Working links I Found
This bridge called my back [http://uploaded.net/file/7wxrt6bu or https://cdn.anonfiles.com/1357537638883.pdf]
I am your sister [http://bookos.org/book/830463/6ee219]

LITERATURE OF NOTE:

• This Bridge Called My Back (downloadable copy)
• More Than 50 books by QPOC 
• Women’s Studies/Feminist/Womanist Reading List
• I Am Your Sister: Collected & Unpublished Writings of Audrie Lorde (Free PDF)
• Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism / Teaching to Transgress/ We Real Cool: Black Men & Masculinity / Black Looks, Race and Representation / Outlaw Culture / Feminism is For Everybody by Bell Hooks (Downloadable Copies of All of the Above)
• Gloria Anzaldua Reader (2009): AnaLouise Keating (ed) (Free PDF)
• Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Free PDF download)
• Shocking Pink: Feminist Zine (1980-1990) Free PDF downloads of ALL Shocking Pink’s
• CosmoQueer Zine: Free PDF Issue #1

EDUCATION 101:

Trans*

• The Gender Bill of Rights
• Action Steps For Being A Trans Ally
• “Brazen: trans women safer sex guide” by morgan m page (FREE PDF download)
• Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antogonist Struggle - Compilation of historical documents & interviews. Including speeches by Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson (FREE Download)

Sexual/Domestic Abuse

• Support Yes & No’s For Victims of Sexual Abuse
• Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood by Aurora Levins Morales 

Race/Racism/Colorism

• Race Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism & the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America by Eduardo Bonilla Silva (FREE Book PDF Download)
• White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise (FREE PDF Book Download)
• “Why White People Are Called ‘Caucasian’” By Nell Irvin Painter, Yale University (FREE PDF Download)
• Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance by Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant
• Introduction to Dominican Blackness by Silvio Torres-Saillant (First DL free but please consider donating 7 dollars for this worthy read)
• The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement by Winifred Breines (Free PDF Book Download)
• Women of Color vs. “Colored” Women

It’s April in Ohio and I miss you

You remind me of home and just like warm weather now

Your comfort always seems overdue and out of reach

Seeking you is out of the question

So I’m stuck dreaming of our next encounter

The smell of fresh bread is enchanting

Eagerly I pick you up off the table

Squeezing you with both hands like I used to do my mother’s

It’s amazing the warmth you both have

The bread crumbles

Shattered pieces fall to the table and floor

The sound is deafening

Torn, I use one hand to reach for scraps not wanting to waste a thing

With one finger I lift you to my eye

This moment is perfect

Placing you on the tip of my tongue, I savor this moment

This is what colonization tastes like

Instead of dissolving in my mouth, each jagged edge tears at my insides

Multiplying with intensity

Blow after staggering blow

My stomach cramps and my knees buckle

Maybe this is my wake-up call

Folded over and looking up

Desperately trying to remember what my parents are always trying to forget

I ask you

“Are you ashamed of being forever molded by foreign hands?”

You smirk

“How do you think you got your name?”

I feel it

On my body are the hand prints of all those that who made me

Both seen and unseen

Their grip tight, threatening to tear me apart

I frantically try to free myself of them

And you laugh

“You can’t pretend that these people

Have no influence over you

The only thing you can do is survive”

“Often times, working in higher education can require many nights and weekend hours, what do you maintain balanced?” – every interview ever

Or in other words, higher education, much like most working environments, requires you to always go above and beyond to prove your merit; socializing you into more oppressive, exploitative, and ableist working environments.  And instead of a reimagining of what work is supposed to look like, we’re wondering what things you do to take care of yourself in light of that exploitation.

A little bit ago, I was having a conversation with a student about school and the abundance of work they had.  They never talked about wanting less work but rather an extension on some of their stuff so they could work on it during spring break.  You know, that time in the middle of a semester where you’re supposed to be able to relax from school.  We’re forever being socialized to accept the amount or the structure of work as immutable.

Self-care is a reaction to being overworked.  When we ask about how you take care of yourself, we’re pretty much acknowledging that it’s your responsibility to find how you do that.  Very rarely, will we as employers have structures for care already built in.  Maybe, we’re asking to figure out how we can support you in self-care, but even that’s a strong maybe.  I just feel like when employers are asking about self-care, we just asking to make sure that you’ve done some reflection on how you can maintain a certain level of work without burning out.  Messed up right?

