Looks like a pump, feels like a wingtip.
![derica:
Dean by Lola Flash from the [sur]passing series (2003)
“[sur]passing is […] a series of larger than life size color portraits that probe the impact skin pigmentation plays on black identity and consciousness. Primarily due to the melanin count of their skin, light and dark-skinned blacks opportunities can differ enormously ranging from overt favoritism to extreme alienation. Kobena Mercer coins this process as a “pigmentocracy” - based on skin-tone. This scandalous and often heart wrenching story line dates back to colonial America and it clearly perseveres today.
In [sur]passing the models are shot with a large format camera from towering urban vantage points, highlighting the re-generation of a new inner-city culture, they become divine, larger than the purposely out of focus buildings of the London, New York and South African skylines, in contrast to the sharp, crisp rendering of each subject. The subjects assertively return the gaze, without being confrontational and by hanging the four-foot by five-foot photographs above eye level, the viewer has no choice but to “look up” to these young people posed as if characters from a modern Shakespeare melodrama.So, as the title [sur]passing suggests, these portraits represent a “new generation” - one that is above and beyond “passing”. We represent a fresh pride and strength; where ambiguity and blurred borders create an individuality that elevates consciousness and advances a plethora of complex and positive imagery of [black] people in the Diaspora and all over the world.” - text from artist’s statement](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m147qnMjq41qb6jujo1_500.jpg)
Dean by Lola Flash from the [sur]passing series (2003)
“[sur]passing is […] a series of larger than life size color portraits that probe the impact skin pigmentation plays on black identity and consciousness. Primarily due to the melanin count of their skin, light and dark-skinned blacks opportunities can differ enormously ranging from overt favoritism to extreme alienation. Kobena Mercer coins this process as a “pigmentocracy” - based on skin-tone. This scandalous and often heart wrenching story line dates back to colonial America and it clearly perseveres today.
In [sur]passing the models are shot with a large format camera from towering urban vantage points, highlighting the re-generation of a new inner-city culture, they become divine, larger than the purposely out of focus buildings of the London, New York and South African skylines, in contrast to the sharp, crisp rendering of each subject. The subjects assertively return the gaze, without being confrontational and by hanging the four-foot by five-foot photographs above eye level, the viewer has no choice but to “look up” to these young people posed as if characters from a modern Shakespeare melodrama.
So, as the title [sur]passing suggests, these portraits represent a “new generation” - one that is above and beyond “passing”. We represent a fresh pride and strength; where ambiguity and blurred borders create an individuality that elevates consciousness and advances a plethora of complex and positive imagery of [black] people in the Diaspora and all over the world.” - text from artist’s statement
(Source: yagazieemezi)
I’ve recieved a lot of requests for a masterpost.
So…I made one.
Yeah.
Like always, contact me with any changes.
Like always, if you’re going to complain that demisexuality isn’t real, polysexuals are just confused, trans* people are liars, or asexuals need to get laid…. Just, I dunno, stop.
Click on photo to read my new blog post What “They” Said: These Things
Go read! It’s dope. ^_^ (Especially as someone who has conflicted/complex feelings about their own “lumps up front,” as I call them.)
a short history of ‘third gender’
Anonymous: totally didn’t know third gender was a culture-specific, appropriateable thing. what’s the history of the term?
(my reply)
According to the article “Romancing the Transgender Native”:
The term third gender was apparently introduced in 1975 by M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies, who employed it to draw attention to the ethnographic evidence that gender categories in some cultures could not be adequately explained with a two-gender framework.I’ve not been able to get my hands on the 1975 chapter where the term is introduced… but I’ll make the article available later for those people interested in reading it, especially since it works both as a good critique of this anthro term and from how the trans community has appropriated it. (h/t to a-bayani for suggesting this article)
Nonetheless, this paragraph alone demonstrates just how and why the term is not only racist when coming from white people, but how it is also white supremacist.
The coining of the term clearly demonstrates that these white researchers assume the supremacy and the a priori validity of their western/white binary gender system. (having a ‘third’ gender makes zero sense if your culture has always had more than two — why would we call it ‘third’ if it is traditional?)
However, the term isn’t necessarily culture specific since white people used it to describe and conflate vastly different genders they deemed ‘other’ based on their own cultural gender expectations. More than anything ‘third gender’ seems to describe any non-white/non-western gender beyond its borders. It signifies ‘other’ more than anything else.
This is why, for me at least, I think that any non-white non-binary person has a right to use the term if they wish to reclaim it. But it is also why white gq people shouldn’t use the term, ever.
If you read the article (but I’ll summarize some points), you’ll see that the later history of the term comes to be that white people like Kate Borstein come to romantise and appropriate ‘third genders’ in their politics. The existence and experiences of non-white third gender people come to be used as an almost continual rhetorical point that many white trans and/or genderqueer people seem content to use in their arguments against a binary gender system.
