270 posts tagged with identity.
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Ethnic democracy means democracy!? What a country!
"The liberal democratic nation-state is on the decline in the West as a result of globalisation, regionalisation, universalisation of minority rights, multi-culturalism and the rise of ethno-nationalism. While Western countries are decoupling the nation-state and shifting toward multicultural civic democracy, other countries are consolidating an alternative non-civic form of a democratic state that is identified with and subservient to a single ethnic nation."[more inside]
Galaxy Gals
The queen of suspense: how Ann Radcliffe inspired Dickens and Austen – then got written out of the canon - "She was all but forgotten. Now the 18th-century author's republished novels reveal why she made such an extraordinary contribution to literature." [more inside]
In the end, guidelines are just that—a guide.
Her first publication? her bat mitzvah speech in the synagogue bulletin
Naomi Klein on the podcast Between the Covers. Part 1 transcript & audio. Part 2 transcript & audio: "We can’t accept the weaponization of traumatic memories, which are real. Nazis boycotted Jewish businesses. That memory is in Jewish DNA and that is going to be weaponized and used to say [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions advocates] are like the Nazis. At the same time, we have to somehow find a way to recognize that those feelings are real and trauma is complicated. We can’t just scream at people who feel things. We have to find a way to navigate that and hold more complicated spaces that allow for the reality of feelings without conceding the truth of the point." [more inside]
What is gender-affirming care?
"So what is gender-affirming care, exactly? And why is it important? The 19th spoke with health care professionals who provide gender-affirming care to adults and adolescents — as well as trans young adults who were comfortable sharing their experiences — to answer those questions."
In the ring, vulnerability is everything
Wrestling turned me cis, then it turned me trans by Abraham Josephine Riesman [Polygon] “Wrestling is built around masculinity, but in its own way it is also transgressive — even queer. Men in wrestling wear bright colors. They intimately touch other men in public. When they’re allied, they speak of each other in the warm terms of life partners; when they’re at odds, they issue ambiguously sexual threats such as “I want your ass.” Most importantly, they show pain. The essential, irreducible element of a wrestling match is the ability to show suffering — the very thing drummed out of every boy by high school, if not earlier. It’s the heart of the art form. No matter how skilled a wrestler is technically, it doesn’t count at all unless they can make the audience believe they’re being hurt. Every wrestler has to spend a significant amount of every match showing nothing but raw, visceral agony. They have to show their secret face, the most vulnerable one of all. Wrestling is an art form, one that turned out to have also planted seeds in my mind about how fun it is to dress up, show tenderness, be vulnerable, and do the things you’re not supposed to.”
...he represents a unique kind of masculinity.
50 years after release, Disney’s Robin Hood is still a life-changing furry phenomenon [Polygon] “Part of the unique qualities that made Robin Hood a furry media mainstay comes down to the fact that the title character — a dashing, jovial hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor — is a fox. [...] From the outside, the film is a laid-back adventure known as much for reusing visuals from earlier Disney movies as for its powerful connection to unlocking personal identities in one subset of fandom. For those of us who aren’t part of the furry community, it may be surprising to realize just how much of an impact Robin Hood has had.”
“What are you?”
MIXED! Stories of Mixed Race Californians. “People are defining you according to this boundary, that you have to be ‘this much’ this,” said Fulbeck. “You have to speak this language. You have to take off your shoes, whatever it is. It's like if you're going to go off those definitions, then you're going to be in a world of hurt. You have to find your own way to define yourself."
The Transfemme Field Guide
Be Yourself, Regardless: The Transfemme Field Guide by Leadhead (ft. TransVoiceLessons, Jessie Gender and AdequateEmily). Text version
Can I Offer You An Egg In This Trying Time?
On the memetic rhetoric of transgender coming-out comics... but a lot more readable than the subtitle makes it seem like it will be. [more inside]
The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far
Money Stuff
The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - "Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters." (archive; also btw What Is Code?[*] by Paul Ford, earlier)
Push to change high school name in Honolulu divides Hawaiians
In Hawaii, there’s a common question posed in the pidgin language of the islands: “Where you went grad?” (archive.today link)
The Sunflower Movements: Useful Fictions and Consensus Reality
corporate libertarianism v synthetic technocracy v digital democracy: "Yes I think the defining political divides of the 21st century will be roughly captured in the terms laid out by Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Expansion... Current crisis is largely transition from the 20th century mode of fascism v communism v democracy to this." [more inside]
Being bisexual in an opposite gender relationship
"I found myself at a total loss"
Machado de Assis (1870), "Captain Mendonça": "'So you think her eyes are pretty?' 'As I said, they have the rarest beauty.' 'Would you like to have them?' the old man asked." Quotes from other stories by Machado de Assis appear throughout Paul Christopher Johnson's prize-winning open access book Automatic Religion, which "reanimates one of the most mysterious ... questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?" in discussions of "hysteria" and Charcot's monkey [PDF], the trial of a "possession priest," the popular saint Escrava Anastácia [PDF], Ajeeb the chess automaton, the spiritist Chico Xavier, Locke's Brazilian parrot, and more. See also suggestions made by P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., in "Writing about Slavery/Teaching about Slavery: This Might Help."
