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| Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 | | 5:22 pm |
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - Queer feminist sex art and lit magazine!
Only 2 Weeks Left to Submit to SALACIOUS! Please forward this far and wide across the land! We need ARTISTS! ----- CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS What is SALACIOUS? SALACIOUS is an up and coming magazine of queer feminist sex art and literature. SALACIOUS aims to meld pornography with high art; comics with erotica; titillation with stunning visuals. SALACIOUS is looking for submissions that highlight queer feminist sex. Comic submissions are strongly encouraged, and are SALACIOUS'main focus—however, SALACIOUS loves the written word and single illustrations, so by all means send those along as well. Specs for illustrations and comics: Black and white 8.5×11 No bleeds 300 dpi JPEG or PDF Specs for the written word: Maximum 5,000 words Short stories, poetry, and more accepted If you’d like an illustration or two to go with your story, let us know. Please keep the following in mind should you choose to submit something to SALACIOUS: 1. SALACIOUS is queer. While we’re not going to tell you what queer should mean to you, please keep this in mind as you compose your work. 2. SALACIOUS is feminist. We consider reproductions of typically sexist, misogynist, hetero-normative sex and sexuality offensive, unimportant, and not worthy of printing. 3. SALACIOUS is anti-racist. We reject racist representations, insist on a multi-racial editorial board and contributor base, and seek to understand racism, like sexism, in relation to local and international inequities of power. 4. SALACIOUS is aimed at titillation, as much as it is aimed at high art. Please therefore submit work you are nothing but deeply proud of. Just because it’s naughty doesn’t mean it has to be poorly done. Send Submissions to: kd@katiediamond.com by AUGUST 1, 2010. | | Saturday, December 5th, 2009 | | 10:38 pm |
Random thoughts in response to Amanda Knox
Would there be this outcry over the treatment of Amanda Knox if she was not a conventionally attractive young white woman? I think not. There certainly isn't a similar outcry over the differences in the quality of "justice" found in US courts, if you're poor/a person of color. I read today at Daisy's Dead Air that there has never once been a millionaire sentenced to death in US courts. Unsurprising. This quote is SO relevant here: "Nationally, studies consistently demonstrate that, everything else being equal, a defendant is approximately four times more likely to get the death penalty for killing a white person than for a black person. The racial configuration by far the more likely to result in a death sentence is a black defendant and a white victim."If I see one more person write in *that voice* just how HORRIBLE and UNFAIR the Italian justice system is compared to ours, I will scream. The whole thing also reminds me of JonBenet Ramsay. The media outcry around her death was HUGE, and so incredibly hurtful to the families and friends of the hundreds of killed/missing kids of color whose tragedies have never made national news. In Atlanta, GA, from 1979-1981, there was a string of child murders that never made it to national news, and the media silence around the killings was part of what made it easy for them to happen. There wasn't this kind of emotion, this kind of personal feeling that someone AMERICAN could be treated this way, when Laura Ling and Euna Lee were captured by North Korea, that's for damn sure. In fact, I remember reading plenty of comments to blog posts talking about how they were stupid to have gotten so close to North Korean soil. Comparing comment numbers on Jezebel, the posts about Ling and Lee being released received roughly 1/5 to 1/10 as many comments as have the last couple on Amanda Knox. It's interesting and enraging and completely predictable. | | Sunday, September 6th, 2009 | | 6:36 pm |
On consent and supposed differences in men's vs. women's styles of communication
GREAT article in The Guardian in which a researcher takes down the myth of unintelligible communication styles by gender, specifically around how this operates in consent to sex. Fucking brilliant. Here's a bit - "Because refusing an invitation - even one that is much less sensitive than a sexual proposal - is a more delicate matter than accepting one. The act of inviting someone implies that you hope they will say yes: if they say no, there is a risk that you will be offended, upset, or just disappointed. To show that they are aware of this, and do not want you to feel bad, people generally design refusals to convey reluctance and regret. Because this pattern is so consistent, and because it contrasts with the pattern for the alternative response, acceptance, refusals are immediately recognisable as such. In fact, the evidence suggests that people can tell a refusal is coming as soon as they register the initial hesitation. And when I say "people", I mean people of both sexes. No one has found any difference between men's and women's use of the system I have just described." Also, an awesome reaction post, "On the supposed inability of men to understand refusals". (via Feministe.) | | Friday, August 7th, 2009 | | 12:39 am |
"This is why science fiction can't have nice things."
