After leaving a meeting this evening about the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and politics in contemporary U.S discourse, the reality that it is still necessary that a majority of our world’s population fight for the right to be autonomous—unencumbered by political restrictions, anachronistic moral codes, antiquated notions of gender—is all the more incomprehensible. Where does this huge chasm between spaces, people and time come from? How, in the neatly carved bubble of the activist community, are these issues reflected on, understood, and respected, in contrast to this larger political scope in which people genuinely—viscerally—do not feel that women—and to a larger extent, anyone—has the right to manage their own sexual politics? Reflecting on the “progress” we’ve made seems almost an impossible feat: what is progress, per se, if it is so isolated between communities, genders, socio-economic brackets and educational niches of our society? How do you cumulatively assess the state of affairs in a society that is fractured, divided by the same fissures that initially spawned its political insurgence. Yes, more people are “aware” of how dehumanizing, degrading, and unjust these gender paradigms are, but to reduce the opponents of progressivism and progressive ideology as simply tenants of some “stone-age,” some by-gone era that they can’t escape, seems to deny how truly ubiquitous and pervasive these issues really are. When was this photo taken, and whom does it represent?—a people of past, present, or a harrowingly possible future? How do imbalances of power complicate our sense of time, history, and narrativity, and why does this struggle to move forward seem all the more frustratingly impossible to oppose? Never again; never again. Yet it feels like it never stopped happening. 

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