Progressive culture since 1954
The video for Taylor Swift’s new single ‘Wildest Dreams’ has been condemned by many commentators as a racist neo-colonial folly. However, this critique can be extended. Rather than being completely absent, I would argue the people of Africa are represented in this video by the continent’s wildlife. This racist analogy has deep roots – not only in the Hollywood era depicted by Swift and co., but the entire history of European imperialism in Africa.
Instead of the generic factoids-plus-publication-list anthologised writers might use, Yi-Fen Chou’s revealed that Chou was in fact Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Indiana. According to his bio, Hudson becomes Chou only when his poems are rejected several times, because apparently his poems get noticed that way. That’s cool – because as we know, Asian writers definitely get noticed and published all the time! (No, they don’t.) As blogger Angry Asian Man quipped about this ‘yellowface’: ‘The fuck?’
Some time ago, I made a mental note to write a piece about the election in Denmark – the one where the country had lurched to the left, repudiating the nativist Danish People’s Party, returning to the social democrats and…
During my medical student rotations I saw people die in ways that could not be described as ‘good’, many of whom I felt would have benefited from euthanasia had they been given the choice. Euthanasia was something I hoped would be legalised before my time to die arrived so that I could make use of it if I needed to. But now I am not so sure.
But simply stating an event is inclusive does not automatically make it so. The phrase ‘pussy power’ promotes the idea that having a vagina is synonymous with being a woman. This is problematic on two levels: it excludes those women who do not have a vagina from the category of women; it also erases the gender identity of trans men and non-binary people who have vaginas by insisting that they are women. This is cis-sexism. Apart from the important reality that associating vaginas with womanhood can trigger dysphoria for some trans people, trans women, like other trans people, face the constant negation of their gender identities.