Red Light Politics
Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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Noted Elsewhere
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What did I miss?
I’ve decided that I am not even going to try to catch up on Tumblr since Friday. Nope. Not gonna do it.
So, did anything important...
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Interesting
Just got a job offer? I know the company, it has a good reputation. And awesome downtown offices.But it’s not quite my style - their...
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“The new rules, which were given the force of an executive order, are a clear improvement over a draft version. If monitored and enforced, they could...”
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Heroism in the Supermarket:
Vitamin Water wants me to believe that drinking their sugary concoction will help to make me a superhero rather than...
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…and The Onion for the win, forever.
Tl;dr: All 10 ways are “Revolutionary Terror.”
(via TheNoobYorker)
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Last night got the pleasure to met and chat with the German Tumblr team.
These women were totally awesome. Total girl crush!
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“The institution of marriage is not under attack as a result of the President’s words. Marriage was under attack years ago by men who viewed women as...”
Tag Results
137 posts tagged Europe
How post is this colonial gaze?
Yesterday I attended the book launches for Changing Perspectives & UNFIXED, two different projects that seek to interrogate art in a post colonial framework. The topics of the books themselves interest me less for this particular post than the round table/ debate that followed the presentations by the book editors. For this debate, they invited three rather important names in the Northern European arts scene: Leen Beijers, Coordinator of the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp, Belgium; Jonathan Harris, Director of Research at Winchester School of Art in the UK and Els van der Plas, from the Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion and the first managing director (now no longer part of the organization) of the Prince Claus Fund, quite possibly, the most important Dutch non governmental institution to manage subsidies and grants for artists and institutions from around the world.
Mr. Harris gave a presentation about globalization in the art world where he treated us to all sorts of rhetorical pirouettes, including profuse mentions of the Cold War in the context of post colonialism, but he carefully avoided even mentioning both the Dutch and British colonial pasts. Which, you know, left some of us scratching our heads because how can you even start to address globalization and post colonial analysis if you won’t even mention the slave trade as one of the founding moments of globalized capitalism, with the transatlantic trade of African bodies as means of production?
Later on, Ms. van der Plas, in response to how can the Dutch art world move forward in the context of post colonial theory, said that, for her, “the world had always been post colonial because the Chinese had been invading other lands for millennia and other civilizations had also been colonizing neighboring territories so, she believed that we had been post colonial for ever”. Yes. Do not roll your eyes as they might come out of their sockets.
So, since we were in a museum, a Dutch institution that is in charge of what I usually refer to as “the administration of knowledge” (both as an institution that produces knowledge in the form of symposia, books, seminars, etc and in the sense that the curating process is an administration of knowledge by itself), I took a look around in the room where all these debates about the post colonial gaze were taking place. Currently, the museum is hosting an exhibition by three Dutch artists: Bart Groenendaal, Stefan Ruitenbeek and Quinsy Gario. The room had been stripped of all the exhibition items to make space for the chairs and the stage where the debate was taking place. In doing so, the organizers arranged the platform so that the event could be filmed and, to do so, they removed the name of one of the artists who was part of the exhibition, Quinsy Gario’s. Now, because we are in a museum and because this administration of knowledge is neither innocent, nor ideology free, I should point to the most telling and substantial aspect in this name erasing exercise: of the three artists, the only name that was covered and erased was Gario’s. Also, of all the three artists, the only one of Color, a Dutch Black man who interrogates the Dutch self perception as a sexually open and tolerant nation. In the context of these debates about the post colonial gaze, about the role of “the subaltern” in art production, the symbolic value of this single name erasure does not escape me.
“Several dozen masked individuals attacked the first sanctioned gay demonstration in St. Petersburg and vented their anger on migrant workers after police drove the gays from the scene.”
Attack on Gays in St. Petersburg Spreads to Migrant Workers | Society | RIA Novosti
From the article:
Police moved quickly and placed all the gays on a bus, which then drove off.
The frustrated homophobes attacked another bus stopped at a traffic light that they mistook for the departed vehicle. But the bus was carrying migrant workers from Central Asia. The attackers hurled stones at the bus and somebody tossed smoke bombs on the road in front of it. They also broke windows and started beating the passengers.
