#articles

I’ve been mulling over two really great pieces on animal liberation and the animal rights movement these past couple of weeks.

Aph Ko: Afrofuturism and Black Veganism: Towards a New Citizenship at the Intersectional Justice Conference

Aph’s work on Aphro-ismandBlack Vegans Rock is awesome, and this video is really important. I’ve been wanting to post this ever since it came out. I finally finished captioning it, so now you can view it on Amara in English. I also put the captions into a slightly edited transcript if you’d rather read her talk. Her description: “In my talk, I discuss how intersectionality is a useful tool for navigating current oppressive systems, and how Afrofuturism is a brilliant tool for creating conceptual blueprints for tomorrow.”

Aph touches on a lot of things and the video in itself is impactful, so I recommend just watching it all the way through (content warning for racial violence and imagery), but I’ll try to sum up some main points:

1. Intersectionality as “social layerism”
   
2. Citizenship politics
   
3. Racial and animal oppression
   
4. Afrofuturism and imagining freedom
5. Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

Intersectionality as “social layerism”

I think we need to re-evaluate the ways that we think systems of oppression are connecting, because currently, I can tell that some activists are struggling to articulate how and why these issues are entangled, and instead, they try to engage with a type of analysis that I call “social layerism”, […] when activists try to enact a type of intersectional analysis, but they just end up superficially layering these issues on top of one another without any meaningful connection or analysis. So that basically means that a lot of people are saying anti-racism, feminism, speciesism, all in the same sentence, which is a really big deal, but there’s not really a lot of work being done on connecting these things conceptually.

Aph mentions a popular video, On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza, where Akilah uses pizza made from animals’ products and animals’ bodies to explain intersectionality, as an extreme example of social layerism. Akilah is literally talking about a pizza with toppings and not making any connections between feminine and animal oppression (see Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat), or any other type of oppression, instead explaining intersectionality as additional layers of issues that aren’t connected or entangled. Although intersectionality has become mainstream, its meaning hasn’t really translated into our social movements.

Citizenship politics

Aph explains how the compartmentalized, single-issue movements of today – feminism, anti-racism, animal rights, etc. – prevent more meaningful connections between oppression to take place. She brings up the the issue of physical borders as a concrete example of citizenship politics, and also as an analogy to the policing that happens within different types of activist spaces. She gives examples of the vitriolic reaction against Black Vegans Rock that white and non-Black minorities have had.

A lot of vegans who believed that veganism was in their possession, in particular, a part of white citizen identity. A lot of white people felt like they unquestionably had access to, and could be the gatekeepers over, veganism, and that Black people who talked about race in conjunction with veganism were crossing a border […] that white folks created, and our racialized discussions about animal rights were threatening them and their current citizenship to the landscape of animal rights. Our attempts at talking about race and animal at the same time was viewed as deviant, wrong, and barbaric. We had to do it “the right way”. We had to go through the right channels to become a proper animal rights activist, which meant adopting Eurocentric ideas about animal oppression, Black oppression, and more. If you do talk about race as a person of color, or if you create your own project, your citizenship to the animal rights space is interrogated, and you’re viewed as not belonging, and being inhospitable as a guest to their white space. You’re basically told to “go back from where you came from,” which were these, like, weird, Brown, anti-racist spaces, ‘cause white people didn’t talk about race in the vegan world, right? It was, leave your race out of this, this has nothing to do with race.

Aph also talks about the hyperresentation of certain Black folks in veganism and animals rights that are held up as examples of “proper citizens” who’ve been “rehabilitated” and have “transcended race talk”. In essence, “Eurocentric post-racial veganism is being used to superficially show Black bodies in a way where Blackness isn’t even really central or discussed, but used as a tool to facilitate a violent form of diversity that serves as a sedative for Black rage.”

Racial and animal oppression

Aph talks about the documentary film, “Always in Season”, that she’s an associate producer on. This was a really emotional part of her talk, since it demonstrated how normalized lynching was not too long ago, and how Black people were (and sometimes still are) considered sub-human and animal.

As many as 15,000 people would be at one lynching. And you have to multiply that by 5,000 documented lynchings that have taken place. And like I said, those are only the documented ones. Experts say there were 2-3 times as many. And this is an image – luckily, you can’t see it too well – but in the center is a 17 year old Black boy named Jesse Washington, who is being tortured and burned in Waco, Texas in 1916. This form of terrorism was so highly organized that they even had postcards they created. […] So this is the front of a postcard, and there’s a guy right here. He was the one sending the postcard. He marked himself in it. They were not afraid to even show their faces. That’s how normalized this was. And at the back of this postcard, to his father, he wrote, “This is the barbecue we had last night.”

This film is about what Black and white people had to live with then, and what they’re living with now. Lynching was like hunting, however, no licenses were required, which meant that Black folks were always in season, which is why it’s titled that way. So I don’t think Black oppression is “like” animal oppression, I argue that it’s a part of it. If Black people are considered sub-human and animal, then what they’re experiencing is also, I argue, animal oppression. So when animal rights activists from the dominating class keep telling people like me that Black people are “centering” ourselves in an animal rights movements that’s supposed to be about animals, you have to realize that Black people intimately understand what it means to be hunted and terrorized. And as long as Black activists are making the necessary connections to animal oppression, then animal oppression will be a product of our racial liberation movements, considering racism, I argue, is also a speciesist thing.

