In this freestyle over Gucci Mane’s “I Get the Bag,” Young M.A boasts her deep pockets and sexual power. The Brooklyn rapper delivers bold lines with internal rhymes that lock into place, and every repeat listen reveals more punchlines and hidden gems. She touches on her experiences with loss, depression, fake friends, and rappers who “ain’t really saying shit.” With “God’s Gift” tattooed on her neck, she’s cocky but grateful for her voice.
M.A doesn’t soften her bluntness for anyone’s comfort. Talking about her more explicit lyrics, she told Genius: “All the dykes out there know exactly what I’m talking about. It ain’t for a guy to understand. If you don’t understand, you don’t gotta understand it.“
Welcome to part three of my mini-series on Helen Keller. I took a Disability in Literature class in Spring 2022 that focused heavily on her legacy. In this class I’ve learned that the idea we have of who Helen Keller was is not entirely accurate. A lot of people either see her only as the seven year old at the water pump, a scene made famous by the film The Miracle Worker. Or, they see her as this elderly woman who could do no wrong and only wanted to help others, that is the image the American Foundation for the Blind and other similar charities and organizations popularized.
In this post I’m going to be discussing some of the controversies surrounding Keller–because there are a lot. Some of these are well known and publicized, and others have been brushed under the rug.
It is important to discuss the controversies around Helen Keller, particularly how internalized ableism can impact a person and disabled communities. I wanted to share this video by Deaf and disabled creator, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, in which she discusses the topic of internalized audism and eugenics from a Deaf perspective. I tried searching for things that discussed her privilege more in depth and found this that includes the following:
“Helen Keller was a socialist who believed she was able to overcome many of the difficulties in her life because of her class privilege – a privilege not shared by most of her blind or deaf contemporaries. “I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment,” she said. ” I have learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone.”
I wonder if the other part includes people like Anne Sullivan, part of the community who helped her, which was, in the end, afforded to her through class and white privilege because her family was able to afford to find and pay Sullivan in the first place.
oh this comic shows up in a really cool anthology i bought a few years back (and was just rereading in fact) called No Straight Lines. it covers the last 40 years of LGBT comics and the various phases, influences and unsung heroes of the zine scene and more. (such as a chapter that focuses heavily on what art and stories resulted from the AIDS crisis, the clash of the gay sexual revolution and the rise of homosexual monogamy, and more.) highly recommended if you’re interested in LGBT history and comics!
oh this comic shows up in a really cool anthology i bought a few years back (and was just rereading in fact) called No Straight Lines. it covers the last 40 years of LGBT comics and the various phases, influences and unsung heroes of the zine scene and more. (such as a chapter that focuses heavily on what art and stories resulted from the AIDS crisis, the clash of the gay sexual revolution and the rise of homosexual monogamy, and more.) highly recommended if you’re interested in LGBT history and comics!
idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+
mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.
lately i’ve been thinking about what 13 year old me would think if they saw me today
i’m a dyke who just quit their shitty job a month ago because my boss was scheming against me for no reason, despite being jobless i spent like 50 bucks on some kpop albums the other day; i still live with my homophobic parents, and i have to drive my long distance girlfriend to the airport tomorrow. like. idk. i have a mullet and i ate an edible a couple days ago and beat my tetris high score. what is fucking happening and how did i get here
…the d slur discourse is taking an interesting turn.
lovecraftian discourse monsters under ice etc etc but do people just keep making new flags with different shades of pink whenever the previous maker turns out to be #problematic because that idea is so funny
Apparently this Pride month is all about flag discourse because that’s all Ive seen on Twitter (but what did I expect from that nightmare of a website?). The creator of the “old” flag, a literal lesbian, says the word dyke and now it’s suddenly a punishable crime. She also recently took down her online shop (which she heavily relied on to make money since she’s struggling) because lots of people have been giving her shit.
update: okay I was wrong. She didn’t take down her shop apparently. Just the merch that had “dyke” on it. Still, this is plain dumb.
…the d slur discourse is taking an interesting turn.
lovecraftian discourse monsters under ice etc etc but do people just keep making new flags with different shades of pink whenever the previous maker turns out to be #problematic because that idea is so funny
Apparently this Pride month is all about flag discourse because that’s all Ive seen on Twitter (but what did I expect from that nightmare of a website?). The creator of the “old” flag, a literal lesbian, says the word dyke and now it’s suddenly a punishable crime. She also recently took down her online shop (which she heavily relied on to make money since she’s struggling) because lots of people have been giving her shit.
Updates: she only took down the merch with the slur on it.
I miss when more people actually used reclamation of slurs as a radical act and in their politics and it wasn’t all about who can or can’t call themselves a dyke or how everyone should use queer instead of lgbt including cishets because it’s more progressive. there’s something about seeing dyke and fag and queer in text from the 70s and 80s that just feels so different and it has bite.
queer especially has just. such a different feeling today. it doesn’t feel radical to reclaim it anymore when that’s what I’m expected to use anyway. meanwhile if I call myself a dyke or a fag I will get a million people on my ass about how it’s not mine to reclaim.
I will trust a thousand out-of-touch left-leaning southerners who don’t know every piece of correct terminology before I trust one weird “feminist/LGBTQ+ ally” dude who couches his bigotry in pseudo-progressive language
60-year-old former hippie I met in Arkansas: I don’t really know much about the whole deal, but I get it. I mean, you like ladies, and I like ladies, and some people like dudes. People should just leave fags and dykes alone, it’s common sense.
Me:Hell yeah brother
Closet-reactionary liberal college student I met last year: Of course I love and respect the queer and trans community! However, one can argue that the early gay community’s… casual attitude toward sex was a disastrous political and social mist–
ik it happens every pride month without fail but y’all are dumb as fuck
lesbians saying dyke is not evil. y’all r not about cancel a bitch for saying dyke while being a wlw. we don’t got time for this shit fr, it is not antiblack for gay women to say dyke, have y’all lost ur minds? GO OUTSIDE
christ i’m actually seeing people insist that dyke is not a slur now as if that’s a necessary justification for wlw to be able to say it? why are people so fucking terrified of what reclamation actually means? the point isn’t to make a weapon used against you so meaningless that target feels safe to sell it back to you on a shirt, it is transgressive and shocking to say “so what if i am that? i am the words that have been the last thing people have fucking heard before being bashed”. don’t insert yourself into a words history and then deny its weaponization, WIELD IT against your oppressors!!
people who get super fucking mad about queer or dyke being acknowledged as slurs because god forbid their identity be acknowledged as transgressive or shocking to cishet sensibilities, or their history be connected to those who have had those words spat with greater venom, are seeking assimilation. if you want the words you describe yourself with to be so enfolded into capitalism that cops feel safe calling themselves queer then what are you actually fighting for?
ik it happens every pride month without fail but y’all are dumb as fuck
lesbians saying dyke is not evil. y’all r not about cancel a bitch for saying dyke while being a wlw. we don’t got time for this shit fr, it is not antiblack for gay women to say dyke, have y’all lost ur minds? GO OUTSIDE
grabbing you by the shoulders shaking you violently does it matter does slur discourse fucking matter. who cares if a gay guy says dyke who gives a shit if a lesbian says faggot why is this the hill youre dying on
slur discourse has rotted everyones brains its not a matter of “being x means you can say y” its a matter of respect. why are you saying this word? what does it mean to you? in what contexts are you saying it? are you using it to hurt people? these are the things we should be asking when faced with the reclamation of a hurtful word, not “do you have enough stamps on your Gay Sex card to earn a life-time guarantee FagPass”
