Two blogs I'm really into right now: Kink Praxis and This Is Not About Adoption. The first one is by Corey Alexander, who is "a white queer polyamorous transgender stone butch. I am invested in a concept of sex positivity that honors desire, multiplicity and complexity, embodied wholeness, critical analysis, and self determination." All the links Corey drops are amazing -- there's a lot of reblogs -- and along with s.e. smith's blog, it's become my most consistently great reading.
"The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white."JMZ has been long touting Paris is Burning, a documentary about the minority transgender community, and it popped up on Kink Praxis the other day too, so that's being moved right up my Netflix queue. I mean, as soon as I get done with Jackie Brown, which I've possibly never fully seen. Odd considering I normally just blindly watch any Tarantino film. Grantland did a career retrospective of Pam Grier and it made me realize I'd never seen a single blaxploitation film. Like ever.
-James Baldwin, "On Language, Race, and the Black Writer"-
Oh, and AMR put me onto Ouran High School Host Club, this anime that is right up my alley as it, minor spoiler alert (highlight if you want), is about a girl posing as a guy as she joins a host club to seduce female students. I haven't watched much anime since I tore through Fullmetal Alchemist but I should really get on it. The problem is that I know I get sucked into series and I can't stop once started. Speaking of which, Mad Men season six is right around the corner. I am still pissed off that Peggy left SCDP but I'll give the show some leeway. More Peggy and Don, please! (But not in that way.)
Oh and not to forget about This Is Not Adoption. I don't know if it's part of an upcoming book or if it's already done and these are excerpts, but author Matthew Salesses is a Korean-American adoptee and his posts explore his story, his relationship with his adoptive parents, and perhaps eventually, his reunion biological parents.
"I arrived a skinny, ill, voiceless child. My parents had waited a long time to have kids. They had wanted badly to have kids of their own, but were unable. I think it was friends of theirs who had suggested Korean adoption -- what did my parents think when they saw me? Did they think they had been ripped off? Like coming home from the outlets and finding that what you picked out so cautiously was already broken?"The only real research I did on EC -- unless reading US Weekly counts as research -- was to look into adoption stories and statistics and histories. I wish I had found a blog like this then, it would have been fantastic.
-Adjustments 2-
Salesses also writes for the Rumpus and his most recent article, "PSY the Clown vs PSY the 'Anti-American,'" had me up in arms about all the references to his Korean wife, as I initially read the article as if the author was white. (I didn't look at the byline.) When I realized it was Salesses, I had to restart from the beginning to place myself. Then I just read it with a tilted, and sad, eye toward his self loathing.
I'm a little over stories about Asians discovering their Asian-ness, but there are just so many around since those are the ones that get any sort of mainstream traction. Actually, what I should be more concerned about is my complete inability to take seriously anyone writing about something unless they are from that community. I just dimiss them immediately, which is sort of a reverse -sim of some sort. Thus the overreaction to all the perceived (over)references to "my wife is Korean so..."
It's definitely becoming a problem.
Took a break and just read Salesses' pieces on Jeremy Lin. The comments section is a doozy. And Salesses' Guernica story, "High Schools, or How to Be Asian American," is quite good also. Like I said, I'm a fan.
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