MANIFEST… Because i am grey. The different parts of me crash into and complicate each other constantly. And i know i'm not the only one trying to figure it all out. Because we all have something to say. Because one important way to break down all that oppresses is to speak our truths without reservation or apology, and find solidarity and inspiration in each other’s honesty. Because sometimes i get angry. Because sometimes i get happy. And oftentimes i want to share. Because if you don’t feel like you have a place to go, you need a place to go. Because i am a Young-Girl. The jumble of fragments that follow in no way comprises an offering of any definitive theory on the Young-Girl. They are materials accumulated from encounters with, observations of, and most importantly, personal experiences of Young-Girls. Minds looking for moral comfort or for vice to condemn will find in these scattered pages but roads that will lead them nowhere. In fact we're not so much trying to convert Young-Girls as we are trying to trace out all the corners of a fractured battlefront of Young-Girlization. And to supply the weapons for a hand to hand, blow by blow fight, wherever you may find yourself. This text is a pact. This text is a labor of love. This text is a gift to you. -To all those who relate and create, connect yourself and keep creating. (inspired by TIQQUN)
GENESIS GREY & FEMMEDYMION
10 TIPS FOR MY NON-BLACK AND LIGHT-SKINNED OR WHITE-PASSING LATINO AND ASIAN BRETHREN!
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1. Stop saying that other people of color are policing or excluding you from POC-ness. There is no such thing as reverse racism NOR reverse colorism. If this makes no sense to you, see #2 - #10.!
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2. Colorism refers to the ways in which material and social gain is systematically given to people who meet or uphold white supremacist notions of beauty. NOT ONE POC who is light-skinned or white passing is being denied jobs or housing or being targeted for violence in a SYSTEMIC way because of their light or white skin. Please don’t tell us about how somebody called you “white bitch” because they were jealous of how white you looked and that this was a form of violence. This is not an example of historical systemic oppression. It’s mean, it’s bullying, it’s misogynist, but it’s not colorism. Note: violence or outright insult, harassment or bullying is never okay no matter who does it.!
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3. Never tell a darker-skinned or non-passing person of color that their behavior is upholding internalized oppression. Never ever. Especially when it’s cuz you feel like they did something to you for being light-skinned or white passing. Just shut up about it. You telling a person with less societal power than you about their internalized oppression is really just you using your privilege to silence them and avoid your feelings of guilt and alienation for being a light-skinned or passing person. Especially if you do it in a public forum. (And no it still isn’t okay even if you “beat” them on some other front, like you are poor and they have money or you have a chronic illness and they seem healthy or you think they have gender privilege over you). Note again: violence or outright insult, harassment or bullying is never okay no matter who does it. If you are being physically or emotionally abused by someone, please seek support.!
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4. That being said, deal with your feelings of alienation and guilt around being light-skinned or white-passing. Like really, really fucking deal with them, historically, emotionally, ancestrally, spiritually, but especially MATERIALLY. I can’t tell you exactly what this looks like without writing a whole other essay. It is still in constant process for myself. But chances are if you are doing any of the problematic shit listed here, you are having a hard time with dealing. Start with
checking your defensiveness. If you are thinking about writing me a tirade about how racist I am or how I didn’t say it the right way to get anyone to listen because I’m being mean, or how I am being divisive to POC unity, or how I am ignoring the fact that you are really pale right now because it’s winter, take a moment to pause. Those arguments are so tired and a symptom of your need for self-reflection.!
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5. Build communities of accountability with other light-skinned and white-passing people of color. Communities of accountability are groups of peers who lovingly push one another towards growth, transformation, and active rejection and dismantlement of colorism and white supremacy. For instance, when you feel bad about something related to #1 - #4 but manage to keep it to yourself in the moment, take care of yourself by talking about your feelings with these light-skinned or white passing peers. If you did say or do something fucked up and have realized that you made a mistake, let your peers support you as you take accountability. If all these peers do is validate your experience and tell you were right or that it’s okay because we all make mistakes, they are not holding you accountable. They are handing you a warm bottle of baby formula, a teddy bear, and a singing you a lullaby. They are keeping you asleep. Nitey nite.!