Aph and her sister Syl have argued for an epistemological revolution (see Why Animal Liberation Requires an Epistemological Revolution). Instead of viewing oppressions as manifesting independently and then connecting with other oppressions in the similarity of their material violations, we need to realize that the root of all oppression is due to citizenship in the territory of “sub-human” or “other” that is inferior to the dominant class (“glorified white humans”).

Afrofuturism and imagining freedom

Part of the power that the dominant society has is being able to take away your imagination such that the way the world is given to you is the only way it can ever be, and the only movement you can ever really do in that system is to get more comfortable. The way white supremacist patriarchy has defined us is seemingly all we can ever be as minorities.

When the system steals your imagination, they have arrested your future. Most of us are so caught up in the fight today, especially in intersectional circles, we’re so caught up in the fight and the language of oppression that we’ve kind of forgotten that this fight is supposed to be temporary. We cannot start building homes in our trenches. We are only here temporarily. Eventually, the goal is, we want to climb out and build a new landscape, because, remember, that’s the goal. It’s not just to stay in the fight just to fight, but it’s to get out and find a space that’s revolutionary.

Aph introduces Afrofuturism as a path forward from becoming a decolonized being to shaping society after liberation has been achieved.

Liberation isn’t the end, it is merely the outcome of revolution. However, we can’t forget to start planning for the day after our liberation comes, because that’s the day when we have to build a new system, and a new society, and we have to start working on that blueprint today. And the day after liberation is the day that we’re most vulnerable, so we need to create some conceptual architecture for tomorrow.

Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

So in a lot of our movements today – even our intersectional movement – we assume that white people are at the center of our solar system, and we orbit them. And so this has produced, in my opinion, a "Dear white people,” type of activism – and that’s a film – where the only way minorities can get any rights or anything done is through white people. And in order for liberation, we have to educate them. This is even why people say “women and people of color”. Where does that leave me? “Women and people of color.” Even in intersectional movements, we say this because these are descriptors for bodies that are not white men. So this is again: they are at the center of our universe. And I’m arguing that we need to move to a model that’s similar to the heliocentric model, which says that we do not orbit whiteness. White supremacy orbits us, and inferior beings, in order to exist, grow, and thrive. There is no white supremacy if there is no anti-Blackness. Just as the earth needs the sun’s light to thrive and grow, systems of oppression need sub-humans in order to feel superior.

I know many in the room would call that intersectional. I’m calling that an Afrofuturistic politic. And what’s interesting about the heliocentric model, again, is that the sun is a conglomeration of all beings that are labeled inferior, sub-human, and animal. And my sister Syl […] says, “Racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism, classism, and so on… These are real phenomena, of course, but as philosopher Sylvia Wynter warned, we should avoid mistaking the 'maps’ for the 'territory’. The territory is the massive domain of Others, whose scope can only be grasped when we dig deeper to go beyond the constraints of the specific -isms and see ourselves as – following Frantz Fanon’s words – damned beings by virtue of lacking of full 'human’ status.” And that’s what connects a lot of us who are labeled oppressed: in addition to non-human animals, we’re viewed as sub-human.

Aph explores the reimagination of citizenship within an Afrofuturistic framework for everyone labeled inferior. With this framework, racial liberation movements will tackle animal oppression – those with citizenship in the same domain of Others, with their intimate knowledge of what it means to be sub-human, will be the authors of change, creating new conceptual architectures for the future.

The power of Afrofuturism is that it’s model-less. There is no model. It’s ambiguous. And its power lies in that ambiguity because there are no structures, there are no leaders, there are no hierarchies, which I would argue are the foundational elements for systems of oppression. It’s about reimagining your citizenship beyond white supremacy and patriarchy.

Animal Liberation: Devastate to Liberate, or Devastatingly Liberal? by Anonymous
By liberating ourselves, from the oppressive chains of causes, identities and ideology of group politics, we may stop walking round towns looking for animal abuse and instead aim for how to rid ourselves of the behaviour which currently reproduces the state and class divided society in our own activity.

27. Of course the idea of a cruelty free product is a carefully crafted illusion. No such thing can exist — all commodities are cruel. Every single thing that can be bought, every service, every item of food, every household good, every house, road or car has been produced with the forced slavery of working class people. The predominance of middle class people who make up the animal rights movement ignore this because they tend not to have to suffer half as much in society themselves. Even if you were only interested in cruelty in regard to animals (a trait with a perplexing popularity amongst the human members of the animal rights movement), how could you avoid using animal in rubber, glues or on photographic film? This isn’t mentioned to make anyone feel bad about taking photos or whatever but merely to show that the notion of being a “true vegan” in this society is an impossible goal. We didn’t choose for it to be that way, we don’t use such things deliberately for that reason — under this economic system we simply have no control over such a thing.

55. It tends to go without saying but there is every reason to combat hierarchy when it rears its ugly head because hierarchy is precisely the trait which keeps humans in a dominating position over animals. The concept of speciesism, like racism and sexism, is nothing other than a specific application of authoritative power. If it were approached as such then perhaps, perhaps, the animal rights movement wouldn’t be so full of the liberal / fascist nonsense it is today.

62. As soon as any movement around a specific cause develops committees, officers, group contacts etc, it starts to develop a division of status and its campaigners begin to behave like governments. As long as the issue is seen to be animal rights then hierarchical tendencies will crop up and be tolerated. As long as individuals refuse to think about what exactly hierarchy is, and recognise that hierarchy is the crucial king-pin holding all of us, and animals into the roles of the oppressed, then the well-meaning efforts of libertarian liberationists will continually be in vain.

