round-up: 6/25

once again, the world is on fire

Despy Boutris

Jun 25, 2022

Hi. Hope everyone’s taking care of yourselves & each other.

Here’s what I have for you today:

Housekeeping
Resources
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Call to action

It’s a long one, so please open this email in a new window if you want to make it to the end.

Housekeeping:

Things in the US have just gotten terribler & many people have, and will, be able to articulate the tragedy & upcoming dangers better than I ever could. I’ve included some of their tweets below.

Anyways,

amid ~~all that~~ I remain on vacation, & I’m trying to enjoy it. Here are some recent pics. I’m writing to you from Israel rn.

dbouts

A post shared by dbouts (@dbouts)

dbouts

A post shared by dbouts (@dbouts)

dbouts

A post shared by dbouts (@dbouts)

Some resources/threads for fellow American readers:

Kate Smith @byKateSmith

If you or someone you know needs an abortion, call 1-800-230-Plan or go to AbortionFinder.org

Alexis McGill Johnson @alexismcgill

The Supreme Court has now officially given politicians permission to control what we do with our bodies, deciding that we can no longer be trusted to determine the course for our own lives. But make no mistake—we are a movement that will demand we are treated like equal citizens.

Devon Price @drdevonprice

This subreddit is for anyone who needs help accessing an abortion -- and for anyone who lives in an area with abortion access, who is willing to help host people traveling there to get the care they need. Lots of other options for providing help here too

reddit.comr/auntienetworkr/auntienetwork: This sub is dedicated to providing information and resources to those in need of abortion services. For direction to funds and …

Health Liberation Now! @HealthLibNow

Here's a doc with a simple breakdown of what the fall of Roe v Wade means and what you can do on the grassroots level. It covers: how to access an abortion, giving to access funds, & practical support organizations. Mutual aid is key right now!

docs.google.comRoe v. Wade: What You Can Do

Alison Turkos @alisonturkos

I made this document b/c I know my friends + loved ones in the repro movement don't have the capacity to answer all questions, or tell folks where to go + what to do. I made this so you can turn your anger into action. We all can do something, here's how:

docs.google.comHow to Show up For Abortion Access*Due to high volume you can access this document HERE* You’re not alone: more than 3,700 people have viewed and taken action with this document You’re reading this because you know the Dobbs V Jackson Women’s Health Organization SCOTUS opinion will be handed down soon and you’re asking yoursel...

What I finished reading:

Field Study, Chet’la Sebree (3/5 stars)
A and B and Also Nothing, Chris Campanioni (4/5 stars)

What I’m rereading:

Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, T Fleishmann

Quotations:

I hate to admit I was afraid you’d leave.
This is the way I never wanted to love anybody.

-Chet’la Sebree

Every day that I exist I acknowledge that being alive is an act of resistance.

-Chet’la Sebree

Even when we aren’t talking about race we are.
It’s inextricable from how I exist in this world.

-Chet’la Sebree

I needed to know I belonged anywhere, to anyone.

-Chet’la Sebree

I don’t know where the rupture began.

-Chet’la Sebree

What is the distance between dream and nightmare? Between there and terror?

-Chet’la Sebree

If it weren’t for ruins, I wouldn’t be writing.

-Chet’la Sebree

Once upon a time, I thought I’d been found.

-Chet’la Sebree

I want to believe that I can be whole with a hole in me.

-Chet’la Sebree

What if someone doesn’t love the me I let them see?

-Chet’la Sebree

Am I attracted to things that will break me—moth drawn to flame, paper wings incendiary?

-Chet’la Sebree

What if I’m irreparable?

-Chet’la Sebree

I’m still sore from the remembering, the forgetting, the remnants.

-Chet’la Sebree

I was ensnared in the hive of our love.

-Chet’la Sebree

You are like windblown sand, silt still in my crevasses.

-Chet’la Sebree

I don’t want any man to be my beginning.