People like me end up being a footnote to some white gq’s ‘libratory’ discourse.
tl;dr ‘third gender’ is a racist term coined by a racist discipline to describe and exotify non-white gender identities.
from top to bottom
Last night I attended a queer erotica reading at the pleasure chest in Chicago. It was hosted by Sinclair Sexsmith, editor of the BDSM queer erotica book “Say Please.” It was a lovely group of folks - and the readers (excluding Sinclair) were all femmes!
But the readings brought something up that I find mildly annoying. To be clear before I go off — this isn’t a critique on Sinclair’s writing (which is fantastic) or about the book “Say Please” (I haven’t read it). Here’s the rub: all the stories last night involved scenarios in which the femme (or more feminine presenting person) was the bottom and the butch (or more masculine presenting person) was the top.
Why queers why are we still setting up/eroticizing this often played-out dichotomy? Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done - but out of FOUR stories - not one of them even slightly toyed with any other power dynamic. And when I do come across a rare femme top photo or story online, it’s often portrayed as “hard femme” - which is fine, but just because a femme has strapped on and has you strapped down, does not necessarily make them HARD (ahem!)
(warning: this is a little ranty)
Been thinking about this type of ish lately. Just read this post from the Trans Queers: A Transfags Sex Journal (which I love) where the author talks about his frustrations as a self described “faggy trans boy” dating cis femme women, and it bummed me out. Not because I’m angry or upset at anything the author had to say—parts of that post hit very close to home, even though I’m not a guy and I pass as a cis femme woman—but because it reminded me of the disappointment I keep running into, or hearing from others.
Sometimes I feel like queer folks got lied to. Like, we hear all this rhetoric about how the various coming-out processes are valuable, how finding community is important, how we can, after all that work, finally be complete, fearless beings.
And yet, what happens? We can’t write scripts that exist outside of the mainstream. We don’t reinvent ourselves in a vacuum. We carry a bunch of the same tired mess that some of us observed in the folks we were running from, the places where our odd-puzzle-piece selves couldn’t find purchase. We borrow the tools that broke our hearts before, repaint them so they fit in with the vocabulary we use for ourselves, and then break our hearts all over again.
And so the masculine folks are supposed to go one way, and the feminine folks are supposed to go the other,* and even though there’s technically no “right” way to be [whatever], there’s always a Legit Right Way, and you’re either working towards it or Screwing Up Big Time. And no matter how persistent you are in knowing your own truth, no matter how much you rail inside your head against the stilted movements that feel like a monstrous offense to just living your life, at the end of everything, you find yourself standing in front of the same stupid sign.
It is boring and disappointing. For all the talk about communication and breaking down the old constructs, all too often folks let a couple of outward identifiers tell the whole story.
I don’t expect strangers to get it. I don’t care if they do. But isn’t there room for our private lives to be a little more creative, for our intimates to pay closer attention to who we really are? When I say I want you naked, honey, clothes are the least of my concerns.
* I refuse to front like people don’t treat androgyny differently based on how “kinda-masculine” or not the presentation is on a given body. The complexity of multiple genders and/or the refusal to favor any of them in presentation end up getting boiled down to “boy” or “girl” in really messed-up ways.
Drag Dad Kickstarter video
“Having Jeremiah when I was seventeen saved my life.”
James William Ross IV, aka Tyra SanchezFixing eggs and toast for your son in the morning. Helping him finish his homework before getting ready for school. Styling your platinum wig and dusting off your prosthetic breast plate for tonight’s drag performance. This is a day in the life of James William Ross IV, a 24 year old drag performer and single father.
ABOUT THE FILM
Drag Dad is an independent documentary project about a six year old boy named Jeremiah and his father, the drag queen superstar named Tyra Sanchez. In 2010, Tyra Sanchez won the popular reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, propelling Tyra and her creator James into stardom.
Capturing both the everyday and the sensational aspects of James’ dual existence as a drag queen and a parent, the film will examine James’s experience of leading these two contrastive lifestyles. What is it like for Jeremiah to have a dad who is sometimes a man and sometimes a woman? Is James any different a dad because he works as a female impersonator?
Filmed in an observational cinema verité style, Drag Dad will combine interviews with James, Tyra and Jeremiah, and footage of their everyday domestic lives in Atlanta to gain an in-depth view into this unique LGBT family.
Really, really hope this gets made.
A story on some trans experiences in China
Youths are leading the shift toward tolerance of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community. Xu Jingxi in Guangzhou and Cheng Anqi in Beijing report.
Xu Hui’s parents locked him in a mill, hired an exorcist and psychologists, and forced him to undergo acupuncture that accidentally pierced his lung, in order to “cure” his feminine behavior. The boy enjoyed playing with his sister’s Barbie dolls and wore bras stuffed with tissue. “I increasingly felt like a girl but didn’t think too much about it,” says the 22-year-old, who now considers herself a woman.
This sort of thing gives me so much life.
(not because Xu Hui had this terrible experience or the misgendering but because it is good to read non-white trans experiences.)
Male rites of passage are common in cultures all over the world. Although different in shape and form, a common denominator is often that these rites comprise either pain, danger or the threat of isolation. Among the Shan people of Burma and northern Thailand, this could, however, not be further from the truth.
