week1

The text i read from feminist killjoys is Queer vandalism. The thing that really sparked my interest was the idea of the institutional plumbers. That in order to change something for the better you have to 'vandalise' it. There might be a blockage in a system but because of that blockage the system works. It is the idea to take away that blockage by 'vandalising' it to make the system more accessible.

This reminded me of a podcast i listened to recently: De plantage van onze voorouders.
The podcast is about Maartje Duin, a woman who's family generations ago had stocks in a slave plantation. She meets Peggy Bouva, who is a descendant of slaves who worked on that plantation. Together they start a research to find out whatever they can about this history they share. Especially in Maartje's family this a subject the don't really want to discuss and which makes them uncomfortable. Thus, by researching this subject Maartje is unblumbing the blockage in the system of the family which eventually (for a part of the family) starts a conversation about this history what they can do in this generation with this information they now have. At the same time this unplumbing also makes that Peggy's family now has a lot more information about the plantation that they couldn't acces before.

The quote I found most compelling was: Not following something as destroying something: no wonder they find us to be destructive.

There was a part where they wrote: ‘To squat, to make use of a space without owning a space, is to throw open the question of what space is for, to be released from the obligation to fill all the rooms in a certain way. Maybe queers become squatters of the family; we might not have a key to the door, but we can force it open by how we combine our forces.’

This is so interesting to me because they talk about two ways of protest. The first one is in a actual psychical way, like they talk about in the text, where you use your body as a form of protest. In this example that would be to literally put your body in a space and interpret the usage of the spaces in the way you would like. This would protest the idea of a certain set of rules how a space is supposed to be used.

The second form of protest this text discusses is to not physically squat a room or a place, but to squat a word or a meaning. Like they write in the last sentence: ‘to become squatters of a family’, to destroy the meaning of the nuclear family and take the word and make it your own.

Following cultural diversity last year, we spoke a lot about how most spaces are designed for abled bodies and how a lot of concepts of life are based on a heteronormative way of thinking. This was something that i was always aware of, but as a able bodied cis white woman was not thinking about on a daily bases because i wasn't confronted with it going about my day. Reading texts like this make it so clear that it’s so important to change the concepts of words and spaces to make things accessible for everybody. And these ideas of vandalising those concepts and ideas by protesting in different ways are very empowering.