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lilquill · 5 years

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i take it you read circe!! did you like it?

I did read Circe!! And my gosh, I’m in LOVE with everything about it!! The language is stunning, the portrayal of emotions is done incredibly well, the themes are complex, and I couldn’t put the book down! I spent several nights in a row reading until 2 A.M.! All in all it was a captivating, exquisite story.

There will be spoilers below the read more cut, just so all those who haven’t read it yet can go in with a fresh perspective if they wish!

The first thing that really hits you is the prose. It’s BEAUTIFUL! The tone of it is very much like a myth or fairy tale, ethereal and full of stunning descriptions and metaphors, which fits perfectly with the story it’s telling.

Circe’s own powers are strong in transformation, and the way that her narration uses incredible metaphors reflects that quite well: looking at something and seeing something else as it.

I loved the aesthetic of the book. The vivid imagery really sucks you in! Picturing a young girl in the dark halls of Helios, a young woman desperately wringing our herbs over the sleeping body of her beloved to make him a god, a weary yet defiant mother holding her baby and casting a spell to spite the Olympians, a woman walking into the sea to confront a massive god as old as the planet to ask for his tail and risking eternal torture, a daughter finally standing up to the sun god himself to demand her freedom as he almost scorched her….I could go on! The writing was so evocative, and I had chills at so many points!

I also loved the structure of the story itself, and its circular narrative that contrasted itself. How it starts with a cruel family where she felt out of place and alone, and how it ends with her having found her family, bound by love and compassion. How it starts with her trying to turn her beloved into a god so he can be with her with pharmaka, and how it ends with her using that same herb to become mortal so she can live with those she loves. How it starts with her turning Scylla into a monster, and how it ends with her killing Scylla so she no longer kills mortals. How it starts with Helios burning her as she stands firm that she has harnessed an herb’s powers, to how it ends with her standing her ground against that same burning father with her own magic from those herbs as a defense. I could go on and on, but I loved how Circe grew and how she inverted the beginnings of her narrative.

The way that Circe’s tale spanned so many different stories in Greek mythology was done incredibly well and highlighted her experiences with love and loss and pain and her perspective on the world around her.

I also deeply loved Miller’s portrayal of Greek mythology as it is commonly known. The stories of great battles and grand feats have the glamor stripped back to reveal their ugliness and callousness, all with a switch of perspective. From the perspective of a woman relegated to the sidelines in these epic stories, a woman who has been watching all this happen for millennia, these stories change.

I’ve talked about how the senseless violence in a lot of western stories, both older and now, bothers me (maybe not on my blog, but definitely to a lot of my friends). Therefore, I really loved how Circe was genuinely upset by these things and sought to fix them.

There was so much tension, and the stakes were incredibly high, but Circe does not succumb to the usual fantasy protagonist’s “war is evil but it is necessary and this whole series is about war and the conflict of war, the protagonist throws up on the battlefield and then becomes a great warrior and/or commander and then it’s all good” type deal. She was not tangled in a “war” or “battle” in the literal sense, other than the conflict between Olympians and Titans in which she became a pawn. This is what I mean about tension without unnecessary violence!! So many books are just the literary equivalent of a first-person shooter, and this is certainly the case with a lot of portrayals of Greek mythology as well, especially because of the heavy influence of ancient Greece on the West today. Circe’s story is mired in violence, but the moments with no violence at all are some of the most breathtakingly intense and dramatic.

Circe’s kindness and love, though often fierce and burning and messy, and her aching loneliness, are such a stark contrast to the gods––and even some of the mortals like Odysseus––who care nothing for lives or genuine emotion. She truly loves people, and in the end it is the way that her relationships always end as she outlives them that motivates her to give up being a god. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story! The way Miller portrays love and relationships is something I truly want to see more of.

And, speaking of kindness and love and relationships, I LOVED Miller’s portrayal of motherhood. I enjoyed that it was a subversion of the ideal of pristine, perfect, pure, gentle white housewives while still maintaining a deeply loving mother-son relationship. Many seminal feminist stories by cis white women demonize motherhood, framing it as a cage for women. Then this experience becomes universalized to all women. The problem is that, for instance, in the case of women of color, having children and a loving family is what is often denied to us. The world forces the kids of mothers of color to grow up faster and tears their families apart.

Circe is a mother in this story. She struggles with raising her child, but she loves her son fiercely and deeply, to the point where she risks eternal torment just to protect him. The gods want to take her child away, and she endures great pain and works incredibly hard to keep him. It is how the world treats mothers of color.

Look at the struggles Black women go through during pregnancy, with inadequate care at their hospitals and little research on the issues and conditions they go through, and high rates of maternal death. (I strongly encourage that you look at the ProPublica/NPR collaboration series Lost Mothers for more on this!) Look at how Latine families are being torn apart at the border, and mothers are losing their kids as those children are given to white families. Look at how the families of indigenous peoples are torn apart as kids are taken from their mothers and forced into assimilation programs. Look at the forced sterilization of mothers of color, and how eugenics treats the bodies of women of color.

Circe’s story, though written by a white woman, was deeply resonant with these things, which is something I adored about the book.

And, of course, here’s the commentary on womanhood, and how women have their agency stripped from them. Reading Circe’s story was cathartic at points. The story of a girl abused, silenced by fear, constantly put down, growing and honing her powers to the point where she can challenge those with immeasurable power. The experiences of various women woven into the story, from Perse to Pasiphae to Medea to the nymphs sent to Aiaia to Penelope. There’s so much to say tere, but Miller has already said it in her book.

