El constante: El sur es salvaje

Los tours que doy suelen ser tierra fertíl para intercambios de ideas. A pesar de los deseos de un jefe trabajo, hablo críticamente del gobierno, de militarismo, de imperialismo de UNESCO, de todo que sea relevante y no amoroso. Despues de cachar mi onda, los integrantes, que son normalmente más pro por  ser un tour alternativo, siempre se apuran a preguntarme lo dificil que es ser homosexual y vivir acá, en Valparaiso, Chile, Latinolandia.

Otro momento en la vida de los 5% que nos llama a la tarea de explicarles a los pesados como realmente funciona el mundo.

Miren, no soy homosexual. Soy algo mucho más divertido y, por eso, peligroso.

Segundo, cuando me preguntan, esperando una respuesta que confirma que son mas civilizados, mas progresados, están activamente re-imaginando y ignorando la violenta historia de la conquista.

Cuando los europeos llegaron a las americas, empezaron al tiro a difundir su manera de vida, justificando las muertes, la explotación y el robo con acusaciones de que los amerindios eran poseidos por el diablo. Una parte importante de las justficaciones fue el relativamente igualtario modo de vida entre los sexos, la falta de abuso (¨disciplina¨) infantil y la aceptacion de actos homosexuales.

Por eso el papa pudo aprobar de la conquista. Por eso los frances jesuitas pudieron, sin pudor, decirles a los amerindios en la tierra que es actualmente Canada que pegaran a sus hijos y sus esposas para ser civilizados y buen compañeros de comercio. Por eso, los europeos inventaron las cazadas de las brujas, para demonizar mujeres, permitir la violacion y dividir la resistencia.

Fue en este momento, con la invencion, la violenta imposicion y la resistencia del capitalismo que simultaneamente se nacio la heteronorma, y su sistema de genero con el que seguimos hasta hoy dia. No solamente inventaron esta plaga y obligaron a los pobres de europa a conformarse con las nuevas normas del sexo, genero y epxlotacion, sino, la gente mas arrogante de la historia del mundo lo difundio con violencia y fuerza por todas partes del mundo.

Entonces, cuando los europeas me preguntan, con penita en los ojos por mi pobre existencia queer aca en el sur, le explico. Le explico que en el verano de 2011, el ejercito de los estados unidos participó en la marcha de orgullo gay en Amsterdam, el capital mundial para hombres homosexuales, en el ´continente más progresista´ del mundo. Le explico que nos subestiman por estar influidas por las misma heteronormas que ellos, los europeos, forzaron en las mentes, los cuerpos y en el espacio mismo de esta tierra. Le explico que no quiero vivir en un conmtinente que ha violado todo el mundo y depsues lo subestima por ser tan violado. No quiero vivir en un pais con una poblacion de disidentes sexuales dividos otra vez por el capitalismo, diciendoles a los hombres homosexuales ricos que son aceptables, pero que las relaciones con mas personas, o que entiended el sexo como algo que no sea una comodidad todavia son diablos.

No, gracias, europa. No quiero tu aceptacion precaria de la homosexualidad normativa. No quiero tu hipocresia. No quiero vivr en un pais que invadio el mundo arabe por homosexual hace cince siglos y ahora, de nuevo, por no tolerar los homosexuales.

Yo quiero mi existencia queer, revolucionaria, amoratoria.



Interesadx en aprender mas??  Pueden leer Caliban y la bruja por Silvia Federici. Recomendadisimo!! Disponible gratis y completo http://calibanylabruja.blogspot.com/

El gran mito de la economia estable

Me detuve al lado de un mural de una bandera chilena, flotando y abrazando a Salvador Allende y, escondida en un rincon, a una familia Mapuche.

¨De hecho, hoy dia, seguimos usando la misma constitucion de Pinochet´ Le explque al grupo de turistas en Valparaiso.

Al tiro, me interrumpio el holandes con su pija metalica que saca fotos. Trabaja y vive en Santiasco.  ´No quier decir que apoyaria al pinochet, pero si no fuese por el, no tendriamos la economia estable que tenemos aca en Chile´

Gracias a la diosa de todo Jazzy que habia dos argentinas ´No estoy de acuerdo´ le cortó.

STOP

Felicitaciones, gringo pesado. Me alegro que trabajes y que tengas dinero para meterselo a tu mujer para que te siga folloando pero todavia no siento que vala la pena.

Respiro profundo

Lo que quiero decir es que no estoy de acuerdo tampoco. No estoy de acuerdo con la economia, con el sistema de genero implicado, con el imperialismo intrinsico ni que sea ´estable´ Ademas de estar mal enfocodo, es una pura mentira.

