Wasn’t there also this tik tok that explained that just because the clothes aren’t eyecatching doesn’t mean they’re not expensive?
There are expensive brands that focus on making you look exactly like he does in that picture.
Fun story: this is a display of power. If you’re rich you can wear whatever you want and still be heard. Only the poor and so called lower class have to worry about first impressions and are forced to don the costumes of the rich in the hopes of being respected.
i just saw someone completely seriously, without a hint of irony, refer to it as “Q-slur Eye” and my intestines started melting like so many Salvador Dalí clocks
I’ve seen “don’t call the show Qu**r Eye if you’re a cishet and can’t reclaim the q-slur” so nothing surprises me anymore.
“Don’t normalize this word that people fought really hard to normalize! Let it keep its oppressive power because I don’t understand queer history”
God I literally fucking hate this rhetoric. It’s exclusionary, gatekeepy, TERFy, and supports a totally revisionist queer history that erases so many marginalized people, especially people who are marginalized on multiple axes.
“LET IT KEEP ITS OPPRESSIVE POWER BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND QUEER HISTORY”
Wow that really sums it up.
I lived through the “take back the word queer” movement, so let me further sum it up
The entire point was to strip the word of the power to hurt us. We embraced it by refusing to be offended by it. We were saying “you can’t hurt us with that word, we now feel empowered when we hear it.”
During this time I saw an interview with a gay man who’d been arrested while wearing a “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It” t-shirt. He was put into a holding cell with other detainees who tried to verbally abuse him. They started out by calling him queer but after seeing his t-shirt, and him not reacting to that word, they started stumbling over their words trying to find a name to call him. They finally settled on repeatedly calling him a “sissy” which, by the late 90s, had become a very out-dated slur toward queer men and was a laughable effort by these hyper-masculine and sexist bullies
When they tried to call him a queer it had no power because embracing the word, no matter who said it, had taken away that power
tl;dr We took back the word Queer with the intent of it no longer having the power to hurt us, but people now calling it the Q-slur are giving power back to the people who hate us
^^^^^^^^^^
I feel like a lot of the people who keep trying to keep us from using queer, don’t understand how reclamation works.
Reclamation is turning a weapon aimed at you, into a shield, to keep them from stabbing you later.
But the way those people talk about slurs, it’s like they think slurs are a privilege.
They are still using those words the same way as they people who they are supposedly reclaiming it from.
I’ve reclaimed fat for myself.
I am fat, and society has treated me like shit for my body type. I do not agree with their assessment. Fat is not a bad word, because being fat is not a bad thing.
That’s what reclaimation is.
If I were to go around quoting the mean girls musical by saying “ugh I’m so fat and disgusting” it would undermine that reclamation completely, because it would still be being used as a weapon. Except I would be doing the stabbing.
If I did this and then said “but I’m reclaiming it” it would be a lie. I could stab myself with a sword and say “I turned it into a shield” and I would still bleed out on the floor.
And since so many people against the word queer seem to be awfully fond of some other slurs, it just leads me to believe…
These people think reclamation is supposed to be self harm.
in my experience, people who are against the reclamation of the word queer tend to be terfs, biphobes and acephobes who dont like that theres a valid umbrella term to encompass all LGBT+ and are trying to cause division within the community
does anyone else remember playing that swordfighting game on wii sports resort where you just swung your controller around like a madman wasting the shit out of everyone else in the game until you won
I cannot stress this enough the fact that Rebecca Black overcame the absolute inundation of internet harassment and bullying after she released a kind of bad song that she didn’t even want to make, because people love to hate teenage girls, and NOW just dropped a new single with a killer mv about being wlw is SUCH an iconic plot point of 2021
sorry wait i know i’m reblogging this twice and with a comment but this information changed my entire worldview on particularly teenage girls in music when i first found it out
which was at a thing called “music fridays” at my high school, where we’d spend 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every friday going over pop culture or even obscure music things
Friday came out and after like a month of resisting, my teacher just walked up to the board and wrote “is Friday a bad song?”
we concluded, after listening, dissecting, and discussing the song, that yes, it is. and then my teacher pulled up information about the company behind the whole thing.
“any of you could have sung this song. Rebecca Black did not write this. It was a gift. and her gift, from well-meaning parents trying to give a girl a taste of her dream, went viral.”
lots of “oh fuck"s went around the classroom. not out loud, bc the teacher would have given us Looks at that, but like.
he talked about how often young people are eviscerated for decisions that might not be their own. how often that happens particularly in the arts, and how that can destroy the essence of a person, because at that young, you ARE your art, even if you didn’t WRITE your art.
he talked about justin bieber, britney spears, hilary duff. it definitely went over that 5-10 minutes, but goddamn, it changed my mind about a LOT of things.
