Forging Home

because 'home' needs to be imagined, dreamed, created, built. because it's never easy, but always necessary.

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La Bordeña: I'm Done

nueva-bordena:

This seems more relevant now that this whole “cotton ceiling” thing has gone around.

I’m done identifying as “Trans*”. I’m done trying to force my way into these movements and groups that are so overwhlemingly white. I’ve already spent three years trying to, I don’t plan to spend the next ten or…

4 notes

queerdesi:

Today is 82nd anniversary of the day when freedom fighters — Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev — were hanged to death.

“By crushing individuals, they cannot kill ideas”.

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Even though India is well-known in the west as the “land of the Kama Sutra” and is thus often romanticized as a sexually exploratory culture, Sanskrit doesn’t have specific words like “lesbian” that would facilitate a translation. In ancient India, outside of heterosexual manhood/womanhood was said to belong to a “third gender” full of eunuchs etc., who often had some sort of special or magic powers. For that reason, the translation has to use a lot of words that usually mean “eunuch,” e.g. “sarvathatipandah” in panel 5 means something like “a super eunuch in every way.” The word I chose for “lesbian” was “svairini,” which usually means “self-willed (i.e. unchaste) woman” but, according to some, can be stretched to refer to sexual orientation.

(The Kama Sutra itself is sexually conservative actually, in that it focuses on regular genitals-to-genitals monogamous sex; the text was written by a religious scholar, as if the fact that Sanskrit was used didn’t heavily imply that already. Oral sex is something reserved for eunuchs, as this quaint Victorian translation shows.)

Arun, who translated a Dinosaur Comic into Sanskrit and provided commentary. (from here)

The FAQ Arun refers to also provides the other word “nastriya”, which from other pages in his source seems to be closer to a genderqueer or even intersex variation on a woman. However, the page itself does seem to be slightly conflating gender and sexual orientation. Here’s what it says about the two (plus some others):

Nastriya:  The term nastriya refers to women who are “not fully female.”  It often describes those who are barren and infertile but can also refer to masculine-type lesbians and female-to-male transgenders.  Four basic types of nastriya are mentioned in Vedic texts: 1) women who do not menstruate; 2) women without a vulva; 3) women with both male and female anatomy, and 4) women behaving as men.

Svairini:  The word svairini is the most common term used for homosexual women in the Kama Shastra but can refer to any type of “independent woman” whatsoever (not only lesbians).  The Narada-smriti (12.49-52) mentions four types: 1) the wife who leaves her husband; 2) the widow who leaves her family; 3) the foreigner or slave, and 4) a woman who has been raped.    

There seems to be some other disturbing implications here, which could be either from the translators’ bias or the original source (I’m not sure):

  • The gender/sexual orientation conflation I mentioned earlier
  • Infertility making you less of a woman (which even the fundamentalist Christian side hasn’t really fully talked about)
  • The lack of distance between gender and societal roles and expectations of genders (though hopefully this can give some context of the sort of culture many of us were raised in, which leads to seemingly puzzling questions like “am I really genderqueer?”
  • Women’s worth being hinged on their marriage or family (I’m not sure if the Kama Shastra ever portrays svairini as positive or neutral)
  • Equating “foreign” with slavery
  • Making women survivors of rape a separate class (though again, it depends on how svairini were generally treated or considered as in the Kama Shastra)

This is likely worth entire research degrees, but already from a couple of words (and dinosaurs, of all things) we find some very interesting threads of inquiry on what it meant to be a woman, especially one “outside the norm” for whatever reason, in the days of the Kamas and Sanskrit.

At the very least, as Arun said, it should be a huge hint to the so-called “Tantric practitioners” who make a big hue and cry about the Kama Sutra as a holy book of sex and India being a sexual paradise and whatever else: it’s actually rather conservative, and the holy men who dealt with this back in the day (or now) would probably find your approach too decadent and not appropriate culturally.

(via creatrixtiara)

WOAHH…

(via azaadiart)

(via azaadiart)

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“We need movements that acknowledge that our feelings are not distractions from the struggle, but that they are damn well why we start or stop struggling in the first place. We need movements that do creative organizing and come up with innovative, fun strategies on how to keep immigrants, trans folks, disabled folks, and anybody that does not feel safe to take part in Big Demo culture to feel safer.”

azaadiart:

“What do I believe now? Cooking Sri Lankan food, hanging out with my girls, painting my toenails, praying, fucking, loving the size of my ass and my girlfriend are all forms of resistance. The only activism I am interested in is the type that sees all the different ways we resist as legitimate because they change ourselves and the world. We also need to find some ways to create big, macro organizing projects that are antiburnout and sustainable over the long haul. We need ways of organizing that allow us to name our despair. We need movements that acknowledge our feelings of grief and mourning when our homelands, or the homelands of people who are family, get bombed. We need movements that acknowledge that our feelings are not distractions from the struggle, but that they are damn well why we start or stop struggling in the first place. We need movements that do creative organizing and come up with innovative, fun strategies on how to keep immigrants, trans folks, disabled folks, and anybody that does not feel safe to take part in Big Demo culture to feel safer. We need to have big demos that are fierce and also look at all the million and one other organizing strategies there are. To have emotion and action wedded as part of one movement. To rest when we need to, and to pick up a rock when we need to, and to have the support team ready. To claim a million different ways to fight.”

—

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Time to Hole Up And a Time to Kick Ass” in We Don’t Need Another Wave (via kru-pa)

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queerdesi: dreamactivist: Thanks for this Alissa. You know why this is awesome? No one friggin’ owns “DreamActivist” let alone the “Dream Act movement.” I’ve seen t-shirts, posters, flyers, buttons made for the cause with the website URL on it. It ain’t trademarked. No one profits from it. And everyone who supports it, fuels it. That’s how you know it’s a real movement. 

queerdesi:

dreamactivist:

Thanks for this Alissa.

You know why this is awesome? No one friggin’ owns “DreamActivist” let alone the “Dream Act movement.” I’ve seen t-shirts, posters, flyers, buttons made for the cause with the website URL on it. It ain’t trademarked. No one profits from it. And everyone who supports it, fuels it. That’s how you know it’s a real movement.