Channelling Efunsetan, Ahebi, Alaba Ida, Nzinga...

vintageindianclothing: The half-sari (pavadai davani in Tamil)...

vintageindianclothing:

The half-sari (pavadai davani in Tamil) is a "training" sari worn by adolescent girls in South India to ease the transition to the six yard sari worn by adult women. The three part ensemble (skirt, blouse, drape aka antariya, choli, uttariya) is not dissimilar to other 3 part outfits in India bar the fact that it mimics  the "full sari" look. 

Normally the lower part is a gathered skirt (like a ghaghra or pavadai worn by young girls) as in pics 2 and 3 but pic 1 (of the actress Savitri) is a little intriguing because the lower part has pleats like a sari but it is still a "half-sari".  I don't think this is an earlier version of the dress (the photograph dates from the 50s), just a version worn in a movie. 

The outfit wasn't much worn in the recent past (the Northern salwar/chudidar ensembles are more common in South India of late) but it appears to be having a bit of a resurgence (for all ages, often with new materials and some hybridisation with the lehenga of the north) and as party/wedding wear. 

meso-zoic: Undressing (sorry if this took forever to scroll...

meso-zoic:

Undressing (sorry if this took forever to scroll through on your dash, I couldn't figure out how to make the pictures small and clickable)

Photo

Ichiro Tsuruta

Ichiro Tsuruta

dynamicafrica: Photos from Sabelo Mlangeni's series 'Country...

dynamicafrica:

Photos from Sabelo Mlangeni's series 'Country Girls', an intimate portrait of gay life in the countryside of rural Mpumalanga, South Africa.

2003 - 2009.

Pinkwashing in a nutshell

eshusplayground:

COUNTRY 1: *commits horrible human rights abuses, discrimination, war crimes, all sorts of fucked up corrupt shit*

OTHER [WESTERN] COUNTRIES: Oh Em Gee! How terrible! How could you DO that? This offends our humanistic traditions (which we don't abide by ourselves) to the core! Something must be done about this!

COUNTRY 1: Um … We love our gays! See our pride parades? See our marriage equality stuff? We love the gays!

OTHER [WESTERN] COUNTRIES: Well, then, you guys are alright.

FOLKS PAYING ATTENTION: Um, what about all those fucked up laws and dead bodies?

COUNTRY 1: We have no idea what you're talking about.

Photo

fitlatina: Irma (short film) Irma Gonzalez is an old...

fitlatina:

Irma (short film)

Irma Gonzalez is an old 'luchadora' (female wrestler) who bears the marks of a life spent battling in the ring, performing daredevil moves. Every day she goes to the gym to rehearse the moves that made her a star. Children watch her curiously. Somewhere in the distance, a song plays: Irma was once a singer, too. In her memory, grainy images of old television clips flicker. Shot in Mexico City, the film is a tender portrait of the multi-talented luchadora and an unusual meditation on athleticism and aging.

Interview with director of Irma, Charles Fairbanks.

thegoddamazon: ME OMG

thegoddamazon:

ME OMG

terrasmiles: yes to everything but the cut up mango. either...

terrasmiles:

yes to everything but the cut up mango. either give me a whole mango and let me suck the seed or mi nuh want it at all.

YES! I love sucking on mango seeds.

akiey: dynamicafrica: iluvsouthernafrica: Madagascar: Beautifu...

akiey:

dynamicafrica:

iluvsouthernafrica:

Madagascar:

Beautiful Magadascan women: c. 1898

(the beauty and power of these women made me cry)

Felt the same way as I was scrolling through these photographs of these incredibly beautiful women. Their elaborate hairstyles and equally as immaculate clothing just blows me away.

This has made my day.
Afrique, mon Afrique.

It is always a pleasure to see these photos from Madagascar.

florestadoamazonas: Dança de Oxum.

florestadoamazonas:

Dança de Oxum.

zuky: the-next-emperor: Hanfu: Tang dynasty.  (Only emperors'...

zuky:

the-next-emperor:

Hanfu: Tang dynasty. 

(Only emperors' could have a dragon embroidery).

