Tag: Race And Racism

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    Not your ‘Fashion Dots’: The Continuous Appropriation of Bindis

    July 1st, 2013     by Raisa Bhuiyan     Comments

    In the latest slew of North American women pop stars to don the bindi, white-passing Selena Gomez clocked in at number 10 for her MTV Movie Awards performance of “Come and Get It.” While it can only be assumed that Selena probably didn’t think this move through, the question remains as to why popular pop stars such as Alicia Keys, Katy Perry, Shakira, Gwen Stefani, Miley Cyrus, Madonna, Nicole Scherzinger, Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks have … READ MORE

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    Toronto Pride art programming: Bambitchell

    June 17th, 2013     by Julia Horel     Comments

    Toronto Pride is almost upon us! There are a huge number of events, programs, installations and shows throughout the city during late June and early July. One of these is That’s So Gay, an annual art exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel, curated this year by Elisha Lim. Stay tuned to Shameless for more coverage of this exhibition coming soon. One of this year’s participants of That’s So Gay is Bambitchell, the name used by Sharlene Bamboat … READ MORE

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    Queers Who Pray: An Elisha Lim endeavour

    May 21st, 2013     by Nish Israni     Comments

    I have had the pleasure of many run-ins with Elisha Lim at various community events, and have been totally blown away by their work. Thus, I feel compelled to promote their recent endeavour, a film called Queers Who Pray. Elisha is a brilliant and multi-talented artist who has illustrated comics, books and anthologies, as well as exhibited portraits in international galleries and screened short films all over the world. They have also self-published beautiful and endearing … READ MORE

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    Guest Post: Woman in Niqab Asking for it?

    May 3rd, 2013     by Guest Blogger     Comments

    by Farrah Khan A consistently held myth is that women who are sexually assaulted “ask for it” by the way we dress or act. However, government reports and community organizations have demonstrated that this doesn’t matter. A woman of any age, physical type, or dress can be assaulted. Violence is violence, and believing in the myth that women “ask for it” is harmful. Not only does it absolve the perpetrators of violence, it also serves as … READ MORE

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    The Contemporary Urgencies of Audre Lorde’s Legacy

    March 3rd, 2013     by Jennifer Marston     Comments

    This coming Thursday will launch a two-week long celebration of poet and activist Audre Lorde. There are free events happening across Toronto and at both York University and The University of Toronto. Check out the list of events below. Community Arts Practice, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in association with Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto Invite you to THE CONTEMPORARY URGENCIES OF AUDRE LORDE’S LEGACY, MARCH 7-21, 2013 1) Medicines for Survival: Indigenous Knowledge and … READ MORE

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    Global outrage, Local “meh?”

    February 8th, 2013     by Jenna MacKay     Comments

    While I home for the holidays I watched the 6 O’clock news with my mom. The local station highlighted the Indian protests against violence against women in response to the woman who was gang raped and beaten. A young protester was interviewed and stated the rates of sexual assault in India. I cannot remember the statistic, but it would have been alarming to the average viewer and was framed in sensationalized terms. … READ MORE

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    The 5 W’s and the H’s of the Anti-Oppression Framework

    February 4th, 2013     by deb singh     Comments

    The Anti-Oppression framework is a tool to see how people experience oppression in the world and a way for us to stop it. This blog will outline some of the basics of what the anti-oppression framework is, how it is used by/against people and how we can use it as a tool for supporting people in our own communities. What is Anti-Oppression? Anti-oppression is a way of thinking about the world as well as a tool to … READ MORE

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    MyMSG: We all need positive messages

    January 29th, 2013     by Guest Blogger     Comments

    by Afi Browne For the past 10 months I have been working with Springtide Resources, an agency committed to ending violence against women and everyone who faces oppression, such as queer and trans people, people with disabilities, Deaf people, immigrants and refugees. Along with four other youth and our project coordinator we have been creating curriculum around our own experiences of oppression and using that curriculum to encourage youth to create positive messages to counteract the … READ MORE

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    That’s Rockist! A racialized experience of listening to western rock music Part I

    January 28th, 2013     by Raisa Bhuiyan     Comments

    Worn out leather jackets. Black skinny pants. Studded accessories. Groupies. Lots of groupies. Cowboy boots. Unkempt hair. Glamourous makeup. Despair. Joy. Smashing guitars in hotel rooms and getting caught in Tokyo for trying to smuggle marijuana into Japan. These terms and phrases reflect only some of the things that have come to inform the public imagination about what makes up the image of a rock star. While a careful and thoughtful analysis of pinpointing the precise social, economic and cultural factors for why rock music in … READ MORE

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    The Comfort of Queer Family Wisdom

    November 20th, 2012     by Elisha Lim     Comments

    I think that last year was one of my most humbling years. I’d become used to a certain level of respect and dignity, and when I lost it, I was kind of floored. I left my home of Toronto. Toronto - where I had been part of the majority. I was an immigrants’ kid, I was university educated, I knew lots of activist jargon and where to shop for shoes. But last year I moved to … READ MORE

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    Toronto event: TORTURE AS PUBLIC TRUTH: The Case of Omar Khadr