Last thought, I was fortunate enough to get checked on my own able-body privilege during a performance/talk by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.  She was talking about how activist communities are not often structured in a way that allows for folks with differing abilities to be present in a space.  Instead of intentionally recreating spaces that takes this into account, people with disabilities are often expected to perform as able-body individuals or excluded entirely.  This is something that I’m grappling with now.  How is the work I do now and the support my office has not conducive towards supporting folks with differing abilities?

As always, comments and critiques welcome and encouraged!

I went through four years of college and never heard the words social justice.  I can recall pretty vividly the first time I was exposed to the concept (which is actually pretty amazing since my memory is usually terrible).  I was interviewing for a graduate assistantship at Bowling Green, and they asked me “What is your experience with social justice?”  I remember sitting there like, wtf is that?  I have no idea what I said, but I felt so inadequate at that moment.  Afterwards, I went back into the room and processed with other potential grad students.  That didn’t help.  There was clearly a gap between my experience and those around me.  I was and still am (around certain issues) “basic.”

Calling someone basic often situates blame on that person, without us reflecting on the system as a whole.  And granted, we all have individual agency and should take the time to do self-work, but how do we look up social justice if we never heard the words before?  How do we get exposed to the Audre Lordes, bell hooks, and Andrea Smiths, if the folks with access to these thinkers aren’t sharing them in meaningful ways?  There are ways that people namedrop to suggest further reading and critical thought, and there are other times when folks are just trying to overcompensate or highlight how much they “know.”  And in the word of Sweet Brown…

Calling someone basic isn’t out of love.  It’s about distancing ourselves from them and acknowledging how “far” we’ve come or perhaps discounting that we were ever basic in the first place.  It’s funny, most folks who engage in the work would never think of social justice as a competency that we can check off, but there definitely seems to be a moment where we feel like we’ve “arrived.”  We feel confident in how much we’ve reflected, and we are both critical of the world and allow space for us to be checked.  The challenge then becomes how we deal with our former, more basic selves.  And this is something I’m definitely guilty of.

At the end of the day, when people aren’t provided space to engage in critical dialogue or exposed to the amazing thinkers, systemic oppression is working.  Think about Arizona’s ethnic studies program.  There is a reason why folks want to get rid of this program that is engaging students critically.  It is to prevent us from accessing the tools to dismantle the system.  I started reading The Revolution will not be Funded, and I remember this part about how foundations co-opt progressive moments and make them less radical.  And how we remember those doing the work is also shifted.  We think about reform rather than revolution.  Samir Sonti recently wrote an article about “The Forgotten Rosa Parks.”

That Parks’ legacy is so completely sanitized of this collective, working-class backdrop teaches us at least two things. First, it testifies to the remarkable power of neoliberal ideology. It’s much easier to attribute the civil rights victories to a few entrepreneurial activists than to recognize that it was the product of years of struggle by thousands of people who organized at workplaces and in communities demanding economic and political justice. The “fable,” moreover, fits neatly within neoliberalism’s simultaneous celebration of diversity and intensification of inequality. As Adolph Reed recently put it, “The tale type of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been reformulated to fit the requirements of a wan, gestural multiculturalism.”

“Rosa Parks was just a tired, Black woman who refused to give up her seat.”

I heard a keynote speaker say that about Rosa Parks just last year.  What started out as a joke has been distorted into a fact that minimizes all the work that she has done.  And I remember thinking, this person is soooooo basic, but also how dangerous it was for this person to say this to hundreds of people, who may not have known the truth about Rosa Parks.  The problem is saying so didn’t cause me to critically reflect on why this was happening or how they would come to this conclusion.  It didn’t lead me to interrogate how lucky I am to come to know the things I do now, and how so easily I could have been an entirely different person.  (For those who do not know, I got to Oberlin on a whim and truly did not know anything about this space when I accepted a position here as a graduate assistant.  My entry to this space was contingent on several other circumstances that happened to come together.)