I really really really deeply enjoyed this book!! Thank you for sending me this ask, anon, and I wish you well!! This reply was a lot longer than I expected, but there is truly so much to experience in this piece of literature and I’m definitely going to reread it soon!

Also, to everyone reading this, please feel free to send me your own takes on this book, and to @ me in your perspectives/reviews/etc.!! Much love to you all!!

#this was so much longer than expected and i STILL ahave so many thoughts omg!!#circe #madeline miller #greek mythology #misogyny #racialized misogyny #sexism #motherhood #book recs #sakshi speaks #hmmmm....#i'll also tag it:#sakshi reviews #just in case this becomes a more recurring thing!!#save #answered #ask #anon #anonymous

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ofcamerons-blog · 5 years

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☼ ☼ ☼ ⎿ MUSE A : KATHRYN NEWTON, CIS FEMALE, SHE/HER ⏋ oh look, CAMERON REID is back, the TWENTY year old HEAD OF DANCE AND GYMNASTICS at camp otenaw. looks like it’s their SECOND year as a staff member. rumour has it, they tend to be IMPETUOUS and SELF-CENTERED, but hopefully we’ll get to see their HUMOROUS and SPIRITED side too. I heard they WERE FIRED FROM THEIR PREVIOUS JOB AS A BACKUP DANCER ; let’s hope this will be an epic summer ! ⎿ BROOKE, 22, EST, SHE/HER ⏋ ☼ ☼ ☼

hey everyone! i’m brooke, and i’m so excited to be rping with you all this summer! i’m 22 and live in the est, but i’m basically nocturnal at this point, so expect me to post at weird times probably. anyway, i’m currently playing my queen, cameron reid! without further ado, here’s her intro!

history

cameron reid was born in winnipeg, manitoba to andrew reid and lucas reid-kleinman via surrogate. she’s the second child of four, but her dads always had more than enough money to provide for them. andrew is a big-shot defense attorney and lucas owns his own clothing brand, reid-kleinman.

when she was four, she watched barbie in the nutcracker for the first time and fell in love. seriously, cameron saw that movie probably a thousand times over the next year. her fathers quickly decided to let her try dance classes, and cam’s been hooked ever since. she started with ballet, and eventually signed up for jazz, contemporary, tap, hip hop, modern and ballroom too. it’s her whole life, honestly.

she started dancing competitively when she was eight, and began placing in third or higher by the time she was ten. eventually, she started being homeschooled to make time for rehearsals.

but, all of that was during the school year. during summer, cameron spent her time at camp otenaw. all four of the reid kids attended camp at least once, but cameron’s the only one who stuck around. the sunshine and fresh air felt pretty magical after nine months indoors, training and preparing for competitions. she loves dancing, don’t get her wrong, but being outside and goofing off with her camp friends will never get old. she’s been here since she was an itty bitty ageratum, and now she’s a counselor!

she started working at otenaw two summers ago, but back then she was just a dance counselor. that fall, she went to the ryerson school of performance for dance for her freshman year. during the fall semester of her sophomore year, she was scouted and offered a job as a backup dancer on a tour for a well-known pop star, and she took it without hesitation. in cameron’s mind, she could always just go back to school if things didn’t work out.

and they didn’t. she hated tour life; it was exhausting and demanding and full of constant criticism. it seemed like everyone was constantly snapping at her, and the whole environment just really made her upset. things came to a head when she ended up blowing up at the pop star, effectively getting her fired before the tour was even over.

so now, she’s sort of dealing with the thought that she might have ruined her career before it even took off, and she’s freaking out about what she’s going to do in the fall. and she is telling NO ONE that she got fired because she’s very embarrassed by it and wants people to think she’s fun and successful and great!!! she’s a bit of a perfectionist, can you tell?

personality + head canons

it would be so easy to write cameron off as the pretty little rich girl - and she is, in a lot of ways. but, coming to camp has also really pushed her to fend for herself. she’s been able to build her own campfires since her third summer at camp, and she’s right at home on the sports fields or in a canoe. the only time she really freaks out over being in the great outdoors is when she sees a spider, but that is a very normal fear, okay?

cameron doesn’t take shit from anyone. like the first person to make some comment about her being a dumb blonde or a girlie girl is going to get a ten minute lecture on why it’s not a bad thing to be blonde or feminine. she’s a tiny, feisty feminist who does not back down from an argument.

she loves a good party. during the rest of the year, she trains pretty hard and doesn’t really go out and drink much, so she goes a bit wild at camp. cameron’s a social butterfly and a happy drunk, so she’s usually the girl who makes sure everyone is having fun and that no one feels left out.

she’s smart, strong and capable, but she can be a bit self-centered at times. everyone has flaws, alright? cameron focuses on herself and her own problems more than anyone else, which isn’t great but is very human. she’s also the first person to throw caution to the wind and do something crazy because it sounds like a good idea at the time. like the time she went skinny dipping in the lake at midnight and almost got caught. it seemed like a good idea at the time, honestly.

she’s sort of inspired by elle woods (legally blonde), cher horowtiz (clueless), and torrance shipman (bring it on) because i love blonde protagonists from 1995-2001 apparently.

wanted connections

i’d love for her to have a sibling-like friendship? like she and someone else who’s been coming here for forever have just formed this really tight bond over the years and they tease each other constantly but would kill for each other at this point?

her cousins! i’m super open with this, but i just think it would be fun for her to have cousins (distant or close) that go here too? idk

a rival of some sort? like maybe they started some sort of friendly rivalry back when they were tiny babies here at camp and they keep it up for the fun of it? like any time there’s a sports competition, they’re on opposite teams because everyone knows they’ll cancel each other out with their competitiveness

a will-they-won’t-they type of relationship where they’ve known each other for years and flirt a lot, but they’ve never actually gone for it because both of them think the other probably doesn’t like them like that?

