Culture

Sweet Blossoms out the Crater: A Review of Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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With all the celebrations of gay same-ness after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to legalize gay marriage, I am grateful for Leah Laskhmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s filthy gorgeous poems, which remind us how queer desires still have the power to fuck shit up. The poems in her collection Bodymap demonstrate how queer desires–for each other, for ourselves, for something different – can provide a roadmap for moving toward freedom. Reading so many poems about raw, dirty, queer crip sex made me think about Yasmin Nair’s recent argument that radical sex does not always translate into radical politics. While I agree that we can’t assume that any particular kind of sex is necessarily revolutionary (don’t we all know kinky people with regressive politics?), the poems in Bodymap serve as an argument that queer desire can–and should – fuel us to challenge the social order and reclaim the full humanity of those whom capitalism discards – including queers, people of color, working class folks, poor people, immigrants, undocumented people, and disabled folks. What shines through every single poem is how hard Piepzna-Samarasinha has had to fight to love her queer, femme, disabled, brown working class self in a world that doesn’t always love her back.

Culture

The Confederate Flag: Heritage or Hate

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The Charleston Massacre unleashed a torrent of questions about the true nature of “The Lost Cause.” Across the country we are coming to acknowledge the “Stars and Bars” as not only a symbol of the slavocracy, but also one of continuing opposition to social progress.

Politics & Society

Jewish & Palestinian Women Are Fasting in Front of Netanyahu's Home for 50 Days

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Over 300 Jewish and Palestinian women will be fasting together over the next six weeks in a tent outside Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem. Those fasting are part of Women Wage Peace, which formed during the Gaza war last summer as a collective voice standing against Israel’s brutal assault. Their fast is taking place from July 7 to August 26, marking the 50-day span of last year’s violent conflict, in which over 2,251 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed.

Christianity

The Emerging Truth about Junipero Serra and the California Missions

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In this book Father Junipero Serra, called by some the “Father of California,” is exposed in damning detail as the father of a system, the mission system, that systematically destroyed the culture of the indigenous peoples of California, who had lived at peace with the earth and more or less at peace with themselves over millennia until the Spanish arrived.There are those who say, “Don’t judge an eighteenth-century person by twenty-first century standards.” Well, when that person is being proposed by the pope himself as a saint and therefore a model for twenty-first century people to emulate, why wouldn’t we have the right and indeed responsibility to judge?

Inter-Culturalism

KKK Posing as Victim of “Cultural Genocide”

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Let’s be clear here: the Confederate battle flag no more represents white Southern culture anymore than the swastika flag represents Gentile German culture. What these flags do have in common, though, is that they both symbolize Christian white supremacy, terrorism, treason, separation, exclusion, enslavement, murder, and in the United States, yes, cross burnings.

Culture

Marriage Equality

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So it occurred to me that in saying that gay people, two individuals of the same sex, wanted to marry, the LGBT movement was striking at the very heart of what marriage has really been all about for millennia: dominance and control. “The Master of the House”, as it were. And mostly still is.

Culture

Marriage Equality but One Paving Stone on Path Toward Social Justice

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Looking back over the years, as LGBT visibility has increased, as our place within the culture has become somewhat more assured, much certainly has been gained, but also, something very precious has diminished. That early excitement, that desire — though by no means the ability — to fully restructure the culture, as distinguished from our mere reform, seems now to lay dormant in some sectors of our communities.