#and it suggests a centering of the critiques of white women

[mermaidsirennikita]

what your thoughts on title cole's hades hangman series?

My immediate thoughts are that Tillie Cole is a racist who should be actually cancelled (not the weak shit we call cancellation), as in any possible publishing career, indie or otherwise, done. Nothing. I'm honestly worried about the pen name shit I imagine she'll pull or has pulled, because I dread people buying books by her without realizing it's her after all this.

But uh.... yeah. I have zero tolerance for Nazi romances, KKK romances, any romances featuring a racist, genocidal protagonist or protagonists. And I do want to be clear--genocide is what the KKK wants in the end. As is the case for most hate groups. They may say they want people "in their proper place" or "over there instead of here" (displacement being a part of genocide) which is all heinous and unacceptable. However, the reality of the nitty gritty is that they want them eradicated, or at least eradicated from the part of the earth the genocide mongerer feels entitled to, which is most of it. The only alternative, if you could call it that, being that the racist wants the "inferior" race enslaved or subjugated for their own gain (the implicit word usually being "again"). And I think that even the "smallest" breadcrumb of racism can easily tip into these mindsets with some degree of radicalization. So yes, zero tolerance.

I often have seen the "devil's advocate" arguments from "liberals" (white feminists who want to read these books) being "but how is this any worse than books where the heroine falls for her rapist".

And here's the thing--there are a couple books I've read wherein the heroine does fall for her rapist, and I like them still. I'll be clear--these are historical old schools (as in, the 80s) which I don't think came from the perspective of say, a contemporary Sam Mariano book. (I haven't read her books, but I know they can contain this content). I have yet to read a recently published contemporary wherein the heroine falls for her rapist that works for me. I have spoken to people for whom certain books have worked, including a couple survivors.

What I think sets these books apart is that a heroine in a dark romance falling for her rapist, however fucked up and unrealistic, is based on a personal relationship between two people. It isn't about anyone the reader represents, and I don't even really think it's often about gender (though it can be, which I think is probably a line--if a hero is a serial rapist because he hates women, I don't think the reception would be the same). And let's be real here--most of the time, this does reflect real life. The vast majority of sexual assaults are the result of intimate partner violence. It is something between two people, and while I would personally never suggest anyone forgive their rapist and reconcile with them, or frankly forgive them in general... That is something where it is about the one individual and her perspective, and in a romance it follows the same mentality. I may not LIKE that book, but I do see that as a book about harm to a PERSON and within a RELATIONSHIP, which is more individualized.

A KKK hero or a Nazi hero or what have you is often paired with a woman who represents a group he hates (though in Tillie's case, the heroine is a white-passing Latina, a "cartel princess", which lol, ALSO RACIST, but I suppose her complexion is meant to create ambiguity). If he isn't, she's the white woman he is allowed to be with anyway. Either way, he hates a collective. He is enacting violence, physical or otherwise, against a collective. Even if the heroine is of the group he hates, SHE cannot validate his redemption arc~ or "forgive" him. However unrealistic the forgiveness or validation of redemption a rapist "hero" may be, that is a situation where I can say "fucked up, but her choice". This is very literally not something a single heroine can give, and even if the author came from the same marginalized group as the heroine in a genocidal hero book... that author can't speak for the collective either. (I say this because I have heard of authors writing about sexual assault and reconciliation in books state that they're survivors, and I really can't speak on how they work through that on an individual level, but I do think it's important to again note the individual.)

While sexual violence is absolutely a worldwide epidemic, it is NOT the same thing as genocide. Doesn't mean it's better or worse... Though I will say, I think the fact that sexual violence is used as a tool by genocide mongerers does speak to the fact that genocide is obviously a more existential threat, here. And I don't really care for the comparisons I've seen made between the two in discussions of this book and its place in dark romance--because they often seem to be coming from my fellow white women, and I feel there is often a "we're all women, we're in this together" mindset. When the reality is... no. First off, women aren't the only targets of sexual violence, and men are not the only people who perpetuate it. Second of all, not all women experience rape culture in the same way. Cishet white women live under the threat of rape culture, absolutely. But white women don't experience racialized predation. Nobody is trying to "convert" cishet (or simply cis) women through sexual violence. Nobody is killing cis women because they feel "tricked" by us. And for that matter, white women, especially cishet white women, can be the oppressors of women of color, queer women, trans women, and so on. They can encourage sexual violence against women with a single vote--and have. How many white women voted for Mr. "Grab 'Em By the Pussy", again?

So yeah, I don't really like the whole "well this is fine for me to read because y'all read your rape books" discussion of these books when we get into discussion, because these just are very different topics. And I don't like conflating them to either EXCUSE the violence of these books, or once again devolve into a "dark romance readers are universally dirty little perverts". Because--while there are ABSOLUTELY dark romance books that go way too far, which I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole... I think there's a point where a book isn't even dark romance, it's just using that as a mask to perpetuate a form of like... artistic violence against an entire group of people.

Because these genocidal hero books are about violence against the collective marginalized group being dismissed, "redeemed" or "forgiven", there's this inherent dismissal of what has happened to potential readers of these books, and I see that as a kind of casual violence. That dismissal happens every day, and it is ESPECIALLY happening right now, when so many western nations (and I'm not denying it's happening elsewhere, I'm just much more aware of the USA, Canada, and Europe) are in the midst of nationalistic far right swings. And hell, let's be real, most people of color are not reading Tillie's books on purpose, I imagine--but frankly, that doesn't matter. Tillie has, I suppose, a legal right to write these books. But I don't view them as any different from the vitriol spewed from a Westboro Baptist Church representative, or the people calling BLM protestors looters.

You just can't slide this shit into a "dark romance is gonna dark" slot, or "why do dark romance readers keep bringing this to us" whine rant. I will bet you anything that a lot of the readers who read this book and rated it a 4 or 5 on GR haven't read a single other dark romance novel in their fucking lives. They enjoyed it because they want to romanticize a guy in the KKK and act like he can be redeemed, because their sick little fantasies about their white prince proud boys are what they're looking for here. This isn't about tiptoeing to the ver edge of dark romance, this is about wanting to bathe in a racist fantasy. It's their Birth of a Nation moment, but with porn.

I mean, what has been really frustrating to me... because obviously outright racists will shamelessly defend Tillie, outright... is just this idea that this somehow has come back to a discussion of dark romance, when really, it should be a discussion of RACIST ROMANCE NOVELS. Which is something that extends faaaaaar beyond dark romance, or any subgenre. I've read a fuckton of racist contemporary romances. Obviously historicals have quite a long journey with racism in books. I've read racism in paranormals, for fuck's sake. I believe one of the big Nazi romances was an inspirational romance. To me, there's just been this dancing around admitting that this is a romance-wide issue, because people want to go "well, it's only an issue with dark romance, MYYYYY favorite romances would never" and it's like. I don't know, girl. People of color are widely underrepresented in the genre (as are queer people and trans people) so maaaaybe just maaaaybe romance isn't your perfect haven where all we need to confront is men being misogynistic. Maybe, just maaaaybe, there are other issues going on here.

[transraccoon]

On transandrophobia and the concept of co-substantiality

I refrained from talking on this topic as it's not a debate in my french leftist circles but seeing how it's prevalent here on tumblr, I think it's a good opportunity to talk about some concepts.

First of all, on a linguistic note, people people create words to suit their needs. The etymology doesn't matter : if transandrophobia is created to description "the specific oppression that trans men suffer", it does not imply that mysandry exists. It's an opression specific to an identity.

This bring me to a critique of some interpretation of intersectionalty. That it would only be intersection of oppressions. As you can't be oppress as a man, there is no intersection between being a man and being trans (so no need to use a different word than general transphobia).

This interpretation is honestly baffling. I'll take an example that I think everybody will agree on : Black men are more often arrested by police (or killed, or put in prison...) than white people because of the racial integral state. But also more than black women, why is that, how can we explain that this police brutality is more harsh on black men ? The same reason as the stereotypes saying that black men are more violent, criminal... This is a specific oppression for black men (who may choose to create a word to describe it).

This is not to say that black men are more opressed than black women. There are differences on the kind of racism that they suffer. Intersectionality is not the addition of oppression, it is used to describe specific interactions of class, race and gender and the social relations associated with them. (even if in general men oppress women, everything depend on the social relations)

(If you'd like to delve deeper into the subject, I suggest you read up theories on subaltern masculinities.)

There are still a lot of critics of intersectionality to do. As a materialist, I prefer the notion of co-substantiality of the social relations (CSSR) (coined by Danièle Kergoat, french sociologist).

A social relation is a antagonistic relation between two social groups around an issue. it's a relation of material and ideal production.

Social relations are co-substantial : they form a knot that cannot be cut at the level of social practices (except from an analytical sociology perspective) and they are co-extensif : when deployed, the social relations of class, gender and race reproduce and co-produce with each other.

CSSR doesn't naturalized the categories for example : "workers and woman" are part of gender and class relations. Sometimes in the struggle, they can form a collectif subject, original in its practices, but a subject always in process and not reductible to that category.

This is the main issue with intersectionality "mapping the margins" this means fixing the categories, naturalizing them. This concept struggles to reflect a shifting and historical relation of domination.

Multiplicity of categories hide the social relations. But we cannot separate social categories and social relations where they were made. Working with those categories is risking to leave blind spot. Spots that can be the strongest aspects of domination, just as they can be bearers of resistance.

Co-substantiality is the complex dynamic interweaving of all social relations; each leaving its mark on the others, modulating each other, building each other up in a reciprocal way; the fact that they form a system does not exclude contradictions between them.

Refusing to reason in terms of fixed entities allows us to put the political subject (and not just the victims of domination) back at the center of analysis, taking into account all its ambivalent and often ambiguous practices.

[bookishfeylin]

bestie can u elaborate why don’t u like the barbie movie (i also don’t like it but i just love giving people the opportunity to be haters)

I feel like I should preface this response with several things:

I liked PARTS of the Barbie movie. Some of the messages in it were really good, and were delivered in a hilarious way. The pure love for humanity and LIFE was very evident and I loved Barbie’s arc. I also appreciated the underlying “redpill ideology is harmful and misleads men” message.

I knew Greta Gerwig was a white woman so I did not expect much in the way of intersectional feminism or even acknowledgment that white women are often the weakest link and tend to be 'class traitors' more than any other marginalized group, so that was not my issue with the movie

It's pretty! And bright! And colorful! It was FUN!

That being said… it did not sit well with me the more I thought about it.

My main problem with the Barbie movie is that it equates Barbieland with real life patriarchy and argues that both are equally bad, when that is demonstrably not true even as shown in the movie itself. When Barbie enters our world, she is sexually harassed, assaulted, and objectified. This is... not how the Kens are treated in Barbieland. They're just... ignored. That's it. The Barbies don't mistreat the Kens, and when Ken gets hurt in the beginning of the movie while beaching the Barbies all rush around him to get him medical attention and worry over him. The Barbies aren't cruel, and they certainly aren't treating the Kens as objects. They're just... ignoring them most of the time. And before someone brings up the Kens being homeless I'd like to add that, given their attempts to build a wall in the movie, there is certainly nothing STOPPING them from building their own homes. More than that: if it really bothered them so much why didn't they ask the construction Barbies for help with making one? I'm sure they would've said yes. There is literally nothing and no one stopping the Kens from making their own houses or having their own little Ken village because the Barbies DO NOT CARE what they do. At all.

