Through the pouring rain

pyraxis:

genderbitch:

We are the plants that feed on the deaths of fairies

We don’t feed on their deaths, we are their deaths.

So now we just have to learn how to create stars to create a cycle of rebirth that defies description

so-treu:

sourcedumal:

deliciouskaek:

ianthe:

kawaii-afro-fluff:

ianthe:

This post was asking about a potential link between the afro-style wigs and big, painted lips of the modern clown and racist caricatures, so I decided to do what any good theatre history student would do - I did some research.

SPOILER ALERT: YUP, IT’S RACIST AS FUCK

From Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top:

Some circus programs contained portraits of clowns in literal blackface, with huge red mouths and bulging eyes, strumming energetically on a banjo, but often the auguste clown’s blackface was metaphorical. He created his racial identity through the act of ‘‘whitening up’’ with thick pancake.

His greasy whiteness and exaggerated bodily zones—huge red mouth, lolling, paint-encircled eyes, big fake nose, ears, and feet—made his look strikingly similar to blackface. Showmen played upon this visual connection by arguing that African American men literally were clowns because of their supposed affinity for clowning and the circus. The Ringling Bros.’ route book from 1895 and 1896 contained a section, ‘‘The Plantation Darkey at the Circus,’’ which imagined—in almost orgasmic language—black men as minstrel characters.

[…]

Proprietors further conflated the African American man and the clown by arguing that both were completely controlled by their emotions, not reason.

Superlative examples of white manhood—the big cat tamer, the wire walker, and so forth—demonstrated little emotion during life-threatening acts. The clown, by contrast, howled in mock fear when he saw a mouse, or shrieked in pain at a mosquito bite. Showmen characterized male African American spectators in a similar vein as giddy and superstitious. 

[…]

Actual big-top acts made this rhetorical relationship between the clown and the African American complete. In 1888 Eph Thompson trained the elephant John L. Sullivan at the Adam Forepaugh circus. Wearing a boxing glove at the end of his trunk, the elephant sparred with Thompson in the ring and frequently ‘‘punched’’ him so hard that Thompson went flying over the ring bank.

Unlike the white trainer who dominated powerful animals, Thompson played a clownish coward—constantly vanquished by the boxing pachyderm—and consequently remained unthreatening to Euroamerican audiences. Yet Thompson still had a difficult time finding employment with American shows. As a result, he moved to Europe where his career flourished.

In line with the tenets of nineteenth-century romantic racialism, show-men’s portrayals of black men and clowns reflected contemporary representations of white women: late-nineteenth-century scientists argued that ‘‘excessive’’ emotionalism defined women, racial ‘‘savages,’’ and children of all races. The German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel and the Americans Edward Drinker Cope and G. Stanley Hall were all proponents of recapitulation theory, positing that every organism repeats the life history of its ‘‘race’’ within its own lifetime, evolving through the less developed forms of its ancestors on its path to maturity. They contended that Euroamerican women and ‘‘primitives’’ remained mentally and emotionally fixed in lower ancestral stages of evolution. Accordingly, only white boys were physiologically and mentally capable of reaching the highest stages of racial and gender development as fully evolved men. This line of thought used pseudoempirical phrenological evidence to claim that African American men were perpetually emotional and juvenile, just like the clown.

The painted clown acted out childish behaviors and infantile pleasures. He reveled in dirt, cried freely, openly adored the serious ‘‘adult’’ acts, and played physical pranks on everybody, from ringmaster to the audience. If playing a hobo (popularized most fully by Emmett Kelly’s ‘‘Willie’’ tramp character during the Depression, when at times nearly one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed), the auguste clown’s persona was defined by dirt. Laughing loudly at the clown’s antics perhaps transported audiences back to the unrestrained pleasures of their own collective infancy and childhood.

More than a ‘‘low Other’’ who simply represented a tantalizing version of what they were not, the unfettered clown symbolized what clock-bound, alienated adult Euroamerican men perhaps felt they had lost.

Even the red noses have their origins in racist stereotypes.

From Mikita Brottman, Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor:

While the Native American plains tribes had their own various manifestations of the Trickster figure, the main clown type of non-Native Americans was not the August, as it was in Europe, but the character clown… After the [Civil War] ended, however, one particular style of character clown came into prominence: the Hobo.

Eric Lott describes how the Hobo figure was originally based on the blackface minstrel clowns (hence the exaggerated white mouths) who portrayed the figures of African Americans made homeless by the ravages of the Civil War.

Lott explains that the Hobo character clown is a distinctly American invention, with his tattered hat, huge white mouth, three days’ growth of beard, torn clothes, and cartoon alcoholic’s big red nose. […] It seems ironic that such mawkishly appealing personalities had their roots in the miseries of poverty and oppression and the disfigurements of alcoholism and venereal disease. 

