A Probability of Being

So recently I was watching a re-mix trailer of Mean Girls using clips from various Disney princess movies. I have friends who are also into High School Musical. There will be a movie coming out this year on middle-school. When I first came to Canada, I was introduced to shows like Degrassi, which takes place in a school as well. I do not quite understand the American school culture. Or rather, I do understand it, but only to a certain degree in which there may be shared experiences of isolation and loneliness and awkwardness of nerds like myself navigating the whole concept of identity and self-esteem (yeah, self-esteem? What the hell was that?). Hence, the number of high-school movies I see around make me wonder why anybody would go to watch them. The people in these movies are horrible. High school is depicted as this awful place where everyone is forced to participate, whether or not they want to. (I refused to. This is why my high school experience was worse than it should h...

macon d at Stuff White People Do discussed self-segregation, and he asked PoC if they ever felt the need to self-segregate when they spend a lot of time in white-dominated spaces. He also asked if there were certain things white folks do that cause this desire to self-segregate. I'll be honest and admit that I never understood the purpose of self-segregation. In fact, I used to be extremely critical of international students at my university, because they spent so much time together, even as they were there to learn English. It seemed rather counter-productive. This is not to say all of them did - I volunteered as an ESL tutor to three lovely students, two Koreans and a Japanese, who were all about going out to do stuff with me like hang at the Art Gallery, or listen to music, or mess with vocabulary. But in general, I would see huge groups of students sticking together. (A friend of mine refers to a hallway in the university as "mini-Lebanon". I don't know if the...

So, someone on  racebending   pointed out to me the Occidental Quarterly, which is, according to the Wikipedia article,  "devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization". It aims to defend "the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples" and examine "contemporary political, social, and demographic trends that impact the posterity of Western Civilization". Because I'm a sick puppy like that, and it was very late at night, I decided to poke around the website of the web edition. The tagline reads, "Western Perspectives on Man, Culture & Civilization."  Because Man embraces all, oh no, it doesn't exclude women at all, not historically, and we really need more Western perspectives on Culture and Civilization. I guess all those philosophers stemming from Socrates aren't good enough for these fine fellows! It looked innocuous enough , although I could f...

For those who have never read Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape , I have to say, you are missing out. When I first read the book , I was deeply moved, and in its own small way, although it states truths that most of us already knew, having it all in one place distilled the facts and tendrils of knowledge into a revelation of its own.  Yes Means Yes! was edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, both famous names in the feminist blogosphere. Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, performer and activist, and has received several grants, done a lot of cool things, like found the WAM! conference. You can totes look her up . Her main site is CounterQuo.org , which is very flashy, but if you can read it, it's got really neat stuff. Although the talk was on rape prevention, how rapists operate, rape culture and other awful stuff, Jaclyn Friedman was upbeat and cheerful, presenting her argument with pop culture references, using really vernacular lang...

Via Womanist Musings, I came across this commercial for Tim Horton's. Timmy's is iconic in Canada. Given the choice between a Tim's and Starbucks, I'll pick the Tims. The hot chocolate is nice, and the donuts are okay. I've never had a meal there, although I've had a bit of soup. I think some of their advertising is misleading (like, advertising sourdough bread bowl, and the branch itself doesn't have the bread bowls. If your product isn't consistent with ads, don't show the ads). Renee makes a great point that most of Tim Horton's advertising is heavily white, although I've seen a couple of commercials with a token black man. She also points out that in this ad, the minority characters are portrayed as newcomers to Canada, and how in the history of Canada, not all PoC are newcomers. I can see her point. PoC shouldn't be portrayed as newcomers, or new immigrants all the time. It's not fair, and it does a great disservice to PoC w...

Note: I started this post back in November, so some of the ideas are kind of dated. Lately, I've been considering what "multi-culturalism" means, whether it's in fiction or in everyday life. I find that whenever discussions of multiculturalism comes up, it's very much like talking about racism, in the "we shouldn't discriminate against each other on the basis of culture! We should be free to share what we have, no matter what!" sort of way that erases actual concerns about the concept. It was only while reading Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire , by Phil Foglio that I started to put my finger on why I'm starting to really doubt whether it actually exists in real life, and why, in discussions about multiculturalism around people who aren't really knowledgeable about issues surrounding race and privilege, I always find myself uneasy, despite their good intentions. (Aside, you know, from believing that the road to Hell is paved with good inten...