TransLiberation

Transgender Liberation, A Movement Whose Time Has Come by Leslie Feinberg, in Transgender Studies Reader pages 205-220. 

Th is pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the “man”-made boundaries of gender.

no meeting 4/25!

next week’s meeting is cancelled!! we look forward to seeing you two weeks from today (5.2) to discuss a history article about welfare and tenants rights organizing in Baltimore! 

Capitalism and Gay Identity By John D’Emilio

Tags

capitalism, gay identity, the family, world war ii

This week we’re reading Capitalism and Gay Identity by John D’Emilio– it’s (from what I remember) a historical-materialist analysis of gay identity in the United States– very interesting!

See ya Thursday!

Boys Don’t Cry Readings for next week

J. Halberstam’s “Brandon Teena Archives” – Chapter 2 in “In a queer time and place”

http://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/halberstam_in-a-queer-time-and-place-l.pdf

and

another 3 page take on the movie to be added when I remember how to post pdfs!!!

Women in Uprising

This week we’re reading “Women in Uprising: The Oaxaca commune, the State and Reproductive Labor” by Barucha Calamity Peller from  LIES volume 1  Pages 124-144.

Through revolt, the women de-mystified the dimensions of their penury, specifically the housewives’ sector of the Oaxaca Commune, who in their own terms defined their rebellion against capitalism and the state as directly correlated with their rebellion against their husbands and families in the domestic sphere.

Pamphlet on the Flatbush Rebellion

Reblogged from Fire Next Time:

A new pamphlet entitled The Flatbush Rebellion is currently being distributed in Flatbush following the events of the past two weeks. It includes a brief account of the murder of Kimani Gray, the rebellion that occurred, and the social causes contributing to such rebellions. You can download it from the image on the left or the link above.

The pamphlet opens with an a quote from Frederick Douglass, from…

Read more… 78 more words

in place of meeting Thursday (3/31): Antonia’s Book Talk at Enoch Pratt!

our beloved Antonia will be talking about her book, The Wrong Kind of Different: Challenging the Meaning of Diversity in American Classrooms, this Thursday! we’ll meet there in place of the regular meeting.

Enoch Pratt Library, central branch (400 Cathedral Street), 6:30 pm in the Poe Room.

here’s the scoop.

Communiques from the occupation

This week we’re reading Wendy Trevino’s “From Santa Rita 128 TO 131” and “On the recent #occupations: Communique from W.&.T.C.H.” from LIES volume 1, pages 103 -124.

“We’re not asking for better wages or a lower interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital — there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out.“

 

Pages from a CNA’s notebook

“This piece is dedicated to all nursing home workers, residents and their family members. Be patient with me, as I share our silenced stories.”

This week we’re reading “Caring: A labor of stolen time” from LIES volume 1, pages 69-100.

Tags

frank wilderson, frantz fanon, jared sexton, policing, trayvon martin, white supremacy

The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events– high-profile homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6; emphasis added).

 

It makes no difference that in the U.S. the “casbah” and the “European” zone are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an isomorphic schematic relation– the schematic interchangeability– between Fanon’s settler society and Martinot and Sexton’s policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world, by virtue of the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do. “Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates it…the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying” (Ibid.: 8). In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police, they are– in their very corporeality– the police. (Frank Wilderson III – The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal)