MY OWN SYNTAX

so-treu:

clingtomymouth:

iisabelle:

redguard:

planetoftheapes:

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a clinical study, conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which 399 (plus 201 control group without syphilis) poor — and mostly illiterate — African American sharecroppers were denied treatment for Syphilis.

This study became notorious because it was conducted without due care to its subjects, and led to major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had “bad blood” and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating. In 1932, when the study started, standard treatments for syphilis were toxic, dangerous, and of questionable effectiveness. Part of the original goal of the study was to determine if patients were better off not being treated with these toxic remedies. For many participants, treatment was intentionally denied. Many patients were lied to and given placebo treatments—in order to observe the fatal progression of the disease.

By the end of the study, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Twenty-eight of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

tiredofbeingignored:

materialworld:

The Arting Starvist:

Everyone is always hating on Yoko Ono. She’s almost universally despised in North America, which I think is pretty culturally revealing. People claim to hate her because she is “weird” and “broke up the Beatles”, but beyond that they know almost nothing about her! Yoko Ono was a well-known and respected performance artist before she hooked up with the man whose fame completely overshadowed hers, and she was hugely important in the popularization of performance art and the legitimization of non-traditional art forms. She ran her own avant-garde gallery out of her apartment in New York, and was an early member of the legendary group Fluxus.

I think that the hatred for her stems from some sort of gross cultural inability to shake off the idea of a the siren who drains a mans virility (hence her reputation as the Beatles breaker-upper), and discomfort with the image of a powerful and sexy Asian woman at the height of the Vietnam war.
So I say DON’T DISS YOKO. She’s awesome. It’s totally fair to hate her if you know her work and have an informed opinion, but no naive hating!

Hey Cara re: your birthday, Kirsten McCrea aka The Arting Starvist does feminist art projects and Yoko love media, has an etsy. Just saying.

While I agree with this, and I think we shouldn’t diss Yoko, and that the  (superficial) hatred projected upon her is a cultural production (in as much as, I think, ‘our’ love for the Beatles could be said to be), I don’t think I agree with a characterization of her as ‘the siren who drains a mans virility.’ I think such language participates in the very sexist (racist) machine that the original post means to critique/challenge. Yoko wasn’t a siren; she was an independent artist in her own right and agent of her own desire, in as much as John, who isn’t labeled a siren, was also. John’s virility wasn’t drained; do we not remember his own history of infidelity while with Yoko (if we were to take the word ‘virility’ at its basic definition)? If anything, John’s aesthetics were being transformed (complicated) and the story of the hate towards Yoko Ono is the story not only of racist/sexist paradigms but of our society’s expressed want not to see artists (who we have grown to love/idolize dearly in another form) change/stretch their and our own boundaries.

Yeah. Don’t diss Yoko, but don’t use the master’s tool to build her a new, celebratory stage either.