User Profile

Vincent Mousseau

vmousseau@millefeuilles.cloud

Joined 2 years ago

Doctorant et travailleur social basé à Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Profitant d'un mode de vie à l'abri des algorithmes manipulateurs des géants du web.

PhD student and social worker based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Trying to live a life less controlled by the algorithmic manipulation of the tech giants.

This link opens in a pop-up window

Vincent Mousseau's books

Stopped Reading

2024 Reading Goal

41% complete! Vincent Mousseau has read 10 of 24 books.

Park Cruising (2023, House of Anansi Press) 4 stars

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban …

The effect of the 1969 decriminalization is overstated, largely because of this last requirement that sex had to take place in private. The kind of sex between two men that took place quietly in the bedroom was already effectively legal, or at least it was impossible to police, as historian Jeffrey Weeks has pointed out in the U.K. context. For practical reasons as much as for moral ones, the state’s over-involvement in queer sexuality rarely targeted that kind of sexuality, and so it was not the kind of reform that would have resulted in more freedom for queer and trans people. Rather, perversely, partial decriminalization of gay sex in the United Kingdom and Canada resulted in an uptick in policing that targeted sexual activity anywhere it took place outside the bedroom.

Park Cruising by  (Page 142 - 143)

Park Cruising (2023, House of Anansi Press) 4 stars

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban …

In isolation, we crave connection. Our communities know all about this kind of yearning. We also know that connection carries risk — risk of rejection, risk of violence, risk of infection — and each of us has decided, over and over, that we are willing to accept at least some risk, at least some of the time. Because no queer can live in splendid isolation. No queer is an island.

Park Cruising by  (Page 66)

Park Cruising (2023, House of Anansi Press) 4 stars

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban …

Queer people know that risk is a continuum and not a binary. We know the activities that bring us joy and fulfillment can turn, in a moment, to danger, violence, ridicule. Many of the things we do are on a spectrum of risk: holding hands on King Street, coming out to our colleagues, booking a stay at a bed and breakfast. Even ordering a cake carries the risk of rejection and shame. One of the great gifts queer people have given the world has been to translate our intimate knowledge of risk into public health policy. The spectrum of risk was visible from the early days of the AIDS crisis, when we started distributing condoms and refusing to preach abstinence. It is equally visible in the work of drop-in centres, needle exchange programs, sharps boxes, and supervised injection sites.

Park Cruising by  (Page 53 - 54)

Park Cruising (2023, House of Anansi Press) 4 stars

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban …

Park cruising is a practice that connects people. It requires participants to keep watch, to seek out and process information about how strangers are acting and what it means about how they think and feel. This feeling of empathy is also captured by Delany's concept of contact: the stranger remains strange, so park cruisers train themselves to remain open toward people they do not know and with whom they may never develop a deeper connection.

Park Cruising by  (Page 35)

Park Cruising (2023, House of Anansi Press) 4 stars

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban …

Park cruising is a site of identity formation. It can reduce loneliness and the attendant risks that come with isolation. It is a site of the distribution of safer sex material (and, in the age of COVID-19, it reduces the spread of airborne pathogens among sexual partners). It takes place away from commercial spaces, and people don’t need money to engage in it. It can lend distinctiveness to a place and become a source of tourism. It teaches people valuable lessons about sexual consent. And, yes, it is a source of pleasure and world-building. Conscientious park cruising can help participants grow more caring.

Park Cruising by  (Page 4)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

Security and safety aren't the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponized state that is using guns, weapons, fear, and other things to "make us secure, right? Horrible things are supposed to be kept at bay by these tools, even though we know that horrible things continue to happen all the time —and that these very tools and the corresponding institutions are reproducing the violence and horror they are supposed to contain.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 95)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

For Black people, the war on terror hasn't “come ‘home.’” It's always been here. How then might we consider the emphasis on the militarization of policing as the problem as another example of “the precariousness of empathy”? The problem with casting militarization as the problem is that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally. We must accept that the ordinary is fair for an extreme to be the problem. The policing of Black people—carried out through a variety of mechanisms and processes — is purportedly warranted, as long as it doesn't get too militarized and excessive.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 84)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

Let us be clear: our punishment system, which is grounded in genocide and slavery and which has continued to replicate the functions and themes of those atrocities, can never be made just. Prisons are an iteration of structural racism in the United States, which allows some people to be treated as less than human and therefore reasonably subject to all manner of exploitation, torture, and abuse. This is the legacy of anti-Blackness in the United States. Even when the system ensnares a non-Black person, the prison-industrial complex remains a structurally anti-Black apparatus, firmly rooted in the United States' ongoing reliance on the financial exploitation and social control of Black people. This can be seen in persistent disparities at all levels of the criminal legal system, from arrest through imprisonment.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 60)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

You can't force somebody into being accountable for things they do That is not possible. People have to take accountability for things that they actually do wrong. They have to decide that this is wrong. They hare to say, "This is wrong and I want to be part of making some sort of amends or repairing this or not doing it again" The question is: What in our culture allows people to do that? What are the structural things that em phat in our culture encourages people who assault people and harm people to take responsibility? What I see is almost nothing. That means, for example, people continue to be rewarded when they do bad things to other people or take negative action against people.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 44)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

The US criminal punishment system cannot deliver any "justice." Marissa has already served over a thousand days in jail and prison. She spent another year under strict house arrest wearing an ankle monitor costing her family $105 every two weeks. Marissa fired a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband and no one was injured. For this, she was facing a sixty-year sentence if convicted in her retrial. True justice is not being arrested and taken away from her children, family, and friends. Justice is living a life free of domestic abuse. Justice is benefiting from state protection rather than suffering from state violence. Justice is having a self to defend in the first place.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 31)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

I don't see the world the way that people do here. I dont agree with it; I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves, and I just don't subscribe. For me, it's too much, "Yeah, I'm going to go do yoga, and then I'm going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I'll go... " You don't have to go anywhere to care for yourself. You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem, and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized reflection is not good for people. Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay. But then you need to test it in the world; you've got to be with people. That's important. And I hate people! So I say that as somebody who actually is really antisocial.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 28)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us (Paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books) 5 stars

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer …

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement—and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food, and education for all? This change in society wouldn't happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by , , (Page 17)