I cannot even begin to explain how much the next sentence out of my fingers is going to make me want to cringe into an early grave but here we go.
Radical feminism quite literally looks at the structures that create societal sexism and misogyny and, well, reverses them. There is no attempt to dismantle these hierarchies and create a truly kind, nurturing environment for all people. It’s just a blatant shot at placing (white, cis, abled) women at the top of the hierarchy and moving (white, cis, abled) men into the newly vacated inferior position.
Complete with all the hypocrisy, paradox, and abuse that entails.
As such, creating a double standard where women should take unilateral control of their own identities to adhere to a specific and rigid construction of acceptable sexuality, but men fundamentally are unable to.
Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh, I can’t believe I just had to define and defend “reverse sexism” but here we all are. These are the depths to which radical feminism forces us all to sink.
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/11/cissexism-and-cis-privilege-revisited.html?m=1
>Michel Foucault initially coined the phrase “reverse discourse” to describe the approach taken by gay liberationists who re-appropriated the heterosexual/homosexual distinction in order to forward the narrative of a homosexual class that was oppressed at the hands of the heterosexual majority.[4] Within feminist theory, the phrase “reverse discourse” has been used to describe certain strands of feminism that conceptualize sexism solely in terms of “men are the oppressors, women the oppressed, end of story.” (Note: in some of my previous writings, I have used the term “unilateral feminism” to describe this particular approach to feminism.) Reverse discourses have also arisen in other activist movements, where they are often described under the rubric of “identity politics.”[5]…
>Having come into activism during the heyday of third-wave feminism and queer theory, I was taught to be highly suspicious of reverse discourses for several of reasons. First, they divvy up all people into two mutually-exclusive groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. This move excludes countless “liminal” people who do not fall neatly into one group or another. This is why feminists who forward reverse discourses have such a horrendous track record in dealing with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, and why gay men and lesbians who forward reverse discourses have such a horrendous track record in dealing with people who fall under the asexual and bisexual umbrellas.
>Reverse discourses also tend to be highly unilateral, focusing primarily on that one particular axis of oppression, while ignoring other forms of marginalization that intersect with that “primary axis” (as well as with one another).[6] As a result, reverse discourses tend to depict the marginalized group in a homogeneous manner—e.g., by making claims that all members share the same perspectives, beliefs, needs, and desires—when this is typically far from the truth. Reverse discourses also tend to portray the “oppressor class” (who in reality are a heterogeneous mix of people who vary greatly in their experiences, privileges, and forms of marginalization they may face) in a monolithic and stereotyped manner. As Judith Butler once said: “The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.”[7]
Tag: read later
Fierce Historical Ladies post: Vladka Meed
historicity-was-already-taken:
Masterpost
These posts tell the story of a Jewish woman named Vladka Meed who, beginning at the age of 21, armed the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, set up covert aid networks in forced labor camps, and dedicated her life to building and preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
Regarding Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) Therapy
Disabled people need to earn their right
to exist by performing less disabled, and ABA will train them to perform
as a less disabled person. At its core, ABA is rooted in the hatred and
denial of the humanity of disabled people. Even with the most generous
interpretation, it is about pathologizing and rejecting disabled ways of
being and holding up non-disabled ways of being as the only right way
and the only way to be correctly human.
It doesn’t matter that it may seem like
fun, it doesn’t matter that your “Behavior Technician” seems like a
really nice person. It doesn’t matter that you read a study that ABA
“works,” because what it “works” at is wrong. It is compliance training at its core.Of all the demographics, one of the groups most at risk of experiencing physical, sexual,
emotional, verbal, institutional, financial, and educational abuse is
the demographic of people with developmental disabilities. You can
double, triple, and quadruple those risks according to how many other
marginalized groups they fall in.Parents and therapists often use an
ends-justify-the-means approach to therapy for their disabled children,
believing that acquiring skills is the most important thing and that it
is worth the child having negative experiences if it means that they
will have a “better life.” In this context, what is considered better is
what is most “normal,” or non-disabled.Survivors of ABA have come forward to say that they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD) as a result of their experiences in ABA. This is not an acceptable trade-off.
This is not an acceptable trade-off. Suicide is dramatically shortening the life-expectancy of autistic people and autistic people are saying it is because they are not being accepted.Autistic writer Max Sparrow, “All
those years of ABA therapy will have taught them that they are
fundamentally wrong and broken; that they are required to do everything
authority demands of them (whether it’s right or wrong for them); that
they are always the one at fault when anything social goes wrong; that
they get love, praise, and their basic survival needs met so long as
they can hide any trace of autism from others; that what they want
doesn’t matter.”Another former ABA therapist writes,
“I thought that because I cared about the kids’ well-being, because I
had a strong desire to help them, everything I did must therefore be in
their best interest. In my mind, it gave me a special immunity to making
mistakes. Caring meant there was no way I could be hurting them. I now realize how dangerous this idea really is.