The worst Barbieland offers men is being ignored by women. And that's not nice, sure. Hence why barbie apologized at the end. But the worst patriarchy offers women is being abused, raped, indoctrinated into patriarchal religions, and murdered by men. Those two things are not the same. So not only could this movie not commit to actually making a real matriarchy that is actually as bad as patriarchy (because don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that a matriarchy in actual practice would be bad y'all), it then argues that this fictional watered down version of a matriarchy is somehow the equivalent of the much more violent real world patriarchy as a ~warning~ to women's rights advocates to not get too carried away I guess? AND REACTIONARIES STILL CAME AWAY FROM THIS MOVIE THINKING BARBIELAND WAS JUST AS BAD AS PATRIARCHY AND BEING UPSET THAT BARBIELAND RETURNED UNDER BARBIE CONTROL (despite the movie's message that Kens were still going to get rights in Barbieland and would one day have the same rights women in our world have but I digress--) And then the reactionaries felt this movie was anti-Men???

So no. I don't like this movie. The fact that a lot of normie people walked away from this movie like "Yeah! It critiqued Matriarchy AND Patriarchy! It critiqued feminism and the red pill!" indicates to me that this movie failed. The premise of this movie was inherently flawed: that women ignoring men=matriarchy=just as bad as the violence and dehumanization of patriarchy. But more than that, the fact that so many agree with this premise concerns me, and suggests that misogyny is much more deeply rooted in the human consciousness than I had expected. If women merely ignoring men and living life without centering men is viewed as matriarchy, as misandry, as "just as bad" as patriarchy, then perhaps the advocacy for women's rights was always doomed.

Sorry to end this on such a downer btw

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Baptist preacher here. If you are interested in my thoughts on mocking God...well, I can probably offer some more interesting reading suggestions than anything I will say. [.... ] But here goes.

1. People do not need to defend God. People do often feel the need to defend the religious practices they have centered - and the ways they have chosen to behave because of what they believe to be true about God. But that is not the same thing as defending God. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about what precisely the accuser is defending.

2. Treating an Italian painting of white Jesus as sacrosanct is most certainly honoring something that is not God. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about what exactly the accuser is honoring.

3. A depiction of Jesus welcoming table guests that others shun is Biblical. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about which Gospels the accuser is reading.

4. "Mocking God" is a mean-spirited critique. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about the intention of the accuser.

But more than any of this: the fact that American Christians so wildly missed the celebration of the Greek gods is stunningly and embarrassingly a result of the anti-intellectual tragedy into which the far right has invited evangelical Christians.

Listen. There is no shame in not already knowing something. It is ok to not readily recognize the Feast of DIONYSOS (Dionysus). I have to look up how to spell it every time I write it.

But the Greek gods are at the heart of the history of the Olympics.

And the opening Ceremony in Paris was about things deeply rooted in French culture and in Olympic history.

Artwork from the Louvre was highlighted.

And though there are depictions of the last supper in the Louvre, the particular painting in question is not at the Louvre because it is in a church in Italy. It has nothing to do with France-or the Olympics and it would have been wildly off topic.

It makes much more sense for the bawdy scene in question to be a depiction of the Feast of DIONYSOS (Dionysus).

I hope you will stop spending energy being angry about the opening ceremony mocking God.

And.

There are things that dishonor God.

Policies that make it harder for children to eat dishonor God.

Policies that strip dignity and self-determination from those whose realities you do not understand dishonor God.

The dismantling of public education dishonors God.

Racial injustice dishonors God.

Centering heteronormative relationships dishonors God.

Championing women who are able to birth live children as virtuous or honorable dishonors God.

Using tricky words to herald a society where freedoms and safety-nets are taken away in the name of some false nobility of suffering dishonors God.

Lying dishonors God.

Cheating on your partner dishonors God.

Destroying ecosystems dishonors God.

Filling the oceans with plastic dishonors God.

Hoarding wealth dishonors God.

Choose, then, whom you will serve.

[Mary Elizabeth Hanchey - Preacher, Author]

[walaw717]

Americans love to build things up, almost as much as they enjoy tearing down what they have built, and Hemingway was no exception. As notions of masculinity changed, Hemingway’s brand of manhood became increasingly passé. Worse, it became associated with forms of macho aggressiveness, insensitivity, and violence. The Hemingway who believed in older codes of romantic love became the sexist Hemingway whose women were either goddesses or bitches; the Hemingway who wrote so unflinchingly of the horrors of war became the warmongering Hemingway; and the Hemingway who hunted, fished, and loved the bullfights became the poster boy of the National Rifle Association and the worst nightmare of the eco-conscious. Removed from his historical context, he turned grotesque in the eyes of many academic intellectuals who had come of age during the feminist movement, Vietnam, and the green movement.

This new image was amply buttressed by misreadings of his works. Critics rarely conflate Edith Wharton with Undine Sprague, Faulkner with Thomas Sutpen, or Vladimir Nabokov with Humbert Humbert. But Hemingway became the oppressive male figures of “Cat in the Rain” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” the callous hunter of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and the self-absorbed Harry of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises became a hedonistic ur-bitch instead of what she actually was—the most sexually liberated woman character in 1920s fiction. Catherine Barkley, the real hero and moral center of A Farewell to Arms, and the victimized Maria of For Whom the Bell Tolls were dismissed as merely insipid male fantasy figures. To many non-Hemingway critics, the author of these texts was but a caricature who represented much of what was most pernicious in the unrevised canon: the physically imposing, bullying, bearded, cigar-smoking, misogynist, racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, white man who hunts, fights, fishes, and fornicates—and, what is worse, writes endlessly about it. Is it any wonder, then, that when Lawrence Buell suggested Hemingway be dismissed from the canon, he didn’t think it necessary to argue the point?

Hemingway will always have his detractors, but increasingly balanced perspectives are prevailing. As many self-appointed canon busters must surely by now realize, it’s hard to extirpate a writer whose work inspires so many readers around the world and who plays such a large role in the development of other authors. It’s also hard to reconcile ideological predispositions to dismiss the fiction with the experience of actually reading and responding to that fiction.3 And it’s difficult for a conflation of Hemingway with his characters to stand the test of time when major canonical authors—from Faulkner and Ellison to García Márquez and Morrison—continue to rise so eloquently to his defense.

Asserting an important principle for all literary critics to heed, Morrison cautions against judging “the quality of a work based on the attitudes of an author or whatever representations are made of some group” and specifically states that it “would be irresponsible and unjustified to invest Hemingway with the thoughts of his characters.” This does not mean, of course, that Morrison advocates giving Hemingway, or any author, a free pass. Hers is merely a call for fair, informed, and intelligent criticism. After all, she makes the above statements while exploring how the Africanist presence influences the form and content of one of Hemingway’s novels. But in that critique, she is quick to point out that “there is no evidence I know of to persuade me that Hemingway shared [the racist views of one of his characters]. In point of fact, there is strong evidence to suggest the opposite”

Lamb, Robert Paul. Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Southern Literary Studies) (pp. 9-11). LSU Press. Kindle Edition.

[gothprentiss]

my reboot hot take is that i actually super don't mind the rossi grief thing that much.

it definitely highlights the extent to which prentiss and alvez are kind of auxiliary characters right now, and it's part of the show's loooooooooong history of killing off women for its male agents' development, but it doesn't center him in the same way that the show usually does-- like him lashing out in grief (behavior i think the show doesn't really allow for a lot of the time) is always about the other characters and their emotional depth and maturity. it's sort of a reverse gideon; rossi's not the team's source of stability as the most mature agent but rather the way that they show how connected they are to each other.

i don't mean this as a critique of the complaints about this. there's no angle from which this isn't obviously a misfire. most commonly i've seen people identifying the problem as the show's consistent focus on its white male characters. this makes the problem with this particular storyline pretty obvious: gideon was played by the most famous actor on the show; reid and hotch were the characters people were most attracted to, or cared about the most. this of course is what happens with white men in tv shows, but their popularity was obvious, and licensed their centrality. the choice to give him a dead wife was a tired one, and probably will be part of them setting him up to retire at the end of the season.

people rightly complain about how the reid addiction storyline was remarkably poorly handled. characters were shown to know he was struggling and only indicate their worry; when he was erratic, vulnerable, or volatile, the characters around him absorbed that behavior without really reacting to it outside of the immediate scene. i don't know that this will go any better but we do see someone who's been (differently, of course) erratic, vulnerable, and volatile, and the narrative is far clearer that cutting him slack is a problem, and also that it's a combination of everyone assuming he's doing better than he is, and the way that everyone around him is isolated, spread thin, and strapped for time and energy. we get to see people treating him with different kinds of care: garcia talks to him about trauma and therapy; alvez treats him with familial patience and empathy; prentiss approaches him with advice she wishes she'd taken, from a source she thinks he's more likely to respect (the gideon don't go silent thing... i'm obsessed). i think his repeated clashes with garcia suggest that she's also going to be at the center of this season, especially given this show's tendency to condense processes of healing and grieving to a few short episodes, then relegate them to passing mentions at most.

in short, i think that this particular rossi arc is definitely just more of the same, but more of the same which, so far, is being conducted better: characters recognize that they're failing each other and respond in ways which are unique and personal; the Evil Administrator storyline that this show loves to lean on is likewise part of their interpersonal world, and we get to see why these problems have gone on the way that they have. this probably won't end up being a thoughtful meditation on loss and community, but it is, so far, way more thoughtful about how the characters care for and are responsible to each other than i've seen the show be in a long while. not great that it's rossi, but it's an improvement, and i'm fascinated to see where it goes.

[moonlitfirefly]

“Baptist preacher here. If you are interested in my thoughts on mocking God...well, I can probably offer some more interesting reading suggestions than anything I will say. Like the project that has been set forth for next year and is widely available to you online. But here goes.

2. Treating an Italian painting of white Jesus as sacrosanct is most certainly honoring something that is not God. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about what exactly the accuser is honoring.

3. A depiction of Jesus welcoming table guests that others shun is Biblical. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about which Gospels the accuser is reading.

4. "Mocking God" is a mean-spirited critique. The accusation that one is mocking God begs questions about the intention of the accuser.

But more than any of this: the fact that American Christians so wildly missed the celebration of the Greek gods is stunningly and embarrassingly a result of the anti-intellectual tragedy into which the far right has invited evangelical Christians.

Listen. There is no shame in not already knowing something. It is ok to not readily recognize the Feast of DIONYSOS (Dionysus). I have to look up how to spell it every time I write it.

But the Greek gods are at the heart of the history of the Olympics.

And the opening Ceremony in Paris was about things deeply rooted in French culture and in Olympic history.

Artwork from the Louvre was highlighted.

And though there are depictions of the last supper in the Louvre, the particular painting in question is not at the Louvre because it is in a church in Italy. It has nothing to do with France-or the Olympics and it would have been wildly off topic.

It makes much more sense for the bawdy scene in question to be a depiction of the Feast of DIONYSOS (Dionysus).

I hope you will stop spending energy being angry about the opening ceremony mocking God.

And.

There are things that dishonor God.

Policies that make it harder for children to eat dishonor God.

Policies that strip dignity and self-determination from those whose realities you do not understand dishonor God.

The dismantling of public education dishonors

God.

Racial injustice dishonors God.

Centering heteronormative relationships dishonors God.

Championing women who are able to birth live children as virtuous or honorable dishonors God.

Using tricky words to herald a society where freedoms and safety-nets are taken away in the name of some false nobility of suffering dishonors God.

Lying dishonors God.

Cheating on your partner dishonors God.

Destroying ecosystems dishonors God.

Filling the oceans with plastic dishonors God.

