Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children.

Margaret Cho: Being Mad on Twitter

When someone says something negative about my face or body I will always and forever just completely lose my shit, because I have so much hatred in me, a violence that lies just beneath the surface of my delightfully illustrated skin. Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness and my image of myself as stunningly gorgeous with a ruthlessness and a defensiveness that I fear for anyone who casually or jokingly questions it, as my anger and rage combined with my intense and fearsome command of words create insults meant to maim, kill and destroy.

Verashni Pillay in The Mail & Guardian: The black professional is not dead

Alienation can drive you mad.

But even Jonker might have wished, that dark night, for something better for her city 47 years after her death. It’s not looking hopeful. If the latest Twitter spat about racism in Cape Town is anything to go by, the postcard-perfect Mother City is proving to be a locus for a discussion that South Africans are desperately in need of having — but terribly ill-equipped to do.

Yolo Akili at The Crunk Feminist Collective: The Immediate Need For Emotional Justice

Emotional justice is about working with this wounding. It is about inviting us into our feelings and our bodies, and finding ways to transform our collective and individual pains into power. Emotional justice requires that we find the feeling behind the theories. It calls on us to not just speak to why something is problematic, but to speak to the emotional texture of how it impact us; how it hurts, or how it brings us joy or nourishment. Emotional Justice is very difficult for many activists, because historically most activist spaces have privileged the intellect and logic over feeling and intuition.

Miss Mary Max: Some Words I Wish You Heard More Often

Thank you for still being alive.

You know when adults like to pretend that sexuality suddenly appears in the teenage years? And it’s troublesome and deviant and something to be highly regulated or at which to be despaired? I’m not sure about any of you, but I remember having the – there is no good metaphor here that is not a sexual one, the seeds, the roots – the origins of romance and sex and longing in me when I was younger than that. I think some people get uncomfortable remembering that because childhood and sexuality are supposed to be separate. Or else they have trouble acknowledging it as valid in the face of active, expanded, and more knowledgeable adult sexuality.

Lots of people say they have known they were same-sex attracted from when they were very young. That’s not the universal story of queerness, obviously, because lots of people do not realise or acknowledge it until much later, and sexuality changes and grows. Hey, lots of people aren’t sexual at all, and lots of straight sexual people didn’t understand themselves as sexual when they were children. I think the knowledge of childhood queerness is important, because it intervenes in the homophobic protests that a lot of teens and twenty-somethings face when they come out. It’s just a phase, how can you know if you’ve never had sex with someone of your own gender, and so forth: these assume youth queerness is something new and confined, something relegated to active sexuality. And acknowledging the queer knowledges of children and childhood is important because it opens up the kinds of knowledges that are generally thought of as legitmate. Children and newly out queers are thought of as not knowing, and here is the double queer/young whammy of I know, I have known. It throws off straight adult claims to the ultimate knowledge, straightness as the only real sexuality, adulthood as the realm of fearfully-kept, regulated sexual knowing.

So I think proliferating stories of queer childhood is a positive thing for children more generally, in acknowledging that who they are, sexually or otherwise, doesn’t just pop up with proximity to adulthood. I also worry that this might backfire. Homophobes might use this to say – I mean, I’m sure they do – that queer stories of childhood plus the “unnaturalness” of childhood sexual identity means that queerness is unnatural. What goes unspoken is that straight childhood is actually a thing, just an invisible, privileged thing. And, at times, not even that: adults fake-pairing up their children, teaching them about how they will grow up and marry someone of the opposite (assigned) gender, and terming friends girlfriend and boyfriend is forcing them into (straight) sexuality, which is frankly wrong and sick-making. Things that are not on: forcing people into kinds of sexuality, demarcating adulthood and childhood in ways that don’t acknowledge the formation of sexuality. Things that are okay: having consciousness of yourself as a sexual or romantic person at a young age, being allowed to develop that privately until the time comes.

I love Sydney, my city, fiercely. I love how ridiculous people are about defending their own little slice of town, and I love that it’s so expansive that I’ll never visit all of it. It’s a bit like Fantasia in The Neverending Story like that. I love standing on the beaches and feeling my spirit rise and stretch to fill the space between sea and sky. Hey, I even love walking down George St first thing in the morning after it has suffered the upchuck of many a drunken reveller. It’s a reminder that other people are enjoying this city, too.