Cuando dijo ´estable´repitio un mito peligroso y desde una perspectiva burgues. La idea de que la econom,ia es estable tiene base en el BIP creciente. Aun asi, me resulta imposible ignorar la desigualded que esta ´estabilidad´ha generado. Chile, permanece mas desigual que los EEUU, famoso por su ricos acumuladores. Seguna una encuesta recien de Encuesta de Caracterización Socieconómica Nacional (CASEN), la taza de pobreza amentó de 13.7 en 2006 a 15.1 en 2009. Este hombre, con su privilegio de raza y nacionalidad, no experimenta esta pobreza. A lo mejor, nunca la ve tampoco, dado el urbanismo de Santiasco.

Con desigualad creciente, la economia esta lejos de estable por muchos. En un mundo donde la mayoria de lxs vecinxs no pueden visitar al medico, dado lo deficiente del sistema, y otros vecinos pueden ser dueños de varios diarios, colegios, etc. es imposible decir que Chile tiene una economia estable.

 Podemos decir que para los ricos, la eocnomia es fantastica. Podemoes decir que para la gente en el norte, la ecnomia chiilena es fantasica. Podemos decir que para los hombre blancos heterosexuales con cuerpos considerados normales, la economia es un super negocio.

No podemos decir que sea estable para las mujeres que se creen dependientes de sus maridos abusivos. No podemos decir que sea estable para los mapuches, a quienes el estado sigue violenciando.No es esable ni para lxs desocupadxs ni para lxs endeudadxs.

El mito de la economia estable no es algo de rescatar de la dictadura (a quien le interesaria rescatar cosas de este tiempo) sino una continuacion de la injusticia misma que la gente chilena sufrio. La guerra interna fue una guerra para que los ricos tuvieran plata, diamantes, oro y todos los otros chiches. No es suficiente que ellos tengan, tambien tienen que impedir que tengamos nosotrxs acceso a lo mas basico para crear las clases socio-economicas en si. Con la historia y la actualidad de imperialismo, de heterosexismo, de sexismo, de desigualdad, no podemos decir que nosotras, las gordas, las trabajadoas vivimos en una ecnoomia estable. Fortalezcanse contra este mnito. Difundan, compartan.

Notes on Jazzy/Notas sobre lo Jazzy

While no one can officially trace the adaptation of the word "Jazzy" to its present use, it has recently come to represent an aesthetic, a philosophy of quotidian performance and celebration.  The style also represents a life style, a guiding perspective for how to approach everything. A brave, unwittingly obnoxious, necessary- for-survival, sometimes conscious decision to fucking do it!

Objects and their significations, as an accurate understanding of Judith Butler}s performativity suggests, make sense in relation, not in isolation. The stories we weave with our symbols, our actions, our wielding of power and our bodies, are based on relationships and interactions. Jazzy can therefore not be found in objects, but rather in relational realities. For instance, a wig made out of the ape from a VHS, curled and noisy, can be an extremely Jazzy object, say on a TransStar or while CAMPing. It is, however, far form jazzy if it is used as a racist Halloween costume.

Jazzy, like jazz historically, is a queered form of fierce resistance whose current development I have witnessed on three continents. It deals with creating power, with appropriating the technologies of discourse and knowledge creation and reformatting our social wiring. Examples of Jazzy include, but are not limited to:

Selling baked goods from your house
Wearing a sparkly shirt as the only way to get through the day
Sewing a vagina on all your pants
Sending a variety dear ones handmade crafts
Sliding between gender expressions
Being honest
Inviting the excluded, from conversations, from meals, from sex
Swaying hips
Keychains with cat faces
80´s style tights with numbers on them at 9 am
Working without a boss (not because you`re the best)
Learning eagerly
Teaching humbley

_--------------------------------Castellano---------------------------------------------------

Mientras que nadia puede trozar la adaptación de la palabra Jazzy a su uso actual, recién llegó a representar un estético, una filosofia de performance y celebración cotidiana. También representa un estilo de vida, una perspectiva referente por como aproximarse a todo. Una decisión valiente, a veces inconsciente, necesaria-para-sobrevivir, a hacerlo como la gente!

Objetos y sus significados, como sugiere una comprension de la teoria de la performatividad de Judith Butler, tienen sentido en relación, pero no aislados. Las historias que tejemos con nuestros símbolos, acciones, ejecucion de poder y los cuerpos, tienen base en relaciones e interacciones. Jazzy, entonces, se encuentra en realidades relacionales, en vez de en los objetos mismos. Por ejemplo, una peluka hecha de la cinta de una VHS, rizada y ruidosa, puede ser extremamente Jazzy, ponele, ne la cabeza de un TranStar o mientras mariconeando. Sin embargo, esta lñejos de Jazzy cuando se usa como parte de un disfraz racista para Halloween.