Hoarding wealth dishonors God.

Choose, then, whom you will serve.

---------EDIT for an additional comment:

I've seen people asking about the apology from the IFC and I'd like to encourage us all to read what was said!

I respect an apology for unintended harm! I respect an apology for something that caused a response they did not expect.

In my reading I have not found the apology to say that the committee or the artist described the show as a parody. I see news reports describing that this belief is what people were angry about. And that is different.

This is what the AP offers.

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance,” Descamps said. “Looking at the result of the polls that we shared, we believe that this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

Jolly explained his intentions to The Associated Press after the ceremony.

“My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock,” Jolly said. “Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”

It's a version of "that is not what I intended but I'm sorry it landed that way." Although the "I'm sorry you took offense" is pretty generic.

And indeed. We are all called upon, sometimes, to be gracious if our work or words have caused offense. We can all wonder what that might mean for us.

Also yes the image I used was just some image I found that seemed available and funny. And I expected a few friends to see and engage with my post. It's a fair critique that there is much better art available. Accurate. You are not wrong. I'll change it.

Here is Banquet of the Gods by Carl Bellosio”.

Banquet of the Gods. 1840. Carlo Bellosio. Italian 1801-1849. oil/canvas.

Olympics 2014 France

[velvetvexations]

I'm a trans woman, so please take this in good faith.

How have we got to the place where people can suggest transfems weaponize accusations of transmisogyny to silence others with no hesitation???

Neither all nor even most of transmisogyny accusations are false, but sometimes lateral transphobia is a thing that happens, and yes, sometimes trans women say something objections to their behavior towards other people is transmisogynistic. This is no different than transmascs occasionally being TERF-y and relying on claims of misogyny. It doesn't make either problem less real even if sometimes members of the group in question are horrid to each other.

TMEs* will hand wave away

I'm not the only transfem who feels this way.

*I do mean transmisogyny exempt- as in nontransfems including cis people of both genders and transmascs, just to clarify before I'm accused of using it just to mean transmascs.

It's good of you to clarify this, but just today I saw someone with TME in their bio answer an ask about what the term meant with "it means female at birth." People overwhelmingly use the term as a synonym for that even to the point of convincing people who are in favor of it, which is why the perception exists - because it's accurate to how the word is used the vast majority of the time.

if it were any other marginalized identity- keeping it generic because transfems using well established dynamics that the general public respects in analogy to describe our own dynamics is terrible obvs-

Overwhelmingly it's white transfems making constant racial comparisons, and overwhelmingly it's PoC asking them to please stop.

if it were any other marginalized identity, would you not see that accusing said person of weaponizing their identity to deflect criticism as blatantly bigoted?

No. Again, some trans men do it too. Cis women do it extremely often, it's basically the primary hobby TERFs center their existence around.

The idea that accusations of transmisogyny are so powerful that being accused of that means you have no recourse to ever criticize the transfem that accused you? Laughable on it's face and actively hateful.

Recently a random transmasc teenager drew a meme with himself in it and an extremely popular transfem accused him of "detransitioning" the original character. Again, lateral transphobia is a thing, we can all treat each other badly. Even now you're using transmisogyny to dismiss complaints.

When accusations of transmisogyny are actually being taken seriously instead of framed as privileged queers avoiding critiques I'll consider thinking "weaponizing accusations of transmisogyny" is something that is actually happening.

Okay, but that is literally what you are doing right this second. "Transmisogyny is bad, so shut up, you're not allowed to complain."

Still thinking about the person who said being rightfully called on their transmisogyny was a dogwhistle. This is where we are at.

How have we got to the place where people can suggest transfems weaponize accusations of transmisogyny to silence others with no hesitation???

TMEs* will hand wave away all but the most vile and violent transmisogyny and then complain about accusations of transmisogyny being wielded against them.

if it were any other marginalized identity- keeping it generic because transfems using well established dynamics that the general public respects in analogy to describe our own dynamics is terrible obvs- if it were any other marginalized identity, would you not see that accusing said person of weaponizing their identity to deflect criticism as blatantly bigoted?

The idea that accusations of transmisogyny are so powerful that being accused of that means you have no recourse to ever criticize the transfem that accused you? Laughable on it's face and actively hateful.

When accusations of transmisogyny are actually being taken seriously instead of framed as privileged queers avoiding critiques I'll consider thinking "weaponizing accusations of transmisogyny" is something that is actually happening.

*I do mean transmisogyny exempt- as in nontransfems including cis people of both genders and transmascs, just to clarify before I'm accused of using it just to mean transmascs.

[bao3bei4]

fan language: the victorian imaginary and cnovel fandom

there’s this pinterest image i’ve seen circulating a lot in the past year i’ve been on fandom social media. it’s a drawn infographic of a, i guess, asian-looking woman holding a fan in different places relative to her face to show what the graphic helpfully calls “the language of the fan.”

people like sharing it. they like thinking about what nefarious ancient chinese hanky code shenanigans their favorite fan-toting character might get up to⁠—accidentally or on purpose. and what’s the problem with that?

the problem is that fan language isn’t chinese. it’s victorian. and even then, it’s not really quite victorian at all. 

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fans served a primarily utilitarian purpose throughout chinese history. of course, most of the surviving fans we see⁠—and the types of fans we tend to care about⁠—are closer to art pieces. but realistically speaking, the majority of fans were made of cheaper material for more mundane purposes. in china, just like all around the world, people fanned themselves. it got hot!

so here’s a big tipoff. it would be very difficult to use a fan if you had an elaborate language centered around fanning yourself.

you might argue that fine, everyday working people didn’t have a fan language. but wealthy people might have had one. the problem we encounter here is that fans weren’t really gendered. (caveat here that certain types of fans were more popular with women. however, those tended to be the round silk fans, ones that bear no resemblance to the folding fans in the graphic). no disrespect to the gnc old man fuckers in the crowd, but this language isn’t quite masc enough for a tool that someone’s dad might regularly use.

folding fans, we know, reached europe in the 17th century and gained immense popularity in the 18th. it was there that fans began to take on a gendered quality. ariel beaujot describes in their 2012 victorian fashion accessories how middle class women, in the midst of a top shortage, found themselves clutching fans in hopes of securing a husband.

she quotes an article from the illustrated london news, suggesting “women ‘not only’ used fans to ‘move the air and cool themselves but also to express their sentiments.’” general wisdom was that the movement of the fan was sufficiently expressive that it augmented a woman’s displays of emotion. and of course, the more english audiences became aware that it might do so, the more they might use their fans purposefully in that way.

notice, however, that this is no more codified than body language in general is. it turns out that “the language of the fan” was actually created by fan manufacturers at the turn of the 20th century⁠—hundreds of years after their arrival⁠ in europe—to sell more fans. i’m not even kidding right now. the story goes that it was louis duvelleroy of the maison duvelleroy who decided to include pamphlets on the language with each fan sold.

interestingly enough, beaujot suggests that it didn’t really matter what each particular fan sign meant. gentlemen could tell when they were being flirted with. as it happens, meaningful eye contact and a light flutter near the face may be a lingua franca.

so it seems then, the language of the fan is merely part of this victorian imaginary we collectively have today, which in turn itself was itself captivated by china.

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victorian references come up perhaps unexpectedly often in cnovel fandom, most often with regards to modesty.

it’s a bit of an awkward reference considering that chinese traditional fashion⁠—and the ambiguous time periods in which these novels are set⁠—far predate victorian england. it is even more awkward considering that victoria and her covered ankles did um. imperialize china.

but nonetheless, it is common. and to make a point about how ubiquitous it is, here is a link to the twitter search for “sqq victorian.” sqq is the fandom abbreviation for shen qingqiu, the main character of the scum villain’s self-saving system, by the way.

this is an awful lot of results for a search involving a chinese man who spends the entire novel in either real modern-day china or fantasy ancient china. that’s all i’m going to say on the matter, without referencing any specific tweet.

i think people are aware of the anachronism. and i think they don’t mind. even the most cursory research reveals that fan language is european and a revisionist fantasy. wikipedia can tell us this⁠—i checked!

but it doesn’t matter to me whether people are trying to make an internally consistent canon compliant claim, or whether they’re just free associating between fan facts they know. it is, instead, more interesting to me that people consistently refer to this particular bit of history. and that’s what i want to talk about today⁠—the relationship of fandom today to this two hundred odd year span of time in england (roughly stuart to victorian times) and england in that time period to its contemporaneous china.

things will slip a little here. victorian has expanded in timeframe, if only because random guys posting online do not care overly much for respect for the intricacies of british history. china has expanded in geographic location, if only because the english of the time themselves conflated china with all of asia.

in addition, note that i am critiquing a certain perspective on the topic. this is why i write about fan as white here⁠—not because all fans are white⁠—but because the tendencies i’m examining have a clear historical antecedent in whiteness that shapes how white fans encounter these novels.

i’m sure some fans of color participate in these practices. however i don’t really care about that. they are not its main perpetrators nor its main beneficiaries. so personally i am minding my own business on that front.

it’s instead important to me to illuminate the linkage between white as subject and chinese as object in history and in the present that i do argue that fannish products today are built upon.

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it’s not radical, or even new at all, for white audiences to consume⁠—or create their own versions of⁠—chinese art en masse. in many ways the white creators who appear to owe their whole style and aesthetic to their asian peers in turn are just the new chinoiserie.

this is not to say that white people can’t create asian-inspired art. but rather, i am asking you to sit with the discomfort that you may not like the artistic company you keep in the broader view of history, and to consider together what is to be done about that.

now, when i say the new chinoiserie, i first want to establish what the original one is. chinoiserie was a european artistic movement that appeared coincident with the rise in popularity of folding fans that i described above. this is not by coincidence; the european demand for asian imports and the eventual production of lookalikes is the movement itself. so: when we talk about fans, when we talk about china (porcelain), when we talk about tea in england⁠—we are talking about the legacy of chinoiserie.

there are a couple things i want to note here. while english people as a whole had a very tenuous knowledge of what china might be, their appetites for chinoiserie were roughly coincident with national relations with china. as the relationship between england and china moved from trade to out-and-out wars, chinoiserie declined in popularity until china had been safely subjugated once more by the end of the 19th century.

the second thing i want to note on the subject that contrary to what one might think at first, the appeal of chinoiserie was not that it was foreign. eugenia zuroski’s 2013 taste for china examines 18th century english literature and its descriptions of the according material culture with the lens that chinese imports might be formative to english identity, rather than antithetical to it.

beyond that bare thesis, i think it’s also worthwhile to extend her insight that material objects become animated by the literary viewpoints on them. this is true, both in a limited general sense as well as in the sense that english thinkers of the time self-consciously articulated this viewpoint. consider the quote from the illustrated london news above⁠—your fan, that object, says something about you. and not only that, but the objects you surround yourself with ought to.

it’s a bit circular, the idea that written material says that you should allow written material to shape your understanding of physical objects. but it’s both 1) what happened, and 2) integral, i think, to integrating a fannish perspective into the topic.