-Chet’la Sebree

Don’t write about what you’re not willing to cannibalize.

-Shara McCallum

Is this a poem, a prose, a prayer?

-Chet’la Sebree

I’m just one woman working toward resolution.

-Chet’la Sebree

What does it mean to feel I belong to nowhere?
To be constantly creating new sites of ruin?

-Chet’la Sebree

Love takes courage, and I no longer think myself brave.

-Chet’la Sebree

Even then I was […] writing so as to be here twice.

-Chris Campanioni

I know that every story is a ghost story but who is haunting who?

-Chris Campanioni

Every reader is a voyeur the same way every writer is an exhibitionist, flaunting their metaphysical corpus every time they put it down on paper, expecting a gaze they will never be able to meet.

-Chris Campanioni

Remembering is an act of memory but also an act of love.

-Chris Campanioni

Sometimes I have the thought that when I write about what happened, I might change the outcome—that is, change the future but also the present and the past.

-Chris Campanioni

Still so much made obsolete. To be visible, to be seen, which is another sort of clarity, is more than a mark of permission. […] To be visible is to be validated. To be seen is to be heard. Everybody listen.

-Chris Campanioni

What would it mean to map the presence of non-normative bodies in our cultural and literal landscape? How do we write about something that has never been written about? And where to do it if not the page we’re on—not to drop out of the book, as James Baldwin has written, but to place ourselves in.

-Chris Campanioni

Queering the archive means seeking alternate sources of evidence, it means attending to and undermining the heteronormative, racialized, cultural, and state processes that have only produced exclusion under the auspices of forming a “national identity.” Queering the archive means to call into question all origin narratives, and all identity premised on nation-building. It means axing ownership; it means owning up to our failure to do without. In short, it means survival, particularly in the face of a culture and a history that has done its best to dismember you.

-Chris Campanioni

No one should know everything about a person; […] people aren’t problems to solve, but questions to consider.

-Chris Campanioni

I know that sort of tenderness one feels when one’s soul is felt across space, across time. Across a page in a book and all the other hands that have bent the binding.

-Chris Campanioni

My mouth, too, seems so often to want to stutter into the choreography of the elsewhere, a place I find myself when I would have wished to hide myself, or be forgotten.

-Chris Campanioni

I care a lot more about the process than the finite product that comes out of the creative act.

-Chris Campanioni

Hybridity is the salve and salvo for those who have been marginalized, who exist in the middle and on the edges, partial and peripheral, at the intersection of categories and labels, race and ethnicity and gender, and the body one carries and is carried by; an expression of the isolation and alienation of non-binary, non-normative, neo-mestizo persons. What better way to account for our experience than to re-present it through the liminal frame of the hybrid personal accounting?

-Chris Campanioni

What I want isn’t story but myth. Not to tell the truth but to tell of the moment truth evacuates into legend.

-Chris Campanioni

Hybridity isn’t a choice. It isn’t an experiment, it isn’t a response to generic conventions or the formal innovations of such constraints, it isn’t abstract cosmopolitanism, it isn’t another version of the lyric essay, it isn’t the academy’s new keyword, or literature’s new passkey. […] It is survival.

-Chris Campanioni

Take the non-normative and transform the normative.
Take the non-narrative and transform the narrative.

-Chris Campanioni

The past is never past but always present.

-Chris Campanioni

Every time I reproduce myself, I stave off annihilation.

-Chris Campanioni

When I am not touched I begin to collect dust.

-Chris Campanioni

What could be more important […] than disclosing your subject-position as researcher while disclosing your research?

-Chris Campanioni

How can the sharing of our stories promote activism, healing, and survival?

-Chris Campanioni

Sometimes the best act of documentation is to listen.

-Chris Campanioni

Nothing fucks you harder than time.

-Chris Campanioni

Most of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed toward analyzing white lesbians and gay men. […] The field of queer theory is a place where a scholar of color can easily be lost in an immersion of vanilla while her or his critical faculties can be frozen by an avalanche of snow.