I love drives through country towns and everyone instantly knowing we’re tourists from the city. I love that the Blue Mountains really do shine blue in the sun. I love that I don’t understand everyone’s accent. I love my memory of my first time crossing the border from NSW to Victoria, and looking out at that beautiful countryside just weeks before it all burned down.

And I loved the next time I went to Victoria, a year and a half later. Melbourne, to sort of answer your question, Jet, is my favourite city. I was waiting for a tram on my favourite street with a friend one night when some white guy started frenetically yelling furious racist abuse at another man driving past. Then he stopped, turned to my friend and politely asked her, ‘Do you have the time? Sorry, I’m not usually racist, but that guy…’ We pissed off to the next stop pretty fast, before the guy could peer through the gloom to that woman hiding under layers of clothing and behind her friend, and realise she was one of them. It wasn’t the first time, of course, but I’d been feeling so safe and happy and, in a way I never am in Sydney, off my guard. So that’s my memory of my favourite street in my favourite city in all the world tainted.

I don’t know how to answer your question, Jet, because it’s a question with so many potential answers in such an amazing land, and it’s also a question of which place is the least painful. I don’t feel right being on stolen land. I don’t feel right being on land where many white people would like me to piss off back where I came from, and then turn around and politely ask my white friends for the time. I ultimately don’t feel safe or comfortable here, but I don’t know what it is to live anywhere else. I have favourite moments rather than favourite places, really, and my best ones are of standing on those beaches. I like to stand on borders, where the land crumbles, with my feet planted here and my heart facing the possibility of everywhere.

Crossposted at HaT.

If someone comes into your personal space with harmful intent, it’s hard to escape. That’s because it’s hard to determine the boundary between okay and too close, and you don’t want to make the situation awkward or worse by asking someone to move away. Your politeness is taken advantage of, and you’re trapped socially and physically. They can keep on keeping you with them, or intimidating you, or what have you. It’s a subtle way of asserting power over a person, and making them complicit in it.

Marginalised groups often need to be aware of spatial dynamics in ways privileged groups are routinely not. Whether it’s watching to see whether those straight people are staying away from you because they don’t want to catch your icky queer germs, or whether it’s watching that you’re deferential to the white man who likes to stride straight ahead without thought to other people’s movements, space is an important component in how power is exercised and reinforced. Particular spaces are set up as belonging to dominant groups, and access is demanded by those groups to the spaces of marginalised ones. Marginalised groups know they are not allowed access to every space and every way of moving.

Asserting yourself in someone else’s space, personal or otherwise, is aggressive in itself, and carries the threat, if not inevitably the actuality, of violence. It’s a claim to possession of something deeply personal and practically indefencible.

At the start of the week, I had a couple of misogynistic experiences that I swallowed and smoothed over at the time. I’m feeling the burning shame now, and regret that I didn’t do anything. Of course, women are socialised to not “make a fuss” in social situations, to keep calm and laugh it off in order to be considered sports. Otherwise, you’re just hysterical and overreacting, so says this script. That’s why the freeze, the laugh, the making oneself as unnoticeable as possible. To be approved for the next round of sport.

And I know that, to use one of the experiences as an example, I don’t deserve to commented upon as a potential sexual conquest in a game of macho social oneupmanship. It’s horrible, it’s reductive, it’s disempowering, it makes me feel like shit. No woman deserves that. It’s up to the people who make those sorts of comments to not do it, and, if they do, to make amends. One is not obliged to tell people exactly what they did wrong by one, and risk further harm, or ruin one’s night, or whatever.

But there’s another kind of shame going on for me; I’m kicking myself because I didn’t give the wrongdoers a good feminist talking to. More than I’m embarrassed at being treated like a sexual goalpost, I’m ashamed that I couldn’t overcome the Nice Lady socialisation in that moment to tell that man exactly how I feel about it. It felt like I couldn’t deliver what I stand for.

Neither of these are flavours of shame I should have to taste. I know I’m in no way to blame; the thing is that it’s hard to think of my strong feminist self helpless and compliant in that moment of being caught off-guard. It’s hard think of it as an ethical failure on the wrongdoers’ parts, because I keep thinking of not fighting back as a failure of my politics. It’s taking a lot of effort to remember that that’s not how it works.

Backing down from your own defence in the moment is no feminist failure. The two shames are two sides of the same coin. It’s a coin that places the fault with women, for existing, for not having fixed the world up feminist style quick smart, for being sexual or not in particular ways: for being in the room. Women are not individually responsible for telling off those who have done wrong by them. Feminism is about changing the system so that wrongdoers don’t feel comfortable doing wrong anymore. The only obligation you as the wronged party have in this kind of circumstance is to take care of yourself.

