#dorothy's dream

[breeberrypies]

“Only bad witches are ugly ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊

[campgender]

from In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019)

In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange:

“Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?”

Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”

“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.

“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.

Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.

The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse. [see footnote 45] Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem. [see footnote 46] Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals.

But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing. [see footnote 47] There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity. In an early lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.

Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.

footnote 45: Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it—unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.”

footnote 46: Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above … do you plan to tell her later?”

footnote 47: This No True Scotsman fallacy could bend these narratives in every direction conceivable; create a kind of moving goalpost that permitted an endless warping of accountability. In a firsthand account of her abuse in Gay Community News in 1988, a survivor wrote: “I had been around lesbians since I was a teenager, and although some of them had troubled relationships, I was unaware of any battering. I attached myself to the comforting myth that lesbians don’t batter. Much later, when I was ‘out’ enough to go to gay bars in a town that was liberal enough to tolerate them, I saw that some lesbians did indeed batter. However, I thought they were all of a type—drunks, sexist butches or apolitical lesbians—so I decided that feminist lesbians don’t batter.” Activist Ann Russo put it more succinctly in her book Taking Back Our Lives: “I had found it hard to name abuse in lesbian relationships as a political issue with structural roots.”

[retirement-home-rumble]

Retirement Home Rumble: Round 1

Side B

*DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ):

This poll is referring specifically to the characters played by these streamers. However, Technoblade, the youtuber, tragically passed away last year. I do not want to see anyone being toxic or disrespectful to his legacy. Feel free to spread propaganda and vote for who you want, but anyone crossing a line will be blocked

Why they would crush the other geezers under the cut:

WARNING: There may be spoilers

Phil and Techno Propaganda:

Golden Girls Propaganda:

[meganjaye2]

Megan can't decide which dress to wear next 💕

[konako]

i don't know, felt like practicing with the DRK AU Trio mid-battle, because they're fun and chill like that.

[gwydpolls]

Lucian's Library 5

Feel free to suggest never written books you wish you could read.

[hascious]

Random question but do you have any headcannons for buddy or dot from dreams come to life?

i haven't read the book in about a year so i dont have many, but i'd like to think that if there was a good ending, Buddy, Dot, Richie (?), and Jacob would all be friends and Buddy would get a dog and name it Boris and they would be the 1940s Scooby Doo solving mysteries about anything but the Ink Machine and they would all live a long happy life :)

here's a doodle of the two because i've never drawn them before and this gives me a good excuse

[mouse-doubleo100]

so like is wicked also apart of dorothys dream that she was explicitly having in ‘wizard of oz’ or is this a later dream that shes having after realising she might not be straight

[eeblouissant]

so I got back into gravity falls …… & immediately had dorothyford thoughts

[fairyflowwers]

Dream blunt rotation

[beauty-funny-trippy]

[womenswrongssupporter]

This was the plot of Dorothy's Vision I think

[random-lil-illing]

my girl dot deserves as much love as buddy, so she gets a place in the puppeteer au too. a very important place.

while Buddy may have talent, he couldn't write a story, even to save his life. he knows this. the cycle needs a story. everyone knows this. unfortunately for Buddy, he's not a writer. thankfully for him, Dot is, and a writer and an artist are a package deal.

[conjcosby]

Stardate: 2024.6.17 ▫ "Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true" 😊🙏 #SomewhereoverTheRainbow #SkiesAreBlue #Dreams #DreamsComeTrue #Lyrics #WizardOfOz #TheWizardOfOz #DorothyGale #Rainbow #Nature #Image #NatureImage #ImageOfTheDay #IOTD #Field #Sky #Grass #MultiColored #Landscape #Idyllic #NatureScenery #NatureViews

[hellohimawarihana]

Pretty Rhythm Snow Dress in EEO Store.

[stardusteyes]

“While the influence of the fantasies of Lord Dunsany on Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is often mentioned, Robert M. Price argues that a more direct model for The Dream-Quest is provided by the six Mars ("Barsoom") novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs that had been published by 1927. It's been noted, however, that there is little in common between John Carter, a classic action hero, outstanding warrior and rescuer of princesses, and Randolph Carter, a melancholy figure, quiet and contemplative, who never actually fights any of his enemies, is captured several times, and needs his friends to rescue him again and again. Elsewhere, Price maintains that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was also a significant influence on The Dream-Quest, pointing out that in both books the main character chooses in the end to return "home" as the best place to be.”

After randomly going through the Wikipedia page for Dream Quest, this paragraph in the Inspirations section stuck out to me for two reasons.

1. Damn, Wikipedia, chill. Yes, we know Randy’s kind of a wimp but that feels a little harsh.

2. ..Is it weird that I suddenly want to see a middle aged man and a ~10 year old girl wax philosophical together about what home means to them?