This was something that I came across at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair a few weeks ago, and I think it speaks a lot to the animal rights movement and social movements in general that this anonymous author’s critique of animal rights in England in the early 1990s is basically the same problem of citizenship politics that Aph critiques in her talk in 2016: “It’s all about where you fit in. Who’s doing it right, who’s doing it wrong, whether you’re an abolitionist or a welfarist, whether you’re intersectional or decolonial. It becomes less about the actual oppression, and more about power. Who is right, and who is wrong? Who belongs, and who doesn’t?”

Our movements reproduce the same power structures that underly the oppression that we’re fighting because we’re operating under the same Eurocentric, capitalist models. Recognizing that the human/animal divide – that hierarchy and power gradients – is the linchpin of oppression is the first step in imagining a future for ourselves.

When Robots Are An Instrument Of Male Desire by Katherine Cross
“When customers and managers talk about ironing out the ‘inefficiency’ of human employees, it seems they mainly want to erase the inconvenience of human sapience: the idea that you as a worker have a will and body of your own that, even while you’re on the clock, does not exist to serve ‘the customer’s’ every whim. I’d argue there’s a connection between how many men want to be ‘free’ to sexually harass Cortana or Siri, and the factthatwe are in the midst ofanepidemic of sexual harassment of restaurant workers worldwide, the majority of whom are women. The link lies in what many consumers are trained to expect from service workers: perfect subservience and total availability. Our virtual assistants, free of messy things like autonomy, emotion, and dignity, are the perfect embodiment of that expectation.”

Organizing for radical change beyond the ballot box by Ben Reynolds
“By organizing ourselves, we build our own power to resist capitalism and fight for a better future. Crucially, we keep power in our communities instead of ceding it to party bureaucracies and the state.”

#EarthDay: The High Cost Of Eco-Activism by Nurith Aizenman
“[…] some of the most vital environmental work is being done by ordinary citizens with extraordinary courage. People like subsistence farmers and tribal leaders in the poorest countries are standing up to some of the world’s most powerful industries. And a growing number of them have been attacked — and sometimes murdered — for trying to protect the environment.”

Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen: ‘My book has something to offend everyone’ by Angela Chen
“Nguyen was adamant from the beginning that his novel would not fall into the ‘typical maneuvers of minority literature written for a majority audience’. He refused to translate his culture – for example, writing ‘Vietnamese New Year’ instead of ‘Tết’ – or have the book’s themes affirm American ideals and American exceptionalism. Had The Sympathizer been written for a white audience, the ‘ending would be radically different’. His narrator never rejects communism, for example. ‘I wrote as if I had all the privilege of a majority writer, and majority writers never have to translate or pander,’ Nguyen said.”

How To Respond When You Suspect Someone Is Flirting With You by Mallory Ortberg
“Are you cheerfully enduring this interaction, or a willing participant? I can’t distinguish good humor from genuine interest. Give me a sign.”

I’m currently going through StyleLikeU’s What’s Underneath video series, which is super cool and touching and vulnerable. Particularly liked Alok’s video, The Pain & Empowerment of Choosing Your Own Gender, and Tyler’s, Move Over, Gender Binary!

Where the Vocabulary of Autism is Failing by Nicholette Zeliadt
“Terms like ‘low-functioning’ are short on nuance and long on stigma.”

Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter by Yasmin Nair
“Twitter is mistaken as a form of political action, and the fact that tweeting has the appearance of unmediated immediacy gives it the legitimacy of authenticity, a hallmark of the neoliberal entrepreneurial self.”

Justice for All by Brian Goldstone
“Ending the scourge of mass incarceration will require seeking justice not just for the innocent but for the guilty.”

The Reckoning by Pamela Colloff
“Fifty years ago, when Claire Wilson was eighteen, she was critically wounded during the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting—the first massacre of its kind. How does the path of a bullet change a life?“

Black Trauma Remixed For Your Clicks by Neila Orr
“In viral videos, the real-life pain of black people is repurposed into fun, catchy songs for popular consumption. But at what cost?”

OpenToonz is here!!

My Mother’s Garden by Kaitlyn Greenidge
“I learned that the best person to talk about wealth and class was an upper-middle class person because she supposedly could look at it dispassionately. The best person to talk about race was a white person, for the same reasons. The best person to talk about gender was a boy.”

Series of Animated Stories Revitalize Indigenous Languages in Mexico by Iris Rodriguez
“The project aims to promote pride, respect, and encourage the use of the indigenous languages of Mexico, through a series of animated stories narrated in these languages and subtitled in Spanish.”

The Radical Raging Grannies of San Jose by Teresa Mathew
“Many echo each other in saying that the Grannies simply target injustice wherever they find it. ‘We go to any gig where we are needed,’ Essie says. ‘We are an unstructured, radical group of older women who say what they want.’”

My Year in Startup Hell by Dan Lyons
Channeling Orwell? “Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said ‘1 + 1 = 3.’ Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, ‘I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.’”

Water’s Edge by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
“The story of Bill May, the greatest male synchronized swimmer who ever lived, and his improbable quest for Olympic gold.”

