naamahdarling:

spiritscraft:

werewolfetude:

fandomsandfeminism:

pikkulaku:

Imagine being a kid in school. Your teacher comes up with an idea for class picture. Every student will draw pictures of their friends.

Everyone starts drawing enthusiasticly, and can’t wait to see what they look like in the drawings. When pictures are ready you notice that popular students have more pictures than rest, but nobody has done a drawing of you. The teacher notices that too, and asks if someone would do your picture. To your horror the class clown takes the job, and comes up with a caricature of you. Others are laughing, but you’re not. You feel awful. The teacher notices that. and asks again someone to do a drawing of you. One of the ‘good students’ starts drawing, but the result is forced. It’s just a drawing of a generic child wearing a shirt of same color as you a wearing. There’s no spirit, no soul in it. You start sensing that the class is geting frustrated with you. They want to be done with this. You ask quietly the teacher if you could do a drawing yourself.

After school your classmates confront you. Why did you have to make such a big deal out of it? The first picture was funny. The second picture was just fine! The drawing you did yourself wasn’t right, do you think you are that good-looking? There were other kids who got only one or two pictures of themselves. Who are you to demand special treatment? Maybe there would have been a picture of you if you weren’t such annoying baby, nobody likes you anyway, and nobody’s going to if you keep on being like that, you don’t deserve a drawing!

This could be story of bullying, but it’s also about how I see portraying LGBTQ+-people and PoC in mainstream entertainment.

Thanks to Fandoms and Feminism for inspiration!

This is a great metaphor. 

This is the most accurate fucking post I’ve ever seen in my life oh my god.

weeping

This is incredible. A perfect metaphor. And it really points out how fucking childish it is to insist that representation does not matter.

angelsandthearchitect:

“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror.  And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all.” 

Junot Diaz

“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” 

Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”

“I was working in theses statements to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation. In fact I was saying just the opposite: that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It was this marginality that I was naming as central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.” 

bell hooks, Marginality as Site of Resistance

“If you an alien, you gotta not apologize for being an alien. You gotta join with the universe and just be.”

Dizzee, The Get Down

sourcedumal:

lillycaul:

I always find it so funny when people bitch about ‘forced diversity’.

because, like, once you work retail you start to see just how different everybody is.

for example, the other day I greeted a woman I was ringing up and started asking her the usual questions we’re supposed to ask (if they have a rewards card, etc) and she made a gesture pointing to her ear and mouthed ‘I’m deaf’. 

and I was just like ‘Oh’, and so I skipped over the questions and just gave her a nice smile instead of the usual schpiel we’re supposed to give. she thanked me in sign language and smiled back before walking away.

and that’s just one tiny example. she was just one customer of hundreds that shift. that’s not even mentioning all the other types of people I ring in a day, of all ages, body sizes, races/skin colors, and gender expression.

it’s like…that’s how the world is. 

when people say having diversity in a fictional universe seems ‘false’ or ‘forced’, that says to me that they must exist in a very homogenous, sheltered environment. because even working for a company that has a rather disproportionately-high white middle-class customer demographic, I still see more diversity on any given day than I tend to ever see in books and movies and TV shows.

it’s just kind of laughable to me when people say a movie/book/franchise has “too much” diversity. because there’s no such thing.

When they say diversity is being ‘forced’ they are saying “It’s bad enough I have to tolerate your existence here in this world. I don’t want to have to ever think about you in a fictional one.”

coca-cola-death-squads:

it’s annoying when people talk about how representation has gone “too far” and their argument is like “what’s next?? a trans schizophrenic immigrant lesbian?? an adhd bipolar physically disabled bisexual?? a japanese-american ocd nonbinary asexual??” and it’s just like. all those people exist. i’ve met all three of those people–one of those descriptions is of me!–and the fact that it’s ~pandering~ to have characters like that really proves that you can only be marginalized one way at a time before people start calling it ‘excessive’. who i am isn’t too much for representation! if seeing a disabled person, a mentally ill person, an lgbt person, a person of color—or, yes, ALL OF THOSE THINGS DESCRIBING THE SAME PERSON— is REALLY enough to bring you out of the story, that sounds like a you problem. because those people exist in real life, and we should exist in fiction too.