Saturday, February 27, 2010
Queer Culture, Identity Politics, Transgender and Rape-Centric Feminism
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
aex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional space
Tingle Tangel Drag Cabaret | March 2009 | Cafe Du Nord San Francisco
It might seem natural to regard intersexuals and transgendered people
as living midway between the poles of male and female. But male and female,
masculine and feminine, cannot be parsed as some kind of continuum. Rather,
sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional
space.
Jasper Documents Jasper And A Baby
Reprint | Jan 24 2010 Happy Sunday morning sweeties, Take a look at this while you drink your morning coffee. I find this document of a young being, fascinating. “More”. Anya is just learning to interact. She learned to point about a month ago. She points and things are brought to her. It is a measure of her interest. It means “More! This is Interesting.” When she sees herself in videos she shows a level of enrapture and focus that I never have. Her constant pointing is kind of like saying “WTF!, OMG! This is so utterly fantastically cool. “ In one Zen Buddhist Narrative, babies are enlightened beings who have not yet unlearned enlightenment. I see that quality in Anya’s rapt attention, like a pool without ripples.
11,500 Year Old Temples Found In Turkey. Before Agriculture!!!
This discovery changes a lot about how we conceive of History. Nomadic Non-Agricultural Civilizations Built Temples and Artwork, 6,000 years before the Pyramids.
Body Fascism Is Over If You Want It To Be
(Sex Positive Queer Fat Femme in San Francisco) London Fat Activism 101
Charlotte Cooper, the very witty fat/queer activist, essayist, zine contributor, girl gang leader and all sorts of things-er, is coming to Goldsmiths to give a talk on why she is a fat activist. If you've ever felt rejected or ashamed because of your looks, fat or thin, boy or girl or trans etc., come along and prepare to have your eyes completely opened. Body fascism is over if you want it.
Monday, February 22, 2010
SF High Femme Dreaming in Dolores Park
(An Afternoon At Dolores | Jasper Gregory) In Spring of 2009. I started to explore perspective. Before that I had been shooting straight on. I discovered perspective by holding the camera above the subject and moving it randomly. I discovered that almost every “Random” shot was better than when my mind was “Lining up objects”. I was just beginning to understand light and to think in the language of light.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
New Age Spirituality: The Opiate of The Elite? -zizek
The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of GlobalFeb 21 2010I agree with Zizek. As a mass religion, California New Age is kind of superficial. People work like dogs here, in jobs that are killing them. They buy enlightenment on the weekends by adopting the New Age hipster look, forking out serious money for Raw Food, Yoga and New Age dance. Following Zizek's logic, the four dollar Heirloom Tomato from the Farmer's Market, is a fetish object or transitional object that we cling to, in order to repress the fundamental alienation that we feel in our Contemporary, Californian, Elite Lives.
I disagree with Zizek about the Mystic Traditions springing out Asia. Zen and other Buddhist models have a very sophisticated epistemology, and set of body-mind-breath disciplines for investigating the Self.
WATERDANCE - Video Gallery
(Davida was one of my Waterdance teachers at Harbin Hotsprings. She gives waterwork in Marin County just north of San Francisco)
Feb 21 2009
I learned to do that. I spent four months going native at Harbin Hotsprings. In the end it started to get too intense. Underwater bodywork is an extremely altered state. Many people go back to the womb.
In Watsu (Intimacy Work/ Aquatic BodyWork) Fat Bodies are called Cloud Bodies
Feb 21 2009
In Watsu (Intimacy Work/ Aquatic Dance) Fat Bodies are called Cloud Bodies, because of the way they float on top of the water. In Aquatic Bodywork School at Harbin Hotsprings, I found a lot of the Aquatic Dance Forms to be Raw-Food-And-Yoga-Body Centric. Cloud Bodies want to be moved differently. I have found that most bodies just want to be held and cradled like a baby
Choosing a Tumblr CSS Theme Is an act of Politics
Jasper Gregory
I am a San Francisco Based Visual Artist. I am a Body Positive, Sex Positive Femmeboy Activist
This my Tumblr Site on
Tumblr, along with Vimeo, seems to be part of a very active Digital Design Community in NYC. Some of Tumblr Free Themes are fantastic Graphic Design. The Theme I use invokes the best of the Post War International Typography movement. In this way New Digital Printing can reach back to an earlier period of Modernity. We can rewind and do Bauhaus all over again. Let's remake modernity. we can start with our digital publishing.Genderqueer Femme Boy | This Photo Initiated my Artist Life Trajectory
Feb 21 2009
This photo was when began an Artist life trajectory. I manifested a genderqueer social gender and asked a stranger to document me. Burning Man Decompression 2008 was my first set of fashion photos as well. This was one of the first photos I cropped, and it shows.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
She Was a Sweetie. We Played Together In Sweet's Ballroom Lighting
(I Met Her at Sunday Morning Ecstatic Dance in Oakland. She Was Sweet, and We Played In The Sweet's Ballroom Lighting)
Feb 20 2009I took street fashion shots at Ecstatic Dance, a kind of Dance Church for the Burning Man Subculture. They are a kind of New Age spiritual community imported from Hawaii's Big Island. I was disappointed in the Burning Man Fashion though, The yoga-pants-that-make-my-ass-look-good thing is really overplayed. They are part a new uniform for the New Age elite of Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Marx called religion "The opiate of the masses". Zizek thinks that New Age Spirituality is the opiate of the alienated knowledge processing elite within Digital Capitalism.
