#Literature Gender

[catgendermikus]

❣︎ allusiongender ❣︎

[ allusion - gender ] a gender related, in some way, 2 literary allusions !! one may derive gender euphoria from reading or recognizing an allusion 2 another work, may see their gender as a form of literary allusion (see also allusogender), may derive joy from seeing literary allusions in other forms of media, or otherwise connect their gender 2 the concept of literary allusion !!

coined 4 day 4 of @dolliecworpse’s coining event: books / reading !!

ఌ — the darling did not find this gender in previous coining posts, but please let cher know if it already exists !! — ఌ

PT: allusiongender [allusion-gender]: a gender related, in some way, to literary allusions!! one may derive gender euphoria from reading or recognizing an allusion to another work, may see their gender as a form of literary allusion (see also: allusogender [link to coining post embedded in text]), may derive joy from seeing literary allusions in other forms of media, or otherwise connect their gender to the concept of literary allusion!! coined for day 4 of @ dolliecworpse’s coining event: books/reading!! the darling did not find this gender in previous coining posts, but please let cher know if it already exists!! END PT

[blvvdk3ep]

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

[prokopetz]

"Why do all gender-bent characters have names ending in -a, that's such a fanfic trope" buddy, the "girl names end in -a" trope is so old that JRR Tolkien invented a Hobbitish dialect of Westron in which "-a" is a masculine name affix, then turned around and "localised" those names to end in "-o" in the published text (e.g., Bilba > Bilbo, Maura > Frodo, etc.) so they wouldn't sound feminine to Anglophone readers.

[king-k-ripple]

[floral-ashes]

Remember when I published this in a serious journal and everyone thought it was very funny?

Well, Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body is basically where I stake my claim at being a depraved freak. 😉

Don’t wait! Get your copy now! Available on Bookshop and plenty more.

[linnytheseagull]

Here's how to spot a Mad Scientist:

Is very smart in a specific field

Probably hasn't slept in the past 4 days

Depressed

Slowly decends into madness/spirals/gets obsessed over something to the point where they destroy their lives over it

Here are other minor signs you might want to look out for (doesn't apply to all Mad Scientist):

Very pathetic. A loser, if you will

Is gay

Wears glasses

Has a best friend who is extremely friendly and also a poet

Graying hair despite their relatively youthful appearance

Can be a little bit silly (as a treat)

Note that not all Mad Scientists are actual scientists. The Mad Scientist can be disguised as something else and may try to trick you; do not be fooled. Look for these traits to identify a real wild Mad Scientist.

Now you are ready to go out into the wild and find your very own Mad Scientists to hyperfixate on for the next month! Hope this helped❤️

[selenedistress]

[gatheringbones]

[“It was only after I came out as a dyke that, for the first time in my life, I felt ready to celebrate being a girl, and I did. Actually, I overdid. Armed with Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Joan Nestle’s A Restricted Country, I embraced femme. I dressed up in short flowery dresses, pushup bras, satin panties, and lacy stockings. I paid great attention to my long, curly, perfectly-coiffed hair, my glamorous makeup, and especially my pouty lips. I spritzed Lola’s smell on my skin—Estee Lauder’s Private Collection—and painted my nails. I wore all of it with black combat boots and a brilliant sense of irony. I reveled in my girliness, went over the top, learned how to tweeze my eyebrows and line my lips with a lip pencil.

My gender presentation was unmistakable: blatant female sexuality. I was a proud, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, uppity, don’t-assume-I’m-straight-because-I-wear-lipstick-and-dresses femme dyke. Because femmes are always assumed to be straight or sleeping with men, and I do sleep with men, I made sure to always have a butch on my arm so I’d be read as femme. Even though I was sure I’d be mistaken for straight, the boys took one look at me and steered clear. It was as if I was too much of a woman for them to handle, like I was a handful, and I was. But butch girls love a handful—a handful of tits, a handful of ass, a girl who needs to be handled, a girl who can handle herself.

How I figured out I was a femme had a lot to do with the women I was attracted to and the dynamic between us. When I was in junior high, I used to mess around with a friend of mine named Angela. Angela was one of those girls who developed early; I remember she had big breasts in like sixth grade. We mostly kissed and touched over clothes, and we played out various boy-girl scenarios. I was always the girl—my early femme roots. My favorite of all our little scenes was the one where she was my male boss and I was the secretary. The boss made me have sex with him and told me if I didn’t I would get fired. Now this was all before Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill and the media awareness/obsession with sexual harassment. I remember she’d tell me to suck her dick and push my face unmercifully into her crotch, which smelled amazing,. The drama of it all—the force, the degradation, the power games—really got me off. After that, there was no going back to simplicity. I was hooked on the power.

Jen really epitomized all the girls I was attracted to then and still am. Being with a butch girl, I was valued for my combination of strength and vulnerability, for dressing up, for wanting an arm to hold onto, hips to wrap my legs around, being able to give my body over to her and say, I trust you, I’m yours. My butch loved me in low-cut dresses, appreciated my sexual voraciousness, worshipped my inner slut. I reveled in the fact that I could be strong and submissive all at once. Surrender and still be a feminist. Being a dyke is not just about who I fuck and love, it’s about being a girl who doesn’t play by the rules.

