STINKY UPDATE
you could consider stinky to be at the ven diagram of:
1. shrek,
2. the figure of the jester,
3. being insanely slutty
stinky is stealing food from your roommates
stinky is referencing way too much memes in everyday conversations
stinky is running like a dog when we arrive to the park
stinky is spitting in each others mouth in sexxx
stinky is mispronouncing words on purpose
GIVE ME YOUR #stinkysummer updates
STAY STINKY
its gonna be a #stinkysummer share the word
stinky is not (exactly) dirty, stinky is a lifestyle.
stinky is an energy, it's feral, it's goofy, it's slutty, it's mischievous, type B, quirky
stinky is saying "out of my swamp" when someone enters your room like you're shrek
stinky is doing forbidden jokes with a quirky smile
stinky is underwear showing outfits (and titties)
stinky is binge watching a whole show in one row even though you need to pee
stinky is wearing clothes with food stain with a who cares im hot anyways attitude
stinky is swimming in questionable body of water
stinky is insane crush and forbiddenships
stinky is listening to stupid electronic music on a bad laptop speaker at volume 100%
stinky is drinking the cheapest beer from the supermarket and saying it's ok
note: straight guys are forbidden to be stinky. it is not cool. it is only cool when pretty girls are stinky because they are pretty and girls.
STAY STINKY
the flinta-isation of queerness i swear lol
im so pissed when babes will litteraly associate queer with "women" (afab...). like queers means lesbian and like some trans masc plus maybe sometimes a bunch of bi/straight girls who never queered anything their life but their vibe. and when you say this event, film, book is queer it's like omg i didn't expect this to be about the radical trans girls let alone the scary gay guys. well associating queerness with vagina is kinda insane to me. which is of course linked to this cis-white neoliberal queer trend of "i'm queer so therefore everything queer is about me". sorry to break it down to you but you are such a little node in the big history of gender and sex non-normativity so be humble and make alliances with other identities and experiences than yours!
why i seems to lowkey not associate myself with it you may ask? well well you see blahaj girly is chronically online, probably autistic and depressed (haha just like me) but the difference is that i'm not like the other girls :) so its hard to pin down but now blahaj has become a stereotype of trans girls like with trans fem friends sometimes we're like "i swear she has a blahaj" when she's like a gamer that drink monster energy drink dressed in a pink miniskirt and programmer socks bought on amazon that probably does the most kinky porn you've never heard of and also is a puppy. that should not be confused with the liliths who is also chronically online but rather on the other side of spectrum it's like a goth bubblegum situation. one has the gen z long sharp eyeliner the other has the messy cybersigil eyeliner. not the same. however some liliths do have blahaj but let's not go there. (i say all of that with the big love, i didn't choosed my culture but long live blahaj lilith and puppy girls <3)
so it all began years ago when ikea made the shark plushy and because as trans women we have zero things to relate to some girly was like omg the mouth is pink then white and blue like tranny flag (plus its a big shark so sexy)!!! then via the famous chronically online autistic transfem networks such as reddit / tumblr / discord .... mastodon ....... it spread through silly memes, kinky underwear selfies, anime profile pictures, and a general affection-starving trauma than only an oversized shark plushy can fill. lot of tgirlies buys them, it becomes an icon like if its in the corner of a bedroom selfy it screams TRANS (invisible to the eyes of the cis people), some even take it to the pride events, its in the name of forum and instances, of course there is porn with it because we're all sluts (its in the news), etcaetera etcaetera. until today's day where it feels like when the doctor prescribe your first estrogen they also add blahaj or something.
and because whatever counter projections will be integrated in the product itself by capitalism ikeas started to brand the plushy like hashtag ally like hehe we know so cool right ??? but of course it sounds the same way than your dad saying 67
i never thought i would say this but im so tired to have to explain blahaj to my cis friends..... like yes so the shark is trans yes.... ikea knows yess...... while it's not even my culture
it's quite intimate but since a few years i had developed invisible wings of fire in my back that would go swroooosh when i closed my eyes at moment i felt i needed to feel strong against life, stress or tiredness and all. burning emanating emotions to warm my will and strengthen my soul
well i'm glad to announce to you all that yesterday coming back home at night i randomly tried to use them and i realized my wings are now made of a lot of knifes, delicately tingling and shimmering, light and sharp as blades
best fedi drawing award goes to @doriane
* when it comes to doing pretend to be dumb and to just do the thing. trying to outsmart yourself with elaborated ideas of what's perfect is an obstacle. think "what happen if i just do this" and then do it. draft a first idea out loud, put the content on the layout, plan a collective event without having your answer, explain something with a pen and paper, write your silly ideas. let yourself do those. and then you pause and think. but projecting (what you should or shouldn't do, etc) can lead to forbidding yourself to create opportunities you need. and this might be let just rehearse from 'dumb' intuitive ways and see.
there is an effect, especially with people coming from art school education, where they try to reach out far away in conceptual world: abstracted thematic, complex references, merging ideas and aesthetics, ambiguous mediums, etc. it is reassuring because it make us feel at the edge of novelty and personality, but it can also become an obstacle to see clearly. it is an other form of difficulty, that is way too much under examined, to do things that are close to us: how do i make a nurturing event, how do i develop a simple tool, how do i explain something greatly, how can i care for this aspect in the community. don't neglect the importance of practicing to do simple things as they are never simple.