 

Holy sht. I knew something was up when I compared the two photos! Something didn’t seem right… and i was right! 

I never would have even thought to make that connection before I saw that post so thank you for giving me something to look into - I truly learn more from this website than I ever will in any class

huh. you really do learn something new every day.

Racism abound…

minstrelsy was the first form of American national popular/mass culture - it’s the foundation for everything that came after it, including vaudeville, the circus, cartoons, everything. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft lays this out really well.

We are the plants that feed on the deaths of fairies

Iron absorbs energy and the star loses energy, gravity crushes it and the blowback causes it to burst out into a nova.

Iron is the starkiller

STARS ARE FAIRIES, COLD IRON KILLS THEM

girljanitor:

princessneeshydoomcuddles:

crackerhell:

Why the fuck do queer people in cishetero relationships need QUEER people to validate their cishetero relationship?

like

REALLY???

Needing your queerness validated is VERY DIFFERENT from needing your cishetero relationship validated.

One is crucial for you to be happy and survive as queer

One is some shit you get literally everywhere that other queer people don’t have the option of getting.

and, one of the things about being specifically a two spirited person is, being with you doesn’t affect the queer identity (or lack thereof) of your partner. Regardless of who I’m with, I’m still queer. That’s just another way that being indigenous and queer is like…really different than white people’s gay/straight/bi/whatever. Being with me doesn’t make my BF gay.

femmeempathmagus:

crackerhell:

LONG STORY SHORT IF YOU COME INTO MY FUCKING QUEER SPACES FLASHING THAT CISHETERO SHIT

YOUR *~IDENTITY~* CAN BLOW ALL THE FUCKING DONGS

I HAVE A RIGHT TO WANT TO ESCAPE FROM YOU AND EVERYONE LIKE YOU

I

HAVE

A

RIGHT

Safe spaces are a necessary.
They take many forms and the rules of the spaces come from those who face the oppression from which they shield subjects of oppression.

STARS

DARK MATTER

GALAXIES

REAPERS

…wait

girljanitor:

genderbitch:

girljanitor:

genderbitch:

Sleep gave me a nice mental reset.

Not a lot but enough for me to last a while.

What I’m basically hoping for is that the sleep apnea treatments will improve the mental resets by a huge enough margin that I stop having these near constant suicidal nights.

Since I don’t expect good things from a psychologist. They have a tendency to push fucked things on neurodiverse trans folks when we come in for stuff like depression.

that’s true.

and, yeah actually getting better sleep will help, I’m sure. i swear for me, sleep and mood are intertwined lovers whom nothing shall ever separate.

Same.

Sleep and mood are pretty much fucking each other every five seconds in my brain

yeah. that’s why i need a nap right now. bleh!

it almost makes we wish i didn’t have such an awful reaction to pot (limbs full of television statics and BEEEES)

chronic insomnia is my name

giving your eyebags eyebags is my game

Pot gives me the kind of headaches that hell are made of

princessneeshydoomcuddles:

crackerhell:

Why the fuck do queer people in cishetero relationships need QUEER people to validate their cishetero relationship?

like

REALLY???

Needing your queerness validated is VERY DIFFERENT from needing your cishetero relationship validated.

One is crucial for you to be happy and survive as queer

One is some shit you get literally everywhere that other queer people don’t have the option of getting.

In case you don’t know what that means, it’s actually risky for me to be with cis men at all

The bubbling ridic transmisogyny that cis men put out (often dipping in their own fear of being gay) makes it not worth it for me to date them pretty much ever. So congrats on spitting tons of privilege into the trans chick’s face in a queer space on top of taking up too much space with your privileged cishetero relationship.

But it’s invalidation right? Riiiiiight? Even though your relationship is privileged everywhere, regardless of what you are sexuality wise and you have the privilege to even have that relationship be viable, instead of having to avoid men you’re attracted to like I and tons of other trans women do.

girljanitor:

genderbitch:

Sleep gave me a nice mental reset.

Not a lot but enough for me to last a while.

What I’m basically hoping for is that the sleep apnea treatments will improve the mental resets by a huge enough margin that I stop having these near constant suicidal nights.

Since I don’t expect good things from a psychologist. They have a tendency to push fucked things on neurodiverse trans folks when we come in for stuff like depression.

that’s true.

and, yeah actually getting better sleep will help, I’m sure. i swear for me, sleep and mood are intertwined lovers whom nothing shall ever separate.

Same.

Sleep and mood are pretty much fucking each other every five seconds in my brain