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My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same thing. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.

Michel Foucault “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1983)  231-232.

(via Anna-Sarah)

(via dworkinclasshero)

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The paradox between male privilege and male misery is often used to argue that women’s oppression is balanced by a similar or even worse lot for men. Warren Farrell, for example, writes that societies such as that in the United States are both patriarchal and matriarchal, with each gender having its own areas of oppressive domination. As with other false parallels, Farrell draws attention away from patriarchy to men as victims who deserve sympathy as much as women do.

At the extreme, men’s woes are used to blame women for the price men pay for privilege, even though the price usually is exacted by other men. Men’s reluctance to open themselves fully to their inner emotional lives, for example, is based far more on fear of being vulnerable to other men or of being seen as insufficiently manly-not in control and controlled by others-than on worries about women. In similar ways, the competitive grind, insecurity, or fear of violence that many men experience is overwhelmingly in relation to other men, not women.

Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot

(via commiekinkshamer)

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Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative, life-sustaining, life enhancing place for the masculine in a non-dominator culture. And those of us committed to ending patriarchy can touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.

bell hooks, The Will to Change, p. 115 (via half-shy)

(via corpseplant-deactivated20130513)

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In fact, the nature of new media art is that it tends to be a deconstructed series of events spread out over the course of any project or an artist’s lifetime. This type of art is more a kin to a form of aesthetic research, which derives its meaning within the information sphere of established global networks. This is actually a move beyond postmodernism that doesn’t really have a term attached to it.

G.H. Hovagimyan, Tell Me About Your Mother’s Tumblr  (via altcrit)

(via masspalace)

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What is it about modernization that causes suicide? Modernity comes with capitalism and individualism, which travel hand in hand. Reduced to its core (and thus risking gross over-generalization,) modernity causes suicide because it commodifies individuals.

What does it mean to be commodified? In a pre-modern society, people’s social identity is defined by their unchanging relationship to the larger society. If you are someone’s father, you never cease to be the father (short of a catastrophe.) Accordingly, your duty and worth as a father likewise never change throughout your life. Such unchanging constancy is precisely the character that a commodity lacks. The worth of a commodity is strictly proportional to its usefulness. If the commodity loses its usefulness, it automatically loses all of its value. The commodity, quite literally, becomes worthless. And once rendered worthless, its existence no longer matters.

Perniciously, modernity commodifies human beings, with sophistication and precision never seen before in human history. In a capitalistic society, every “human resource” (hideous words, if you think about it) comes with a sticker price, precisely indicating his/her value. A lawyer costs $350 an hour; a stripper, $20 a song. And inevitably, for a large number of humans, the value is zero or near zero—useless, therefore worthless. Likewise inevitably, for even larger number of humans, the sticker price that are given to them (which is something that they can only partially control) is far lower than their own ideas of their intrinsic value. This discrepancy pushes such people to view themselves as worthless. The next step is easy—the commodity whose existence no longer matters proceeds to end its existence.

Ask A Korean, Suicide in Korea Series: VI. Case Studies — KAIST and Ssangyong Motors (via iggymogo)

(via drugdoer)

transitive-verb:

spittingonhegel:

I’m trying to explain to my mother that domestic work is upaid labor and therefore that she’s being exploited whether she enjoys this work or not, because exploitation isn’t a moral harm brought upon you, it’s economic extraction, it’s someone getting more out of your labor than you are.

The family is one of the most politically fucked up institutions. Think of how we raise our kids to view their mothers as obligated to do this shit. The responsibility for tending to housework needs to be evenly distributed.

If you find that problematic you can go fuck yourself.

“The household is also the site of egregious thefts of services, where women perform thousands of hours of work annually but are not paid for it, and in fact sink more deeply into dependance and poverty the more committed they are to their families, whereas men benefit from women’s domestic work and often would not and indeed could not succeed outside the home without it. Women also frequently perform tasks for men that are directly related to men’s paid employment or careers, such as co-writing (or writing) men’s novels, or men stealing ideas from their wives without ever giving proper credit or compensation. Men individually and collectively become increasingly successful where it counts — in the public sphere — and build their empires on women’s backs and through women’s labor without sharing power with women individually or collectively, and male power is then wielded over all women abusively.” [x]

“To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.” Barbara Ehrenreich, Made to Order

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Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The “nice” girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the “loose” woman, who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases. Women are trained to smile more than men, too. In the economy of smiles, as elsewhere, there is evidence that women are exploited, for they give more than they receive in return; in a smile-elicitation study, one researcher found that the rate of smile return by women was 93 percent, by men only 67 percent. In many typical women’s jobs, graciousness, deference, and the readiness to serve are part of the work; this requires the worker to fix a smile on her face for a good part of the working day, whatever her inner state. The economy of touching is out of balance, too: men touch women more often and on more parts of the body than women touch men: female secretaries, factory workers, and waitresses report that such liberties are taken routinely with their bodies.

Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power (via spittingonhegel)

The girl of five does not make any use of lateral space. She does not stretch her arm sideward; she does not twist her trunk; she does not move her legs, which remain side by side. All she does in preparation for throwing is to lift her right arm forward to the horizontal and to bend the forearm backward in a pronate position … The ball is released without force, speed, or accurate aim.

—Erwin Strauss

Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention.

—Iris Marion Young

“Girls traditionally were not supposed to take up space, nor were they supposed to inject their entire bodily presence into a situation. That was considered unladylike.”

(via transitive-verb)

(via ellesugars)

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What is called ‘courage’ is thus often rooted in a kind of cowardice: one has only to think of all the situations in which, to make men kill, torture or rape, the will to dominate, exploit or oppress has relied on the ‘manly’ fear of being excluded from the world of ‘men’ without weakness, those who are sometimes called ‘tough’ because they are tough on their own suffering and more especially on that of others -the assassins, torturers and ‘hit men’ of all dictatorships and all ‘total institutions’, even the most ordinary ones, such as prisons, barracks or boarding schools -but also the new ‘hatchet men’ of modern management, glorified by neoliberal hagiography, who, themselves often subject to ordeals of physical courage, manifest their virility by sacking their superfluous employees. Manliness, it can be seen, is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself

Pierre Bourdieu - Masculine Domination (via basedsushigoat)
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Housing is an essential need for both the individual and the family and should not be owned by others. Living in another’s house, whether paying rent or not, compromises freedom. Attempts made by various countries to solve the housing problem did not provide a definite solution because such attempts did not target the ultimate solution - the necessity that people own their dwellings - but rather offered the reduction, increase, or standardization of rent, whether it went to privately or publicly-owned enterprise. In a socialist society, no one, including society itself, has the right to control people’s needs. No one has the right to acquire a house additional to his or her own dwelling and that of his or her heirs for the purpose of renting it because this additional house is, in fact, a need of someone else. Acquiring it for such a purpose is the beginning of controlling the needs of others, and “in need freedom is latent”.

The Green Book (via ellentansey)

(via hoxhaist-revisionism-deactivate)

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Most people on food stamps work full time. They work full time but they don’t have enough money to pay for food for their kids. So really, in some ways, food stamps are about a business subsidy because it allows low wage business workers to… feed their families and continue working. But we call it charity, or the Republicans call it charity. They want to cut food stamps so badly that every church, synagogue, mosque, house of worship in the United States—every single one—[would] have to raise an additional $50,000 every year for ten years to replace what he wants to cut. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna work.

Sister Simone Campbell [x]

(via kyaryarchy)