Tuesday 26 July 2011

THE POWER OF THE FRO (in the streets of Paris)




Today I went to a job interview with an afro wig on.
Little did I know that it would be such a thought-provoking experience.  I am mixed race argentinan-brazilian.  My mother is white and my father is black, both from  two white and two black progenitors.  But like many latin-americans, they both have in their genetic patrimonies elements of Aboriginal, Asian, Caucasian and African descent.  Afroindiolatina, that’s how I like to describe myself . It makes me daydream about strong women with big hair in the wind with a baby in one hand and a gun in the other.  Basically I am brown and curveaceous (ye baby) and my hair is straight.
When I dressed up like a secretary to pretend I was a model citizen to go and get a job to pay for my addictions, I couldn’t help but notice my hair wasn’t gonna do it.  Shaved patches in the back, long patches in the front and some green locks in it- maybe I could pull it up in an social worker-esque do ?
Not really.
So I grabbed this  afro wig my cousin gave to me.  Put it on, FUCK YEAH, looks like it belongs there.
Lemme tell you all the implications of wearing an afro wig.  Judith Butler talks about the performative quality of gender[1], and as a woman I know what power of transformation an ensemble of different techniques (make up), practices (shaving) and body modifications (piercings, wigs) can have on one’s (re)presentation in the outside world.
  First of all, go to the nearest PAK’S, Wal-Mart Wigs, or Pozzi and try and find a nice looking afro wig.  You are lucky if you find one.  The reason for this is simple: the whole market of weaves and wigs for afro hair lays on the promise of providing straight, at the most curly or frizzy, manageable hair.  Which brings me to the fact that the Fro’s visibility amongst female populations of black african descent is meager.  Why do sistas do not wanna have afro hair, it’s a whole other problem, but we can talk about it later.
So you’re basically wearing a relique of the 70’s blaxploitation imagery, Pam Grier and Huey P. Newton  going tribal all over your head, but this retro vibe hasn’t quite hit neither the catwalks or the streets yet.  Nobody goes for the fro!  Mental candy for the attention-seeking femme-inist ho that I am.
As I said, the wig looks like it’s my real hair, which is the whole point of it.  I go out dressed with a little black dress, big glasses and my new do. The whole blaxploitation/roots woman thing is broken down by my sober black outfit and the huge Napoleon Dynamite glasses. I feel amazing, it’s like a mask, a new identity that is still to be affirmed and tried out new in the real world. And it’s funny right, because once in the street I realize I've gone from being a dark-skinned white citizen to a light-skinned black one.  And not a dirty hippie or a bamboula, but a working-girl that has a fro.  So a more or less emancipated, wanting-to-fit-into-the sistem black young bio-woman, that chooses to cultivate the bodily manifestations of her genetic inheritance, with an obvious second degree to it. 


I live in Paris, where I am perceived as « exotic » but I can look (or so I’ve been told) like millions of people in Latin-America, South-East Asia, and the Maghreb, depending on what techniques, practices and body modifications I use.  I kindda know what effect they have on people : the latin-american intelectual, the booty-shaker, the white anthropology student.  They all generate different reactions and interactions, and even though my friend Ophélie says she’s never met racism, I can say that race classification is definitely on the plate when it comes to relate to one another. Not in an openly hostile way -luckily I haven’t met those sickos either- but as way of identifying otherness.  Like dogs  meet and smell their asses for a while, so do we humans with accents, general appearance, lexical fields, gender and race.
I jut took the metro there, went to the job interview, took the metro back home.  A bunch of 15 year old black girls laughed at me. A black man asked me where I come from and another gave me  his phone number. At least four middle-aged white men in suits stared at me and quickly gazed away when I met their eyes.  Hobos did not ask me for money.  Generally, there was a certain tension of curiosity  and  -let's call thing by its name- desire in the air.  Without wanting to push it too far, I feel like I somehow embodied the two polarities Eldridge Cleaver defined in The Allegory of Black Eunuchs[2] : "The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak bodied, delicate freak, a sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong self reliant amazon and desposited her in his kitchen...The white man turned himself into the Omnipotent Administrator and established himself in the front office"[3]

That is, in the new cyberdelic era when the insane amount of informations and references we handle, technological and even endocrinological advances let us play with our identities as we speak.  Beware, State, System, Heteronormative Order, there is a on growing mass of us playing with your bipolar standardisation grill, white/black, male/female, natural/artificial, the lines are blurring, and you can't keep the pace.  We are using the same tools you use to control us: Candy (drugs and hormones, legal and illegal) and Porno.  Ok but this is a whole other story. We can talk about it later.
I go, do my job interview, will know about it Friday. I think I got it. 


