#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

[king-k-ripple]

[that-butch-archivist]

"LAS: That's the thing about being femme: you don't enjoy everything about being a girl. AH: That's right. You're always trying to figure out what part of female experience you're going to appropriate, and what part of it puts you in a compromised position. So you are constantly in an internal struggle: does this hairdo, this dress, this mannerism, this way of sitting, speaking, this eyeliner in any way compromise my femme position? Femme identity is as constructed as butch identity and not a lot of people talk about it like that. LAS: Can you talk more about that? AH: The difference between myself and many of the straight women that I know is that they think they are normal and natural. They believe in girl-ness, that girl-ness becomes woman-ness, and woman-ness becomes old-woman-ness. They believe in a gendered system that they flow through ... But my role models for being femme have been drag queens, because drag queens construct female identity. I look at drag queens and think, That's how I feel as a woman ... LAS: Drag queens and femmes both have that blatancy, that in-your-face outrageousness, and sense of being too much. AH: My femininity is about irony. It is a statement about the construction of gender; it is not just an appropriation of gender. It is not being a girl; it is watching yourself be a girl. I go to drag queens as my mentors and my role models because they were the ones who believed completely and passionately in their femaleness. The better they were as drag queens, the more they were completely 120 percent girl when they were in persona. They knew exactly the work it took to get there ... They could take the dress off and be the messiest looking guy in a coffee shop, but in twenty-five minutes could be the most ravishing beauty. They made femininity make sense to me."

An excerpt from "Gender Warriors: An Interview with Amber Hollibaugh," as recorded in Fem(me): Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls and conducted by Leah Lilith Albrecht-Samarasinha. (Emphasis in bold my own.)

[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❤️

[littlelioncub43]

Ok but Spider-Man kissing Eddie while he lays on your bed with his head dangling off the edge, he just said something silly that made you laugh, you're sitting on the floor, digging through your sweaters when you look over at him and you're just so in love with him. You couldn't help it, you crawl over, softly cradle his face in your hands and press a sweet, tender little kiss to his lips out of pure love and happiness.

And when you pull back from the kiss, he's looking at you with a dumb, happy, lovesick smile and that twinkle in his eyes that you swear is actual sunshine.

[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.

[gatheringbones]

[“When I asked focus group participants again about body hair and their desires for women, Adam responded:

That’s what makes the woman different, her body, I don’t mind uh having hair in certain specific parts on her body um . . . in general I . . . like woman to be clean. Just in certain areas. But like I said, down in the genital, like it’s okay for me.

Hair, for Adam, Musiteli, and other participants, served as the visual representation of the differentiation between “men” and “women.” Further, Adam referred to a woman being hairless not only as “proper” but “cleanly,” as well.

Often, when I asked participants specifically about genital hair, the response was that they did not prefer hair due to cleanliness, hygiene, and other such myths surrounding body hair. The idea that hairlessness is cleanly is reflected in colloquial discourse (e.g., “clean shaven”). Ryan, an Indian American, cis-het man, explained to me his distaste for a “bush” or a large amount of hair genitally:

I just think like it's better to sometimes, maybe, fully shave it, like coordinate with your partner if you're going to do that, because then it could help but like, yeah, if like two people both have bushes then like you don't know what's going on. And, also, it's just like, cleaner. Like in terms of like keeping it clean. It's easier when you have less hair in those areas.

When I asked Liz, a cis-lesbian, Latina woman, whether she cares if a woman shaves her armpits and genitals or not, she similarly responded, “Yes (laughs). Yes definitely. It’s just . . . um . . . how should I call it? Hygiene. Hygiene.”

In Ryan, Liz, and Adam’s discourse, pubic hair is conceptualized as unclean, non-hygienic, and obtrusive. Such ideas, again, are not mere individual preference but are instead shaped by cultural and generational understandings of hair. Herzig highlights that “the normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old,” with such ideas arising during the same years as the Cold War with individuals in the United States describing “visible body hair on women as evidence of a filth, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” Porn and the framing of sexually explicit material have also shaped cultural understandings of pubic hair. While pubic hair removal for women went out of vogue after the nineteenth century, it became popular once again in the 1980s, in part, due to pornographic depictions largely including hairless vulvas, and more recently, hairless bodies for men, as well. Cultural discourse surrounding pubic and body hair is, thus, shaped by racialized, gendered, and xenophobic understandings of the body and hair. The fact that these ideas are shared by immigrant participants/participants of color does not deny the racialized and xenophobic roots of such discourse, so much as it highlights the internalization of racism and xenophobia by immigrants and/or people of color, as an adaptive response to the racism of society.

As participants conceptualized hair as animal-like, masculine, and/or filthy, they also conceptualized of it as excess or surplus to the human (woman’s) body. Pubic hair shaped their idea of what it means to do womanhood and to be a woman. As such, participant discourse not only was shaped by racist, sexist, and xenophobic conceptualizations of hair that have proliferated in the United States but also cissexist concepts of manhood and womanhood as opposite, different, and biologically based. That which is “improper to manhood/womanhood within White schemas of a gender binary are unnatural, unclean, and undesirable.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[radfemcroatia]

[selenedistress]

[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.

[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-

[obsessioncollector]

If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life.

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

[blackwaves]

reading into irl ichiyo higuchi and dwelling on the statement that ichiyo was bound by the structure of acceptable writing for female writers at the time — having to recreate a performance of feminity which contradicted and moved around the actual way women spoke, & which notably did not come naturally to her — but managed to make it her own + express assertiveness within it nonetheless.

anyway this is all just to say that i'm so fond of the bsd higuchi-centric chapter which says she's not naturally suited the port mafia, but that she stays and tries anyway. the way she gains respect via throwing herself into a fight she expects to lose from the motivation of her love/loyalty for akutagawa. thinking primarily of ch.77 where tachihara's suitability to the mafia is defined in his recklessness, passion, and bravery— there is something to me there about how she makes those traits her own.

[the-indie-owl]

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

[genderqueerdykes]

A passage from Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers.

[Image ID:

A photograph of a page from the book mentioned above, which reads:

"Language reclamation and renewal is key to understanding Two-Spirit storytelling. From Mesoamerica to sub-Arctic tribal communities, Native languages routinely avoided the use gender pronouns. Lakota speakers for example, tended to use the linguistically neuter "it" instead of gendered pronouns. Throughout Indian Country, distinctions of animate and inanimate, thing and person, human and more-than-human kinship, carried greater meaning than Western-style gender pronouns. The Hopi, who speak an Uto-Aztecan language, distinguish people and things not according to gender but according to the categories animate, inanimate and vegetable. Athabaskan speakers didn't historically use gender pronouns and as a consequence had what Europeans perceived as confusing gender distinctions. Among Dakota-speaking people, gender is understood in lots of different ways, but historically the language has never involved the use of gender-specific pronouns. And Iroquoian speakers, like the Cherokees, did not use gender-specific pronouns either.

These examples only scratch the surface of linguistic and cultural understandings of how Native Americans blended gender roles in and identities and engaged in sexual activity they considered normal and healthy. Traditionally, Indigenous people tended to avoid using anatomy or physical appearance as crude markers of gender. They developed much more complex social and cultural systems that made room for gender blending and sexual fluidity within kin-based communities.

The idea that an individual might blend multiple gender identities into their conception of self is an alien concept in virtually every Western culture. But when Europeans began invading the Americas during the late fifteenth century, most Native communities did not connect gender to to anatomical concepts of "sex" in the way we do today. Instead, Indigenous people blended occupational roles, physical characteristics and clothing, speech patterns and jewelry, and spiritual and... (text ends here)"

End image ID.]