Currently in San Diego at CSUN! Had the opportunity to take Paul J. Adam’s mobile accessibility workshop (check out his awesome list of a11y resources). San Diego is beautiful, by the way.

Also, many thanks to everyone who’s shared and replied with their experiences on my posts about Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexualityand Asexuality and Race in a Digital World.

A Letter to My Chinese Immigrant Father About American Racism by Lucy Lee
“In these moments, when I feel ready to hurl out angry accusations of complicity and anti-Black racism, I try to think about the loneliness you and mom might have felt as new immigrants in a country that viewed you only in caricature. I think about how you left behind a family that idolized you, to live among strangers who dismissed you as subservient, alien, and irrelevant. I think about how you might have felt as young parents, waking up in the middle of the night to robbers breaking into your apartment with a newborn sound asleep.”

Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco by Rebecca Solnit
“Alex Nieto was 28 years old when he was killed, in the neighbourhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he carried for his job as a bouncer at a nightclub, when someone called 911 on him a little after 7pm on the evening of 21 March 2014.”

In Indonesia, Knitting Gets Political by Theodora Sutcliffe
Artist Fitriani Dalay is using knitting and yarn-bombing “to challenge consumerism, censorship, and elitism in the political and art worlds, while empowering women.”

How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color? by Christopher Emdin
“First, the belief that students are in need of ‘cleaning up’ presumes that they are dirty. Second, the aim of ‘giving them a better life’ indicates that their present life has little or no value. The idea that one individual or school can give students ‘a life’ emanates from a problematic savior complex that results in making students, their varied experiences, their emotions, and the good in their communities invisible. So invisible, in fact, that the chief way to teach urban youth of color more effectively—that is, to truly be in and in touch with their communities—is not seen as a viable option.”

Facial Recognition Apps Are Leaving Blind People Behind by Jonathan Keane
“Biometric logins like facial recognition are often discussed as being the real alternative to traditional passwords. But as companies develop apps that verify identity with a snapshot of the user’s face, few are considering whether that method is accessible to people with visual impairments.”

In work/life news, my coworker and I are presenting at the 2016 CSUN Conference next week on Responsive Accessibility in the New Google+, I made signs for different garbage types for the APIQWTC Year of the Monkey Lunar New Year Banquet, and I’m very, very tired due to daylight savings time.

How Gallaudet University’s Architects Are Redefining Deaf Space by Amanda Kolson Hurley
“DeafSpace is an architectural approach that springs from the particular ways Deaf people perceive and inhabit space. […] DeafSpace isn’t about just replacing the auditory with the visual—it’s about creating a rich multi-sensory environment that eases mobility, expresses identity, and enhances wellbeing.”

The Matter of Black Lives by Jelani Cobb
The history of #BlackLivesMatter, what the movement hopes to achieve, and its future.

8 Asian-American activists down with the cause by Angela Fichter
“From South Asia to California, here are eight Asian Americans who helped change America for the better, and fought the power on their own terms.”

On the Racialization of Asexuality by Ianna Hawkins Owen
“This chapter takes up a peripheral genealogy of the asexual through the study of race, beginning with the conceptual deployment of asexuality in the past to understand some of the ways in which the contemporary invocation of an asexual orientation is circumscribed by a racialized inheritance.”

I haven’t posted in a while due to volunteering more, spending hella time at the climbing gym, and general waffling. I’ve been reading a lot of interesting stuff lately, though, so I figured I would just start posting linkspams.

Some things I’ve been thinking about: race and (a)sexuality, anti-blackness in Asian communities, non-oppressive masculinity, and the absent referent in cultural appropriation.

Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability by Mia Mingus
“This is our work as femmes of color: to take the notion of beauty (and most importantly the value placed upon it) and dismantle it (challenge it), not just in gender, but wherever it is being used to harm people, to exclude people, to shame people; as a justification for violence, colonization and genocide.”

We Need a Decolonized, Not a “Diverse”, Education by Zoé Samudzi
“It is impossible for American education to be neutral and/or apolitical when lesson plans of all educational levels are sites of historical revisionism.”

Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh. by Adrienne K.
J.K. Rowling has a series of writings up about the history of magic in North America in the Harry Potter world and it erases contemporary and living Native cultures.

Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say by Kj Dell’Antonia
In a world where a child’s digital record can start the moment their parent posts a picture of them after birth, how can we teach and practice consent surrounding social media with children today?

Badass, Motherfucker, and Meat-Eater: Kit Yan’s Trans of Color Slammin’ Critique and the Archives of Possibilities by Bo Luengsuraswat
“Yan’s performance brings to attention the impossibility for male-identified people, in general, and Asian American men, in particular, to simply reclaim maleness in order to be recognized as legitimate citizen-subjects, since there is no such a thing as a singular, authentic masculine ideal in which one can easily draw upon as a measure of identification and belonging.”

Shrinking Women by Lily Myers

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork, in every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so.

Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit.” It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking, making space for the entrance of men into their lives, not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.

I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?” he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas. You have been taught to grow out, I have been taught to grow in. You learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence – you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much. I learned to absorb. I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself. I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits.

That’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit, weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again. Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many. How much space she deserves to occupy.

Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, and I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country. I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry”. I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza. A circular obsession I never wanted, but inheritance is accidental, still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

TW: descriptions of disordered eating and exercising.

There Once Was a Girl by Katy Waldman
Against the false narratives of anorexia.

