How I feel listening to white women in academia trying to legitimize their extractive work in communities not their own

The only ppl I befriend irl have to be this much of a bad bitch too

These guys r fukkin role models tbh

Lilos hyperbolic drama queen ass is instructive and teaches us how to live at the edge of camp, the authentic rendered through artifice and flamboyance

Get in bitches we going to do a panel at NAISA about reclaiming our narratives even when they have problematic elements

Incredulous ungrateful little native brat puts colonial agent on the spot and asks for him to account for US imperialism and state sanctioned violence

Fuck gratitude honestly

Lilo makes her own joy in mentoring stitch and teaching him how to be part of her family. Lilo demands to be recognized as a teacher and it’s only when her demands are met and she is seen as such that her behavior improves

Lilo cares for stitch who is not a metaphor for anger, but is a living, breathing dangerous alien dog thing who lilo refuses to domesticate because she recognizes his power is in both his queerness and his destructiveness and she knows he needs love not control

We might say lilo is not rebelling against Nani, but that it is a misguided attempt at rebelling against the forces controlling Nani. Nani wants lilos conformity mostly because she fears the continuation of years of colonial intervention into native family and social structure

So you can read lilos brattiness as I did when I watched the movie: that she cannot accurately place her rage upon those structures that control her, so they messily emerge in ways that end up biting her in the ass

But through it all, she learns to be tender with her friend stitch, who similarly finds himself in a position where structures of civilization (which is to say colonial infrastructure) severely limit the possibility of his being

And in doing so finds a way to restructure family for herself in a queer way that works for her and Nani and everyone else involved, eventually gaining the recognition of her agency as a mentor and person with wisdom to offer others

I don’t care if a white person wrote it I can still make it my own and read it beyond anything they intended for it. And yes I’m aware of some weird things and inaccuracies . But damn if this little brown girl didn’t teach 14 yr old me how to live

That despair, that hopelessness, that knowledge that something is wrong but being unable to place what exactly it is. That’s the condition of being a person of color disconnected from radical politics or non western knowledge traditions

Fuck gratitude