When boys of the Shan tribe undergo the ritual “Poi Sang Long”, the focus lies on what in the Western world would be described as “feminine values”. They are dressed up in bright colours and adorned with make-up. The aim is to mimic the young Prince Siddhartha before he became Lord Buddha. Even though the purpose of the ritual is to show that the boys are ready to become mature and responsible men, it is loaded with aesthetic values and free from any physical trials. This is what sets it apart from other typical male rituals – and Bamberg’s portraits question the cultural and societal constructs of gendered norms.
The entire series, Flowers, is absolutely stunning. Check out the rest of the series here.
A New Queer Agenda finally hit the online new stands!
Hello the internet!
Specifically the POC centered, gender self determining, queer liberation, disability & economic justice internet!
I co-authored a chapter in Queers for Economic Justice’s ebook, A New Queer Agenda with my sibling Che & AJ Lewis about queer & trans people resisting police violence. after many years in limbo, The Scholar & Feminist Online journal published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women published it! it finally hits online newstands today! We wrote it in 2009, but clearly police violence has hasn’t stopped, nor has our resistance, so IMHO its still relevant! its also filled with beautiful photos by Syd London!
You can read it here:
For my fashionable friends and gender studies folks/advocates and trans family:
Pinterest is awesome but it sucks that they force you to identify between “women’s apparel” and “men’s apparel” if you want to categorize your fashion inspiration board.
These two categories are also insensitive to trans folks using Pinterest or really anyone who doesn’t agree with the concept of a gender binary.
All types of people are fashionable and like to share their inspiration.
If you agree, please reblog and click through to repin this request. Additionally, contact Pinterest directly and ask them to create a “fashion” category so that can find boards that aren’t restricted by gender.
Submit a request for a gender neutral “fashion” category:
https://support.pinterest.com/anonymous_requests/new
Example:
This is a tiny thing amidst a whole bunch of inequality issues affecting trans people but I wanted to share. Thanks.
ART: Sophia Wallace and “Modern Dandy” [threadbared]
Feeling this writeup, and the photo series. Really like the last line Mimi wrote here.
(Sophia Wallace is just dope, by the way. I’m partial to this series and “On Beauty” - check her page out, since the link’s below.)
The proliferation of queer fashion blogs and editorials in the last year is astounding (my new favorite being Queerture), and no doubt deserves a post of itself. Into this fray, Sophia Wallace’s photographs in a series called “Modern Dandy” are just one of a number of projects that consider the dandy as critical figure. Wallace’s artist’s statement reads:
The dandy—conventionally defined as a strikingly attractive man whose dress is immaculate and manor is dignified—has been around since the late 18th century. Often misunderstood as superficial, the dandy is rather a space of creative possibility where men and women can perform a persona in ways that reach far beyond the narrow binary constructs of masculine and feminine. Indeed artists like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, H.H Monro and less recognized women such as the American painter Romaine Brookes and her cohorts found Dandyism to be a liberatory space not only for appearance but more importantly, for a life of independence that did not necessarily adhere to a deterministic heterosexual model of marriage and children. Examples of modern dandies include Andy Warhol, Quentin Crisp, Grace Jones. My many years focusing on gender, race and constructions of beauty led me to dandyism as a radical position for art making and social critique. Indeed, dandyism’s subversive aesthetic of beauty disrupts normative gender in fascinating ways. Beauty is defined in almost all contexts as the domain of femininity which is commonly understood as frivolous, weak and passive. The dandy is neither traditionally feminine or masculine. Rather, the dandy is an aestheticized androgyny available to men, women and transgender individuals. Herein lies it’s power and it’s danger.
Now, I love me a dandy (friends who know me in real life can testify), but something that requires some consideration (and femme theory) are the parameters of androgyny, or genderqueer, especially practically — which items of clothing signal androgyny, through what assemblages, on which bodies?
Coming Out As Genderqueer At The Age Of 50
gqid:
I’m lucky to have found the option which works for me at an early age. I wonder what society will look like 50 years from now?
Interesting article - great to hear about genderqueer folks beyond their 20s, since they tend to not be adequately represented in media around gender identity.
Transmography
Thirteen Fairytale Portraits of Queers Beyond the Gender Binary
by Molly Crabapple and Najva SolTransmogrify,Verb:
To transform, esp. in a surprising or magical manner
From poets to porn-stars, computer nerds to community gardeners, artists to activists: these portraits capture some of the real gender warriors today. They are trans, genderqueer, or just gender-fabulous, and they deserve their own magical realm.Each portrait was shot by Najva Sol with a lomo camera, then embellished by me. Show sponsored by Lomography. Hope to see some of you at the New York opening!
Show Opens At Lomography stores in New York AND San Francisco
June 7th at 6pm until 9pmNew York Lomography Store
41 West 8th Street
Manhattan, NY 10011
212-529-4351San Fran Lomography Store
309 Sutter Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
415-248-0096
