Queer Virtual

Feb 08

“Although in dominant culture, cunt and pussy are deployed in a derogatory sense and may seem inherently misogynistic, I would offer a different, more complicated perspective. As pointed out above, both terms are criteria for gender performance in ballroom culture, as opposed to insults or demeaning expletives hurled at women and femme queens. For example, Brianna explained that she realized that she could be successful living and competing as a femme queen, and thus living as a woman in the outside world, when people were complimenting her drag performance (as a butch queen up in drags). Brianna said, “When I first got into drag, like a lot of people was telling me about it, saying you know, ‘you look fishy’ and ‘you look cunt.’” That people conferred onto Brianna these terms, even before she started taking hormones, meant that she embodied and performed the ultimate femininity necessary to both identify as a femme queen within the ballroom scene and to live as a woman (unmarked as a transgender woman) in the world outside of it. Or when Ariel Prestige boasted about being seen as pussy, she certainly did not view this as a demeaning interpellation within the context of ballroom culture.
Finally, at the Ebony Ball that I referred to above, when Jack Givenchy asked the biological woman whether she was “real cunt,” she did not appear offended at all. Instead, she responded with affirmation, “Yes, it is all real,” suggesting that the terms signify and serve as criteria for authentic femininity. Moreover, when these terms are used, the speaker does not typically say “you are a cunt.” Instead, the speaker says, “give me pussy” or “you look cunt,” meaning give me femininity in your performance and self-presentation. These terms are about the desire to achieve femininity, not to demean it. Granted, from outside the ballroom cultural context, these terms carry a meaning much different from what I argue is true within it, but it is important to take seriously the context in which terms are used and the varied meanings that they carry for people situated within that context.” — Marlon M Bailey, Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture (via julianahuxtable)

Jan 31

“The network-disgust that’s experienced by even the most positive-minded artists today is captured in our continued abuse of the meme “LOL,” which becomes ever more applicable in direct correlation to the degree that we overkill it and wear it out. Not even a word, the term itself performs the loss of language and of laughter, even. It’s a disembodied and thus efficiently transmissible abbreviation of laughter that in its repetition seems to reveal both the ecstasy and the anxiety of our nonstop displacement within social media. An overwritten, highbrow press release about networks may be LOL. Or a JPEG of a knowingly failed painting. But mostly LOL signals the amputation of laughter from the body and its recoding as the silent, poison-dart-like flight of a postword within a network. The more we abuse it, the more it functions as the postlaughter of wit minus bodies, always somehow aimed at the bad faith of postcommunal connectivity.” — John Kelsey, “Next Level Spleen,”
Artforum Sept 2012 (via bravenewwhatever)

(via angstravaganza)

mirrortheories:

uh vol. 2

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for hmm-ing

Jan 26

divorce: “Ultimate Wizard Quest the Movie for the Big Screen: So Many Battles”... -

divorce:

“Ultimate Wizard Quest the Movie for the Big Screen: So Many Battles” or “What I Really Think About Intergalactic Tournaments and their Role in Representing Fictional, Exaggerated Spiritual Worlds as present in Asian Media Marketed Towards Teenagers & That Effect Towards Global…

Jan 24

Virtual Mourning: A Eulogy For Someone We Never Knew

videodrag:



image


When Mark died— or when it really sunk in and I truly believed that Mark had died— the first thought I had was that it threw my theory about queer virtuality right out the window. 


Mark was a caustic and alluring presence on Tumblr. Tumblr is a blog platform comprised of various communities, many of which I’ve seen intersect over issues of gender politics, queer advocacy and the politics of marginalized identity. What it means, what it feels like to be fat, to be weird, to be queer, to be trans*, to be other, to be Othered. There are the fierce feminists who post images of crochet patterns reading “My Body Is A Battleground.” There is the legion of gay male-identified performance artists who post screen caps of shirtless Christopher Meloni and ironic Grindr encounters. There are queer people of color posting about what it’s like to be racialized, to be queer, to be fierce, to be Beyoncé and Mariah and Naomi. And then there was calloutqueen.


When I first found Mark, she terrified me. Here was someone who was relentless— who lived relentlessly, who was constantly questioning and interrogating and never allowing anyone she encountered to relax into their identity, into their privilege. Without ever speaking to me directly, calloutqueen called me out so many times on what I took for granted about gender, about beauty, about existence, about my comfortability with my position as a white cis-woman. She held me accountable for her pain— for the pain that anyone who is fighting for difference and agency inevitably has to feel. 

She defied category. She railed against definition. She refused to stop being difficult, confusing, unapologetic for her own existence as marginalized, as next-level. 


Mark frequently posted about her sadness, about her own exhaustion with the world’s limitations, about her sister’s recent suicide. She got it in a way that so few people do— to really experience the unbearable way that world cannot understand you— to feel the pain of loneliness, of boredom, of limitation. She was a beacon of a kind of consciousness that screamed out, fought breathlessly for the future— and exuded unapologetically a kind of darkness that was essential and real in its ugliness. 


She was, for this pocket for the internet, an ambassador of a new code of beauty, and kindness, and understanding, and ruthless identity transformation. Mark was someone whose work you don’t realize is so important until they are gone. 


A couple months ago, she posted a picture of a recent tattoo. A sigil, in honor of her sister: “to save me from drowning.” In a description of one of her works, Mark explained: “It’s that thing where you realize that your own attempts at passive aggressive manipulation and power don’t stand a chance against the structural forms of DOMINATION against your body.” 


It feels terrifying and hopeless and stupid that I know that is what killed her. That no matter how sanctioned and sacred and full of love and inspiration the space you create for yourself online can be, that sometimes it does not change the crushing experience of an everyday reality that reifies an abject hatred and contempt for your existence. 

