isthisfeminist:

This woman is giving you a thumbs up. IS THIS FEMINIST?

TRIGGER WARNING. The “thumbs up” is the most phallocentric gesture imaginable. You are literally telling someone that a good job is the equivalent of growing a penis. In this case, two penises.

Additionally, this kind of casual congratulation has been known to put the recipient in a good mood, which can lead to entire minutes of complacency about their own privilege. PROBLEMATIC.

Labrinth - Express Yourself (by LabrinthVEVO)

Booo @ this not being on spotify and his CD not being in itunes.

I like teaching summer school courses more than semester long courses.  I say that, as I am teaching the course that I taught last semester now, and I genuinely enjoy prepping for the class.  I like being in the class.  The 2hours 4x/week doesn’t seem like a burden, but a gift.  I realize, in my undergraduate career, I enjoyed summer school classes more than semester classes.  Maybe it’s the accelerated pace?  I think they kind of feel more like a community.  People aren’t pulled in as many places.  I also enjoy having a bit more control over the screenings.  I wish we had maybe 1 more week though.  We didn’t have enough time to make it project based and get through all the readings and screenings.  One week would have fixed that.

totally.

(Source: pleatedjeans, via from-fatass-to-hourglass)

I talked to my other grandmother on Saturday. We had breakfast together.  I was in Chicago to give a presentation at Northwestern (the conference was fabulous, extremely generative, and people got my project and gave fantastic feedback).  Anyway. I hadn’t told my grandma about my project, so I explained the high level, public facing portion with a dabble into the theoretical, and showed her this site.  She got it.  She was so excited.  The idea of seeing what a diaspora of black women across time and space made her share a story with me.

She has a photograph of my great-great grandmother, her grandmother.  She is/was the gray eyed slave she mentioned to be previously I believe.  Apparently, she is of South African descent, and we know this because she was the last generation to still speak one of the indigenous tongues of South Africa.  Not sure which one though.  Little details like that are so interesting.  It humored me greatly because one of the photos I spoke about was the picture of the Hottentots, who are, of course from South Africa.  I talked about recognizing my body, something that rarely happens, when I saw them.  While the heritage it is too far back to be of any importance in my day to day life, it makes me wonder if my body shape is because of that link.  I will, of course, never know.  Still, cool deets.

She is going to try to get the photo scanned and sent over.  I wish I had been able to meet her at her house! I would have just taken a picture with my phone.  Alas, time was not on my side, and I did not have a car.

by Audre Lorde

From Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press Feminist Series (1984)


I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities
conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting
upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American
women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these
considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the
political.


It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist
theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant
input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I
stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment
within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists
and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this
conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are
inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women
have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and
silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what
does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women
who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it
mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of
that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of
change are possible and allowable.


The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the
consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this
conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on
material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model
of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In
this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems
of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and
women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of
nurturance that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too
high a price for the results," as this paper states.


For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but
redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is
rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal
world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social
power open to women.


Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to
be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a
difference between the passive be and the active being.


Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest
reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in
our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of
necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a
dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become
unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths,
acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world
generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no
charters.


Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that
security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return
with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect
those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw
and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.


As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view
them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for
change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable
and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But
community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic
pretense that these differences do not exist.


Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of
acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of
difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who
are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how
to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common
cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to
define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to
take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will
never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat
him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine
change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define
the master's house as their only source of support.


Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily
manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our
daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not
deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our
oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean
your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist
theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the
theory behind racist feminism?


In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the
groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to
recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the
first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become
define and empower.

Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference?
Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only
possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black
panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love
between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who
don't love each other?


In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We
did not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility,
the same cop-out, that keeps Black women's art out of women's exhibitions,
Black women's work out of most feminist publications except for the
occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off
your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white
feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the
past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black
women and the differences between us -- white and Black -- when it is key to
our survival as a movement?


Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male
ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an
old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with
the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to
educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our
existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This
is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal
thought.


Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine
conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our
reasons for acting."


Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and
time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of
knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any
difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as
the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

relationalcosmetics:

Frantz Fanon

(via theeducatedfieldnegro)

dynamicafrica:

vintageblackbeauty:

Danseuse de la région de Mobaye (Oubangui)

Jeune fille du village de Poto-Poto avec une coiffure de perles. Elève de la mission catholique, répondant au nom “”d’Héliani”“, elle fut repéré par Ellebé lors d’un tam-tam (fête) à Poto-Poto et devint un de ses modèles pour une série de photographies intitulée “”Eve noire”“.

1943, Congo

Going to attempt to translate this as best as I can (feel free to correct me):

Dancer from the Mobaye region (Oubangui)

Young girl from the village of Poto-Poto with a hairstyle of pearls. Student at the Catholic mission, who responds to the name “Heilani”, she was spotted by Ellebe at a tam-tam festival/celebration at Poto-Poto and became one of his models for a photographic series titled, “Black Eve”.

Highly disturbing eroticism and exoticism at its finest. After some quick searching, I came across this blog entry that gives some background behind the intent of this photographic series (book here), and sheds some further light on the issue of black women’s (naked) bodies, and other non-Western women, as subjects for the intense, and at times perverse, sexual desires and fantasies of white men.

There’s just something about “Heilani’s” expression, and the intense gaze of the white men in the background on her nude body, that embodies this fetish.

Opinions welcome.

- DynamicAfrica

Debated posting this one.  I was so uncomfortable when I saw it.  Everything, from the story to her expression, to the men in the background.  I was actually a bit shocked when this one came up in this specific search because it wasn’t like the other photos that came up. It stood out because it was so out of place.  I have since purchased a used copy of the book online and will probably do something with it outside of vintageblackbeauty, depending on how it is, because a series of these photos is too heart heavy for me to have in that space… this photo is the epitome of what makes people of color, especially women of color, cringe when they think of people studying “the Other” when the other is “me”.  This photo though good job at illustrating that everyone and every place has a different stake in this.  Like, I can’t believe this was their student and they had her do this. I am glad to see that I’m not the only one who had this reaction, but grateful that we have a space to speak about it.

Bisso na Bisso-L’union (by loonymoonz)

Older song to start the day… well, really I started in some digital archives, but then I thought of this song.  I loved this song so much when I was younger <3

pierrebennu:

Jean paul Goude  photographed Jones in a variety of positions, using boxes to help prop up her body. These images were then pieced together to create a collage which served as the cover for her 1989 album. Or as they say today  ”I’ll fix it in post”