How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics
Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.
What is life?
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth - "The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself." (previously) [more inside]
Making Photography in a Surveillance State
Last summer’s uprisings were likely the most photographed in history, with not only mainstream press in attendance, but near-every attendee equipped with their own networked camera, live-streaming and hashtagging the protests, creating layers upon layers of unquantifiable documentation. The rampant circulation of these images—often shared in real-time— propelled the movement on and offline, allowing the summer’s events to swell into a global uprising. When these images were quickly co-opted by the state, with law enforcement using them to retaliate against BLM activists, photographers online began to employ a variety of visual answers to the problem of privacy, blotting out the faces of protestors with digital ink.
Silverwolf
Were the group “Victorian cultists?” Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today. [more inside]
“She positioned herself as Cherokee"
A Genealogy of a Lie. Sarah Viren investigates another academic who has claimed an identity that they should not have. (SLNYT; Archive.org snapshot) [more inside]
We’ve tried a beautiful experiment here; this is where the future lies
"The price of food keeps us from realising our desires"
"The basic materialist approach to history and politics starts from a concept of man as a material being, and begins explaining everything else about society from there. That puts important emphasis on the connection between the ‘natural world’ and human society. Historically, this has often meant a focus on how humans have appropriated natural resources to wage competitions for status and control among themselves. But as the compound crisis of climate change and COVID-19 accelerates, we should be humbled by the emphatic reassertion of nature’s own causal powers. There’s never been a better time to get back to basics."
being so much more than you once believed yourself to be
"I wanted to say to my young self 'You’re loved. You’re beautiful. You’re complicated. You matter.' I know that by saying this to myself with each book I write, I am saying it to every reader who has ever felt otherwise." Author and poet Jacqueline Woodson has been named a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. [more inside]
What we didn't get
Politics is an American industry - "Industries like technology, finance, health care, higher education, and media dominate our collective lives, and yet they are not regulated by anything recognizable as open competition for the custom of decentralized consumers. These industries share some things in common." [more inside]
I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech.
For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies. Jessica A. Krug, a white professor, confesses in a blog post that she falsely claimed Black identity. [more inside]
A better world than this is possible
Stories vs. Reality: Who Are We Without Storytelling?
- The Fundamental Difference Between Stories And Reality - "Characters have clear transformative arcs [whereas] our identities and personal journeys are so much more complex."
- Your Life is Not a Hero's Journey - "The history of the heroic adventure and the implications of projecting the hero's journey on our own lives."
- Identity Without Storytelling - "The only thing is, when it comes to the stories of our own lives, we are both author and character."[1,2,3]
a way to avoid being, without allowing time itself to end
Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs. [more inside]
🙋🏿🎮🕹️
The state of blackness in games [Eurogamer] “Seeing a black person in a game is still a strange experience more often than not. For the longest time, black characters seemed to fall precisely into two categories, scary and...funky: Your average scary black character is at first glance like so many other men in games. He's buff, and he has a gun. What you need to take into account however, is how this stereotype has affected black men in real life: many people still readily draw the conclusion that a black man who looks a certain way is likely to have a history that includes a council house upbringing and a brush or two with the law. [...] The funky black guy either sports an afro, says "yo" a lot, wears sunglasses indoors, or all three. He's also usually loud, and claims to be a "free spirit" or anything else that makes people think of Chris Rock or Dennis Rodman. He's often a quest-giver, or someone who appears in the background for laughs, such as in Persona 4 or Ni no Kuni 2. There's often at least one character of this type in every fighting game, including Tekken and Dead or Alive.” [Previously.] [more inside]
The story of your life, the story you tell yourself
In This Is All - "There is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory."
“Tyler is a fully-realized...not reduced to simplistic trans tropes.”
Microsoft introduces first lead trans character in a major video game [The Guardian] “At Microsoft’s X019 event in London on Thursday, the company revealed a range of major new titles for the Xbox and PC. But in an industry which has often struggled with representation and diversity of lead characters, one announcement stood out. The latest narrative adventure game from the acclaimed French studio Dontnod (developers that produced Life is Strange) will have a transgender man as its lead character – a first for a major game release. [...] “Tyler is a fully realised, endearing character, whose story is not reduced to simplistic trans tropes,” said Nick Adams, director of transgender representation at Glaad. “Creating a playable lead trans character – and taking such care to get it right – raises the bar for future LGBTQ inclusion in gaming.”” [YouTube][Game Trailer]
The Wrong Goodbye
This is a pretty severe case of mistaken identity. But it happens more often then you’d think.
Pro Publica writes about Freddy Williams and Raheme Perry.
Products of our time
Philosophy often emphasises the significance of being the same person despite change. It asks how various changes – such as total memory loss or a brain transplant – might create a different person. This helps to clarify aspects of personal identity and the self, but it also overshadows intuitions about the significance of change itself. The ideal or model way to persist through time is not to stay exactly the same. Instead, it is to change.