'Woman' thus becomes an 'identity' solely constituted through the 'injury' of male sexual power
(Sex-Positive Femme Identity | B&L After Ships In The Night Queer Dance Party, SF)
Feminism and Ressentiment
According to Brown, politicized identity, including feminism, displays many of the 'attributes of…. ressentiment' (1995: 27): the tendency on the part of the powerless to reproach power with moral arguments rather than to seek out power for itself. The turn to Nietzsche accounts for Brown's use of terms like 'pain' and 'injury' to indicate the effects of marginalisation and subordination. Nietzsche postulates that the cause of ressentiment is 'suffering': this suffering causes the individual to look for a sight of blame for the hurt, as well as to revenge itself upon the 'hurter'. Brown describes the 'politics of ressentiment' as follows:Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it ['the politics of ressentiment'] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the "injury" of social subordination. It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning…the effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors (1995: 27).
Ressentiment's investment in powerlessness means that it prefers moral posturing over political argument:
His [Nietzsche's] thought is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of political argument, and to understand the codification of injury and powerlessness… that this kind of moralizing politics entails (Brown 1995: 27).
Brown's opposition between 'morals' and 'politics' seems at first difficult to accept, especially for feminists. What are we to base our politics on, after all, if not some notion of what is right, what is just, what is good, for women — all moral notions? However, in encouraging politics rather than morality, Brown does not suggest that we get rid of, or can do without, the 'right', the 'just' and the 'good'. What she does say is that ideas of what is right, just, or good that are based on moral notions of what we think we are lead to a politics of ressentiment, of 'reproach, rancor, moralism and guilt' (1995: 26). She argues that we need to develop new spaces in which to decide politically, collectively, what is good, just and right, derived not from identity-based notions of 'who I am' but from a new ethics of 'what I want for us' (1995:75).
The tendency to turn towards the state for protection, rather than questioning state power to regulate and discipline, is one that Brown sees as especially problematic for feminism. She notes women have particular cause for greeting such politics with caution. Historically, the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical in legitimating women's exclusion from some spheres of human endeavor and confinement within others. Operating simultaneously to link "femininity" to privileged races and classes… protection codes are also markers and vehicles of such divisions among women. Protection codes are thus key technologies in regulating privileged women as well as intensifying the vulnerability and degradation of those on the unprotected side of the constructed divide between light and dark, wives and prostitutes, good girls and bad ones (1995: 165).
The notion of 'injured identities' offers a provocative way to begin to examine how and why CATW feminists are positioning the 'trafficking victim' in their discourse. Brown's examination of the historical formation of late modern politicized identities places the problematic of 'logics of pain in the subject formation processes'(1995: 55) central. This has immediate resonance: CATW's campaign against trafficking in women constantly reiterates the literal, physical pain undergone by 'third world prostitute' bodies. If 'politicized identity's investment… in its own history of suffering' (Brown 1995: 55) is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the 'suffering' of third world trafficking victims in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about CATW's efforts to seek protection for trafficking victims through 'protective' legislation.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Femme 101 | What Makes (Me) a Femme « Sublimefemme Unbound
Hands on Lesbian Sex Education for Bi-Girls
Sexy & Powerful Queer Femme Fashion @EagleTavern
Wendy Brown's Scathing 8 Page Critique of Identity Politics
Brown offers us an Anarcho-Libertarian reading of Feminist and Queer Liberation which fights the state at every turn. She critiques Identity Politics for embracing the State, The Courts & the Police. Brown offers a way for Postmodern Radicals to Twist the Libertarian Agenda into a Liberating Agenda. Right and Left can unite around rolling back the State and Empowering Choice at local and individual Levels.
