torturelabyrinth:

Something I wish people on Tumblr would understand is that pro-war propaganda can be critical of the war in question and still work as propaganda. Propaganda doesn’t have to be all jingoism all the time–it can have nuance. It can be realistic about the injustice of the draft, about the trauma that soldiers suffer, about the disillusionment they feel towards their country and their cause. What makes it propaganda is how it encourages people to assume the perspective of the invading forces. We see these characters as complex, sympathetic people; we feel their pain and anger. We experience the war through their eyes. Very rarely, if at all, do the soldiers from the opposing army–or the civilians of the country being invaded, for that matter–receive the same treatment. Sometimes they don’t even appear on the page or screen. This is fine, because at its heart, no war story told by the invaders is ever about the people whose country has been invaded. It’s always about our guys. Our guys can struggle and agonize and writhe with guilt about what they do during the war, but at the end of the day it’s still their story. When we watch or read propaganda, when we adopt the perspective of our guys, we can easily forget that the war ever had an impact on anyone else besides us, let alone what that impact actually was and is. This is exactly what propaganda wants us to forget.

So, if you’re reading this and you are one of the many consumers of propaganda about the Korean War, let me tell you what you are being made to forget. My grandmother is Korean. When I think of the Korean War, I think of the stories she’s told me. I think of how she survived her homeland’s violent invasion by two different imperial forces before she turned sixteen. I think of how she and her family had to ration their rice when they lived in U.S.-occupied Busan. I think of how she had to learn English in her makeshift one-room school run out of an abandoned warehouse, just like she had to learn Japanese in the village where she was born: you’ve got to know the language of your colonizers. I think of how the U.S. dropped more bombs on North Korea alone than on the entire Pacific theater during World War II. I think of how the population of the North was literally decimated: 12 to 15 percent, over a million people dead, many if not most of whom were civilians.

I think of how lucky my grandmother was to get out of South Korea alive, before the U.S. installed a right-wing authoritarian government there that terrorized its citizens for the next several decades. I think of how the war technically never ended, how the U.S. still has military bases on the Korean peninsula, how some of my grandmother’s relatives disappeared and died in the North after the 38th parallel was drawn. I think of how South Korean and U.S. forces collaborated to coerce women into sex work near military bases, how those women are only in the past few years receiving acknowledgment of the cruelty they suffered. I think of how the stigma of simply existing as a Korean woman in the American imagination continues to this day, often with deadly consequences, as we’ve all so recently witnessed.

I think of how the grief and trauma that is the Korean War’s legacy reverberates down through my family and through me, as it does for literally every single Korean person alive on Earth today. I think of how the experiences described above are nowhere near unusual, and in fact my grandmother is incredibly fortunate compared to most Koreans of her generation. I think of how I learned nothing about the Korean War in my high school history classes, because to learn any accurate information about the war at all is to comprehend the full scope of the United States’ depraved brutality. I think of how people my age who think of themselves as intelligent, empathetic, politically aware consumers of media are choosing not only to get their information about the Korean War from a 1970s propaganda television show, but also to be entertained by such propaganda. What a huge gap there must be, between my life experiences and yours, if you can be genuinely entertained by propaganda about the Korean War. If you can look at the propaganda and see shippable twinks or gender envy or relatable humor, instead of a reminder of the horrific violence that the U.S. inflicted and continues to inflict on occupied land all over the world.

It is impossible for me to be entertained by propaganda about the Korean War, because I know what this propaganda wants me to forget. If you are entertained by this same propaganda, I would ask that you think about what makes that possible, and what exactly it is that you don’t know, or that you are choosing to forget.

(via myfishdreamisasexdream)

:

jiang cheng and lan wangji’s ability to not bond is honestly astonishing. name any other pair of characters who could spend three months fighting at each other’s side, having both just experienced the destructions of their homes at the hands of the same people, while searching desperately for a person they both love, and end up with zero emotional connection at all. iconic

(via feuilletoniste)

Anonymous asked:

I feel really stuck between being a butch lesbian and being transmasculine also and i dont know what to do about it cause like. Im bisexual. Im seventeen so this doesnt even matter for now, but god i was a lesbian for so long, and then i was a boy for a year and i realized i like boys, and now i kinda wanna go back to lesbianism but i cant anymore bc this cant be re-repressed. Transmasculine is good for now but i feel. Weird about it. I wish i could just be a butch on T in the 90s

queersatanic:

turing-tested:

I know this doesn’t fix other stresses you have going on but you can…..just be a butch and transmasc. you can be butch and also go on T, I am 3 years on T and I’ve never been more at peace with my body

as for the other things you mentioned, for me my attraction to me tapered off soon after I realized I just didn’t have the connection to manhood I thought I did, because of a variety of reasons, including ‘i don’t want to be in a relationship with a man with this specific dynamic/relationship to my gender’ and following that I just didn’t have the same attraction to men that I’d had.

