dirtylibrarianthoughts:

Members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, including Sylvia Rivera (seated in middle). (photo: Ellen Schumsky)

Queer Prehistory

In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other gender-benders, hustlers, runaway teens and cruising gays. The Compton’s management had begun calling police to roust this nonconformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away. 

Get it right, because the Stonewall Riots were not the first acts of queer rebellion against the State.

ninasafiri:

Göttin der Dummheit: Two Women

arielnietzsche:

I am a woman.
I am a woman.

I am a woman born of a woman whose man owned a factory.
I am a woman born of a woman whose man labored in a factory.

I am a woman whose man wore silk suits, who constantly watched his weight.
I am a woman whose man wore tattered clothing, whose heart was constantly strangled by hunger.

I am a woman who watched two babies grow into beautiful children.
I am a woman who watched two babies die because there was no milk.

I am a woman who watched twins grow into popular college students with summers abroad.
I am a woman who watched three children grow, but with bellies stretched from no food.

But then there was a man;
But then there was a man;

And he talked about the peasants getting richer by my family getting poorer.
And he told me of days that would be better and he made the days better.

We had to eat rice.
We had rice.

We had to eat beans!
We had beans.

My children were no longer given summer visas to Europe.
My children no longer cried themselves to sleep.

And I felt like a peasant.
And I felt like a woman.

A peasant with a dull, hard, unexciting life.
Like a woman with a life that sometimes allowed a song.

And I saw a man.
And I saw a man.

And together we began to plot with the hope of the return to freedom.
I saw his heart begin to beat with hope of freedom, at last.

Someday, the return to freedom.
Someday freedom.

And then,
But then,

One day,
One day,

There were plans overhead and guns firing close by.
There were planes overhead and guns firing in the distance.

I gathered my children and went home.
I gathered my children and ran.

And the guns moved farther and farther away.
But the guns moved closer and closer.

And then, they announced that freedom had been restored!
And then they came, young boys really.

They came into my home along with my man.
They came and found my man.

Those men whose money was almost gone.
They found all of the men whose lives were almost their own.

And we all had drinks to celebrate.
And they shot them all.

The most wonderful martinis.
They shot my man.

And then they asked us to dance.
And they came for me.

Me.
For me, the woman.

And my sisters.
For my sisters.

And then they took us.
Then they took us.

They took us to dinner at a small private club.
They stripped from us the dignity we had gained.

And they treated us to beef.
And then they raped us.

It was one course after another.
One after another they came after us.

We nearly burst we were so full.
Lunging, plunging—sisters bleeding, sisters dying.

It was magnificent to be free again!
It was hardly a relief to have survived.

The beans have almost disappeared now.
The beans have disappeared.

The rice—I’ve replaced it with chicken or steak.
The rice, I cannot find it.

And the parties continue night after night to make up for all the time wasted.
And my silent tears are joined once more by the midnight cries of my children.

This poem was written by a working class Chilean woman in 1973, shortly after Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown. A U.S. missionary translated the work and brought it with her when she was forced to leave Chile. This is to be read by two people, one reading the bold-faced type and one reading the regular type.

The period of rice and beans for the poor woman in the poem occurs after the election of the socialist, Salvador Allende, as president of Chile. Allende was elected in 1970. He was overthrown in a military coup in September 1973 after a long period of destabilization launched by the wealthy classes and supported by the US government and US corporations such as International Telephone and Telegraph. Along with thousands of others, Allende was killed by the military. The coup, under the leadership of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, launched a period of severe hardship for the working and peasant classes. Although Chile currently has a civilian government, the military is still the country’s most powerful institution.

(via the tiger’s mouth · The real face of White Australia)

In October 1911, the Sydney Morning Herald published a short article under the headline, ‘An indignity: photographs and finger-prints’. The article discussed the situation of Charles Yee Wing, a wealthy and respected Sydney businessman, who had asked to be exempted from having to supply his handprint and photograph as part of the process of being issued a CEDT.

Yee Wing had travelled before and was well-known to Customs officials. … Yee Wing’s primary objection was that the officials insisted upon photographing him, in various positions, ‘just like a criminal’.

+++

As part of our Invisible Australians project, Tim Sherratt has recently been experimenting with facial detection technology to automatically extract and crop photographs from CEDTs. You can read Tim’s discussion of what he’s done over at his blog. After extracting 7,000 photographs from Sydney series ST84/1, about a seventh of which is digitised in RecordSearch, Tim built an interface to display them as an interactive wall of faces. As Tim was putting it all together, I thought of Sophie’s critique of the use of photographs of Chinese people in the Forgotten Faces exhibition and of the way the images had been assembled together in rows as a kind of rogues gallery. I also thought of Charles Yee Wing’s comments a hundred years ago about the indignity of having to provide his photograph for a CEDT.

Could the same kind of criticisms be levelled at our wall of faces as at Forgotten Faces? Are we representing our subjects as more than passive victims of a racist bureaucracy? Are we using their images respectfully and decently? Are their images able to be understood by our contemporary audience? And how should we acknowledge the resistance and opposition of people like Charles Yee Wing?

