Gender & Queerness Archives

Words our fathers should have said: Encouragement for other Black cis-het men experiencing body-dysmorphia

I hoarded bodybuilding magazines and wasted nights diagramming routines which earned me more injuries than benefit. In the gym, I exercised to nausea, vomited and despised myself for being ill equipped for exercise regimens designed to market magazines.

Black women’s impossible dilemma: How this world ties our “safety” to the protection of our abusers

October 7, 2020
Amber Butts
Blackness & Anti-Blackness, Gender & Queerness, Music, Women & Feminism

The world has an appetite for our pain, and this is what I refuse. This is why I will never again decide to protect someone who harms me.

Sex work is subject to the same anti-Blackness as every other industry in the US

September 29, 2020
Nuni Snowden
Sexuality

When we say we are committed to Black liberation it must be in service of sex workers’ autonomy. But they are never nuanced beings. The fight for sex worker liberation is the fight for all Black lives, and until that is prioritized, erasure and respectability politics will persist. In every industry.

Police can’t save children from sexual abuse, but we must

August 26, 2020
Ignacio Rivera & Aredvi Azad
Blackness & Anti-Blackness, Gender & Queerness, Sexuality

With inadequate responses to CSA and little trust in police among people of color, relying on cops to address an issue like CSA is questionable, at best.

The problem with using proximity & poverty to dismiss the fallacies of “Black-on-Black crime”

August 5, 2020
Jacques Lesure
Blackness & Anti-Blackness, Gender & Queerness, Men & Masculinity, Race & Blackness

Black men’s “senseless” acts of violence are much more sophisticated in nature than both the liberal and conservative anti-abolition culture of poverty argument would have one believe.

The perils of navigating platonic relationships with other gay men

Being a sexual minority puts pressure on gay men to connect sexually or romantically with the gay men who are most proximate to them.

How “Gayle King v. Kobe Bryant” obscured a valid critique of sensationalizing sexual violence

March 5, 2020
Marcus Board
Film/TV, Internet, Media & Entertainment, Women & Feminism

In our efforts to resist this silencing, however, we must also consider the ways that others who are not public figures are implicated in these discussions

Ayanna Pressley sees power in being a sexual violence survivor, & there’s science to that

February 25, 2020
Cat Cuevas
Electoral Politics & Organizing, Health, Sexual Health, Women & Feminism

For those of us survivors whose bodies revolt, itâ€™s not just that we are experiencing random medicalized dysfunctions. We are reacting to the toxicity surrounding us.

Having friendships with cis-het Black men taught me that we get to say no to sex, too

We’re tricked into believing that sex is about performance more than it is about connection, autonomy and consent. And the pressures of performance encourage men to consider hardness as our only option, means of expression, and source of intimacy.

We protect us: Why the state will never solve the epidemic of missing and trafficked Black women & girls

January 2, 2020
Boke Saisi
Blackness & Anti-Blackness, Gender & Queerness, Women & Feminism

State institutions such as the police, and child welfare services are often complicit in sexual violence enacted upon Black women and girls.