When we describe people or situations as basic, we need to think about why we are doing it, and if it’s helping to perpetuate or illuminate the systems of domination.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to go to a retreat and had a great time reflecting on my own identity in that space.  Something, apparently, that I don’t do enough.  One of the discussion we had began with this question:

Do you feel like a typical American?`

Immediately, I thought of all the times someone asked me “what are you?” or “where are you really from?”  The phrase “typical American” is an incredibly loaded phrase, one that is steeped in power and privilege.  It conjures up images of a white straight family with kids, the fence, and a dog, an image that I will never fit.  When you spend your entire life made to feel different, normalcy is not a privilege you have.  So to say I feel like a typical American would be to deny all the times people wondered what I ate at home, questioned my musical tastes, and judged the hand-me-downs that I wore.  But at the same time, I am an American.  I was born and raised in the United States.  My narrative is both unique and shared with others.  Just because I don’t fit in the narrow, fucked up framework of the “typical American,” doesn’t make my experience any less American than anyone else’s.    So depending on the day and how I interpret the question, I both do and don’t feel like a typical American.

Being Vietnamese-American

Following from that, I began reflecting on what it meant to be Vietnamese.  I grew up always saying that I was, but there were several moments in my life when I didn’t feel like it.  Since I didn’t speak Vietnamese or celebrate certain holidays, I was often told I wasn’t really Vietnamese.  This is something that got reinforced when I went to Vietnam in 1996.  Just like I had an image of what being American meant, I was beginning to form an image of what being Vietnamese meant as well.  And as more and more criteria were added to what Vietnamese was, I realized that I didn’t fit.  I think that is when I began really using Vietnamese-American to identify myself.  It seemingly represented the interstitial space that I was occupying, not quite Vietnamese and not quite American.  But even with a new name, I couldn’t separate how I understood Vietnamese-American from being Vietnamese and American.

When I went to college, I was doing more work in communities of color and was introduced to ideas of pan-Asian solidarity and being a person of color.  These identities were new for me and mine to define for myself.  They represented a communal affiliation not based on shared culture, because in reality we shared none, but yet there was some sense of belonging there.  Being a person of color allowed for more complexity and fluidity in how I understood myself and my experiences in the United States.  This is a freedom that didn’t exist for me with being Vietnamese/American.  By its very nature, there was no one way to be a person of color.  It was the first time I didn’t feel policed about how I presented myself and I was free to explore who I was through that lens.  It was incredibly empowering, and I found myself less and less thinking about what it means to be Vietnamese or American, but rather what it means to be a person of color.

Now, however, I have come full-circle.  Using person of color as a tool to reimagine my own identity, I began to both empower myself and engage in a process of self-determination.  No matter how often people continue to question my Vietnameseness or my Americaness, I am still Vietnamese, American, and Vietnamese-American.  By identifying as such, I choose to unlearn what being Vietnamese/American is supposed to mean and to challenge the narrow frameworks that seek to dictate who I am and what I do.

Seriously? I’m not all about prisons, but I pay bigger fines for speeding or parking incorrectly.  This is ridiculous.  What kind of sentence do you think a non-police officer would have got for just shooting a gun (not even in the direction of anybody)? It doesn’t seem to be any secret that the law looks after police officers, that they get lighter punishments for crimes committed.  And for the most part, we sit here and accept that as fact.  But let’s think about how messed up that is for a moment.  As citizens (whether we want to or not), we enter into a social contract with police officers.  We entrust them to protect and serve our communities and enforce the law.  When they break the law, if anything, they should get harsher punishments, not lighter ones.  They broke that contract with us.  They violated that trust we placed in them and are abusing their position of power.

Oh and by the way, when things like this happen, you’re not doing much to affirm that whole DC Transgender and Gender Identity Respect campaign that you had going.

How did the idea come about, and how did you go about executing it?

Upsetting Rape Culture actually started as an art exhibition in Baltimore in 2010. After we did that, we wanted to keep working, so the next thing we did is we made a line of underwear called “Consent Is Sexy.” We came up with this three-pack of underwear with a set of “No” underwear, “Yes” underwear and “Maybe” underwear, which we thought was a cute way of wearing what you were in the mood for. About a month later, Victoria’s Secret came out with this underwear that said “Yes, No, Maybe,” but it was all on the same underwear. Instead of saying yes, no or maybe –  and “I get to decide about what happens to my body” — it’s like, yes, no, maybe, I don’t know.

So instead of “No” being a way for young women to set a boundary, it is a way for them to flirt, which I think is part of this understanding we have in our culture that creates and perpetuates rape. So we were like, wow, this is crazy problematic. So the idea started to do a knock-off of Victoria’s Secret PINK line and we decided to time it with the fashion show.  Social media was the way to go, since as individuals, this was our best shot at creating a large impact and reaching a lot of people.