more can be found here! and i’m always down to brainstorm something else! like this for me to message you to plot <3

#otenaw:intro #( cameron | intro )

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itspatsy · 7 years

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Part of me thinks JJS2 didn't want to acknowledge they'd majorly dropped the ball on race in S1, so in S2 they amped up the "Jessica is a part of a minority group" aspect, had a black woman say "you people," to turn the narrative even further away from Jessica's own white privilege, and destroyed Trish, who was a viable target because she wasn't a traumatized white woman like Jessica - she was a RICH white woman. And they were desperate to avoid their fuck-ups so they made Patsy a patsy.

okay, so this turned into a long, generally incoherent rant that starts with “this show absolutely fails at dealing with race” and ends with “wtf were they even trying to do with trish’s story,” and it should probably be separate posts or better yet just not posted at all, but it’s all generally related to this ask, so whatever. it’s a mess, i have a lot of confusing thoughts, ignore me.

rather than acknowledging the mistakes of s1 regarding race and trying to course correct, the show definitely seemed like it decided to double down. before the season started, as it was becoming clear they were going to do this “prejudice against powered people” thing, i was really weary about how they would handle it, and apparently my instinct was right.

to start with, it felt kind of pulled out of nowhere. realistically, sure, people would be weary of powered individuals, but it hasn’t really been fully built into the fabric of the mcu or the netflix mcu as a realized form of bigotry. it was also really only a thematic element in the first half of the season, and they made no effort to really explore it and its implications before they tossed it out and changed gears. it was just there to be used as a device for conflict and drama.

and it’s such a ridiculous thing when you only have one powered person in the show that’s experiencing that bigotry and she’s a skinny white heterosexual cis woman? like, the most direct parallel for this wasn’t misogyny or homophobia, but racism, and they didn’t try to tell multiple perspectives about it. having a black woman say “you people” at jessica was the most tone deaf bullshit, like, i could not fucking believe it (and then they later killed her off in the most disposable way, which is a whole other issue, and something this show has done repeatedly). they had oscar, a moc that had been in prison (of course), start out the same way, seemingly expressing bigotry and getting “righteously” called out for it by jessica. then there was pryce, another moc, aggressively going after jessica, trying to steal her business, calling her an animal because of her anger and powers, and he “never takes no for an answer” and jessica gets to be like “how rape-y of you” in what was supposed to be a moment of #femaleempowerment. but it just feels like white lady empowerment at the expense of poc.

but hey, gotta pile on to show how very oppressed jessica is in every aspect of her life, right? which, yes, she has absolutely been oppressed and violated and traumatized, and that is so important and real and should never be diminished, but the show didn’t attempt to contend with the ways she’s also privileged and the ways she’s been able to use it to her advantage and having her acknowledge it (including the fact that having powers, being able to protect herself, is an incredible privilege instead of only the awful burden it’s been portrayed as and she’s always interpreted it as). i probably wouldn’t have even said they’d need to explicitly deal with this under other circumstances, if they were focused on telling a different story, but they’re the ones that decided to make analogies to racist prejudice and have poc express it towards a white woman, so they put the expectation on themselves to tell a nuanced story about oppression and privilege and intersectionality, and they didn’t do that at all. they clearly weren’t actually interested in talking about prejudice in a serious, meaningful way.

but here’s the even bigger issue: the show tries to present itself as being feminist, but it can’t be feminist when there are no women of color in main roles or even supporting roles. it makes no effort to tell the stories and perspectives and experiences of woc, and that is an absolute failure. it’s inexcusable that they made no effort to fix this. it absolutely doesn’t help that the woc that are actually present in small roles keep getting killed off unceremoniously. i had some hopes when i saw that they had females directors that actually included some woc, but i don’t think they have any in the writing room, and that matters SO MUCH. it makes such a difference, and they could’ve probably avoided so many of these missteps if they just had other voices represented in the creative process. i just saw a headline with melissa rosenberg where she says, “oh yeah, i totally agree with the criticism we don’t have enough women of color,” okay, except this is not a new criticism, people were saying the same thing after s1, so if she agrees with it and cares about it, why didn’t she do anything about it while they were making s2?

the show has sort of attempted with men of color, in that they actually exist in the cast, but it doesn’t handle them well at all, some of which i mentioned before. then you’ve got malcolm. the only lead character of color in s2. he was set up to be the moral center of the show, but there was no real follow through. he was ultimately treated like an afterthought in most situations. he just? disappeared? constantly? when shit went down? i lost count of the number of times i was like, “umm, where the fuck did malcolm go? is he all right?” and the characters around him were pretty consistently awful to him. jessica almost always treated him like shit. his relationship with trish was a train wreck they both kind of contributed to, but trish turned on him pretty epically, and the emotional fallout for him wasn’t really dealt with. and the writers told his “proxy addiction” story in the laziest, grossest way possible (sex? really? that’s all they could think up? and then to use it as excuse to have him treat women like they’re disposable and faceless?). they just clearly have no respect for him.

it’s such a mess, and s2 was probably worse than s1 in this regard, and there’s no reason it needed to be. this isn’t an impossible thing. when people tell you, “hey, you fucked up. this is how,” you don’t double down or pretend it didn’t happen, you listen and you do better. this should be a show for everyone, not just white women.