The anorexic impulse to lyricize one’s illness is a prescription for estrangement, for controlling and muffling the messy truths about who we are. Despite its promise of expressiveness, it is the enemy of writing. It is certainly the enemy of living. We need to tackle the false narratives clustered around eating disorders in our culture—clichés that vex and complicate treatment, contributing to low recovery rates and a frightening death toll. By looking harder at both the literature and the science of anorexia, we can expose where the plotlines conflict, where the self-deception and self-sabotage sneak in.

Anorexia is one of nature’s bleaker illustrations of “monkey see, monkey do.” […] The charge that anorexia memoirs are “how-to manuals in disguise” is well-established by now: Writers from Emma Woolf (Virginia’s great-niece) to teens on eating disorder–related Internet forums have faced criticism for wreathing their anorexia stories in beckoning particulars: minutes on the treadmill, target weights attained, calories consumed. Thanks to the disease’s competitive nature, these tidbits, ostensibly offered as warnings, can read as inspiring benchmarks or even veiled instructions. Recalling her student-sensei relationship with Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, “a cornerstone, a beloved, poetic contemporary classic” of eating disorder literature, the writer Kelsey Osgood reports that she “incorporated some of Hornbacher’s tricks into my own weight loss repertoire.”

More fundamentally, though, anorexia is an inveterate liar whose grand theme is your identity. Because the channels through which it flows and acts are so often linguistic, the disorder has inspired a perverse literary tradition, replete with patron saints (Catherine of Siena, herself a twin, who recorded the details of her miraculous asceticism in letters she sent to aspiring female mystics), glamorous elders (Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath), tropes (fairies, snow), and devices (paradox, irony, the unreliable narrator). “Anorexic literature” commits the inherently literary, self-mythologizing qualities of anorexia to paper. From the novels of Charles Dickens to the poetry of Louise Glück, it contains and reproduces something more amoebic, perhaps more dangerous, than dieting tips: a specific persona and sensibility.

I have this very vivid image of myself as a teenager, sneaking into my parents’ bathroom in the dead of the night to step on their digital scale. I stand there for three seconds and then kneel, prostrating myself on the ground, head to the scale, knees on the cold tile, eyes straining through the darkness to read the result. It’s vivid for me in a way that other aspects of my illness aren’t because I distinctly remember choosing it to be. Right before I knelt, I thought, this is a symbolic moment. The height of my disordered thinking, to literally worship the scale. It was performativity at its finest, and I knew it – it was me “doing anorexia”.

Those performative moments were where I felt safe, where I felt like I had an identity. To eat without guilt made me feel guilty. If I wasn’t constantly thinking about food or exercise or my body, I wasn’t truly sick. If I wasn’t this idealized paragon of asceticism, I wasn’t truly ill. “Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison. The choreography becomes so absorbing that you can no longer access your own will or desires. You may require an external party to confirm for you that you exist.”

I was an active poster on an eating disorder internet forum back then. I made friends with other users. We shared thinspo and low-fat recipes. We celebrated when people reached the DSM-IV criteria for anorexia. We commented on each other’s journal threads with words of comfort along with tips on how to ignore hunger. It was the same thing again and again – am I really sick? am I thin enough? am I performing anorexia correctly? – and with every new user we would confirm, yes, you are sick enough, if you are on here you are ill enough, and you deserve help. But we weren’t the ones who could help.

InGoing Hungry, young adult author Francesca Lia Block equates anorexia with “that perfect blend of angelic and demonic—the faerie. Ethereal, delicate, able to fly.” She recalls her time under the sprite’s spell in an outrageously irresponsible bout of lyricism: “I stared out the windows at the twisting, starving trees, the silvery, sorrowful sky. I wrote strange, surreal poetry. My father stopped at a Dairy Queen, and I ate a vanilla cone. It tasted fearsome and frightening. Like mortality.”

It makes me wish there were a Bad Sex in Fiction award, but for thinspo. And yet—who was one of my favorite authors as a preteen? I remember 1999, when I was 11 years old, my whole being magnetized to Block’s waifish bohemians, her purple-haired witch babies and genie changelings. I remember the spicy explosions of jacaranda, the porch scents of tangerine and cinnamon, all the deferred deliciousness of imaginary pleasure. Block recounts “a kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate for a year.” Why didn’t it strike me as weird that she always used food metaphors to describe nonfoods? That her protagonists were unfailingly languid and small-boned and lean? Most of all, I remember the moment in The Hanged Man when the heroine declares: “I will be thin and pure like a glass cup.” A glass cup! It seemed impossibly poetic. This was years before Alice Gregory poked fun at Block in the New Yorker for composing “laughably elliptical passages that read like demented ads for diamonds or bottled water.”

Though their effect is hard to quantify, “a lot of war stories and memoirs out there … glorify the specialness and suffering of anorexia,” says Dr. Angela Guarda, director of the Johns Hopkins Eating Disorders Program. “Anecdotally, patients often acknowledge that these writings romanticize the disorder,” and that “reading them can be triggering and worsen their ED.” While the actual disease is not glamorous at all, Guarda reiterates (do you remember the boring calorie records from Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl? Imagine them as the script for your entire life), “the idea of anorexia often is.” Doctors at Johns Hopkins generally discourage patients from reading most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, including the not-inconsiderable portion written by authors who “describe themselves as recovered and appear to still be ill.”