We worked with an amazing web designer named Dan Staples, fantastic photographer Philip Laubner (who also shot the YES consent is sexy line), a fabulous group of models who support consent and the project, two stylists named Michelle Faulkner and Darian Gavin, and a few amazing volunteers. In addition, we recruited a group of about 100 people who were in on the prank and helped us spread the word using Twitter, Tumbler, and Facebook. This was absolutely a group effort!

Why Victoria’s Secret?
Fighting rape would be a major shift for Victoria’s Secret. Though they are a woman-focused company, VS has never taken a stand on any women’s issue.

In fact, their current designs seem to lean more toward rape culture than consent. Their PINK brand, marketed at high school and college-aged women, sports thongs with the slogan “SURE THING” printed right over the crotch. Young women across the country are wearing underwear with “SURE THING” literally printed over their vaginas. We can think of one circumstance where a vagina is treated like a “SURE THING”: rape.

PINK is specifically marketed towards younger and younger girls, and like the rest of Victoria’s Secret, PINK is selling a specific brand of sexuality.  VS PINK has co-opted the idea of sexual freedom and twisted it into an image of sexuality in which the woman (or girl) is not really in control. The “Sure Thing” and “Yes No Maybe” and “NO peeking” underwear promote the idea of limitless availability, or on the other hand, leaving the choice up to the (presumably male) partner. The brand teaches girls to be coy instead of vocal and makes it seem uncool and unsexy to say no and mean it. By re-enforcing that sex is about an image, that looking good is more important than feeling good, PINK promotes rape culture.

Read the full interview here and check out the website!

CASSANDRA CLARE: As a creator, you know going into working with filmmakers who are adapting your project that you are going to have a limited amount of power. There are some cases, I think, where the author has more power, but those instances are very rare. About the only choice you get to really make is who you sell your rights to.

You are correct that most of the time authors are powerless over movie casting. It is a terrifying feeling that the project that began as your brainchild is in the hands of others and you can only hope that they choose to allow you to have say.

I often think of Ursula le Guin’s experience with the TV movie of the Wizard of Earthsea which she wrote about so movingly. It is sobering to realize that such a well-known author’s call to not whitewash her beloved work would be so summarily dismissed. If it could happen to her it can happen to anyone.

People think authors have power that they don’t. I just want to be clear that though I did insist Magnus be cast as an actor of Asian descent, another studio could have shut me out of the [casting] process entirely.

I was looking at old emails about casting and I found one of mine that just said this: “MAGNUS IS ASIAN. HE NEEDS TO BE PLAYED BY AN ASIAN ACTOR. PERIOD.” Early on, before any auditions or real discussions, names for Magnus were bandied around. When I saw some were white actors and I said, “Please don’t do this, and this is why,” they could have easily chosen to ignore me. I am lucky they didn’t.

So, I think it’s important, because it can be the only choice you get to make, to pick the right studio or producer to sell your rights to. Though, even then, they can switch producers on you, they can switch studios on you, or screenwriters on you — you can never be 100% sure.

I was lucky to have producers who wanted my feedback. I decided I needed to pick the hills I would die on — the things that were my “I will not see this movie if this happens” choices — and throw my weight behind those — because in this situation you might only ever get one chance to express your opinion at all.

In my case, that was the casting of Magnus. He’s a hugely important character, a fan favorite, and is the only character who appears in every book I’ve written. Both him being Asian and his bisexuality were core elements of his character that needed to be preserved.

RACEBENDING.COM: Did you also have to be adamant about the inclusion of the Alec and Magnus romance and their sexual orientations?

CASSANDRA CLARE: Yes, I got a lot of pushback about having gay characters in my books when my film agent was trying to sell the rights: “No one cares about your gay characters.” That’s the one I remember.

I asked before I sold the rights to Unique/Constantin if the gay relationship would be preserved and they said yes. I was adamant from the start that Magnus and Alec’s romance and sexual orientation remain. So adamant that I can’t say what would have happened if I hadn’t been!

I never saw a script where Alec and Magnus’ sexuality wasn’t preserved. I’d like to think that would have been the case no matter what I had done. Alec’s talk with Clary about his sexuality was one of the audition pieces for his character.

Read the full interview below.

Check out racebender for more about the film/controversy.