So yeah, there's this new anthology, right, of SF stories, and it's all white males, and it's called the mammoth book of the best SF ever or something, and then all this shit happens. A writer named Paul DiFilippo freaks out on people calling out this astonishing fact of the anthology authors' homogeneity and thus, we have this AMAZING POST FROM THE ANGRY BLACK WOMAN, entited "This is why Science Fiction can't have nice things." You know, if we're going to have racist bigots telling us that women and people of color don't belong in science fiction, at least let's have some fun with them. | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 3:55 pm |
Sexist jokes bad! Science says!
Link here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/uog-sjf070209.phpSexist jokes favor the mental mechanisms that justify violence against women This release is available in Spanish. Sexist jokes (and all the variants of this kind of humour) favour the mental mechanisms which urge to violence and battering against women in individuals with macho attitudes. Those are the conclusions of a study carried out at the University of Granada, that will be released tomorrow Thursday 2nd of July in the framework of the world most renowned international symposium about humour and its scientific applications ('International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications') that will be held in Granada. In order to carry out this research work, the scientists applied several questionnaires to a group of 109 university male students aged between 18 and 26 years old. They showed them two series of jokes, one of them with sexist jokes where women were denigrated and another one with common jokes, without any kind of sexist content. Next, the researchers proposed them several scenes with different cases of battering against women, from minor to serious attacks, to ask them how they would react in this kind of situation. They are more tolerant with violence The work proved that those who had listened to sexist jokes were much more tolerant with male battering than those who had not, this is, that this kind of humour favours the mental mechanisms tolerant with violent behaviour towards women. However, the researchers warn those individuals affected by sexist humour showed a previous tendency to tolerate violence against women, as we can gather from a survey which weighed up sexist attitudes against women. Some of the items of the scale used by the scientist to measure men's sexist attitudes were: "Deep down, feminist women intend women to be more powerful than men", "Most of the women do not fully appreciate what men do for them" or "There are many women who make sexual insinuations to men and later they reject their advances just to make fun of them". ### This work has been carried out by professors Mónica Romero-Sánchez, Mercedes Durán, Hugo Carretero Dios, Jesús L. Megías and Miguel Moya, of the departments of Social and Experimental Psychology of the University of Granada, and will be officially presented tomorrow Thursday 2nd of July at 5 PM in the Carmen de la Victoria of Granada, within the 'International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter'. The results of this research work have been accepted to be published in the renowned US 'Journal of Interpersonal Violence'. | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 11:19 am |
US citizen abducted and tortured by suspected Philippine military agents speaks publicly
Warning - triggering. Skip to minute 17:00 to watch Melissa Roxas's testimony. There's also a description of it at the bottom of the post, but her testimony is intense and if you can manage, please watch it. --------------------------- Here is a petition to sign to demand action on the tortures, abductions and disappearances of hundreds of Filipinos: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/find-filipina-american-activist-melissa-roxas.html--------------------------- From http://bayanusa.org/Los Angeles, CA – In her first public appearance since being released from captivity, Melissa Roxas, a U.S. citizen abducted and tortured in the Philippines from May 19-25, will hold a press conference to describe the human rights abuses she endured while held for six days in an alleged military camp. Ms. Roxas, an American human rights advocate of Filipino descent, is the first known American citizen to have become a victim of abduction and torture in the Philippines, a country which has drawn international condemnation for state-sponsored human rights atrocities. In a sworn affidavit submitted to the Philippine Supreme Court, Ms. Roxas described being abducted at gunpoint by several heavily armed men, brought to what she believed is a military camp, held against her will, questioned without the presence of an attorney, beaten repeatedly, and asphyxiated using plastic bags before being released. During the press conference, Ms. Roxas is expected to demand accountability from the Philippine government and military, who she holds responsible for her ordeal, as well as the U.S. government for providing funding and training to the Philippine military. Reports by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Philippine-based human rights organization Karapatan, and Human Rights Watch have overwhelmingly concluded that the Philippine military is responsible for systematically carrying out human rights violations such as abduction, torture and extra-judicial killings against innocent civilians. Nearly $1 billion worth of U.S. military aid and materiel has been granted to the Philippines since 1999, the year the U.S.- Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement was enacted. The experience of Ms. Roxas is considered typical for the 200 cases of abduction and 1,010 cases of torture recorded since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became president of the Philippines in 2001. The Philippine government’s quick denial of responsibility for Ms. Roxas’ abduction and torture is also considered a typical response; in his 2007 report on the Philippines, U.N. Special Rapporteur Philip Alston cited such systematic denial by the government as one of the primary obstacles to stopping the rampant human rights violations plaguing the country. In his 2009 follow-up report, Alston indicated a general failure of the Arroyo government to stop the persistent human rights violations. In April 2009, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) also released a report detailing the use of torture by the Philippine military. At the press conference, Ms. Roxas’ legal counsel, Attorney Arnedo Valera, will explain the potential legal remedies that are being explored, including the filing of a tort action in U.S. Federal Court for punitive and compensatory damages against her identified assailants or the Arroyo government in the absence of named assailants; the lodging of a private complaint before the U.S. Department of State, Human Rights Desk against the Philippine government for the violation of the fundamental rights of a U.S. citizen; and the filing of a complaints before the appropriate U.N. agencies for violations of the International Covenant Against Torture, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. The press conference will be held in Los Angeles, CA and broadcast live on the website www.bayan.ph. Media in the Philippines will be hosted simultaneously by Bayan Philippines and will be able to ask questions in real time. The U.S.-based press conference is sponsored by the Justice for Melissa Roxas Campaign, whose membership includes Ms. Roxas’ legal counsel, BAYAN-USA, GABRIELA USA, Katarungan Center for Peace, Justice and Human Rights, and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns. | | Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | | 11:16 am |
Gardening classes! Free ones!
The following message is from a friend who works for the USDA. Greetings Friends! I wanted to pass along some great info about a project I've been working on and see if you'd help me get the word out. We're doing a free gardening workshop series about different aspects to growing a healthy garden. They are 30 minutes in length and specifically designed to be hands-on and very practical. Please pass along to any listserv group or people you think might be interested. I only ask that you take out my personal note and email address if you are sending it to a listserv or people I don't know. We want this to be professional, of course, but want it to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you can come to the first one this Friday, super kudos to you! You'll get your hands dirty, learn some good skills, and even take home a goody too (a good one)! The info is as follows: The People's Garden "Healthy Gardens" Workshop Series by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Fridays from 12pm-12:30pm beginning June 19 through September 25 12th and Jefferson Drive, SW by the Mall exit of the Smithsonian Metro Station on Orange/Blue Line Rain or shine except where thunder and lightening are present or other dangerous outdoor conditions exist Schedule: June 19 Gardening From the Ground Up Part 1: Is Your Soil Healthy for Gardening? June 26 Gardening From the Ground Up Part 2: Improving Your Soil July 10 Make-Up Day #1 July 17 Container Gardening and Window Boxes July 24 Weeding and Removing Invasive Plants July 31 Installing and Using Rain Barrels August 7 Make-Up Day #2 August 14 Attracting Pollinators: Friends of Healthy Gardens August 21 Inviting Wildlife with Bat Boxes and Other Backyard Habitats August 28 Maximizing Your Harvest September 4 Make-Up Day #3 September 11 Making and Using Compost September 18 Choosing and Using Fertilizers September 25 Fall Maintenance: Preparing Your Garden for Next Season | | Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 | | 10:01 pm |
| | Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 | | 7:43 pm |
House Break-In
My house was broken into and robbed at some point yesterday evening. The cops told me that something that really really helps, if you can afford it, is an alarm system. I wish we'd had one, and I think we'll try to get one now. a woman will tell you / every home she has ever inhabited / has been broken into/ starting with her body -suheir hammad | | Friday, April 10th, 2009 | | 10:27 pm |
Also! Feminism in XKCD
.....aaaaand by that expansive subject line I mean one comic in particular ( http://xkcd.com/322/), which I think very neatly captures some of the problems with Randall Munroe's take on feminism. Yes! We get it! It's very bad to sexualize and demean women on the internet! Yay R.M.! But... Who is this dude who waltzes in as Teh Decider? And then assigns some first-name-only woman to shadow a fucking douchebag for a year? Hmmm... Because nothing screams Feminism! At! Work! more than random dudes busting in and Saving the Day(TM) by assigning women to do the grunt work. He KIND of gets it, which is why it's so infuriating, in its way - you (I) just want to scream, "You're almost there!" | | 10:11 pm |
| | Friday, March 27th, 2009 | | 7:07 pm |
Roommate needed for short-term lease in Del Ray
Posting this for a friend of mine. If you're interested, message me here, and I'll send you a link to the listing. $700 + utilities for a bedroom in a 2 bedroom duplex, mid-April through August with option to extend. 15 minute walk to metro with frequent buses. Roommate is a queer, kinky, liberal, quirky, 25 year-old female professional and her middle-aged, well-behaved cat. Infrequent parties and no drunken orgies. | | Monday, March 23rd, 2009 | | 4:29 pm |
Awesome event centered around queer South Asian women and their families!
LOVING TIES: CELEBRATING OUR FAMILIES! Please join us for this special event of conversations with siblings and parents of South Asian lesbian and bisexual women in recognition of Women's History Month. We aim to create a safe, supportive discussion and awards dinner to celebrate those that love us and that help us be who we are. PLUS it's the cherry blossom in FULL BLOOM weekend, so plan a trip to DC! When: Saturday, April 11th 2009, 6-9 PM Where: DC JCC, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington DC SCHEDULE OF EVENTS Dinner Panel Discussion with Parents & Siblings of South Asian Queer Women Q&A Awards Ceremony We have kept this event FREE so as to encourage greater access for everyone, though donations to recover costs of putting this event together would be greatly appreciated. PLEASE RESERVE A PLACE by emailing RSVP.khushdc@ gmail.com Please provide name and number of people in your party. Please RSVP by April 7th as we need to make arrangements for food accordingly. And if you tell us whether you prefer veg/non-veg, we'll love you even more. Thanks! EVERYONE IS WELCOME: LGBTQ Communities, Straight Allies, Friends & Families. If you can't make it, or even if you can, please help spread the word. Making this event a success is as much in your hands as is in ours. This is a HUGE deal for us and an extremely SIGNIFICANT event as this is the first time an event of this nature is being planned on the East Coast. So please help us get the word out. Thanks KhushDC | | Saturday, January 17th, 2009 | | 12:53 am |
| | Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | | 9:10 pm |
i KNOW this is Thanksgiving-themed, but ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) graymalkan made me post this anyway. it is also THE SINGLE MOST HILARIOUS THING I'VE EVER SEEN!!!! | | Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | | 7:56 pm |
| | Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | | 3:37 pm |
| | Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | | 3:12 am |
On Halloween, Fear, Kink, Race, Geishas and Community
I keep thinking back to my two Halloweens. Friday night started at the Black Cat, and was drunken and angry, full of dancing and yelling and biking and some hazy eating in the late late hours. Saturday night at the big kink party was sober, wary and tense. Both of these nights were, in some sense, Halloween, the first because the calendar said so, and the second because it was a Halloween party and people were dressing up. I hate Halloween, let me just say. It has always seemed like an excuse for people to get drunk and inappropriate. I hate St. Patrick's Day and New Year's for the same reason. But I have a special hatred for Halloween as a person of color, as an Asian American woman, as someone who is not-white. It's the day where I get to see people - white people, generally - dress up to look like me. When I say "me," I mean the stereotypical invocation of the Asian woman - kimono, whiteface, elaborate hairdo or severe bob, sandals, etc. Often, this costume is sexified. In preparation for going