Jazzy, como jazz historicamente, es una forma QUEERiada de resistencia furiosa, cuyo desarrollo actual he visto en tres continentes. Tiene que ver con crear poder, apropriar las tecnologias del discurso y de la creacion del saber y reformatear nuestro cableado social. Ejemplos de lo Jazzy incluyen pero no est{an limitados a lo siguiente:


Vender artesania desde su casa
Llevar una camisa brillante como la unica forma que tiene para safar
Coser una vagiun en todos sus pantalones
Enviarles regalos hechos de mano a sus queridxs
Deslizandose entre expresiones de genero
Ser honestx
Invitar lxs excluidxs a conversaciones, a once, a sexo
Menearse las caderas
Llaveros con caritas de gatxs sus bolsas de comida
Llevar calzas ochentosas que tienen numeros en la madrugada
Trabajar sin jefe
Aprender con ganas
Enseñar con humildad

¨I need to raise your rent...in order to survive¨ she told me in between mouthfuls of  fish. Literally.  A day after buying a motorcycle. Literally.

¨This is not a place for politics.¨ She told me when I wanted to watch a queer movie.

You´re not poor. Everything is political. I hate you .

Photo round up

Apropriación del estilo de la clase obrero: tener dinero es hacer violencia

Empleo y escucho criticas denunciando las tendencias modernas de apropriación del estilo de la clase obrero por parte de los ricos culeados. A menudo, la respuesta es que es la mejor opcion que hay, que utilizar o crear un estilo prpio a los burgueses es hasta más violento.  Voy a esquivar esta dualidad, esta manera de enmarcar la conversacion entre dos opciones y si bien destacar lo que la conversacion expuesta: que el hecho de ser rico es un acto violento  y todo de lo que uno hace, siendo rico, solamente puede expresar esta violencia.

Al parecer, llevar guante y botas de lana, a pesar de tu sueldo personal que podría alojar una familia entera, es una acto inofensivo o hasta uno de solidaridad con los con menos recursos materiales. Despues de todo, es una manera de normalizar y quitar la estigma de estilos. Si los ricos eligen a llevar la misma ropa que los pobres tienen que llevar, asi podemos empezar a borrar las líneas entre las clases sociales.  Parece una buena manera de solidarizar con la clase obrera.

Vale destecar un par de misconcepciones importantes en este argumento. Primero, hay que entender que son pocos los pobres que no tienen opciones para vestirse y que tienen que recurrirse a ciertos estilos y prendas. Tienen agencia y escogen a vestirse como manera de expresarse. Pensarlo de otra manera muestra una falta severa de respeto para la gente que suele ser la mas resistente y creativa de nuestras sociedades.

El segundo punto que deseo destacar expande a partir del otro punto. La actitud de los que se piensan los salvadores de los pobres por haber intentado a "normalizar" sus estilos es paternalistica y hace daño. Segun los estudios de movimientos sociales, estilo es una manera de luchar contra, de expresar desacuerdo con poder. El negro de los punks. El maquillaje de los queers. Las pijamas en publico de los pobres. Son todas maneras legitimas de expresar descontento. Cuando los ricos eligen a apropiar los estilos de la clase obrera, estan haciendo uso de sus privilegios para depoliticar la vida cotidiana, para quitar la agencia y la voz directamente de la garganta de los pobres. No es una manera de solidarizar. Es una manera de silenciar.

Si adoptando los estilos del Otro es un acto de violencia, se puede pensar que les queda un sola opcion: crear  y utilizar estilo propio a la clase burguesa. No necesitamos pensar tanto para darnos cuenta de que  esa tendencia ya es violenta. Profundiza la segregación de la sociedad. Contribuye a hiper consumerismo y a consumo conspicuo. Con el poder de dinero, es inevitable que los estilos que llevan ricos son y serán manchados con todo el residuo reflejado en la sociedad misma que tiene un base importante en la distincion de las clases.

Entonces, que hacemos? Que hacen? Si los ricos no pueden vestirse sin violencia, es cierto que tienen que hacer violencia? Yo digo que sí. Mientras sean ricos no hay posibilidad de no hacer violencia. Pero, no se preocupen ricos del mundo porque hay maneras de quitar la violencia de sus acciones: dejar de ser ricos. se puede cumplir con esa meta en varias, pero no en cualquiera, forma. Es recomendable darles dinero directamente, y no a traves de una organizacion "sin funes de lucro". Es avisable usar el dinero para instalar instituciones de las que no serás un líder. Las pobres, las gordas y las putas tienen que ser las personas mas importantes en estas organizaciones. En resumen, hay que compartir sus privilegios socials y materiales. Corto de eso, seguirán haciendo violencia diariamente.