Tang dynasty style, from the golden age of Chinese civilization. A government census conducted in the 7th century counted 50 million citizens of Tang, who were living through a flowering of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, literature, music, cuisine, and trade by way of the thriving Silk Road. The cosmopolitan Tang capital of Changan was the largest city in the world. The development of woodblock printing made books widespread. And as you can see, it was a heyday in Chinese fashion, with finely embroidered silk robes and hairstyles which would influence traditional styles throughout East Asia to this day.

ay-cono: junglepussy i love u

ay-cono:

junglepussy i love u

Photo

We Eat an Apple In My Bed

mileswalser:

We've been kissing for months. Three times a week our toothbrushes share a chipped porcelain mug in my bathroom. As my lips reach for the juice falling from her laugh, her mom calls. I listen as she talks about Biology, her new job, asks about her sister. Her eyes drop as she whispers, No, I still don't have a boyfriend.

On cue, I stop chewing. She looks at me, waiting for my face to flush, for me to tear from the bed, but I won't get mad at her. She shouldn't have to explain why we can't go swimming in public, why I don't own a razor, why she doesn't need to buy birth control. She hangs up the phone; I pick up the fruit, tell her Apparently, there's a tiny amount of cyanide in apple seeds.

She shrugs, says she can handle a little danger, but I've studied how her dimples disappear when she lies, and I know she's thinking about a man she could parade around her family, who could kiss her scratchy with stubble. The kind of man I'll never be.

She squeezes my hand in the movie theater dark but tosses it to the side in front of her friends. Says she just needs time. She walks on the sidewalk. I walk in the street. She closes the door. I kiss it goodnight. She goes home for Thanksgiving. I promise not to call.

If I were a postcard, she could hide me in her pocket. If I were clay, she could mold my body into something easier to love. If I were the guy who sells her a cup of coffee every morning. I could smile at her anonymously, safe as a stranger.

She kisses down my neck, my peel hiding the rotten fruit inside me. As I tell her about the cyanide, her head resting on my chest, she talks about cider, autumn pies. See, she says, Apples are harmless. But she saves the last bites for me, scared to let her lips wander too close to the core.

(From my new book, What the Night Demands, available HERE)

Greatest hits of Victorian Feminism: Alien vs. Predator fight over intersectionality

redlightpolitics:

You know how in the movie Alien vs. Predator two monsters fight it out and humans die? This is the image that the ongoing "arguments" about intersectionality between White British feminists in some very mainstream (and really well known) media elicit for me. 

On one corner we have challenger Louise Mensch, fashion blogger extraordinaire (former MP) who, at The Guardian, writes "How about some reality-based feminism?" 

"Intersectional bollocks," in other words. "Check your privilege." "Cis". "Are white middle class stories the only ones worth telling?" and so on and so forth. Notable from their absence from these debates about terminology and frame of reference are male feminists; at some point even the most leftwing and right-on guy just tunes out.[…]

And that is what the modern feminist movement has become. Full of intersectionality, debates about middle-class privilege, hand-wringing over a good education (this is again "privilege" and not well-deserved success), and otherwise intelligent women backing out of debates and sitting around frenziedly checking their privilege.

Then on another corner, we have Laurie Penny, white feminist "ally of People of Color" who, also in The Guardian, writes: 

"Intersectionality" is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years.

The Guardian, unable to resist the power of white feminists debating intersectionality among each other to decide if the theory is "useful" to them, enlists yet another opinion, that of Hadley Freeman, who writes: 

It is, in other words, a sassy exhortation to acknowledge identity politics and intersectionality (the school of thought which says, for example, that different minorities experience oppression differently).[…]

The command to check one's privilege might feel ubiquitous now to those who spend too much of their days on social media, but in fact the phrase has experienced a slow burn.[…] You can date the phrase back further, to 1998, when Peggy McIntosh used the word "privilege" in her essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. 

And then she cites Caitlin Moran and you know it can only go downhill from there:

The growing interest in feminism in the media – aided in a large part by Moran's book, How to Be a Woman – also kept the phrase in constant use, with some feminist bloggers arguing hotly among themselves about the merits or otherwise of intersectionality in feminism.

The Spectator, riding high on the coat tail of all these white feminists with opinions on the usefulness of intersectionality, attempts to be original by publishing a piece by a white man who sets the record straight from the get go "Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You're still wrong" 

It comes, all this stuff, from the vogueish notion of intersectionality — the contention that hardly anybody who is marginalised is marginalised for just one reason, and if you focus on the main reason for their marginalisation then the more marginalised bits of their marginalisation end up being more marginalised still. 

"Vogueish notion of intersectionality".

