Also, I thought I’d do a post on why many Romani people openly refer to themselves as “Gypsy” instead of Romani.
So, in the United States, half of the people don’t even know what the actual terms for us are. Conversations usually go like this:
“Oh are you Italian or something?” “I’m Romani.” “Romanian?” “No. Romani. A diaspora from India.” “So Indian?” “*exasperated sigh* Gypsy.” “Omg! Can you read my palm?!”
So, a lot of us honestly just say Gypsy and move on. That doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a slur. So don’t come to me talking about how some Romani people use it therefore it can’t be oppressive. Gadje stop.
^^^^
Some Rroma will also use the word “Gypsy” among family/very close friends in an effort to reclaim the word or as kind of a joke. My familija, for instance, will sometimes affectionately refer to each other as “crazy gypsies” or “road trash.” But that doesn’t mean gadje are allowed to call us that too. We’ve turned the verbal weapons people used against us for centuries into something positive, a point of pride even. But those phrases are only proud when we use them, and use them on our own terms.Put them back in gadje hands, though, and they become weapons once again.
Ethnic groups are allowed to reclaim slurs that doesn’t mean people outside of those groups can reclaim them.
Regular readers of my blog will hopefully remember me announcing
Defying Doomsday, the anthology I’m editing. Here’s a quick reminder:
Apocalypse fiction rarely includes characters with disability, chronic illness and other impairments. When these characters do appear, they usually die early on, or are secondary characters undeveloped into anything more than a burden to the protagonist. Defying Doomsday will be an anthology showing that disabled characters have far more interesting stories to tell in post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction.
The anthology will be varied, with characters experiencing all kinds of disability from physical impairments, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses and/or neurodiverse characters. There will also be a variety of stories, including those that are fun, sad, adventurous and horrific.
The stories in Defying Doomsday will look at periods of upheaval from new and interesting perspectives. The anthology will share narratives about characters with disability, characters with chronic illnesses and other impairments, surviving the apocalypse and contending with the collapse of life as they know it.
If that sounds exciting, you will hopefully want to check out our Pozible campaign where you can pre-order the book (due out in 2016) or choose some other goodies. To check it out visit: http://ift.tt/1F1LoS7.
And if you missed our other social media links, here they are:
Content imported from Blogger http://ift.tt/1DsBTyN. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so at the aforementioned link.
I just heard about this anthology on the Twitters and backed it! THIS IS VERY RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS. Y’all should take a look and become a supporter, too! :D
It’s basically a massive database full of high-quality images of different hairstyles. I mean, look at all the options in that sidebar (and part of it’s cut off):
In total they have 976 pages of hairstyles with about 17 styles each, that’s about 16592 hairstyles to look at.Â