* learning require practice. which means you can see all the previous iteration of your work as the try out of the next one (when you zoom out of your timeline). the things you're making right now are not your greatest and won't be, as there is no greatest, there is only you changing yourself and changing others by trying out stuff. so don't try to do project to collect achievements (trying so hard to make it oh so great), try to do project in a way that changes yourself and others (because you created the opportunity you needed to experiment, to gather, to link, to word stuff). this of course require mistakes, be excited for them like: omg i get it now! it failed because of this social dynamics that was mega important, or because of how i balanced principles in this design it's about priorities, or because of how people react to certain aspect and what are the little things that made it cool in the end, whatever. those opinionated learning through situated experiences are your actual portfolio, you'll see it and others will see it
reflecting on it the best advice for alternative art/design/tech/publishing/activism practices i can give (from my 32y old experience) is
* don't focus too much on what's in your head and join local communities. it's not about selling/branding yourself to them (portfolio mindset), it's about you learning the ecosystems of practices around you, the ones that are before and after you (humbling mindset). meet, listen, gossip, network, share, critic. you don't have to be (hyper)social but don't isolate, meaningfulness doesn't come from yourself alone, it comes from the echoes between you and the worlds. take opportunities to practice in those ecosystems, even if they're not representative of the grand vision of how you think about your own practice (a trap), put a bit of yourself in them, try and learn. the true work you're doing is not this or that project, it's the living ecosystems of practices you can be part of.
so since everyone is begging to know this is my best attempt at portraying what gender kinda is to me...
my definition of sex is mostly: using patriarchal science authority to enact socio-culturally implemented sexism or something
that's also why some of us revendicate the term transsexual.
which originally was an alienating psychiatric diagnosis, then removed at some point because of its obsolescence in face of the new, well-educated and politically correct, gender sex dichotomy. a dichotomy that silently says: all your efforts to transition will only change half of what you are, your sex is fixed. and even if i would agree with that, because the way we use words and languages it make those notion permeable... also, and particularly, in the head of the biggot. viciously leading to: because you can't change sex, you'll experience transphobic biases that actually are social and cultural.
by saying i'm a transsexual we're like fuck your cis bullshits that pretend to not see how language works, and to not see what our transitions produces on both culture and science and all the rest.
ultimately, i love the linguistic approach to this and how Amanda Montell in her book wordslut, says that the difference between "woman" and "female" is that, in practice in the english language (based on huge corpus of texts) "female" is mostly used in misogynistic arguments when the speaker want to claim that women are "biologically inferior". which well... why do they know about the chromosomes or uterus of this "crazy female" they're talking about.
the paradox is that having *practically unverifiable definitions* on words that are used in *casual social settings* is a lie.
we can't keep a notion of sex (and male and female) that isn't cultural and social, not because of bodies, not because of science, not because of normativity (which we could all go into and find paradox there too) but firstly because of language and the way we use words. the cop at the airport security scan has pressed the F button when i pass the portal. Dr have asked my trans women friends if they had their period or if they're on a contraceptive. there are so many examples.
trans women can change their genitalia. when we take hormones our balance is the same than menopaused cis women on hormones because we take the same thing. if anyone would say but what about chromosome i think i'd just look at them in the eyes in silence and whisper... are the chromosomes in the room with us right now? and the uterus... oh my god not this one. sure defining the female sex with the ability to bear a child could lead to nothing wrong for woman on a large political scale right? if we do produce such a dichotomy between gender and sex we ends up with the same transphobic arguments just now postponed to the notion of sex, that ultimately can produce violence on both cis and trans woman.
i find it so cringe when people explain the gender / sex difference (gender is cultural sex is biological, or worse "woman" versus "female") as a display of well-educated feminism, or even as a sign of trans people inclusivity. unless it just showed they didn't actually though about it for real.
ok so as a trans woman, my gender is woman and my sex is? male?
sure nothing politically wrong with that. from there, there is in practice one step away from saying/acting like trans women aren't actually women because they don't have the same sex than the "real woman", which lead to gender essentialism and violences.
despite all the prescriptive scientific sounding definitions we can put on sex (chromosome, genitalia, hormones) (and gender) in the end gender and sex are both words - they are linked to evolving and contradictory usage not definition. our use of gendered words in natural language is mediated by perception of gender. In many social context people will attribute me the "sex" "female", without checking science because of how i present.
if i legally change the "gender mention" on my ID card, it changes my national number: the one assigned to me at birth ("odd for males and even for females") to keep administrative system coherent. which the terminology seems to refer to sex, so am I actually changing sex?
The Smart Phone was not designed for any particular utility, it was designed to sell smart phones.
YOU WOULDN'T CENTER MY DATA
Who and what is the worldwide expansion of digital infrastructure serving?
A roundtable with: @lenuageetaitsousnospieds @doriane @technopolice_be @Medor_mag #NotBigTechWorkgroup #ExuinoxInitiativeForRacialJustice in collaboration with Les Soulèvements de la Terre.
Wednesday 24/6 @19:00, Pianofabriek, Elsenor (Rue du Fortstraat 35, Brussels)