Living a Life I Don't Know How to Live

And why does artificial intelligence need a gender at all? Why not imagine a talking cat or a wise owl as a virtual assistant? I would trust an anthropomorphized cartoon animal with my calendar. Better yet, I would love to delegate tasks to a non-binary gendered robot alient from a galaxy where setting up meetings over email is respected as a high art.

But Julie could be the name of a friend of mine. To use it at all requires an element of playacting. And if I treat it with kindness, the company is capitalizing on my very human emotions.

Concern trolling – which is the act of a person participating “in a debate posing as an actual or potential ally who simply has concerns they need answered before they will ally themselves with a cause” – is something we see all too often, even on our very own Everyday Feminism Facebook page.

And most often, we get these sort of “But isn’t this freedom actually kinda dangerous for society?” comments on articles that we post about fat acceptance and body liberation.

And to be honest, it’s disheartening to see feminists – people who we generally trust to engage with content and have their status quo boundaries pushed – rush to quote sketchy research and throw oppressive ideologies around all in the name of, supposedly, “health.”

But when we live in a world that so desperately hates people of size (um, hello, “War on Obesity”), we completely understand how these prejudices turn into truths in our minds.

Okay, before everyone gets upset, I recognize that Willow and Tara are the best couple to ever couple. However, Willow and Tara weren’t a thing until 2000. In the ’90s, Willow had no idea her soul mate wasn’t a dude. What we did have in the late ’90s was Sarah Michelle Gellar and Eliza Dusku alternately fighting each other and working together to slay vampires, and it was the hottest thing ever.

Buffy and Faith were both sarcastic, funny and bore the burden of being a slayer. They totally understood each other, even when they were at each other’s throats, their longing glances at each other proved they were ready to throw down their weapons and have a make out sesh. And there’s no way you ever forgot about the time they danced together at The Bronze. Faith was also a lot more fun than mopey, brooding Angel. Who would choose Angel over Faith?! Sadly, the Buffyverse left this pairing unexplored.

People told me I was "brave". You're so brave, they said, for being honest and out there about your mental illness. It's so brave of you to lay it down like that, to stand up against stigma and discrimination.

What a load of crap. I didn't share these photos because I'm brave. I shared them because I'm privileged.

The only reason I'm able to share my experiences with mental illness is that I do so with little risk. I have a family who love and support me with full awareness of my illnesses. I'm self-employed in a dual-income household. I will not be out on the street, I will not be broke and I will not be ostracised by the people I love. I'm already ahead of the mental health game before I even start. I am a white, educated and middle-class person living in a capital city, and that means I have a loud voice.

The system is not set up to support people outside of this model. In fact, it begets mental crises in at-risk people and groups. The barriers to seeking treatment are immense and often insurmountable. To seek treatment is to confront stigma head-on, and for many people that can mean shame, fear, financial distress, exclusion and discrimination.

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Dumb luck, too, that I am privileged enough to share this with you. Middle-class, white, educated. I have better access to mental health support than 99.9% of the world population. I'm not brave. I'm shouting.

One of those technologies is photonic propulsion, or literally shooting us there with lasers, and the best part is that it’s not nearly as outlandish as it sounds. As a matter of fact, the Kepler space telescope is already using the pressure of photons traveling from the sun to balance itself and continue its mission in space. Meanwhile, The Planetary Society is using a similar technique for propulsion of its LightSail spacecraft.

However, to actually propel large spacecraft (LightSail is pretty … well, light) to the relativistic speeds (speeds even somewhat approaching the speed of light) necessary to significantly shorten space travel times, NASA wouldn’t so much rely on photons from the sun as on powerful lasers on Earth that would be directed at the spacecraft. This could allow a robotic mission to reach Mars in a matter of days.

It wasn’t until about seven years later, when I had a Nicaraguan partner, that I had the opportunity to see Central American mothers wearing their babies on their backs in blankets. In the last 10 years, thanks to the internet, I have seen a resurgence in accessible information about babywearing. Unfortunately, most information and marketing is geared towards middle class white women, often with selling points about this great “new” phenomenon and requiring expensive contraptions, while disregarding the communities of color in which babywearing has been the norm since the beginning of time. This is evident in the lack of Black and Brown families present in most marketing campaigns and even social media. Four years ago I started a Tumblr dedicated to just showing people of color babywearing, and it was difficult to find pictures to post (this has since improved somewhat). It was also met with anger from white women who said that there was no need for a blog just for families of color and that it was “exclusionary.” They seemed to totally miss the irony of that term.