-José Esteban Muñoz

Every life is the defense of a form.

-Susan Sontag, 1979

I was writing […] to see where my excess of desire would go.

-T Fleischmann

What can one do with a past?
What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?

-T Fleischmann

I think of what is not written, the silenced past and the terrifying future that weigh on autobiography.

-T Fleischmann

I think of the love I have within myself and in thinking of it make it an offering to the many-handed hunger of transsexuality.

-T Fleischmann

I resisted the mainstreaming of queerness, as it seemed urgent to sustain a more radical tradition, assimilation being a form of death.

-T Fleischmann

I hope beauty might still touch my humanity, the part of me that is shared, that is awful and good.

-T Fleischmann

I know what it means to be unfixed from narrative, an unfixing that feels something like claiming power.

-T Fleischmann

This is me, for better or worse.

-T Fleischmann

I distrust linearity.

-T Fleischmann

Tweets:

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

i love it when lit journals r like “sorry it took us three years to make a decision 🤪 anyways it’s a no from us”

brecht apologist @madison_tayt

holy shit, i can fix this if i vote? awesome! when’s the next supreme court election??

aída chávez @aidachavez

There’s a lot to learn from the more militant feminist movements in countries like Mexico, Chile, Argentina

Zoé @ztsamudzi

I'm not even going to make a "people who aren't women get abortions, too" caveat because at this point it's just willful and piss poor analysis that pundits aren't understanding the simultaneity of the right's attacks on trans and queer people alongside reproductive justice.

No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC

The Supreme Court just declared war on women and the right to privacy. And this is just the beginning.

Ari C. @lit_ari_ture

What I keep trying to explain is that the law is violent by nature. The basis of U.S. law is slavery and the slave economy, which means that antiblack violence and all the religious, classed, gendered and gendering work it performs is always at the core. By design.

⚓️Imani Two-Kitchens Gandy⚓️ @AngryBlackLady

LGBTQ rights WILL be overturned. Please protect yourselves and start now. This is not a drill. This is not a maybe. This is an eventuality. Please prepare for it. xx

chris evans @notcapnamerica

Same sex married couples and families: Please make sure to take the legal steps to protect your spouse and your children in the event our rights are overturned.

Emily Krebs @EmilyKrebs6

Can’t mandate masks but you can mandate pregnancy. What a country.

Anosognosiogenesis @pookleblinky

2% of all pregnancies are ectopic, which *inevitably* kills parent and fetus if not aborted by 16 weeks or so. There are already-existing laws drafted that specifically exclude ectopic pregnancy as cause for abortion. These openly sentence to death 1 out of 50 pregnant people.

eh @BethLynch2020

Pelosi's reading a poem, House Dems are singing God Bless America, and Biden's on tv telling protesters not to "threaten or intimidate" (while using riot cops and snipers to threaten and intimidate the public). yeah, I'd say Democrats are down with fascist USA.

Heidi N. Moore @moorehn

I think it's a mistake to think that Pelosi et al have any beliefs at all. They are fundamentally unprincipled and working for their own self-aggrandizement.

Chris Hayes @chrislhayes

@jbouie @rtraister I think Clyburn, Pelosi, Feinstein et al believe, *truly believe*, that over time things get better, that the slow-boring of hard boards yields progress and that this too shall pass. Most politically mobilized people on the center-left think things are much much more dire.

Mac @GoodPoliticGuy

Probably the fastest rightward shift in my life and it’s happening while democrats control the house, senate, and presidency

Kevin Collier @kevincollier

Seeing more calls today to delete your period-tracking apps. But experts say that if you look at how states have already brought evidence in abortion-related cases, the *much* bigger concern is unsecured, unencrypted communications & stored search history. nbcnews.com/tech/security/…

Qupid💌 @onyxtippedastro

explicitly not trying to have a ‘hot take’ but i wanna let it be known that of the justices who voted to overturn roe, one is a woman, & another is a black man. any accurate analysis of the situation must have more to say than “cis yt men grr🤬”, though they are a pain in the ass

℮oin Higgins @EoinHiggins_

Democrats have only one solution: Vote for us so we can fail you again, then blame you for not voting hard enough

Amy Lu @amylunews

#NEW from @SpeakerPelosi: “This cruel ruling is outrageous and heart-wrenching. But make no mistake: the rights of women and all Americans are on the ballot this November.”

