July 17th, 2016
from Nat
I quite honestly don’t know what to say about this week and month and year. I have been trying to listen and hear and read and learn more. Here’s some things this week that helped me do that.
- You have until midnight tonight to apply for the GYALCAST Academy – a series of workshops for Black girls and women 16-29 in Toronto. You should do it!
- 12 reasons CanLit’s got me feeling so tired (“#2: I’m tired of looking at the handful of people of colour in the room wondering if they feel outside too or if they’re blending in just fine and realizing that either way, it’s still a lonely cause”.)
- Wealthy funders, start lining up: an immersive Cree summer camp for girls is at risk due to lack of funding
- Black children are not allowed to be innocent in America
- Why I’m non-binary but don’t use they/them: “I don’t like using they/them pronouns because it feels so foreign to me. It’s really no shade to those who have found a home in they/them, but more so calling into question the terms “gender neutral” and “neutrality” in a world where nothing is neutral or objective, and often all defaults are based in masculinity and whiteness.”
- On Race in the LGBTQ community, Black Lives Matter, and how we can do better from the Edmonton Men’s Health Collective.
- I KNOW this is going to come in handy for some GUTS readers: 12 tips for seducing someone who identifies as a witch (main tip: be a Taurus)
- “haunting is a gender. gender is another word for horror story.” GRIEF AFTER GRIEF AFTER GRIEF, a new poem from Billy-Ray Belcourt
- “On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.” Laurie Penny on self-care is very good
- “I need to address the white people and non-Black POC within the sick and crip communities that I’m a part of, or that have resonated with Sick Woman Theory in their own work.” Johanna Hedva on Black Lives Matter
- Rethinking forgiveness in the face of unceasing Black trauma
- Babely Shades is a QTPOC collective taking up space in Ottawa’s music scene: watch out, bros.
- “BLM-TO’s Pride protest has steered the conversation back to deeper and more important, even philosophical, questions of queer life. We need to meditate on them.” Rinaldo Walcott on BLM-TO
- Very excited about this game: The best time I pretended I hadn’t heard of Slavoj Zizek
- Leslie Spillett, an Indigenous women and an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, has been removed from the Winnipeg Police Board
- “Being jailed simply for the crime of being born somewhere else is unacceptable; indefinite detention is utterly unjustifiable.” Sign this petition to end indefinite detention in Canada.
- How to prioritize the safety of women on the TTC
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The mental health zines filling the gap that therapy doesn’t
- “Crowd-sourced syllabi are acts of resistance. Circulating collective knowledge online can assert and centre marginalized histories—within spaces and narratives that continue to brush their existence aside.” On the #BlackLivesCDNSyllabus, a very important project
- Sometimes a hard week calls for a rousing hate-read, and I am thankful to Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer for giving it to us. Alternately, you could watch something purely cute.
- FINALLY, we released the call for submissions for our fall issue on LOVE Friday: check it out and send us a pitch by August 8th, ok?