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japanning is the name for the popular imitative lacquering that english craftspeople developed in domestic response to the demand for lacquerware imports. in the eighteenth century, japanning became an artform especially suited for young women. manuals were published on the subject, urging young women to learn how to paint furniture and other surfaces, encouraging them to rework the designs provided in the text.

it was considered a beneficial activity for them; zuroski describes how it was “associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment.” a skillful japanner, rather than simply obscuring what lay underneath the lacquer, displayed their superior judgment in how they chose to arrange these new canonical figures and effects in a tasteful way to bring out the best qualities of them.

zuroski quotes the first english-language manual on the subject, written in 1688, which explains how japanning allows one to:

alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing patterns.

this language evokes a very different, very modern practice. it is this english reworking of an asian artform that i think the parallels are most obvious.

white people, through their artistic investment in chinese material objects and aesthetics, integrated them into their own subjectivity. these practices came to say something about the people who participated in them, in a way that had little to do with the country itself. their relationship changed from being a “consumer” of chinese objects to becoming the proprietor of these new aesthetic signifiers.

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i want to talk about this through a few pairs of tensions on the subject that i think characterize common attitudes then and now.

first, consider the relationship between the self and the other: the chinese object as something that is very familiar to you, speaking to something about your own self vs. the chinese object as something that is fundamentally different from you and unknowable to you. 

consider: [insert character name] is just like me. he would no doubt like the same things i like, consume the same cultural products. we are the same in some meaningful way vs. the fast standard fic disclaimer that “i tried my best when writing this fic, but i’m a english-speaking westerner, and i’m just writing this for fun so...... [excuses and alterations the person has chosen to make in this light],” going hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with authenticity or even overreliance on the unpaid labor of chinese friends and acquaintances. 

consider: hugh honour when he quotes a man from the 1640s claiming “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves” 

these tensions coexist, and look how they have been resolved.

second, consider what we vest in objects themselves: beaujot explains how the fan became a sexualized, coquettish object in the hands of a british woman, but was used to great effect in gilbert and sullivan’s 1885 mikado to demonstrate the docility of asian women. 

consider: these characters became expressions of your sexual desires and fetishes, even as their 5’10 actors themselves are emasculated.

what is liberating for one necessitates the subjugation and fetishization of the other. 

third, consider reactions to the practice: enjoyment of chinese objects as a sign of your cosmopolitan palate vs “so what’s the hype about those ancient chinese gays” pop culture explainers that addressed the unconvinced mainstream.

consider: zuroski describes how both english consumers purchased china in droves, and contemporary publications reported on them. how: 

It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light.

referenda on fannish behavior serve as referenda on the objects of their devotion, and vice versa. as the difference between identity and fetish collapses, they come to be treated as one and the same by not just participants but their observers. 

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese? 

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finally, it seems readily apparent that attitudes towards chinese objects may in fact have something to do with attitudes about china as a country. i do not want to suggest that these literary concerns are primarily motivated and begot by forces entirely divorced from the real mechanics of power. 

here, i want to bring in edward said, and his 1993 culture and imperialism. there, he explains how power and legitimacy go hand in hand. one is direct, and one is purely cultural. he originally wrote this in response to the outsize impact that british novelists have had in the maintenance of empire and throughout decolonization. literature, he argues, gives rise to powerful narratives that constrain our ability to think outside of them.

there’s a little bit of an inversion at play here. these are chinese novels, actually. but they’re being transformed by white narratives and artists. and just as i think the form of the novel is important to said’s critique, i think there’s something to be said about the form that fic takes and how it legitimates itself.

bound up in fandom is the idea that you have a right to create and transform as you please. it is a nice idea, but it is one that is directed towards a certain kind of asymmetry. that is, one where the author has all the power. this is the narrative we hear a lot in the history of fandom⁠—litigious authors and plucky fans, fanspaces always under attack from corporate sanitization.

meanwhile, said builds upon raymond schwab’s narrative of cultural exchange between european writers and cultural products outside the imperial core. said explains that fundamental to these two great borrowings (from greek classics and, in the so-called “oriental renaissance” of the late 18th, early 19th centuries from “india, china, japan, persia, and islam”) is asymmetry. 

he had argued prior, in orientalism, that any “cultural exchange” between “partners conscious of inequality” always results in the suffering of the people. and here, he describes how “texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated” without the presence of any actual living people in that tradition. 

i will not understate that there is a certain economic dynamic complicating this particular fannish asymmetry. mxtx has profited materially from the success of her works, most fans will not. also secondly, mxtx is um. not dead. LMAO.

but first, the international dynamic of extraction that said described is still present. i do not want to get overly into white attitudes towards china in this post, because i am already thoroughly derailed, but i do believe that they structure how white cnovel fandom encounters this texts.

at any rate, any profit she receives is overwhelmingly due to her domestic popularity, not her international popularity. (i say this because many of her international fans have never given her a cent. in fact, most of them have no real way to.) and moreover, as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people? 

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

i think a lot of people get the relationship between ideas (the superstructure) and production (the base) confused. oftentimes they will lob in response to criticism, that look! this fic, this fandom, these people are so niche, and so underrepresented in mainstream culture, that their effects are marginal. i am not arguing that anyone’s cql fic causes imperialism. (unless you’re really annoying. then it’s anyone’s game) 

i’m instead arguing something a little bit different. i think, given similar inputs, you tend to get similar outputs. i think we live in the world that imperialism built, and we have clear historical predecessors in terms of white appetites for creating, consuming, and transforming chinese objects. 

we have already seen, in the case of the fan language meme that began this post, that sometimes we even prefer this white chinoiserie. after all, isn’t it beautiful, too? 

i want to bring discomfort to this topic. i want to reject the paradigm of white subject and chinese object; in fact, here in this essay, i have tried to reverse it.

if you are taken aback by the comparisons i make here, how can you make meaningful changes to your fannish practice to address it? 

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some concluding thoughts on the matter, because i don’t like being misunderstood! 

i am not claiming white fans cannot create fanworks of cnovels or be inspired by asian art or artists. this essay is meant to elaborate on the historical connection between victorian england and cnovel characters and fandom that others have already popularized.

i don’t think people who make victorian jokes are inherently bad or racist. i am encouraging people to think about why we might make them and/or share them

the connections here are meant to be more provocative than strictly literal. (e.g. i don’t literally think writing fanfic is a 1-1 descendant of japanning). these connections are instead meant to 1) make visible the baggage that fans of color often approach fandom with and 2) recontextualize and defamiliarize fannish practice for the purposes of honest critique

please don’t turn this post into being about other different kinds of discourse, or into something that only one “kind” of fan does. please take my words at face value and consider them in good faith. i would really appreciate that.

please feel free to ask me to clarify any statements or supply more in-depth sources :) 

[gimme-mor]

ACOTAR THINK PIECE: ELAIN AND THE CONCEPT OF CHOICE

*DISCLAIMER*

Please take the time to read this post in its entirety and truly reflect on the message I am trying to send before commenting. My goal is to use my background in Gender and Women’s Studies to deconstruct the behaviors and comments I have seen on Tumblr and Twitter, and, more importantly, bring awareness to the ACOTAR fandom. I WILL NOT tolerate anyone who tries to twist my words and say I am attacking people and their personal shipping preferences. In fact, I AM CRITIQUING THE ARGUMENTS THEMSELVES NOT THE PEOPLE USING THE ARGUMENTS.

As someone who has been a long time lurker on all sides of the ACOTAR fandom, the growing toxicity and hostility has become more apparent to the point that civil discourse is, for the most part, entirely lost. More times than not, the cause of the communication breakdown centers around Elain and the relationships she has with those around her. Before and after the release of ACOSF, I’ve noticed that when the fandom expresses its opinions about Elain and her development as a character, whether in a romantic light or generally, the conversation wholly hinges on the concept of choice. Common examples I’ve seen include:

Elain has been stripped of her choice for a majority of her life

Elain should be able to make her own choices

The King of Hybern took away Elain’s choice to be human when he had her tossed into the Cauldron

Elain did not choose the mating bond for herself, instead it was forced upon her

Elain feels pressured to choose Lucien

Elain should have the choice to stray away from what is expected of her

Elain and Azriel being together represents a different and stronger type of love because she’s choosing to be with him

If you ship Elucien, you’re not Pro-Elain because you’re taking away Elain’s right to choose who she wants to be with and forcing her to accept the mating bond

Elain chose to accept Azriel’s advances in the bonus chapter 

When Rhysand called Azriel away after catching him and Elain together, Elain was stripped of her choice to be sexually intimate with Azriel

When Azriel and Rhysand are talking in the bonus chapter, Elain’s choices aren’t at the center of their conversation

If you suggest that Elain should leave the Night Court, you’re stripping Elain of her choice to remain with her family

If you suggest that Elain should be friends with someone else, you’re ignoring Elain’s choice to be friends with Nuala and Cerridwen

Why is the concept of choice exclusively tied to Elain and everything surrounding her character while simultaneously ignoring that other characters in the ACOTAR series have, to varying degrees, been stripped of their choices at some point in their lives? And why isn’t the concept of choice connected to these characters in the same way that it is connected to Elain? For example:

Did the High Lords strip Feyre of her choice to consent when they turned her into a High Fae?

Did Tamlin and Ianthe strip Feyre of her choice to consent when they started to control every aspect of her life in the Spring Court?

Was Vassa stripped of her choice when the other Mortal Queens sold her to Koschei, which resulted in her being cursed to turn into a firebird?

Was Feyre stripped of her choice to know the risks involved in the pregnancy?

Did the King of Hybern strip Nesta of her choice to be human when he had her tossed into the Cauldron?

Was everyone stripped of their choices under Amarantha’s rule?

Was Feyre stripped of her choice to just be a daughter and a sister when the Archeron family failed to contribute to their survival, which resulted in Feyre being the family’s sole provider?

Did Lucien’s family strip him and Jesminda of their choice to be together when they killed her because of her status as a Lesser Faerie?

Are Illyrian females stripped of their choice to consent when their wings are clipped?

Did the Hybern general strip Gwyn of her choice to consent?

Did Ianthe strip Lucien of his choice to consent? 

Did Keir strip Mor of her choice to consent to her engagement to Eris?

Universally, femininity is synonymous with weakness and women often face discrimination because the patriarchy is part of an interactive system that perpetuates women’s oppression. Since the ACOTAR universe is set up to mirror a patriarchal society, it’s clear that the imbalance of power between males and females stems from sexism. The thing that sets Elain apart from other female characters in the ACOTAR series is the fact that SJM has portrayed Elain as a traditionally feminine character based on her actions and the ways in which Elain carries herself. Compared to them, Elain is inherently held to a different standard because her femalehood takes precedence over other aspects of her character in fandom discussions. These conversations indirectly place Elain on a pedestal and hail her as the epitome of traditional femininity; and when her character is criticized in any way, it’s seen as a direct attack against women, specifically women who are traditionally feminine. Also, these conversations fall back on Elain’s femaleness when analyzing her character since it can be assumed from a reader’s perspective that Elain, despite being the middle sibling, is coddled by those around her because her ultra-feminine nature is perceived as a sort of weakness in need of protection. However, the fact that the concept of choice is used as an argument to primarily focus on Elain’s femalehood highlights the narrow lens through which Elain, as a character, is viewed. It implies that Elain’s femaleness is all her character has to offer to the series overall and insinuates that Elain’s character development is dependent on her femaleness. To suggest, through the choice argument, that ACOTAR’s patriarchal society constrains Elain’s agency and prevents her from enacting her feminist right to choose while failing to examine the patriarchal structure of the ACOTAR universe and its impact on the female characters in the series, the choice argument ultimately falls apart because it shows that it’s only used to focus on Elain’s femalehood. Furthermore, the implication that Elain’s right to choose is, in itself, a feminist act in the series indicates that the concept of choice as an argument is used to promote choice feminism.