Margaret Killjoy 🏴 @magpiekilljoy

remember no single tactic or strategy is best. strong movements are made up of diverse groups with diverse ideas who figure out how to coordinate, avoid stepping on each other’s toes when possible, and never do the enemy’s work for them by informing on each other.

nope. @myliquidlibrary

apropos of nothing: "We can handle one 10,000 person protest, but ten 1,000 person protests throughout the city will overwhelm us." -Michel Moore, Head Pig of LAPD, November 9, 2020

drewtoothpaste @drewtoothpaste

the democrats let Roe fall so they could fund-raise. The "donate to help us fight this" email was prewritten and got sent five minutes after the decision hit. Do not give any politicians any fucking money

fire fuck with me @bitchvibrations

extremely hard not to lie down and die while living in a rotten death cult of a country. keep in mind who these necropolitics are targeting most and form allegiance with them, for all we have is one another

trash jones @jzux

banning juuls before assault rifles is so funny. america is really like “kids are allowed to die quickly but NOT slowly”

GOOGLE LASD GANGS @PplsCityCouncil

Democrats running for office vs Democrats while in office

Alex Winter @Winter

There's something a little ghoulish about all the fundraising off of today's decision by people who, at the very very least, could have done more to prevent it than they did.

roxane gay @rgay

I’ve gotten six fundraising emails from Democrat candidates today. It’s tacky and highlights a real disconnect between many politicians and their constituents that is only growing.

Leah M. Willingham @LeahMWillingham

The clinic staff spent Friday canceling the appointments of 60-70 patients scheduled for abortions in the coming weeks. “Some patients broke down and could not speak through their sobbing. Some patients were stunned and didn't know what to say. Some patients did not understand.”

Leah M. Willingham @LeahMWillingham

The only abortion clinic in West Virginia is no longer performing abortions, as of today. “Roe has never been enough, but in states like West Virginia, it was the only thing protecting abortion access,” executive director Katie Quinonez said. https://t.co/hD3zS9n59S

Lakyn thee Stylist @OgLakyn

You should’ve codified it in 2009 like you said you would.

Barack Obama @BarackObama

Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans.

William C. @williamcson

The same politicians that are going to be sending emails and making empty statements about human rights are the same ones that support the police who will be attacking anyone who raises hell in the streets. Recognize the ruling class and their servants.

Josh Ling @metacrab

Having overturned Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is targeting Lawrence v. Texas next. If overturned, consensual sex acts would immediately be criminal in 14 states (with at least 4 only applying to homosexual couples). I pulled the details and punishments into a single sheet

eve6 ha @Eve6

i dunno to me it makes sense to be mad at the party that tells you if you vote for them they will fight for your rights and then they don’t at all

Julie Millican @JMillzDC

Anyone surprised by today’s ruling or who thinks what Thomas wants next won’t happen, has not been paying attention. Overturning Roe is just the tip of the iceberg

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1

Clarence Thomas writes, in a concurring opinion, that the Supreme Court should reconsider Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell — the rulings that now protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.

meredith @dietz_meredith

"vote" is democrats version of thoughts and prayers

bada bing / bada boom @jazz_inmypants

constitution says u can't kill babies unless it's with a gun

transgender marx @JUNlPER

politics in america is cool, you vote for democrats and they win elections but republicans still get everything they want, then democratic leadership will email you something like “we are in disbelief” and link a video of lin manuel miranda rapping about how much he loves america

