hat tip to Feminist Law Profs Blog.

Tags: blogs, celebration, feminist

Jenn at reappropriate has a good post up about the phrase "the personal is political" reminding us of the importance of understanding and including the "apolitical" people (and aspects of ourselves, too, I think!) in our political organizing.

Tags: blogs, politics

I have two more food posts up on entrepreneurial city, but I know that they are of the TL:DR variety for LJ, so I've just linked instead:

1) Mouthwitness accounts conflict
2) Hume-ility and Kant-empt

They are part of a series of posts inspired by 4 groups of food reviewers: Yelpers, Chowhounders, Linda Burum of the LA Times, and of course Jonathan Gold (at the LA Weekly).

Tags: blogs, food

*Image removed*

All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair . . . lots of chocolate for me to eat . . . oh wouldn't it be lovely?

Rest and easily digested nourishment - Eliza Doolittle guiltlessly celebrates caloric accumulation. Puritanism is only necessary in a state where nourishment and rest are easy to come by. In a situation where one is starving and constantly on the run from predators (and other people), it hardly makes sense to extol the virtues of industry and abstinence. No "ought" without "can", but correspondingly, no oughtn't either.

Now what I eat is constrained partly by time, partly by money, and of course a lingering sense of guilt. Gone, however, is the literal parental control, punishing me for having chocolate, denying me the extra plate of noodles. In theory, life for me could be one long, sweet meal, punctuated by sleep, television, books and radio.

But enough about food. Let's talk about sex.

Sex continues to be an area where I dare not dream. And perhaps it is an area of life where a certain obliviousness serves us well. Dig around too much in your sexual tastes and activities, and you might uncover truths about your past and present that you'd rather not face. Colonialism, childhood fears, family violence, insecurity, economic status (or lack thereof), all affect our sexual desires, just as they do our more prosaic appetite.

The drive towards structure as we follow our appetites is ever present: eating is neatly quarantined into meals and snacks (although the new healthy way to eat is to constantly "graze," though that too implies a kind of structure: a levelling out, rather than a gathering together); sex is confined to a few or one partner, or, if not, then wrapped in a sanitizing "safe, sane and consensual"* language. But rarely do our (perhaps I am projecting. Let me just say "my") appetites run solely to monogamy, or safe, sane consensuality, or punctuated regularity. They hit us (me) as an insistent rumbling, a hunger that is larger than myself.

To have a desire - is this an act? I suppose it is merely a property in that we "have" a desire. To want, then, is the act. One may protest, and many do, that it is an act that one has no obvious hand in, at least, not without intense investigation. However, as the Oedipus myth teaches us, guilt may attach to acts which we didn't know we were committing, so why not to acts that we didn't know how to not commit?

If I trip while holding a child, and she falls and breaks her neck, does not her family feel resentment, no matter how careful I was?

By protesting our innocence, either through an appeal to genetics or even to the inscrutability of desire, queers allow our acts to be defined as criminal. Nobody is called upon to justify their taste for chocolate (although given the nature of the two cultures, Colonial European and Aztec, that are responsible for it, perhaps they could).

*Note: Just a little internet reading on this phrase reveals that slave david stein (who coined it in 1983) was/is aware of the potential for its misappropriation as yet another way for one group to define what is "good" sex and what is "bad" sex (or even "not" sex).

photo: Loving it... by barbus22

Tags: blogs, musing, queer

So last week, toughstuff from belowthebelt emailed me and asked me to look at the blog. I, flattered, did so and paid particular interest to some of the recent posts about asian men and white men dating (by the way, has anyone else noticed that often "inter-racial" dating discussions default to POC-white? I've dated interracially several times, and not always with whitey).

Anyway, one of the posts (the first link) led me to Andy Quan's page for his campaign against racism in online personal ads. Quan calls for an end to online ads which contain charming racially-exclusive lines such as "no GAMs" or "no fats, fems, or asians."