Narrative, Fiction and World-Building Reality
Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living." [more inside]
Who was the falling man from 9/11?
"The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story" by Tom Junod for Esquire [CW: pictures of the iconic falling man]
[more inside]
“...diverse games are nice, but diverse studios are better.”
There's A Latinx Void At The Heart Of Video Games [Kotaku] “Latinx art abounds: I found music I could listen to, books I could read, movies I could watch as I put myself back together to face the world and do my part. Here’s what messes me up: I didn’t know where to look for that in video games. It’s not that there aren’t spaces, people working towards making video games a more distinctly diverse place. [...] Latinx folks are out there. Yet the video games that have broken into the wider public consciousness—in the biggest games and the biggest studios—do not seem to care all that much.” [more inside]
They look white but say they're black
NPR Code Switch Book Club, Summer 2019
NPR's Code Switch team has a list of 14 non-fiction and 14 fiction books for summer reading, ranging from The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis and White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (forward by Michael Eric Dyson) to No-No Boy by John Okada and Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (all book links go to Goodreads).
“...was the average 1970s computer hobbyist also a male?”
The Gender Binary of Computing: Challenging Sexism in Technology by Rahul Zalkikar “Byte magazine was one of the most widely circulated magazines of its kind, reaching an estimated circulation of about 420,000 (third highest of all computer magazines) in the early 1980s. This analysis focuses on Byte’s beginnings, a time where hobbyists discussed ideas, sought help, shared opinions, and planned club events about computing technology. The average hobbyist was relatively young (students to middle-aged adults), relatively wealthy (middle to upper-middle class), and predominantly white.” [more inside]
That's Meta-Country, Bro
Toby Keith (and lots of other Country artists) have recently released songs that, rather being about traditional country music subjects, explain to the listener just how "country" the singer is. Because nothing is cooler than authenticity police with a hectoring tone and a checklist.
I didn't want to be the only straight person on the team
Identity is Always a Negotiation
We had this very Scandinavian-looking child, and for the first time in my life what I now call the fiction of race was thrust into my consciousness. It’s an experience that most people, black or white, don’t have to have because most people don’t live on the racial margins and don’t see how ridiculous it is to say something like, “My father is black, and my daughter is white, but they have the same smile.” And my daughter is blond-haired and has blue eyes and white skin, but she’s of 20 percent West African descent. Most people don’t actually have these kinds of contradictions. So, her birth really set me down this path. An interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams in the LA Review of Books [more inside]
What if the only images you saw of people who looked like you were dead?
Infinite Essence is my response to pervasive media images of black people dead and dying. Being gunned down by police officers, drowning and washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering in award-winning photography. The trope of the black body as a site of death is everywhere. [...] With this series, I’ve set about on a quest to recast the black body as the cosmos and eternal. I hand paint the models' bodies with fluorescent paints, and [...] for a fraction of a second, their bodies illuminate as the universe. We view the beauty of the soul and our deeper cosmic connections communicated through them. [via NPR]
Mpendulo: The Answer
A new short science fiction story from Nosipho Dumisa in Slate Each month, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for January–March 2019: Identity. [more inside]
The island has run out of oxygen
Niviaq Korneliussen is a queer writer from Greenland whose work has recently been translated into english. [more inside]
The main attraction, center of attention
Food: The universal human experience. Heck, sharing food leads to better negotiation outcomes. But if you're eating too much and always feeling the need to clean your plate, a Vanderbilt professor has some tips for you.
“...there is more evidence that she is transgender than cisgender.”
Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It. [The Mary Sue] “Representation for transgender people is equally tough to find in gaming. Both Dangonronpa and Persona 4 managed to blunder transgender representation. One of the most famous transgender video game characters, Poison from Final Fight, is empowered but blatantly oversexualized. Characters and stories like this reinforce the harmful idea that transgender women only have societal value in their sex appeal. That’s why I’m thrilled to tell you that one of the most famous women in videogame history happens to also be a transgender woman! It’s none other that Nintendo’s Samus Aran! It’s true!” [more inside]
The Anti-Defamation League's reading list for children
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has compiled a list of books more than 750 books, filterable by topic, that address a wide range of social justice issues, including ableism, bullying, LGBTQ issues, anti-semitism, race and religion. On its website, the organization says: "Books have the potential to create lasting impressions. They have the power to instill empathy, affirm children’s sense of self, teach about others, transport to new places and inspire actions on behalf of social justice." Here are few highlights picked by Lifehacker's Offspring sub-site.
Entitled
Film maker Adeyemi Michael made a short about his mother and the immigrant experience for the Channel 4 Random Acts strand.
The film is called Entitled.
Here is Michael talking about Entitled on BBC World/Africa. "It felt like a duty to me, to celebrate the woman, the mother, the matriarch, the immigrant... The film is looking at this idea that all immigrants are conquerors."