ALL THE DEAD BOYS LOOK LIKE ME
A poem by Latinx poet Loma, which they wrote in the aftermath of Orlando, expressing grief, outrage, frustration and love in the queer poc community. The piece connects the personal and the political, and puts the Orlando attack in context of the other forms of violence (recent and historic) that target the community.
You don’t have to get normal to become legitimate.
Judith Butler in an interview with Regina Michalik (LOLApress) in 2001.
Women are supposed to be the ones on the balcony, not the ones down below professing their love. We don’t think the female romantic is romantic. We think she is a predator. We think she is desperate, unstable—Fatal Attraction, the cougar, the spinster, the troublemaker. But deep emotion in this age is a radical act.
Masha Tupitsyn in this incredible Bitch interview on Love Dog (via marginalutilite)
I already had a quote from the interview on my blog last summer. I can still recommend it. Masha Tupitsyn’s work is great.
First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies,
just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done.
Great quote from Dean Spade’s essay “Dress to Kill, Fight to Win” from a few years ago. When checking to source, I stumbled on this good discussion of the article by Mimi Thi Nguyen at Racialicious.
JESSICA HOFFMAN: Why did you choose a multimedia format to write about love?
MASHA TUPITSYN: With Love Dog something happened to me: I met someone, it rattled me to the core, and I felt called upon to write about it in some roundabout, uncategorizable way that would still examine all the other social, political, and philosophical issues that I have always been concerned with. Tumblr allowed me to write the kind of interactive, associative, experimental, and discursive criticism that I have always wanted to write and that directly responds to the digital structure that now informs and organizes our lives. [Love Dog is the second in] a trilogy of writing on the Internet that began with LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film. It was the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter, and an exercise in criticism as a form of living. I did not know that [these books] would be part of a trilogy. I only knew that these projects were bigger than me just tweeting and blogging, that I had no interest in using social media without making some kind of critical intervention.
“Queer is Hardly Just Who You Sleep With”: Q&A with Masha Tupitsyn | Bitch Media
The entire interview with writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn is worth a read. She touches upon queer sexuality, love, desire, masculinity, and writing. And her multimedia print book Love Dog sounds really interesting.