turning to trish, since you mentioned her: i’ve mostly tried to avoid post-s2 reviews, but one of the few i read described her character arc as a critique of the white savior mindset. i highly doubt that’s what the show had in mind. as we established above, careful thoughtful commentary about race is not this show’s strong suit, and writing a critique of the white savior mold wouldn’t even occur to them. i could kind of see where the reviewer was coming from, there were some flavors of white savior-ism in trish’s behavior, but they had to pretend she had never experienced an ounce of hardship in order to make it fit. this was basically the conclusion: “trish is rich and has a family and could never under poor traumatized orphaned jessica’s life.” nevermind that money doesn’t stop you from being abused and traumatized, that a family member was her primary abuser, and that living in poverty and wanting money was the motivation for her abuser to sell her out. this take also ignores the thing driving trish the most. it wasn’t “i want to help people, and they should listen to me because i know best” or even “i want to be special, i want to matter.” it was “nobody touches me anymore unless i want them to.” she was tired of being the victim, of never feeling safe. that’s why she wanted powers. it was muddied by the writing, but it really is as straight-forward as that.

i think trish being rich has likely had some influence in the audience diminishing how she was violated and abused in most every kind of way (physically, emotionally, sexually, financially), but i definitely don’t think the show went after her for being a rich famous white lady as a cover for its various racial fuck-ups. i don’t think the show even really tried to contend with or acknowledge her rich white privilege anymore than it tried to contend with jessica’s privilege. if anything, it tried to do the opposite by showing her to be belittled and demeaned and disrespected by everyone around her, similar to how they were upping the ante on jessica’s oppression by having her face bigotry about her powers. granted, it’s clear the audience had an easier time relating to jessica (probably partly due to the money and fame aspect again; also partly because the narrative backed her up more: for instance, the dynamic of having trish envy the privilege of jessica’s power, but the show seeming to say “oh, gosh, trish just doesn’t understand it’s not a privilege at all, it’s a terrible burden” even though that’s kind of ridiculous, as i mentioned earlier). the execution was shitty, but they were definitely still trying to show that trish’s life was not good and people treated her like she was nothing and worthless in a way that paralleled jessica’s treatment.

tbh, rather than punishing trish for being rich or whatever, i sometimes got the vibe they were actually punishing her for daring to have ambition, but that probably wasn’t on purpose, just an unfortunate implication of the way they treated her in general. at first, i’d assumed they were trying to tell a story about addiction and the ways it can destroy your life, and they just sucked at handling it with any kind of thoughtfulness, but now i think that’s being too generous. they didn’t even really try to grapple with the reality of her addiction and mental illness, so much as use it as an excuse to make her more unstable and put her in a position where she’d keep escalating things.

i read an interview before the season dropped where melissa rosenberg talked about female anger (or, as the reality of the show is, white female anger), and anger definitely was a theme for all the female characters. if you recognize trish’s main motivator as mentioned above (protecting herself from further abuses), you can see where it fits into this theme, and that it wasn’t just senseless anger and was driven by vulnerabilities and never feeling safe. so, i don’t know, i guess trish’s story was maybe intended to be about an abused woman finally being so goddamn fed up with victimhood and disrespect and belittlement that she decided to take what she needed instead of quietly waiting for other people to acknowledge her humanity and treat her accordingly. that she finally said “fuck it” and tried to find her own power and become her own hero. except, if that was the story, the way it was executed was, wow… exceptionally awful and not remotely clear and not at all done in a positive way. a storyline like that could’ve had the potential to be powerful and affirming and perhaps empowering (once again, for white women at least), but that’s not the story they ended up telling.

like, i honestly don’t get what i’m supposed to take away from it. they seemingly gave her what she was after, but they spent the entirety of the season shitting on her and had her destroy everything good in her life to get what she believed she needed, which was really just to feel safe. what’s the point here exactly? you do you boo and fuck everybody else because it’ll pay off? don’t have dreams and ambitions for yourself because they’ll make you heartless and selfish and you’ll hurt other people? the desire for power always corrupts even when you’ve been a victim and just want the power to protect yourself? trauma doesn’t go away and can make you do terrible self-destructive shit that you think is helping you but actually isn’t? drug addicts are awful, amirite? what. are. they. trying. to. say?

#anonymous #replies #my thoughts about s2 are a constantly shapeshifting shadow monster #and it's hard to settle into any specific feelings that aren't just 'honestly fuck the writers in general and m rosenberg in particular'

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inside-liminale · 4 years

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#BlackLivesMatter (2)

InSide-Liminale, Alice ed io, sosteniamo la causa del #blacklivesmatter.

Sia come individui che come collettivo di lavoro, siamo impegnati nella lotta contro qualsiasi tipologia di razzismo. Ci stiamo attivamente mettendo all’opera su come possiamo sostenere la nostra comunità sia negli Stati Uniti che a livello internazionale. E’ nostro compito interrogarci sul nostro rapporto con le questioni politiche, razziali ed economiche e indagare su come il nostro lavoro può portare verso il cambiamento. Non abbiamo delle risposte, ma vogliamo apportare il nostro contributo.

Queste sono alcune risorse che abbiamo raccolto e che vorremmo condividere con voi come strumento di sostegno e di apprendimento in merito al tema.