There were no police in the area during the bus attack. Police said later they were accompanying the bus with the gay activists.
The police wouldn’t actually think to appease the homophobes by letting them take their rage on the “less valuable” brown bodies employed for manual labor, would they? Also, I love the lack of commentary on the chance that in that bus full of Asian migrants, there might as well be queer folks.
And then, right below the story, there is this comment:
LGBT people cannot destroy Russia. That is such sillyness [SIC]. If you want more babies pay Ethiopians to have your babies through IVF.
I just can’t.
Next week, it’ll be a year since the initial rape accusations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, at the Sofitel Hotel in New York broke into mainstream media. Ever since, I have written enough for a small book about his deeds and further allegations of abuse. Now, if only he granted me an interview, my work about him would be done (I guess I can only dream, no?). Or, you know, it’d be done until the next round of abuse and/ or rape allegations came up.
In the meantime, at the link above, the “gang rape” investigation and what the overturn of the law against sexual harassment in France means for potential victims.
Socialist candidate Francois Hollande won the French elections
And yet, I am highly skeptical of anything meaningful or valuable coming out of this. Why you may ask? Because this is the same Socialist Party that wanted Dominique Strauss Kahn for a candidate and lamented his “sex scandals” (i.e. multiple accusations of rape, harassment and abusive behavior) that prevented him from becoming the Party’s presidential runner. Also, DSK and socialism? LOL. The guy that was head of the IMF would surely uphold values of social well being. So, you know, if these are the values the party has displayed so far, I am not exactly hopeful they will rule in a manner that is opposed to what they have done so far.
And you know, about the legality of sexual harassment in France
DSK was explicit in his disdain for WoC and minorities, so I don’t need to tell you who is fair game now, without consequences.
Also, trans people? No legal protections now. Free for all.
Lesbian and queer women? Back to the closet for you because we know there will be consequences.
Sex workers? You better hide because now, no legal protection, no matter how flimsy for you.
Ugh, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. People who are already vulnerable, are now with absolutely no legal recourse.
I wrote about current affairs in Europe in view of this week’s commemoration of the end of WWII. From the post intro:
This week, Europe commemorates the end of World War II, the event that marks a breaking point in contemporary history, the event that faced us with this reminder of humanity’s capability for evil. I don’t need to re-visit the significance of this war or the importance of the event as others have done it (and continue to) much better than I ever would. Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about the legacy of this war, the Holocaust and how we have moved forward after the concerted and life long efforts of so many activists to never repeat anything remotely similar again.
While thinking about this loss of life and the ensuing continuum that leads us to today, May 1st 2012 (coincidentally or not, International Workers Day), I end up with a few snapshots, a few seemingly disconnected events that offer a landscape, a view from the margins if you will, which is, after all, the only view I am ever capable of.
Spoilers alert: we don’t seem to have learned much (or at all). As a matter of fact, Europe seems to be repeating some dangerous patterns.
“A poem by a 15-year-old Dutch boy about his uncle who joined the SS will not be part of next week’s Remembrance Day commemorations”
DutchNews.nl - Row over teenager’s poem overshadows Remembrance Day
Contrary to what you may believe, this is not part of a piece at The Onion. Someone did think that a poem about a “poor youngster” who joined the German SS out of his own volition was suitable to commemorate the end of WWII. That was until a group representing Auschwitz survivors said they would boycott the event if the poetry reading went ahead. Because you know, the survivors had to actually tell that this was wrong, otherwise the reading would have gone ahead.
“For years, German police were baffled by the nine murders of ethnic Turks and one Greek man committed by the Zwickau cell of neo-Nazi terrorists. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, they even asked the FBI for help. The profilers submitted a report clearly stating that the victims were killed because of their ethnic origin.”
And yet, it took them more than four years to actually acknowledge that indeed, this was a racist group murdering foreigners.
At xoJane, I wrote about the elevation of Breivik to pop culture icon status and the alarming amounts of “fanart” created about him.
“Hail Celestia!”
My Nationalist Pony. A Tumblr ran by a neo-nazi brony.