Yes, the Rectum is a Grave: Shame, Trauma and Breeding

Shame and trauma are integral themes in queer theory, as well as sociological studies of sexual minorities, and with good reason. Knowing that shame plays a role is, however, very different from understanding how it functions. Shame works both as a despised position and as a desired emotion. It leads to teenage self-cutting alone in bedrooms and to six-packs abs floating down canals in Amsterdam.

In the subculture identified and discussed in Tim Dean’s piece, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and Giftgiving,” the desire to experience shame and trauma is a pervasive, defining and motivating force. This group of people and this activity partially accomplish and complicate both Leo Bersani’s and Michel Foucault’s calls to action in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, respectively. Despite Bersani’s claims that his writing serves as a critique of Foucault’s redemptive theories of sexuality, their positions on sex have overlapping assumptions and similar goals in some cases. I will use Dean’s piece to illuminate their differences and agreements, as well as to add to the discussion of the relation between penetration, shame and politics articulated in the aforementioned works as well as by Michael Warner in “The Trouble with Normal,” and Ann Cvetkovich in “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities.”

Bugchasing, giftgiving and barebacking, the activities at the center of Dean’s piece, are the defining activities of a specific “breeding” subculture. Barebacking is the practice of having sex without a condom out of a desire for enhanced pleasure, to reassure one’s constantly-threatened masculinity, or out of forgetfulness. While this interaction looks the same as bugchasing and giftgiving, as all are forms of unprotected sex, they differ in their motivation: giftgiving and bugchasing involve the deliberate transmission of HIV among gay men, which is the central activity in a subculture that has its own terms, practices and values.

Dean notes in his piece the values that are created through this breeding subculture. Arguing that breeding culture has formed in opposition to values and norms of both the heterosexual and homosexual communities, he argues the culture reimagines “kinship” through serostatus, which creates “ostensibly permanent forms of bodily and communal affiliation.”¹ He connects this rebellion against gay norms with the increasing acceptance of gay life, as evidenced by gay marriage and adoption, even asking the reader to “conceive of exchanging bodily fluids as a viable alternative to exchanging wedding rings.”² These behaviors and this subculture constitute newly created sexual identities, and, in this regard, are creative and shamed.

Creative rebellions against dominant sexual discourse are exactly what Bersani requests in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In this piece, he identifies the horror of AIDS crisis as an opportunity to shame homosexuals into “welcoming the return to monogamy”³--something he advises gay men to avoid. In calling for gay men (and presumably others) to rebel against sexual regimes, he is also calling for an embrace of the pleasures and value of shame and trauma he sees as inherent to penetrative sex.⁴ Bersani sees his piece as a critique of the “general enterprise” of the “redemptive reinvention of sex.”⁵ Because he sees sex as inherently traumatic, self- shattering and antisocial, our best option, accordingly, is simply to embrace the these seemingly negative aspects of sex as the pleasures that our bodies constantly desire.

While Bersani positions himself in opposition to Foucault’s call to continually discover the pleasures of the body, they actually share many assumptions and prescriptions. They both end their pieces with calls to action, requesting an embrace of pleasures; even those that may at first not seem like pleasures. As an integral part of this appeal, they both advocate for a destruction of the self: Bersani by connecting the “strong appeal of powerlessness” with the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” inherent in penetration,⁶ and Foucault in his call for to leave behind our sexualities and instead inhabit only our bodies. Believing that sex has inherent value,⁷ they both argue for the removal of moralism in order to allow for the full pleasures of the body. While it is true that Foucault, unlike Bersani, imagines a time before sex became a stigmatizing act, Bersani’s call for embracing shame can at times be a route to realizing Foucault’s utopian vision.

Breeding culture, as a group which embraces the pleasures of trauma and shame as described by Bersani, represents a fulfillment, and complication of many of the aspects of Foucault’s and Bersani’s prescriptions for sex. Bersani points out that while penetration has always functioned as the “grave” for the “masculine ideal of proud subjectivity … AIDS literalizes that potential,” as well as contributing to the rectum’s symbolic status as such.⁸ In contrast, in Dean’s piece, being seropositive comes to be one “humiliation” that proves your “masculine status” within the bareback community, as evidence of having endured “physical ordeals.”⁹ While breeders fulfill his call to embrace shame (of being seropositive) they do so in a way that reinscribes masculinity, rather than shatters it.