But what happened with me and Block felt like a slightly different thing. I wasn’t anorexic (yet), she wasn’t writing an anorexia memoir (explicitly), and I’m not sure how anyone could have known to intervene.

Sadness is “interesting,” notes Leslie Jamison in her magisterial essay on female pain, “and sickness [is] its handmaiden, providing not only cause but also symptoms and metaphors: a wracking cough, a wan pallor, an emaciated body.” Children want desperately to be interesting. Block’s slender, graceful wraiths with their dark secrets appealed to my ambition and sense of drama, not to mention my kiddie narcissism. Here’s one Blockian character indulging in a Petrarchan inventory of her own gaunt figure: “My shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through.” Bones, small, mirror, hair, pale, eyes, thin, light. The single syllables stream by like stars, all of them smooth, bright, reflective, or feminine. The hair’s thinness allows the light in. Projecting myself into that body, I think I loved the implication that someone might pay close enough attention to me to worry about my collarbone.

Was my collarbone interesting, though? Did it “unfurl like a bird’s wing”?

As a child, I loved reading through the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. I particularly liked reading Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, perhaps because I fantasized that my upcoming teenage years would be as dramatic and important as the stories told in the book. There was one story in there called “Gabby, You’re Sooo Skinny”, and it was the popular narrative of a straight-A, “very together” teenager dieting and then spiraling into anorexia, only to have an incident shock her into reality and onto the “long road of recovery” with help from loving friends and family. Later, as a straight-A, seemingly “very together” teenager myself, I wondered if that was the only way to get people to notice that I was actually not very together at all – if it was only physical sickness and manifestations of illness that could garner attention.

That’s not to say that anorexia and other eating disorders are simply a cry for attention. They are and they aren’t, and the reason I love this article so much is because it expresses the contradictions, the complexities, and the influences of culture and femininity and tropes about anorexia itself. “A fantasy of anorexia: total expressivity. See the anorexic’s sadness, legible on her anatomy, her inner life and emotions immediately present to anyone who looks at her. In a reverse transubstantiation, flesh becomes word, becomes character. Only the most authentic artist could possibly live her art like that.” It’s a tangled mess of romanticizing anorexia as expression, as self-control, and something to be admired.

Sometimes I start eating, and I can’t stop.

This part is hard to write, but it is also part of the narrative. As I dipped in and out of recovery after college, my disorder started to morph, losing any illusory claim it could have made on wan, heroic reserve or glamorous pallor or what have you. I stored up my denials. Then I binged on whole boxes of cereal, cartons of cookie dough ice cream, vats of raisins stirred into Nutella or hot fudge. The beginnings of these episodes were glorious—radiant increments of permission in a fascistically regulated life, Bosch gardens in which all the naked people were made of marzipan. But the middles and ends were crushing. The conviction, postbinge, that you are the most disgusting, worthless, execrable creature on Earth is total, as consuming a psychic pain as I have ever experienced. I’d walk to work wondering why people weren’t throwing things at me. If a colleague was kind, I’d feel so ashamed and undeserving my eyes would tear up. Time after time, the emotional fallout from bingeing proved so excruciating I would vow to never, never, do it again. And then—surprise!—I would.

This twist in the anorexia story often goes untold, because it doesn’t harmonize with the martyr-romance of the eating disorder. But overeating is a common response to the physiological and psychological stresses of starvation: More than one-half of anorexics will flirt with bulimia or binge-eating disorder on their path to recovery. “Restricting makes food more rewarding,” says Carrie Arnold, author of Decoding Anorexia: How Breakthroughs in Science Offer Hope for Eating Disorders. “After billions of years of evolution, our brains and bodies really don’t want to starve.” The chronically hungry contend with a primal drive not only to ease their immediate pangs but to counteract profound nutritional deficits. As Arnold explains, “a flashing neon sign in the eating disordered brain is saying GORGE NONSTOP.” For the most part, people with anorexia prove adept at ignoring it—until they don’t.

After a bout of anorexia, I swung into binge-eating. But binge-eating is agonizing. There is no romantic notion of self-control – it’s the complete and total opposite. I had realized I needed to stop letting calories and weight control my life, but it wasn’t as simple as just starting to eat again. Once I began to eat, I couldn’t stop. Terrified, I started trying to restrict again. I wouldn’t eat anything during the day. Then, at night, ravenous, I would sneak into the kitchen, this time not hoping that my parents wouldn’t hear the beep of the digital scale but the squeak of the pantry door. I would mindlessly devour food in front of the TV in the living room and when my stomach was so full it would start to hurt, I would punish myself by eating even more.

Recovery is complicated.

Lapping seductively at the joints of the craft was the cold, dark water I knew. It said that E’s behavior was not really crazy at all. That one should sup not on salmon and green beans but on scintillating conversation and small exquisite sips of Perrier. Dive in, beckoned the water. Be beautiful again.

Words and Offense by Kinsey Hope
Ah slurs. Amazing little linguistic fragments of nastiness, they are one of the most misunderstood elements of oppression in existence.

Slurs are systemic and offense is personal. This we can all agree on (unless we are quite ignorant about how these things work).

So now I drop the bomb on you. I do not give a single flying or landbound fuck, when it comes to fighting slurs, about offense.