Feminism is a social movement that seeks to promote equality and equity to all genders, and feminists work toward eradicating gender disparities on a macro-level, in addition to challenging gender biases on a micro-level. Historically, feminism prioritized the voices of white women, specifically white women who were cisgender, able-bodied, affluent, educated, and heterosexual. But over the decades, the inclusion of women of color and other marginalized women’s voices has broadened the scope of feminism and caused it to take an intersectional approach when discussing social identities and the ways in which these identities result in overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination. On the other hand, choice feminism, a form of feminism, greatly differs from what feminism is aiming to accomplish. In the article “It’s Time to Move Past Choice Feminism”, Bhat states:

“Choice feminism can be understood as the idea that any action or decision that a woman takes inherently becomes a feminist act. Essentially, the decision becomes a feminist one because a woman chose it for herself. What could this look like? It could really be anything. Wearing makeup is a feminist act. Not wearing it is also a feminist act. Shaving or not shaving. Watching one TV show over another. Choosing a certain job over another. Listening to one artist over another. Picking a STEM career. Choosing to dress modestly or not. The list goes on. At first glance, there does not seem to be an apparent negative consequence of choice feminism. A woman’s power is within her choices, and those choices can line up with a feminist ideology. For example, a woman’s decision not to shave may be her response to Western beauty standards that are forced onto women. Not shaving may make her feel beautiful, comfortable, and powerful, and there is nothing wrong with that. Women making choices that make them feel good is not the issue. The issue lies in calling these decisions feminist ones. Choice feminism accompanies an amalgamation of problems‒the first being that this iteration of feminism operates on faulty assumptions about said choices. Liberal feminism neglects the different realities that exist for different women‒especially the difference between white women and women of color, transgender women and cis women, etc. Not all women have the same circumstance and access to choices, not all choices made by women are treated equally, and not all choices are inherently feminist” (https://www.34st.com/article/2021/01/feminism-choice-liberal-patriarchy-misogyny-bimbo-capitalism). 

Just as white feminism ignores intersectionality and refuses to acknowledge the discriminations experienced by women of color, choice feminism and arguments supporting choice feminism have, by default, made the concept of choice exclusionary. The individualization of choice feminism glorifies the act of a woman making an individual choice and, by extension, gives the illusion that women’s liberation from gendered oppression can be achieved by enacting their rights to make personal, professional, and political choices. Herein lies the problem with choice feminism: it (the argument of “But it’s my choice!”) stifles feminist conversations from exploring the depths and intricacies of the decision making process because it’s used as a way to shut communication down entirely, shield arguments from criticism, and condemn those who criticize choice feminism for its disconnection from a larger feminist framework. Contrary to what choice feminism advocates for, it lulls the feminist movement into complacency because women’s individual choices do nothing to alleviate gendered oppression. Choice feminism’s leniency towards choice fails to address the limitations of choice in regards to women’s intersectional identities and enables society to shift the blame of women’s oppression away from the societal and institutional structures in place to women themselves for making the wrong choices that ultimately resulted in their circumstances. Choice is not always accessible to every woman. For instance, choices made by white women are, in some way, inaccessible to women of color, in the same way that choices made by cisgender women are inaccessible to transgender women. Choice is one of the founding concepts of the feminist movement and it “became a key part of feminist language and action as an integral aspect and rallying call within the fight for reproductive rights‒the right to choose whether or not we wanted to get pregnant and to choose what we wanted for our bodies and lives” (https://www.feministcurrent.com/2011/03/11/the-trouble-with-choosing-your-choice/). When choice, in a feminist context, is framed as something that is solely about the individual as opposed to the collective, the feminist foundation on which it stands “leads to an inflated sense of accomplishment while distracting from the collective action needed to produce real change that would have a lasting effect for the majority of women” (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/i-am-not-feminist-jessa-crispin-review/). 

By linking the choice argument with choice feminist rhetoric and extreme acts of progressiveness, it plays into today’s negative understanding of a social justice warrior and normalizes fake wokeness. In its original conception, a social justice warrior was another way to refer to an activist and had a positive connotation; nowadays, the term carries a negative connotation and is:

“. . . a pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation. A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typically repeat points from whoever is the most popular blogger or commenter of the moment, hoping that they will ‘get SJ points’ and become popular in return. They are very sure to adopt stances that are ‘correct’ in their social circle” (https://fee.org/articles/how-the-term-social-justice-warrior-became-an-insult/). 

Today’s perception of the term social justice warrior is directly tied to fake wokeness because both are performative in nature, fueled by the drive to be seen as progressive, and derail necessary conversations from taking place by prioritizing toxicity. According to the article titled, “Three signs of fake ‘wokeness’ and why they hurt activism”, it states:

“. . . social media did not create activism: it did, however, create a legion of hashtags and accounts dedicated to issues . . . Sadly, fake woke people will use these hashtags or create these accounts, see that as contributing to a cause, and just call it a day; these same people tend to shame those without the same level of interest or devotion to a given cause . . . Ironically, as open-minded as the fake woke claim to be, they struggle to deal with opposition. More often than not, those who fit the fake woke bill will ignore, misconstrue, or shutdown anything remotely opposing their stances . . . Now yes, human nature often leads us to possess a bias against that which contradicts our views, but human nature should not serve as an excuse for irrational behavior. Opposition to our stances on issues helps activists more than it harms: it allows them to look at the causes they champion from a perspective they possibly ignored before, further enlightening them. More importantly, by discovering information that may refute what they believe, they can find and eliminate any flaws in their reasoning and strengthen their arguments. Activism involves opening up to change, something one stuck in an echo chamber can never achieve” (https://nchschant.com/16684/opinions/three-signs-of-fake-wokeness-and-why-they-hurt-activism/). 

Rather than critiquing ideas, thoughts, and theories about Elain and her character development with textual evidence, the concept of choice as an argument is used to silence opposing viewpoints. This is similar to choice feminism because the conversations start and end with the concept of choice, leaving no room for a critical analysis of Elain’s character. Although the concept of choice as an argument is intended to shed light on how ACOTAR’s patriarchal structure limits females’ agency to some degree, the fact that it’s only applied to Elain invalidates the point of the argument because it doesn’t include the experiences of other female characters when examining the impact of sexism in the ACOTAR universe. The failure to do so calls the intent of the choice argument into question. As it stands, the concept of choice as an argument frames Elucien shippers and those who are critical of Elain as woman haters, misogynists, and anti-feminists, especially if they identify as women. The belief that a woman is anti-feminist or a woman hater any time she dislikes another woman suggests that women have to be held to a different emotional standard than men. If men are able to dislike other individual men without their characters being compromised, why can’t women? Feminism and what it means to be a feminist do not require women to like every woman they encounter. One of the many things feminism hopes to accomplish is granting women the same emotional privileges afforded to men. 

Terms like “oppression”, “the right to choose”, “feminist”, “feminism”, “anti-feminist”, “anti-feminism”, “internalized misogyny”, “misogyny”, “misogynist”, “sexist”, “sexism”, “racist”, “racism”, “classist”, “classism”, “discrimination”, and “patriarchy” are all used in specific ways to draw attention to the plight of marginalized people and challenge those who deny the existence of systems of oppression. Yet these words and their meanings can be twisted to attack, exclude, and invalidate people with differing opinions on any given topic. When social justice and feminist terms are thrown around antagonistically and carelessly to push a personal agenda, it becomes clear that these terms are being used to engage in disingenuous discourse and pursue personal validation rather than being used out of any deep-seated conviction to dismantle systemic oppression. The personal weaponization of social justice and feminist concepts is a gateway for people who oppose these movements to strip these terms of their credibility in order to delegitimize the societal and institutional impacts on marginalized people.

It’s important to question how an argument is framed and why it’s framed the way that it is to critically examine the intent behind that argument: is it used as a tool to push a personal agenda that reinforces dismissive, condescending, and problematic behaviors, or is it used as an opportunity to share, learn, enlighten, and educate? The concept of choice as an argument is extremely problematic because: it limits fruitful discussions about Elain within the fandom; enables arguments that oppose opinions about Elain and her narrative development to masquerade as progressive by pushing social justice and feminist language to their extremes; normalizes the vilification and condemnation of individuals who are either critical of a ship, Elain as a character, or prefer her with Lucien; encourages an in-group and out-group mentality with differing opinions about Elain’s development resulting in politically charged insults; exploits social justice and feminist terms; ignores that harm done on a micro-level is just as damaging as harm done on a macro-level; and cheapens Elain’s character and her development.

There is more to Elain than her being a female who is traditionally feminine. Elain has the potential to be as complex of a character as Feyre, Nesta, Rhysand, Lucien, Cassian, Azriel, Amren, and Mor, and to reduce her character to her femalehood in fandom discussions is a disservice to Elain as a character, the ACOTAR fandom, and SJM’s writing. So I ask this: is there a reason why the fandom heavily emphasizes the concept of choice when discussing Elain that goes beyond a simplistic analysis of her as a character (i.e. using the concept of choice as an argument to reinforce Elain’s femaleness), or is the concept of choice used as a shield to prop up one ship over another?

gimme-mor library

[thebopkabbalah]

NOTES ON TELEVISION

thought i'd have a go at putting my thoughts down for each of the shows i've watched / finished in the last two weeks or so, otherwise it all sort of swims away into an undefined experience of consuming something and not reflecting on what it meant to you as a viewer etc. spoilers below so beware!

feel good season 2 (Netflix)

was massively excited to have mae martin back on my screen and charlotte ritchie - something very affectionate about the two of them, even independent of mae and george's relationship. it was absolutely mad !! to see someone struggling with gender onscreen and have no quick resolution for that - likewise with trauma / abuse, where in parts i felt very deeply for mae and was equally frustrated by them. interesting to see wokeboi Eliot mansplaining his way through polyamory and all, although perhaps becoming a caricature towards the end. laughed in bits, worried at others. thought that may mae and george's reunion could've taken a longer span to happen in, but feel good has always been sharp, concise and so it was. absolutely HATED the last shot that zoomed out of mae and george because it took me out of that beautiful moment they were having !!!! 

hacks season 1 (HBO)

got to fucking love jean smart. the meanness, the switch to vulnerability, the humor, the sheer flexibility of her face whereby she demands attention from a viewer is wild. loved, loved, loved her character and the way it's developed in tandem with ava's. found myself liking and disliking ava through the episodes until the end, maybe. not sure how i feel about deborah's assistant / CEO person or her casino dealer being POCs - like even as their characters are developed, they remain props to a narrative about white people. does anyone else feel that way in shows centered around white ppl but populated by some POCs? how would this show have done if the lead actresses were non-white? food for thought. the writing is very very sharp and funny, lots of laughing did happen. I RECOMMEND FOR JEAN SMART. 

we are Lady Parts (Channel 4)

having listened to a bit of taqwacore and wondered when i might see more muslim women onscreen in non-stereotypical ways, this show was fucking fantastic. i have only one or two critiques with their storytelling, but overall, really smart, really well done. there's lot of music to lose your shit over, there's musical-esque moments, there's visual references to films, there's a diversity that doesn't feel forced or just put it in for its own sake, but realistically imagined !!! can't blame me for having the HOTS for Saira, jesus christ, with her tattoos and low-voice intro “We are Lady Parts” which is just !!!!! not sure what i felt about Amina being set up with Ahsan because thats very stereotypical rom-com heteronormative shit and honestly the show could do so much better. appreciated how religiosity is included in very nuanced and interesting ways in the show, and displayed without pomposity or judgment. loved the music, maybe there should be more? not sure what another season of this would look like but im living for muslim / queer / women representation that is breaking out of old patterns and shit. LOVE THIS. PLEASE WATCH. 

elite season 4 (Netflix)

weirdly put together season that made very little sense, had no mystery, perhaps too much sex because i was seeing so many asses and breasts that i was left confused about who was seeing who and why character development was thrown for a toss. elite's always been campy, mystery-trash fun but one or two things they got right initially was their narrative grasp of queer character arcs and non stereotypical representation of muslims !!!! no such nuance here. enjoyed rebe and mencia's relationship and cayatena's growth as a woman rejecting men FINALLY in favor of herself / her career but overall there was no depth no complexity nothing. lol. thought there might be interesting complex conversations around polyamory etc but that dissolved into patriarchal piss shit. 

the pursuit of love (BBC miniseries)

i dont know why i watched this, except for andrew scott perhaps. while some of the shots are pretty i could find little else to enjoy or feel anything about in the show. the cousins ​​'relationship was definitely weirdly sexual-tension driven (couldnt they have been friends who eventually have a homosexual relationship? much better premise imo) - lily james' character kept panting and sighing in the most morose ways possible, weird to listen to - - most characters were just types, without depth or motivation. nothing about queerness just one dance segment that suggested it. straight people stuff is boring. lots of other problems with how they depicted / dealt with the politics of the time. ugh. the one time i was excited, besides andrew scott's presence, was when Sons of Kemet played in a jazz club. hope i dont associate the show with the song please please feeling ridiculous for having given 3 hours of my life to this. lol. okay. dont watch. 

