The reason I hate the “Shakespeare didn’t actually write Shakespeare” theories so much is they seem to be inherently rooted in taking his works away from ordinary people. “The son of a glovemaker could never have written these plays! Surely only an Aristocratic Intellectual, like the Earl of Oxford, could be responsible!“
Honestly fuck off. Shakespeare was one of us. His plays were written for the masses. He was an ordinary man who captured the voice of the people and the depths of their emotions. We credit Shakespeare with making up words and phrases, but who’s to say he wasn’t writing down what he heard on the streets? "But something as complex as Hamlet could never have been written by Shakespeare! It must have been the work of a nobleman!” Well guess what, not only did he write it, but he wrote it because that’s what his audience liked. The hordes of ordinary people consumed his deeply philosophical play about a young man musing over life and death and sin and they LOVED it.
Shakespeare was a crowd-pleaser and an entertainer, and reason his work is so beautiful and poetic and philosophical (as well as bloody and sexual!) is because he was responding to popular demand. Most people attending the theatre were illiterate; they consumed literature by listening, and this is one of the reasons why playwrights utilised iambic pentameter and rhyming schemes. Their dialogue is poetry, and it’s beautiful to listen to. The first time Romeo and Juliet meet, their shared dialogue creates a sonnet. Imagine a commoner sitting in the crowd listening to that, and it hits him like an arrow, wow, listen to the way these characters speak,this is love at first sight.
Shakespeare was an ordinary man, and the beauty and complexity of his works were fuelled largely by the appetite of ordinary people. Although plays could be written and performed for the aristocracy, it was the hordes at the theatres that one had to keep happy. This modern obsession with putting him on a pedestal and trying to make him high culture or inaccessible to ordinary people is just gross. This upstart crow will always be one of us, and his work will always be for us.
Just to add on a bit, I was an English major, and I remember once in college, my linguist professor was discussing Shakespeare, and how he created new words. She said that linguists have studied the languages of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, and they’ve basically come to the conclusion that Shakespeare didn’t invent these new words, at all. They theorize that he actually picked up these words from young women who would use them, as slang speech. Slang speech in these centuries can be found in letters young women wrote to each other, with the slang coming from them shortening words, in order to write faster. Of course, women’s ways of talking have constantly been looked down upon throughout society, but here’s an article from Smithsonian, discussing the fact that young women throughout history have shaped language, and continue to do so. They say that what holds men back (men trail by about a generation) is the fact that they make fun of the way in which women talk.
im not suggesting we immediately transition to full communism or whatever, but you have to admit that Bothov had a lot of good ideas
I’m not suggesting we immediately genocide our enemies, but I think we can all agree their time is ending.
tell me, which of Bothov’s teachings do you disagree with? I bet you don’t even know who he is.
You know, you’re right, I don’t know they guy, never read anything by him, but if his ideas promote communism they’re garbage and so are you.
You’re telling me that you’ve never heard of Bothov? Come on, just ask me if you’re not sure.
Bothov is basic dialectical materialist theory, I’m against Communism myself but you really have to read Bothov to be able to form an argument against Communist on a theoretical
Seriously, @tehgore if you want me to explain Bothov to you just ask, I’m always up to talk about one of my favorite subjects.
Could you explain Bothov
I’ve never read a whole lot about communism. Overall my understanding is everyone works according to their abilities, and receives according to their needs. I think many people have kneejerk reactions against communism because of Soviet Russia and cold war era stuff. Really it’s not a bad concept, but it’s all but impossible to implement on a large scale, and generally attempts at communism have failed due to corruption and bureaucracy. I think it’s socialism that promotes everyone getting a minimum quality of life guaranteed, with the ability to work to increase your QoL, but then “oh socialism is bad because Nazis” happens. Isn’t politics grand
How did you miss the joke it’s literally right there in bold sparkly flaming letters i’m in awe
The fact that every time it’s been attempted there was corruption I think says something about the concept itself. Maybe the True ideal of communism is good, but incompatible with humanity’s desires. Someone has to regulate the communist laws after all, and that single person isn’t likely to be perfect.