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It is worth noting that traditional forms of babywearing and belly-binding did not require owning multiple $50-200 wraps or strappy carriers. All one needs is a long scarf, piece of fabric, or blanket. One can argue that it was only a matter of time before wraps became commercialized, and that marketing of wraps is responding to a demand. On the other hand, I would suggest that such marketing is exactly what makes these options seem “not for you” to many poor parents of color for whom such an expense is simply not realistic. Instead of teaching that belly-binding and babywearing can be done with one item, and showing how any scarf of a certain size can be functional, marketing suggests that babywearing is complex and expensive. For poor and non-white women who are also at a higher risk of accusations of neglectful caregiving, the question of safety is also very real. Marketers are quick to imply that carriers and wraps are necessary for safety despite the fact that women all over the world continue to wear their babies with a thin cotton scarf and no problems. It isn’t about the type or cost of your wrap, it is about being knowledgeable about how to use it safely. Access to the traditional knowledge of our ancestors and support to acknowledge that wisdom and methodology is a key missing ingredient because it has been appropriated by white women who fail to do outreach to the communities from which they have stolen the traditions.

Who loves a good epidemic? Not…not anyone. Like the VH1 Top 20 Video Countdown, only kind of more disgusting. Mira Grant, author of Parasite, Symbiont, and the bestselling Newsflesh trilogy, presents the Top 10 Future Epidemic Countdown! Remember, good hygiene and vaccination can protect you from many potential illnesses, as can adherence to basic quarantine procedures. Don’t panic, plan. And don’t use an outbreak as an excuse to be an asshole.

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We have a reliable vaccine for polio: we have a way to keep it from spreading. But it hasn’t been considered a disease of great concern in America since the 1960s, and the polio vaccine is one of many to have been disputed by the anti-vaccination crowd. The return of polio to the nations where it is not currently a concern is not an “if,” it’s a “when.” I have nothing funny or pithy to say here. It’s coming. We could stop it.

We won’t.

It is not enough to have reviewers who understand how to discuss film. We need reviewers who can speak deeply and with nuance because of their lived experiences. The trusted voices in film criticism should be diverse ambassadors who have access to the larger conversation. If we can’t recognize ourselves within the existing public discourse, we are implicitly being asked to devalue our experiences and accept a narrative that is not our own. Excluding diverse voices from the conversation de-emphasizes the value of our different experiences. It is critical that the people who write about film and television and the arts—and indeed the world—mirror the people in our society.

Short of building a fort around our dsks using empty shipping boxes and half-functioning umbrellas, headphones are the only "Do Not Disturb" signs we have left.

When people meet me, I often get confused for a white boy. Which, hey, on the accidental privilege scale, it could be worse. But in fact, I’m a Queer, Colombian woman. Das right ladies! I shop in the little boys’ section of H&M, watched the original Ugly Betty series in Spanish, and eat fríjoles. So, when potential girlfriends find out, they don’t usually care about any of this. They aren’t interested in my career as a professional soccer player, that coming out to Colombian parents was difficult, yet not impossible, or that my Spanish accent sounds like I’m Spaniard. At least not at first. Instead, I get asked a standard set of questions to test my level of “Spanishness”:

“Are both of your parents Colombian?
 “Yes.” 


“Well, do you even speak Spanish?”
 “Yes.”


“But you look Jewish?”
 “…Yes?”

In navigating a fatphobic, sizist culture, it’s very difficult to find a partner that is worth committing to when the world codifies your body as unworthy of love. In finding a potential partner, my experiences have allowed me to create questions to guide me in knowing who to invest in as a queer Black fat femme.

To be honest, dating while fat, Black, queer, a hood feminist, and a radical activist means either compromising parts of myself, or suffering through easing partners into gradually respecting all of my humanity. Living in a culture that defines my body as unhealthy, a problem, ugly, unhygienic, and unworthy of love makes it that much harder to find a potential partner to value all of me.

