Tag: student

‘Slay’ bells ring? A semi-seasonal post on the origins of the term ‘yas’.

This post responds to the Reply All podcast from the 7th of July 2016 entitled Disappeared. If you would like to listen to it first, the link is: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/. I will be focusing on the second half of the podcast from 19 minutes onward. However, the first half is an equally fascinating discussion about Left-Pad, Azer Koçulu, and opensource licensing of code, which I equally recommend that you listen to.

That being said, the second half explores the origins of the term ‘yas’, which is an incredibly popular way of expressing an intense appreciation for something or someone on the internet; any brief jaunt through Twitter, Tumblr, or potentially Facebook will undoubtedly return at least one use of it. For example (credit for all tweets given to the original account holders):

Yaas tweet 2

The tweet above appears to relate to the viral video that is credited with bringing ‘yas’ into popular culture, as is referenced in the Reply All podcast.

yaas tweet

This tweet (above) is also interesting from an analysis perspective, and potentially offers an explanation for the popularity of the expression. It also engages with an interesting facet of drag culture as an exaggeration of stereotypes or gendered characteristics, as well as performed expressions of emotion.

There are even gifs of velociraptors from Jurassic World with ‘yas’ superimposed upon them:

yas dinosaur gif

Returning to the original usage, however, I myself have used ‘yas’ on Twitter multiple times in response to things I loved. However, quite shamefully, I had no idea of its etymology. The Reply All podcast informed me that it first appeared in Harlem in the 1980s as a part of ball culture – specifically drag balls. Here is the origin of my shame as one of the communities with which I identify most as a bisexual woman is the LGBTQIA+ community. Clearly, I need to widen my knowledge of LGBTQIA+ history beyond UK borders. Regardless, learning about ball culture, the related house families that took in young, queer Black and Latinx people, and hearing Jose Xtravaganza speak about his own experiences with the House of Xtravaganza (of which he is now the Father) was both enlightening and emotive. I later went on to watch Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which offers an intimate portrayal of multiple drag balls and speaks to numerous queens about their backgrounds and their experiences of being drag queens in New York City. It is an amazing and incredibly emotional documentary. It also expanded upon the Reply All podcast for me, in that the queens in Paris is Burning explain the meaning behind many more popular terms used at drag balls, almost all of which I have seen and heard used online today. I recommend that you watch the documentary for a better understanding than I can provide in a short blog post.

The main thing that irritates me about the popular culture usage of ‘yas’ and other drag terms is not the fact that they have been popularised, per se, but that they have been popularised at the expense of their cultural heritage. I have no problem with multitudes of people using these words, but they have no idea of the atmosphere in which they were birthed. The vast majority of people using these words don’t understand why the subculture from which they come came into being; they don’t appreciate the immense hardships that these groups of people faced, or the relief of the sense of belonging that using these words and understanding them within gay culture gave. They are now part of mass culture. It feels almost as if by absorbing and appropriating gay language, popular culture has subsumed gay subculture, taken what it wanted, and spat the gay people out as ‘still not accepted’. It doesn’t come from a place of welcoming acceptance of gay culture and inclusion of popular slang used by the gay community with knowledge of the words’ heritage; it just lifts the word and erases its past and present as a ‘gay’ word. Homophobic people, transphobic people, biphobic people – people who are just unnaccepting of any and all parts of queer life and the queer subculture use ‘yas’ both online and in real life.

It is ironic in a way that a word with a queer history exists in the mouths of people who would absolutely ‘gag’ – in the basic sense of the word – and wash away all traces of it if they knew it had been used to celebrate drag queens and positive queer youth culture. But it also just stings. Part of the balls in Harlem was a competition to see if people could ‘pass’ for a certain gender or social class: they played with normative culture, and now one of their celebratory words is normative culture, but without them. It is still used by queer subcultures online, but many of those people are equally as unaware of the origins of one of their most-used words as I was. I think the main thing that saddens me is just that the revival of a word into mass usage doesn’t necessarily mean that social or societal groups are progressing and diversifying, but almost that popular culture is continually homogenising history and subculture into a mulch of ‘accepted’ popular culture. Words are stolen, repurposed, or even used in the way in which they were originally intended, but by different groups of people that cast them as monochromatic.

Popularising gay culture and drag culture is in no way bad when it reflects a more positive attitude towards LGBTQIA+ people: this is incredibly necessary, and a wider occurence of positive attitudes towards queerness would save so many people so much pain. But I don’t feel like that’s what this is. For me, and in my experience, the success of ‘popular gay culture’ like Ru Paul’s Drag Race has been mostly down to a fetishization and exoticising of gay culture for a straight, cisgendered audience who want to ogle the exiled ‘different’ people and the way in which ‘they’ live. There are, of course, LGBTQIA+ people who adore Ru Paul and feel represented by it, but its encouragement of stereotypes and high-performance ‘gayness’ has often been a turn-off for me and others in my own life. I do not speak for everyone and I am not trying to, but this is my personal discomfort with the ways in which ‘popular gay culture’ is sold.

