#bnuuy bomb

[jay-nya-uwu]

Ru

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Power to Yield (Feb 2024)

We assembled on 2024-03-01 to talk about our February book pick: Power To Yield and Other Stories by intersex author Bogi Takács. The book is a collection of science fiction & fantasy short stories.

This was a first for our book club in that we spent the whole session gushing about the book. Everybody loved it. We haven’t been giving books ratings thus far but this one would get a 5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟.

Overall takes:

vic: I loved it, I loved it so much. The stories all felt so different. Disability and intersex were very normalized and not shoehorned, it just felt so good. 

Michelle: the worlds in this book felt so richly crafted. This book reminded me that short stories can be the bomb! I got gender euphoria from seeing characters use neopronouns!!! So refreshing and exciting to see them in text. That was how I got started with them, I wrote characters like that and then I was like.... moi? It’s just so joyfully affirming. 

Bnuuy: I only read “Folded into tendril and leaf” and started "The 1st interspecies solidarity fair and parade" but it deeply impressed me. 

Elizabeth: I'm not really a short story person. I find I take a while to get immersed in a book, and I don't like the switching from story to story so much. And as someone who does not like the short story genre, I liked this collection, which I feel says a lot. 

Intersex themes:

Intersex representation throughout the book that feels both casual and important at the same time. It’s normalized in a way that feels tremendously validating. Takács also importantly depicts a variety of intersex characters in terms of gender (binary vs genderqueer), type of variation, and age. Folded into tendril and leaf depicts a romance with an intersex character that does not sexualize or fetishize being intersex. ❤️

Intersex sea creatures, always a classic 🦑 - clear example in the Good Friday story.

Plants as intersex. 🍃 A bunch of stories throughout the book involved somebody turning into a plant. We talked about how this turned out to be a fruitful (lol) metaphor since so many plants are cosexual or dichogamous, there’s so much variety and difference in plant reproduction and it disrupts our ideas of what sex is. Bnuuy pointed out that botany can also just be an affirming thing for intersex people to learn about, e.g. a flower with both male and female reproductive parts is called a “perfect flower”! It’s valued rather than described as a deficiency.

In the fantasy story Power To Yield, the doctor feels the pain of his patients as he treats them, which per Elizabeth: “feels like such an intersex and/or disability fantasy”. Pain may not always be avoided but having doctors feel and be aware of our pain would change the patient-doctor dynamic so much.

Neopronouns: there are a lot of neopronouns used in a variety of settings for a variety of characters, disrupting ideas of gender and sex in ways that felt joyfully inclusive and affirming. As Michelle put it: “we get a glimpse of the world outside the binary in a kind of ecstatic way. Like, hey, you don't have to be male or female. You can be intersex and something else. And you can be trans. Like, it's just so, like, joyfully affirming. Genuinely like a rainbow-colored feeling.” 🌈 (also, reading neopronouns in context is a great way to learn how to use them!)

Other themes:

System change happens through people relating to each other differently. As vic put it: “Bogi really showed that the people are the system and the system is made of people”. Such as in the Spy-Turns-Into-A-Plant story the ways that Hasidic people were combining old and new cultural practices to include intersex & genderqueer people, in the Solidarity Fair story everybody noticed the trader was missing, and in Power To Yield there’s a need for all of the possible neurotypes. 

Mentorship: the book defies the conventions of the mentorship trope. A lot of times in media, mentors are marked for death once their apprentice has learnt what they need, but here the mentors stick around and continue to be in their apprentices’ lives in different ways.

Survival stories that were communal in mindset rather than rugged individuals. We see characters putting the pieces back together after catastrophic events such as wars and invasions. There’s an optimism that we can survive catastrophe. We liked the depictions of joy and competence. Michelle identified a Talmudic theme of "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it”, throughout the book.

Other things we liked:

The prose. Michelle praised it as approachable. Xe also commented: “Bogi has an authorial voice that feels well read. People who don't read so much have a particular style and it can be hard to read, they have a hard time expressing themselves... and this was the opposite of that!”

Disability representation that felt realistic. For example, a character being constantly exhausted due to being drained of blood, and a character worried about breaking an ankle while walking through uneven terrain. Disability wasn’t skimmed over nor was it romanticized, just treated with good humour as a quotidian kind of limitation.

Representation of old people. There’s a big range of characters’ life stages. Old characters are active and given things to do, and got to have personalities beyond “old”. For example, the old sociologist in the solidarity fair story was open-minded and competent. She didn’t want to sit around and be a granny. 

