marc4marc:

emilysyrja:

reblogging a letter i wrote to my hero

in which i reference my own suicidal thoughts and tendencies

and tagging it #desperate youths doing awkward shit

doesn’t make me feel any less like killing myself

thanks,

emilysyrja

So this guy I had a thing with once upon a time is doing this thing where he rather obviously mines my tumblr for things/people and then reblogs their/my shit. He doesn’t actually follow me so this constitutes some degree of effort on his part which is…well it is what it is. But just now he did this to a lady blogger I respect a lot. I respect her because of her unwillingness to yield when it comes to her chronicling of her PTSD problems. I respect her because she takes up space, digital and otherwise, with her feelings that are valid. And it helps me remember that I also have the right to take up space when I need to.

Feminism, as a movement, has deeply informed my practices in queer/affect theory and my research. My commitment to bad affects (jealousy, rage, loneliness, insecurity, depression) is in part because it’s these affective stances that allow us to form targeting lenses. “Why are you happy?” is a question that is frequently difficult to answer. Precisely because the creation of happiness is almost always arbitrary (see Ahmed for analysis) but the creation of our ugly feelings (borrowing the term from Ngai) is almost always much easier to track. I am frequently infuriated by something in the world and the lens of anger allows me a hyper-specificity. Emotional agency is augmented by the tethering of the feeling to a specific thing that can be addressed. What he did, for example, made me angry. It was petty and shaming and a silly thing to do that was just…mean. And I’m angry about it. And we all should be. Shame based tactics are precisely what have worked for so long to force us to give up our negative affects. “Shame on you,” the rallying cry of so many liberal movements, is something I hesitate to deploy because it’s out of line with so much of what I want to unburden us of through my work.

But really Evan, shame on you.

interested to see if he responds to my message asking what he thinks is funny about trying not to kill yourself while pursuing something you’re passionate about but so far no dice.

this dude is being a total penis. i am interested in deploying some feminist cyberbullying. maybe you are too?