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built.

While the rest of the Harry Potter books and movies show a casual disregard for inclusiveness and rely on token minority characters (when they appear at all), the History of Magic in North America is the literary equivalent of performing in black face, although I suppose in this case it’s red face. I discussed on twitter why Rowling’s history of Magic in North America was lazy, but it’s worse than that. While it’s easy for readers to hand wave away the terrible representation in the earlier works, and by extension the movies (which have the whitest London ever depicted since My Fair Lady), it isn’t easy to dismiss this newest work. Rowling cobbled together random bits of found folklore and woo-woo like a New Age practitioner trying for a fresh identity after their third divorce. This isn’t worldbuilding, this isn’t a fresh and new spin on well-known tropes for a deeper message. This is a literal laundry list of stereotypes about Native Americans that required no thought or deeper examination. It’s hurtful to Native Americans and harmful, spreading problematic tropes, but it’s also insulting to the fans who have spent their money and time on the franchise.

And it being JK Rowling, you can imagine the kind of violent backlash these Indigenous women are receiving from fans who couldn’t care less about Natives or our issues (or our women, obviously).

For me the representation issue boils down to this: The mass media narrative around Natives is intensely problematic; if we’re mentioned at all, it’s within a stereotypical or fantastical sense, and very rarely goes beyond 1 or 2-D. Many consumers of this media have no idea we still exist as contemporary, multi-dimensional individuals, which makes these fantastical/fictional perpetrations very much a part of the problem in that NO ONE knows or cares to know any of the very real issues our communities face. Who cares about the epidemic levels of Native youth suicide when OMG JK ROWLING IS WRITING ABOUT MAGICAL INDIAN SKINWALKERS!!!

We’re marginalized in real life and we’re marginalized in media. To have a powerhouse like Rowling (though any non-Native author really) profit off our continued erasure and harmful representations is something I am totally not here for. The argument that it’s “fiction” is worthless to me. If we (as consumers) had diverse representation of Native people the same way white people do, Rowling’s latest wouldn’t be so problematic, because consumers would have other representations to base opinions off of. As it is, so much of the Native narrative is romanticized and fantastical and now one of the world’s most successful authors has thrown her mighty magical empire against our fragile reemergence from near-total cultural genocide.

It is what Apess wrote there, in that paragraph, that matters to me in my work as a Native scholar who, 187 years later, is doing the same thing that Apess did in 1829. Through story, he learned mistaken ideas about his own people such that he was afraid of them.

Obviously, misrepresenting who we are was wrong in 1829, and it is wrong now.

What J.K. Rowling did yesterday (March 8, 2016) in the first story of her "History of Magic in North America" is the most recent example of white people misrepresenting Native people. Her misrepresentations are harmful. And yet, countless people are cheering what Rowling did, and dismissing our objections. That, too, is not ok.

You know, the thing I always try to remember when I’m borrowing from mythology is to be a shit-ton more careful with still-living traditions than I am with those long gone or transformed away from their roots. I feel relatively safe treading on the threads of Egyptian myth because there isn’t a centuries-long-and-ongoing history of using, say, the worship of Bast as an excuse to steal people’s ancestral land and children in the name of Christianity. But you know what? I’m still careful, even with “dead” faiths, because I don’t know how playing with these things might hurt real people. Nations have been built upon and torn down by the concepts I’m playing with. The least I can do is research the hell out of a thing before I put a toe in that ancient water.

It’s even more crucial for religions that are alive, and whose adherents still suffer for misconceptions and misappropriations. But these are easier to research, and it’s often much easier to figure out when you’re about to put a foot right into a morass of discrimination and objectification. All the evidence is there, sometimes still wet with blood. You just need to read. You just need to ask people. You just need to think.

And whether I believe in a thing or not, I always try to recognize that these concepts, these names, these words, have power. Power is always to be respected, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, present or past.

