Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

I Act Most Like Myself... When I'm In My Hometown, Santo Domingo. I Try To Get There About Five Times A Year.

I Mean In The Community That I Grew Up In, You Know, A Very, You Know, Mixed, Almost Entirely African Diaspora Community, One Of The Things That We Were Not Ever Supposed To Say Was How Much Self-hatred And Colorism Determined And Guided What We Would Call Our Desire. In Other Words, What We Would Consider Beautiful.

I Always Had A Sense That I Would Fall In Love With Tokyo. In Retrospect I Guess It's Not That Surprising. I Was Of The Generation That Had Grown Up In The '80s When Japan Was Ascendant (born Aloft By A Bubble Whose Burst Crippled Its Economy For Decades), And I'd Fed On A Steady Diet Of Anime And Samurai Films.

I Was In Fact Pretty Much - By The Larger Culture, By The Local Culture, By People Around Me, By People On Tv - Encouraged To Imagine Women As Something Slightly Inferior To Men.

Genre Might Certainly Increase Some Of Your Narrative Freedoms, But It Also Diminishes Others. That's The Nature Of Genre.