[dwellordream]

“Girls’ schools promoted an intense female peer culture which contrasted with the disciplines of moralistic home environments. Evidence from the accounts of girls attending the myriad female seminaries and girls’ boarding schools throughout the Northeast suggests that their academic programs were relatively gentle, and that their peer culture was powerful and often fun. Despite the best efforts of outnumbered teachers, relations with friends tended to overshadow lessons learned. Overwhelmingly when girls wrote home to their parents, they described the girls they had met, and the antics they had shared; in diaries they noted the romantic intimacies they had formed, with academic work generating only occasional mention.

Girls’ peer life at school was high-spirited, collective, and ritualized all at once. Teachers themselves often participated. At Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1860, teachers organized a costume party, suggested characters for everyone, and helped sew costumes—perhaps in part a sewing lesson. (For Lily Dana, suggestions included an elf, Mischief, or a witch.) At a Prospect Hill School party in 1882, townspeople came, the girls wore flowers and white dresses, and Margaret Tileston reported that she had done the quadrille with Miss Clarke and the gallop with Miss Tuxbury—concluding that she had had ‘‘a very nice time.’’

Girls remembering their days at convent schools report similar good times. Julia Sloane Spalding recalled elegiacally her years at Nazareth Academy, a school run by the Sisters of Charity in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1850s. ‘‘The sisters allowed us to romp and play, dance and sing as we pleased and our stage performances were amusing, if they had no greater merit. Musical soirees, concerts, serenades and minstrelsy kept our spirits attuned to gladness. Varied by picnics, lawn parties, hayrides, phantom parties, nutting parties in summer and candy pullings and fancy balls with Nazareth’s colored band to fiddle.’’

Exclaimed Spalding, ‘‘O what fun!’’ in fond reflection on the good times among the sisters who served ‘‘good substantial sandwiches, cakes and fruit’’ from ‘‘great big baskets.’’ She concluded, ‘‘and so, the spice of life conduced to our health and happiness.’’ Mary Anne Murphy arrived at Nazareth Academy with her sister in 1859 during a quadrille, the slave musicians calling out the figures. She and her sister stood in ‘‘wonderment that such fun was tolerated in a convent.’’ Whatever the nostalgia of middle age, certainly these reflections suggest that elite Catholic and Protestant girls’ academies left some of their richest memories in collective fun.

If teachers sponsored some activities, they implicitly sanctioned many more. Wilfrida Hogan attended the Sisters of St. Joseph convent school in St. Paul in the 1870s and remembers fondly her class, which was known for its lively irreverence: ‘‘Each girl seemed to view the other as to who could play the biggest pranks, or have the most fun.’’

Ellen Emerson overflowed with delight in a letter to her mother (significantly, not her father) while at Miss Sedgwick’s School in Lenox, Massachusetts: ‘‘Every night we do things which it seems to me I can never remember without laughing if I should live to be a hundred. The most absurd concerts, ludicrous charades, peculiar battles etc. etc. Then the wildest frolics, the loudest shrieks, the most boisterous rolling and tumbling that eye ever saw, ear ever heard or heart ever imagined. I consider myself greatly privileged that every night I can see and join such delightful romps.’’

When teachers were around, the pranks were more likely to occur upstairs in student bedrooms. Lily Dana and friends joined together to victimize two other girls by putting crumbs in their bed, and cutting off candle wicks. Another evening Dana noted that she ‘‘Had some fun throwing pillows and nightgowns,’’ and though Miss Porter caught her, it did not seem to dampen much her spirits. Teachers at girls’ schools were occasion- ally disciplinarians, clearly.

One teacher told Lily Dana that ‘‘she supposed my mother let me do everything,’’ and the sisters at St. Mary’s Academy in South Bend, Indiana, turned the piano to the wall in order to keep girls from waltzing with each other. Yet students often emerged victorious; at St. Mary’s they played combs for dance music instead. (One participant reported that ‘‘the Sisters had to give up, for they knew not what to do.’’) The ideology of nurture combined with the shared exuberance of age mates overpowered much teacherly remonstrance.

It is sometimes hard to read such tales of schoolgirl exuberance without wondering whether the inmates had taken over the asylum, however, so a corrective is in order. One such account which requires a second look is the spirited account of Agnes Repplier, In Our Convent Days (1906), about her time in the late 1860s at a Pennsylvania school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Repplier writes of the pranks and passions of her band of seven partners in crime, in an ebulliant account designed to appeal to a readership newly attracted to childhood naughtiness in revolt against Victorian propriety. It is clear in retrospect, though, that she must have concealed or minimized an- other side to her experiences. For the denouement of her story is her expulsion and removal from a school she adored.

Peer cultures could also be cruel and hurtful beyond the control of evangelical teachers, as the practices of hazing in British public schools testify. Some of the most painful memories of inclusion and exclusion in girls’ schools centered around that most primal of media, the sharing of food. Food boxes, customarily sent from home, were the occasion for impromptu parties, a demonstration of wealth and taste, or an opportunity to play favorites.

The elation which greeted such arrivals might well prove a commentary on the regular fare at boarding schools, which sometimes undoubtedly was very poor. (The advice giver Mary Virginia Terhune’s critique of girls’ boarding schools included the accusation that they fed their students from a ‘‘common vat’’ which supplied breakfast, dinner, and supper all together, a practice partially confirmed by one account of eating the same stew at least twice a day at an Ursuline academy in San Antonio in the 1890s.)

At any rate, the arrival of food from home occasioned select gatherings and provided opportunities for discrimination among friends. When one friend’s mother brought good things to eat, Josie Tilton noted that ‘‘we’’ had a feast tonight, explaining for the future who she would always mean when she said ‘‘we’’—‘‘Lizzie, Emma, May and I’’— the groupness secured by inclusion in this select group of diners.

Lily Dana suspected a friend of being miserly and so snuck into her room to inspect. ‘‘There was a box which had been filled with cake, part of a pie and several other things filling her trunk nearly half full. . . . If I had a box sent to me I think I should give my friend more than ‘five or six cookies.’’’ If girls could feel short-changed by each other, relations with parents could also strain over the sending of food boxes, which represented extremely conspicuous con- sumption for girls attempting to ‘‘belong.’’

In an unusually direct letter home in the 1840s, Maria Nellis passed on to her parents her unmediated hurt and sense of disadvantage in the competition for food—and the status that came with it. Elizabeth got her box yesterday and was favoured with six times more things than I was. Her box was so large and heavy the master found it his match to carry it upstairs. She has 4 kinds of cake, nuts, apples, candy, clothing and every thing else, but after all, Dear Poppy, I am not jealous. . . . When you sent that box you did not send half what I asked. I was very disappointed. You said it would be eatables, but it wasn’t. You sent only a few apples, one cake and some clothes. Why didn’t you send me some nuts? I haven’t had a nut yet this winter, and indeed I expected nuts above all things. E. Fox had a box worth speaking of. Now that shows that you don’t care enough for me to even send me a few nuts.

Intermittently, Nellis regained control, but her grievance was palpable. Finally at the end, she acknowledged to her parents that she might be hurting their feelings, reassured them that she loved them all with ‘‘a deep and fervent love,’’ and promised better behavior in the future. Clearly at stake for her was both status in the school world and a primitive sense of deprivation in her own family.

As the correspondence suggests, the emotional atmosphere in girls’ boarding schools was not only intense but more expressive and enacted than that within moralistic, Victorian households. Within private, female, boarding academies, duty-bound Victorian daughters learned languages of sentiment, desire, and emotional excess censored from other parts of their lives. The elaborate conventions accompanying the expression and affirmation of affection among boarding-school girls, sometimes involving teachers as well, was indeed a separate ‘‘female world of love and ritual,’’ as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg affirmed in a classic article about nineteenth-century women’s culture.

In recent years, Smith-Rosenberg’s ‘‘Female World of Love and Ritual’’ has been attacked for its overgeneralizing characterization of an exclusively female emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, but her strongest evidence confirms the significance, the power, and the longevity of girls’ boarding school friendships, which were enacted through elaborate rituals in a range of schools.

The rituals of boarding school life centered around the making and breaking of special friendships, known variously as ‘‘affinities,’’ ‘‘specials,’’ or ‘‘darlings’’ and increasingly as either ‘‘smashes’’ or ‘‘crushes.’’ One way of expressing interest was to ‘‘filipine’’ with someone, to leave her a surprise gift outside her door. (When Lily Dana was caught, she needed to give her gift, a large apple, outright.) Such relationships played out in diaries, letters, and the poetry of autograph books. Girls expected to pair up for many school activities and entertained a variety of ‘‘dates’’ with different girls for walking, going to church, and sleeping.

Sally Dana wrote home to her mother explaining that she was following her father’s advice not to form special friendships too soon, and so had ‘‘slept in eight different beds.’’ During these private moments, girls would share secrets about their own likes and dislikes, each other, their teachers, families, and their school lives. The intricacy of such social calendars opened ample opportunities for misunderstanding and frayed feelings.

These peer relationships characterized elite female seminaries in the North- east, but they also appeared in a range of schools, including the African American Scotia Seminary, founded by the American Missionary Association in Concord, North Carolina, following the Civil War. Scotia had northern roots, which may have influenced its student culture. Glenda Gilmore tells us it was modeled on Mount Holyoke, and was ‘‘calculated to give students the knowledge, social consciousness, and sensibilities of New England ladies, with a strong dose of Boston egalitarianism sprinkled in.’’

Roberta Fitzgerald went to Scotia in the early twentieth century and kept a composition book, likely in 1902, which was filled with the talismans of schoolgirl crushes. A note inside addressed to ‘‘Dear Roberta’’ asked, ‘‘Will you please exchang rings with me today and you may ware mine again,’’ and Roberta herself wrote a sad poem to a friend ‘‘Lu’’ who had thrown her over.

And so you see as I am deemed

Most silently to wait

I cannot but be womanlike

And meekly await my fate.

Ah! sweet it is to love a girl

But truly oh! how bitter

To love a girl with all your heart

And then to hear ‘‘Cant get her.’’