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6. If you gather with other light-skinned or white-passing people, but you all never talk about and TAKE ACTION around your privilege, then your association with them is just the white/ light POC equivalent of an “old boys’ club.” It is not a community of accountability; it is just a franchise for white supremacy.!
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7. When you notice you are someplace where there are only lightskinned or white-passing people, talk about it. Especially if it is an environment that is touted as a people of color space. Do not allow yourself to be the token or amongst a small minority of people of color in a space that is claiming to be POCinclusive without at least saying something. Verbal acknowledgement holds power. Interrupt spaces that uphold white supremacy by speaking up and naming the elephant in the room. Unless your basic needs or physical safety being met is at stake, take action by stepping down from tokenizing roles where you and other light-skinned white-passing POC are the only members. Demand that darker-skinned and/or black folks with more experience than you replace you. Actively make sure this happens. Actually I take that back. DO NOT send other POC of any
skin tone into an environment where tokenization is happening. Put in the work to shut that shit down or actively warn people against getting involved in tokening projects and organizations.!
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8. If other people of color (even ones who you consider “as” light-skinned or white-passing as you) ask you about your race or don’t accept you right away, don’t get all hurt. Just be straight up. Let your acts and how you show up in the future speak for itself and build trust. Do you trust every POC you meet just because they’re POC? I certainly don’t. Yes, it might hurt you to feel rejected or be met with suspicion by a community you want to call your own, but truth is you have access to all sorts of communities and privileges that others in your group don’t get because of your skin privilege. Also, protecting ourselves from whiteness is a REAL safety issue. People of color want to know who is white so they know who to not to turn their back on. This is healthy self-preservation, especially for people perceived as black, who face regular threat to their very lives by the state and other upholders of white supremacy. The closer you are perceived to be to blackness, the closer you are to physical, economic, and psychological violence committed by white supremacy and its agents.!
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9. Remember that privilege is not just an idea or a thought or a conversation. It is also an experience of embodiment that can be observed by others. Remember that the hive mind of human consciousness is so adept that we can all state, without doubt, which races are at the top and which are on the bottom. White is on top. Black is on the bottom. If you cannot admit that and let yourself feel the way the consciousness of white supremacy lives within your flesh, then there is no hope of ever exorcising that hierarchy from the hive mind. Pretending our whiteness isn’t there just gives it more power and prevents the healing that needs to occur between people of color in general.!
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10. Be able to name your light-skinned or passing privilege without stuttering. And don’t expect a parade with glitter and a marching band when you do. You can imagine one in your head if you like. That’s okay. !
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I lied. I have one more because I’m generous like that. If your darker-skinned or non-passing POC homies agree with you when you tell them how fucked up this article is and assure you that you are really awesome, they might be reassuring you because they
are scared of what they might lose if they disagree. Don’t put them in the position of reassuring you. THAT’S fucked up.!
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-http://nicodacumos.com/
A Letter I've Been Trying to Write for Awhile (unisgned. i think the recipient knows it's from me.) DEAR UNIVERSEI do not want to write another poem about rape. about why and where and when I learned the art of not feeling safe, about how none of my sisters are allowed to feel safe all the time just a reminder, because I'm tired of having to tell myself that everything is fine dur ing times whe n an y thing else should be on my mind, I scan, where is the closest person who could hear me if I screamed this time, universeI want to be done with that I want to genuinely trust humanity I want to stop applying statistics to every room of girls or women that I see, Universe, I will have children one day. And that scares the shit out of me (for a lot of reasons, but) I will still tell them how great you can be, please do your part and live up to that. Be a place I can feel sexy not vulnerable, lying on my back, because I need to move on. I need to feel safe. I'll be cautious (trust does not preclude street smarts, after all) but I think this will be my last rape poem for awhile.