Butch girls don’t play by the rules either, and I love butch girls. Girls with hair so short you can barely slide it between two fingers to hold on. Girls with slick, shiny, barbershop haircuts and shirts that button the other way. Girls that swagger. Girls who have dicks made of flesh and silicone and latex and magic. Girls who get stared at in the ladies room, girls who shop in the boy’s department, girls who live every moment looking like they weren’t supposed to. Girls with hands that touch me like they have been touching my body their entire lives. Girls who have big cocks, love blow-jobs, and like to fuck girls hard. Every day, it is the girls that get called Sir that make me catch my breath, the girls with strong jaws that buckle my knees, the girls who are a different gender that make me want to lie down for them.

Someone else said it about me recently and it’s right on target: “She gets off on all different sorts of people sexually, but she falls for butches.” Like the poet who bought her first strap-on with me and then wanted to sleep with it on. The shrink-in-training who got harassed every time she drove down South. She did look so much like a fifteen-year-old boy: blue button-down shirts, neatly-combed blond hair. The ad exec who had names for her dildos and used to love for me to spit-shine her wingtips. The photographer whose face was so mannish she could pass almost anywhere. The writer who wanted a body like Loren Cameron’s. The telephone repairwoman who drove a truck. The cook who had a boy’s name. The academic who got cruised by gay men on Castro Street. The cornfed farmboy from the Heartland with arms so hard and strong you swear they’ve been working the land, not the iron at the gym.

And there’s the one who’s got the James Dean stare down, and dresses like a clean-cut fag, and looks at me like she could look at me forever and never blink or grow tired or move from the spot she’s in. She’s a girl who loves girls like me—girls in velvet bras, girls who want to surrender to her mouth. She’s a girl who isn’t afraid to throw a femme down on the bed and fuck her. Possess her. My kind of girl. This girl is different.”]

tristan taormino, from this girl is different, from a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories, 2000

[hamletthedane]

I love you mean girls in literature, I love you manipulative and scheming elder sisters of the protagonists, I love you ambitious women washing damned spots from bloody hands, I love you “she was always the perfect/favorite child,” I love you Emma Woodhouses and Caroline Bingleys, I love you mean girls with complex and morally questionable but ultimately understandable motivations, I love you mean girls they called evil and never bothered to explain at all, I love you mean girls who are not even girls, I love you queen bees, bullies, cheerleading captains, and heads of the school play in teen flicks, I love you weapons of war and calculating politicians and manipulators of royal court, I love you sirens and succubi and vampiresses, I love you changed by the end, I love you still the same bitch as before-

[the-indie-owl]

I think I just somehow recently found an Interesting Platonic Trope here.

[perpendicularpotatoes]

"Sodomy and the pirate tradition" (B. R. Burg, 1983)

Short intermission from fanart: I recently learned that there is a 1983 book called "Sodomy and the pirate tradition" and it got fucking Blackbeard on the cover 🤣🤣🤣

Just wanted everyone to know about that.

The author is still alive and seems very cool. His attitude on the back cover was basically:

I'm not saying all pirates are gay and I'm definitely not trying to argue the obvious and indisputable fact that they had tons of gay sex. I want to look at what homosexuality being okay and even encouraged meant for pirate society.

When I posted this on Reddit a month ago I was informed that he is still very much alive and super excited about OFMD, hadn't watched it yet though because he's hard of hearing and wasn't sure how to at the time the commenter talked to him which is both heart-warming and heart-breaking. 🥺

I hope he's figured it out by now.

(I was able to get a free ebook version through a university library BTW. Haven't gotten around to reading it yet though)

[prokopetz]

"You don't see characters in classic literature telling people their pronouns" I mean, if we're gonna get technical, Captain Nemo only has pronouns.

[macrolit]

I thought I knew Carson McCullers based on her writing. I couldn't have been more wrong. New IG post.

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Y'all wanna know about a gender-non-conforming knight from 13th century France? No? That's okay- I'm fine with talking to myself.

I'm obsessed with gender performativity in early medieval texts- so obviously I had to know everything about Le Roman De Silence.

To preface-

So, long before there was the Marvel Cinematic Universe- there was the interconnected works of the Arthurian Legends. The original superheroes- King Arthur, Merlin, Morganna le Fey, and the rest of the cast. However, one of the lesser known (only arguably canonical) interconnected texts of the Arthurian legend hails from France. People argue over whether or not to include these texts as part of the cannon of King Arthur because it's technically french- and the french-english divide between characterization of all the main players of Arthur's court is remarkably different. Much research on this suggests the discrepancy of characterization is largely due to distance between where the stories originate, and sociopolitical tensions between the French and the English. Either people were too far apart to share stories- thus too far apart to keep characterization uniform, or they fucking hated each other enough to mess up the characterization on purpose. For example, many of the French portrayals of King Arthur paint him to be a rather terrible person, where English portrayals are generally more kind to him.