Not being US-centric: in speculative fiction there’s a way of talking about or relating to things that can feel very American (vic: “even though they’re in space, they act as though they’re in California”) and Takács doesn’t do this, which we appreciated. As Michelle put it: “There’s a definite immigrant vibe to the book.”

Representation of Jewish characters. Not everybody could relate to the Orthodox Jews but not every story needs to be relatable.

All these forms of representation come together. As vic put it: “the disability politics, intersex, the trans stuff… It all felt so normal and was incorporated in a way that felt so seamless. It felt really good reading it,  didn't feel like any of it was shoehorned in.. Just like, yep, normal people living their normal lives and we're not making anyone feel weird about their differences. Usually with books that have people that are different from the mainstream in some way it's kind of clunky: even if it's #OwnVoices, it still reads as self-conscious and apologetic. But this book all read very un-self-conscious and very comfortable.”

What we didn’t like:

Elizabeth doesn’t like the order in which the stories were presented. Ze felt the first few stories were fine but didn’t showcase what the book has to offer. Ze recommended to the group to start with:

"Folded into tendril and leaf" (medium length)

"The 1st interspecies solidarity fair and parade" (medium length)

"The ladybug, in flight" (very short)

"Power to yield" (novelette)

Bnuuy and vic started reading with Elizabeth’s recommended stories, and this may have influenced the conversation.

After the book discussion, vic went back and re-read the stories in order, and mentioned they also didn’t vibe with the order of the stories as presented in the book.

Stories of note:

“Folded into Tendril And Leaf”: we liked the water caltrop description and visualization. It was Elizabeth’s favourite: “The reason I put that on my list of recommendations is it was just such a big, warm hug of fiction. It's such a tender story, but at the same time it grapples with really serious stuff. I've brought it up before that I'm a sucker for any sort of intersex at puberty story because that's the kind of intersex I am. But also the intersex people as plants theme really landed here.” Elizabeth also praised how there was a character who realized their privilege that they didn't have to follow the news.

“The 1st interspecies solidarity fair and parade”: we liked the realism of the organizing, and we all wanted stories from this setting, especially about the aliens that were genocide survivors. It was Bnuuy’s favourite, enjoying its comedy and how it flips stereotypes of Gen Z/Alpha by having them be the older generation in this future. The depiction of an alien who presents as though she is a cat was amusing; vic described it as: “Yeah, the image of a gigantic, floating metallic orb  meowing so that it can be more relatable to humans is, I think, a huge non-binary mood.”

“Power to Yield”: we appreciated the depiction of autistic special interest (and it has its own word: abuwen!) that is realistic without either romanticizing or spectacularizing it. It shows how a special interest can happen suddenly, it can be overpowering, it can sometimes be inappropriate, it can be unpleasant for the person as they neglect other parts of their life. We could all relate. The depiction of asexual BDSM also stood out; per vic: “oh, I guess it can not be a sex thing!”

“The Ladybug, in Flight”: Michelle was horrified (in a good way) by the slow consensual cannibalism. Whereas vic read that one as practical and utilitarian in an autistic way, like sometimes autistic people will horrify others for practical things.

“Volatile Patterns”: Michelle is very crafty and this was xer favourite: “the story talks about  reappropriating motifs and being like, no, you're doing it wrong. We can show you how to do it right. It's fine. Just stop doing it the wrong way. Like, especially clothing attacking people was very funny to me because it reminded me of a game called Fall in London, where in certain areas of the world, everything is sentient.”

“A Technical Term, Like Privilege”: This one vic highlighted as a favourite: “I often feel sad about the place where I live, because it is a rental and it's not getting cared for the way it deserves to be. So the metaphor of the house needing your blood was apt. I've read a few rental horror metaphors, and they were all bad. So I was really happy to read this one.” Also, the disability representation: “when the character in the house story came up with a good, reasonable solution and then was SHOT DOWN it was so real”.

Overall: out of all the books we’ve read thus far for the book club, this is the one everybody was most positive about. It was a joy to read and we recommend it! 💜

[the-astral-fairgrounds]

THE BNUUY OR RHE BOMB???

🧨 sits in your ask box like this

Thought that was a hairdryer

[dave-the-tech-guy]

𓃹 BNUUY

WELL GREAT LET ME JUST. CLIMB OUT OF THE LAKE TO FIND IT THEN. whats next are you going to throw a pipe bomb