“Lolita is not about love, because love is always mutual; Lolita is about obsession, which is never, ever love, and Nabokov himself was so disappointed that people did not understand this and take away the right message. For how could anyone call this feeding frenzy of selfishness, devouring, and destruction love?” (a comment by Mary Gaitskill)
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According to my records, i finished reading Lolita for the first time 27 February 2008; i was a sophomore in high school, remember sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen island one day after school and reading the story’s first proper paragraph out loud to her:
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“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
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I was bowled over by its inexhaustible lyricism. It brought me to the brink of tears, to the brink of falling into, yes, i understand this—“this” being obsession, not the tempest of pedophilia in which it is housed. But the verging scared me. When would my own sense of obsession disentangle itself ?
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My aunt didn’t like me reading the book; we fought about it one morning in the car as she drove me to the bus stop. I told her i wanted to see the two films based on the novel.
! “You’ve read it,” she said grudgingly. “I think that’s enough.” ! !
In the back row of my geometry class—in rebellion—i tattooed the outsoles of my Vans with evil twin lines from the book:
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“Look here, you fat fool.”
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“Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.”
That summer, A. and i would read it out loud to one another in our tree house-cum-her bedroom, our voices, young, wing-like, texturing the text’s beauty, my heart stilling, sailing, almost reverential. We underscored half the text, each in our own color of ink.
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I did see both of the films, hid them from my aunt beneath my mattress, both the 1997 with Dominique Swain and the 1962 starring Sue Lyon. They are each their own inadequate crosssections of the novel they adapt.
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! ! In the ’62, Dolores’ most powerful line—“The word is incest”—is stricken from the record. ! !
Five years later, A. and i spoke of it in Copenhagen in the context of love, in the context of loving someone for themselves versus loving the way that the other makes one feel, the element of pedophilia reflexively suspended in favor of abstraction. Was this, we wondered, the difference between love and whatever Humbert Humbert felt? The difference between feelings of love and feelings of obsession?
! ! What did i feel? What had i learned to feel? ! !
The cover of the 1997 edition of Lolita is graced with the following snippet from a Vanity Fair review: “The only convincing love story of our century.”
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I felt oddly close to the story while in Denmark—something about the prim, starched, stark European hotel room i made my base camp: white sheets, no en-suite toilet, breakfast spread of sliced cucumber, sable bread, pots of jam, smoked fish, pastry, soft-boiled eggs. H.H. is nebulously “European” in the same general sense that i felt the Absalon Hotel. I thought, too, of the utilitarian American hotels Dolores and H.H. bop between, between ghostly stretches of highway and bleached sheets and fucked up fucking and the ever-more inebriated madness, the ever-deepening avalanche of obsession.
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“What’s happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”
What’s obsession? The hushed knowledge that there never can be enough.
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We lost track of that underlined book. The copy i read now opens itself to fresh scrutiny. I open myself to fresh scrutiny. I am obsessive—about the people, the words, the music, the feelings i love, the feelings i hate, the shadowy mycelium of feelings and ruby-sanguine traumas, deep muscle memory, the haunted cells of my blood and mind.
! I am obsessed with ghosthunting. ! I obsessed with understanding it all. !
— Chelsey k. shannon
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1" Our Luckless Bodies by Scott Brent!
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Men, you are lucky if you have a body that defines sex appeal. I have to !
! remember the sadness to that claim as well as the truth that’s behind it. It is a very ! ! vague term to both the individual who holds sex appeal as a standard and those who are ! ! measured by it. Since I do not have a body that fits the description of what I am talking ! ! about, I am prepared to tell you what sex appeal is not. ! ! ! ! Sex appeal does not involve trying to impress women by subverting their !
