This is a social construct.

Ever since the election I can’t stop thinking about social constructs. When I was in school we often joked about how first years were obsessed with the idea that gender was a social construct. It’s true, but just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it has no real world consequences.

And yet, as I see executive order after executive order passed limiting everything from immigration from predominantly muslim countries to hiring of federal employees, I can’t help but think about how we collectively create much of our own reality. Without the consent of the governed, Donald Trump is nothing but a man writing his personal opinion on some paper. Democracy doesn’t work unless we all agree to act within it’s constraints.

But this isn’t just about Donald Trump, but also the system that gave him legitimacy. It’s about capitalism, an economic system that thrives on the exploitation on low-wage and unpaid workers. It’s about how we understand success in this system. Our collective understanding of success is about financial gain and acquiring assets such as homes and vehicles. It’s about money itself. The value of stocks in the stock market is more often then not influenced by public perception of the well-being of a company. As more of our banking goes online it becomes clear that money is nothing more than numbers on a screen.

I think about this while I sit at work day after day. I think about how some days I am sick or exhausted or depressed. I think about the sunny days when I would rather be outside finding beauty in our world. I think about how if I didn’t have my job I would be able to pay rent or buy food or afford health insurance. In a capitalist system our ability to exist is literally determined by the labor we provide. It disadvantages so many women, people of color, poor folks, and people with disabilities.

So why do we agree to these structures? After all, our participation is essential to keeping these institutions powerful. What if we all chose to withdraw our consent from oppressive systems that we exist under? What would the world look like?

For the most part I think we either don’t realize our own power within these systems, or else are afraid about what follows that kind of revolution. We stay with the devil we know because we can’t imagine what a more egalitarian system would look like, or because we have achieved small success in this system and don’t want to forfeit our privileges.

And yet I think as more and more people become dissatisfied with our society, it will become our responsibility to construct new realities where we value people more than labor, and relationships more than monetary gain. Where we understand identity politics to be less about the individual and more about our collective definition of what labels represent. Where we understand how different facts and theories have been shaped by their historic context, and where we allow them to change as we do.

I think it is hard to change how we imagine the world and I think it takes a lot of time. But I also believe we all have the power to create change. Through art and theory and conversation and protest we put our ideas out into the world and allow them to germinate and be influenced by others, and slowly transform what we understand to be truth.

That is what it means to be a social construct. And idea is built by many and with it comes consequence.

Some thoughts on the election, in no particular order

1. I woke up this morning in the arms of my girlfriend, and I thought “how could anyone hate this thing we have, this sweet early morning thing we have, this warmth against my spine flowing to my heart, this love which has opened up wells inside me, so I always have more love to give?” How could they hate us?

2. My mom told me that she couldn’t remember being this distraught since JFK was shot. She’s not a very political person, but she wept when Hillary lost. I hope she sees a woman president in her lifetime.

3. I want to be empathetic to those who feel disenfranchised by American politics but I’m angry that their vote came at the expense of so many lives.

4. I want to be able to utilize my anger, but my heart is broken and I am tired.

5. I can’t stop thinking about my wrists, and how close my veins are to the surface. We are, all of us, so fragile.

6. “Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.” -Edith Wharton

7. Sometimes guardian angels are the people organizing protests and writing petitions and organizing resources and offering money and to walk people home. They are everywhere if you are looking for them.

8. We did not start “making things political.” Sodomy laws made death a punishment for being gay in America. Until 2003 you could be arrested for being gay in 14 states. When white people came to the United States they brought black slaves and committed endless atrocities against them. They committed genocide against Native Americans for land.  Disability was treated with institutionalization which was often violent. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized until the 1970s, around the same time women received the legal ability to apply for credit separately from their husbands. All of this was legal. They made our bodies political, and our ancestors had to fight for our freedom. We are still fighting. We will not stop being political until we are all liberated. (My liberation can not ever come at the expense of anyone else’s).

9. For all the disagreements I had with her, I feel for Hillary Clinton. The sexism she experienced (has experienced, is experiencing) on a national stage has been an unsettling reminder of how we value ambitious women. I hope I channel her steely perserverence. I hope somebody has hugged her and told her she matters.

10.  You matter. You are valid. You are good. You are not monstrous or disgusting. You are not dangerous, except to the heterosexist white supremecist ableist transmisogynist system. You are a brilliant offering to the world around you. Your resilience is inspiring. Your vulnerability in the face of hate is breathtaking. You are cared for and loved. It is not alright now but I will fight to make it alright to you, wherever you are.

All my love,

Marnie

Keep Your Heart Open

I’d like to apologize for the radio silence these past few weeks. It’s been a hard few weeks to be a person here in the world. Our hearts have been heavy in response to the violence in Orlando, Tel Aviv, Turkey, Istanbul, Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and I’m sure a few more places that I am missing. There is so much to say and yet so few words are forthcoming. I don’t know what I have to offer in response to these tragedies.

