Honor from The Panopticon by Melissa Finn

With the panopticon
Differences can be drawn
Quartered
Observed
Women
Their symptoms, circulations, mental prowess
Character, development, strengths, taking breaks
Stubbornness
Are designated as incurable fecklessness
When their strength, power and resilience
Are actually characterized by boundlessness

Efficiency, classifiability
The panopticon is a lab for the gaze
The observer can experiment
With actions that alter the prisoner’s need to please

To train, correct, bring in line
And monitor the effects
Of new social medicines
Used, without patient approvals

This all-seeing lab of power
Penetrates human behavior
And knowledge about these topics
Men and women
Men upon men
Men upon women
Women upon men
Women upon women
Across all of their surfaces

Discovered across these distances
From which power is exercised
The surfaces from which
Degrees of guilt
And degrees of punishment
Are meted out

Who is the object of suspicion and oversight
As well as completely civilized and self-deciding?

Who is the object of suspicion and oversight
As well as completely civilized and self-deciding?

The system is mightier
When women are conquered with caution and pity
And divided from each other
Pitted in competition for men’s affection / and publicity
Are you hearing me?

In their partitions, they are immobilized
By their fragmentation and futile bid for perfection
Here, the modern panopticons
Are cruel and ingenious cages
Built by people with unexplained fears and rages

And by people who work bodies for wages
Political and social technologies
Promiscuous in their utilities
With immense use, but unattached to any specific use
Are you hearing me?

They can censure women in space and time
Reduce resistance or friction
Distributing women in hierarchies
Classifying centers and peripheries
Different channels for management

Woman.
Weighted down by the constant pressure
Making independence manageable
Offenses against perfection, of imperfection
Mistakes, crimes of indifference


Foul paper bag test comparisons
Treatment differentials for color shades
Questioning dignity, empathy, desirability
Intelligibility, estimation, demanding conformity

Bleaching marketing win, panoptic trap of colored skin
Human and desirable spectrums: sub-altern
Human genome vs eraser's white hokum
Internal gaze of state sin and everyone’s kin

Affecting pay rates, school suspensions
And all that we claim to memorize
Tragic apparently is attractiveness, femininity, sexuality
That drips relentless drops of the history

Of chattel slavery on color palette currency
Race and color watchtowers are grim
One drop of black rule justifies exclusion
Beauty industries invalidate with time, urgency

Resources, personnel, the worth of women
Living for themselves, knowing themselves beneath skin
Before masks and injections are placed on them, in them
And Photoshop disciplines, spreading lies and miseducation

Where their minds choose self-determinism
In freedom || Away from diffuse, rotten
And insidiously manipulative instructions
They're not victims, true! They live in action

But spades are spades
Context is context
Structures are structures
Conditions in millennia are conditions in millennia

Where their face violates the laws of physiognomy
Where their face violates the laws of symmetry
Where their face violates the mean between extremes
These crimes are made before they are even committed

Who is burdened by the weight of women’s
Self-expression? || The lie is that economies
Will have no capacity for optimization
If they include women’s perspectives and soul yearnings

The lie is that economies
Will have no capacity for optimization
If they include women’s perspectives and soul yearnings

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