2015. augusztus 6., csütörtök

"9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS" - Sarah Schulman

One of the best critiques of the way AIDS decimated the LGBTQI community in New York and in the process enabled a gentrification of both the spaces where the dead lived and of their memories. Anyone know of any other radical queer lit as compelling as this (The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation - Sarah Schulman)?"The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of 20 years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital."

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