! expectations of what you cannot accomplish physically. For example, if you are four ! ! feet tall and see your girlfriends riding camels, don’t assume that camel-riding is the ! ! slickest medium for flirting. You have a weaker body than that camel and therefore that ! ! camel is going to demonstrate why it has a better chance of being accepted than you ! ! do. Also, don’t try to make your situation easier by using adaptive tools tailored for ! ! weak bodies. I tried to mount a camel by using a stool, thinking that two white ! ! platforms would generate tremendous sex appeal, but once I finally saddled up, the girls ! ! who I found enchanting were riding a mile away. ! ! ! Sex appeal does not come by mimicking what you see short-statured people !
! attempt on television. If someone you’re crazy for asks you to do a somersault because ! ! Mini-me can do twenty and he’s only three feet, you don’t try to perform one just ! ! because you’ll accidentally kick your potential lover in the face. You don’t do it because ! ! she is comparing what is unique about you to a fantasy she will never have. I ! ! made the same mistake when I was sexually coerced to do a risky double back flip for a ! ! woman I thought was “the one.” In midair, I was crushed between two well-! ! upholstered gentlemen, who reeked of body odor and deer musk. When I awoke, ! ! there was no note left by my one-person audience as a consolation prize for trying. !
2"
! ! As one of the 0.000001% of people who were unfortunate enough to have ! ! dwarfism, congratulations; you are at a disadvantage when you try to amass! ! a worthy amount of sex appeal through dance. As a caveat, when you’re ! ! dancing with a woman, be prepared to fight off overly ambitious men who ! ! will try to steal your date away for themselves. I went to Bar-Mitzvahs and ! ! homecomings with women much taller than I, and when we gripped each other’s waist, ! ! I heard faint snickering from a man who was judging us from the end of the dance ! ! floor. He encroached on the space that my legs occupied, and employ what was ! ! somehow proper body language; he did not beg or plead to win my date’s ! ! approval but instead moved his booty around her crotch. Whoever this sex offender ! ! was, he knew I was an easy target because I could not fight to get him off of her. I could ! ! have called the rape police but I didn’t want to be known as the tattletale who saved the ! ! evening. Their pelvises were directly aligned so that her legs were in between the legs ! ! of my competition. Their movements became slower and sexier to the point where my ! ! date instantly became a slave to the man’s tempo, and I bit the trail of dust ! !
they left behind. ! ! ! Fellow brethren, if we can even call ourselves real men, our bodies have crippled !
! not only our sex appeal but also more importantly our pride. How do we force our ! ! bodies to achieve more than what they’re capable of achieving? Does that make us look ! ! self-righteous or self-deprecating in public? We need to be teachers to ourselves more ! ! than we have been teachers to a world that has chosen not to accept us. I cannot ! ! present you with a solution to how we can turn our adversity into advantage. I just ! ! know that what lies beyond our adversity is the journey I’m ready to take.
