Having separate flags is good bcos it’s good to have a symbol for your particular identity to embrace but it also important to remember the rainbow flag unites us all. All LGBT+ people can use it. I feel like it’s somehow become assumed by a lot of younger lgbt+ people that it’s only fr gay men, which it isn’t and never has been
The rainbow flag when originally created by Gilbert Baker in 1978 actually contained 8 stripes that were assigned values and specific meanings that were meant to show what unites us and what we value as a community,
It took 30 people to hand dye AND hand stitch the first 2 pride flags- 30 people of various identities came together to create the first symbol of pride. Hot pink was removed due to fabric shortages and turquoise was mixed with indigo to have the darker blue we have today.
Having individual flags is great to show your identity but I think we shouldn’t forget that the rainbow flag isn’t reserved for gay men, it was created to show what we all have in common regardless of identity.
**UPDATE** - My family and I have reached our goal! Thank you to everyone who shared this post! <3
I’ve never done this before, I normally just leave a pinned post for people who’d like to donate, but I’m in desperate need right now. I’m on the brink of eviction as I’ve been in and out of the hospital along with other troubles and I’ve fallen behind on rent. I’m begging any and everyone who is willing to donate to send to my cashapp *****funded***** Even if it’s just a penny, I’ll be grateful. My goal right now is $2,395 which will cover the past due and put my family and I one month ahead until we can get back on our feet. If you need any proof or details about what’s going on, please feel free to message me (I just had surgery on my spine and abdomen so I may not reply right away, but I will try to be as prompt as I can) and if you can’t donate, please share this post for me. Thank you!
a little wip as-well - last time I worked with sims4studio there was no wallpaper creation for me (because my computer couldn’t do it. don’t ask me why …)
hihi. :x (no reshade btw.)
Please vote on what palette you would like to see the wallpapers in first! (for the wallpaper/painted part, not the tiles!)
An associate professor at MIT University, USA, has written a new book named Design Justice examining the way in which technology can be functional for more people within the society. The new book focuses on the correlation between technology, design, and social justice.
In the book, Design Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Constanza-Chock shared their experience as a transgender and nonbinary person, and explained how technology could help improve the experiences of others that belong to minority groups.
Highlighting the biases built into everyday objects, including software interfaces, medical devices, social media, and the built environment, Constanza-Chock examined how these biases reflect existing power structures in society. published by the MIT Press, the book offers a framework for fixing the shortcomings of technology in society, while suggesting methods of technology design that can be used to help build a more inclusive future.
‘Design justice is both a community of practice, and a framework for analysis,’ said Costanza-Chock, who is the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. ‘In the book I’m trying to both narrate the emergence of this community, based on my own participation in it, and rethink some of the core concepts from design theory through this lens.’
In one particular example, Constanza-Chock talked about how something as simple as going through airport security can become an unusually uncomfortable process. Airport’s tend to be set up with security millimetre wave scanners which are set up with binary, male or female configurations. To operate the machine, agents press a button based on their assumptions about the person entering the scanner – blue for ‘boy,’ or pink for ‘girl’. As a non-binary person, Constanza-Chock would always be flagged by the machine when travelling, prompted for a hands-on check by security officials.
‘I know I’m almost certainly about to experience an embarrassing, uncomfortable, and perhaps humiliating search… after my body is flagged as anomalous by the millimetre wave scanner,’ Constanza-Chock wrote in the book.
This is an experience familiar to many who fall outside the system’s norms, Costanza-Chock explains – trans and gender nonconforming people’s bodies, black women’s hair, head wraps, and assistive devices are regularly flagged as ‘risky’.
The book also looks at the issue of who designs technology, a subject Costanza-Chock has examined extensively — for instance in the 2018 report ‘#MoreThanCode,’ which pointed out the need for more systematic inclusion and equity efforts in the emerging field of public interest technology.
Costanza-Chock, hopes the book will interest people not only for the criticism it offers, but as a way of moving forward and deploying better practices.
‘My book is not primarily or only critique,’ Costanza-Chock said. ‘One of the things about the Design Justice Network is that we try to spend more time building than tearing down. I think design justice is about articulating a critique, while constantly trying to point toward ways of doing things better.’