The practice of conversion parties, in which one person would be penetrated by many HIV-positive men,¹⁰ speaks to Bersani’s belief of sex as anti-social and to the comparisons of paranoia surrounding 19^th century prostitutes. To Bersani, sex is antisocial, riddled with power dymanics and “anticommunal.”¹¹ For breeders, being converted by multiple partners is a communal act that is at once an antisocial auto-displacement away from mainstream values and society, as well as initiation into a “community of outlaws”¹² that spans generations. In choosing to practice seroconversion in groups, breeders are seemingly in agreement with Bersani’s prescription to resist the monogamy that the AIDS crisis and its representations encourage.¹³ This practice also reflects onto representations of 19^th century prostitutes, where multiple orgasms, “an unquenchable appetite,” and “the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,”¹⁴ all factor into societal perceptions of them. The communal nature of their sexual activities adds to the shame and trauma breeders strive to endure.

Ann Cvetkovich, in “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities,” adds to our understanding of trauma, how one can embrace it and the multiple meanings of penetrations. Cvetkovich asks the reader to imagine that any single sex act (i.e. phallic penetration) may have more than one social meaning.¹⁵ One of the meanings that can inspire trauma is the breach of boundaries, both of the mental and physical shells.¹⁶ Two additional routes to inspiring trauma are the penetrated’s feeling of being used solely for the pleasure of the penetrator and the unknowability that creative and newly forming sexual identities inhabit.

Effectively and persuasively, Michael Warner asks us to understand shame as a social process, involving politics and in-group purification, as well as a way of unifying a subculture. Warner helps articulate the trauma associated with social exclusion to citizenship, as caused by¹⁷ unknowability, but he also believes this shame “intensifies the oscillation of aversion and fascination,” ¹⁸ signaling that shaming another is a product of curiosity. By focusing on identity, rather than the politics of shame, the LGBT movement , he writes, have used shame to engage in “in-group purification,” allowing shame to be an adhesive force for queer subcommunties, functioning similarly as it does for LGBTQ generally.¹⁹

Although Dean does not examine shame or trauma in any serious way, both Cvetkovich and Warner can help us understand how integrally shame functions in breeding culture. Breeding subculture, like all sexual identities, is historically contingent; in this case, most obviously upon the AIDS crisis. Bugchasing is a new phenomenon that seems completely at ends with many of society’s seemingly core values. For this reason, bugchasing is on the edge of knowability. For many, to imagine anything but revulsion to multiple HIV-positive semen samples swimming around inside one’s body, or even to anal sex, seems impossible.

Trauma as a breach of boundaries has multiple iterations in breeding culture. One is the desire for penetration expressed by the bugchasers. Another is the breech of the healthy subject; HIV runs through the blood, deteriorating the entire body: it is fully penetrative of the body and the mind. The lack of condom also serves as a way to secure the trauma by dissolving barriers, or as one bugchaser, quoted in Dean’s piece, put it:

Over and over, I asked myself why it was so appealing for me to get fucked without a condom. I'm a bottom, and I honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me with or without a condom. It feels the same to me. Yet I still didn't want the barrier, and it really disturbed me that I didn't know why.²⁰

The surface sensations have nothing to do with why this particular barebacker chooses to disregard the condom. The multiple barriers being broken inspire multiple sources of pleasure via shame and trauma.

Another route to trauma, which the bugchasers seemingly invert, is when “the bottom is constructed as humiliated by or used for the pleasure of the person doing the fucking or penetrating.”²¹ Butch-femme discourse on this matter emphasizes the potential give and take of penetration and the power that being the penetrated can entail.²² Breeding culture signifies the power of penetration slightly differently. The terms “bugchasing” for the penetrated and “giftgiving” for the penetrator construct the “bottom” as the desiring subject and the “top” as fucking to satisfy the desires of his partner. The penetrated, Dean writes, “gets to enjoy the men, sexually possessing them all…”²³ In breeding culture, being penetrated is the crème de la crème, partially because it is more likely to result in seroconversion, and thus elevated status in the community.

The HIV virus has created stigmatized identities. Bersani points out that the AIDS crisis has given new cultural legitimacy to the persecution of homosexuals, many of whom had entered mainstream normalcy.²⁴ This association of homosexuals and AIDS led to panicked in-group purification²⁵—changing sexual practices, identity distancing, etc. Homosexuals with AIDS have come to be seen as a separate class from HIV-negative homosexuals. This construction allows for HIV-positive semen to carry significance along with the virus. The trauma associated with ostracization from what was one’s community, is exactly what breeders are striving for as they rebel against ethical norms associated with mainstream U.S. culture and mainstream gay culture.