I’ve hurt many people I care deeply about. Just because you care about
someone or have good intentions does not guarantee you’re doing the best
thing for them.”
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
Long and depressing but worth reading.
Streets in the sky … the Sheffield high-rises that were home sweet home
Why Do Rich Kids Do Better Than Poor Kids in School? It’s Not the “Word Gap.”
The answer isn’t “culture of poverty” “low morals” or “poor people just don’t care about education”
here we go:
Low-income children are more likely than their higher-income peers to be in factory-like classrooms that allow little interaction and physical movement. As a result, these children spend more time sitting, following directions and listening rather than discussing, debating, solving problems and sharing ideas.
As a teacher I hear so much about how “these parents” don’t care about learning and their children’s education. There is palatable frustration at how we can’t “deal with” the students we work with.
But there is little to be said about how our public school systems are not equipped to provide students with valuable learning experiences. Instead we are continually told we need to do more with less.
Number 1 problem: we build schools in the hood designed to control instead of teach.
Why Do Rich Kids Do Better Than Poor Kids in School? It’s Not the “Word Gap.”
The Death of a Once Great City | Harper’s Magazine
“Yes, the rich will be with us always. But New York should be a city
of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a
place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and janitors, or people who wear
buttons reading is it fascism yet?—as one woman in my neighborhood has
for decades, even as she grows steadily grayer and more stooped. A city
of people who sell books on the street—and in their own shops. A city of
street photographers, and immigrant vendors, and bus drivers with
attitudes, and even driven businessmen and hedge fund operators. All
helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they
do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable.“Instead, our leaders seem hopelessly invested in importing a race of
supermen for the supercity, living high above the clouds. Jetting about
the world so swiftly and silently, they are barely visible. A city of
glass houses where no one’s ever home. A city of tourists. An empty
city.”This is a good article.
Can’t sleep gonna read this zine
In case anyone is interested, it’s a great read:
http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/89858:why-misogynists-make-great-informants
“[Misogynists] both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable”
[Essay] | Punching the Clock, by David Graeber | Harper’s Magazine
Historically, human work patterns have
taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming,
for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around
planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects.
Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to
take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always
worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result
in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the
opposite effect.One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was
largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most
labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the
relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at
the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top
couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent.Most societies throughout history would never have imagined that a
person’s time could belong to his employer. But today it is considered
perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent out a
third or more of their day. “I’m not paying you to lounge around,”
reprimands the modern boss, with the outrage of a man who feels he’s
being robbed. How did we get here?By the fourteenth century, the common understanding of what time was
had changed; it became a grid against which work was measured, rather
than the work itself being the measure. Clock towers funded by local
merchant guilds were erected throughout Europe. These same merchants
placed human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves
that they should make quick use of their time. The proliferation of
domestic clocks and pocket watches that coincided with the advent of the
Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century allowed for a
similar attitude toward time to spread among the middle class. Time came
to be widely seen as a finite property to be budgeted and spent, much
like money. And these new time-telling devices allowed a worker’s time
to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold.
Factories started to require workers to punch the time clock upon
entering and leaving.The change was moral as well as technological. One began to speak of
spending time rather than just passing it, and also of wasting time,
killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so
forth. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an
episodic style of working was increasingly treated as a social problem.
Methodist preachers exhorted “the husbandry of time”; time management
became the essence of morality. The poor were blamed for spending their
time recklessly, for being as irresponsible with their time as they were
with their money.Workers protesting oppressive conditions, meanwhile, adopted the same
notions of time. Many of the first factories didn’t allow workers to
bring in their own timepieces, because the owner played fast and loose
with the factory clock. Labor activists negotiated higher hourly rates,
demanded fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, twelve- and
then eight-hour work shifts. The act of demanding “free time,” though
understandable, reinforced the notion that a worker’s time really did belong to the person who had bought it.
[Essay] | Punching the Clock, by David Graeber | Harper’s Magazine
Before Europe: The Christian West in the Annals of Medieval Islam
historicity-was-already-taken:
Love this! This is post-modern historiography done beautifully! Not rejection of narrative and contextualization abilities, but reframing of narratives in a challenge to Euro-centric constructs and modes of thought!
Sorry for saying “post-modernism” lol. And like, the other jargon. I’m just having a Moment.
“Is it possible, then, to write a history of Europe using only Arabic sources?”
Wow, this is really interesting!
Before Europe: The Christian West in the Annals of Medieval Islam
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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