20-year-old student of history and lover of fiction. posts inane text, comic art, and panels from the currently reading list. there is no logical flow to this blog.
Could’ve been as easy as that.
I don’t know Ms. Allis, but I like that she decided to illustrate Miyazake’s words.
Yes. All of it.
oh my god there is a white woman going on and on in the comments of that selena gomez article about how white women “wear bindis to feel beautiful” and “have the right to do so”
aside from completely missing the point, how dare you insinuate that your piecemealing and appropriating of another culture is valid just because of the personal benefit you get from it? how dare you try and make the oppression of an entire culture worth it just because you get to feel pretty and “exotic” for a moment?
(and of course, that’s why you feel pretty. not because you understand anything about what you’re doing, but because you get to put yourself in another time and place and pretend to be something you’re not for as long as you wish to, a privilege the rest of us will never have.)
sorry, that “right” is utter bullshit.
How unfortunate is it that my parents had to literally force me to wear beautiful parts of my culture because I was afraid of being ostracized, but Selena Gomez can take aspects of the clothing I grew up with and make money off of them? How unfortunate is it that South Asian immigrants and South Asian Americans are Otherized every single day for the way they look, talk, and dress, but Urban Outfitters continues to commodify and make a profit off the sale of bindis – as made popular by American pop stars?
[..] My bindi is not a way for you to present yourself as being friendly to South Asian culture while exotifying it. My bindi is from my mother, put in my drawer because it is another mark of my internalized Otherness, on top of my brown skin. My bindi is tainted by Western celebrities trying to be “cultural” or “bohemian” or “tribal.” My bindi is not just a piece of plastic, my bindi is not for sale, and my bindi is not for you.
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