What we have here is the latest saga in what I call Victorian Feminism where white people of certain wealth are anxious because the plebes dare to have opinions of their own and where the racial and class divides are being threatened by ideas created by the now erased "former subjects of the Empire" who, really, should know better than go around telling others to "check their privilege". Needless to say, not a single one of these people have acknowledged or pointed out the history of intersectionality: why the theories behind it came to be, who created them and for what purpose. These ongoing debates, akin to a toxic spill ruining a landscape that now remains tainted by the erasure, all pretend that the theories and ideas they are butchering came to be in a vacuum. In this feminism, more reminiscent of a cast call for Downton Abbey, the "Masters of the House" are deciding whether the trinkets owned by the "service" are pretty enough to be appropriated.

Notice how there isn't a single word about the fact that intersectionality was created, developed and advanced by Women of Color. Not a mention to Patricia Hills Collins, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones, and all the dozens (hell, hundreds) WoC bloggers that have been throughout time writing about it, advancing these ideas and developing new ones. Peggy McIntosh does get a shout out, though. You know, her condition as a White woman lends her enough legitimacy to be named. The media posting these public conversations didn't see the necessity to include a single voice of a Woman of Color to bring this rich history to the forefront. They are too concerned debating whether the ideas created by Women of Color to explain their lives is of any use to them.

As Reni writes on her piece, "Standing on the shoulders of giants": 

These are the black women who came before me. In 2013 I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. The truth is, thousands of black women made the case for intersectionality before I was even born, and thousands more will make the case for intersectionality long after I'm cold and dead in the ground.

how-i-love-gabon: Dipoula L'Albinos - PaheEditions...

how-i-love-gabon:

Dipoula L'Albinos - Pahe
Editions Paquet

 Petit garçon de 8 ans, Dipoula a eu le malheur de naître albinos au Gabon, dans une ethnie où ils sont réputés pour attirer le mauvais œil. Abandonné à sa naissance, il atterrit dans un orphelinat tenu par des bonnes sœurs, où il va rencontrer ses amis qui vont l'aider à faire les quatre cent coups.

Dipoula, le premier héros albinos qui vous montrera une vision originale de la différence et de la difficulté à se faire une place dans le monde des adultes.

Dipoula, le premier héros albinos qui vous montrera une vision originale de la différence et de la difficulté à se faire une place dans le monde des adultes.

Pahé, le dessinateur de la série, nous présente cette série. 

L'interview ICI

Looks interesting.

exiledpoetssociety: Gabon Bruno Barbey

exiledpoetssociety:

Gabon

Bruno Barbey

African Terms for Same-Sex Patterns* (please feel free to let me know if these are bullshit if anyone knows)

strugglingtobeheard:

thefemaletyrant:

strugglingtobeheard:

African Terms for Same-Sex Patterns*

kimbanda, diviners; esenge (pl.omasenge), man possessed by female spirit; eshengi (pl. ovashengi), "he who is approached from behind" 
—Ambo/Ovambo (Wanyama) 

wändarwäräd, "male-female";wändawände,"mannish women" 
—Amhara (Amharic) 

jigele ketön, reciprocal anal intercourse 
—Bafia (Fia) 

mzili (pl., inzili); buyazi 
—Bagishu/Bageshu, Gisu 

kitesha (pl. bitesha), male and female 
—Bala/Basongye/Ba-songe/Songe 

mokobo, tongo, sterile men 
—Bambala/Mbala 

akho'si, lagredis, court eunuch; gaglgo, homosexuality 
—Dahomey (Fon) 

m'uzonj'ame katumua, male lover;m'ndumbi, "podicator" 
—Gangella/Ovigangella 

onek, active male 
—Gikuyu/Kikuyu 

'dan daudu (pl. 'yan daudu); k'wazo/baja, older/younger men; kifi, lesbianism 
—Hausa 

okutunduka vanena, anal intercourse;epanga, lover; oupanga, erotic friendship (male or female) 
—Herero (Damara) 

sagoda 
—Konso 

londo, nonmasculine males 
—Krongo/Korongo/Kurungo 

ashtime 
—Maale/Male/Maalia 

kiziri 
—Maragoli/Logooli 

mugawe 
—Meru 

tubele, nonmasculine males 
—Mesakin (Ngile) 

mke-si-mume, "woman, not man," male and female homosexuals; mashoga (sing.shoga), male; basha (pl. mabasha), partner of mashoga; msagaji, msago (pl.wasagaji, misago), "grinders," lesbians 
—Mombasa (Swahili) 

soronés, pages 
—Mossi (More) 

