this is our last chance to forgive ourselves

divascreech: it makes me physically ill that people celebrate Robert Pattinson for his “give no...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:09:20 +0100

it makes me physically ill that people celebrate Robert Pattinson for his “give no fucks” attitude but people treat Kristen Stewart like shit for hers

same thing goes for Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel for being “quirky”

like la la la la la you hate women please get away from me

guardian: Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:08:41 +0100

guardian:

Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast

A new exhibition in Edinburgh gathers the work of over 80 notable fashion photographers, including Edward Steichen, Norman Parkinson, Albert Watson and Sølve Sundsbø, to showcase their work for the publishing house.

Photograph: Clifford Coffin/Condé Nast American Vogue, June 1949

NIGEL BARKER IS THE ONLY NOTABLE FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER.

tybaltcapulets: faeriviera: medievalpoc: Unknown (formerly...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:59:59 +0100

tybaltcapulets:

faeriviera:

medievalpoc:

Unknown (formerly att. Johann Zoffany)

Dido Elizabeth Belle

Scotland (1779)

oil on canvas

Scone Palace, Perth (private collection of the Earl of Mansfield)

Although this painting falls outside the usual scope of this blog, it is one of my favorite historical European paintings. Dido Elizabeth Belle was the illegitimate daughter of Admiral Sir John Lindsay and enslaved African woman named Belle.

This painting was most likely commissioned by her father, the nephew of the Earl of Mansfield, and depicts the beautiful and vivacious Belle alongside her cousin, Elizabeth Murray.

The first time I saw this painting was in an art history classroom, accompanied by a story regarding the dehumanization of Africans in the Unites States, and the scores of visiting Americans who were scandalized by this painting. In America and several places in Europe, contemporaneous paintings always depicted people considered Black in subservient positions in relation to people considered White, if they bothered to paint them at all. To raise a bastard daughter of color alongside legitimate heirs was antithetical to American thought.

Dido Belle was raised and educated alongside the other highborn daughters of the household, and remained a favorite of the Earl and her father well into her thirties, after which an advantageous marriage was arranged.

Her position in the Earl’s household supervising the poultry yards was typical for any lady of high birth at the time, but her job overseeing the lord’s correspondence was usually a task reserved for a highly educated male clerk or scribe and is evidence of her importance and elevated rank. She received an allowance of £30 per year, more than any except the heiress herself and a sum unheard of at the time for any illegitimate daughter.

Upon Lord Mansfield’s death in 1788, Belle was furnished with a £500 lump sum in addition to a £100 annuity, as well as a suitable marriage to John Davinier, with whom she had three children. In Mansfield’s will, her status as a free person was carefully confirmed, since many would have been all too happy to divest her of her fortune.

Belle died in 1804 and was interred in St. George’s Fields, the parish to which she and her husband belonged.

My interest in this story was renewed recently when I learned that an upcoming film, Belle (currently in production), will be a dramatized biopic of Dido Elizabeth Belle’s life. The titular role will be played by South African actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

[x] [x] [x] [x]

Holy shit, I need to see this movie, this is FASCINATING!

This was filmed at my uni, I remember seeing the cast walking about and thinking that it looked a hundred shades of awesome.

Photo

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:55:51 +0100

blackandkillingit: Black Girls Killing It Shop BGKI NOW

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:54:46 +0100

blackandkillingit:

Black Girls Killing It Shop BGKI NOW

Photo

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:52:53 +0100

lotsalipstick: BOOM roasted

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:51:06 +0100

lotsalipstick:

BOOM roasted

"You’re VulCAN not Vulcan’t"

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:44:14 +0100

““You’re VulCAN not Vulcan’t””

- Jim T Kirk probably at some point (via ser-jaimelannister)

Photo

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:43:30 +0100

Marina and the Diamonds - Louis Vuitton Store Opening in...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:15:50 +0100

Marina and the Diamonds - Louis Vuitton Store Opening in Munich.

"Don’t you mean SOME men?"

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:15:02 +0100

“Don’t you mean SOME men?”

- Ancient Male Proverb (via theroguefeminist)

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:14:37 +0100

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”

- Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” (via lashleyshank)

ghostdaddotcx: Self reblogging to add a thing I...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:33:57 +0100

ghostdaddotcx:

Self reblogging to add a thing I found:

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/

The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.

For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.

@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?

A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.

The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.

BRING BACK @ANTI_RACISM_DOG.