From that page I clicked through to his archive of and response to Dan Savage's callous and (un)shockingly privileged advice to an Asian man experiencing sexual racism (the one I read back in the day in SF Weekly right before I stopped reading both Savage Love and the SF Weekly).

From that page, I went to modelminority's repost of a student note in the Harvard Law Review about the use of race in personal ads, which I found quite well-reasoned. I have to admit that, as an example of law review writing, the student note is almost parodically methodical. Still, it gets the job done. Those Harvard boys are nothing if not thorough. Take, for example, the introductory paragraph of part II:

The use of racial signifiers in personal advertisements may have a stigmatizing impact on the excluded group. Moreover, such signifiers may perpetuate the notion that racial group members should "be with their own kind," which in turn may lead to increased social segregation and economic stratification. It is possible, however, that racial signifiers in personal ads serve valuable purposes that outweigh any harms they pose. This Part explores these purposes, and weighs the social costs and benefits of this conduct. There are several possible motives that lead advertisers to specify the desired race of respondents . . . [author then goes on to give each possible motive a heading and analysis]

I wish Supreme Court justices would write as clearly.

Meanwhile, some hetero Asian bloggers I follow (well okay, I just follow Jenn at reappropriate, but she linked to the other blog!) are having their own discussion about Asian-white dating. Oh, and also marriage. Of course.

Jenn's first post that I read on the subject links to C.E. Le's statistical analysis of inter-racial marriage, which seems to show that Asian women marry white men more often than Asian men marry white women. To be precise, my understanding of the numbers on Le's page is that his analysis shows that asian-women-who-marry-white-men are a greater segment of married-asian-women than asian-men-who-marry-white-women are of married-asian-men. Which makes me want to know what percentage of asian men are married, and what percentage of asian women are married. After all, the other stereotype/perception of Asian men is that we are losers who can't get dates. It wouldn't surprise me if this social stigma was reflected in lower marriage rates for Asian men.

Of course, I have issues with both Jenn and FF44's posts (would I be FiF if I didn't?), though I tend to side more with Jenn's "don't blame the person of color for stereotypes imposed on their dating choices" approach than with FF44's "be a role model, date Asians" exhortation (which is a little creepy, and reminds me of the oft-unspoken "only gender-normative, clean-cut, monogamously coupled gay men and lesbians need apply to be LGBT community spokespersons" attitude that I've always deplored).

I do think that Jenn is a little too quick to dismiss as "stereotyping, pure and simple" Asian (presumably hetero or bi) men's complaints about certain Asian women's explanations of their choices to date white men. I've personally heard Asian (and white) women, in explaining their preference for white men, denigrate Asian men's masculinity and sexual attractiveness, or make the same old tired excuses that feminists rightly called men on when they were used to devalue women ("oh, Asian guys just never ask me out!" sounds a lot like "oh, women just don't participate enough at meetings!").

I do think that Asian women should not be singled out as the cause of the sexual disenfranchisement of Asian men (and thus saddled with the burden of undoing it), but neither should they (or any of us) ignore the many ways they have been affected and are sometimes complicit in that disenfranchisement.

Image from worth1000.com

x-posted to fluentinfag

Tags: blogs, musing, race, sex

While doing a little internet research for an enterpreneurialcity post on !dealliance, one of the first North Carolina blogs I found was http://www.interstateq.com/, written by Matt Hill Comer, a queer activist from North Carolina. As Rachel Ray might say, How Cool Is That?

In it, I found out that North Carolina has an openly gay state senator, and that she is speaking at a business guild of some kind.

As a side note, do y'all think that Comer is pronounced to rhyme with "Homer" or "Hummer"? Or perhaps like the Spanish verb "to eat"? In any case, InterstateQ's reassuring grays and blues are far more pleasant than !dealliance's aggressively garish color scheme (which I can sum up as ketchup red, mustard yellow, frankfurter orange).

Tags: blogs, links, queer, shameless self-promotion

A bunch of us have a new food blog, meaning fewer food posts on this blog. You can check it out at:

http://fewdblawg.blogspot.com

Tags: blogs, shameless self promotion