[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminisn and the subversion of identity, Routledge, 1990.
[2] Concept that Germaine Greer reused in The Female Eunuch. « The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women. »
[3] Eldridge Cleaver, The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, Soul on Ice, Delta, 1968.

Keisha Fabo for President



HAIRY ARMPIT$



Girl, perleaaaze. They all love it.  Once a boy told me:  I love it because it's like more pussy.  BOOM. Simple as that.

Monday 25 July 2011

(corny but) as real as it gets.

i am proud we are free spirits; i am proud we are punks (in the heart - looks don't mean anything); i am proud we are young, reckless and beautiful; i am proud of this blog; i am proud of our magic; i am proud we are lovers; i am proud of what we are and what we are becoming.
joe, leclet - i love you from the deeper ends of my body, my mind, and my soul. i am so proud of you.

NO TITLE, NO BURNERS

its been a while again! its been always a while.
loved your post sofia

i was comming back from a little lonely diner in downtown yesterday night. thinking about my day, my trip you knaw? like these momentos when youre feeling good and healthy and air. but sometimes we, the artists or dont know how to call that, we feel cancheros. check for cancheros word in wikipedia or something. so i was feeling canchero w my new jacket from the 80s. got down from the subway king in a kind of a getto style get me? like kurtis blow when he dances
took my marker. walking around, listening to absolute beginner. dont understand what he says at all but hes makes great music. i made a tag in a blue basket and keep going. some noises around, but the night was really peacefull. other little tiny tag in a white wall. and i felt it. like something in my back... when you feel something, its because its real man!!!! listen to that message of the body! thats the real body language! i just kept going. nothing happens. me hago el boludo como dirian.
get the corner an.......BAM! one guy gritando to me in fucking swedish dont understand any fuckin word and said in spanish que mierda te pasa hermano que carajo estas diciendo. and BAM!!! OTHER GUY FROM THE BACK!!
CSG. POLICE ANTI GRAFFITI of stocolm. whaaaaaaaaaat?
FUCK YOU!!! YOU PEOPLE DONT HAVE ANY OTHER THING TO DO W YOUR LIFE??? CHASE A LION OR A SERIAL KILLER, NOT AN ASSWHOLE PAINTING THE STREETS!!!
2 hours on the floor, then 5 at the police station. getting there was like sarah connor in terminator 2. remember? she sleeps in a white room with a bed and socks. and the corridor was soft. ok, this shit was the same but in yellow and mustard colors. i was just with:
- 2 socks
- 1 jean
- 1 t shirt
- 1 boxer
- my earing
- 1 pillow
- 1 manta for the cold
- 1 paper toilet
- 1 glass of plastic
those were the elements that could be grabbed with my hand. the other, was just walls. and a window. and two doors.
done
5 hours
then, free again. its raining. im getting wet. but freedom is something invaluable
2000 koronas of bill (200 euros). fuck off, i will not call that girl from the gobernmente to pay that money. im going off on thursday.
hopefully, today we made our 4th paint of the week with anton.
heres the pic. this saved my day. painting saved my life. if not i would be studying economics, being in military stuff or working at the csg. god saves rebelion and freedom. god saves the rules to break them. thank you lord for the chocolate of the days. thank you glew to be here and made this words possible. thank you babyface and clot to share our merde in this virtual space. thank you. and thanks to the love, for the love of all days.
CSG, FUCK OFF. GET A JOB. OR A CUBET FULL OF BLUE PAINT AND ENJOY A CANVAS OR A SHOWER.
love, love, love again




Hear Me Now

This is my face



and this is a letter i wrote to a good friend.

Dear XXXX:

When in Nowhere we talked about the pill, i felt like I wasn't totally able to tell you why I am so against it.
Hope u don't mind if i tell u a bit more.
We are now, as you know, in the third phase of capitalism: first there was the industrial revolution/slavery, then the Taylorism/Fordism where the middle class appeared, and now we are in what Beatriz Preciado calls the "farmacopornism".
What is this? Its a capitalism that doesn t aim to the trade of tangible production anymore (steel, cars, machinery), but to the trade and production of tertiary goods: information and communication. They have discovered that there is a huge pool of money in the control of our subjectivities. What is our subjectivity? it's a mix of our sexuality and our identity. Our desiring body, that likes or dislikes something without the intervention of Reason or the State.