"If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:43:52 +0100

“If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth.”

- (via damnnbiogears)

dallyingminstrel: maltair: i think that teenagers being aware of social issues like trans* people...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:47:57 +0100

dallyingminstrel:

maltair:

i think that teenagers being aware of social issues like trans* people and slut shaming and rape culture and misogyny and racism because of a dumb blogging website called tumblr shows that if the medias and politicians explained and showed those things, people would actually start to understand them and stop being close minded assholes

This is a grade A post.

Photo

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:37:28 +0100

alittlecoconuttart: [Article excerpt] New Study Shows Hillary...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:24:50 +0100

alittlecoconuttart:

[Article excerpt]

New Study Shows Hillary Clinton’s Face Makes Women More Confident

Tess VandenDolder Apr 25th at 1:07 pm

In the study individual men and women were asked to give a speech in front of a panel of six strangers. For some there was a picture of Bill Clinton on the back wall and for others there was a picture of Hillary. Overall the men spoke longer and were judged as better speakers than the women, except for the group of ladies who spoke while looking into Hillary’s baby blues. That group blew the men out of the water as far as the length of their speeches and overall confidence and success in conveying their ideas publicly.

The conclusion researchers drew from this study was that when women are exposed to powerful female role models in leadership positions they gained instant boosts in confidence and the ability to achieve at high levels. ”Female political role models can inspire women and help them cope with stressful situations that they encounter in their careers, such as public speaking,” the authors of the study wrote. ”A lack of female powerful role models leads to a vicious circle, because if women fail to take leadership positions, they also fail to provide role models for junior women to follow.”

immigrantstories: mresundance: reckonedrightly: indypendenthis...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:49:19 +0100

immigrantstories:

mresundance:

reckonedrightly:

indypendenthistory:

On Sep 13, 1944, a princess from India lay dead at Dachau concentration camp. She had been tortured by the Nazis, then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy who had gone into occupied France using the code name Madeline. She carried her transmitter from safe house to safe house with the Gestapo trailing her, providing communications for her Resistance unit.

Oh my God, yes. Let’s talk about Noor Inayat Khan.

Wireless operators in France had a life expectancy of six weeks. Noor was actively transmitting for over three times as long.

While she was in France, every other wireless operator in her network was slowly picked off until she was the last radio link between London and Paris. It was “the most dangerous and important post in France”.

She was offered a way back to Britain and refused.

In fact, in her transmissions to London, she once said that she was having the time of her life, and thanked them for giving her the opportunity to do this.

She was captured by the Gestapo, but never gave up: she made three attempt escapes. One involved asking to take a bath, insisting on being allowed to close the door to preserve her modesty, and then clambering onto the roof of the Gestapo HQ in Paris.

Her last word before being shot was, “Liberté!”

The term BAMF was coined for such persons.

She was of royal Indian descent through her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was born to nobility and came from a princely Indian Muslim family.^[He lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism. Her mother, Ora Meena Ray Baker (Ameena Begum), was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who met Inayat Khan during his travels in the United States. Ora Baker was the half-sister of American yogi and scholar Pierre Bernard, her guardian at the time she met Hazrat Inayat Khan.Noor’s brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, later became head of the Sufi Order International.

Although Noor Inayat Khan was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father, she and her brother Vilayat decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny: “I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.”

When she was captured, as the prison director testified after the war, Inayat Khan remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives.

"everyone asks me why i’m not dating…why would i want to date? i’m free to do what i want, read when..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:43:42 +0100

“everyone asks me why i’m not dating…why would i want to date? i’m free to do what i want, read when i want, cook when i want, watch tv when i want…a man would ruin that. two women together…lesbians…or just room mates, they’re equals. they do thing for each other, but there’s not one coming home and expecting you to make them dinner while you clean the house and take care of the baby, etc. my neighbors are gay men and they’re equals. it’s a gender role thing…i don’t need a man to ruin my life like that again.”

- my grandma just now (via mhysarys)

lalondes: peterpeterdoesnteatpumpkins: lalondes: i have a new...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:42:00 +0100

lalondes:

peterpeterdoesnteatpumpkins:

lalondes:

i have a new favourite twitter

Thank you, but it doesn’t just happen to women. Don’t blame all men for the stupid and inconsiderate actions of a few. Au revoir.

you’re a fucking idiot

why do men always have to ruin a good thing