Kate Bagnall on the ethics of using POC imagery/records obtained coercively, in media addressing racist coercion and ommission in historic archives.

Invisible Australian’s is an online gallery project, documenting the thousands of Chinese, Malay, Japanese, Afghani, Indian and Syrian people subject to state surveillance - as migrants at the commencement of the now infamous White Australia Policy.

+ the archive they’re creating counters white nationalist denial of POC contributions to nation building. Their ‘about’ page states: “They celebrated Federation. They fought at Gallipoli. They struggled through the Depression. And they battled for freedom in the Pacific.”

Whatever you think about the links between militarism and nation, this and the photos of families of primarily Asian Australians who served in military and civic roles are a visible counter to current aggressively ahistoric, white nationalist myth building around Gallipolli, the ANZACs etc.

-although these people are now deceased, their descendents may recognize them, using the gallery. You can access the project via a blog - which does have posts describing lives and politics at the time of the photos - acknowledging whatever is known about the subjects, their self perception and how this was disregarded by the WAP. Or you can access a photo browser that directly clips photos of these people with their original migration dept. ‘Excemption from Dictation Test” paperwork.*

That part - the separation of any subjectivity, context, consent etc. from what remains a demeaning white supremist mode of archiving - remains jarring and ethically dubious imo. 

- otoh, much work being done in Asian Australian histories is very academic or highly localized and not public searchable atm. I suppose the thing this prompts and why I’m tumbling it is, because there is a lot of scope for online curation in addressing the legacy of the WAP, just thinking about the how, who, where aspects.   

*dictation tests were English language skills tests that Australian immigration staff could apply randomly at the border. They were manipulated to discriminate against POC or non-British migrants, to whom they were given far more than white Brits, although they could involve esoteric questions that even mother tongue English speakers probably wouldn’t know.

Left: ‘A young dandy wearing a formal suit and Top hat, circa 1890’ Right: ‘Conroy Campbell, a pupil at Willesden High school, 1973’

I just rediscovered this book; Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy put it together in 2007. It uses press photos to document post-war black settlement in Britain during the twentieth century. Instead of just recording the immigrants’ settlement the book paints a really beautiful picture of people’s lives. via Black Britain: A Photographic History | Teenage

nocturnalawakenings:

Paul Schutzer - Girl farm worker washing turnips from river, on collective farm, Romania, 1973

(via Too Gallant: Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge)

Jane Avril’s flinchingly high kick on the poster for her Jardin de Paris performance is perhaps the most defining image of turn-of-the-century Paris. Even at the time, Avril credited the Toulouse-Lautrec designed poster with launching her career, and now it’s become one of the most widely reproduced posters of all time.

However most peoples’ knowledge of the enigmatic dancer largely ends here … The daughter of an abusive alcoholic courtesan, Avril (then Jeanne Richepin) fled home aged thirteen only to be incarcerated in a mental asylum.

She was diagnosed with Syndenham’s chorea, a condition characterised by the rapid, jerking movements of the hands and feet. At one of the balls held for hospital patients, however, she astounded her doctors and fellow patients with her dancing: Avril channelled her ailment into the medium of dance, explaining her infamous eccentric style and later earning her the nickname La Mélinite (after a powerful form of explosive).

(via Mosman Art Gallery: Australian Accent: the Designs of Annan Fabrics and Vande Pottery of the ’40s and ’50s)

Nance Mackenzie and Anne Outlaw screen printing fabric, 1944. They started their screen printing business, Annan Fabrics, in the depths of World War II and went on to represent modern Australian textile design internationally and domestically. (Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney)

i love this photo, for how much printing hasn’t changed, and their overalls.

oz culture note: their designs were less appealing otoh. they might have encouraged the shift from parochial, British trend following in design to acceptance of [some] local women artists and styles, but they also had a phase of producing those colonial racist kitsch styles which competed with real Aboriginal artists.

nezua:

badassmexicans:

Bracero workers registering.

Foreign contract labor was banned in the US since 1885 because of its connotations with slavery. The ban, however, was lifted to implement the Bracero Program (1942-1964). This program permitted companies to contract Mexican laborers to work in the US: it established a temporary worker program. The Bracero Program essentially created a new second-class citizenry of Mexican laborers in the U.S.: they had no rights of a U.S. citizen, yet provided great benefits to our economy.

BAM

Know your nation’s history. Acknowledge your debt.

Tammy Rae Carland, Cell 69 / Enlargement from [i think] her Queer Youth series.

unaguerrasinfondo:

Free Food for the Community Programme, 1971, Oakland. Photograph by Stephen Shames

/not hating on the OP. OP was more mature than most on tumblr, and has their own investment in the issue. More the responses. Still on the power dynamics of recording histories, dividing them, claiming them. 

aseaofquotes:

S.J. Watson, Before I Go To Sleep