Tag: representation matters

kinopia:

“When I was a kid, I believed you would become a mermaid when you went in the water to swim”.

I really loved the little mermaid as a kid growing up so I had the warped perception you became a mermaid when you entered the water ahaha. This is me learning to swim with my cousin! This piece is for a gallery show at work.

capnromanoff:

consider this: 

thor is always running into little kids who are thrilled to meet him – he doesn’t really understand the concept of signing autographs, but he starts carrying asgardian toys around in his pockets to give to kids he meets (much to shield’s chagrin – how are we supposed to keep alien tech under control when the god of thunder is giving out magnetic propulsion toys to five-year-olds?) 

but one day, he meets this girl who’s nine, maybe ten, and she runs up to him all misty-eyed and immediately asks him if he knows jane foster

and her mother’s embarrassed because “honey, that’s thor, aren’t you excited to see thor?” but the girl just explains that she wants to be a scientist when she grows up, and that jane foster is the astrophysicist (she pronounces the word carefully, as if she’s been practicing) who found out how the rainbow bridge worked – isn’t that so cool? she read about it in kids discover and they watched a documentary in school and dr. foster was in it and it made her think that maybe because she likes planets so much she could be a scientist, too 

and thor smiles broadly and tells her that wanting to be a scientist is a noble dream, and he says “if your mother would be willing, i could introduce you” 

and that’s how jane foster ends up with a tiny science geek in pigtails trailing around behind her in her lab, asking how everything works. jane can’t really comprehend the fact that a kid would want to meet her, but she likes explaining things and she looks at this girl and can’t help seeing herself. thor is just fucking delighted because to him the idea of jane being a child’s hero makes perfect sense, why wouldn’t it? she’s jane

and years later the girl grows up to be an astrophysicist or an astronaut or an aerospace engineer and she never forgets the time that dr. jane foster knelt down beside her and said, don’t let anybody stop you from chasing the stars, if that’s what you want 

jane foster inspiring girls in science, y/y 

scottyottyotty:

grizzlykurtz:

witchesbitchesandbritches:

lifeundefeated:

Yea it’s clearly our “generation that’s making homosexuality a trend.” Seriously, pisses me off when people say that. look at this! It’s always been around, it’s not a trend, it’s real. It’s beautiful.

These are really beautiful images.

History Lesson: In America from about 1700-1920 there was a social rule that said that women did not have a sex drive. According to men, all women ever were asexual and only ever had sex because their husbands wanted it and as a good doting wife they would open up for him. That said, lesbians flourished in this time! Because it was believed that women did not have sex, when two women would share a house and finances together (called a Boston Marriage, look it up!) nobody thought anything of it. Because clearly they werent homosexuals since clearly women were incapable of being independently sexual. The more you know!

Wow

queertrees:

geekygothgirl:

verycuriousnocure:

During World War II, Josephine Baker served with the French Red Cross and was an active member of the French resistance movement. Using her career as a cover Baker became an intelligence agent, carrying secret messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and received a Medal of the Resistance in 1946. In 1961 she received the highest French honor, the Legion d’Honneur awarded by then President Charles de Gaulle.

Our loss, U.S.A….

If you don’t admire the shit out of J. Baker, who was also pretty openly bisexual and adopted NINETEEN children in addition to the badassery mentioned above, I want you to go sit in the corner and think about your life choices.

um she was also a huge civil rights activist and her refusal to perform for segregated audiences at major clubs that were fallin over themselves to book her helped de-segregate vegas performance venues

aaaand she had a pet cheetah

bocchan:

karhide:

windandsalt:

friarpark

#this is not an exaggeration okay #children do say this #children do wonder why they can’t find themselves in the media #don’t fucking tell me it doesn’t matter #it matters so much #children NEED to see themselves represented #or else they grow up feeling inferior and not worthy

okay, story time: i’m a resident actor a children’s theatre company, and we just did peter pan. i was cast as peter because i’m the only one who looks young enough to play the part; but aside from looking young, i look nothing like peter pan. he’s this little white boy with reddish brown hair and i’m an arab/hispanic queer with black hair and freckles. 

our company has a really devoted following, and these kids are reeeally young. after every show, we do autographs as the characters and have to keep up the act, because to a lot of these really young kids, we are who we pretend to be on stage. that terrified me. i’ve done autograph sessions in-character before, but never as such a well-loved character. who, again, is white. i was worried about what children might say.

over the course of the production, we must have performed for close to 500 kids, between the shows we did for families and the shows we did for school field trips.

and i distinctly remember one little white girl who came up to me with a DVD copy of disney’s peter pan, and she had this adorable tinkerbell dress on, and she just stared at me wide-eyed and after a while she said “i have all your movies!!”

first of all, if you don’t think that’s the cutest thing ever, please leave.

and when i asked her what she wanted me to sign, she handed me her DVD and said “by your face.” and she points right at this little white redheaded peter pan with pointy ears who is clearly not me, as if she can’t tell the difference… or she can, and she doesn’t care. similar things happened with different children, but it never lost its charm for me. on the contrary, it really warmed my heart.

