Posts tagged homophobia.

sluteverbabe:

ya’ll out here acting like racism/sexism/transphobia/queerphobia/etc. is just an inconvenience for us rather than violence against our bodies

03.22.13 ♥ 3853
Like anyone who is African-American today, I’m heartened by the appearance of so many black filmmakers who are doing work that speaks to some degree to the issues and experiences in our community. That said, I’m disheartened by the fact that, too often, what seems to be privileged is a very old-fashioned patriarchy in which misogyny, sexism and homophobia are simply taken for granted in the empowerment of young black men. Over and over again, we are confronted with the glorification of violence and phallocentrism as the means by which we redeem ourselves, in which black male empowerment is assumed to be the equivalent to black liberation.

So I really question whether we can call this tremendous progress, as some are lauding it, simply because we now have a number of black filmmakers who are doing work. For me, I think, as Isaac Julien has said, that it’s not sufficient to just have a black face or a black director, but we also have to ask what the work or that face signify in terms of blackness. Are we treated to a fairly standardized notion of what it means to be a man, or a woman, a family, a nation? Are our visions really expanded beyond these fairly pernicious boundaries in which we police difference, even within our own communities? Unfortunately, I see us doing much of the latter, and, to that degree, I can’t join in the celebration, the kind of enthusiasm, that I see so many of us now engaging in.

Marlon Riggs, New Agendas in Black Filmmaking: An Interview with Marlon Riggs (via notime4yourshit)

I wonder how come no one is protesting TOMS, since they donate to the same anti-gay hate groups that Chick-Fil-A does.

08.29.12 ♥ 2021
Perry’s film distorts Shange’s work of self-determination in ways that reinforce the crooked room imposed on black women by male-centered religion and resorts to tools of shaming that so often derive from the crooked room. Although the women in Shange’s original work rely on spirituality and divine support, they are not beholden to any specific definition of God. In Perry’s film the women are subjected to more dominating, moralistic, and constrained notions of morality. Perry creates a new character, played by Whoopi Goldberg, who is a religious fanatic. She serves as a tool of shaming surveillance in the film, interjecting her judgmental, mocking, dogmatic Christian ethics over Shange’s original poetry. Perry also generates a homophobic story line that does not exist in Shange’s play. In this subplot, one of the women learns she is infected with HIV by her closeted gay husband, whose philandering is caused by the woman’s neglect of the relationship in favor of pursuing success in her career. And in a particularly egregious revision of the original text, Perry conflates the Lady in Yellow monologue about sexual freedom and exploration with the Lady in Blue narrative about seeking an unsafe, illegal abortion.

Melissa Harris-Perry (via wretchedoftheearth)

And Shange added a poem about HIV to updated copies of the orignal text, and while it does deal with a closeted Black man, it is NOTHING like what is in the movie, at all. What Perry did with that text is an affront to the talent he gathered to act in that movie. 

(via glossylalia)

06.05.12 ♥ 7

liquornspice:

“Let’s remember the politics of marriage itself. The simplistic formula that claims “you’re either pro-marriage or against equality” makes us forget that all forms of marriage perpetuate gender, racial and economic inequality. It mistakenly assumes that support for marriage is the only good measure of support for LGBT communities. This political moment calls for anti-homophobic politics that centralize anti-racism and anti-poverty. Marriage is a coercive state structure that perpetuates racism and sexism through forced gender and family norms. Right wing pro-marriage rhetoric has targeted families of color and poor families, supported a violent welfare and child protection system, vilified single parents and women, and marginalized queer families of all kinds. Expanding marriage to include a narrow band of same-sex couples only strengthens that system of marginalization and supports the idea that the state should pick which types of families to reward and recognize and which to punish and endanger. We still demand a queer political agenda that centralizes the experiences of prisoners, poor people, immigrants, trans people, and people with disabilities. We reject a gay agenda that pours millions of dollars into campaigns for access to oppressive institutions for a few that stand to benefit. We are being told marriage is the way to solve gay people’s problems with health care access, immigration, child custody, and symbolic equality. It does not solve these problems, and there are real campaigns and struggles that would and could approach these problems for everyone, not just for a privileged few. Let’s take the energy and money being put into gay marriage and put it toward real change: opposing the War on Terror and all forms of endless war; supporting queer prisoners and building a movement to end imprisonment; organizing against police profiling and brutality in our communities; fighting attacks on welfare, public housing and Medicaid; fighting for universal health care that is trans and reproductive healthcare inclusive; fighting to tax wealth not workers; fighting for a world in which no one is illegal.”

— Dean Spade & Crag Willse in I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal (via maozedongisnotcool)

OMG I’MA CRY!

05.18.12 ♥ 907

velocicrafter:

kit-kat-o-graham:

s1utever:

gold star 4 t swift

OH THE IRONY IT BURNSSS USSSSSS!!!!

05.16.12 ♥ 205723

Media sexualization of women and the pressure on women involved in sports to appear as “real women” means wearing make-up, appearing and acting feminine. Some researchers blame homophobia in sports for the need to present heterosexual images. Driven by fears of being labelled as lesbians, women athletes seek to project an over-emphasized heterosexual, feminine image.


But the (hetero)sexualization of women athletes keeps women in their place, whether they are playing or coaching in “male” sports or ones considered more “feminine appropriate.” Compulsory heterosexuality and the sexualization of women are very effective tools in the treatment of women athletes as second-class citizens and they also diminish women’s talents as athletes and coaches.

there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
03.29.12 ♥ 12