Week four

Description:
the bracelet is made from pink, transparent and metal-coloured plastic beads. It has a pendant in the form of a silver-coloured Latin cross, its material is believed to be copper as it has green staining. The cross is rounded and decorated.

The elastic holding the beads together suggests that the bracelet is not worn often.

The bracelet was gifted to Sevda Moors by her mother. Her mother is catholic, which is very likely the reason for the cross pendant. The year and day it was gifted are unknown, but it is estimated to be around 2010. Where the mother obtained the bracelet remains a secret.

By who and where it was created is unsure, although there are reasons to believe that is was created by an anonymous factoryworker in China.

This is a collage made from photographs I found on the Facebook pages of old friends. All the images collected are from 'Extase', which is a bar where I spend many nights in my early teens. I tried to find a photograph of every part of the bar and I did except for the smoking area.

For the last 7 or 8 years Extase has gone bankrupt for at least 4 times. But this bar was the only home this enormous family had, so each time someone decided to buy the bar and bring it back to life.
Until the bankrupcy of september 2018. By that time most of the Extase-family had full-time jobs and didn't go out too often anymore. And since the second bankrupcy everyone knew that this was never going to be a money maker anyway, they just kept it alive for good old times sake. So this time Extase was not going to be saved and neither was the family.

Like the photographs we are and have always been documented, only we are shattered into small pieces. I wanted to take those pieces and bring them back together to document the thing we have lost: the place where it all started.

"If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/ gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis." p86

I think that there are little to no people who haven’t experienced some sort of questioning of their body. Even most little white boys have had insecurities of their bodies. Really it could be anything. Curly hair, red hair, big front teeth, small hands, big feet, sound of their voice, sound of their laughter, too much or too little body hair, too much or too little facial hair and don’t forget penis size! We all judge each other’s bodies and we start doing that from a very young age because that is what we are thought.

This doesn’t mean that racism, sexism, disability discrimination or any kind of discrimination isn’t horrible, it is and we need to fight it. But I do think that there is maybe a hand full of people on this earth that have not been confronted by societies unrealistic standards of what is ‘desirable’ and ‘beautiful’. So yes the people who haven’t experienced rejection because of their body are very privileged. But I think privilege is a wide spectrum with many categories and this is just one, because if we start talking about associations connected to those bodies and how that negatively impacted the person living in that body then we start to see a wide range of different levels of privilege or lack of privilege. Because being bullied in 7th grade because you haven’t had your growth spurt yet is bad, but it is not the same as being repeatedly rejected because of your skin-color or gender.

"A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach.
The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons." p87

This text made me realize that I have put a lot of importance into social inclusion, but I have somehow forgotten the importance of representation. Which is, after thinking about it, quite odd since the thing I struggled most with growing up was a lack of recognition for my body. I was extremely insecure. Until I was 17, I never had close contact with a woman who had a similar descent and was proud of it. Actually, my whole friend group became more culturally diverse.

Looking back, I probably wouldn’t have had so much of a problem with my olive skin, if I had a role model who looked the same. Maybe then, I would’ve loved my thick, dark eyebrows, perhaps even so much that I wouldn’t have felt the need to pluck, shave or bleach them. And maybe if I knew that the shape of my nose was never odd, but just more common Middle-Eastern countries, I wouldn’t dread the thought of it growing until I die. Or maybe I would feel comfortable wearing T-shirts without shaving my arms first. Maybe if I grew up looking at women who looked more like me and faced the same struggles as I did, I would have never drawn angry, hairy figures with big noses saying “me now” next to happy, skinny, hairless princesses with tiny noses and little to no eyebrows saying “future me”.

"That realization is a small gesture that has huge implications for the ways in which the material culture of schools can be changed. A key tenet of decolonization has to also include a sense of intersectionality. So another clear example might be the heteronormativity of public bathroom spaces, particularly in schools. If the architecture of our early childhood spaces structurally reiterates gender binaries, we will never grow up to really be comfortable in non-gendered bathrooms because our comfort is first introduced and developed at a young age. Prior to those moments, most children do not think very much about who is around them when they perform any biological act. If we change the gender markings of early education bathrooms, we have changed the embedded social meaning of everyday practice in the future." p89

I never really had an opinion about gender(neutral)bathrooms. I never felt like I needed to. For me, either way would’ve been fine, it wouldn’t have harmed or benefited me. And I think that in any given situation where changing something wouldn’t have a noticeable impact on my quality of living, but it would change someone else’s life for the better I see no reason not to do it. Even if it is just a matter or someone not feeling bad or excluded and so I never felt the need to read into it because there was reason enough to change it already.
So reading this text is defiantly giving me a new perspective and I can see how gender-based toilets influence young children’s idea of gender. But I am not sure if our society is ready for men and women going to the same toilet. I think many women would feel unsafe going into a bathroom where there might be men, knowing the awful amount of sexual violence in the world today. But I am also not sure if Rizvi is suggesting that adults should all go to the same toilet or that this should only apply to children pre-puberty. Either way Rizvi does show how gender binaries are rooted in every single step we learn a child to make, even before they understand the concept of gender.

"Often we feel trapped in one system, and we feel the system is so much larger than we are; but we are the ones who are keeping that system going. So once you recognize the inequity, and trace how your own body is being disciplined and kept in a certain place, you can begin to think through how you might design intervention, as a creator of cultural material. "p90

Yes, yes, yes! This is so important! Not only because it gives hope, but also responsibility. Because if we are trapped in a system we are victims, but if we are the system we have liability. Too often I hear people say that they, individually, are not going to make a difference so there is no point in trying. Which, if it were true, would be fine if they didn’t have any responsibility. Which in this case they do. And the theory that we are responsible for maintaining a certain system suggests that, in a way, we should have some power over it.
I love how she calls upon our creativity. That we could have a part in designing the future society. It focusses on creating new solutions instead of simply fighting problems. And it makes fighting for justice feel like less of a burden and more like a blessing. I think this positive choice of words is important, because it shows what we can win and sometimes, or actually quite often, I feel as if the fight for equality only leads to more personal sacrifices. Which is not very motivating, and I can imagine how this idea of endless offering doesn’t excite people to join the revolution. And besides all that, focussing on all the wrong is turning me in a frustrated, less likeable person who sometimes forgets to take pleasure in the journey. But isn’t that why we are here?