A week ago I read a headline:
Vancouver's Tamara Taggart and Madame Premier combat sexist term undermining B.C. COVID-19 school concerns
I had questions. This led to a rabid loop of news articles that vaguely mentioned various combinations of the words "sexist language", "hysterical", "school districts" and "Tamara Taggart" - but absolutely no answers about what exactly happened.
One article alludes to someone calling parents "frenzied" in their fear of COVID, but mostly it's just puff piece after puff piece about a female-owned political t-shirt company and a local celebrity teaming up to donate 30% of the proceeds on a $45 polyester blend t-shirt to benefit a local domestic violence charity.
We don't talk about it much, but your spicy shop runners are both heavily involved in local housing activism, electoral politics and mutual aid. So imagine our dismay when we're constantly knee-deep in human misery that never sees the light of day (Did you know the BC Residential Tenancy Branch enforced 22 evictions in the month of November alone, giving tenants 2 DAYS to vacate their homes when they lose a hearing in the middle of a global pandemic?) to read MULTIPLE articles that say absolutely nothing about a non existent problem that has nothing to do with barely recognizable local "celebrity".
So then we made the regrettable decision to look up the tee shirt company that could have been us in an alternate reality where we didn't grow up poor, under the specter of the financial crisis, and near the back end of the human centipede of neoliberal austerity. Also climate change. And, this is a year old gripe, but as a former resident of Vancouver-Kingsway hearing Tamara Taggert exclaim "The economy and the climate go hand in hand" over and over again while defending Justin Trudeau's pipeline was mind boggling.
Howwww Tamara??? Howwwww do they go hand in hand you never elaborated.
They make feminist political tee-shirts completely devoid of a message beyond "More women in Power" it brings to mind a particular Madam Premier, who is the reason this blog is rife with spelling errors and I am basically illiterate Christy Fucking Clark. It also brings to mind Margret Thatcher, Marien Lapen. Kelly Loeffer, and Chrystia Freeland who supported a facist coup against a democratically elected socialist by, you guessed it a #bossbitch lady white supremacists' dictator. Jennene Anez. Maybe we're irrationally mad, you might even call us hysterical but we saw a bag that said "politics is life" and screamed Life is Political!!!
THEN WE FOUND RONA AMBROSE ON MODELING FOR THEM AND A WHITE HOT FURY RUSHED OVER US. A feminist company lionizing an anti-choice Juul peddler who's standing by a the guy who want's to "Take Back Canada" and no, I don't think her place is in Parliament. Politics isn't a sport or a hobby. It's the apparatus which decides who lives with dignity and who starves.
As a body politic, we have to stop falling into the trap of neoliberals who have no intention to create any material change co-opting identity politics. *Cough Cough Copmala Harris*...
So I have some issues with the media parading Tamara around as a feminist icon. I have issues with polished, privileged women coopting what was a dirty, messy and sometimes violent power struggle that freed us from subjugation. Focus on gender alone is the high-speed shell game that forever keeps a true analysis of power frustratingly out of reach.
So, instead of exploding with rage at rad-libs we're going to honour one of histories most impactful and underrated revolutionaries, Louise Michel. The French Grand Dame of Anarchy or as the press dubbed her, Queen of the Scum. A woman so fearless and respected that she dared the Bourbons to kill her and they didn't fearing it would restart the revolution. That's the #resistance energy we should all aspire to.
UPDATE: The title of this blog is now its own t-shirt and sticker!