Spoken for Dykes Gone Digital, the digital version of Ottawa’s yearly Dyke March.
It is hard to be here.
Spoken for Dykes Gone Digital, the digital version of Ottawa’s yearly Dyke March.
It is hard to be here.
This is the only thing I can write today.
My Canadian residency is in doubt. My denial may soon be final, based on something so perverse and so trivial as my being a member of an ODSP-receiving household. My appeals may yet save me, as Ania and I exhaust every remaining option to secure my life here in Canada.
Because there is no life for me elsewhere.
I got out.
I don’t know how long I can stay. Canada has refused to employ me despite (because of?) my advanced degree, and if anything goes awry in my immigration process, they might yet force me back.
But I got out.
It is not possible to run out of reasons to love Steven Universe. This show’s explicitly queer representation is staggeringly high for a show as mainstream as it is; its psychological depth is impressive; it tells us forthrightly and aggressively that our genders should not constrain our possibilities; most of the characters are women or people of color (and largely voiced by people of color); there is a plot arc that is unambiguously about consent and another about being willing to seek comfort from one’s friends in crisis; onward and onward.
It’s also an impressively diverse treatment of immigrants’ and refugees’ feelings about the place they used to call home.
Spoilers out to episode 83 follow.