Jo > Recent Status Updates

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?'" Aldo Leopold

"A drag queen - a good drag queen - is not there to mock women, but to transcend the limitations of masculinity."

"The gay roots of pop culture is an embattled terrain of making the people happy and being readily dismissed as insipid."

"Now drag is everyone's escapism - perhaps more like it used to be. Camp is the stuff of wedding reception. Doing the YMCA is a first-world coping mechanism. Over-identifying with the diva vocals of spurned women is no longer the sole prerogative of gay men."

"I texted him a link to a 1987 essay by Leo Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' He texted back: Oooh. Don't tell me how it ends." 🤣

On 'queer community': "We hear the word 'community' all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe 'community', as Famous says, excludes inherently. At the word 'community', both of us are prone to hear 'clique'."

Re a Wolfgang Tillmans video installation: "The video made me consider the nightclub as a site of loss - losing inhibitions, your friends, your possessions, yourself. It's a place to find something through abandonment."

"Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag."

On the 'gay shame' movement: "It seemed though that the group's intent was generally less about introspection & more about being enlightened queers rebuking benighted gays - in which case, shame was not a reclaimed affect, but a verb: a wagging finger."

"Sometimes, Joan would watch Vanessa do a reverse three-point turn, her palm flat as it moved against the wheel. It never failed to light something up in Joan."

*screeches in gay*

"In 2004, the Anglo residents of New Masset & Port Clements threw in their lot with th Haida, signing an according that says, essentially, that they trust th stewardship of th local Haida more than that of Weyerhaeuser [the logging conglomerate] & th provincial government. One of the signatories is Dale Lore, the current mayor of Port Clements; a logging road builder by trade..."

"It seems that in order to succeed - or even function - in this world, a certain tolerance for moral and cognitive dissonance is necessary."

"Lots of ppl take inspiration from trees & forests, & we often like to think of them as sanctuaries of peace & tranquility. But this is deceptive; forests are, in fact, ruthlessly competitive places, where trees - and even branches on th same trunk - are engaged in life-and-death struggles for optimal position. Th winner in this slow-motion race for speed & light is determined by th tree or branches tht photosynthesi

"It has always seemed strange to me,' said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness & generosity, openess, honesty, understanding & feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism & self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

"...but, always, I feel the lurking horror of an ending...is this the bind of great good fortune, I wondered? Does joy come parcelled up with the knowledge of the end of joy?"

Why do we have a "man of the people", but no female equivalent, asks the protagonist? "People, I suspect, are largely suspicious of a talkative, gregarious woman; they favour the demure and the moderate. Even the very beautiful become questionable if they're considered garrulous or especially extroverted."

"When our actions begin to integrate with our beliefs, when we are doing some of the work that we know needs to be done, we have less need for the various doubles our culture offers up disguised as a good life."

"This is th pwer of collective organizng: it expands th sense of th possible by expandng th possible 'we'. It persuades participants tht, contrary2what they hav been told, their pain is not th result of a failure of character or insufficient hard wrk. Rather, it is th consequence of economic&social systems precisely designed2produce cruel outcomes, systems tht can b changed only if ppl drop th shame&unite2 shard goal

Citing Keeanga-Yamahtta: "Struggle helps us see each other. It helps us break from our individualism & th particularities of our identities." When individuals organize toward a goal, they discover not only tht they share interests with ppl who might look (& vote) very differently from them but also tht a new sense of power flows from this alliance."

"...time2loosen th grip on various forms of proprietary pain & selfhood & reach toward many different forms of possible connection & kin, toward anyone who shares a desire to confront th forces of annihilation & extermination & their mindsets of purity & perfection... It will not be enough to protect 'our' ppl; we will need2 have th stamina of true solidarity, which defines 'our ppl' as 'all ppl'."

Citing Arielle Angel, EiC of Jewish Currents: "But what is clear is this: We are going to need each other. This means staying attuned to the possibility of a collective power, instead of attached to a proprietary pain."

"...as individuals & groups: we want separation & distinctness, & we want unity & community. Th tension is fruitful & does not need to be resolved. Th problem lies in the fact tht our culture is so biased toward one tendency over th other. It's th scramble4separateness tht is richly rewarded & encouraged in our zero-sum economy, while th urge to act in solidarity & mutual aid with others is discounted & disappeared"

"But th truth is tht nothing of much consequence in th face of rigged systems can b accomplished on our own. Change requires collaboration & coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition. Mariame Kaba, a longtime prison abolitionist [says]...'Everything worthwhile is done with other people'."

"Th shift2confronting& reimagining structures requires something else: a recognition tht this work is not something we can do on our own, as individuals, with a charity donation or an equity & diversity training, or a performance of virtue on soc media...we live in a culture tht tells us to fix massive crises on our own, through self-improvement."

"We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people," says the civil rights scholarship john a. powell. That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures."

"We must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world...that is not predicated on sacrificial people and sacrificial ecologies and sacrificial continents. More than imagine it, we must begin, at once, to build it."

"...'the ppl who are th exploiters of this planet are ppl who put themselves first'...th climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of heat-trapping gases in th atmosphere; it can also be understood as a surplus of self."

"...there is an intimate relationship between our overinflated selves & our under-cared for planet...humans most urgently need to learn a simple lesson: 'We're not just the center of the universe. This world wasn't made just for us'... Iris Murdoch's description of observing something beautiful-whether a bird or a painting-as 'an occasion for 'unselfing'."