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Hello and happy Thanksgiving from Canada, where it is still a Sunday by feeling. This weekend I visited my mother and sister in New York—even though we don't celebrate any holidays at all, the joy and gratitude and quiet sense of reunion seeps right through. We don't see each other often, and there's no outward expressions of affection, but the older I get the more I feel it in the air. When I am with them I am closer to the self that I am constantly searching for, and that's something.
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+ Wesley Morris' debut as critic-at-large at the NYT, The Year We Obsessed Over Identity
The bitterness of the sketch made me wonder if being black in America is the one identity that won’t ever mutate. I’m someone who believes himself to have complete individual autonomy, someone who feels free. But I also know some of that autonomy is limited, illusory, conditional. I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment. So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission.Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived.
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+ Jenna Wortham's stunning profile: Zanele Muholi's Transformations
The work she does is draining; it erodes her spirit and interferes with her personal life. ‘‘I’ve listened to so many people’s pain, and it meant I had to sleep with that pain when people moved on with their lives,’’ she says. ‘‘When do photographers get time to deal with their own pain and be given their space to do it? Others will say, ‘Oh, just go to therapy.’ But it is not that simple.’’
Muholi feels that turning the camera on herself will force this introspection. ‘‘This is why the self-portraits are so major to me,’’ she says. ‘‘We get caught up in other people’s worlds, and you never ask yourself how you became.’’
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+ Safy-Hallan Farah's investigation into the internet's most ambiguous meme, "It Me," You, and Everyone We Know
The whole reason I took up making jokes on Twitter was to curb my tendency to talk about my own personal business. Now, if I feel some type of way, instead of subtweeting or over-sharing my life, I deflect. For instance, I recently tweeted "I'm not even looking for a man. I just want an emergency contact." I could have just as easily tweeted "I'm really lonely and long for true love," but I didn't. There's some truth to my tweet, though not the whole truth. That is what "it me" does, though in way less words. Sometimes not only in less words, but in other people's words -- and images-- creating distance and making us seem smaller.
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+ Sara Ahmed on rebuilding the queer identity: Selfcare as Warfare
Self-care: that can be an act of political warfare. In directing our care towards ourselves we are redirecting care away from its proper objects, we are not caring for those we are supposed to care for; we are not caring for the bodies deemed worth caring about. And that is why in queer, feminist and anti-racist work self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities, assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other. This is why when we have to insist, I matter, we matter, we are transforming what matters. Women’s lives matter; black lives matter; queer lives matter; disabled lives matter; trans lives matter; the poor; the elderly; the incarcerated, matter.
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+ Sarah Jean Alexander's poem, "Ways In Which It Is True"
...What if it’s not that we need to breathe in order to stay alive
but it’s our breaths that are the owners of our soul
and it’s the soul that needs this body to keep on going
What’s life for if not taking everything
spoken to me as a sign to move in closer
What’s life for if not using another body
as a placeholder for your fear
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How are you? What have you been dreaming about? When you think of warmth, what texture is it?
xoxo,
Tracy
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