- - 


I went to bed last night, defeated that we had lost a leader. I woke up this morning believing that out of the ashes of annihilation and despair, that Mark has left us with some hope. 


As I write this, Tumblr is in mourning. My dashboard is a series of echoes of Mark’s work, her philosophies, her videos, and the people she affected. There are many eulogies like mine, most from people who knew Mark personally. And then there are the rest of us— those who never spoke to her, who only knew her through the presence she cultivated online— those of us who are asking, now, what is the appropriate expression of mourning for someone we never knew?


Last night, Colin Self presented a call to arms to the Tumblr-sphere. He posted a video of himself brushing his hair the way Mark used to, over and over again into an OCD level of smoothness, painting his lips a deep MAC red, pursing them like Mark did, lip-syncing breathlessly with Donna Lewis, “I Love You, Always Forever, near or far, closer together…” This morning, my dashboard is inundated with video after video that gayinterest has reblogged in tribute to Mark. People from all over tumblr painting their lips, brushing out their top-knots, lip-syncing to our anthems. We Found Love in A Hopeless Place. We Can Work It Out. More Than A Woman. Aretha’s Skylark (“Won’t you tell me where my love can be? … Won’t you lead me there?”).


We are taking up Mark’s work. We are using the echoes of her fierce presence, the archive of her virtuality that she has left behind, to create new work in her honor. We are using her same video platform in imitation, in tribute, in order to publicize Who She Was and Who She Is Becoming. We are using our queer internet videos to make her visible. We will ensure that she is seen.


I hope that her virtual archive doesn’t become a meme. That she is not as quickly forgotten as the popularity of her death has spread like wildfire over the internet. Who will keep up her virtual presence? What can ever replace calloutqueen? Which of us will break us out of the cycle of tribute and of imitation and lead us into the kind work that Mark would have wanted to create but didn’t have time to? 


This is our project, now. This is our charge. Like everything else, it is terrifying, and daunting, and important. 


And Mark has challenged us not to fuck it up. 

reminder to myself.

cloudnoise:

Like
If you’re gonna be a straight white male Dom
You had better get into feminisms and deep cuz I’m not tryna fuck with some intellectually lazy, politically abhorrent “play rapist” looking to spray his repugnant psychic load all over what should be a negotiated and ideally therapeutic scene

Jan 13

: lebanesepoppyseed: The rappers/hip hop/performers/artists/etc that I’m... -

lebanesepoppyseed:

The rappers/hip hop/performers/artists/etc that I’m here for:

…and so motherfuck these assholes:

YOU AIN’T ABOUT THAT LIFE, WHITEY

(via queenspiration)

Jan 10

“I’m just tired of pretending that I’m unworthy.” - singi

Jan 08

How I Landed In The Ring With Azealia Banks & Perez Hilton | xoJane -

themodernistwitch:

microphoneheartbeats:

Hey look!

The magnificent Janet Mock wrote about the whole Azealia/Angel/Perez thing in a way that treats everybody as human and flawed, calls nobody a waste of oxygen, gives no passes for misogyny or transphobia or homophobia but simultaneously recognizes the racism involved in double standards and coverage of black public figures compared to white ones AND calls out mainstream gay media and activism for only caring once the slurs were directed at gay men. And recognizes that we can all still love problematic and complicated pieces of cultural output!

Basically, Janet Mock is amazing? Yeah. That’s the takeaway here.

Janet Mock #1.

(Source: girlslikeusnews, via human-resentipede)

Jan 04

Interexperience

gameaway:

Why have we limited something as important as an interactive form of cultural expression to a term like “videogames”? Isn’t it true that it’s probably due to someone who a long time ago thought it would be fun to play games on a computer? They would play games. On a computer. They wouldn’t play videogames, no, they would play games on a computer.

Some engineers and software developers thought about this for a while after entering the videogames industry and realised they wanted something more. I won’t be naming them here since the name of their company isn’t the important thing (I’m sure you can figure it out on your own with a little bit of research) but recently they held their first event with the purpose of gathering developers of similiar minds and presenting their results. What can be explored? How far can we go?

I personally also believe that we’re restricted by the whole term “games” which is why I’d like to bash in the head of whoever said it first but even with such a limiting form we’ve been blessed with innovations like Fahrenheit and The Path. Two great examples of just how different games can be from one another rather than just having the exact same idea with their own twist.

Screenshot from "The Path"

I’d also like to say something in regard to the indie-developers out there. Don’t mistake indie-developers for innovative developers or companies that produce material of a different kind than the major ones. There are a ton of rip-offs out there and only a few really stand out. Don’t get me wrong, I love games. But I also love other things like taking a walk with friends, getting stressed out on facebook, breaking my Gameboy Advance SP in half when I get pissed off but when there is a whole other world… no, let me rephrase that, when there are billions of other possibilities that we haven’t explored I want to explore them. There’s nothing wrong with liking games the way they are, but the fact that we’ve become limited  by them or rather that we are and always have been limited by them is a painful fact.

Here’s an example of what can be done when you’re not limited by the word “game” or the criterias for being one: http://blabla.nfb.ca/

So what I’d like to do is to create something entirely new, something that would serve as the creator for the category “games” on computers, and I’m not talking about “software”. The actual content already exists, but we need something that’s broader than just “videogames”. Making up a word based on the criteria for it to have a foundation in an or several actual words is hard, but for now I’ll settle with “interexperience”. It may sound ambitious but this, or a simplified form of it, is what I will call everything that resides within interactive experiences such as games or interexperience like The Path. Do you have any better ideas for the name or can you come up with a simplified form that is easy to remember and pronounce?