July 2012
29 posts
“When I first moved to the US, I realised that this is where race lives: curled under your diaphragm, like a corporealised paywall. Pushed and tucked away because I really didn’t want to believe in identity politics at the time: there were other, grander, more structural things at play; things that didn’t turn on my personal feelings and emotive responses to the world around me. I learnt about intersectionality in theory, but not in practice. Multiple concerns were woven into that sinuous diaphragm that pulled down with every breath, or at least I think I did. Yet these small, knotted concerns still remained tucked away where I could occasionally take them out, and turn them over—the precious marble behind the loose backboard in your childhood home—before putting them carefully back, out of sight.”
—unstriating the internet | THE STATE
“Curiouser and curiouser,” cries Alice as she tumbles down the wormhole. Into the early days of the Internet, when Yahoo! and its ilk are still doing their best to be portals, windows into another worldwideweb. Or perhaps she is shrinking, becoming encoded into bits and bytes; flesh dividuated into strangely anthropomorphised animalgorithms. The datastream is suspiciously electoral, replete with a tea party and a mediated caucus race of four-legged animals in red, white,and blue. Then as now, the Mew Aesthetic holds sway; a mention of her cat’s enough to derail the whole thing, in what one could hope is a foreshadowing of the 2012 presidential election.”
—unstriating the internet | THE STATE
