HannahB

Well-known member
This depends what you mean by feminism. If you mean womens liberation or womens emancipation in the most broadest sense, and a kind of practical direct action, then sure I would agree. I took your enquiry to be more about the academic discipline of gender studies, which is highly class delineated.

Where did you live in the middle east, by chance? in rural villages or in the cities.

Because the agrarian question is the key to the appeal of reactionary ideologies like political islamism.

People in my Kurdish village don't have a grasp of English beyond the colloquial basics, let alone being able to read say, the highly obscure prose of Judith Butler. You have to work at their level. And unlike me they don't have to live in Baked Beans land.
And If interested, today
 

HannahB

Well-known member
Sufi - can’t watch clip on this phone, the Curtis shared… Wow Ruya - ok so now there is even more you have not told me let alone those books you have that I still need to read !
Will look for more ruya accounts -
 

HannahB

Well-known member
Sufi - can’t watch clip on this phone, the Curtis shared… Wow Ruya - ok so now there is even more you have not told me let alone those books you have that I still need to read !
Will look for more ruya accounts -
Sufi - where are those books?
 

HannahB

Well-known member
Maybe they were caused by Soviet shrapnel injuring his optic nerve? Oftentimes severe sudden nerve damage can cause what can also be called ‘big dreams’ (been there - their effects can last years in reality, part of MA thesis, observing)
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
how do you reckon most english people (i guess you're in england) categorise you? i mean you're right obviously, no-one here has any idea what a kurd might be.

Ah-raab, oriental, middle eastern, dangerous muslim. Something to that effect. It's only Americans who categorise by skin colour.

It's why you can have Black British (for caribbean immigrants of the windrush generation who are also predominently xtian) but noone would say British Kurd with a serious face, unless they wanted to be laughed at.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i always thought of kurds as white, they certainly look white but that doesnt mean much today
when a lot of the most villified and feared ethnic groups in the country are 'white'

In all honesty there's not such a thing as objective Whiteness, which is where the Americans get it wrong. The closest you get to what one would call white would be the imperialist powers. So Britain, Germany, France and USA are the gold standards for white, then you'll descend to Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc, etc. But you can hardly call the Roma or Polish white, and you could probably only just call Greek cypriots white, but in a very peripheral sense. I call them mediterraneans. I don't necessarily think the whites are more or less privileged than me or have advantages (this is just too much of a detached university perspective) I just despise any concessions to Britishness and viscerally hate those who are intent upon parading it under the banner of left progressivism. Obviously feel free to gas up David Moyes this season, of course.

Either way, I have brown skin so the point is moot in my case.
 
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HannahB

Well-known member
In all honesty there's not such a thing as objective Whiteness, which is where the Americans get it wrong. The closest you get to what one would call white would be the imperialist powers. So Britain, Germany, France and USA are the gold standards for white, then you'll descend to Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc, etc. But you can hardly call the Roma or Polish white, and you could probably only just call Greek cypriots white, but in a very peripheral sense. I call them mediterraneans. I don't necessarily think the whites are more or less privileged than me or have advantages (this is just too much of a detached university perspective) I just despise any concessions to Britishness and hate those who are intent upon parading it under the banner of left progressivism. Obviously feel free to gas up David Moyes this season, of course.

Either way, I have brown skin so the point is moot in my case.
I bought a Kurdish Feminist Manifesto in LA but do not have it here and do not remember which group it was from. Read it about 4 years ago. Had a revolutionary woman with a gun on the cover, like a screen print. What’s the name of it, if anyone knows, had some good ideas if I remember?
 

version

Well-known member
I haven't heard of that, so I don't know. It's apparently due to British imperialism and anti-Irish sentiment in Britain and America.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
In all honesty there's not such a thing as objective Whiteness, which is where the Americans get it wrong. The closest you get to what one would call white would be the imperialist powers. So Britain, Germany, France and USA are the gold standards for white, then you'll descend to Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc, etc. But you can hardly call the Roma or Polish white, and you could probably only just call Greek cypriots white, but in a very peripheral sense. I call them mediterraneans. I don't necessarily think the whites are more or less privileged than me or have advantages (this is just too much of a detached university perspective) I just despise any concessions to Britishness and viscerally hate those who are intent upon parading it under the banner of left progressivism. Obviously feel free to gas up David Moyes this season, of course.

Either way, I have brown skin so the point is moot in my case.
Certainly Portuguese - or a certain large and vocal subset - are very keen to stress that they are 'White' when their actual colour is quite different is from mine... but of course they are not talking about actual colour here.
Some people still dispute whether or not the Irish are white too.
This is exactly it, not to do with skin colour but some kinda perceived hierarchy.

One of my friends... his dad is from Algeria and his mum maybe English or Irish, but growing up in Belfast he said the Irish used to call him 'p*ki'.

Of course another word for 'white' is Caucasian. Interesting cos we hear that word and don't really sort of think about it, but if/when my gf were to use the word Caucasian she would use it in the literal sense, i.e to mean someone from the caucasus - a Georgian or Armenian for example - and she was surprised to learn that in the west it has the meaning it does. And when asked I couldn't explain it so we looked it up - apparently it goes back to some anthropologist who, when he saw Georgians, decided they were the most handsome people he had seen, and it naturally followed for him that that must be where the 'highest' race must have originated.

And we're stuck with that obvious nonsense. Every time it's used on the news or whatever it harks back to that...
 

version

Well-known member
Certainly Portuguese - or a certain large and vocal subset - are very keen to stress that they are 'White' when their actual colour is quite different is from mine... but of course they are not talking about actual colour here.
Apparently there's a lot of colourism in places like Brazil, India and South Korea with people favouring lighter skin.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's not quite that that I mean to say, though there is probably an element of that too with some people. It's just that the absurdity of the idea white is greatly highlighted.

Maybe I mentioned this thing about how one time we were walking with a Muslim friend from Kuwait and this black bloke in the street made same comment and one of our group started going on and on about how the n-word word shouldn't have insulted the Kuwaiti - and to me the way he said this really suggested that he had a number of different levels on which he puts different groups.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yeah. there are Italians with browner skin than English. I don't mean afro-italian or middle eastern Italian immigrants, but people who have been natives for centuries. It's all to do with a hierarchy as Rich points out.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The majority of Brits and Irish are descended from Neolithic Turks//Greeks/Sardinians/Spanish and greater %'s of Crimean Bronze Agers

Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman less

Then you have the Alans from Persia who migrated as far as Orleans in huge numbers in the 1st millennia AD, so huge numbers of Italians and French are related to Iranians


Black Irish is an old one and cited in a current legal case

 
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