July 2012
June 2012
men’s gymnastica qualifying finals!!
Mitt Romney calls for these things that are already part of Obamacare during his press conference calling for the repeal of Obamacare:
- “We have to make sure that people who want to keep their current insurance will be able to do so.”
- “We also have to assure that we do our very best to help each state in their effort to assure (sic) that every American has access to affordable healthcare.”
- “We’ve gotta make sure that those people who have pre-existing conditions know that they will be able to be insured.”
(via The Daily Show)
Mitt Romney is a liar. Whenever he opens his mouth, he lies. He is a liar. A liar.
i utterly blame queer theory for this bullshit about being 'non-heteronormative' makes you queer.
i won’t lie that shit seemed hella attractive to me when I was 20 and didn’t want to have to face a world wherein my claiming my identity could get me fired, homeless, assaulted, killed, and/or imprisoned for protecting myself.
which isn’t to say all the ‘non-heteronormative definition of queer crowd’ are really queers afraid of claiming themselves. nope some of them are straight people with oppression fantasies.
This is far from an uncommon opinion, but it doesn’t really show a broad knowledge of what this kind of queer theory is.
A lot of this queer theory tends to come from queer of color scholars, whose experience as sexually queered and racially queered people for whom the consequences of that queering cannot neatly be understood through the lens of homophobia or racism or even the intersectional lens of that overlap, and thus need to create new modes of thinking that can explain, for them, why things that should un-queer them (for instance, the trope of black sexual expression as queered to begin with, so theoretically a queer sexuality from an african-american is a heteronormative expectation) only serve to queer them further.
You can not agree with it (and some of it is clearly flawed on its face; as a relatively new scholarly discipline it is still very much working out the kinks in itself and its canonical works) and you definitely should be critiquing it, but “blaming” it and then dismissing it sort of misses the point, doesn’t it?
lol lol except for that second degree i have where i spent most of my time emersing myself in Black Thought on the performance of sexual politic in my community. And all that time I spent being a Black queer my damn self.
and if you don’t know how to read sarcasm in a post then i’m not sure why you entered this conversation but i know i don’t give a damn. please continue to pontificate about queer of color critique, as if reading it tells you anything about my life experiences as a Black queer woman boo boo.
No, no, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to dismiss your opinion and I fully admit that when I got my second degree in american studies with my focus on race and performance, I had the hardest time wrapping my head around queer theory as a whole and particularly queer-as-non-heteronormative theory, which was largely addressed in my contemporary feminist thought classes (4th wave feminist theory, women of color theory, queer of color theory). a lot of it struck me on its face as hugely problematic and an effort to draw in those excluded by the experience of queer of color folk — oppression fantasies, as you put it. but in terms of the discussions we had about it in class, my critiques of it in that vein were most vigorously derided by the queer of color women and men in my classes, who seemed to be really intrigued by it.
now, those are individuals. they do not, by themselves, legitimize or delegitimize a huge and new theoretical field just because they were into it. but if there was one part of the field that i could wrap my head around, it’s that it seemed to spring from the dismissal of sexuality and race theory that came from queer of color scholars in the mid-20th century.
you don’t have to like it. i don’t really like it, nor do i fully understand it even after all the work i put in for that degree. and i as i said, i think you (and everyone else who engages with it) should be critiquing it. but i just sort of thought the blame and dismissal part was sort of ironic, considering the theory’s origin.
i’m just another scholar, and i’ve got my own opinions. that doesn’t invalidate yours, nor do i even want to, not even a little bit; it’s just part of a discussion.
1)i really don’t give a damn about your creditials. i mentioned mine because you had the audacity to suggest that my opinion on this issue comes from me not being well read enough.
2) i don’t know not one of these supposed qpocs and the opinions that you relate from them. if a fellow qpoc wants to talk to me about how/what queerness means to me then i might engage with that person. but we definitely don’t need a white intermediary presenting their *perception* of our opinions and analysis to each other.
3) the classroom, especially at the graduate level, is a performative space. one wherein queer folks of color are called to do back flips and tricks about their ideas about our communities in order to seem ‘nuanced’, ‘balanced’, ‘critical’ and a whole lot of other words that mean comfortable with white people and straight ‘allies’ who can’t hang with being told they aren’t a part of the inner circle. some of that performance can be internalized but most of it (in my opinion) is a show. so what a queer Black or Brown person said in front of you, a professor, and however many other white people about the portability of the concept of queerness across straight bodies in a classroom is not not-legitimate but it ain’t the whole story and never could be.
OK. I was just responding to something that piqued my interest. I didn’t mean to imply you were poorly read, and i apologize for my poorly worded response; I just thought what you were saying ran counter to the history and origins of queer theory and queer of color theory.
