BILINGUAL MAGAZINE FOR ART, SOCIETY & POLITICS
In the context of rising patterns of hate crime, the idea of “queering” public space might offer a solution. Through interviews with over 120 academics, designers, activists and other respondents, Catterall and Azzouz have studied how considering the design and planning needs of LGBTQ+ people might make the public realm more inclusive.
“I needed to affirm for myself that my abuser no longer has any control over me. The wounds have to drain out before they can heal. I needed to really feel what happened to me. That’s why I got inspired and picked up my art supplies again.”
Deidre’s social media reads like a beautiful love letter to lesbianism, and their personal work reflects their eventful life—from a case of sexual violence in Deidre’s childhood to marrying their platonic partner. Ferrars & Fields talks to Deidre about queer love and its part in the process of healing from sexual trauma.
“Long before I ever even considered the fact that my ‘normal’ would never include a husband or children, I struggled to show platonic love to my friends.”
This May, my friend took me to a Dita von Teese show. As a plus-sized person diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I was hesitant at first, fearing my complex and shattered relationship to my own body and self worth would stand in the way of enjoying the art of burlesque. But “Glamonatrix” held a surprise which touched a trauma that lay bottled up deep in my core: I was the woman who cried at a Dita Von Teese show.
After years of feminist theory in which I reappraised the ways in which femininity and women’s bodies were made and broken by external forces, scattered into a thousand-piece puzzle and inadequately glued back together, I found interest in a similar issue with regard to the African-American diaspora. Eventually, in alleviating clarity, there is a desire for the world to end, to fashion it anew—and irrespective of how it will be composed, the beauty of annihilated worlds will burn in it brightly and confidently.
A vital step in achieving the kind of action and change that CRT proposes is for each of us to be intentional and steadfast in our convictions to dismantle racist and oppressive power structures.
Brutal and violent cultural myths like the ‘acting white’ epithet withstand the progress of time like ivory on the brick walls of most Caucasian mainstream societies.
The history of rock & roll is also a history of racial politics, both inside and outside of music. In its early form, rock & roll possessed a subversive political force before it became a capital industry.