And Lulu dear as I must here

Relinquish with a moan

May your joys be as deep as the ocean

And your sorrow as light as its foam.

On the back of the notebook, which also contained class assignments, was a confidence exchanged with a seatmate. ‘‘I was teasing Bess Hoover about you and she told me she loved you dearly.’’

For those much in demand, this charged atmosphere of flirtation and intimacy in the North and South represented an exhilarating round of fun and sport. For those less secure, diaries and letters presented an obvious outlet for the anguish of the neglected. Agnes Hamilton, a member of a Fort Wayne clan which sent several daughters to boarding school on their way to prominent careers in progressive America, experienced some of both. Sometimes she basked in the glow of family reputation; often she worried over her own inability to keep up with her illustrious cousins. Her unusually detailed accounts document an entire school culture rather than just an individual emotional life.

Hamilton’s first impressions of school social life at Miss Porter’s School were favorable, but even these revealed insecurities to come. In an entry from November 1886, when she was seventeen, Hamilton noted that ‘‘Farmington is just as perfect as they all said it would be, the girls, Miss Porter, and all.’’ Her reservation had to do with her own imperfections: ‘‘But I don’t think I am the right sort of a Farmington girl.’’ Even so, Agnes was in demand, describing a flurry of close attentions from numerous girls. A week later, in her cousin’s absence, she received displaced attentions:

Yesterday Mannie was very nice to me. I suppose she thinks I am lonely without Alice. We walked past the fill around by the river to the graveyard. Then she came in and we talked for an hour. All evening we were together. This afternoon we walked together too for Tuesday is her day with Alice. We went down to the green house where Mannie gave me some lovely roses. I would give anything to know what she thinks of me. . . . Will I ever be able to talk and be jolly as other girls? Some girls are frightfully stupid and yet they can make themselves somewhat agreeable. I have struck up a sudden friendship with Lena Farnam. We were together Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday I asked her to be my church girl in Alice’s place.

Agnes was still in a position to be picky, noting one drawback: Lena ‘‘seems very nice indeed but I wish she were not only fifteen.’’ Lena was far from the only prospect. Agnes noted another new friend: ‘‘I have seen a great deal lately of Edith Trowbridge too. When she overcomes her shyness she will be exceedingly nice.’’ Not surprisingly, with all the intensity of the socializing, Agnes mentioned with no comment that only three out of thirteen in the class were prepared for their lessons that Tuesday. In those early weeks, Agnes Hamilton’s enthusiasm for this exciting life of emotional intrigue was palpable. The next week (she seems to have written on Tuesdays), Agnes announced to her diary ‘‘the jolliest crush in school’’ involving one of her very own intimates of the week before.

‘‘I walked with Edith Trowbridge this afternoon, on purpose to have her tell me about Lena. I hinted and hinted in vain. I told her about every other crush in school but she never said a word about Lena’s, so at last I told her that I knew all about it but even then she would not say a word about the subject. I hope she will tell Lena so that she will speak to me about it next Saturday when we are driving.’’ The triangulation of such relationships increased the possibilities for intrigue. Agnes wearied a bit of the uncooperative Edith, though, observing that though ‘‘very nice . . . she did not get over her stiffness.’’

Agnes Hamilton seemed to be trying to do her schoolwork, but her roller- coaster social life intervened. One day when she was preparing for class, a friend came by to teach her a dance step, from which she was interrupted by the arrival of a buggy she had rented to take another friend for a ride, the same girl whose ‘‘jolly’’ crush had amused her the week before. (‘‘The more I see of her the better I like,’’ she now reported. ‘‘Her face is rather attractive at first and then it grows on one.’’) When she returned, she found another visitor who stayed till it was time for tea.

The result: ‘‘I have not looked at my Mental since Thursday.’’ By the end of the same day, yet a new ‘‘crush’’ had taken over when Agnes got word of someone’s interest in her, and Agnes wondered ‘‘if I have ever been as actively happy.’’ The frenzy had settled down a week later, when Agnes announced that she had all her walking days ‘‘just as I want them.’’ Each day of the week was assigned a different companion, with whom Agnes would exchange intimacies and gossip, using the rituals of girls’ school life to structure its emotional extravagance.

One must conclude that the intensity of the social life was seen to serve some purpose, for evidence suggests that it was allowed to flourish until the turn of the century. (Lily Dana noted that Miss Porter’s permission had been sought for at least one and probably more sleeping dates.) At that time, new sexualized interpretations of girls’ and women’s friendships brought a crackdown on such friendships. At the time, though, they appear to have received official sanction. In fact, one of the first of Ladies’ Home Journal ’s ‘‘Side Talks with Girls’’ took up the question of ‘‘School Girl Friendships.’’ The Journal endorsed such girlish relationships for their innocence and energy and their precious brevity, saluting ‘‘the giddy, gushing period’’ as one which ‘‘never comes to some and to most it soon passes.’’

In particular, it contrasted this girlish spontaneity with the superficiality of the jaded young lady. Its contrast of ‘‘young girls, lively, radiant, energetic, spirited, loving girls’’ with ‘‘young ladies who talk of their beaux, dresses and the surface shows of society’’ represented another version of a conventional warning against precociousness. Girls’ crushes on other girls were still perceived as innocent and healthy—and would be well after doctors first began to cast suspicion over such relationships in the 1880s and 1890s.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Competitive Practices: Sentiment and Scholarship in Secondary Schools.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[aalapdavjekar]

Vegans need to add some intersectional theory to their diet

Veganism is almost always taken to be nothing more than a restriction on one’s dietary choices. To the newcomer, this might seem to be the case.

In my case, I dipped my toes in, thinking it’s a mere puddle, but the bottom gave way and I was left submerged in an ocean of interwoven relationships and narratives. As i tried to swim to the surface, i was instead thrust deeper into a never-ending quest to transform myself and the world around me.

What does all this mean?

It means that while I became vegan when I realised cows can only give milk when they are pregnant - a fact that leads to the exploitation of their reproductive organs for the production of milk - I stayed vegan only because I realised I had been socially conditioned to think of cows as “for the use of humans only”; as walking milk factories; as necessities to satisfy our nutrition.

I realised it was similar to the conditioning my grandparents’ generation went through when most Indian women were expected to marry and pump out babies; their labor a necessity for our survival.

It was similar to colonial beliefs that suggest the colonised have no ability to govern themselves and must be ruled by white men who were naturally superior by virtue of being white. Exploitation was a necessity for the good of the empire. If they didn’t rule us, surely someone else would.

It was similar to cultural beliefs that led some races or castes to see others as so different than them that they needed to be governed by a different set of rules altogether (as was the case with Jim Crow laws in the US or the Manusmriti in India).

Such social conditioning led my grandparents’ generation to celebrate the birth of a son. The dairy industry today sends its sons straight to slaughter.

Veganism has never been a question of species, sex, race, religion, or caste. Veganism transcends these ideas of compartmentalised hierarchies by looking for structures of violence and then rejecting them in favour of something better.

Organisations promoting veganism are called anti-Hindu or Islamophobic for the same reason witches are burned alive or atheists are shot dead - because structures of power fight back against any form of reform. Lincoln, MLK, Harvey Milk, Chico Mendes, Marielle Franco and Avijit Roy - all went against the grain and ultimately paid for it with their lives.

Opposition to reform can take far more nuanced positions as well.

Non-vegans (out of good intentions) bring up the question of the unethical treatment of farm labourers or the lack of workers rights in a certain polity as a critique of veganism but one cannot justify the enslavement of non-human animals simply because human exploitation exists.

Some say there are bigger problems out there and that the lives of farm animals aren’t important - but this is a straw man. The assumption here is that the violence against farm animals happens in isolation, cut off from the rest of the world, when in reality, there is a great overlap between the conditions that lead to patriarchy, psychopathy, violence against women and minorities, the destruction of the environment, and the treatment of farm animals.

We’re conditioned to seeing the world as a fragmented collection of isolated incidents, when in reality, it’s all the same great, big, tangled mess of existence.

Veganism offers the lens of anti-speciesism to see the world as an interconnected and interdependent web of life, as opposed to a binary, human-centered, and male-dominated world.

It took us thousands of years to understand the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It’s taken us many more to understand the world does not revolve around humans.

Most vegans I know don’t try to go beyond a simple change in diet. Many vegans eat plant-based for their health for the same reason most meditators I know meditate for better emotional resilience or higher productivity at their job, not total liberation from Samsara.

To each their own.

The point is not to discard an entire philosophy because the majority are satisfied with the puddle.

The opposite is also true - one cannot look up to veganism as a one-size-fits-all solution to all of the world’s problems. I’ve often found that the cultish flavour of certain vegan circles goes hand-in-hand with the inability to look past the diet.

But I guess everyone has to start somewhere.

There are many more intersectionalities worth exploring and I’ll keep bringing them up. For now I’d highly recommend reading the works of Carol J. Adams, especially The Sexual Politics of Meat.

[oberlincollegelibraries]

Weekend Edition: Books on BLM Reading Lists

February is Black History Month, which was created by historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926 as "Negro History Week." Here are a few title suggestions, but if you'd like to find your own, try searching Google for "Black Lives Matter reading list" or check out Oberlin College Libraries' Anti-Racism Social Justice guide!

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essasys by Damon Young

For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as "How should I react here, as a professional black person?" and "Will this white person's potato salad kill me?" are forever relevant. What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young's efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It's a condition that's sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the "being straight" thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to "Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies." And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. by Treva B. Lindsey 

"This project examines New Negro womanhood in Washington, DC through various examples of African American women challenging white supremacy, intra-racial sexism, and heteropatriarchy. Treva Lindsey defines New Negro womanhood as a mosaic, authorial, and constitutive individual and collective identity inhabited by African American women seeking to transform themselves and their communities through demanding autonomy and equality for African American women. The New Negro woman invested in upending racial, gender, and class inequality and included race women, blues women, playwrights, domestics, teachers, mothers, sex workers, policy workers, beauticians, fortune tellers, suffragists, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. From these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces comes an urban, cultural history of the early twentieth century struggles for freedom and equality that marked the New Negro era in the nation's capital. Washington provided a unique space in which such a vision of equality could emerge and sustain. In the face of the continued pernicious effects of Jim Crow racism and perpetual and institutional racism and sexism, Lindsey demonstrates how African American women in Washington made significant strides towards a more equal and dynamic urban center. Witnessing the possibility of social and political change empowered New Negro women of Washington to struggle for the kind of city, nation, and world they envisioned in political, social, and cultural ways."--Provided by publisher

Blood At the Root: A Racial Cleansing In America by Patrick Phillips

"A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia and ... testament to the deep roots of racial violence in America ... Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century"-- Provided by publisher

The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene by Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

The men who launched and shaped black studies This book examines the lives, work, and contributions of two of the most important figures of the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and Lorenzo Johnston Greene. Drawing on the two men's personal papers as well as the materials of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), Pero Gaglo Dagbovie probes the struggles, sacrifices, and achievements of these black history pioneers. The book offers the first major examination of Greene's life. Equally important, it also addresses a variety of issues pertaining to Woodson that other scholars have either overlooked or ignored, including his image in popular and scholarly writings and memory, the democratic approach of the ASNLH, and the pivotal role of women in the association.

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Bo Burnham: Inside Songs Ranked from Worst to Best

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The musical of the summer was supposed to be a life-affirming celebration of one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods, full of color, romance, and big group dance numbers. Instead for many viewers, the musical of the moment was filmed and performed by one man, alone in isolation from the comfort (or discomfort, really) of his own home, with songs centered on techno paranoia, mental health, and the fear of aging. Maybe after a year stuck in their homes, audiences could relate to the existential dread and general anxiety on display in Bo Burnham: Inside more than a conventional movie musical.