All that aside- many people will disagree that Le Roman de Silence should even be part of the Arthurian legend canon anyway- because it only mentions Merlin at the end of the poem and because it's a super french poem.

The main storyline is about this character named Silence. From the Old French Poem- Le Roman de Silence.

Gender? No- Never heard of it.

The latter half of the story in this poem is predicated on a complex mediation of Nature vs Nurture. What happens is that a baby is born into a wealthy family, and for sociopolitical reasons, the family decides to raise the girl baby as a boy. They name this child "silence." Silence grows up with full access to an education, as was typical for the boy children of aristocratic medieval families- this education becomes important later as Silence wrestle with where they fit into the larger social structure after maturing into adulthood. Essentially, they find the idea of marriage too boring and would like to be a Knight or Explorer instead. (I love them.) Anyway, it's fascinating to me that the conceptual ideas of nature and nurture are personified into being something like "deities" which are overseeing the growth of Silence through the ages- and so we get these deities commentary.

Silence wants to be a knight- so Nurture brags about being right that gender is more performative than it is biological. Then, later Silence grows up to be remarkably "pretty" and according to the deity of Nature- they brag about being right that biology and gender are intrinsically tied. It's such a thought-provoking mediation on gender as either performance or pure biology that I forget it was written in the 13th century- long before Freud or Lacan or any of the others who became hyper fixated on human presumption of gender as either a social category or a biological necessity.

I argued in a paper, once, that the narrative itself does actually finally end on the note that Gender is a performance, and it is tied into social roles only so the ruling class can have control of the population. That is why the stories ending shifts into horror-genre-esque of Silence marrying into the upper-ruling class.

I also have a strong urge to write a Fanfiction of Silence as a knight- who does not meet a sad fate but rather lives happily as a knight and eventually marries a princess. Okay- Okay? fine I said it. I said it-

Social pressure to marry?

The story takes a dark turn, however- when the King demands Silence to reveal themselves in front of the court. Obviously, even the author of the story was aware that misogynistic social standards would not allow for people to ever really be free of gender stereotypes and roles. So, Silence is then forced out of the adventurous lifestyle of a knight and into a marriage. Also, this is the place in the story where Merlin makes an appearance (I have a theory that Merlin is representative of the devil, and the author really hated that all AFAB people were forced into marriage back in 1200's. So that's why the devil shows up when all the bad shit is happening to Silence).

Inevitability and dismay-

What I find particularly interesting about this poem is the fact that the end, as Silence is forced into marriage and back into "proper" social roles for their assumed biological characteristics, is the fact that it is written like an early attempt at gothic horror!

So, one of the stipulations for something being a "gothic horror" is 1.) old, archaic, twisted buildings. (this blog is indeed named after my fixation with gothic horror elements, it's interplay relation to social reform, as its emphasis on decay as the tonal necessity for social indemnification). Anyway, the other most important aspect of gothic horror- is an overwhelming sense of desolation, isolation, and loneliness.

Sure, Silence is forced into marriage- but even with the forthright writing style of the author, we, as readers, are struck by Silence's loneliness. Thus, the "happily ever after" part of the storyline wherein the characters get married, as it traditional to chivalric romance, is recriminated against in subtext. Now, we have a moment in which the "happily ever after" is a creation of horror rather than peace.

Ending the narrative with marriage as equivalent to a loss of freedom and a sense of evermore-present loneliness, cumulating in the edifice of horror-struck fear in Silence at their own new future, is a remarkably bold social statement coming from a 13th century author.

I just think it's a really interesting text on the thematic points of negotiating Gender identity, in broader terms of performance and social roles, as much as it is a critique on the total social control that the monarchy held over the people of 13th century France.

Edit: I need to add that Silence themselves consistently rejects the idea that they are AFAB and instead only ever refers to themselves as "Silence" or "the knight"

[flowersforfrancis]

[dwellordream]

rules of engagement for discussing female characters in historical fiction or pseudo historical fantasy:

is she a ‘not like other girls’ character meant to demean femininity?

or does she simply:

not enjoy cosmetics or feminine fashion

have stereotypical ‘masculine’ interests

prefer pants or loose fitting, baggy clothes in muted colors

have short hair

work in a male-dominated profession

not enjoy childcare/being around children

keep a messy house/dislike cooking or cleaning

have a blunt/abrasive personality

is she a feminist heroine who resists the patriarchy?

or does she simply:

mock other female characters for being ‘weak victims’/make victim blaming statements

resist an arranged/forced marriage but marry a man who has groomed/abused her

value stereotypically feminine sexualized clothing over stereotypically feminine ‘modest’ clothing

insist that a ‘real woman’ could have kept him from cheating on his wife

despise her mother/sisters for enforcing patriarchal control but absolve her father/brothers of any responsibility

declare that men make more trustworthy and loyal friends than other women

insist that her personal autonomy as an upper class woman will automatically benefit working class and impoverished women as well