Panoramic Entropy

"Being triggered does not mean “being upset” or “being offended” or “being angry,” or any other euphemism people who roll their eyes long-sufferingly in the direction of trigger warnings tend to imagine it to mean. Being triggered has a very specific meaning that relates to evoking a physical and/or emotional response to a survived trauma. To say, “I was triggered” is not to say, “I got my delicate fee-fees hurt.” It is to say, “I had a significantly mood-altering experience of anxiety.” Someone who is triggered may experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack. A survivor of sexual violence who experiences a trigger is experiencing the same thing as a soldier who experiences a trigger, potentially even including flashbacks. Like many soldiers who return from war, many survivors of sexual violence are left with post-traumatic stress disorder. Unlike soldiers, however, they are not likely to receive much sympathy, or benefit from attempts to understand, when they are triggered. Instead, triggered survivors of sexual violence are dismissed as oversensitive, as hysterics, as humorless, as weak. Well. Trivializing the concerns of a person whose traumatic experience of sexual violence has been triggered is a legitimate response. But it’s not a very kind or decent one. I will never understand why anyone wants to be the total jerk who evokes someone’s memories of being assaulted by blindsiding hir with a rape joke (or image, or metaphor, or whatever), in the guise of “humor.” No “joke” is worth triggering someone. Not if you understand what triggering someone really means."

Reblogged from crunkfeministcollective

“Survivors Are So Sensitive” (via meggannn, superherotoranse) (via serenitymonkala) (via thatgirlannabagelhead) (via communityandresistance) (via crunkfeministcollective, asdfjlaskjdflksjdflk)

"Only with something so small, that can be in everyone’s hands, can we challenge the empire."

Reblogged from theredtree

  —Dr. Vandana Shiva (via theredtree)

"we hope that we all stop settling for an exploitative system built to oppress, and instead that we are all strong enough to build something completely new and utterly beautiful."

Reblogged from theredtree

  —Walidah Imarisha. (via theredtree)

"The obsession with marriage also sanitizes the history of queer struggle. Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot, led by the very queers who are now erased from the public image of gay equality. Drag queens, trans people of color, young queers, and butch dykes fought systematic violence and in Sarah Schulman’s words, “[…] arose to change society, to expand rigid gender roles, to break down confining social mores of privatized families and to defy the consumerism that accompanies monogamy and nuclear family lifestyle in the United States."

Reblogged from grrlyman

Thanks for this (via queerasfuck)

"

One group, the Hindu American Foundation, has launched a “Take Back Yoga” campaign to address what they see as a fundamental disconnect between yoga and Hinduism.

Sheetal Shah, senior director at the foundation, says the group started the campaign when it noticed that while “Vedic,” “tantric” and many other words appeared regularly in yoga magazines, the word “Hindu” was never mentioned.

So, the foundation called up one of the country’s most popular magazines to ask why.

“They said the word ‘Hinduism’ has a lot of baggage,” Shah says. “And we were like, ‘Excuse me?’ “

Shah says she understands why some people have a problem with linking yoga and Hinduism. Many American practitioners associate the practice with something pure and serene, she says. But when they think of Hinduism, she says, they think of “multiple gods, with multiple heads and multiple arms. Colorful [and] ritualistic.”

It may be difficult for people to see how these things fit together, Shah says.

With the Take Back Yoga campaign, the Hindu American Foundation is hoping for broader acknowledgment that yoga has Hindu philosophical roots — while also emphasizing that it is universal and appropriate for everyone.

“What we’re trying to say is that the holistic practice of yoga goes beyond just a couple of asanas [postures] on a mat. It is a lifestyle, and it’s a philosophy,” Shah says.

“How do you lead your life in terms of truthfulness? And nonviolence? And purity? The lifestyle aspect of yoga,” Shah says, “has been lost.”

"

Reblogged from crunkfeministcollective

To Some Hindus, Modern Yoga Has Lost Its Way (via love-resist)

I’m so happy to see this and I fully support them. I stopped doing yoga — as much as it was benefitting me physically — because it started feeling really disrespectful to just be using it for exercise when I knew it was part of a serious, longstanding spiritual tradition.

(via queerbrownxx)