A Femme Boy Working at a Local Castro Coffeeshop | Femme as alternative to Trans ((tag: GenderQueer, SanFrancisco, StreetFashion, Femme, HotPink, NeonYellow, Eighties, AvocadoGreen, Scarf, SF Winter, Pretty, Queer, MTF, Trans, usa, California, JasperGrego
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Is this Erotic Art? Jones Has Captured the Sensual, Tactile Pleasure of the Voluptuous
Pucker up, Peeps. It's time for the Adipositivity Project's Valentine series. Every day through Valentine's Day you'll see another Adiposer couple gettin' at least semi for ya. But remember, most of 'em are in pre-, mid-, or post-canoodle, so some photographs may be even more NSFW than usual. Hope they make you smile as much as they do me. Happy Valentine's Day!
Male Born Femme In The Wild | Coffee To The People | Haight Street | San Francisco
When You Ride Alone You Ride With Hitler!
Detail of English WWII Conservation Propaganda (h/t Storiographic)
This is an interesting little Statist Media Ecology. This image is still very very interesting.Feb 18 2009 @PhilzCoffee
How do we change the world and achieve Emancipation? Zizek blames LGBT Lifestyle politics for the death of the Left.
I agree with his critiques of LGBT Separatism. If I interpret him correctly he views LGBT Identities and PoC Identities (Person of Color) as Coping Mechanisms, Attempt to process personal trauma. These are similar to Wendy Brown's concept of Identity Politics as Wounded Attachment, Identifying as perpetually persecuted minorities. I cannot to the strength
Fantastic Short Overview Of 20th Century Design. Futurism Dada Propaganda Construcitivism ArtDeco
Radchenko, Early 1920's
He was the first to really explore Photo Collage. His work is a call to action.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Constructivist printing flowered in Russia right after the Revolution | Visionaries were given the printing presses
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.
Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team, carried out secret Josef Mengele-style experiments on human test subjects. Now some remains from the unit are prompting a reopened investigation into what crimes occurred.
The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.
I have always found it hypocritical how accepting we all are of Japanese War Crimes. What is the phrase... "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it"
Food Not Bombs | SF | 16th Street Bart | Feb 11 2010
adipositivity Fat-Positive Art Photography: Substantia Jones has a unique eye. She Photographs Voluptuous Body With A Sharp Sensitivity
Jones provides the Sex Positive antidote to Hatred of Women's bodies which has taken over our media ecologies. When uncovered we all stand in awe at the beauty and sensuous abundance of this woman's body. Yet we create a world where the elites pathologize her as unhealthy, sick, and gluttonous. She is the embodiement of the Original Mother Goddess who we find in statues from our earliest cultures. I find it interesting that these avatars of the Mother Goddess are outcast and heaped with scorn, especially from progressive Americans.
Photo: A Beautiful Ass | SF Event: Spanking Meet and Greet
time: 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM
where: The Thirstybear
address: 661 Howard St. San Francisco, CA
cost: Cost of your own order but please allow for a generous tip
dress code: Spanking Casual - whatever you want, this is San FraniciscoDescription
Whether it is your only kinky interest ( and you've been almost embarassed to say that at other munches ) or you have wide variety of other interests with a soft spot( or should I say 'sweet spot' ) for spanking...this is the munch for you.
If you are coming from the broader BDSM world, please recognize that the focus of this group will be spanking and don't expect to convert anyone to 'harder drugs'.
Autogynephilia: Robert disclosed that sometimes his wife penetrated him anally with sex toys and he indulged in the fantasy of being the helpless female partner subject to her predatory will.
She particularly enjoyed the fantasy of raping someone else. This was generally played out with female sex workers who would be accommodating and compliant with the fantasy to her satisfaction. The only male she carried out this sex fantasy with was her husband Robert and at the time of penetrating him she said she clearly envisioned herself as a man with a penis, dominant, powerful and aggressive.
I find Autogynophilia a fascinating phenomenon. It refers to a Mab (Male At Birth) fantasizes about being the object of desire and wants "to be thrown around in bed" by a Fab (Female At Birth). What? Mabs are just supposed to be fucking machines. Have we not all figured out that that jackhammer sex is a true perversion and fetishization of human sexuality. I embrace my desire to be Femme, to attract and seduce rather than dominate and conquer. Get your Femme on and help heal our sick society
Such A Beautiful Woman! I Met Her At Coffee To The People In The Haight Street Autonomous Cultural Zone
Monday, February 15, 2010
Happy Bush/Reagan Day! New Video Blog | Jasper Shows how not to put on Eyeliner
Feb 15 2010
This morning Jasper is at The new Science Fiction coffeeshop in the Mission. He attempts to show us how to put on liquid eyeliner, and wishes you a happy BushReagan day. It is a beautiful President's Day in the San Francisco.