by that same token there were many children of color who were affected by seeing a brown peter pan. a lot of them (usually older children) and/or their parents ask me how i got into acting, and if i had any advice for how to get into it. it meant a lot to me that there’s this whole generation of children of color who are going to pursue the arts, because even though i live in a very diverse area, our theatre landscape is still very whitewashed.

anyway, what i’m trying to say isn’t just that representation matters, which it does. what i’m also trying to say is that one less white face in the crowd isn’t going to hurt anyone. i feel like i’ve heard time and again that white people can only identify with white characters, and the whole point of my story is that that’s obviously not true. that kind of behavior, where people only empathize with characters who look like them, has to be taught. and that kind of behavior is racism.

bolding is mine, because that last bit really knocked it out of the park for me

artsyflight:

seerofsarcasm:

persystella:

groot is probs assumed to be male but tbh i figure groot is a lil genderless being. who needs the gender binary when you’re a celestial tree creature. riddle me that.

“Are you a boy, or a girl?”
“I am Groot.”

But like, didn’t Groot accidentally grab Gamora instead of Peter at the beginning? And Rocket was all “Learn genders already!” So like. Groot has no idea what gender is. Seems pretty canon to me?

What about our fans? Are they privileged? Let me tell you about Anders. He was one of two male love interests in Dragon Age II, and the only one of the two that would actually make his intentions known to the player without the player expressing interest first. If you were nice to him, he would make a pass at you, and you could turn him down, and that would be the end of it. And some fans REALLY did not like that.

Some of them asked for a gay toggle; because in a game where there’s mature themes, slavery, death, and none of which we offer toggles for, encountering a gay character? OOH, beyond the pale. They didn’t want to be exposed to homosexuality.

And this one fan on our forums posted that he felt too much attention had been spent on women and gays and not enough on straight male gamers. For all of whom he personally spoke, of course. ‘It’s ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamers, when in the past I would only have to say fans.’ The purpose of the romances in Dragon Age II was to give each type of fan an equal content. Two romances whether you’re male or female, straight or gay.

How upsetting for this particular Straight Male Gamer to realize he wasn’t being catered to. This was not equality to him, but an imbalance; an imbalance of the natural order. He did not want equality, he’s not interested in equality. To him, from his perspective, equality means he’s getting less. Less options? Actually, no, the number of options we had in that game was actually the same number of options that he would have received earlier. What was his issue was the idea that there was attention being spent on other groups, which SHOULD have rightly gone to him.

Do ALL straight male gamers feel exactly the same as he does? Absolutely not. In the thread where this came up in fact, there was quite a few guys who came in and identified themselves as straight male gamers and said ‘I actually don’t have an issue with that, as long as I receive an experience I enjoy, I think other people should be able to enjoy that too.’ But if you think that Straight Male Gamer Dude is an outlier among our fanbase, you were not paying attention.

This is Anita Sarkeesian, she’s the author of the Feminist Frequency, a blog which examines tropes in the depiction of women in popular culture. You’ve probably all heard about this, it’s a matter of public record, she announced a Kickstarter to start a web series to look at the tropes in video games and she was subjected to a campaign of vicious abuse and harassment by male gamers. Why? Well, because she represents to these guys the loss of their coveted place in the gaming audience. Never mind that well all know Goddamn well that they’re still at the top of the totem pole. What they see themselves losing is sole proprietorship over their domain. That’s what it is.

Everything that is changing about the gaming industry to accommodate these players, to them, is diluting the purity of gaming which has belonged solely to them. That’s what this is all about. And here’s the thing, I’m pretty certain that our industry fears the scrutiny of those guys way more than the scrutiny of everyone else. Because those are the guys that scream at the top of their lungs, they spend their time on every internet forum, they spend their time making Metacritic reviews. Infuriate them, and you become a target. It’s so much easier to say “Well, that’s what our fans are like. There’s nothing we can do.” And that’s bullshit.

They didn’t set the tone, did they? We set the tone. What we put out there, what we permit, whether it’s on our forums, whether it’s on Xbox Live, the things that we permit we are in effect condoning. What happened to Anita, we the industry, are partly responsible for. We’re in part to blame. And if the idea of moral responsibility doesn’t phase you, consider the idea that the time will probably soon come that this will also amount to legal responsibility.

BioWare EA Writer David Gaider speaking on sexism and sexuality in video games. (via lolitsgabe)

also known as “Why I Love And Support BioWare Games”

(via optimisticduelist)

Bioware ain’t perfect, but good gosh it does give me the warm fuzzies when one of their crew knocks it out of the park.

(via northstarfan)

lostthehat:

shuraiya:

beatonna:

lecinematheque:

Pumzi – dir. Wanuri Kahiu // Kenya

In a dystopian future 35 years after an ecological WWIII  has torn the world apart, East African survivors of the devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.

The main character is a museum curator in the future and also yes I would like see this now please

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT THIS I DON’T LIKE

The complete short film is on youtube and it’s really good and the end kind of took my breath away.