I hope you don’t find yourself in this kind of situation. You probably do, though, and I hope you remember that being aware of social injustice doesn’t mean you don’t internalise unjust societal messages. It doesn’t mean you have to carry on your shoulders the entire weight of making the world better. And it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person if you shrink away in a threatening situation. You’re never to blame for someone doing wrong to you, whatever the circumstance and however you make your way through the world.

Lyrics here. Description: the band is in a large room, surrounded by electronic equipment. Mostly they are seen through screens or mirrors, but when they are shot directly, the bodies are invisible and only their moving clothing indicates their presence. Shirley Manson, the lead singer, in invisible mode, takes her dress off and dances about. It ends with the invisible lead singer in a bathroom, only her boots and gloves visible, standing and urinating into a toilet.

Okay, keep that in mind for a moment – the song, that is, I’m not going to talk about the visuals in that video; you can draw your own conclusions. Shirley Manson wrote the lyrics in 2001, based on books she had just read by JT LeRoy, while they were becoming friends. What neither Manson nor the world knew until 2005 was that JT LeRoy was a fictional persona belonging to one Laura Albert, and portrayed in public by her then-partner’s half-sister, Savannah Knoop. LeRoy’s books and other communications, which spoke about experiences of being a teenage sex worker, homeless, and, later on, trans, had been understood by the general public as autobiographical fiction. LeRoy’s and Albert’s reputation(s) sunk, stonelike. I was pretty appalled by hearing of some person wanting to appropriate those experiences and wax authoratively, gaining a huge following where people who actually had those experiences had no audience. I hear now that part of this writing was based on Albert’s actual experiences of childhood and figuring out gender, and LeRoy was her way of processing that, but I’m not sure what to believe anymore. It’s been called a great literary hoax, which is something I sniff at; here there’s none of, say, the charm or integrity of James Tiptree, Jr., in exploring gender and self. (See this previous post on gendered literary hoaxes.)

Anyway, to the song. It has some dynamics I’m uncomfortable with, and I’m not sure whether they’re a result of Manson not really understanding what transness is all about, or whether she’s respectfully reproducing how Albert represented LeRoy and LeRoy’s characters. (Just a note in case of confusion: I think the first verse is talking about Sarah, the mother of the LeRoy figure in LeRoy’s first novel, also called Sarah.)

With your cherry lips and golden curls,
You could make grown men gasp when you’d go walking past them
In your hotpants and high-heels,
They could not believe that such a body was for real

This image bothers me a lot. Here’s a crossdressing boy, or a trans girl, depending on the interpretation of LeRoy Albert wanted people to have at whichever point in time, having to perform a very particular mode of femininity for an adult cis male audience. Okay, that’s the deal when you’re an exploited underage sex worker. What gets to me is that there’s this huge joy coming through the music and lyrics both in being able to embody this appearance, only to have it invalidated by the last line, the implication of which is that this body is not real at all. It’s about the flashing blue eyes, being ‘a delicate boy’ who ‘looked just like a girl’ but could never be one, really. In short, it’s about having any kind of feminine or female identity being taken away by the speaker who thinks they see right through the performance that makes up this supposedly false body. And it’s about that performance, that dressing up, that dressing down, being viewed by a fascinated cis audience.

And yet. There’s so much joy and encouragement towards the subject realising who that subject is.

You hold a candle in your heart
You shine a light on hidden parts
You make the whole world wanna dance
You’ve bought yourself a second chance

Go baby, go go, we’re right behind you,
Go baby, go go, yeah we’re looking at you,
Go baby, go go, oh we’re right behind you,
Go baby, go baby, yeah we’re right behind you

It’s a friend wishing another friend well in coming to some kind of self-understanding and comfort in the midst of a really rough life. It’s a great push towards happiness and hope for the future.

This song sweeps the gamut for me, from oppression to deep compassion in the lyrics, from disgust to uncertainty in the background. I think that’s why I keep coming back to it: it’s three minutes of life compressed.

• Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin
• “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr.
• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

What about you?

Two things I am pretty passionate about: religion! Chinese history! Sometimes these come together and it means I have enough background to write pieces for Global Comment called Islamophobia in China: Violence Breaks Out in Xinjiang, because things are not so much with the happy for Muslims in Western China right now. You should go read that, because there are things about ethnic tensions and the influence of Western Islamophobia you may not know.