Since the end of the WWII there was a boom in research in farmacology having to do with sexuality and "behavioural troubles"(from depression to hyperactivity to erectile dysfunction). LSD, DMT, MDMA, Viagra, Methadone, Prozac, Oestradiol, and the Pill amongst thousands of others were all invented in the post WWII-Cold War USA, with the State's money.
What do all these substances do? They provide us the feeling of release, autosatisfaction, omnipotent control, and happiness that we can't find out there. All these tend to organize, name, and therefore castrate our desires.

Tell me, how would the Capitalist Patriarchal Order survive if the care of the babies wasn't ensured by women, that is, for free? That's why they wish to remove in us our male hormones, for example testosterone (a hormone that has to do with vigour, efficacity and authority defiance) which is, as every hormone, present in every body, bio-female, bio male or intersex. Women aren't supposed to be hairy, not because it's "ugly" but because a woman that is hairy is supposed to have more testosterone in her, and she won't be the coy caretaker/servant she is supposed to be to make this shit work.
How do they castrate our "male"? Beauty standards, social acceptance rules, but they are sneakier than that. The Pill (a compound of female hormones such as Oestrogen) is given to us for almost nothing, whereas it's quite expensive and hard to get Testosterone. It makes of us that little unstable uber feminine creature that will then take other substances to counter rest the disturbances she feels, thus giving more money to the Farmacological Industry.
The term "Farmacopornism" goes also to describe the mega sexualisation of pretty much everything nowadays, padded bras for 9 yr olds, etc. The double standard is "Look at this HOT whatever, you know you want it, you desire it. Desire is primal, animal and untamed, so we (white, male, straight, capitalist powers) have nothing to do with you wanting it. You're free, you're in control of your desire" We're supposed to desire freely. But the truth is that they educate our desire, stimulate it in the parts that go to perpetrate the Heteronormative Order, make it taboo, shameful or even illegal in the parts that do not serve the world's economy.

ANYWAY sorry to bore you, it might not be really clear, but i really needed to express myself on that one, and I know you are good ears. There is very clear patent of sexopolitical analysis of the economy that very few people are willing to talk about.
Love
S.

Saturday 23 July 2011

i need to get it off my chest

it's ten million degrees in nyc (both farenheit and celsius) and i just have all these things i want to shout to the world. i need to shout them, i need the weight of my thoughts off my shoulders. it's crazy, but the heat turns everything into the most animalistic thing you can imagine. it's all about instincts and survival. people want ac and i want ac and sex. that's all that matters these days.

excuse the randomness and disconnections of this post, but i really need to express these thoughts so that i don't waste any more time on them, i need to stop wandering off in my head and i need to focus in the right now (carpe diem, as the Romans would say):
i'm pretty sure the papacito was into me. i'm also pretty sure he didn't tell me he is with someone (even though the status of the relationship might be a bit unclear and volatile). i think he would like to hang out but the situation is actually too complicated. i think he got scared of actually maybe liking me, or maybe scared of me actually liking him. maybe he wasn't such a papacito after all, or maybe sometimes life can be too complicated. it's hard for me to understand with my heart because my life is so carefree (and i love that), but i can grasp it with my head. life is about timing, and patience is a virtue. i don't want or plan to be patient this time. i'm going to be smarter and i'm going to let it go. it's time for me to help myself. not only with this, but in general - avoid problems, my new mantra. am i disappointed? yes. is my life going to be worse because of it? never. and that's cool.

i just feel like saying - to all the things in life that don't go the way i'd like to: you can kiss my lioness ass. better things will come.

Thursday 21 July 2011

vicodin and i really need a shag

it's like 39º out there but i'm on vicodin and it feels really silky smooth. yum.
also, i really need to get laid. i can't think, i can't sleep and i can't exist. it's been 2 months or more and i'm  craving some sweat. if you have any friends you think would suit me, please get in touch.

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Sunday 10 July 2011

skype time

buenos aires - new york

new york - london

Saturday 9 July 2011

totes awesome

independence day

for Argentina

and for South Sudan

MAY FREEDOM ALWAYS PREVAIL