Out of the Jar
I go by Dyl for short
and Pickle if we're
close enough.
Boston//Northeastern
Post-college getting everything together for grad school. Sort of.
activism
androgyny
boots and bow-ties
coffee
composting
cuddling
cycling
dancing
design
good food
kittens!
maps
music
plants
reading
reuse
sweaters
tea
trans
The term “McJob” has come to epitomize all that’s wrong with the low-wage service industry jobs that are growing part of the U.S economy. “It beats flipping burgers,” the cliché goes, because no matter what your job might be, it’s assumed to be better than working in a fast-food restaurant.
Today in New York City, though, hundreds of workers at dozens of fast-food chain stores are walking out on strike, demanding better of those jobs. At McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell, and Domino’s Pizza locations, workers have been organizing, and today they launch their campaign. They want a raise, to $15-an-hour from their current near-minimum wage pay, and recognition for their independent union, the Fast Food Workers Committee.
Saavedra Jantuah, who works at a Burger King on 34th St. in Manhattan, explained that the $7.30 she makes per hour after two years on the job doesn’t pay her enough to support her son. “I’m doing it for him, I’m going on strike so I can bring my family together underneath one household,” she said. “A union can help us get to where we can make it in New York.”
Cannot even express how thrilled I am about this story. I’ll be on the picket lines with the workers in a couple of hours, with photos and more stories. Service jobs don’t have to be lousy jobs—respect and a decent wage would do a lot.
(via differentclasswar)
(via fixedwhilefeminist)
(via justojusto)
17 June 2012
End Stop and Frisk: Silent March Against Racial Profiling
(via kalemason)
Intersectionality is not optional. It is not something you can take off and put back on again at will, when you feel like it. An intersectional lens should inform any critical evaluation of a subject, because these connections are key to understanding the web of oppression that weighs down on us all. These interconnections, too, are very weblike in their nature, because when you tweak one string, all the rest vibrate with it. There is no way to separate these things out from each other.
People complain that people keep dragging ‘side issues’ into ‘their movement’ and they don’t understand that these issues are the movement. Because a movement that commits oppression in the name of liberation is not a good movement, to put it bluntly. We are more vocal about these issues because we have learned the cost of shutting up, because we constantly have to remind people, because the minute we stop, everything returns to the way it was, the status quo is reestablished, and the real structural and institutional problems that create inequality go, once again, uninterrogated.
This is all connected. To misquote Patrick Henry for a moment, give me intersectionality, or give me death. This is not hyperbole: The current system, as it stands, is killing me. It is killing my people. It is killing the people I work in solidarity with. It is killing you. If you do not give me intersectionality, if you will not commit to being intersectional in your deeds, your thinking, your doing, all the time, no matter how you identify your politics, you are killing me.
Take that! #faith in student government #I never thought I’d say that
Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm, the WinShape Foundation, is responsible for donating millions to anti-LGBTQ rights organizations. We do not agree with Northeastern’s choice to support Chick-fil-A as a vendor in the Curry Student Center using our tuition and Student Center Fee dollars when this fast food corporation’s values do not align with Northeastern’s commitment to providing a safe, inclusive campus. We want a local, fresh option and not a multi-national corporation with questionable ethics.
We demand that Northeastern put people before profits! Sign the Change petition today!
Venezuelans stage protest following oil spill.
Hundreds of protesters blocked streets and burned tires in eastern Venezuela on Wednesday to demand clean water after a recent oil spill polluted rivers and streams that supply local storage tanks.
“We have not had water for a week,” said Maria Rodriguez, an angry 26-year-old housewife who joined the protest in the city of Maturin. “We don’t have water to cook and bathe, and we don’t have the money needed to buy bottled water everyday.”
(via tofuboots)
This website is a queer, student activist/organizer wet dream.
Resources, resources galore! Seriously, if you’re doing LGBTQA work on a college campus, you need to check this out and even submit some of your own work to better the cause. There are some topics that could use more information and sample documentation.
“Materials include sample funding proposals, position descriptions, outreach strategies, programming resources for small and large events, introductions to climate assessment, and many other useful tools for starting and/or furthering the work of campus-based resource programs.”
oh my god i met this guy, he’s the shit
my dad really likes him.