Agreed. Under communism the dikfer just can’t be balanced among all members of the population. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the dikfer just ask, I’d be happy to explain, it’s quite fascinating
What “dikfer? ”
What’s a dikfer, you ask?
You see this?!? You see this horse shit?!?! This is why we can’t have proper discourse.
read the post again and you’ll realize it was never discourse in the first place
anti-sjw: why?? am I triggering your delicate tattoo artist sensibilities?? trigger warning: waving arms and logic! you mad bro? huh, you ma – ow ow ow that’s not what the tat is supposed to look like.
as a tattooist please beleive me when i say that i have tattooed this guy before.
i know its satire, but like. you’re not even wrong.
this is both the most enlightening and the saddest addition to my post.
i was exaggerating the best i could, and it turns out to be real. i’m so sorry for you.
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
The pushback against queer is RECENT.
Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL. And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence. You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).
We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.
And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.
So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.
YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.
Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.
You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.
WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.
Honestly, the way some people act it’s like. . You can’t reclaim slurs, but you can’t create new words without being branded the butt of a joke, so people who don’t feel like outlet labels fit them are supposed to just sit and suffer in silence.
If you don’t want to be called queer then fine, but don’t erase the history of those who used it, who fought for it TO be used as an umbrella term. If you don’t want it applied to you then fine, but don’t say what it should and shouldn’t be used for. I know that many people hear it as a slur and don’t want it applied, but to say it can’t be an umbrella term based on that doesn’t make sense. “Gay” is one of the absolutely most common slurs I have ever heard used in my life and it still gets used and applied to umbrella situations. If we went off of if things have been used against us as slurs then we wouldn’t have anything to call ourselves.
I’m here, I’m queer, and it took me a damn long time to get used to it and I’m not going back now.
This post has helped me. I am asexual, autistic, i have issues due to sexual trauma, i am agender… I thought i couldnt use the word queer. Thanks to you guys i feel welcome.
I am queer, thanks.
if you get no thing else out of this post (because i know its long) i suggest you at least try to get this:
It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
because it is fantastic
you can get a phd in Queer Literature.
enough of this terf shit. learn your history and stop being the private army of anyone who sounds offended.
jesus and satan are the same guy in different hats
god created satan in order to have him rule the inferno, because he already had hell built and ready to go before the Fall. if we assume that jesus and satan are the same person, after suffering for centuries lucifer is allowed a chance to atone for his sins and becomes a human being, dying voluntarily on the cross in order to return to god’s side. this completes his penance (for the crime of sneaking out of hell to tempt humankind into falling from grace and being banished from eden.) the archangel gabriel is seated at the left hand of the father (god) and jesus/satan is seated at his right hand; essentially, humans were god’s project from the getgo, and so lucifer’s job was tormenting the damned, before there were even any damned, and gabriel’s job is, sort of, to punish the living. gabriel shares that role frequently with the archangel michael, who carries a flaming sword and is often depicted crushing serpents with his heel, like the virgin mary. the serpent here does not particularly represent jesus/satan, but rather the embodiment of the original sin.
if we accept this metanarrative, then the gospels become much more interesting. for example – it becomes obvious that jesus must have arranged for judas to betray him in advance, thus condemning himself to death and requiring judas to repent in the desert for the supposed betrayal (really a sacrifice of the self; judas gives up the companionship of the apostles, becomes a secret martyr for christ, etc) before he can rejoin christ in heaven. we are meant to understand that we are all judas, and in doing so, understand that the holiest of men can still be liars. we are begged to consider that perhaps the scriptures themselves are littered with lies, inserted here and there by translators and monarchs. in fact, the actions and life of judas iscariot become a sort of pageant for the fall and redemption of christ/satan; judas becomes the most christlike of the apostles.
The most monumental even in human history was the reddit VS 4chan battle in Tribes Ascend where 4chan pulled it back in the final 10 seconds and you just hear GO GO GO GO GO GO as fucking Galo Sengen starts playing in the bg and then 4chan wins