[…] You see, offense isn’t the actual problem. It never has been. It isn’t the thing that makes slurs so ungodly harmful. Furthermore and this is important, offense is not limited to the marginalized and oppressed. Oh. Yes. That’s a bit of a problem isn’t it? Because you see, privileged people can be offended just as easily by marginalized and oppressed people as we can be by them. The effects of the offense may be different (power always adds extra harm to stuff) but there’s no doubt that we offend the privileged every day of every week of every month in any given year. Our anger offends the privileged and hurts them. Our self expression and living our lives offends the privileged and challenges their worldview painfully. […] Offense is a very eclectic concept and it is open to anyone, even the oppressor. Even worse, offense is built entirely around direct effect. If a tree falls in the woods it does in fact make a sound, but if no one is there to hear it, no one will cringe at the crash. Likewise if a slur is said in a completely privileged group, without any supporters of oppressed people around (or people who just don’t think words are an issue) who exactly is it offending? No one. No one is there who would be affected. I’ve heard of too many people who just avoid using the phrases and slurs around people they know it will offend and then go and use it around people they know it won’t.

So one of the biggest problems with just concentrating on offense is because offense can be used just as easily against us as it can for us when it comes to getting rid of slurs being spouted by the privileged.

The frighteningly direct way that words influence behavior and in turn directly and effectively boost the effects of oppression on a huge scale is a much bigger concern then whether someone is personally offended. It means that no matter where someone says that slur, even if no one is around that could be offended, it still hurts us overall.

So no, it’s not about offense. Not entirely. Words really do have astounding power.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can mobilize an entire society in violent hate against me. And we should never forget that fact.

This is particularly apt in light of things have been going on lately. Words have a huge affect, especially those used by the media. This extends past slurs and into the way things are framed as well. Calling abortion rights a “debate” when it’s a health issue? Not admitting when words directly have an impact on the actions of a murderer? Not calling it terrorism when a white person terrorizes the public? Seriously.

On a related note, one of my favorite podcasts lately has been CounterSpin, which critically looks at the past week’s news and how mainstream media covered it. It “exposes and highlights biased and inaccurate news; censored stories; sexism, racism and homophobia in the news; the power of corporate influence; gaffes and goofs by leading TV pundits; TV news’ narrow political spectrum; attacks on free speech; and more.”

A World Without Police!? by Ryan Higa
Inspired by all the police brutality videos going viral these days causing even more hatred towards police.

So, this is an example of something that is not politically correct. A quick summary so you don’t have to give this video any more views: Police brutality is a serious issue, but people nowadays are going out and deliberately antagonizing police. Police are human, too! They deal with assholes every day, so they’re bound to be asshole-ish sometimes. #NotAllPolice are racist – just like we want to avoid stereotypes that Black people are thieves, Asians are bad drivers, and Muslims are terrorists, we shouldn’t judge a group of people based on a few bad ones! The very minorities who are mad at being discriminated against are discriminating against the police! The world couldn’t survive without police anyways, we’d descend into a Netflix-less hell (don’t ask)!

Yeah. This was basically a #NotAllMen about the police. Somehow he decided to compare police with oppressed minorities. The police are not an oppressed minority – the police are the oppressors, or at the very least, the enactors of oppression. They’re part of a corrupt system.

Moreover, who else deals with assholes every day? Retail workers. Restaurant workers. Janitors. Housekeepers. Minimum wage workers. They don’t have the luxury of acting like assholes. It’s really frustrating to see this video have nearly two million views. Literally no one was asking him to comment on police brutality, but I guess he wanted to cash in on it (just like the supposedly antagonistic people filming police he was criticizing).

Poet Franny Choi pictures a world without police by Corinne Segal
“When [organizers] say we want abolition of prisons and cops, what do we envision in its place?”

When people of color are being murdered by the police with impunity, and when queer and trans folks are being murdered and being incarcerated for trying to defend their own lives, and when immigrants are being deported at record high rates, and when there’s a presidential candidate who proposes having a national Muslim database, it seems like there are a lot of forces in the world that tell me, and people who are similarly outside the norm of a ‘default human,’ that we need to apologize for existing.

Field Trip to the Museum of Human History

Everyone had been talking about the new exhibit,
recently unearthed artifacts from a time

no living hands remember. What twelve year old
doesn’t love a good scary story? Doesn’t thrill

at rumors of her own darkness whispering
from the canyon? We shuffled in the dim light

and gaped at the secrets buried
in clay, reborn as warning signs:

a “nightstick,” so called for its use
in extinguishing the lights in one’s eyes.

A machine used for scanning fingerprints
like cattle ears, grain shipments. We shuddered,

shoved our fingers in our pockets, acted tough.
Pretended not to listen as the guide said,

Ancient American society was built on competition
and maintained through domination and control.

In place of modern-day accountability practices,
the institution known as “police” kept order

using intimidation, punishment, and force.
We pressed our noses to the glass,

strained to imagine strangers running into our homes,
pointing guns in our faces because we’d hoarded

too much of the wrong kind of property.
Jadera asked something about redistribution

and the guide spoke of safes, evidence rooms,
more profit. Marian asked about raiding the rich,

and the guide said, In America, there were no greater
protections from police than wealth and whiteness.

Finally, Zaki asked what we were all wondering:
But what if you didn’t want to?

and the walls snickered and said, steel,
padlock, stripsearch, hardstop.