Titled:“What Living on a Queer Commune in Rural Oregon is Like”
I didn’t mean to move to a queer land project in rural Southern Oregon when I left New York City two years ago searching for an adventure. But in retrospect it makes perfect sense. The land that I now call home is exactly what I would have collaged on a vision board if you’d asked me where, in my most perfect manifestation, I would like to spend my days: A combination modern queer safe-space, early seventies back-to-the-land commune, and a riot grrrl’s DIY fever-dream.
There is a long history of queers moving to rural places and setting up intentional communities where we can fly under the radar of mainstream oppression and expectations. To describe all such places would be impossible. “Queer land” means different things for different people. There are sex positive sanctuaries, drug-free homesteads, separatist communities. Some of these lands have been around for decades and the people who live there would bristle at my use of the word “queer” to describe them (identities are tricky things to pin down, even trickier to assign to others); some have been around for just a year or two and are still looking for a permanent place to settle, renting spots that’ll do while the inhabitants save enough to buy land. I can’t speak for all queer lands, and I can’t even be the definitive voice for mine–it’s been around for a decade, and I’ve only lived here for nine months.
What I can tell you about is what living on queer land has meant to me, a queer grrrl in her mid-twenties, and why I think it’s so important that all queers know these spaces exist, and that we keep investing in them.
I’d been traveling and living out of a backpack for months when I got here last summer, but I fell in love with our 46 mostly wild acres immediately. Upon arrival I met the women who owned the place, pitched my tent, established how much work I’d be expected to do to earn my keep, and met Rachael, another young woman who was passing through.
At dinner on my first night Rachael suggested that I read a book she found on the communal bookshelf: Weeding at Dawn: A Lesbian Country Life, by Hawk Madrone. Later that evening I wiggled into my sleeping bag and gobbled up the words all at once, finishing the book in one sitting and swiftly developing a crush on the author, who is now in her seventies and lives about an hour away. I learned at breakfast the next morning that I would be meeting her the following weekend, at an open house we were hosting. We’d skill-share, potluck, and socialize. I couldn’t wait.
This is my favorite part: getting to know other human beings. Specifically, queers. There is something so damn beautiful about the queer community, about the individuals who belong to it, about our shared history and unique experiences and the honesty and openness that can be channelled when queers gather and talk to each other, exist together, escape the assumptions of heteronormative living. It is extra beautiful when we bridge the generation gap, mingle with our elders and our youth, appreciate that we owe so many of the comforts of our own queer lives to the powerful folks who came before us—but also that the young have much to teach, too.
Last September a young woman from Ohio came to volunteer on our land and confided in me that it was the first place she had witnessed other women being so powerful, so in charge, so supportive of each other. “I didn’t know this kind of life existed,” she said. “Now that I know, I want to live it.” She cried when she left.
I am constantly begging my friends to come visit me on the land, not because I am lonely or because we don’t already have a constant stream of visitors, but because I want all the queers I have ever known to understand how powerful we are, how self-sufficient we can be. I want everyone I have ever loved to experience this feeling, and I mean so many things when I say that. I mean that I want them to hold a chainsaw and chop wood and then use that wood to make a fire that will keep us warm in the winter, but I also mean I want them to exist in a space that is just a little bit out of the patriarchy’s grasp. I want Diva Cups and skipping showers to be the norm but tampons and deodorant not to be scorned if that’s what you want to use; I want communal cooking and intergenerational learning and late-night slumber parties and impromptu sing-a-longs and love, so much love.
In a world that is steeped in digital media, it feels like a radical act to carve out a physical space and call it ours. The internet has provided a safe space for millions of young queers who may have no where else to turn in their small towns or their conservative families or their own total confusion, it’s true, but I want those people to know there are places where we can meet face to face, get our hands dirty together, fight and fuck and listen and forgive and live, without any screens to separate us. I want to talk about queer spaces that are not New York, San Francisco, London, and Berlin. I want to advocate for community building that does not only take place in bars.
I want to acknowledge how important queer land is, how grateful we should all feel for it, and how capable we all are of creating it and keeping this legacy alive. I want to help lead a queer revolution in the woods because living here has made me see that we can.
So there’s a post in the asexuality tag that you can go find if you want that’s made me a little upset. The thing is, it’s not really about what the post is saying (which is why I’m not responding directly to the author), but rather how the author frames hir argument. Namely: shut up you ignorant people, you don’t know anything about the Academic Framework, so therefore you may not comment.