Hey y’all, I’m Kneena. This article was written about me protesting the Rick Santorum event in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The article is inaccurate in ways that are offensive and uncomfortable both to me, and others that were involved. I want to be sure that everyone knows I was not acting alone. I was working with twenty other people, some of them from Occupy Charleston and some of them from the Radish Collective (a group of radical queers working to destabilize Charleston). By portraying me as the “lone transgender” the media was able to diminish how scary I really am. I went into the rally with the goal to introduce the narritives of trans visibility and queers being violent into mainstream media. The press was able to erase the twenty people I went their with and portray me as a lonely, deluded freak.The first question the interviewer from buzzfeed asked me was weather I was there alone or not, and I told her I was there with twenty other people, but obviously she had already written her story.
The article stated that I was born biologically male. I wasn’t, I am female assigned at birth, and when I was 18 I learned that I am Queer Bodied ( a term that I am using to mean that I am neither male or female, but not able to get down with the term intersex). I would’ve told this to the interviewer, but she never asked. She only asked if I was trans, and I said yes.
I do not think the labeling of me as a transwoman was an accident. ( I want to take a second here to say that I respect transwomen so much, and that I am not trying to distance myself from this label. I was just not assigned male at birth) In the picture you can sort of see my beard,and I was rocking it so hard while also dressing super femme that day. The tension caused by my visible beard and my femme attire is central to my queer identity, however many people see me and label me as a “Sloppy tranny.” Images of transwomen in media are always seen as dangerous and deceptive (super hot girl who turns out to secretly be a man) or as comical ( a man in a dress!). By viewing me as a sloppy tranny I am often seen as an emasculated man (incapable of defending myself), and an unsuccessful woman. In this way the media was able to use transmisogyn to mock and invalidate my identity as a queer radical renegade which allowed readers to see me as comical figure and not as a dangerous one.
I was trying to push a narrative of queers bashing back and being violent not because I necessarily believe that violence is all around the answer. Reading about police brutality towards the occupy movement today, I was feeling indebted to those who have chosen to peacefully protest in the face of blatant violence. I felt jealous, because being non violent is not an option for me. It’s even less of an option for me now that the Huffington Post and other media outlets have outed me as a transwoman.
Living in Charleston as a visible queer trans body of color means sacrificing safety. I do not leave my house without knives, because I am physically confronted at least once a month, but sometimes twice a week. I am verbally assaulted at least once a day if not more. I have come to know violence intimately, because even if I can (and have!) escape the bigots that chase me with rocks and knives I cannot always escape the fear they surround me with. When people like Rick Santorum suggest that gays don’t have the right to exist, he is asking his followers to stamp them out.
I have become to familiar with what it means to be an object of bigotry. When people look at me I can tell that they are angry that I feel that I have the right to exist. I know that they, like me, are committing themselves to their activism. They are actively trying to drive freaks like me back into a normative existence, and if we refuse they are happy to drag us to our graves.
I yearn to take the violence doled out against me with a smile, to let myself be beaten to smithereens laughing all the way, but I know that when I do not fight back my face is not blown up across the internet. No one is paying attention. I know that when I am not ready to fight back, I will not fight back, and they will know to. And I know that if I do not fight back, that means that I will let myself be dragged into the trunk of a black van full of college bros looking to lynch a tranny, never to be seen again. If I do not fight back then I will just be another dead queer that the south chewed up and didn’t both to spit out. If I do not fight back, I will quickly become one less queer body, and my fellow renegades will be left on the front lines without me.
I told Santorum and the reporters that the longer you silence queers the harder we will bash back, and that is the truth as I see it, because we are fighting a war where we are being killed everyday. Our identities and struggles are invisible to the world that refuses to see anything but the white, gender normative, heterosexual, upper middle class.
The world needs to know and respect that the other exists: that there are queers, people of color, poor people, differently abled folx (cognitively and physically), undocumented folx, transfolx, and so much more who are entitled to the same rights. We are here, we have knives and we are coming for our rights.
I hope this has been helpful to read, it was certainly self indulgent to write. I am so thankful to all the support I have recieved from so many people!! Y’all are incredible, I assumed for sure that you would be too normative and embarressed to get down with my fight. If you want to fight the fight with me and all the other renegades, I want you to do that.
There are so many things that you can do to help:
1) Work to make the spaces around you safe. By safe I mean evaluating the actions and words in the space and consciously phasing out violent or offensive terminology. It also means holding people in the space accountable for their words. This can be hard and no fun. However, nothing makes me feel worse than being in a space I thought I was safe in and hearing any of the following: faggot, retard, rape jokes, tranny.