I think that by educating anyone and everyone who uses the word ‘yas’, or any of the other terminology that originates in drag culture, we could solve the problem of it being appropriative. That way, those who are accepting of its origins and willing to continue the process of educating others can continue to use the words, fully aware of their history, and anyone who is upset by gay or drag culture will probably dislike the taste of ‘yas’, and cease to use it, thus eliminating the appropriation.

 

Some links for further reading/ watching:

There is no separation between the artist and their work.

 

There is a major trigger warning on this post for profane language, and descriptions of and allusions to sexual and physical assault – something publishers and academic institutions that set books like this should also fucking provide.

Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be:

Why would you write this?

No, seriously, why would someone write this book? I understand that some people like to pretend to themselves that they’re James Joyce^ and they’re being so incredibly revolutionary by shocking their audience with *gasp* graphic descriptions of blowjobs, but this is disgusting.

An excerpt from pages 243-245 of HSAPB:

As I slept that night I saw a room on the twelfth floor of a building with a courtyard in the centre, and in this building lived young people and social workers, educators, lots of people. And into a room at the top there came deliveries of sharp, long knives, short knives, twisted knives, all sorts of knives, guns, ropes, and huge shipments of drugs. Razors were sent there, picks, files, cuffs, scissors, things to pull with, things to clamp with, and chains, everything like that, so that no one who saw the shipment and loved their sister could leave her there in that room with those boys, and yet someone did. Lots of people did. One person took the elevator down and told the social workers, "I'm scared. I think something might happen to my sister! I think something might be going on in that room!" But the social workers did not understand; one said she was going to go up, but she was not as scared as the person who left her sister, who just stood there pacing, beyond worrying, so certain, on the main floor in the center of that courtyard. Because it would now be too late. The social worker went up, but it was too late because more boys had gone up with all their frightening clothes on, all their paint, all the things they dressed in regularly to scare people. They went up, and the room got more and more crowded with people who thought they should take part in the orgy because why not join in for once? Why always remain aloof? Why not join in and stick the things, the metal bars, into the mouths? They wanted to have a good time. The room was small, but it held all the women you could think of and all the men you were ever scared of in your whole life, passing on the street or just imagining, and all the men you loved the most. That is when the party started. So many of these people were crowding in from the elevator that the social worker could hardly make her way into the room, and she never did make her way into the room, but came back with a pale face, her hair frizzed with fear from not being let into this room with all the tools and all the drugs, and that is where the orgy began. That is where it began in no innocence at all, but compared to what was to come, it began in innocence. There were knives and girls skinned alive and kept alive, and one woman screaming but trying to laugh it off to another, "Look what they did to my face!" - and there were the amputations performed right there, the limbs cut off, and the bars fucked with in the mouth, and all the things that can be done to a person including the pulling and ripping of everything that we don't even know we love about a person - their intactness, their perfect intactness - and all the things that seem to us the person - they were destroyed, ripped away, so that you could not tell one girl from the other except some were taller, some were thinner, but you could not see it in the face, just bloodiness, like animals turned inside out. And in the courtyard, and in the balconies surrounding all twelve floors of the courtyard was the whole audience; rowdy, unhappy guys who were waving their flags and watching and waiting, so that at every floor they had their paint - orange, yellow, purple, blue - and when they were done with the girls, and when they were still doing them, doing everything before they dropped each girl, one by one, to her terror, thrown from the room, twelve floors down to the concrete floor of the courtyard, blood falling off her body as she fell - no skin, no face, but kept alive - then from the balconies came the colours flung, and she would fall through eleven floors of thick paint, house paint and wall paint, burning at her skin that was no longer skin - a nice bright green, a happy yellow, orange, purple, red, a rainbow. (Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be? (Vintage: London, 2013), pp. 243-245.)

I get that this can be viewed as a metaphor for the internet, and society’s wilful ignorance towards the depravity that exists there and what it potentially inspires. I get that it’s potentially highlighting the fact that women are often only valued as someone’s sister/mother/aunt/daughter/wife, when we’re actually people separate from our relationship to a man. Or that the ‘blame’ for assault is often a strangely detached and disembodied entity. Or that men are ‘boys’ in the passage a lot of the time and are infantilised and it’s their parents/ society/ social conditioning’s fault that they act like they do and they’re separated from responsibility. And that their ‘clothes’ they wear ‘to scare people’ are them performing this role. I can do the academic assessment of it, I am just refusing to centre this post about that.

I also see that it’s arguably critiquing society through the microcosm of the building in which everyone knows what goes on, but no-one, even those employed to do so (the social workers), does anything about it- as unfortunately often happens in real life. The bystander effect. “There’s nothing I can do”. But just with Sansa’s rape in Game of Thrones, the horrifically graphic suicide scene in Thirteen Reasons Why, and the needlessly triggering documentation of anorexia in To The Bone, this scene is fucking unnecessarily graphic, triggering, and fucked up. I don’t care what point you were trying to make, Sheila Heti, or what I can ‘read it’ as, you do not need to add to the mutilation and assault on womens’ bodies that happens for sport in the world already by writing this scene. 