    November 12th, 2012     by Julia Horel     Comments

    University of Toronto Equity Studies Students’ Union Presents… TORTURE AS PUBLIC TRUTH: The Case of Omar Khadr Lecture by Sherene Razack, Phd. http://www.uoftessu.com/tortureaspublictruth [free lecture followed by Q&A session] In this lecture, focusing on the torture of Omar Khadr, Sherene Razack will explore how torture comes to be a public truth in democratic regimes. How is torture written on the social body? How does a practice so extreme come to be seen as a necessary part of our everyday world, a … READ MORE

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    Misogyny in Geek Culture

    October 15th, 2012     by Guest Blogger     Comments

    Seventh grade was the year I realized that I definitely Wasn’t Cool. Until that point, my relative coolness had been up for debate - sure, I was a brainiac know-it-all who spent most of her spare time with her nose stuck in a book, but I’d always done well socially and had a fairly sizeable group of friends. Something happened, though, during that summer before seventh grade. Some kind of paradigm shift went down among the … READ MORE

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    Eat, Travel, Oppress: Travel Discourse and Imperialist Nostalgia

    September 18th, 2012     by Raisa Bhuiyan     Comments

    In an inspiration-intended to-do list aptly titled “25 things to do before you’re 25,” I read the following suggestion, 16. Identify your fears and instead of letting them dictate your every move, find and talk to people who have overcome them. Don’t settle for experiencing .000002% of what the world has to offer because you’re afraid of getting on a plane. I thought it was imperative to bold the second sentence of that suggestion for two main … READ MORE

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    Interview: 2qtpoc-montreal show

    September 4th, 2012     by deb singh     Comments

    Hey Shameless Blog Readers, Having sadly been unable to attend the awesome 2qtpoc-montreal Show for the city’s Pervers/cite, I did get the opportunity to connect with one of the amazing artists from the show, Textaqueen. Their website reads: “Texta” is Australian for felt-tip marker and TextaQueen is Australia’s felt-tip super-hero. Renowned for use of the humble felt-tip marker to boldly re-interpret the tradition of the salon nude, TextaQueen explores politics of sex, gender and identity in tangent … READ MORE

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    Recommended Viewing: It Gets Fatter

    August 29th, 2012     by Julia Horel     Comments

    It Gets Fatter is a project started by three self-identified fat people of colour, with the intent of building a dialogue around being fat people of colour in a fatphobic world, eating together and being in safe spaces together. “… maybe it could be a project, like It Gets Better, but actually better, because people of colour are doing it.” They have so far posted an introductory video that can be found here, and a version with … READ MORE

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    Recommended Reading: Hate Crimes Always Have A Logic: On The Oak Creek Gurudwara Shootings

    August 7th, 2012     by Julia Horel     Comments

    Highly recommended piece from the amazing Harsha Walia over at Racialicious. While these murders were abhorrent, they were not ‘senseless’. The ad nauseaum suggestion that the killings were senseless attempts to construct the shooting as random and without logic, when in fact racist hate crimes operate through the very deliberate and precise logic of white supremacy. White supremacy, as a dominant and dominating structuring, actually necessitates and relies on a discourse that suggests that hate crimes are … READ MORE

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    Hold Ya Head: What will grab our attention after Jun Lin’s head is recovered?

    July 10th, 2012     by Raisa Bhuiyan     Comments

    I remembered Yoshihiro Hattori when I first read about the murder of Trayvon Martin this past March. Yoshihiro was a 16-year old Japanese exchange student who was fatally shot by a man in 1992 when he had knocked on his door in search of directions to a Halloween party. Upon his arrest, the killer Rodney Peairs claimed that he was only ‘defending’ his home from the ‘intruder’ who was ‘was acting in a menacing, … READ MORE

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    Toronto event: Brown Canada Showcase

    June 12th, 2012     by Julia Horel     Comments

    Brown Canada Showcase, Wed Jun 27 @ Grace Toronto. Premiere of the original play “Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!” Tickets are free, RSVP now on eventbrite! Brown Canada Showcase Sharing Our Stories: Creating New Legacies Wednesday June 27th, 2012 5:30-9:00 p.m Grace Church, 41 Britain Street, Toronto (east of Queen station) Dinner served from 5:30-6:30 pm. Program starts at 6:30 pm, sharp. This is a Free Event, but space is limited; please RSVP before June 25th ateventbrite or by contacting browncanada@cassa.on.ca or 416-932-1359 … READ MORE

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    CROSS-POST: Youth violence in Toronto and our hierarchy of victimhood

    June 11th, 2012     by Guest Blogger     Comments

    This piece originally appeared in the Toronto Star on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. It is cross-posted here with the permission of its author, Simon Black. You can find Simon on Twitter @_simonblack or at his website. Last year in the city of Chicago, nearly 700 young people were hit by gunfire; 66 of them died. The vast majority of victims were African-American and Latino youth living in the city’s racialized low-income neighbourhoods. A recent analysis found … READ MORE

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    Ad.ver.sary: Making a statement in the industrial music scene

    May 22nd, 2012     by Julia Horel     Comments

    PLEASE NOTE: The video discussed in this post contains racist and sexist language, as well as violent imagery. The video is not hosted on this page. A censored transcript is found here, with a link to the video. The Kinetik festival (May 17-20 this year in Montreal) is an international festival of electro-industrial music. Toronto-based act Ad.ver.sary (Jairus Khan) was scheduled to play his set ahead of two bands he has openly criticized for using highly … READ MORE

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