2) Educate yourself. We are born into bigotry, and we are socialized to be bigots. Disengaging from bigotry and oppression is hard. You have to work for it. It is never an oppressed individuals job to educate you, or let you know about their struggle. It is your job to get down with their struggle.
ok, thank you for reading. If you need any help, or you want to work with me, I am here.
In solidarity,
Kneena
My social movement communication class has me thinking more and more about violent vs nonviolent forms of protest. As activists, I feel that many of us do not like the idea of violence and harming others. However, this easier to do when you have a large group of other protestors in solidarity present with you. At protests camera phones and media keep some checks and balances on violence, but this is not the case on an individual level. When a person is singled out, self-defense is imperative. We should feel empowered to stand up for ourselves and not have to apologize or be criticized, harassed, or attacked for doing so. Kneena, this was extremely powerful to read. Thank you and we’re here fighting back with you.
I’m ready to kick up an advocacy storm. It’s about time that we see a few more queer inclusive policies pushed onto the administration’s agenda. After all, Northeastern prides itself on being home to a diverse community, let’s make it safer for everyone. Still, as a queer, trans* activist on campus, I’ve regularly felt like I’m tied up in red tape, and this is by no means consensual.
Let’s go over some queer resources we already have in place or are coming soon:
- LGBTQA Resource Room through NU Pride (328 Curry)
- Gender-Neutral Housing (Available for Upperclassmen and Freshman)
- Gender-Neutral Bathroom Map
- Preferred Name and Gender Change Form (In progress, link to come soon!)
- “Sexual Orientation” is included in our Equal Opportunity Policy. If you need to report an incident, feel empowered to do so! (“Gender Identity and Expression” will be added to NU’s EOP in 2012 thanks to the passage of the Transgender Equal Rights Bill.)
- OUT @ NU Speakers Bureau
- Queer Caucus (NU School of Law Graduate Student Group)
- Matthew Shepard-Morris S. Kay Scholarship Application
- GLBT Studies Research at NU’s Libraries
- Safe Zone Training for Residential Life (Is this still running?)
Alright, now let’s go over a few things that we need:
- Trans* inclusive healthcare
- Queer Studies courses (Including dedicated professors to teach them!)
- Private changing and showering facilities at the Marino Center and Squashbusters to protect the privacy of trans* individuals
- Full-time staff and an annual budget for the LGBTQA Resource Room
- Forms that allow students to self-identify gender
- A better distribution of student activity funds for social justice and cultural student groups
- LGBTQA Alumni group
- Lavender or Rainbow graduation
- LGBTQA mentoring program for new students
- Meetings between NU public safety and LGBTQA campus organizations to better understand safety concerns
So what is it going to take to see some more change? Visibility and leadership! Stand in solidarity with the queer community and speak out! With that being said, if you need any help starting a queer activism campaign, please feel free to contact me. I’m always down for some good old-fashioned community/student organizing.
- Dylan
I had a not so great experience going to get tested yesterday. The doctor asked me if I slept with “girls or boys.” When I responded telling him that my partners were mainly female-bodied, he assumed I was talking only about women. He did acknowledge that he phrased his question using condescending language and that he should have said “women or men.”
He also seemed a little awkward discussing barrier methods. He told me to choose the right partners and that people interested in having sex on the first date probably weren’t the types of people I should choose. At this point, I really didn’t appreciate hearing this from him. The whole situation made me a bit anxious, but I wish I had fired a few questions back his way to get him thinking.
When the lab tech asked about my insurance they realized there was a discrepancy between my listed, preferred name and my legal name attached to my insurance. They asked me to go back to the Registrar to change it back. I had to explain to her that I was trans* and that I wasn’t going to do such. She wasn’t sure of how to handle the situation because she didn’t want me to get billed as though I didn’t have insurance. And adding to all of this, the lab tech assumed my pronouns. The staff was cordial throughout, but obviously super unaware of trans* friendly sexual health.
I politely challenged a few of these issues directly with the staff, but it’s really not my place to be informing medical professionals of how to be more queer friendly. So it looks like this is the fire underneath my backside encouraging me to get more trans* inclusive and queer aware healthcare at NU. Let’s make it happen.
Hey fellow feminists!
My friend, Hannah, helped to start the Feminist Because tumblr as a class project at the College of Charleston to foster a greater understanding of why people identify as feminists. They are looking for more people to participate to get a better representation of diverse backgrounds from across the country. If you want to join in on the project, check out the submission guidelines and send in a photo today!
