera gente que vería la foto de otra manera. No entiendo. ¿Indignante es trabajar? ¿Indignante es servir tintos?”, indicó Rosa Haluf de Castro, madre de Zarzur y quien también aparece en la revista.

I don't have idea who these women are, to be honest, but I wouldn't mind if these kind of Celebrities Magazines disappear. Completely. We are flooded with these. They are all about pretty, millionaire, white-looking celebrities posing in their mansions, being "fashionable," whatever that means, talking about frivolities in their uber-rich privileged lives, showing the pretty European/Global North ideals that plague our colonized existences. And these magazines are targeted to developing Latin American countries. It's kinda obscene.

--

I haven't written in english in a long time. And it probably shows.

Oh, white people. How you disgust me some times.

And I'm not even talking about the overtly racist white lady on the video.

Were I this woman, I would sue their asses off. What the fucking hell.

I guess you can't travel without being handcuffed in the US if you aren't a white person.

Such a brilliant post. Panic on the streets of London.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ’’

First of all: The two essays linked in this post talk about rape and sexual abuse and are BIG TRIGGERS.

I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD is an essay Mac McClelland wrote talking about her PTSD. And mind you, I didn't want to trivialize it or say something that could led to the interpretation she had no right to experience PTSD so didn't want to talk about this in public.

The race and class privilege in her essay made me uneasy: her trauma was about being exposed to the trauma of Haitian people (which, of course, she has every right to feel); the way she wrote about that, specially about other woman whose experience was.... actually more traumatic than hers, was trivializing and insulting.

But then eccentricyoruba linked me to this:

Edwidge Danticat Speaks on Mac McClelland Essay.

The woman whom McClelland talked about said this:

The full text of the letter in K*'s own handwriting is attached and is written in Haitian Creole. It says:

You have no right to speak of my story.
You have no right to publish my story in the press
Because I did not give you authorization.
You have no right. I did not speak to you.
You have said things you should not have said.
Thank you

Which is just damn awful.

Danticat says this:

I have K*'s permission to publish this letter and to talk about K* because she is angry at the way Ms. McClelland has portrayed her in the tweets, has ignored the wishes of her letter and continues to make K* part of her story.

This week, K* wrote me an e-mail from Port-au-Prince saying, “I want victims in Haiti to know that they can be strong and stand up for their rights and have a voice. Our choices about when and how our story is told must be respected."

Via delux_vivens: A Game of Fail.

The books had a lot of things wrong, but the way the series did it was UBER race fail.

( Spoilers here )

Via delux_vivens.

So law doesn't protect queer POC from having their experiences appropriated by white straight privileged people, but IT CAN protect said white privileged people from... POC people who talk about the assholes "intellectual property" that came from appropriation and lies.

The Amina Hoaxer threatened to sue Minal Hajratwala for sharing his "copyrighted material" about "Amina."

Via delux_vivens. As always, when you said "women" in mainstream feminist circles, you mean, "white, cis women."

Otherwise, I don't get what Yonmei even tried to compare here.

Via the_future_modernes: Deconstructing Pointy-Eared White Supremacists. There is a reason why I will never touch Tolkien and generally (not always, there are exceptions) stay away from Medieval-like high fantasy.

Another thing elves like to do is that they have a low birthrate, are fiercely jealous of humans for being able to drop litters, and when humans get too many they will sail away to the west, weeping tears of severe butthurt all the way in their pearly swan-boats. You ever heard a particular breed of white folks lamenting how awful it is that all the black people and the Chinese and Hispanics are spawning like bunnies, and that white people are increasingly an endangered species? You ever seen a white family get spooked when their neighborhood becomes just a little colorful, so they move to an all-white suburban area where they can continue to send their kids to school full of other middle-class white kids, attend parent meetings where they’ll never ever be threatened by the sight of someone who isn’t the hue of frog bellies?

Ah.

So, what we have are essentially white supremacists, except in fantasy their racism is directed at white humans and white dwarves, rendering any deconstruction or criticism of elves’ attitude ultimately pointless.

But sometimes the table is turned. Elves are subjected to racism. Which brings us to an altogether different, but no less asinine, kind of fail.

Elves: A Vehicle for Appropriating POC Experiences

Let’s talk about Lynn Flewelling. For context, Alec is an elf and Yhakobin is a Plenimaran.

[...]

What are Plenimarans? They’re like this: dark-skinned, scimitar-wielding, woman-oppressing. Plenimaran women are veiled, require chaperons when going out, and are expected to commit suicide to preserve their husbands’ honor. Throughout Flewelling’s books Plenimarans and Zengati (also brown-skinned) are every single one of them evil: they deal in necromancy, slavery, and most of all they deal in enslaving elves. Alec, during his experience in a Plenimaran household, is subjected to beatings, being kept in chains, threatened with gelding, used as a breeding apparatus; he witnesses other elves being castrated, worked to death, raped, and brutally flogged. Elves are shipped en masse, in chains, cramped into small cabins across the sea to be sold to Plenimarans.

Sounds familiar? I’m sure you will be shocked, just shocked, to learn that Flewelling’s elves are white too!

Ahahahahahahahahahahaha.

SI has a pretty interesting post: The Racialization of Mental Illness. (Also, about gender, and how psychiatrists described illness.)

As the urban background suggests, this fear extended beyond individual safety to social unrest. In a 1969 essay titled “The Protest Psychosis,” after which Metzl’s book is named, psychiatrists postulated that the growing racial disharmony in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, reflected a new manifestation of psychotic behaviors and delusions afflicting America’s black lower class. Accordingly, “paranoid delusions that one is being constantly victimized” drew some men to fixate on misguided ventures to overthrow the establishment. Luckily, pharmaceutical companies proposed that chemical interventions could directly pacify the masculinzed, black threat depicted in advertisements like the above. “Assaultive and belligerent?” it asks. “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”