I am sad. I am tired. I am doing my best to help in my own small ways though it does not feel like enough. There is always a voice in my head asking “what else can I do? what else should I do? what else do I have the responsibility to do?” I am scared often for the people I love, in this world where people die because of ideological reasons, for their identities, for simply existing in public.

Sometimes I am reminded that despite the breadth of human history, there will always be questions that don’t have neat answers. I wonder if my ancestors felt this in response to the tragedies of their time. I wonder if they chose to act, or if they turned their eyes and closed their hearts, to protect themselves from the confusion and pain.

I hope to keep my heart open, even in these heart-breaking times. To be affected by injustice, even when it is not close to home. To not allow myself to be complacent. To keep helping in my small ways, and hope that if enough people chose to act in small ways, it can become large scale change. I hope that you will too. I hope you will keep talking (and shouting) about injustice, keep donating money and time, keep being kind to those around you, and choosing to accept when you are wrong.

I’ll leave this small post with some articles and a poem that I have found useful these last few weeks.

Love and peace to all of you.

Full Transcript of Jesse Williams BET Awards Speech 

Racism in America FAQ

Philando Castile Was A Role Model to Hundreds of Kids

In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club

#PulseOrlandoSyllabus

LGBTQ People Can’t Have Safe Spaces But We Still Need Community

After Attacks on Muslims Many Ask: Where is the Outpouring?

Mourning on Ramadan: Breaking My Fast With Queer Muslims After the Orlando Shooting

Love is all we have

There are no words for what happened in Orlando last night; or rather there are too many and none of them are quite right.

There is the fact that I have already seen people asking not to politicize this tragedy, saying we can not blame the hateful ideology of a presidential candidate, or gun laws for what happened. It’s true there is no one thing that convinces someone to take a gun and use it to kill people he perceives to be “different” and “wrong.” But this didn’t happen without context. There are many ifs. If he hadn’t been able to access a weapon that can kill many people in a short period of time. If he hadn’t been exposed to political agendas that say that LGBTQ folks don’t deserve basic rights and heard the underlying message that queer folks, trans folks, and people of color don’t matter and don’t deserve to be alive. If if if.

There is the grief for the queer folks who died while celebrating their identities. It’s pride month. It was latin night at Pulse. It is a time of joy and community and conversation about how to make our communities stronger. There is grief for the families and loved ones of these queer folks, and the knowledge that family often looks different in the queer community. There is imagining the fear of not knowing if someone you love was hurt because you’re not “next of kin” on government forms.

There is anger that this could happen. Why did this fucking happen? Why did this have to happen? Why has this been happening in smaller, less publicized ways for years and why hasn’t it been stopped? Why is my queerness perceived as such a threat that people debate if me and my community deserve basic rights and safety? Why are trans women considered threats when they want to pee, when they are part of a community that constantly has to worry for it’s own safety?

There is fear for those I love, for copycat attacks that will follow, for losing more queer people, who are just trying to live.

There is a sense of impotence for what I can not change, and for the privilege I have that means I am less at risk for these kinds of attacks because I am white and middle class and cisgender.

And there is love. Love for my queer community. Love for the people who are already organizing vigils and donating blood and writing their representatives. Love for the others afraid for their own safety. Love for the grieving and the bereft. Love for Muslim folks in the U.S. (especially LGBTQ+ Muslim folk) who already are the scapegoats for so many tragedies.

It can feel trite to quote Martin Luther King Jr but since reading about the shooting, what has circled in my brain is this:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

We have to continue to love each other as hard as we possibly can. The root of justice is love. The root of our community has always been love. In heartbreaking times like this, love is all we have.

Radical Femininity and Motherhood in the Hunger Games

This article contains some spoilers for Mockingjay Part 2.

Since the beginning of The Hunger Games Trilogy Katniss has been the kind of heroine that I had been waiting to see grace the big screen. Not just a Strong Female Character™, Katniss’s strength came from her natural empathy and fierce protectiveness of those she loved. In a world based around performance, her authenticity is what presented a threat to the Capitol, and her inability to hide what she was feeling is what rallied people to her. In what other blockbuster film do we see a young woman whose bravery and love is used to start a revolution?

Katniss manages to be both feminine and strong without falling into the common film tropes of the overly sexualized female character (see Black Widow in Iron Man) or the Strong Woman who only portrays masculine ideals of strength (again, see Black Widow). Katniss squeals when her stylist Cinna designs her a beautiful dress, and also enjoys the practical clothes he had designed for her  when she joins the resistance. She hunts and fights, but also has an innate sense of humanity that makes her resistant to taking a life unless it is absolutely necessary. She feels guilty for the lives she takes, and is enraged when she sees others killing indiscriminately. She fights with Gale, her best friend and love interest, when he discusses war tactics that unnecessarily kill civilians. She also cuts ties with the resistance when she believes they killed children (including her sister, Prim) for their own gain.