tinkonkana, boy wives 
—Mpondo/Pondo (Pana) 

koetsire, sexually receptive males;soregus, friendship bond; ôa-/huru, /huru, mutual masturbation; /goe-ugu, "tribadie" 
—Naman/Hottentot/Kaf-fir 

agyale, "friendship marriages" (sex denied)
—Nzema 

eshenga, gender-mixing male shamans 
—Ondonga (Ndonga) 

a bele nnem e bango, "he has the heart [aspirations] of boys" 
—Pangwe/Pahouian (Fang) 

umuswezi, umukonotsi, "sodomite";kuswerana nk'imbwa, kunonoka, kwitomba, kuranana inyuma, ku'nyo, male homosexuality; ikihindu and ikimaze(Mirundi), "hermaphrodite" priests 
—Rwanda/Ruanda (spoken by Hutus and Tutsis) 

nkhonsthana, tinkonkana, nkonkana boy wife; nima, husband 
—Tsonga (Thonga) 

chibadi, chibanda, chibados, jimbandaa, kibamba, quimbanda 
—Umbundu/Mbunda/ Ovimbundu 

omututa, (male) homosexuals; eponji, "lovers" 
—Wawihé/Viye 

gor—digen, men—women; yauss, insertors; oubi, "open," insertees 
—Wolof/Woloff 

ndongo—techi-la, boy-wives 
—Zande/Azande/Sandeh 

inkosi ygbatfazi, "chief of the women" (diviners); amankotshane, izinkotshane, inkotshane, boy-wife; skesana, cross-gender males; iqgenge, masculine partners
—Zulu 

*The names of most African groups in the historical and ethnographic literature are language names. Language appears in parentheses in the case of groups whose names are not language names. Variants of group names are separate by slashes.

source: http://www.willsworld.org/africa.html

I can speak on the Hausa terms here which I've bolded, in particular 'dan daudu/'yan daudu (I've never come across k'wazo/baja and kifi afaik means fish so I find it interesting that it could refer to lesbianism).

'Yan daudu are men who dress as women and assume roles typically assigned to women in Hausa society, such as cooking. Western observers tend to label 'yan daudu as gay because of their dressing and/or mannerisms, or label them trans* which is kinda wrong because in Hausa society they are still regarded as men. The diversity within the 'yan daudu tends to be overlooked, some 'yan daudu choose to appear as men, some are straight, others are bisexual, apparently a very small percentage of them do sleep with men (although it is possible that some of the 'yan daudu interviewed may have hidden this from researchers). 'Yan daudu tend to be very involved in the Hausa indigenous religion, so it is suggested that they cross-dress due to this (most West African indigenous spiritualities have this, cross-dressing devotees, the belief that a woman can have a "male" spirit causing her to act like a man and vice versa). 'Yan daudu are not necessarily an example of an African "same-sex pattern".

thank you. i would have had no way to confirm or deny any of these, so i appreciate this. i also appreciate your added info on the words you highlighted. especially since that's kind of the point, like that there are so many variations of gender and gender roles and sexuality and when these dudes say oh homosexuality is evil and never existed or that there are only TWO genders and anyone who moves outside the one they are born with are bad, they are applying a lot of western thinking to it. just as you said with the term, of westerners applying same sex relationships to what seems to be a more gender identity that is not what we frame inside our binary or trans* conception. who are we to even try to box in different forms of expression and love anyways? or to demonize them? and these dudes (and some women) tryna take something they dont even understand and fit it into the small western boxes. 

as for same-sex patterns, i think queerness has always been the minority but it has always been present in various cultures and ethnicities throughout time. 

I agree with everything you said.

One thing I’ve learned from reading on queer cultures in indigenous African societies, it is that they generally don’t appear in ways that are similar to Western ideas or thought. Western observers tend to misread a lot, however that doesn’t mean that there was/is no homosexuality in these communities. It’s just they appear in ways that are different. In the case of ‘yan daudu and the female husbands for example, I’m sure there are gay ‘yan daudu and lesbian female husbands but those institutions were not made to cater to queer cultures. Or like the woman whose name I forget, who went to Lesotho and asked “where are the lesbians?”, and was told that there were no lesbians even though there was a strong culture of women loving women there.

I’ve also been thinking about how indigenous African queer cultures have more or less been eroded due to colonialism etc, and are now being replaced by these Western boxes. I think it’s sad because it means we’ve really lost that connection and understanding.