This.is.the.stuff.of.comedy. Only you know, it’s real. As in, there is someone with this belief system out there. From the post linked above:
Any mythos or religion that celebrates strength and beauty would be a radical improvement over the shaming, emasculating dogma of Christ.
Jesus should be laughed at for getting his just desserts. The Romans built the noblest civilisation on earth, but this just wasn’t good enough for Jesus because it wasn’t a communist utopia. He talked out of line and condemned the values of strength, honour and pride, and frankly, I’m glad that traitor met a miserable end.
European history is the story of the Nordic race’s will to power. It should never have been corrupted by a glorifying those who would not help themselves - Jesus could have been a soldier, a merchant, an artist or a mason, but instead he chose to spread the poison of egalitarianism. The will to power is what sustains and preserves life, and a new religion must have a basis of affirming life and strength rather than weakness and death.
Norse, Greek, Roman and Celtic religions must be brought back from the brink. The antidote to soul-deadening pop culture lies in allowing ourselves to be emotionally drawn to their symbols, mythos and ideals. To deny that these religions have emotional gravity for Europeans is to deny their genetic heritage; These fictions are pre-rational and echo, always, always echo, down the corridors of time; manifesting in a different shape with every age.
The black sun symbol is at least two millenia old. In 2011, a European woman sat down to tell a story, and decided that harmony would be maintained by a magical, majestic unicorn that raises the sun.
Emphasis mine. Because really, the irony burns my eyes. “Soul deadening pop culture” says the guy who runs a neo nazi tumblr populated by Ponies. He even has a tribute to mass murderer Anders Breivik with a “fanart” of Ponies in nationalist regalia. But he still dares criticize “soul deadening pop culture”.
Also, I LOLed at “In 2011, a European woman sat down to tell a story, and decided that harmony would be maintained by a magical, majestic unicorn that raises the sun”. Is that how these people “read” My Little Pony? As a new European mythology? Because if that’s the case, it explains a lot about all of these infantilized racist manchildren out there.
I was interviewed at Gender Across Borders as part of the series of Women and immigration running today throughout the day.
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Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.
Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.
The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.
”Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes | The Raw Story
Read the rest at the link. It’s really worth it.
“It’s been a tough couple of weeks for the EDL. Last month’s attempt to unify Europe’s anti-Islamic groups – a pan-European coalition of idiots, if you will – in a “summit” in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, was a bit of a washout, with media and spectators easily outnumbering the supporters. But while it’s easy to laugh at EDL’s failures and jokes on Twitter, everyone knows laughter is only the best medicine when the illness isn’t terminal.”
From the piece:
Anders Behring Breivik is on trial for the murder of 77 people in Norway and his links to our very own far-right group are clear from his “manifesto”: “I … have spoken with tens of EDL members and leaders,” he wrote. “In fact, I was one of the individuals who supplied them with processed ideological material (including rhetorical strategies) in the very beginning.” And a recently published report by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate found that the “counter-jihad movement” – a network of foundations, bloggers, political activists and street gangs – was flourishing in Europe and abroad.[…]
So while the laughter is a good starting point – as pointed out by Flavia Dzodan in her article on the hidden networks of hate in the EU – more needs to be done and said.
Go read the piece, which is great, not only because it’s about one of my “pet topics” but because it sheds light on how people have reacted to this hatred by taking Twitter by storm.
Really? REALLY?!
I have to apologize in advance to anyone who reads this Tumblr looking for quality content. All I got today is rage. Massive amounts of rage.
The thing with people like “European Resistance” is that they are the manifestation of something much more serious and dangerous. You can equate this person to pus on an open wound. Sure, the pus is gross and disgusting and very evident. However, it is also the symptom of a general infection, the part that is not visible and slowly spreads around the organism. While the pus does not directly affect other organs, the infection that manifests as pus in the wound erodes them, and eventually leads to massive failures. That’s the way I see this person. Sure, just like pus, their views are “evident” and in the open, but they are only the manifestation of something much more serious and unaddressed going on. While “European Resistance” posts photo after photo of Breivik, glorifying his actions, somewhere in Europe, there is a silent racist in charge of an HR organization who refuses to hire a Person of Color. “European Resistance” is the vocal, visible symptom of this widespread disease.