Watching the films we lose some of Katniss’s internal monologue from the books, but the other choices made by the filmmakers, as well as Jennifer Lawrence’s compelling performance allow us to follow Katniss’s internal struggle as she copes with her trauma from her two rounds in the Hunger Games, as well as the loss of her district, her sister, and temporarily Peeta. By the end of both the books and the movies, Katniss is grieving. She has nightmares and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her relationship with Peeta is built around the idea of healing. The scene where he plants primroses for her is a perfect example of encouraging Katniss to move forward without having to forget what happened to her. Very rarely do we see such a dynamic portrayal of grief and mental illness in a blockbuster like The Hunger Games.

Maybe that’s why the scene where Katniss appears as a mother feels like such a let down.

The Katniss that we see, in her floral dress smiling down at her baby didn’t feel like the same woman I had been following for 3 books and 4 movies. She felt purposely softened, as if her radical femininity and her trauma had been erased by motherhood. 

As S.E. Smith of Bitch Media put it “As a revolutionary, Katniss is a brave and impressive figure. As a mother, she’s just as strong—mothering itself is revolutionary—but the scene has a sense of literally and figuratively putting her out to pasture. Your work here is done, the scene implies, and so too is your value and interest as a human being.”

One of the tropes of the Strong Female Character is that their strength is defined by masculine stereotypes of strength, such as stoicism and violence. Katniss is forced to embody these traits for most of the series, but what makes The Hunger Games unique  is that is always shows how doing these things affects Katniss emotionally. She has nightmares. When she finds out she has to return to the games in Catching Fire she blacks out and breaks into a strange house. Throughout the books she asserts frequently that she never wants to have children and subject them to the trauma she went through. Katniss’s grief is always palpable and serves as a commentary on how war and violence can affect people. In Mockingjay it is made clear that she isn’t the only victor of the Hunger Games to experience trauma, long after the games have finished. Her mentor Haymitch turns to alcohol, several of the other victors are heavy drug users. In the epilogue of the book Mockingjay, Katniss says it took her 15 years to agree to have children with Peeta, and that she still uses coping mechanisms to get through the trauma of what she has experienced.

The final scene of the Mockingjay Part II film fell flat for me because it attempted to gloss over an interesting and honest portrayal of trauma. Instead it chose a shot of a young Katniss smiling while telling her infant child about the nightmares she has, nightmares that epitomize her worst fears for her children. It was a scene that emphasized the softest parts of Katniss’s femininity, instead of giving us the opportunity to see the strength it took for her to decide to have a family, and the fierce protectiveness she would undoubtedly embody as a mother.

From a film series that showed us unexpected empathy in a violent time, I was hoping to see an equally revolutionary understanding of recovery, femininity, and motherhood in a time of peace. On that front Mockingjay Part II did not deliver.

Grateful

November has been rough.

It’s become hard to look at a computer or open a newspaper without finding a new example or terror and hate, a new story to grieve. Our hearts here are going out to Baghdad, Beirut, Paris, the students of Mizzou, the families of the Black Lives Matter activists who were shot this Monday night, the continuous plight of the Syrian Refugees, and the staff and patients of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, as well as Planned Parenthood offices all over the country.

Honestly it can feel like  a lot of places for a heart to be at once.

How do we as feminists and social justice advocates cope with living in a world where it feels like we are facing a new tragedy every day, some of which target our personal identities? How do we sit with the grief for ourselves and for humanity in general? How, this Thanksgiving, do we find anything to be grateful for?

I haven’t found an answer that feels good for me yet. Often I feel split between the desire to join the dialogue and the understanding that my voice doesn’t need to be the most elevated one. Sometimes the only way it feels possible to stay sane is to disengage, but I don’t want to be someone who is apathetic in the face of tragedy. I also know that being able to disengage, especially for issues surrounding racial injustice and Syrian refugees, is rooted in the privilege I have as a white American.

Despite all the terror we have seen or experienced this year, I do feel we have a lot to be grateful for. I am thankful for my communities, where I have found love and support during my own hard times, and anger and solidarity during large scale tragedy. I am forever grateful to my friends and mentors who have educated me and inspired me and taught me how to better my own understanding of social justice.

I am thankful for the activists. I’m thankful for the folks who create apps and petitions and organize protests, and who believe in a better world. I’m thankful for the folks who have reported the facts about injustice being perpetrated, whether it was on Twitter or in newspapers. Without them none of the revolutionary work we have seen this year could have been possible.

I’m also thankful for grief and for anger because feeling them means I have loved. I have opened my heart to the idea of a just world and I continue to believe it can exist.

Below are some ways you can get involved with some of the movements discussed in my blog post.

Write to your Governor and members of Congress to support refugee resettlement: http://cqrcengage.com/theirc/app/write-a-letter?0&engagementId=146418

Download Share the Meal to provide meals for Syrian refugees: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/app-lets-users-share-meals-syrian-children-151112200450748.html

Get involved with Planned Parenthood: https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/?_ga=1.148159799.1098778570.1448726367

Get involved with Black Lives Matter: http://blacklivesmatter.com/getinvolved/

Show up for Racial Justice (SURJ): http://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/stand_with_blm_mn?sp_ref=162720005.300.17012.f.71716.2