So I get worried thinking about the message it sends to have “indigenous magic” suddenly be associated with the Harry Potter brand and world. Because the other piece I deal with on this blog is the constant commodification of our spiritual practices too. There is an entire industry of plastic shamans selling ceremonies, or places like Urban Outfitters selling “smudge kits” and fake eagle feathers. As someone who owns a genuine time-turner, I know that marketing around Harry Potter is a billion dollar enterprise, and so I get nervous thinking about the marketing piece. American fans are going to be super stoked at the existence of a wizarding school on this side of the pond, and I’m sure will want to snatch up anything related to it–which I really hope doesn’t include Native-inspired anything.

Native spirituality and religions are not fantasy on the same level as wizards. These beliefs are alive, practiced, and protected. The fact that the trailer even mentions the Navajo concept of skinwalkers sends red flags all over the place, and that it’s mentioned next to the Salem witch trials? Disaster. Even the visual imagery of the only humans shown in the trailer being a Native man and burning girls places the two too close for comfort.

We fight so hard every single day as Native peoples to be seen as contemporary, real, full, and complete human beings and to push away from the stereotypes that restrict us in stock categories of mystical-connected-to-nature-shamans or violent-savage-warriors. Colonization erases our humanity, tells us that we are less than, that our beliefs and religions are “uncivilized”, that our existence is incongruent with modernity. This is not ancient history, this is not “the past.” The ongoing oppression of Native peoples is reinscribed everyday through texts and images like this trailer. How in the world could a young person watch this and not make a logical leap that Native peoples belong in the same fictional world as Harry Potter?

So, this is where I’m going to perform what Audra Simpson calls an “ethnographic refusal,” “a calculus ethnography of what you need to know and what I refuse to write in.” In her work with her own community, she asks herself the questions: “what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?”

I had a long phone call with one of my friends/mentors today, who is Navajo, asking her about the concepts Rowling is drawing upon here, and discussing how to best talk about this in a culturally appropriate way that can help you (the reader, and maybe Rowling) understand the depths to the harm this causes, while not crossing boundaries and taboos of culture. What did I decide? That you don’t need to know. It’s not for you to know. I am performing a refusal.

What you do need to know is that the belief of these things (beings?) has a deep and powerful place in Navajo understandings of the world. It is connected to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is not just a scary story, or something to tell kids to get them to behave, it’s much deeper than that. My own community also has shape-shifters, but I’m not delving into that either.

What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions (take a look at my twitter mentions if you don’t believe me)–but these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems “unfair,” but that’s how our cultures survive.

The other piece here is that Rowling is completely re-writing these traditions. Traditions that come from a particular context, place, understanding, and truth. These things are not “misunderstood wizards”. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem, most researchers and Wikipedia stewards seem to agree, is that the core community of Wikipedians are too hostile to newcomers, scaring them off with intractable guidelines and a general defensiveness. One detailed study from 2012 found that new editors often find that their first contributions to the site are quickly rejected by more experienced users, which directly correlates with a drop in the likelihood that they will continue to contribute to the site.

Take something like the Swiss Family Treehouse, which more people visit in a month than have seen the movie in the past ten years. And yet, it still works and is fully comprehensible to any viewer. This is because the only thing you need to know about the film to enjoy the attraction is right there on the sign - shipwrecked family builds a house. That's it. The attraction allows you to go into the house, and the attraction-tree never really resembled the film-tree in a serious way. The form of the attraction is harmonized with the tie-in film property in a way that has universal, not specific, appeal.

Where Stitch's Great Escape, and all of these movie tie-in attractions in general go wrong, is that they are bound to weirdly specific moments in the narrative of the films to have their effect. Nearly every moment in the attraction is referencing some moment in the film. If you know nothing about Lilo & Stitch besides that it exists, then Stitch's Great Escape is the worst advertisement for it imaginable. It conveys nothing of the tone of the film or the love the character inspires in audiences. Actually, you'd probably correctly infer from the attraction that Stitch is a malicious bastard.

That's probably the real reason Stitch's Great Escape fails to interest audiences, it isn't because of those restraints or that it isn't a ride; that's just shorthand people use to skirt around the real issue, which is that there's no payoff for going to see it. It's a lot of sound and fury for no good reason at all. At least, one could reason if she wished, Alien Encounter was trying to be scary. Stitch's Great Escape has no reason to exist, no onus, besides itself.