Most products in the mass and luxury markets are manufactured in harmful conditions that have deleterious effects on the environment and the people who work and live near the facilities. Fashion is not the only or even worse contributor to environmental racism, labor exploitation, and global warming. Commodities and services that pack a larger eco-punch, for example, are air travel, bottled water, and disposable razors. Yet fashion consumers are easy scapegoats. They’re already perceived as frivolous, wasteful, and stupid conspicuous consumers whose feminine vanity leads them to participate in irrational and irresponsible consumer practices that are the cause of All Of The World’s Problems. The gendered subtext that always lurks behind this finger wagging is why I’m turned off by fashion-shaming of all stripes and sizes… Seldom is this kind of moralizing and shaming lodged at consumers of luxury cars, personal technologies, homes, and vacation packages even as all these luxury items have adverse effects on the local environments and economies in which they’re produced… I have no truck with fashion-policing or morality-policing. I’m more interested in critiquing the structures of wealth and wage inequality and the systemic practices of financial companies that have resulted in the racial disparity in credit card debt that give shape to the differential meanings, possibilities, and relations to consumption for marginalized people.
Minh-Ha T. Pham in “A Pyre to Privilege, Not an Invitation to Gender Shaming” full article HERE (via moniquemallo)
Organized fandom is, perhaps and foremost, an institution of theory and criticism, a semistructured space where competing interpretations and evaluations of common texts are proposed, debated, and negotiated and where readers speculate about the nature of the mass media and their own relationship to it… Within the realm of popular culture, fans are the true experts; they constitute a competing educational elite, albeit one without official recognition or social power.
Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins, 1992 (via meiringens)
(Source: phdfan)
Ableism must be included in our analysis of oppression and in our conversations about violence, responses to violence and ending violence. Ableism cuts across all of our movements because ableism dictates how bodies should function against a mythical norm—an able-bodied standard of white supremacy, heterosexism, sexism, economic exploitation, moral/religious beliefs, age and ability. Ableism set the stage for queer and trans people to be institutionalized as mentally disabled; for communities of color to be understood as less capable, smart and intelligent, therefore “naturally” fit for slave labor; for women’s bodies to be used to produce children, when, where and how men needed them; for people with disabilities to be seen as “disposable” in a capitalist and exploitative culture because we are not seen as “productive;” for immigrants to be thought of as a “disease” that we must “cure” because it is “weakening” our country; for violence, cycles of poverty, lack of resources and war to be used as systematic tools to construct disability in communities and entire countries.
A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night.
J.M. Barrie (via unbearabilityofbeauty)
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (via nabokolia)
‘The assurance is that Mr Sherlock Holmes feels much for you, and is more dependent on you, in a sense, than you are upon him. Why else would he provoke you, as he does, why else would he administer drugs to himself in your presence, if he does not want to stimulate your reaction, and be assured of your concern? He gives to you, and to you alone, all his vulnerable side, all his needs, all his love, so far as he is able; and yet, unless I am much mistaken, he will never give you more than he gives at present. He is incapable of it; there exists in him some deep emotional blockage, some fatal inability to admit to his vulnerable side, which causes him to present himself as all brain and no heart. However, the cost of this is high, as his need for the drug bears witness.
Piercy, Rohase. My Dearest Holmes (p. 62).
‘It may be true, as you say, that he feels more for me than he shows. But it is against his nature to express his emotions. And any display of emotion or affection towards himself would disgust him. He defends himself against anything of the sort. I do not know why. He finds life difficult, I think. Without his obsession, his cases, he would be lost. But even if he could bring himself to admit the possibility of anything between us, he would never—it would not be possible for him.’
Piercy, Rohase. My Dearest Holmes (p. 25).
Watson on Holmes and the possibility of feelings/a relationship between them.
Also: about me.
As feminist. race, and sexuality studies sought to unmoor their identities from debilitating physical and cognitive associations, they inevitably positioned disability as the “real” limitation from which they must escape… Formerly denigrated identities are “rescued” by understanding gendered, racial, and sexual differences as textually produced, distancing them from the “real” of physical or cognitive aberrancy projected onto their figures.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse
It was so damn sensible they ought to make it a law in every city, long-lettered words in white paint that tell you which way to look if you want to live. […] The pavement signs were the only things he paid attention to. Look left. Look right. They seemed to speak to the whole vexed question of existence.
Mao II by Don DeLillo
“The Implicit Holmes”, Edgar W. Smith, 1946
(Source: meiringens)