Articles:

“The Death of George Floyd, In Context,” by Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker

“Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for the New York Times

“This Is How Loved Ones Want Us To Remember George Floyd,” by Alisha Ebrahimji for CNN.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning The 1619 Project is as important as ever. Take some time to read (or re-read) the entire thing, particularly this essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones

“You shouldn’t need a Harvard degree to survive birdwatching while black,” by Samuel Getachew, a 17-year-old and the 2019 Oakland youth poet laureate, for the Washington Post

“It’s exhausting. How many hashtags will it take for all of America to see Black people as more than their skin color?” by Rita Omokha for Elle

“The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

“How to Make This Moment the Turning Point for Real Change,” by Barack Obama in Medium

Books:

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Can we talk about race? Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria by Beverly Daniel Tatum

A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature by Jacqueline Goldsby

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Biased by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children In A Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Next-Time-James-Baldwin/dp/067974472X

Books for Black Dance Legacy

Dancing the Black Question: The Phoenix Dance Company Phenomenon

By: Christy Adair

Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism

By: Kimberly W. Benston

Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance

By: Thomas DeFrantz

Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture

By: Thomas DeFrantz

Marion D. Cuyjet and her Judimar School of Dance. Training Ballerinas in Black Philadelphia 1948-1971

By: Melanye White Dixon

African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader

By: Harry Justin Elam, David Krasner

The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, Class in African American Theatre: 1900-1940

By: Nadine George-Graves

The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool

By: Brenda Dixon Gottschild

The Black Tradition in American Dance

By: Richard A. Long, Joe Nash

Dancing in Blackness. A Memoir: The Life and Times of Halifu Osumare

By: Halifu Osumare

WHAT TO LISTEN TO

podcast episode with Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, and Bryan Stevenson about Just Mercy

1619, a New York Times Podcast, an audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling. Nikole Hannah-Jones

Still Processing, a New York Times culture podcast with Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morrison

Seeing White, a Scene on the Radio podcast

Code Switch, an NPR podcast tackling race from all angles

Jemele Hill is Unbothered, a podcast with award-winning journalist Jemele Hill

Hear To Slay, “the black feminist podcast of your dreams,” with Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom

#blacklivesmatter #liminale

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lesbianchemicalplant · 1 year

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I don't think I'm being unreasonable that the way people can't talk about makeup/shaving/etc. without recoursing to “Natural” Bodies vs. “Mutilated” “Unnatural” Bodies is fucking intolerable and makes me immediately distrust anyone who says it

so many of these people are going to become Trads in a few years' time, explicitly citing their reactionary notions of Natural Bodies, evopsych-ified Biotruths about “Female Dating Strategy” and Natural relations between The Biological Sexes, the Natural unit of The Family, etc.

this isn't a weird hypothetical, this has happened millions of times over with epic feminist bloggers specifically

#my posts #transmisogyny #epic cis feminist things #rad conservatism

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thisbirdhadflown · 8 years

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February Fic Rec Round-Up, Part I

Hartwin

Rather Emotional Days by Draycevixen

This fic is delightful. Yes, Harry Hart Lives!, but he comes back as a field agent and utterly confident in his desire for Eggsy. But things aren’t always straightforward; it takes time for Harry to requalify and Eggsy is the bright, shiny new agent taking on all the exciting missions. This throws Harry for a loop, but luckily, Merlin is around to troll assign his agents to missions where they’ll be forced to confront their feelings.

Callouses and Canes by starredthought

Adjusting to the world without a sight would be challenging for anyone, and Harry’s no different- his reaction at the beginning is heartbreaking. But with time and Eggsy by his side, he gradually adapts to his new circumstances and the world. This fic follows the process, and how they slowly grow together and take care of another. It’s just lovely.

First Impressions (Or a second) (Maybe a third) by propriety_is_not_a_priority

Think of this as the Meet Cute from hell. Harry springs Eggsy from jail, they share a pint at The Black Prince, and quickly realize they’ve met before… and we’re not talking about when Harry gave Eggsy the medal. Eggsy is cheeky and brazen here, and Harry’s embarrassment is palpable and delicious.

Accidental Roommates by enjoy_acne

YASSSS! @enjoy-acne just updated this, and it’s fucking awesome. Devastating, hilarious, and a great mix of canon elements. The Hartwin interactions are gold. READ READ READ.

Unwin, et al. (2016) by eggmuffin

Nerd humor FTW!

Okay, I love this fic. I’ve read other academia AUs and they tend to focus on the petty politics and the soul-robbing process of finishing the thesis. This story touches on all that and more, but the difference is its tone. It’s gleeful. It’s fun. You can tell that @eggmuffinwrites had a blast writing this, and for me as a reader, it’s so delightful to read.

where on this earth i could be by fideliant

When I was a teenager, my grandpa gave me his copy of “The Royal Road to Romance” and I learned that the word “romance” has many different meanings. I’m bringing this up because this fic by @fideliant embodies romance. Eggsy and Harry go on epic adventures together, and the slow burn between the two is gorgeous. Their love is never voiced, but you can feel it in every interaction.

And can I say that when they finally get together, I love how easy it feels?

to all the men who have stood without fear by romans

Hartwin vampire AU where Harry, instead of recruiting a young man into the service, has a taste for rent boys.

So this is fantastic with one hell of a twist.

For the sake of a simple thing by concernedlily

At least in terms of ubiquitousness, Rentboy! Eggsy is the coffeeshop AU of Kingsman fandom, but @concernedlily elevates the trope to a new level in this fic. Harry is assigned to take Dean’s group down and Eggsy is his confidential informant.

The first thing that struck me about this fic is how gritty it is. There’s this low level tension that permeates the story and never lets up. Also, no glamour nor gloss here; the inglorious side of spycraft is emphasized. A lot of waiting, a lot of watching, a lot of politics and behind the scene machinations.

I was also struck by the writer’s empathy for Eggsy. Usually CIs are portrayed as craven and motivated by personal greed, but @concernedlily never lets you forget that Eggsy is the one taking all the risks, and he is the one with the most to lose. I remember feeling infuriated when Eggsy literally risks his life and limb (due to shoddy information) for an assignment.

