People talk about the Lesbian Web Of Death and lesbian over-processing, but I’ve been in any number of mostly-straight spaces where the tangled relationships present (sexual and otherwise) fostered a palpable sense of anxiety and shame and anger and humiliation. I actually think straight people are considerably worse at having good, not-weird relationships with their exes than queer women are. To what extent are the “scenes” of marginalised groups more visible, more the focus of anxiety, than less-marginalised scenes and subcultures? Maybe it’s just because we can’t scene-hop as easily, so feeling comfortable in any particular scene carries more weight. Maybe we expect more of these scenes. But I think there’s also an element of internalised homophobia, a persistent belief that our occasional unhappiness in love is not because we are human but because we are fundamentally dysfunctional. And an element of regular homophobia: I’ll fucking crack it I hear another straight or essentially-straight person make an off-hand joke about the “dramatic” nature of queer communities. Cool, now tell me again about how you ducked behind a magazine stand to avoid making eye contact with your ex’s new partner.
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Posts tagged subculture
So. I know it only took about a thousand months, but here’s the pdf of Betrayal - A critical analysis of rape culture in anarchist subcultures. It’s only in readable format because I’m terrible with computers, and keep forgetting to ask someone to make a printable version.
Sorry this took so long. But here it is! As always, any questions or concerns, let me know.
http://zinelibrary.info/betrayal-critical-analysis-rape-culture-anarchist-subcultures
(via missvoltairine)
![this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on. I was 21. extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In. I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post.
I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog. partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god. I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there. but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing. When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne. afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested. it was pretty scary. security culture became the buzzword du jour. for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me. weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?). I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved. security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey. it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in. for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices. if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely. but as a lifestyle — no. Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous. But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable. We are not all everywhere. We come from different places. I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself. immediately, without fail. I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people. I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life. the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity). Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance. That’s not really where I’m coming from. My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark. It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body. I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness. (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.) I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind. I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility. I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with. I want roots. none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere. but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to. I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them. they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves. it just makes them so much easier to remember. you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url. I’ve never changed my name, either. while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history. hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends. lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place. there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town. plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability.
how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted? and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation? increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary. if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat? absolutely none of this is prescriptive. I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity. that’s my face. you’ve seen it before. my name is liz, if you didn’t know. it’s not an uncommon name. it’s not a remarkable face. it doesn’t matter. it’s a history and a geography.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md3y93aZMB1qzi4y4o1_400.jpg)
this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on. I was 21. extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In. I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post.
I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog. partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god. I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there. but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing. When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne. afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested. it was pretty scary. security culture became the buzzword du jour. for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me. weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?).
I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved. security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey. it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in. for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices. if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely. but as a lifestyle — no.
Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous. But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable. We are not all everywhere. We come from different places.
I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself. immediately, without fail. I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people. I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life.
the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity). Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance. That’s not really where I’m coming from. My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark. It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body. I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness. (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.)
I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind. I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility. I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with. I want roots. none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere. but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to. I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them. they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves. it just makes them so much easier to remember.
you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url. I’ve never changed my name, either. while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history. hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends. lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place. there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town. plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability.
how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted? and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation? increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary. if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat?
absolutely none of this is prescriptive. I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity. that’s my face. you’ve seen it before. my name is liz, if you didn’t know. it’s not an uncommon name. it’s not a remarkable face. it doesn’t matter. it’s a history and a geography.
I’ve never met a 20something who was super into “teen culture” and “anti-ageism” who actually made a serious effort to reach out to anyone other than similarly nostalgic 20somethings to get sanctimonious with
really I’m just super-bitter because of this one time I was going to go to a kind of expensive 18+ gig and someone I know started ranting about how nobody should ever go to shows that weren’t all ages, much less pay for them, or for that matter go to shows that cost more than $10, sorry if that was “punk elitist”, then changed their mind when they realised a lot of their friends were going (because someone they knew was gonna be a dancer and was getting people on the door), made a few phone calls, got on the guestlist, started excitedly dressing up, and in the meantime I realised I was the only person I knew who wasn’t getting in for free, and felt so small and so uncool that I couldn’t face going at all, and also felt stupid for wasting money, and also for having spent money to waste in the first place, in a recursive dorky-feeling loop, and I generally have pretty OK social confidence so you can imagine how depressing the whole situation was to bring me to that point.
like, my emotions were affected by a lot of other things going on at that time, I’m not trying to say that person’s terrible cultural politics caused me to collapse in a puddle of anxiety, but fuck you if you think having better connections than other people makes you more radical than them
also the thing that builds those connections is years spent in a scene, and few teens from the sticks have those connections, teens are generally much more able to rustle up a fake ID than get on the fucking guestlist for an international act
I just really want people to remember what it was like to be a teenager, rather than romanticise the figure of The Teen, because that’s no different to Impulse deodorant advertising
anyway, that person is super into Rookie now and still doesn’t hang out with actual teenagers
speaking of pastels
I am 24 which is old by tumblr standards apparently,
and I am enjoying how the ~youth of tumblr~ (i.e. people who don’t actually remember the early 90s) are enraging slightly older people with their “soft grunge” and “pastel grunge”, or even better, calling anything with a 90s revival vibe “grunge” (tell me more about how your glow-in-the-dark tie-die smiley face crop top is grunge).
see also: people getting mad about “pastel goth” because “goth means dark colours” or “a colour scheme is not a subculture” or sometimes even both?!
I mean I have pretty mixed feelings about the actual visual content of those subcultures myself, because one thing that is absolutely authentically 90s about them is their saturation level of culturally appropriative motifs (gtfo with your bindis and dripping yin-yang symbols). but people who care about the authenticity of grunge and goth are possibly even more ridiculous than people who get mad about “mall punks”, and they deserve a comeuppance.
first world youth culture’s apathy towards history is irritating at best and can be really fucked up, but there is also a lesson here for aging hipsters, and it is that if you don’t challenge our culture’s obsession with extreme youth while you are yourself young than you will quickly fall into baffled embittered irrelevance.
I am fascinated by teens, especially teen girls, I love how much they care about fashion and how inventive and ahead of the curve they are, but I hate how they become images that are used and chewed up and spat out by the culture industries. & it’s more complicated than that again because of course the sixth sense teens have for the next trend is partly self-fulfilling, because they’re watched so carefully by the people who market those trends.
it’s resistance and capitalism and exploitation and exploration and self-representation and cultural theft and narcissism in one big, messy, fucked-up ball and if the thing that makes you the maddest is “that’s not grunge!” then I don’t understand you.
I don’t understand why you expect me to care about you doing stuff purely for yourself.
like sometimes that’s fine of course but why would you tell me that self-care is your ethos? the sole organising principle of your life? if that’s really the case, why wouldn’t you just do it and not care what I think?
it’s almost like this individualistic self-care stuff actually relies implicitly upon the tolerance and work of others.
newsboy caps are like the fedoras of anarchists^^^
(via pussy-strut)
