Genderqueer Chicago: Your Fave is Problematic

For background, we're talking about the phenomenon Know Your Meme frames as follows:

“Problematic Fave” is an expression used to describe popular celebrities or fictional characters that have been accused of some form of prejudice or bigotry"

- Know Your Meme

Last Open Topic ended up centering around community; how we frame who it consists of, what obligations and benefits it carries, how to define it, and more. One angle of it was how to handle when one finds someone who shares an aspect of one's identity to be disagreeable. It's disappointing when someone I look up to or identify strongly with says/does something specifically bigoted, and I'm not always sure what to do about it. Some people handle this by boycotting work that the person is involved in, like when people avoided seeing the movie Ender's Game because it was based on a book written by a raging homophobe.

Worse, sometimes I like the bigoted thing. The music artist Ke$ha has a cissexist transphobic song called "Grow a Pear" in which the pre-chorus asserts that dating a man with an internally based reproductive system is out of the question and misogynistically mocks the presumably cis guy for not performing masculinity according to the narrator's standards. It's extremely offensive, perpetuates a lot of ideas that have caused me personal harm, and on three of my work out playlists. Eep!

So Wednesday night we'll discuss how we handle when something or someone we care about is bigoted, and I look forward to hearing everyone's perspectives. This is a topic I expect people to get to use their "blinkers" more often for, to give a heads up on the nature of the bigoted thing before talking about it in more detail.

The topic for next week is "Voice and Speech"!

Wednesday, February 22nd, 7:00pm to 9 pm

Center on Halsted, 2nd Floor (Room 202)
3656 N. Halsted St.

Genderqueer Chicago is as safe a space as we can make it. To help with this, we have some working agreements that we would like all who come to meetings to keep in mind while within our safe space meetings. Please check out our working agreements here.

Safe space meetings are strictly closed to researchers and reporters in their professional capacities. Meetings are open to anyone else wanting to talk and think about gender! For more info, give us a shout at genderqueerchicago@gmail.com!