Becoming George - Abel Korzeniowski
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
— A Single Man (via riennestreel)
Magic Sound Fabric - We Are All Connected
There are types of life and existence that you have no concept of whatsoever but we are all connected
i hope rick santorum buys kids cereal to get a toy but when he opens it it isnt the one he wanted.
(via lesshumansmorecats)
“
For decades, Barbie’s blond hair, blue eyes, wasp-thin waist and improbable curves have embodied American culture’s ludicrous yet deeply harmful beauty standards. These beauty standards are grounded in racist notions that associate whiteness with virtue and loveliness. When Mattel debuted black Barbies in the late 1960s, the dolls were essentially replicas of the original white Barbie with darker skin. Barbie’s idealized Anglo-Saxon facial features remained the same: a barely-there nose and rosebud mouth. The company would not update the doll’s features for another forty years. When they did, the Europeanized look of the new black Barbies remained problematic to some.
Given this history, the lure of Barbie for black female rappers might seem to reflect an internalization of white beauty standards. Barbie embodies the European appearance that dominant American culture tells women they should want; black Barbie, as a doll and a concept, symbolizes many of those same ideals. By claiming the label of Barbie or black Barbie, rappers like Lil’ Kim and Minaj can signal that they have a mainstream (read: “white-people-approved”) beauty.
Minaj’s Pink Friday cover art deploys exaggerated Barbie imagery in order to call attention to the artificiality of her appearance. One outstretched leg, shiny as plastic, is more than double the length of her torso. She has no arms, and her breasts are thrust so high they cover her collarbone. These out-of-whack proportions and missing limbs communicate the impossibility of the femininity she embodies. Meanwhile, her vacant expression—eyes wide and dull, pink lips in an expressionless pout—suggests not a doll come to life but a life-size doll, revealing the non-transferable nature of the Barbie ideal.
The cover art of the album perfectly captures Minaj’s approach to gender and beauty as performance. As Lisa Lewis wrote of Madonna, Minaj “engages with and hyperbolizes the discourse of femininity.” Appropriating the Barbie image, and taking it to its logical extreme, may actually be a way of subverting white beauty ideals.
”— Sarah Todd (further) explains what Barbie means in Nicki Minaj’s images, hip-hop, and “girl culture” on the R today. (via racialicious)
(via deactivated-catladysouls)
NATIVE YOUTH SEXUAL HEALTH NETWORK, North America (www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com)
Campaign Titled: Healthy Sexuality and Fighting Homophobia: Native Youth Photography Project
About the Project:
This is the first national campaign for First Nations youth across Canada to fight homophobia and normalize healthy sexuality!
First Nations youth from across Canada came together in March 2010 to create a national campaign about sexuality and fighting homophobia. These are the images created from the campaign which can be utilized as posters, postcards, as well as community newspaper inserts for articles and awareness.
About the Organization:
The Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) is a North-America wide organization working on issues of healthy sexuality, cultural competency, youth empowerment, reproductive justice, and sex positivity by and for Native youth.
The reclamation and revitalization of traditional knowledge about people’s fundamental human rights over their bodies and spaces, intersected with present-day realities is fundamental to our work.
We work within the full spectrum of reproductive and sexual health for Indigenous peoples.THIS IS AWESOME
(via pinkpanthers)