SF Fat Femme Drag | Gayboy Femmes Know how to Perform Femme. They're Not Hung Up on the concept "Real Woman"
I met this Femme Beauty on Haight street. She shows the art of Femme as drag. Like most crossdressing Femmes she is unequivocal about her sex. She is male, she is a boy, and yet her Femme Gender is seamless and overpowering. In contrast to the dominant paradigm among Male-To-Female Transsexuals, she can embrace Simone de Beuvoire's (sp) suggestion that you are not born woman you become woman. Paradoxically, she becomes real by not clinging to an idea of "Real Woman."
She achieved that I projected the social gender "Femme" on her. The projection of woman was strong, so that when we talked about her being a boy. My mind filed that as untrustworthy data that did not fit.
Male Born Femmes can take inspiration from both these Fag Femme Artists and (Fat) Femme Dykes. Take off the "Real Woman" straightjacket. Estrogen can't make you a "Real Woman" because there is no such thing. The social identity of Femme offers me freedom of gender exploration as well as social integration. I feel like my Femme Identity has become authentic and self nurturing because I gave up the quest for "woman" authenticity.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity | 7m video | I highly recommend this
Feb 12 2009
Katz does a great job showing how aggressive masculinity is not only enculturated, but also enforced. Male Born Femininity is actively oppressed.
I like how he also touches on the role of Heterosexual women (even feminists) in valorizing Mab masculinity, and keeping the structures intact.
I would also add the Feminst versions of Fab (Female At Birth) Nationalism also reinforce the the cage of masculinity by painting all Mabs as aggressors and predators, thereby enforcing the invisibility of Mab femininity.
SF Femme Street Fashion | "Younger men are just like girls, underneath the attitude."
I met A. this week at the new Geeky Book Cafe Borderlands in SF in The Mission. We had a great meandering talk about art, the CityArts cooperative gallery, Gender and Fat Activism.
She said that in relationship, younger men "feel" like girls. That is fascinating. Are boys really just girls underneath it all? That reminds me of my Pitbull Model of Masculinity. "You are not born a pitbull, you become one." Boys are emotionally immature, territorial, aggressive, and rigid because they are raised through abusive enculturation. Underneath it we are just girls who were pathologically socialized. This model rests on a hunch that girl-socialization with its emphasis on learning to nurture, socialize and cooperate has continuity with pre-agricultural and primate sociality. It is older. The emotional scarification of young boys is of more recent vintage.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Body Positive, Kink Positive, Pansexual Sex Education in San Francisco. Event Listing
Center for Sex & Culture EVENTS
http://sexandculture.org/events/week.listevents/
*TONIGHT! Legwork! New comedic work from Beth Lisick & Tara Jepsen, Kirk Read and Erin Markey
Friday, February 12, 8-10pm
*My Sucky Valentine
Sunday, February 14, door at 7, show at 8
*Ask Our Doc: Cunnilingus @ Good Vibes Valencia
Wednesday, February 17th, 6:30-7:30
*NEW -- CSC Photo Club -- modeling by Tanya Leigh Cummings
Sunday, 2/21, 12:30-4
* Janus presents: Tease Me, Bait me, Make Me Wait with Master Mark M.A.
Sunday, February 21, 6-8pm
*SF Jacks
Monday, 2/22 -- doors 7:30-8:30 only
*Sex Workers' Writing Workshop
Tuesday, 2/23, 6-8 pm
*Sex & Memory: Writing from Your Own Experience
Wednesday, February 24, 5:30pm - 07:00pm
*Erotic Reading Circle
Wednesday February 24, 7:30pm - 09:30pm (in CSC main suite)
*From Somatic to Digital and Back Again: Reid Mihalko in a Candid Conversation with Joseph Kramer
Wednesday February 24, 7:30pm - 09:30pm (in Back Alley Sally's cabaret)
*Relationship Mapping/Poly 101 with Shanna Katz, a.k.a. Essin'Em
Thursday, 2/25, 6-7:30
*Love Your Body Now! with Catherine Toyooka
Thursday, 2/25, 7:30 pm
*Vaginal Fisting for One and All! with Shanna Katz, a.k.a. Essin'Em
Friday, 2/26, 7pm
*Intro to Exotic Dance with Slinky Productions
Sunday, Feb. 28, 12-6
*NEW! Girl Sex 101 with Allie Moon
Thursday, March 4th, 7-9pm
*NEW! Marcus Markus tells you all about "How To Whore"
Saturday, March 6, 3-5pm
NEW! Power Flirting with Cat Toyooka
March 23
NEW! The Sexually Confidant Woman with Marcia Baczynski
March 25
*NEW! Pussy Boxes with Ruby Pearl
Saturday, 3/27, 12-4pm
Photo by Jasper
Boylesque- 7 deadly sins - Mama Calizo's Voice Factory