and additionally……and someone may be very mad at me for this, but if you feel this much anxiety about attraction to men, if you feel this upset about being attracted to men, that’s worth looking at. attraction is supposed to feel good. it’s supposed to be nice and not fill you with uncomfortable feelings.

and while someone may be further mad at me, the thing that made me finally realize I was a lesbian was that im not interested in men, which is different than being attracted to them. if you aren’t comfortable with being in a relationship with a man, if it’s not something that you feel would make you happy, or give you want you need…..that’s ok. you don’t have to factor people into your orientation that you aren’t interested in. you do not have to recategorize your entire orientation around possibilities or people you are not interested in. if you want.

it’s up to you how you categorize yourself and I don’t know your exact feelings so I’m just offering up my experiences and a final note:

you can be on T and not be a man, and you can be on T and be a lesbian. you can be on T and be bisexual as well. nothing you’ve said here precludes you from doing what makes you comfortable.

*I am not saying that this person is not bi and am more so relating to my own experiences that I have had that are similar in feeling and what happened with those feelings and the conclusions I drew from them. this person is obviously handling a lot of new different things and difficult problems to handle with their identity and I am offering the perspective that I have lived.

I know this is a whole thing, but for a somewhat opposite perspective for anon, it’s also entirely possible for you to like some boys/men and still be a lesbian if that’s what feels most comfortable to you right now.

A future-you may feel differently about boys or about the comfort of lesbianism as a category for yourself. Which is fine. That’s really your journey to figure out, and to keep figuring out. No one else can be you to know what is most appropriate for you.

What @turing-tested is saying about T being irrelevant to essentializing your gender or sexuality is absolutely right. But I reblogged this from someone whose takeaway was how destructive and confusing the trend of labeling has been, and this takeaway seems entirely due to an essentializing and exclusionary tendency going along with the labels rather than the labels themselves.

This may not be a great comparison for everyone, but if you view these identities less as medicalizing, essentialist terminology and more as an ad-hoc tag system, they have a lot more utility and a lot less harm to anyone.

It’s true that the way you feel about yourself at 17 may not be the way you feel at 25 or 40 or 80, but so what? Either the tag was useful or wasn’t; everyone else is living their lives and terms will change or new ones will come along all the time. We don’t need to slip into fear of contagion or complain that “words have meaning” or fret on behalf of poor young people who are “confused” when they’re talking about what feels most right and is most helpful for them at that time.

Anyway, hopefully, the “tag” versus “exclusive medicalized category” distinction resonates with other people. But this paper by Taiwanese queer researcher Josephine Ho was really revelatory in terms of how long these conversations have been going on, how arbitrary most of the distinctions ultimately are when you drill down deep enough (see: the fisting discussion or judging forearms not genitals), and how little we’ve changed—arguably, we’ve regressed—in almost two decades since that was written.

It’s downright depressing reviewing how a half-century since the issues of bisexuality and trans-ness became possible to recognize, we as a community remain ultimately stuck in place due to a lack of familiarity with queer history and an inability to identify what’s the matter structurally with exclusionist arguments versus relying on in-group clues to reject specific TERFs, aphobes, etc.

Trans-Sexuality: Bisexual Formations and the Limits of Categories (2003)

https://href.li/?http://www.igs.ocha.ac.jp/igs/IGS_publication/journal/7/1.pdf

href.li

Keep reading

trans-mom:

Banks don’t belong at pride. Corporations don’t belong at pride. Cops don’t belong and pride. Fascists don’t belong at pride. The forces that have abused us, oppressed us, have murdered our brothers and sisters do not get to take part in pride.

(via smitethestate)

libbyframe:

Groovy baby!

(via willowveild)

hater-of-terfs:

becuzitisbitter:

“Following the 1992 LA riots, leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of ‘good intentions’ (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as ‘pure criminality’), but it also reflects an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro- American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, Leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/ rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages - the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some Leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, ‘We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.’ Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy ‘madness’ of it all, the ‘good fun’ they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that ‘we can do what we want.’ Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence - rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disrupters are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.”

— Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety

When you play the media’s language games, you give them power. If the media says “This was a senseless riot” and you convince people that no, it was actually a politically motivated rebellion, not a riot - then the next time something like this happens they can just say again “This was a senseless riot” and it will have exactly the same power. You’re saying that their criticism is legitimate, just not accurate, and so you have to debate every one separately

Whereas if they say “This was a senseless riot” and you respond that everything is political, and that even seemingly mindless revelry in the chaos can be traced back to a deep desire for freedom and autonomy that even some of the rioters might not personally recognize, and that actually, smashing shit and stealing shit is good - then they have no power anymore. Their arguments aren’t just unsound, they’re invalid

Stop playing by their rules and take back the narrative

(via queeranarchism)