The thing that added to the sting of reading this kind of exploitative ‘artwork’ was the fact that Sheila Heti is friends with Lena Dunham, and has had Margaret Atwood write a blurb for this particular text. Both Lena Dunham and Margaret Atwood have explicitly denounced and attempted to discredit women who have spoken out about assaults that they have suffered. Lena Dunham in particular has made some appalling comments over the years (some of which are documented below), and Heti counts her as a friend whilst profiting from womens’ pain in the work quoted above. Here is a tweet of Dunham’s, supporting white women who spoke out about abuse:

Lena Dunham Tweet

Ignoring for a moment the potential subtext beneath the idea of women lying about what they eat for lunch and the perpetuation of eating disorders, this is supportive. Of white women. When a young woman of colour, Aurora Perrineau, spoke out, detailing how a writer for Girls (Lena Dunham’s almost-entirely-white, only-accessible-to-those-who-can-pay-for-access-to-it American ‘sitcom’), Murray Miller, had assaulted her when she was 17 and he was 35, Dunham ‘responded’ by attributing her accusation to ‘the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year’. She later tweeted:

LD Tweet 2

Margaret Atwood also signed an ‘open letter’ to the University of British Columbia that ‘concerns the firing of former UBC Creative Writing chair and best-selling writer Steven Galloway who has been accused by multiple female students of sexual assault and sexual harassment.’. This quote has been taken from an article on jezebel.com, linked below. In the letter, all co-signatories called the accusations ‘unsubstantiated and unexamined’, adding that the university ‘amplified’ claims against Galloway, ‘severely damaging Professor Galloway’s reputation and affecting his health. The University has not, however, made any allegations public, citing privacy concerns. No criminal charges were laid against Professor Galloway at the time. None has been laid since.’. The letter has been criticised for seeming to place Galloway’s well-being and career before the well-being of the women assaulted – a criticism with which I agree. Too many times have we heard that allegations of assault are damaging to men’s careers, and that women should “think twice” before reporting a man because it could ruin his life. What of the effects upon the person who experienced the assault?

This year has seen many women speaking out about trauma that they have suffered at the hands of high-profile individuals, and I fully support all of these women in seeking justice. I do not support anything that hurts survivors’ recoveries, nor anything that takes some kind of perverse schadenfreude in detailing horrors. What do passages, books, or people like this contribute?

There is no separating the artist from their art. An artist’s connections and personal morals matter when deciding whose work to support. The list of people whose work I do not associate myself with grows longer, but the list of individuals whose contribution to their respective field has been damaged by trauma, and whose healing I hope for and empathise with is longer yet. I stand alongside them to prevent its further growth. #MeToo, and no more.

Helplines:

UK:

  • Rape Crisis: Freephone 0808 802 9999 : 12 noon – 2.30pm and 7 – 9.30pm every day of the year. https://rapecrisis.org.uk/
  • Freephone 24 hour National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247
  • Refuge: The Freephone 24-hour National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247 helps women find spaces in refuges across the UK. The police and social services can also put you in touch with us.
  • Safeline: Support for men, women and young people affected by rape and abuse. (Opening hours for both helplines Monday, Wednesday & Friday 10am – 4pm, Tuesday & Thursday 8am – 8pm , Saturday 10am – 12 noon)
    • Men specifically: 6Million Men Helpline: 0808 800 5005
    • Everyone: Helpline: 0808 800 5008

USA:

  • RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 24 hours a day: 1-800-656-HOPE
  • National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
  • National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline: 1-866-331-9474
  • Anti-Violence Project for LGBTQIA+ and HIV+ persons: 212-714-1141

Australia:

  • National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Service: 1800RESPECT
  • Kids Help Line:
    • Freecall: 1800 551 800
    • National 24 Hour telephone counselling for children and young people

New Zealand:

  • Shine/Te Kakano Tumanako: FREE Confidential Domestic Abuse Helpline 0508 744 633

WEBSITE LISTING HELPLINES AND ORGANISATIONS FOR EVERY COUNTRY:  http://www.hotpeachpages.net/a/countries.html

 

 

 

^ Note: I do not like James Joyce, nor do I personally think that he was revolutionary.

Some potential links for further reading:

Guardian digested read of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/27/how-should-person-sheila-heti-digested

A Guardian review of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/11/sheila-heti-how-should-person-be

A New York Times review of How Should A Person Be?:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/books/review/how-should-a-person-be-by-sheila-heti.html

Goodreads reviews of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9361377-how-should-a-person-be

Lena Dunham in the media: notable events in reverse chronological order. (CONTENT WARNING: sexual abuse, (?) false accusations, (?) animal abuse, abortion):

Margaret Atwood’s signing of an ‘open letter’ to the University of British Columbia (amongst numerous other writers):

The First Casualty: An Introduction.

Millennials are not possessed of the Midas touch of the baby boomers: we turn all that we connect with to quartz, at best with a little iron ore. But here is my connection with you, through this blog. I am a third-year English student at Queen Mary University of London, and over the next twelve weeks I will be posting about Contemporary American Popular Culture. We shall see if I believe that there is indeed any gold.