Dry-mouthed, we came upon a contraption
of chain and bolt, an ancient torture instrument

the guide called “handcuffs.” We stared
at the diagrams and almost felt the cold metal

licking our wrists, almost tasted dirt,
almost heard the siren and slammed door,

the cold-blooded click of the cocked-back pistol,
and our palms were slick with some old recognition,

as if in some forgotten dream we did live this way,
in submission, in fear, assuming positions

of power were earned, or at least carved in steel,
that they couldn’t be torn down like musty curtains,

an old house cleared of its dust and obsolete artifacts.
We threw open the doors to the museum,

shedding its nightmares on the marble steps,
and bounded into the sun, toward the school buses

or toward home, or the forests, or the fields,
or wherever our good legs could roam.

Dreams of a world that would look back on our time in horror. 

A Sea/ I See of (No) Yellow by Elie
Those micro-aggressions back then didn’t faze me: I thought they were true. I was a “bad” Asian because all my white friends were “more Asian” than me. I then started wondering how can I be a “good” Asian? I never figured it out. If you know, let me know. Better yet, build me a time machine and go back to my middle school days to let me know what items I need to fulfill to check off “good” Asian. It would save me a lot of stress and wondering what the f— I am.

That night after meeting up with them I got into one of my Wikipedia binges. This Wikipedia binge was different than the others, though. Instead of reading about my favorite episodes of “The Office” and education reformists, I somehow ended up on the Wiki page for the “Asian American Civil Rights Movement.” I was consumed. I had no idea this happened in the 1960s and 1970s – the same time as the Civil Rights Movement. It was because of the Asian American Civil Rights Movement that Asian Americans were able to develop ethnic studies programs and gain reparations for Japanese-Americans put in internment camps during World War II. What was most surprising was that our movement was a response to the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Power Movement caused many Asian-Americans to question themselves, prompting the “Yellow Power” movement. This fought against the harmful and racist stereotypes that East Asian women were either soft, docile and submissive, or luscious and dominating “dragon ladies” designed to fulfill white men’s sexual pleasures. They fought against stereotypes that East Asian men would steal white wives from their husbands. They fought against the idea that we would totally annihilate and disrupt America’s society. Yellow Power activists also wanted to prevent gentrification from destroying historic Asian-American neighborhoods. They proudly protested and showed solidarity with Black Power and Black Panther Party activists. Yellow Power showed America that we are not your model minority.

Falling deeper into the rabbit hole, I read about Asian-American activists. Some prominent ones include Richard Aoki, a Japanese-American man who worked with the Black Panther Party and Yuri Kochiyama, another Japanese-American woman activist who is photographed holding Malcolm X as he lay dying. I saw photos from the 1960s and 1970s of Asian-Americans holding signs that read “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” and “Power to the People – Black Power to Black People – Yellow Power to Yellow People.” They protested in the streets to reclaim and redefine what it meant to be Asian in America.

From middle school to high school, I rejected my Chinese identity and replaced it with my Jewish religion and being “American.” I was American-Chinese, not Chinese-American. I was a paradox: I didn’t want to be a “stereotypical” Asian in any way, yet I loved when I could be Asian with Hanna Park. The Wikipedia binge showed be that “being Asian” isn’t restricted to being good in math, eating rice, and being docile, sweet and nice. “Being Asian” can mean those things and more. A “good Asian” can be great at math and want to protest the system and stand up for their rights. A “good Asian” can play the piano and be a comedian. A “good” Asian is what I have been all along.

Finally, after nineteen years, I found my tribe of “Cool Asians,” which has expanded to include Drea and Hope’s two other Asian roommates. We still love watching Studio Ghibli movies, eating Shin Ramyun, and adding Sriracha to everything, but we aren’t defined by that. We don’t melt into the background because we’re supposed to as women, and especially as Chinese women. We aren’t quiet. We yell “Black Lives Matter” in solidarity for the fight to take up space and be us. We cut our hair short and wear “boy clothes” because fuck gender stereotypes. We aren’t your typical Chinese-American girls, but we are still Chinese-American girls every day of our lives. To quote Drake, I’ve “started from the bottom now we’re here.” We, as in my Chinese, American, and Jewish parts, are here. All the parts of me are here. My whole team is f—ing here.

Smashing stereotypes.

‘​A Blind Legend’ Uses Binaural Audio to Create a Game for the Visually Impaired by Emiko Jozuka
In mobile video game A Blind Legend, players see nothing. The only thing that guides them are strange thuds, rustling leaves, and the voice of a girl—all coming from multiple directions.

The game follows blind knight Edward Blake, who, guided by his daughter Louise’s voice, sets out on a quest to save his wife Lady Caroline, who has been kidnapped by a mad king called Thork. Throughout the game, Blake must use his auditory senses to avoid traps and ambushes, and fight with members of Thork’s faceless army. The smartphone touchscreen acts like a joystick, with players either swiping left, right, forwards, and backwards to move their feet or sword. Louise provides the navigation instructions, and as the game progresses, the soundscape grows increasingly multi-layered.

In recent years, creators in the gaming sphere have started to design games catering to a wider audience. British developer launched the Papa Sangre series in 2010, and in 2014, Incus Games created Three Monkeys, an audio-only action game for the visually impaired.

DOWiNO hope that their 3D binaural technology for gaming gets adopted more widely by other games studios in France.

“The aim was to open a door and to show that it was possible to make a game without images. If others start making these kind of games, it’s all for the better,” said Gagne.

This game is pretty cool! The soundscape is really great. My coworkers and I have been playing through it, though I’m awful at it (like I am at most fighting games).