Glory to the Resistance

all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?

yes that is indeed why she's on the list of famous women who like women

why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed "um actually most of these people are bi or pan" did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I'm going to kill you.

#op probably has this post muted but the icon is too real.

the icon is because of this post

POV: you make a good post and then encounter tumblr reading comprehension

this is so true Taylor writes from the ultimate closet (being straight) and that's so brave of her

Tags pass peer review. "Queering" has gone from "I will find stories to make my own in a world that refuses a place for me" to "I refuse to interrogate the social conditioning that's taught me to devalue others like me and will instead keep projecting onto cis-hetero white media that excludes me and hide my denial in tinhattery".

It's ridiculous to refuse to even acknowledge that the white capitalist construction of cis/allo/heteronormativity is something we've all been conditioned into, and that nothing other than stepping outside our comfort zones will ever help us get free. That doesn't mean anybody should be ashamed of liking what they do, or needs to justify liking Taylor's music. If something resonates with you, then that's important to you, and it's fine. But I think these people believe this kind of critique means they're a "Bad Queer" for liking the "wrong things". A natural result of seeing identity as something you need to prove and perform for others the way radfems/Christians/neoliberals do. No one is so obsessed with other people's identities as those who build their own cages in gold and call it liberation.

I made a rather reactionary post about white trans activists co-opting Black women's slogans this morning. After reading some rebuttal points by UK's Black activists since then, I've learned a lot better about claiming ownership over political movements. Also my saying "only the queer community has identity politics" is...objectively a ridiculous stance lol. I'm always about not letting conversations be driven purely by reactivity to radfems and the right-wing, but sometimes I do fall in soup myself.

There's so many interesting discourses I want to share, but because they involve Black intra community politics, I'm worried that it might harm their dialogues by taking them outside Black spaces. Otoh, the neoliberal and USAmerican exceptionalist influence on post Civil-Rights Black activism is problem that gets in the way of global coalition-building, and it's particularly a trap for non-Black people who want to be good allies.

I highly recommend you follow Chardine Taylor Stone on Twitter. She's someone who follows the solidarity and socialist coalition-building models of older Black activists, pushing back against neoliberal identity politics and gate-keeping.

Leaving you with this:

I don't know is anyone "owns" a movement but tbh if people on Twitter spent half the time talking about black women whove been murdered rather than repeating a phrase MEANT TO HIGHLIGHT THAT SILENCE maybe black women wouldn't feel like they have to claim ownership. Cooperation and alligence go both ways. But I notice it's always black women who are expected to give selflessly 🤔

I understand the point about erasure and forever being embattled for space on social media. QPoC are so silenced and invisibilized in the queer community, and Black ones doubly so. It's why I also reacted angrily to the idea of what came to media attention as a slogan for Black women killed by state violence being used for a white trans girl killed by her peers.

But when I settled down to hear what Chardine had to say, it seemed that it's not so clear where any of these slogans first came from, and that these justified ill-feelings are being mined to drive division and the isolationism of Black diasporas. I've personally been led badly astray by being protective over my people's own racial and colonial trauma. It makes it really easy to push ahistorical, revisionist narratives about liberation, encourage more lateral oppression, and generally become myopic to the struggles similar to our own. "Black" is itself a contested identity in the UK, after all, because the racial hierarchies there are constructed differently, just like in Australia. Which gives even more credence to Chardine's argument about neoliberal identity politics exerting undue influence on current discourses.

At the end of the day, as Chardine and others kept pointing out, we're quarrelling about hashtags over the body of a murdered child. What are the optics here? Who benefits? Who can hear the names of any of the dead over these petty arguments? Ultimately, it's Black trans lives that end up belonging nowhere.

I wanna be clear I am not black so I have no stake in this. I see over and over the reality that black people create something, white people co-opt it, and then never go back to give that thing created by black people for their liberation. This is done in music, this is done in art, this is done in Activism. The fact you boil this down to space on social media means you got your colorblind glasses on.

Your argument against this being that we can all share these phrases. But this is LITERALLY why All Lives Matter is bad. Black women created a tag to discuss their issues and it's invaded by white people so they can't find a place to speak.

The Cree tag which should be discussing Cree people in Canada is invaded by some Critical Role character. The poly tag which Ig was previously used for Polynesian people was invaded by polyamorous people. These things are not intentional but if we want to actually deal with white supremacy white people have to make some sacrifices. If giving up a hashtag is much to give up (esp when other options have been discussed) we are not in the same movement.

I don't get your point that I'm boiling this down to social media? We're literally talking about a Twitter hashtag.

I grant you that the appropriation of Black art and culture is a problem. Again, one of the reason I initially agreed with the backlash against using the slogan. But this isn't art or culture. It's political movement. "Black power" used to refer to the entire global coalition of colonized peoples against white supremacy and state violence, and only broke down into IDPOL during the '80s. That doesn't invalidate that "Black" in the USAmerican context now refers exclusively to Pan-African community, but it does highlight how political identities and the needs of coalition-building and liberation are very different from issues of culture and racial heritage.

But, you're comparing the life of a trans girl lost to the burgeoning far-right power in the UK and deadnamed in the press and her own death certificate...to All Lives Matter? You're comparing a chant taken up by the UK trans community at her vigil...to the US right-wing attempt to counter the Black movement against state brutality?

Transness is not privileged over Blackness. That is not how intersectionality works. Yes, Brianna was white. But she was killed for being trans. No, it's not the same as Black women being killed by cops. But it's the same fascist power matrix, the same fear of the Other and the need to subjugate and exterminate it. Neither are given dignity and personhood in death, their names struck from the record and buried. If you're standing over the corpse of a murdered child and asking what colour her skin was, are you not doing white supremacists' work for them?

As for the rest – if you're going to devote endless amounts of your energy to policing English words and abbreviations and social media hashtags, that's your own lookout. But please read Chardine's threads and assess what she has to say for yourself. If neither of us are Black, then maybe neither of us have a place in this conversation except to amplify the Black people having it. But one thing has always reinforced itself to me – true justice and solidarity come from a place of compassion. Even when we have all the justification in the world to be angry and protective of our own injustices.