Read it! The storytelling is top notch and the characterization of all the players, even the minor OCs is outstanding. There’s a sequel as well, and it seems to lighter, thank goodness. I don’t know if I could take another equally intense follow-up.

A Long Way to Go by 221watson

Eggsy gets woke.

I love this fic for three reasons:

1. While class issues were discussed in Kingsman, nothing else was said about the lack of diversity of this mostly white, male, upper class group.So I enjoyed how @queercroft explored the prejudices that would exist in such an insular group.

2. The roles are reversed, and Eggsy is Harry’s teacher.

3. The emergence of Harry Hart, unapologetic feminist. (”…he even gets enthusiastic about it, because a gentleman should know his privilege, he says.”)

#kingsman fic rec #rec list #hartwin #eggsy unwin #harry hart #kingsman fic #fic rec #kingsman

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hashtagtransanthology-blog · 8 years

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Contributor Interview: Gabriel D. Vidrine

Next up: Gabriel talks about their essay on The Crow, YA novels, and what they watch on Netflix on Friday nights.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you generally write.

First and foremost, I am a scientist, but I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote my first full-length novel at 16 (it was terrible, don’t ask, but it was cyberpunk). I entered short story contests before then, as well, but didn’t win. I never thought I’d be any good at it, or be able to make a living off of it. So scientist it was. I write what I like to read. I primarily write fantasy (epic and urban) and horror (paranormal and survival), but I’ve dabbled in science fiction, erotica, and essays. Out of nowhere, I wrote a trans YA summer romance story. Not much has been good enough to publish yet, but I keep hoping!

2. What is your essay for #Trans about?

My essay is about how I realized I was trans through the help of pop culture and media, specifically movies, comic books, and video games. It took me a long time to be okay with how important pop culture was to me (at least, the pop culture subgroups I enjoyed) and how it affected what I thought about my gender identity. It’s also a comment on how difficult it is to find those identities that are liminal – in between – like being bi and nonbinary.

3. Katherine Cross describes her realization of being trans (and a feminist) as a series of 'clicks' on a keyboard in online space. What was your 'click' moment when you realized you were trans?

I didn’t have much of a click moment (though she does describe it as a series of them, and I can see that). I’m a horror writer, so it’s probably easiest for me to describe it as something like the creeping dread. There was not one moment, but many small ones, building up over time, until I could no longer deny what I was experiencing. I never noticed my feelings until I was looking back over them, drowning in them, and just couldn’t ignore them anymore. I had always felt boyish, but it wasn’t until many things fell into place that I realized I was actually trans.

4. What is your next project?

Getting fiction published! My trans YA romance is nearly ready to be shopped around, so I’m hoping that I can find an agent or a publisher who is looking for something like it. (Shameless plug: it’s an ownvoices trans boy m/m fluffy summer camp romance!) I’m also working hard on getting my dance career revived and vlogger career started. It hasn’t left as much time for writing, but I keep trying. I’m currently writing a trans epic fantasy

5. You're given a time machine. Do you go forwards or backwards in time? Why? What do you do?

Forward. Definitely forward. I want to see how humanity turns out, if we survive the coming years. More importantly, does the Earth survive us? How have we all fared, and what direction did we take? If things look good, especially for trans people, I want to stay there. If things look bad, I’d come back and see what we could do to avoid that fate (provided we don’t run into any Oedipus-like problems).

6. What is your favourite book written by a trans or nonbinary writer?

I’m a bad trans person. Admittedly, I have not yet read that many books by trans or nonbinary writers. I’m a sucker for genre fiction and I’m super picky about it. There isn’t as much written by trans people in the genres I enjoy as there are in regular fiction, non-fiction, and YA genres. I have read Elliot Wake’s (writing as Leah Raeder) Cam Girl, which has beautiful writing but just isn’t my genre. I have also read If I Was Your Girl, Some Assembly Required (which was probably the most important for me), and Rethinking Normal. I just bought Peter Darling but I haven’t started it yet. I haven’t yet read anything that has spoken to my soul, a “Yes, this,” but I have enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I have made it a priority this year to read as many trans-written books as I can, even if they aren’t my genre, so I’m actively looking for books I will hopefully enjoy.

7. What historical figure--trans or cis--would you like to have dinner with? What would you ask them, and what would you order?

These sorts of questions are so hard, lol! I tend to find history boring (unless it involves dragons or something) so I don’t really idolize any historical figures. I’ve met a few people I’ve idolized before and it’s always underwhelming (you find out they’re human, just like everyone else, with prejudices and weird habits and such). There are a few people I think I want to preserve my interior image of instead! The only person I can think of would be Anne McCaffrey. Her work changed my life and started my dragon obsession. A lot of it went over my head when I discovered it (I read my first book of hers in fifth grade), and I think a lot of her work is deeply misunderstood today. I would like to talk to her about it, about why and how she was able to sneak in gay people without being too obvious, and still have her work be taken seriously in the 60s and 70s, especially as a woman author writing science fiction (with gay people!). Since we’d likely be in Ireland or England somewhere, a good British pub sounds about right. I’m fond of Cornish pasties. It makes me incredibly sad that I never got to meet her before she passed.

8. What's one message, image, or feeling do you want people to take away from your work?

A lot of my work is about pain. Internal pain, external pain, the suffering it causes. I want people to know that pain doesn’t have to stop your life. That when you feel overwhelmed by it – no matter its source – that there is someone out there to help you, to share it, to take it away. That none of us have to suffer alone, and to reach out to those who love you when you are in pain. I know that’s hard; I have suffered a lot of emotional, psychic, and physical pain in my life. I’ve struggled with reaching out. I try to bury it, to suffer alone, to not bother anyone with it. Please, bother someone with it. It’s worth it.

