African American Doctor, Daniel Hale Williams, is credited with having performed the first open heart surgery on July 9, 1893 before such surgeries were established. While he is known as the first person to perform an open heart surgery, it is actually more noteworthy that he was the first surgeon to open the chest cavity successfully without the patient dying of infection. His procedures would therefore be used as standards for future internal surgeries.
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I wish people wouldn’t just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add race to it, and it became, ‘Well she’s too Asian’, or ‘She’s too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It’s a very strange place to be. You’re not Asian enough and then you’re not American enough.
(Source: joanwatson, via transmutes)
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State of the Industry: Politically Deployed Cinema at the Oscars
lazz:
The 85th Academy Awards will, as every year, be a boring, overlong, masturbatory tribute to mediocre cinema. For decades now, the Oscars have predominantly celebrated middle-brow films that embrace shallow evocations of gravitas over anything approaching creativity. One thing about owners, about the old, rich, white and powerful, is that when it comes to art they are deeply stupid: confusing seriousness with artistry, the emotive with the emotional, realism with profundity. But when it comes to control, strategy, and power, these confusions become assets, foundational aspects of bourgeois subjectivity, of obedience and self-ignorance.
(via iamthecrime)
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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
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John Berger Ways of Seeing (via spartanbitch)
This is super fucking relevant.
And why self portraits (selfies) are often such an act of self preservation and resistance.
(via sexxxisbeautiful)
(Source: homeless-dad, via feministartdegree)
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rich ppl think taxes are worse than racism.
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Musings from a Queercrip Femme Man of Color by Edward Ndopu
I feel compelled to make it known that I do not move through the world as sometimes black, sometimes disabled, sometimes queer, sometimes femme, sometimes male and sometimes Afropolitan. I move through the world embodying all of those identities at the same time, all of the time. We often make the mistake of thinking that an intersectional identity means a set of compartmentalized lived experiences joined together. An intersectional identity is one lived experience layered with the complexity of sociopolitical and cultural context. To borrow the words of Eli Clare, “gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race…everything finally piling onto a single human body.”
When people asked me how I identified prior to my understanding of what it means to embody an intersectional identity, I gave them a rehearsed, succinct response because I didn’t want to overwhelm them with the complexity of my lived experience. I would say: I was born in Namibia, but brought up in South Africa, now living in Canada, and that I use a wheelchair because I was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy at the age of two. I usually left it at that, hoping I satisfied at least some of their curiosity. Now, I make it known that my personal narrative cannot and should not be summarized because I am intentionally complex. I do not subscribe to normative ways of being and knowing. And I do not even want to try. I dwell in the grace of my differences. Born to a South African freedom fighter mother who fled the Apartheid regime to Namibia and went into self-imposed exile, I grew up knowing that everything is political, including my existence.
My existence necessitates a re-imagining of ontological and epistemological understandings of time and space. I identify as femme partially because masculinity has given me nothing in terms of validation and self-actualization. Being a femme man allows me to perform masculinity outside of its heteropatriarchal gaze. People who are invested in hegemonic conceptions of gender may label my gender expression ‘effeminate.’ My gender expression is femme, not effeminate. The latter is an adjective couched in a web of patriarchal, cis normative, trans misogynistic assumptions. The former is a self-identification grounded in the divine feminine. I very much claim my masculinity, it just happens to be a feminine manifestation of masculinity. Notwithstanding the sociopolitical imposition of an inaccessible world and cultural paradigm, disabled femmes of all genders teach able bodied ness new ways of being beautiful in the world. We firmly belief that there is no shame in seeking glamour, power and magnificence if you have been labeled undesirable, useless and inconsequential; there’s no shame because those things already abide within the spirit, they’re yours for the seeking.
As a disabled femme, I deal with pain, rejection and solitude in ways that compel the people around me to redefine courage and tenacity. I reconfigure sexiness and sweetness and passion in the name of ugliness, tragedy and the promise of survival. Forget being inspirational, disabled femmes want to be everything. We want to move through the world on our own terms, guided by a bright flame of fabulousness. As I see it, we should all be allowed to simultaneously enjoy and problematize the myriad of ways we show up in sociocultural spaces. We neither have to give up the fabulous, nor put up with its shit. There’s space for complex shades of grey in our experiences, because we have been accorded with the inalienable agency to exist and embody that existence in sexy, dynamic, conventional and counter-hegemonic ways. Indeed, I’m relentless in my pursuit of the limelight. But, I’m more obsessed with embodying light. Since leaving South Africa, I’ve grown more and more comfortable identifying as an Afropolitan. As Taiye Selasie put it, “what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is wonderful [and] unique. Rather than essentializing the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.”
To negotiate my survival as a disabled queer femme Afropolitan, I break down what it means to survive into little pieces of grace, then take those little pieces of grace and reconstruct existence in a way that challenges the normative. Without difference, the universe would be less vulnerable, less revealing, less courageous.
Edward (Eddie) Ndopu is a black (dis) abled queer femme Afro-politan living in Ottawa, Ontario. Named by the Mail and Guardian Newspaper as one of their Top 200 Young South Africans, he is a social critic, anti-oppression practitioner, consultant, writer and scholar.
*This writer received an honorarium for this piece. If you want to support QTPOC being paid for their work, please consider making a donation to BGD!(Source: theboyprincessdiaries, via takebacksexuality)
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Handing an American woman an M16 with the guideline, “Yo, shoot that suspicious-looking brown man” isn’t feminism. It isn’t empowerment. If your “feminism” is about co-opting the same patriarchy’s imperial wars, jingoism and ultra-nationalism, I don’t need it. Step aside.
(via marrymejasonsegel)
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Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
—
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via helplesslyamazed)
Again Atwood just gets it.
(via walterbasedjamin)
I should make my brother read Atwood before he goes to college.
(via amber-and-ice)
The second last line is too intense for me.(via wyrdwulf)
(Source: courcel, via ghostbread)
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What if all women were bigger and stronger than you? And thought they were smarter? What if women were the ones who started wars? What if too many of your friends had been raped by women wielding giant dildos and no K-Y Jelly? What if the state trooper who pulled you over on the New Jersey Turnpike was a woman and carried a gun? What if the ability to menstruate was the prerequisite for most high-paying jobs? What if your attractiveness to women depended on the size of your penis? What if every time women saw you they’d hoot and make jerking motions with their hands? What if women were always making jokes about how ugly penises are and how bad sperm tastes? What if you had to explain what’s wrong with your car to big sweaty women with greasy hands who stared at your crotch in a garage where you are surrounded by posters of naked men with hard-ons? What if men’s magazines featured cover photos of 14-year-old boys with socks tucked into the front of their jeans and articles like: “How to tell if your wife is unfaithful” or “What your doctor won’t tell you about your prostate” or “The truth about impotence”? What if the doctor who examined your prostate was a woman and called you “Honey”? What if you had to inhale your boss’ stale cigar breath as she insisted that sleeping with her was part of the job? What if you couldn’t get away because the company dress code required you wear shoes designed to keep you from running? And what if after all that women still wanted you to love them?
— For the Men Who Still Don’t Get It, Carol Diehl (via monkeyknifefight)
(Source: ashemo, via monkeyknifefight)
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Man denied heart transplant due to autism
They’ve started a change.org petition. Maybe if we make enough noise we can fix this act of bullshittery?
Petition link here for easy reference: http://www.change.org/petitions/help-my-autistic-son-get-a-life-saving-heart-transplant
(via iamthecrime)
