Links: Queer as in Fuck You

[sonia]

Strategic Resistance: Mass Demonstration by Karawynn Long. "Why organized nationwide rallies are an excellent use of your time and energy right now"

To overcome that fear, to begin to embolden potential defectors and peel off some of Trump’s key support, will require huge numbers of people pushing back, in organized, strategic ways. So our goal — the one goal, to which everything else is secondary if not irrelevant right now — should be to grow a bigger organized resistance movement.

“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison by Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University doctoral student whom ICE abducted from campus for co-authoring an op-ed in the campus newspaper.

No one deserves to live in cramped, unsanitary, inhumane conditions and have their medical needs ignored. No one deserves to have their religious needs ignored. And no one deserves to lack access to nutritious food. I am free, but my true freedom is interlinked with the freedom of many women I lived alongside in ICE prison. As a “detainee,” I not only endured my struggles but also had the privilege of connecting with remarkable women who shared their stories with me. Their experiences opened my eyes to a new realm of humanitarian crisis, expanding the circle of grief and compassion in my heart.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers (in 1965) by Gustavo Arellano.

"These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," she says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."

Queer as in Fuck You by Aiden Grace Smith, via cosmolinguist. Powerful essay about being trans and genderqueer.

Having that conversation reminded me of nothing more than being told, in kindergarten, that we were to line up every day by gender to go to the playground. I wanted desperately to go to the playground, and I did not know which line to join. I remember having a kicking, screaming meltdown at recess time for the first week of kindergarten because I could not in any other way articulate my rage that there were different lines, maybe any lines, at all.

Comments

[ofearthandstars]

Oof, that last essay, I must have screenshot a third of it. So good.

[sonia]

<3

[silveradept]

Very interesting to know that we've tried to replace migrant workers with young "American" men, and found out instead that the conditions are abysmal and the work is body-destroying. We seem poised to learn this again.

The last essay is such a useful reminder that life is often the thing that defines things, and so many of the words we use are abstractions and negotiations between people.

[sonia]

Why "American" in quotes?

[silveradept]

Because they're representing the white fever dream of a True American Man, white, strong, handsome, and the like, rather than the reality of being part of the U.S. population, if that makes any sense.

[sonia]

That makes sense, thanks.