An analysis of how embracing trauma and shame functions in breeding culture has many things to teach us with regard to the creative fulfillment of sexual pleasures. One is a greater appreciation of the multiple meanings of penetration. Here, the penetrated is masculine, has access to others’ bodies, and is the receiver of, not only the phallus, but also pleasure and the “gift.” Because this particular expression of sexuality has little to do with bodily pleasures (as evidenced by the quote above: I honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me with or without a condom. It feels the same to me.”) it remains firmly in the field of sexuality, and thus not in line with Foucault’s dream of a world without sexuality, that would focus on pleasures. The practice does, however, square with Bersani’s calls for creative ways to embrace the inherent shame of sexuality. Although breeders in ways reject his argument that being penetrated necessarily means humiliation, they do seek to enjoy that humiliation in other manners. Whether or not these theorists would approve of these specific desires, or if they would see them as in line with their aspirations for sexuality is indeterminable from these essays, given the relative youth and just-barely-thinkability of these manifestations.

1 Tim Dean, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and Giftgiving,” (University of Massachusetts Review: 2009) pg 82.

2 Ibid.

3 Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Homos (Harvard University Press: 1996) pg. 218

4 Bersani, 216.

5 Ibid, 215

6 Ibid, 217

7 Bersani, 217, 222

8 Bersani, 222

9 Dean, 85

10 Dean, 85

11 Bersani, 215

12 Dean, 82

13 Bersani, 218

14 Bersani, 211-2

15 Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme sexualities,” in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University Press:2003)

16 Ibid, 56

17 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York (The Free Press: 1999), Pg 7. I am using “citizenship” broadly to refer to access to goods, resources and cultural legitimacy.

18 Ibid, 23

19 Ibid, 31-2, 34-6

20 Dean, 83

21 Cvetkovich, 59

22 Ibid, 59-60

23 Dean, 88

24 Bersani 203-4

25 Warner, 32

Esta semana en creatividad culinaristica

Recien llegamos a nuestra casita y la tierra ya nos tembló. La onda, las fantasmas nos invaden desde la mañana hasta la mañana. Con la vibraciones vienen angustia, fruto, miradas hacia adelante y magia. La magia que fluye es extension de los instintos, que comunica con lpos cuerpos, con redes, con el espacio y las vibraciones. Es el base de comunicacion, del flujo y de la creacion.

Estamos saltando. Como cabritas sin preocuparnos (de la caida)

proyectos abundantes

Por el momento te dejo una pizca de jugo seductor en la lengua. El proyecto mas realizado, que ha rendido el mas placer hasta entonces es la comida. Como con todos los placeres, andamos experimentando, compartiendo, entorpezando y epandiendo. Miauw!!!

1. Nos encantra la mezcla de salado y dulce. Lo complejo hace dificil entenderlo y la lengua rezuma y expande en busqueda --> Salteamos peras con salsa de soja. Funciono como el clave contrasto cuando lo juntamos con carne de soja y calabaza aromatizadas con comino. Con tantos sabores que complimentan, la boca no se aburre do los placeres. prrruuaa

2. Despues del ejercico de la mañana, tuvimos de aterrizarnos. El vuelo desde la cama hasta la cocina fue duro y lo teniamos presente cuando inventamos panqueques con harina tostada. El sabor terroso fue super rico con la salsa de chocolate casera pero la magia de la cosa (como mucha mucha magia) aun no ha sido totalmente explorada. Lo imaginamos con queso, flotando en una rica sopa de espinaca, o enrollados con champignones.  Esperen ver esta cosa estrenar en las cenas creativas de LAB 00

3. Y en la tradicion chilena, estamos haciendo mermelada de alcayota. El proceso dura varios die pero vamos a temrinar con algo super rico. Le echamos gengibre y amaretto encima de la receta normal. Ademas guardmos un  trozo (!) para experimentar despues. Nadie sabe todavia

My family is fucked. Thank the gods!

My family is fucked. Few caveats break my family’s impressive streak of failings. Six years into my life, my mom divorced my abusive, alcoholic, crack-addicted dad, whose presence is infrequent and dreaded. Driven mad by a lifetime of stress from parental and spousal abuse as well as raising four kids alone, my mom is depressed, anxious and lonely. My older brother, Jake, is currently working as a grunt at an arcade because he knew better than to finish his first semester of Community College. Luke and Cori, too often lumped together as the youngest siblings, are failing sophomore and freshman year of high school, respectively. That is, whenever Cori is not being hospitalized for bipolar disorder. And I’m a boy who likes to kiss other boys. Yeah, we’re fucked.

At least we have learned not to strive. The magazine's teachings fall on deaf ears ion our household, lost in the static between the animal droppings and the unwashed dishes, we are fortunate enough to have time to care about the what the fucking neighbors think about whom I fuck, or to try to be another ass hole man in a suit. No, thankfully, we don't have time for your shit.

Doing our best to add some Jazzy to his ciudad aweanada. 

We decided to go out one night like this. Well, because its fun and important to celebrate with colors and despite the negative energy of this city. Day in day out we explode. Like a jazzy grenade that a heterocapilast has thrown his body over, we, admittedly, are muffled, but not without leaving our mark

 

Men in Suits: Bike Lane Occupiers

Introducing a new series called Men In Suits, where we will look at normally white hetero-capitalists  and the dangers and harms of their presumptuous attitudes towards, or without regard to, their systemic privileges. 