9. It's Friday night and your plans fall through. What do you do instead?

Either I spend my night dutifully sewing a new dance costume while listening to a documentary on Netflix (old castles, LGBTQIA, or true crime) or I tell my guilt to go to hell and spend all night playing video games.

10. Finally, what is your social media of choice? How can people contact you?

I’m on Facebook the most, but I use that for mostly private, personal interaction with irl friends and family. Twitter is the best way to contact me otherwise, but I’m all over the Internet. I have an Instagram where I post pictures of my silly cat and weight loss progress, if that’s of any interest, or they can email me at [email protected] or contact me through my Tumblr (though I don’t use it as much as I should).

Thank you, Gabriel! Up next: Shawn Dorey.

#interview #transgender #trans #nonbinary #LGBT #spilled ink

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 2 Review: Friends in Low Places

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Wynonna Earp review contains spoilers.

Wynonna Earp Season 4, Episode 2

Damn, Wynonna Earp. That sex scene. In the context of the show, the Wayhaught love scene was gorgeous, sexy, and one of the most romantic scenes of the entire series so far. In the larger context of television history, it was one of the most explicit and beautiful sex scenes between two women that I have ever seen on network or basic cable TV.

In many ways, Wynonna Earp follows a tried-and-true genre TV formula: a snarky-yet-sentimental narrative path laid out by shows like Buffy and Supernatural. But it also has done some seriously revolutionary things when it comes to the inclusion of (white) (queer) women in the supernatural TV genre. From the casual, normalizing ways the series mentions subjects like lesbian sex or menstruation culture (both tampons and pads have featured as an episode’s ongoing gag) to the enthusiastic incorporation of Melanie Scrofano’s real-life pregnancy into Wynonna’s Season 2 storyline, Wynonna Earp is pushing back against the idea that just because something has to do with an experience of specifically womanhood, doesn’t mean that it can’t be part of the supernatural genre TV world.

For so long, feminist storytelling in genre TV has meant showing how women can do the same things as men. How petite, blonde, sometimes ditzy Buffy (when given the powers of a Slayer) can be stronger than any man (or vampire). Wynonna Earp isn’t interested in reenforcing that idea, in putting Wynonna or Waverly’s supernatural strengths in the context of a gender binary. Not only do we assume that the show understands the concept of the gender spectrum, we know that it isn’t interested in contextualizing its characters’ qualities as in relation to either an abstract idea of manhood or a specific dude. Wynonna isn’t as strong as any man, she’s just strong—full stop, without qualifiers. Her strength isn’t a fact that exists in spite of her womanly experiences but as equally-important aspects of her that exist inside of the same human.

Wynonna is unabashedly a woman, and the show is neither going to qualify that, nor represent her heroism as exceptional amongst her sex and/or gender. This kind of celebration of womanhood in storytelling is only possible if there is a plethora of woman characters, which Wynonna Earp has. In “Friends in Low Places,” Wynonna’s comrades-in-arms are Nicole and Rachel. She isn’t the Smurfette saving the day amongst a screen majority of men, on both sides of the good guy/bad guy divide; she is just another lady, amongst other ladies and the occasional dude, getting shit done.

In this episode, Doc is the exception to this onscreen world of women (Jeremy doesn’t actually appear in this episode, though Eve does take his form), flipping the usual gender breakdown on its head in what is still (sadly) a revolutionary way. It’s why Wynonna Earp is able to get away with lines like “Save your heteronormative hero hogwash for humanity, sweetie.” Delivered by a woman baddie (if we can give god-demons a gender) to another lady character in reference to the lone man in the episode, it is telling rather than frustrating in its winking irreverence, which is how these kinds of lines often play: as a tongue-in-cheek way of commenting on the quality of gender representation in media within the same, tired kind of man-minded story rather than coming as part of series that imagines a new kind of narrative, one that doesn’t care what dudes think about it because it’s not explicitly for them.

Lesbian sex is another experience that only women can have. It has nothing to do with men, and never will. It’s something that women don’t need men for, and that makes it an outlier when it comes to representation in TV and film, which is so shaped by men that most mainstream stories can’t imagine a conversation between women that is about something other than a man. We need a whole test for it. Depicting beautiful, emotional, passionate, hot lesbian sex on TV that is not for the male gaze is a radical act. It picks up the low bar that is the Bechdel Test, paints it in glitter, and holds it up for everyone to see.

Women deserve more stories like this one. Not just queer stories or white stories or cis stories, but stories that give all different kinds of women the space to escape from the traumas, big and small, that come with living in patriarchy. Stories that aren’t all explicitly about those traumas, and therefore allow women to let go, to celebrate, to have fun. Stories that don’t make women push aside the specific joys and pains of womanhood in order to enjoy genre TV storytelling.

Oh, and there was a time jump in this episode. Did you like that abrupt review transition? It was meant to mimic the experience of unexpectedly finding out that the viewer (and Doc and Wynonna and Waverly) has missed 18 months of Purgatory goings on. As far as time jumps go, 18 months is a relatively minor one. So far, all we know about what was missed is that Nicole’s hair has grown out and there are dead bodies hanging in downtown Purgatory. Jeremy isn’t with Nicole at the homestead, which suggests he might still be in Black Badge custody, and there is no sign of Nedley or Mercedes either. We’ll have to wait until next week to see how bad things truly are in Purgatory and how the rest of our friends are faring.