I don't like being obsessed with you, but at the same time l live for it. I'm checking your twitter upwards of 10 times a day. That's the social media you're most active on. Then your instagram. Less so Facebook, you're not as active on there. It's mostly your fans tagging pictures of you two together. I search your band on tumblr when I can't sleep. I know many girls have crushes on you. But I can't call this a crush. "Crush" to me implies something from our personal interactions has charmed or enamored me so much that I've begun to feel fond of you. I think you're cute. I get nervous fantasizing about what an interaction between us might be like. I have crushes on other musicians. When I daydream seriously about meeting them, one day running into them at a party or a music festival, I imagine myself being flustered. "Crush" means the object of my affection has the power to melt me on the spot while my insides turn hysterical and I cling for dear life onto trying to appear calm and cool in their presence. But I have the power in my obsession over you. It's because our only conversation lasted for about 5 minutes at a soon to be closed DIY venue last summer. I can't remember what I was wearing and I went because I knew you'd be there. I thought it was bogus that there was a cover charge, seeing as I'd seen your band for free, or had the chance to see your band for free many times at home, and I told L I was only going because we had nothing better to do and it was close enough to her apartment that we could bail if need be. You came up to us before your set. Your band was closing the show. L and I sat on the floor against the wall in the back and you came up and squatted down in front of us. You made small talk. You said you always saw me running by your house. Why don't you ever say hi to me? I said. You should say hi to me. You said. I have my headphones in, I can't hear you. Say hi to me next time. I said. Why do you run? You're skinny? You said. I looked down and feigned embarrassment. No I'm not. I said. Though what I should have said what shut the fuck up, which is what I was thinking, and I think you would have liked that better too. That was awkward. L said. No, he definitely left because he was embarrassed. I said. You ended the show with I Want To Be Your Dog. You know he's singing that to me, I said to L. -------------------Two months ago when I (what I thought was casually) mentioned to L that I had had a sex dream about you she stopped painting her nails and looked straight at me in genuine but mild disgust: He's 19 and probably has an STD. Implying that I could do so much better. Like a guy who didn't drop of out high school (because the lead singer of the Black Keys told you to, or so the rumor goes). Moving on. But she made me sound so much more pathetic than I really am. I mean, you're 20. I'm not a pedophile. That's the last time I said anything about you to her. I can't stand when it seems like I don't have the upper hand. A few weeks later I was driving E's car back home from from the city when (again, trying
to be casual) I told her I had a sex dream about you. She perked up from her drunk tummy ache. Dude, really? I can hook that up if you want, he's at my house all the time smoking pot with my brother. He's getting kind of fat though. Alex was like, he needs to lay off the sauce. Ew, girl, nah! At that moment I was the incarnation of Cher Horowitz. As IF.
I had two more dreams about you. In one of them you did me and my friends' laundry. In another you played a show on my neighbor's roof and I watched from my house. ---------------V texted me a couple days ago because you started following her on instagram and she was flattered because "he seems like he only follows hot chicks on instagram." Babe, you're hotter than all his little groupies. But back off bitch, he's mine lols :P Which is true, the first part. Don't worry, she said. I'm not enough of a bad bitch for him to be into me. I don't take her compliment seriously. This also coming from the girl who told me I looked cute with acne. "Some people look cute with it, some people don't." (This is why she's my best friend). When did my obsession start? Was it over the summer when my brother told me your band was in an MTV commercial? Was it when, that same summer, I went outside one day to go running and upon seeing you skateboard down my street, turned back inside because I didn't want you to see me without makeup and in my running clothes? In some ways you make me shy. Was it when you drunkenly came up to my friends and me after a busted house show and yelled Hey older girls and we all burst out giggling? Was it after I started dreaming about you? Or did it start way earlier? When I rode the bus with you in middle school? When my exboyfriend said he thought you were a prick? When I was running in ass tight booty shorts and I saw you drive past with your head hanging out the passenger seat like a dog? Was it the moment when I screenshotted your post that said "If I never see another white girl again that'd be just fine" and sent it to V saying Is it a sign? Was it this year when I started checking your band's twitter, then your band's instagram, then your twitter, then your instagram, daily, and sometimes your tag on tumblr? Was it when it became