Also, while you’re waiting with bated breath for the new edition of the Down Under Feminists Carnival, did you know that you can submit to February’s edition? Details at the DUFC site.

I read a lot of white writers, between the systemic racism of the publishing industry and living where I do. And I love reading about race when it’s done well, from white writers and non-white writers both. But I have a very different response to, say, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness and Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn. They’re both very powerful narratives about race and racism, with a particular focus on black experiences, that respond to a US racial history and context. When I read Le Guin – when I read white writers – on race, I’m comforted, because here is a white person saying, yes, I recognise you, I affirm your humanity, I get it. When I read Octavia Butler – when I read non-white writers/writers of colour on race – my nerves are on edge, and I’m drained even as I’m fed, because this is personal and recognition and pain and a life in a way it could never be for a white writer. I can handle Butler in small doses because she hits too close to the bone, even as I think she’s possibly the best writer I’ve encountered. Le Guin I lap up. It’s partly that I can’t always deal with that kind of pain, it’s partly that internalised racism means I seek out the affirmations of white people, it’s partly because I want to believe that privileged groups can do better – it all adds up to something distressing.

So while I keep flipping through Justine Larbalestier’s and Karen Healey’s books and marvelling, I think I need to look at why I’ve picked up precisely one thing each Alice Sola Kim and Junot Díaz have written. Maybe it’s because reading non-white writers talking about non-white perspectives is getting smacked in the face with something I experience every minute of the day, and I’m reading to escape the everyday. Healey, Larbalestier, and Le Guin work really hard to represent characters of colour and anti-racist narratives; ultimately these are imaginary products rather than a manifestation of something they have to contend with in the ways Kim, Díaz, and I do. The kinds of recognition we can have with each other are different. It’s not about whose writing is better, or who is the most anti-racist, or who has the most non-white characters. It’s about trying to breathe with everything crashing over one, and working at one step removed.

So I’ll often go for the white writers, sad to say, if they do it well. It’s not just comforting for white people. Now that I’ve finally articulated this to myself, I’m going to look at changing it. If I can find some way of working it so that I read a higher proportion of non-white writers on race, without being in a regular state of emotional battering, it’s well worth doing. Our stories and writers need the support – and that skill and pain are well worth the recognition.

* Of course, there is the creepy tradition of having an Asian country of the year: ooh, let’s publish lots of books about China this year, because that’s hot right now, India was last year. White perspectives go into shaping which books from authors of which heritage get to be exotic and not threatening this season, too.

Previously: How White Writers Should Address Racism, Writing Race.

It smacks of colonialism. Terra nullius, those native people don’t count because we can’t understand their political relationship to each other and how they are tied to the land, we the conquerers are the only ones who count. There’s a pride in it that makes me cringe, one taken in snapping up all the world, cramming it into greedy pink-lipped mouths. Where the lack of capacity is really in those who do not understand that not being organised on European terms doesn’t mean not being people. Here first to destroy, here first to assert that the presence of white people is what makes a country, a place, a history.

“I was here first” is also a dangerous assertion when it comes to ideas. Any number of inventions and theories have been taken from the originators by those in a position socially privileged enough to guard against retaliation. I’m thinking particularly of Rosalind Franklin, whose data and thinking were used by Crick and Watson towards the double helix model of DNA. This didn’t stop Crick and Watson taking the credit and adopting a very condescending attitude towards her, including, famously on the part of Watson, in his book The Double Helix ten years after Franklin’s early death. Flag-planting sends a simply and strong message that doesn’t necessarily stop for ethics.

What’s been really grating for me lately – hey, for as far back as we can go – is something that harks back to that colonialist attitude, the morality twist on being there first. We were the first to think rightly, one cannot properly remove oneself from our moral framework; adopt our thinking, and you will be correct/welcome/saved. The idea that there can’t be more than one way to properly think is self-evidently untrue, if one cares to examine the world. And evangelising of whatever kind is often about pushing a powerful way of thought on the other. We are the first ones to see rightly, and will obliterate any other ways and history, because we are the first ones to make it here.

There’s a lot to be had from history, and few journeys, of whatever kind, are original ones. We’re all human beings, and we’re all working with similar source material. I’m learning to be humble, having been subjected to this kind of rubbish myself, and recognise that I may not have all the answers or be the first one to have them.