Thinking Blogger Award!

April 12, 2007 at 10:51 pm (blog, blogosphere, theory, writing)

Wow, Brownfemipower of the excellent Women of color blog tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award! What an honour!

Here are the rules of the meme:

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

These are my picks. These are blogs that have pushed my mental boundaries in one way or another that really stuck in my mind. Since I’m new to the blogosphere and the meme, I’m gonna mix up recent and older posts, because there sure is some solid gold buried in archives.

1. Angry Brown Butch: I found Jack’s blog when it was linked by someone in an anti-racist LiveJournal community. The issue was gentrification. This post transformed my ideas about what’s going on in the Redfern community. Although I’d been told that gentrification has already happened in Sydney, I knew from a research project I did for an undergrad class that displacement and neoliberalism are affecting people of colour on the very doorstep of our university. Linking capitalism to indigenous dispossession (and subsequent indigenous housing issues) through Jack’s words on gentrification and race blew my mind. While the communities Jack is talking about aren’t necessarily indigenous, the way Jack talks about race, space, and class just really hit the right mental nodes.

2. Diaries of an eccentric nerd athaba hijibiji: Zooey’s posts on postcolonialism and radical women of colour feminism do a lot for me. They make me think, they make me feel implicated/included in the struggles of people of colour around the world, but at the same time they challenge me about the privilege I have in relation to those struggles. Zooey strikes a balance between reflection and responsibility; theory and practice. I’m especially grateful for her post Women of Color Feminisms, Chela Sandoval etc. which encompasses so many excellent thoughts.

3. Women of Color blog: BFP manages to push my mind in new directions with pretty much every post. The “thinkiest” for me so far has been her post on pornography, which is a wonderful example of her amazing mind! BFP is a crucible of synthesis, because she combines these insights with posts about activism in the arenas of labour, anti-violence, media, anti-racism, peace, queer rights… as well as occasional posts about literature, academia, and theory. How can all this fit inside one woman? This question inspires me to push myself to understand and engage more and in new ways.
I know BFP tagged me with this meme (meaning she got the award before tagging me with it), but I’m so in awe of her blog that I have to name her here.

4. Having Read the Fine Print……: I’ve just recently started reading this blog, but the link in Donna’s blog to BlackAmazon’s post on “Sofia Coppola feminism” really got me thinking about how to deconstruct the feminist category of “woman” (despite the naysayers who herald the death of justice by such a move), and made it abundantly clear why we need to keep doing that.

5. Queer Dewd Formerly Known As (): QD/Bitch|Lab has, in the past, got me thinking really deeply about feminism and about the implications of our own political stances. Posts about sex wars and feminist positioning reignited my interest in feminism, which had very much taken a back seat to my politics until recently.

According to the rules, I’m only allowed to tag five people, but I should share the love with every blog I read. My time is precious and I spend it on these for a reason — your blogs are good, people! I don’t think there’s a blogger who doesn’t make me think. But these have influenced my thinking in particularly noticeable ways, and I wanna acknowledge that. I have no doubt that all of you will get the acknowledgement you deserve from the blogosphere, because you are brilliant.

Goodnight!

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Racist V ad

April 12, 2007 at 9:05 pm (media, race and racism)

I have a bajillion things to blog about, but this is something I can do quickly, in between everything else (non-bloggy) I need to do.

Racist V ad

Has anyone else seen these ads around? They’re for V, apparently to release a new flavour.

APPARENTLY IT’S FUNNY TO MAKE JOKES ABOUT MYTHS THAT LED TO GENOCIDE NOW. FFS!!!!

THERE ARE NO WORDS.

I posted a message to the V message board, but who knows if they’ll even notice it. It’s not like I was a customer, just a passerby put off by the offensive visual pollution.

EDIT: I sent this message to them via the contact form.

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to express outrage over the new poster advertisements I have seen around Sydney.

They are offensively racist. They rely on a disgusting stereotype of people of colour as cannibals, and valorise white peoples’ “exploration” of remote regions. These are stereotypes which have been used to justify genocide and exploitation on a hideous scale. See for example Michael Taussig’s work on the use of this myth by brutal colonial regimes to inflict horrendous violence upon indigenous peoples.

Your rendering of this myth as a humorous anthropomorphism of energy drink cans is a joke at the expense of people against whom genocide was committed in the name of this myth. This both exploits the pain of these people and renders their suffering invisible and ridiculous. It is inhumane.

I would suggest you withdraw the poster.

Who knows if it’ll achieve anything, but at least it’s not addressed to the marketing exercise message board.

3 Comments