the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning when my eyes are puffy and crusty and can't stay open and the last thing I do before I go to sleep and the thing that I do when I can't sleep? Was it when I started doing things so out of character for me, like listening to the band that you're on tour with? Because in high school I considered them white people trying to be edgy music, and associated them with the kids who listened to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kings of Leon (I know I'm a hater). Was it when, this week, I started listening to your music on spotify? You guys actually aren't bad. I totally understand the appeal. Was it when I realized you're kind of a legit fucking rock star? And I live down the street from you. And we went to high school together. And you say hi to me at shows and I get to take a tiny moment that you'll be too drunk to remember and hang on to it and use it to thrill myself when I'm bored. But this obsession is for my pleasure only. Because the next time I see you at a party or a show or in our old neighborhood, I'll ignore you. You see, you kind of are getting a gut, and not in a cute way. I once likened your appearance to one of those white, red eyed lab rats. I'm not really into blondes either. Plus, you probably do have an STD or a couple, all the other girls who are in lurrrve with you are on average six years younger than me, and the way you talk about females is unacceptable. It so easily reveals the loathing and fascination you have for us. I will ignore you until you come up to me, and then I'll probably be a bitch to you because that's just what I do for our mutual entertainment. And when you do come up to me, the shine will dull. I don't even want to
think about it because you gross me out a little more. When you come up to me, beer probably on your breath, faded in every sense of the word, so close that I can see myself upside down in your pupils, I'll smile to myself at my strange imagination and the whack and downright idiotic things I daydream about. But I'll admit, I love being obsessed with the idea of you. -Femmedymion
5 Fantasy Exit Strategies by Courtney Preiss
!1. Run away to Brooklyn. Rent an apartment with a claw footed bathtub. Commute to Manhattan
during the week and put in hours at a menial publishing job. Drive home to New Jersey on weekends to swim in the pool and cry to your mother. Smoke Gauloises on the fire escape. Let yellowing issues of Rolling Stone and Vogue pile into a protective fortress around your bed. Listen to Cat Power. Fall asleep mostly naked beneath the duvet watching Sportscenter and drinking earl grey. Date a Yankees fan and kiss his hands on the 4 Train into the Bronx.
!2. Run away to Barcelona. Eat milk chocolate magnum bars and drink cheap champagne. Burst into
charming fits of laughter whenever you get embarrassed about butchering the Catalan language. Wear denim cutoffs, Dr. Pepper chapstick, and very little else. Go dancing at 3 a.m. Whiten your teeth. Tan your shoulders. Braid feathers into your hair. Perpetually wake up with sand caught in the thin cotton sheets of your tiny bed. Listen to the Rolling Stones and kiss all the longhaired boys you can get your hands on without ever having to apologize.
!3. Run away to Los Angeles. Sublet a studio in Venice three blocks from the beach. Listen to top 40
radio. Go to Chateau Marmont and charge drinks you can’t afford to a long-dormant credit card. Sleep with a television actor who lives in the valley. Sleep with a musician who lives in Bel Air. Break things off with both of them when gas prices begin to rise. Find Gilda Radner’s star on the Walk Of Fame and swallow a sob when you see the filthy cement around her name is cracked. Walk through the Venice Canals until the sun sets and you forget your own name. Call your mother crying from the parking lot of a 24-hour Ralph’s supermarket. Tell her you want to come home.
!4. Run away to Paris. Gaze at the pink and pistachio glow of macarons in the window on Boulevard
Saint-Germain. Listen to Joni Mitchell. Meet an Argentinean man in the Latin Quarter for drinks. Melt into his accent and kiss him goodnight, but return to your apartment alone because his face doesn’t look enough like the man’s you are trying to forget. Get lost in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, admiring Napoleon’s fine red damask. Walk alone along the Seine in an old dress, ten-dollar shoes, and an Hermes scarf. Fumble with the locks on the fence overlooking the river. They all have lovers’ names etched into them and the girl who left the red heart-shaped lock has the same name as you.
!5. Run away to Martha’s Vineyard. Write heartbroken stories during the day in front of a large fan
that blows curls of humid hair across your tired face. Take a waitress job at The Black Dog at night and try hard not to drop too many trays. Learn to ride a moped. Pretend you’re a Kennedy. Listen to Carly Simon. Eat hand-churned ice cream out of waffle cones. Visit the flying horses and consider how many girls just like you have sat on the same horse clutching for the same brass ring. Get stoned and dance barefoot down the length of the eroded Jaws beach. Date a Red Sox fan. Yell at each other during baseball games, and then kiss and make up between tangled sheets. TC mark.