Riding my bike through the city, man people wonder through the bike lane, while looking at the sky, the ever-present dog poop on the ground or anything that is not the potential traffic using the ground thus designated. This is annoying, but what is angering are those who stare at you, standing over a painted bike symbol, daring your eco-friendly, non-oil hungry self to mow them down, challenge them. These arrogant challenges almost always come from white men-in-suits or MISS, as we shall call them.

I'm not sure what combination of systemic power and refusal to confront it makes these heterocapitalists feel that it is their absolute right, indeed duty, to stand a meter off of the sidewalk. This infraction does more than brush my bubble, it also puts the rest of the people using the street in greater danger. The space required by this MISS's arrogance pushes bikes into the car lanes, and the cars then have to adjust, causing disorder and uncertainty. And disorder with 2 kilo machines at 40 mph, well, it's not pretty and it's not worth his ego.

Wearing a suit does not mean your job is more needed, useful or anything else good. What I read in your suit is exploitation, is that you go every day to sit behind a desk and extract money from marginalized groups, to have your soul sucked out of your mouth, your creativity killed and your racial, sexual and gender privilege confirmed. Keep it up MISS, you're the most penetrable point in the shell of heterocapitalism.  Your suit exposes your insecurities.


Photo from NPR http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/07/why_do_people_walk_in_bike_lan.html

Translation Project: Accepting Donations

Working on an exciting new ~Project~

Roxana Kreimer is a Buenos Aires intellectual and social activist. She holds regular public meetings on philosophy and has dedicated her life to the production and dissemination of knowledge. One of her books, La tirania del automovil, which is freeely available online here covers the emergence of the automobile and begs for an expansion of the critique of the automobile into the realms of the social science.

This is an important work not only for its insights into the symbology of the automobile, but also for the way she explains its effects on gender and class relations, imperialism and the urban setting. It is made even more valuable by being free and open to the public. A great resource and service for the community!

I am happy to announce that I and a few others will be translating the book! It will be in English and also freely available to the public. The translation will require hundreds of hours of work, which is why we are accepting donations to help get the book done faster and with less strain on our lives.

As a first release of what has been translated, and to give you a ~taste~ of how important and insightful the work is, I am including the introduction, translated by me, below. Enjoy!

    The Tyranny of the Automobile: An Introduction

    During the 20^th Century automotive transport in general and the automobile in particular have decisively modified the structure of cities, the environment and human behavior. The automobile is much more than a means of transportation: it embodies at once the material representation and the symbology of a culture.     Created towards the end of the 19^th century and massively adopted in a good part of the planet by 1940, it has produced changesin ways of life so radical that we are still trying to understand what it means.

    

With surprising speed, the automobile went from being a dream of mechanical prophets to being the first massive “animal” created by the human being for his service. Object of universal consumption, priviliged motor of the economy, generator of massive trends, identity product par excellence, the utmost expression of capitalist individualism, it has produced more deaths and injuries than a large number of wars and, nevertheless, the victims appear to embody the “inevitable” or “inexorable” consequence of technology and progress in the modern world. According to studies done by the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2002, more than 1,200,000 people died in transit accidents. In less than twenty years, this figure will double.

While the deaths occasioned by the two World Wars spawned movements against the the idea of progress, the deaths sustained by automotive transport, on the other hand, appear justified as an inevitable consequence of technological progress. In the century when medical advances have substantially extended the average life span in developed countries, automotive transport engendered more agony with the same movement with which is has anesthetized the perception of danger. Research into this phenomenan, into the global acceptance of a mode of transport that harasses minute by minute the lives of citizens and that has contributed to the death of millions of people in the 20^th century, is not a task to be undertaken in the technological field. It requires an elucidation framed as a set of problems which can only be confronted from the perspectives offered by philosophy and the social sciences.

Like Auschwitx, as procedures of a specific type of rationality applied to massive death, caused reflection among critical theorists, the present research springs from the consequences of technological development in relation to the deaths sustained in the 20^th century by automotive transport, deaths that civilization hegemonically judges inevitable in the name of the modern world's progress.

The automobile has been the object of a vast literature, but it is still a topic scarcely explored by fields that go beyond the realms of urbanism and road safety.

