Shufei ✌🏼 @Shufei@mastodon.social

#introductions

A muffin-topped tree-fondling hermit of ambiguous origin.
A sassmouthed déclassé cutie pie who won’t just get with the programme.
The lobster-clawed lunch lady baking cookies for the protest.
The creepy-silent older kid you confess your secrets to at recess
(but were forced to invite to your birthday party).
A wild-eyed lumpenintellektueller mindspiv yelling doggerel in the dark.
I’m the briny basketcase your mommy says to get off the phone with.

EN, ZH, and others. 🙆🏽‍♀️

The recent modus operandi for the Atlantic seems to be: Splash the cover with a mess of problematic myopia masking itself as sophistication. Then follow it up with more down to earth retorts as chasers.

This reply practically itches with frustration over the well crafted hit piece on trans kids. Nothing says hetcis like smothering young people into suicide, natch.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/i-detransitioned-but-not-because-i-wasnt-trans/563396/

I found this Atlantic piece on “detransition” especially canny in its lighter touch: melding neo-gatekeeping, TERfy dog whistles, condescending head pats to trans people, cis gaze voyeurism, generously positioned straw men, and cis parental panic. The result is a sloppy kiss to every abusive parent who wanted to torture their trans children by isolating and withholding medical care.

The takeaway for my Queer eye is that this benchmarks elite class’ journalistic ethics.

With the transgender of the rainbow under direct and unceasing assault (literally) nearly everywhere, and USA policy becoming overtly brutal again, why focus on the desperate and oft thwarted medical needs of transgender children when one can concern troll for the ~0.5% of deluded cis people who go through transition?

Our bourgy pals at the Atlantic are up to the challenge.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/

/me walks in, with Richard Burton in arm, and in a slushy Liz Taylor voice intones:

“WHAT a DUMP-puh.”

Exeunt.

And personally: yes, I’ve known such domestic servants. They were “well treated” and formally contracted by well-meaning cadres who tried to treat them in the spirit that Chairman Mao’s exhortations led them to believe in. But these were poor girls from the country who, no matter how encouraged to education and benefit of opportunity, were terrified they would be sent back in shame.

And when I say girl, I mean girls as young as 14.

So don’t ever pull that “culture” argument on me.

American slavemasters about their beloved mammies in 1860: “But muh heritage and culture.”
Asian slavemasters about their beloved Lolas in 2017: “But muh heritage and culture.”

No. No thank you.

While surveying the Atlantic comments, a revolting tendency to try to build firewall by cultural apology enraged me. This is the sort of dynamic which makes me side-eye identarianism. Slavery in the antebellum USA south and modern Asian homes may not be sociologically identical, but it’s insane to elide the continuity in their oppression.

A mammy is a mammy, in Shanghai or Charlotte.

I’m happy the Atlantic brought this issue out a bit, even despite themselves. #slavery

I’m not familiar with Filipino context, but: Anyone with a dollop of honest reflection who has intimately seen Asian domestic servitude knows even the very best such situation is unavoidably grotesque. This is why one of the unsung real achievements of the CCP was eradicating this scourge from much of China... for a short time. Now it’s back in a big and filthy way. Even the most lovingly kept servant is a pet, and that is why we are to prefix their names with “Little” no matter age.

Having been working in deep drudgery at the time, I missed last year’s charlie-foxtrot in the Atlantic, a pathetic spin piece for domestic slavery not even approaching the level of mea culpa.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/

Aside from the gut-churningly obvious, such New Yorker or Atlantic fails are notable as touchstones for the USA bourgeois mindset at this juncture: how it intersects with third world elites under #neoliberal #empire.