I have no interest in being a “white intermediary” for either a racial discussion or a queer discussion, but I’m also not going to say that I shouldn’t have a voice in a discussion about race and culture in America because I am part of that discussion every day. (you don’t know me, nor do you know my racial background; if you went to my blog, all you know is that i’m jewish.) that’s why I chose to study it and that’s why I remain interested in it. i am not interesting in talking FOR black folk, or brown folk, or really outside of my own identity, though i do find those perspectives interesting and i try to integrate those voices with my experiences and other voices to get a sense of the way day-to-day racial experience ripples through cultural constructions. (yeah, i’m that girl, staring into space and thinking about this stuff at inopportune moments.) Queer-as-non-heteronormative became part of that study because it’s one way of seeing any race other than WASP white as a queer identity — something that, like you, i think is absolute crap. so there we definitely agree.
cheers, and it’s been interesting to read all the comments and all your responses on this post.
i utterly blame queer theory for this bullshit about being 'non-heteronormative' makes you queer.
i won’t lie that shit seemed hella attractive to me when I was 20 and didn’t want to have to face a world wherein my claiming my identity could get me fired, homeless, assaulted, killed, and/or imprisoned for protecting myself.
which isn’t to say all the ‘non-heteronormative definition of queer crowd’ are really queers afraid of claiming themselves. nope some of them are straight people with oppression fantasies.
This is far from an uncommon opinion, but it doesn’t really show a broad knowledge of what this kind of queer theory is.
A lot of this queer theory tends to come from queer of color scholars, whose experience as sexually queered and racially queered people for whom the consequences of that queering cannot neatly be understood through the lens of homophobia or racism or even the intersectional lens of that overlap, and thus need to create new modes of thinking that can explain, for them, why things that should un-queer them (for instance, the trope of black sexual expression as queered to begin with, so theoretically a queer sexuality from an african-american is a heteronormative expectation) only serve to queer them further.
You can not agree with it (and some of it is clearly flawed on its face; as a relatively new scholarly discipline it is still very much working out the kinks in itself and its canonical works) and you definitely should be critiquing it, but “blaming” it and then dismissing it sort of misses the point, doesn’t it?
lol lol except for that second degree i have where i spent most of my time emersing myself in Black Thought on the performance of sexual politic in my community. And all that time I spent being a Black queer my damn self.
and if you don’t know how to read sarcasm in a post then i’m not sure why you entered this conversation but i know i don’t give a damn. please continue to pontificate about queer of color critique, as if reading it tells you anything about my life experiences as a Black queer woman boo boo.
No, no, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to dismiss your opinion and I fully admit that when I got my second degree in american studies with my focus on race and performance, I had the hardest time wrapping my head around queer theory as a whole and particularly queer-as-non-heteronormative theory, which was largely addressed in my contemporary feminist thought classes (4th wave feminist theory, women of color theory, queer of color theory). a lot of it struck me on its face as hugely problematic and an effort to draw in those excluded by the experience of queer of color folk — oppression fantasies, as you put it. but in terms of the discussions we had about it in class, my critiques of it in that vein were most vigorously derided by the queer of color women and men in my classes, who seemed to be really intrigued by it.
now, those are individuals. they do not, by themselves, legitimize or delegitimize a huge and new theoretical field just because they were into it. but if there was one part of the field that i could wrap my head around, it’s that it seemed to spring from the dismissal of sexuality and race theory that came from queer of color scholars in the mid-20th century.
you don’t have to like it. i don’t really like it, nor do i fully understand it even after all the work i put in for that degree. and i as i said, i think you (and everyone else who engages with it) should be critiquing it. but i just sort of thought the blame and dismissal part was sort of ironic, considering the theory’s origin.
i’m just another scholar, and i’ve got my own opinions. that doesn’t invalidate yours, nor do i even want to, not even a little bit; it’s just part of a discussion.
i utterly blame queer theory for this bullshit about being 'non-heteronormative' makes you queer.
i won’t lie that shit seemed hella attractive to me when I was 20 and didn’t want to have to face a world wherein my claiming my identity could get me fired, homeless, assaulted, killed, and/or imprisoned for protecting myself.
which isn’t to say all the ‘non-heteronormative definition of queer crowd’ are really queers afraid of claiming themselves. nope some of them are straight people with oppression fantasies.
This is far from an uncommon opinion, but it doesn’t really show a broad knowledge of what this kind of queer theory is.
A lot of this queer theory tends to come from queer of color scholars, whose experience as sexually queered and racially queered people for whom the consequences of that queering cannot neatly be understood through the lens of homophobia or racism or even the intersectional lens of that overlap, and thus need to create new modes of thinking that can explain, for them, why things that should un-queer them (for instance, the trope of black sexual expression as queered to begin with, so theoretically a queer sexuality from an african-american is a heteronormative expectation) only serve to queer them further.
You can not agree with it (and some of it is clearly flawed on its face; as a relatively new scholarly discipline it is still very much working out the kinks in itself and its canonical works) and you definitely should be critiquing it, but “blaming” it and then dismissing it sort of misses the point, doesn’t it?
7 Die in Severe Weather: Power Knocked Out for Millions
Raging storms swept the Washington, DC area on Friday night, claiming two lives and knocking out electricity for more than 2 million residents. Earlier in the day, five people in Tennessee and Missouri are thought to have died from the stifling heat. Governor Ray Tomblin of West Virginia declared a state of emergency, saying “the damage from today’s storms is widespread and in many places severe.” Officials were investigating the deaths in Tennessee and Missouri, including that of a baby and two young boys, to determine if they were related to the heat.
Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photo