J(enna) Wortham @jennydeluxe

intellectually knowing that something is coming does not prepare you for the devastation in the body when it hits

p.e. moskowitz @_pem_pem

once u give up on the fantasy that we live in a democracy, the solutions become much clearer

matt @mattxiv

i hope no member of the supreme court ever knows peace again. i hope there are people standing in their driveways and screaming into their windows every day and every night for the rest of their lives

Elizabeth B-Z🖕🏻💄 @hellahydrangea

every campus has one (1) brand new science building that’s nicer than a hotel and one (1) arts/humanities building that hasn’t been updated since the 80s or earlier

Shareen きよこ Murayama @AmBusyPoeming

Here's my 2nd blurb for my first poetry collection, HOUSEBREAK (@badbettypress , July 2022). Grateful for the words of Despy Boutris @itsdbouts You can check out more of Despy's work here despyboutris.com/writing.html

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

grateful to have a lil art out in @OrionsBeau’s newest issue!

orionsbeau.comSummer 2022, Any Way I Want You, These DaysOrion’s Beau is a free digital arts & literary journal specializing in LGBTQ+ works of fantasy and speculative fiction. By publishing short stories, poems, and illustrations by LGBTQ+ authors and creators, we hope to create a community for queer individuals and supporters. We strive to elevate fanta…

Call to action:

Send a donation to a reputable abortion fund.

We’re poets, we’re writers—so of course this donation can be small. If you donate more than $20 & email me proof & your address (you can reply right to this message & I’ll get it!), I’ll send you a free zine.

Anyways, per one of the resources I listed above (x):

If you’re looking to give money:

*Remember to give locally. Now is not the time to support Planned Parenthood, NARAL, The ACLU, or The Center for Reproductive Rights*
- These orgs have long-standing foundation funding, they have major grants, and access to donors that small abortion funds, independent clinics, and many state-based orgs DO NOT.
- If you’re looking to learn more read this great op-ed in Teen Vogue, here’s more background from Monica Rae Simpson in 2014, and from Amy Littlefield in the NYT
Now is the time to invest locally in abortion funds. Funding abortion builds power. Funding abortion is a radical act of empathy. Here is a great list from @helmsinki
- Here’s an ActBlue link that will split funds between 80 abortion funds
- Support Black feminist leadership fighting for Reproductive Justice
- Here’s a great thread from Alison Dreith re practical support funds and the folks who work SO HARD to get abortion patients to their appointments
- You can also donate to practical support funds here
Even better, and if you have the capacity! Start a monthly recurring donation to your local abortion fund. Sustaining contributions and support are vital, especially during times like this. $5 a month goes a long way!
Support local, independent abortion clinics via the Keep Our Clinics campaign and the Abortion Care Network
- Use these links to find your local indie clinic and you can give directly to them
Help expand abortion access in MD. Morgan and Diane are working to open an independent abortion clinic in Maryland.
Give to state-based orgs led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks. These leaders have been investing in this long term fight, and will continue to be leading for years to come:
- SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW - GA
- Surge Reproductive Justice
- Indigenous Women Rising
- Shero Mississippi
- The Afiya Center
- Bold Futures - NM
- Our Justice - MN
- Holler Health Justice - Appalachia
- Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH) - IL
- AVOW Texas - TX
- Jane’s Due Process - TX
- New Voices for Reproductive Justice - OH and PA

Put your money to use with these C4 orgs: All* Above All Action Fund, AVOW Pac (TX specific), Reproductive Equity Now (MA specific), Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights Action Fund,

Alternately,

You can donate another way by buying this shirt I designed—all proceeds are sent from the website directly to the National Network of Abortion Funds. *shrugs* I have little to offer monetarily but at least use my dumb graphic design skills when I can.

In conclusion:

Kemi Alabi @kemiaalabi

Maybe the best political poems are blockades, strikes, protests, mutual aid, cities on fire. Maybe direct action is a poetic form.

With love & solidarity,

-Despy Boutris
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