This is sort of a variation on a theme I’ve heard quite a few times (another reason this isn’t directed solely at the author of today’s post), and between it and “stop appropriating things from ‘real’ queer people,” it’s come to give me an increasingly large amount of anxiety. Now, I am aware that “you just don’t understand or else you’d agree with me” is a near-universal reaction of people when faced with a differing opinion, but the deeper implication of who is allowed to participate in discussions and who is not is troubling to me.
I really do feel like if you’re a member of a marginalized group, a graduate degree in a social science should not be a prerequisite for participation in the conversation about that group. If someone’s understanding of a concept is flawed, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate what they’re saying, and I really do take exception to the derision I’ve seen toward people just trying their best to articulate their lives, however clumsily.
Particularly when it comes to the asexual community, we’re just supposed to wait until researchers get around studying us and then accept their conclusions (or the conclusions we can draw from their abstracts) as truth because they did the research and understand the model? How long are we required to wait quietly for this surge of interest? What recourse do we have if we perceive the conclusions to be flawed? Besides going to graduate school ourselves, of course.
I get it, I really do. I am not above having said, “You are aware that science doesn’t work that way, right?” many a time before. It’s frustrating to see people Doing It Wrong, and I am not demanding that one must educate before one impugns (although I personally would appreciate it). But I feel that one must also be aware that there is Academic Discourse and there is Popular Discourse, and popular discourse is what’s really relevant to most people in addition to being the only kind they can really engage with. Particularly for groups whose experiences are not widely represented, internal popular discourse is the only thing they have to attempt to define themselves and make connections. People are going to come to the discussion with different levels of sophistication to their ideas, but if it’s their discourse for them, I don’t see how anyone can tell them to gtfo with a clear conscience.
And for the other group of people who say things like this because they believe asexuality isn’t actually a real sexual orientation, well, you just don’t understand, because if you did you’d agree with me :P
Prime example of racists co-opting progressive language to pass their bigotry off as something else
liberalism and white feminism have always led down this path.
We don’t have riots in Houston, but the moment someone comes for our Slabs…
The feminist language is pretense. What these people really care about is property values.
The same type of people move into African American neighborhoods and try to use noise ordinances against the loud church services on Sunday mornings. They move into white working class suburbs and try to get laws passed to stop the shade tree mechanics from having more than two vehicles parked in their front yards. They move to the country and bring nuisance lawsuits against farmers over the noises and smells and dust that are an inescapable part of farming.
All with the goal of making the area more attractive to the upper middle class who will pay more so that they, the new arrivals, will get more for their place when they go to sell.
This is the kind of behavior you get when market forces trump community.
While First Saturdays are free, we’re trying something new and requiring advance registration so we can help manage crowds.
We’ve waited two years for the return of #FirstSaturdaysBkM and we’re so excited to see those of you who registered for performances by Isa Reyes, Bathe, and The Lay Out, hands-on art making, pop-up talks, a special town hall with central Brooklyn’s newest City Council members, and more!
If you didn’t manage to register for April’s event, please look out for upcoming announcements to register for events this summer!
Admission is subject to capacity at the time of registered visitors’ arrival and is first come, first served. If you’re not feeling well on the day of the event, please stay home.
Join us on April 2 from 5-10 pm for the return of one of our borough’s most beloved events celebrating culture, community and the excellence of Brooklyn. We’re excited to share a dynamic lineup honoring the continued fight for Black liberation with special guests, including:
Isa Reyes
Bathe
The Layout
Mel Chin
Anastacia-Renée Tolbert
Quincy Scott Jones
Cynthia Manick
Along with this incredible line-up, you can also see #WarholRevelation for 40% off during the span of the event!
First Saturdays are free, but advance registration is required. Admission is subject to capacity at the time of registered visitors’ arrival and is first come, first served. RSVP today at bit.ly/3qcIPy6
Started in 2020 by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer after having COVID-19 himself, this ongoing exhibition visualizes and memorializes the extraordinary loss caused by COVID-19.
During a time when distance and stillness halted public rituals of mourning, “A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial” continues to provide a virtual and physical space to mourn loved ones lost to the pandemic.
In this participatory artwork, a modified robotic plotter deposits grains of hourglass sand onto a black surface to recreate the images of those lost due to COVID-19. After each portrait is completed, the surface tilts and the same sand is recycled into the next portrait, echoing the collective and ongoing nature of the pandemic.