This book is the first that calls for exhaustive research into the distinctive aspects that have made, despite the growing number of deaths and damages that it causes, the automobile an emblematic and mythic object of the modern world. The purpose is to research the constitutive traits of modernity embodied by the automobile and to study the social impact that it has had on urban life in relation to the ethical limits around which one should promote technological development. As I intend to demonstrate further on, automobile accidents cannot be explained only (not even fundamentally) by the lack of road safety education, nor by insufficient policing on roads and highways, nor by drivers' aggression. According to The Report of Road Risk from the year 2002, presented by the People's Advocacy (Defensoría del Pueblo) of the city of Buenos Aires, 88 percent of those polled in the city believe that the lack of respect for the norms of transit is the principal cause of accidents. This book seeks to question the general belief that the explanation for traffic deaths begins and ends in road discipline and to highlight among the most important causes the way in which the automobile has been accepted, among other reaons, because it embodies the fundmanetal characteristics of the ideal of the modern individual, an absolute trust en the pristine conscience that assumes an infallible individual, asolute master of one's actions, who is never distracted and always enjoys a sound mind. Nevertheless, the car rejects the “invisible hand” of road rationalityand reveals itself as the most irrational, passionate and violent instrument generated by modern technology. The studies on the problems of violence and risk in relation to the effects of automotive transport which has come to be understood as a milestone that has substancially modified life in our cities during the 20^th century will be central to this analysis.

In the first chapter I will analysize the automobile as an emblem of the modern subject. I will describe the automobile as an instrument that the modern individual feels to have articualted “in his image and likeness.” The subject as principle rector, with the clear and distinct conscience of a rational being, autonomy, liberty, democratic utopia and universalist of egalitarian dignity, progress, acceleration of time, mediated reality, reduction of distance, authenticity: traits belonging to modernity that the automobile embodies like no other instrument conceived in its depths. I will characterize the automobile as an instrument that represents much more than a mode of transportation, produced under the budgets of a model individual who will be subject to critique throughout this work.

In the second chapter I will analyze the history of the automobile in its 100-year life, in relation to modern industrial development and the impact that produced the invasion of this completely novel technology. I will investigate the identification of the automobile with the modern systems of the assembly line (fordism) as archetypes of massive production in an industrial society and the global imposition of the automobile as a representation of the hegemony of the United Statesm, in contrast with English hegemony represented by rail roads.

In the following chapter I urge research into the impact of automotive transport in new configurations of urban spaces. I will analyze the radical change that urban structures have undergone since the generalization of automobile use, the mode in which the train tracks have been displaced for the construction of asphalt paths, the upsurge of phenomena such as air pollution, sound pollution and the weakening of the city, favoring the implemtation of new transport policies which have, in turn, disintegrated the city.

In the fourth chapter I analyze and reject the arguments used by specialized organizations to explain automobile accidents. I deal with beliefs of the citizens in relation to accidents and postulate a new perspective for analyzing this phenomenon outside of the urbanist and road safety framing.

I will investigate in the fifth chapter how speed and risk operate in modern, popular imagination, the appeal that speed exercises beyond the realm of transport and speed as an instrument of change, en relation to progress and youth, the group most affected by automobile accidents. The phenomenon of speed will be analyzed starting with Crash, the novel by Ballard which brings the modern fascination with speed to the fore.

In the next chapter, I compare the advantages and disadvantages that the different forms of modern transportation offer, and I will analyze the impact of the advent of the automobile in some cultures who have other hegemonic modes of transport.

I will dedicate the seventh chapter to the mythic and symbolic function of the automobile in contemporary culture and its relation with the whole of signification embodied by the horse in the Middle Ages, through the perspective of gender, advertising, education and cinema.

A fundamental chapter to this work, the eighth, will be dedicated to the analysis of the automobile and of transit as representations of a breaking of social ties. It will involve more evidence that the study of this phenomenan should not be limited to road safety, and that it requires an analysis from the perspectives of philosphy and the social sciences. I will analyze chaotic transit and traffic jams that characterize a good part of the countries who automotive fleet has grown significantly in recent years as part of the breaking of social ties and the “war of all against all” which represents contemporary indlividualism.

Next, in the ninth chapter, I will evaluate the costs and benefits of tenchological development and critique the notion that general use of the automobile represents “progress” for modern culture. The analysis will consider deaths and injuries in automobile accidents, the supposed “shortening of distances” traveled, the radical change in urban structures and the environmental impact, among other factors.

The tenth chapter will be dedicated to the formulation of proposals oriented towards a more rational urban planning. We will see initiatives from movements around the world seeking to establish limits on the “culture of the automobile,” and summaries of other proposals seeking to progressively reduce the negative effects of the automobile in the contemporary world.

Putting together a fancy yellow bike!

Chicky chicky did it!!!!!

Yesterday I constructed and tensioned this lovely little wheel. Truing has to be an obsessive practice. The slightest turns of the pokes can turn it all off balance. Either frustrating, or as my good friend put it, meditative

The rest of this yellow beauty is on its way!!