to the party, I told my friend, I was going to wear a sign that said, "Not Your Fucking Geisha." I didn't, but that's the mood I was - am - in. The geisha/kimono Halloween costume is incredibly insulting to me, and to many other people. It appropriates, often completely inaccurately, Japan's traditional dress. It is intended to be "exotic" and "mysterious" in a way that completely otherizes Asian bodies and traditional clothing. Can you, if you are not a person of color, imagine what it is like to see someone considering you so foreign that they dress up as YOU - or some sensationalized version of you - for Halloween? It negatively impacts my life, these stereotypes of the Asian/AsAm woman as sexualized, as submissive, as exotic and mysterious and unknowable and all that bullshit. The geisha costume is a little reminder, every year, that the racist and sexist stereotypes about me have not been forgotten, and in fact are being actively preserved. I don't always like the me that surfaces when I drink, and the combination of Halloween and alcohol let to a verbal confrontation outside the Black Cat with a white woman in a geisha costume. The resulting hangover prevented me from even considering drinking, the night of the party, but I was as surely prevented from addressing the people in geisha/fake-Asian costumes by a the code of silence that reigns in the organized kink scene around race and racism. Fully three people that I saw were wearing some kind of geisha/fake-Asian gear, and I was deliberately trying not to look, so there may have been more. I did not want to, could not, engage. I am often faced with this dilemma, where I cannot for the life of me imagine how to both introduce myself to someone for the first time AND tell them their costume is oppressing me. I am not surprised I didn't see some of the other traditional - and traditionally offensive, costumes - involving afro wigs, black face paint, sombreros, fake droopy mustaches, and the like. Remember, those aren't EXOTIC or MYSTERIOUS or SEXY and that's what kink is all about, right? Like I've said before, I hate when racism gets in my kink. The reality of the organized kink scene, as I know it in DC, is that I am outnumbered by white people at least 10 to 1. I keep generally quiet about stuff for my own mental health, because I have to pick my battles, and because I know that I will most likely be met with the same kind of denial that I am faced with every day in my vanilla life. It just hurts that the silence is always, always, deafening. I get really tired of the polite fiction that, because we are kinky, we are generally tolerant in other ways too. Sometimes I like to imagine a kink scene where, no matter what the racial breakdown, people don't dress like Asians for Halloween. Where I'm not regularly told that "I love Asian women." Where other kinky friends of color do not report to me, with depressing frequency, about the ways their sexuality is racialized, or their race is sexualized. Where I do not feel like I cannot bring these issues up when they happen, because of the knowledge that I will be perceived as another militant minority, and written off. Sadly, this all affects my desire to identify myself with the kink community, too. Even assuming all of our kinks and perversions are the same, I feel FAR less close to the white couple who came to the party in matching geisha/fake-Asian gear than I do to a random Asian American person on the street who would freak out if she saw my toy collection and has never, not once, mixed up pain and pleasure. It makes me more guarded in the relationships I form within the community, and less likely to attend events and parties. I have known for a long time that the circles I travel in are rareified ones. The organized kink scene is very homogeneous in terms of class. Because I happen to have some serious class privilege, the race dynamic is the one that leaps out at me the most. But leap it does, and sometimes I cannot fucking keep it in one second longer. http://ricedaddies.blogspot.com/2006/10/memoirs-of-racially-insensitive.htmlhttp://www.racialicious.com/2008/10/30/take-back-the-halloween/http://www.angryasianman.com/2007/10/be-asian-for-halloween.htmlhttp://www.racialicious.com/2008/10/15/asian-hair-for-halloween/http://www.racialicious.com/2007/10/30/reasons-i-hate-halloween/http://resistracism.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/the-racist-sexist-hellfest/ | | Sunday, September 14th, 2008 | | 12:37 pm |
a TRULY productive day
So far I have.... - woken up at a time of day that starts with a FIVE - helped arrange a giant spread of food - bowed to my (uncle's) deceased parents - eaten a very large meal - helped clean up after said meal - played badminton - seen Mamma Mia...in the theater .....and it's only 12:30 in the afternoon! | | Saturday, September 13th, 2008 | | 12:07 am |
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