Billed as a stand-up special, Burnham’s latest musical comedy endeavor finds the former wunderkind holed up and feeling more uncomfortable than ever. Writing, editing, directing, and performing from a claustrophobic studio, Burnham’s stand-up special skews more toward being a straight-up musical, and not because the special is light on jokes and missing an audience. Rather this has all the hallmarks of a musical narrative and plays closer to experimental cinema than sketch comedy.

Burnham expresses his characters’ inner-thoughts, fears, and desires via song throughout a contained narrative, in this case the narrative being one man trying to occupy himself during a pandemic. It has ballads, charm songs, comedy numbers, “I Am” and “I Want” songs, and a big reprise. By capturing his personal pandemic experience and putting the whole affair to song, Burnham has created one of the most compelling (and catchy!) accounts of life during 2020.

To celebrate the musical that we all needed after a year in our homes, we’ve decided to rank every song from Bo Burnham: Inside. You can stream along via the Inside (The Songs) album on the streaming platform of your choice.

20. I Don’t Wanna Know

Merely an interlude, “I Don’t Wanna Know” doesn’t quite work outside of watching the special itself. However, it is a clever way to address the fact that modern audiences do not have the attention span to sit through a film at home without checking their phone or complaining about a runtime.

19. Bezos II

While certainly meant to poke fun at the real-life Lex Luthor, it’s not that fun to listen to Bezos’ name repeated. Stil, Burnham does elicit a few laughs with his over-the-top mock congratulations. “You did it!”

18. Any Day Now

A Sesame Street-like mantra that plays over the credits, “Any Day Now” suggests this could all end either hopefully soon or on a depressingly vague far-off date that will never come. We’d like to think it’s the former, but it’s safe to assume what Bo thinks.

17. All Time Low

While this number gets docked points for its short runtime, it absolutely packs a punch with its four-line, single verse. After Bo admits that his mental health is rapidly deteriorating, he describes what it’s like to have a panic attack set to a chipper ‘80s dance backbeat. Unfortunately, we don’t get to ride the wave long enough, and judging lyrics, that’s probably a good thing for Bo.

16. Content

This strong opening number musically sets the vibe for Inside, letting us know that we’re in for some synth-heavy throwback beats that would be best listened to underneath a disco ball.  Also incorporating silly backing vocals, a hallmark of many of Inside’s best tracks, Burnham declares he’s back with some sweet, sweet content. “Daddy made you your favorite,” he sings, and he ain’t wrong. 

15. Bezos I

Unlike the reprise in “Bezos II,” “Bezos I” gets by off its increasingly deranged energy, with Burnham roasting fellow tech billionaires and working himself up into a manic frenzy by song’s end. Musically, it sounds like the soundtrack to an intense boss battle on a Sega Genesis game before ending with a sick little synth solo and Burnham hilarious squawking. It’s arguably the only acceptable thing that Bezos has ever been associated with.

14. Unpaid Intern

While “Unpaid Intern” is one of Inside’s shortest tracks, it absolutely makes the most of its time. The jazzy tune scorches the exploitative nature of unpaid internships before Burnham breaks out into a laugh-out-loud worthy scat routine. It unfortunately ends too soon.

13. Shit

Inside’s funkiest jam sounds like Burnham wrote the lyrics for a new Janelle Moane album cut. Bo show’s off his vocal dexterity and plumbs the depths of his depression in a surprisingly danceable fashion. Throwing in a little faux crowd interaction helps bring home the fact that we have all felt like this at one point or another during the pandemic.

12. Sexting

This slow-jam details the complications of sexting, throwing out hilariously too-true punchlines like “the flash makes my dick look frightened.” “Sexting” feels like one of a few songs that could most easily appear on previous Burnham specials. Proving that Inside’s musical textures do not come exclusively from ’80s synth pop, the outro of the song expertly mirrors modern pop trends by throwing in some trap-influenced “yahs” at the end of Bo’s lines.

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11. How the World Works

Influenced by comedian Hans Teeuwen and children’s entertainment in general, “How the World Works” finds Burnham going back to the well by playing the ignorant, smarmy white guy who is oblivious of the real issues plaguing nonwhite Americans. What’s even better though is Socko calling Burnham out on forcing others to educate him for his own self-actualization instead of doing the work on his own for the betterment of others.

Socko pointedly asks “Why do you rich f—— white people insist on seeing every socio-political conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization?” Not to keep things too heavy, the song ends with an absurdist bit where Burnham returns Socko to the nether place that he goes when he’s not attached to Burnham’s hand. Scathing and bizarre, it’s a great piece of social commentary. 

10. FaceTime With My Mom

While most of the music of Inside feels directly transported from the 1980s, “FaceTime With My Mom” seems only inspired by the past decade’s musical trends, updating the sounds in much of the same way that the Weeknd and Dua Lipa have. This is Bo Burnham as a hitmaker, and his attempt is convincing. “FaceTime With My Mom” earns easy laughs by getting to the seemingly specific, yet universal things that all our moms do over video chat. 

9. Goodbye

Every good musical needs a good closing track, and Burnham nails it with “Goodbye,” pulling off a reprise that weaves in many of the special’s signature musical moments and touches on the special’s core themes. A forlorn piano ballad before it soars through Inside’s best motifs, “Goodbye” caps a triumphant musical achievement, coming back to “Look Who’s Inside Again” just to punch you in the gut one last time. 

8. Problematic

Addressing his past work and some aspects that have not aged well, while also skewering celebrity apologies, “Problematic” is self-aware critique by way of an ‘80s workout bop. From the specific Aladdin confession to the overall apology for being “vaguely shitty,” Bo has never made accountability sound so good.

7. That Funny Feeling

This is Bo Burnham’s version of Father John Misty’s “Holy Shit,” a laundry list of all the stupid things that are signaling the fall of culture and civilization as we know it. If Misty hadn’t gotten there first, we may have had this one ranked higher. Still, Burnham manages to come up with a sticky chorus that you’ll be humming the next time something makes you feel like you’re living in the uncanny valley.

6. White Woman’s Instagram

Perhaps the special’s most playful moment, “White Woman’s Instagram” uses the musical cues of an inspiring empowerment anthem to poke fun at the predictably, perfectly curated feed of a “girl boss” Instagram. The song is greatly enhanced by the accompanying visuals, which find Bo recreating the meticulously staged and glamorous portraits that women pass off as their everyday lives.

However, Bo always likes to sneak in some sentimentality, and imagines a genuinely heartfelt post to his white woman character’s deceased mother. Don’t worry, the emotional moment doesn’t overstay its welcome, and we’re soon back to laughing at horribly derivative political street art.

5. All Eyes on Me

The droning synth and pitch-down vocals make “All Eyes On Me” oddly hypnotic and beautiful. The song seems to be addressing Bo’s depression along with his need for validation and attention, a juxtaposition that many performers deal with. It becomes clear that Burnham isn’t addressing an invisible audience, but himself, trying to will himself up and out of his dreary mental state.

4.  Look Who’s Inside Again

A classic “I Am” musical song, “Look Who’s Inside Again” just may be Inside’s most emotionally resonant track that seems to hit closest to who Bo Burnham was and who he is today. This is the song that I will most likely regret the most for ranking so low.

“Well, well, look who’s inside again. Went out to look for a reason to hide again,” perfectly describes the cycle of depression and will, for me, be the special’s most lasting moment. The downbeat ending “come out with your hands up, we’ve got you surrounded” is heartbreaking enough to send a shudder down your spine.

3. Comedy

The special’s real first number is absolutely packed with hooks, from the “Call me and I’ll tell you a joke” bridge to the “Should I be joking at a time like this?” change-up. This is Bo really flexing how far he’s come as a musician, expertly utilizing autotune and a key change (us “stupid motherf***ers” can’t resist them).

“Comedy” also finds Bo comfortably in the lane that we’re most used to seeing him in, playing the egomaniacal white messiah with a wink. “Comedy” is the tone-setter and it’s so good that it lets you know that you’re in good hands for the next hour plus.

2. 30

Either I’m ranking this song too highly due to its personally relatable nature or the fact that I haven’t been able to get “All my stupid friends are having stupid children” out of my head, but I really don’t care. “30” is Inside’s biggest earworm and addresses the existential terror that comes with no longer getting pats on the back for being a young wunderkind.

“30” also examines generational differences, showing how 30 year-old people are more infantile than ever. However, at the end of the day it all comes back to those shimmering keys and that irresistible refrain. Apologies to my friends with children.

1. Welcome to the Internet

No matter how deep and emotionally rich some of Inside’s other tracks may be, “Welcome to the Internet” is the one that will live on the longest. If this were a traditional musical, this would the antagonists’ showstopper; a vaudevillian romp through the alluring chaos that is the internet. Speeding up and slowing down the pace to mirror the manic, addictive nature of surfing the net, Burnham pitches the negative aspects of online culture as they are: a feature, not a bug. Promising “a little bit of everything all of the time,” “Welcome to the Internet” is almost as enticing as the dark tool itself.

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[grootpoepjeplasjehoofd]

Coulthard contends in Red Skin, White Masks that Marx’s theory of expropriation as a historical condition of capitalist development is primarily concerned with “the perpetual separation of workers from the means of production” and not with the colonial relation in and of itself. Similarly, we are told that Marx’s discussion of “The Modern Theory of Colonialism” in the final chapter of volume 1 of Capital was dedicated simply to establishing his theory of wage labor and capital by pointing to the necessity of capital removing workers from the land, indicating an overall lack of concern with colonialism. Building on these criticisms, Coulthard suggests that the critique should shift from a focus mainly on the capital relation to one that also highlights the colonial relation, thereby overcoming Marx’s one-sidedness in this respect.7

Yet, in chapter 31 of Capital, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Marx already points to the need to consider the colonial relation as underlying the capital relation. Indeed, he is crystal clear on this issue:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.8

Hence, for Marx it is not the various enclosures of the commons in England, discussed in the early chapters of part VIII of Capital on “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” that constituted the chief moments of primary expropriation and the genesis of the industrial capitalist, but rather the plunder of the entire world outside of Europe, centering on the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population,” encompassing the robbery of the precious metals, the lands, and the bodies of the indigenous.9 Moreover, the English white settler colonies receive specific criticism for the horrors they inflicted:

The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called [or, settler colonies—in Spanish colono/a means settler] the Christian character of primitive accumulation was not belied. In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation, and for English money, they were tomahawked by the redskins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”10

It did not miss Marx’s notice that the price of scalps was equivalent to the price of prisoners, meaning genocide not slavery was the object. In this way, Marx stressed that the chief goal in the English settler colonies in North America was the absolute “extirpation” of the indigenous population. Indeed, as William Howitt explained in Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (1838), which Marx first studied in 1851, the white settler colonialism of the nascent United States was aimed at the extermination and removal of the Native American tribes. Here, Howitt quoted Abbé Raynal’s statement that the goal of the English and French was “to extirpate” the Native Americans.11 Howitt also described “the exterminating campaigns of General Jackson,” quoting Andrew Jackson’s declaration on March 27, 1814, during his military campaign against the Southern tribes, that he was “determined to exterminate them.” The Native American peoples, Howitt observed, “were driven into waste, or to annihilation.” Writing at the time of the Trail of Tears and the massive removal of the Native Americans of the Southeast, Howitt concluded with the words:

Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Whenever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.12