All in all, “Friends in Low Places” would have worked as a season finale, and been the best one yet. It was both an epic conclusion to main dilemma of the Season 3 finale and a thematic end to the three-season Curse Arc around which this show has been structured so far. “The Curse is over, Waves. It’s time to start living for ourselves,” Wynonna tells her sister as she saves her from a self-sacrificial commitment to life on The Garden’s throne. I’m not sure what Wynonna Earp‘s future looks like—Eve is still out there, Black Badge is always up to something, and living and loving is always messy—but it sure does look glittery.

Additional thoughts.

Um, but are they officially engaged now?

The post Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 2 Review: Friends in Low Places appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3k4wRC6

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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butterscotch-brigade · 5 years

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list of things magus is likely to do:

go on r/incel daily, sometimes multiple times a day

attend/organize a straight pride parade

run an anti sjw tumblr blog

make "EPIC SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE FEMINIST" cringe compilations

get offended by down with cis

watch pewdiepie

say "triggered" as an insult unironically

deny climate change

id as "sapiosexual" bc hes offended by the term cishet

#vanilla talks #ct #i. dont actually hate magus i just think hes a slimeball #so i love makin fun of him

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topmixtrends · 7 years

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TO TURN THE PAGES of Spill is to watch the invisible become flesh from the language of humming, longing, living, and dying. Drawing from the deep aquifers of the work of Hortense Spillers, American literary critic and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetry is an overflow and offering of Black voice. It is a voice mostly for Black women that illuminates a world critically and lovingly restored with dimension and structure by the work of Hortense Spillers. Characterized by intermittent rhyming, a perspective that is at once fluid yet rooted in the language of the body and the usage of space and citations, Gumbs weaves narratives of hope, desperation, and knowing into one sharp longing. It is a “poetilitical praxis,” an unflinching look at what pain has wrought and what fruit might yet be born.

A queer Black troublemaker, a Black feminist love evangelist, and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Her scholarship spans the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University. Alexis is a public intellectual and essayist on topics from the abolition of marriage to the power of dreams to the genius of enslaved African ancestors.

Alexis is the visiting Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota. Her conversation about Spill can be found at Left of Black, and more about her work can be found at alexispauline.com. The second book in the series, M Archive: After the End of the World, comes out in a few weeks.

Alexis makes time for me right after a dentist appointment, so that’s where we begin.

JOY KMT: How are you?

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: Doing well. I didn’t engage in full-scale battle against the dentist and dental assistant, which I used to do when I was a kid. I guess meditation works. Because of how I don’t really get numb from anesthesia and how I am in the throes of grieving my father, I have been thinking a lot about Lucille Clifton’s poem “water sign woman.” I have a Cancer rising sign. She talks about the “feels everything woman.” That’s me. 

I am sorry to hear of your father’s passing. I have a moon in Pisces, so I understand the “feels everything woman.”

Yeah. I miss him so much. He was actually one of the first people to read Spill.

What was his reaction?

My dad was a big cheerleader for me, so of course he was like, “It’s groundbreaking, it’s stunning, it’s going to take the world by storm.” But that’s what he said about everything I did so …

It’s true, though.

My dad would say, “Just because I’m biased doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

How would you say general reactions have been to Spill?

The reactions have been really humbling. People have written beautiful letters and emails about how the work is impacting their healing, their relationships, their creativity, and their lives. And it’s been a wide range of people from other scholars and poets, people in my neighborhood, and dance classes. I wanted it to be a space for all my communities of accountability to be together, and it seems like it’s working.

Over and over again people have told me that the scenes are out of their own lives and the lives of the people they love. And when I share the book, I use it as an oracle. I ask people to think of a question and then a number and I read them a page and it seems like the book is able to speak to their lives and get all into their business. Long story short, a lot of people are looking at me like I’m a witch. And they aren’t really wrong.

I’m really struck by the tenderness with which you were able to render scenes, even when they were scenes of deep antipathy — “she loved the soft blue ocean of wishing he would die,” for instance. Why and how did you frame those very devastating scenes like you did?

The one thing that was present for me every moment of writing the book and that I hope is present in every moment of the book is love for Black women as Black women above everything, despite everything. So in a moment like that scene where this woman is trying to use all the gentleness and servility she has been taught to destroy, the person she sees as her oppressor, abuser, exploiter, love is still there. Her love for herself is there. Even if it can only be expressed in her desire to be free from the situation.

I think that no matter what we are going through, and even if we are not in a so-called “empowered” or “positive” space, mood, or situation, love is there. My study of Black women as a Black woman has taught me that. Love is always there. Always. Even when it seems completely impossible that it would be.

You start the book and each chapter with the definition and synonyms of spill — the title of your book. It seems both an homage to Spillers and a declaration of defiance. What is the container that you intend to overflow in this book?

Yes, I definitely think of this book as a celebration of the fact that Black women have not been contained, even though our blood has been spilled over and over again (including internal bleeding). I also think of the book as a libation to honor our ancestors and begin a ceremony that doesn’t end in the book. You have to use it every day. So I think the container has many names. Heteropatriarchal capitalism? Colonialism? The Western idea of the individual life?  In the next book (coming out in March!), I write about the Black Feminist Pragmatic Intergenerational Sphere, which is just of way of referencing what Audre Lorde said in “My Words Will Be There,” which is that who we are is beyond the limits (or container) of one lifetime. But most explicitly what I designed the book to defy was the oppressive interlocking set of narratives that entrap Black women every day.

What kind of ceremony do you see springing to life from this work?

For me it is the opening part, the libation, of a three-part work. A triptych. This is the part that opens the way for ancestral honoring and healing. The second part, “M Archive: After the End of the World,” is about long visioning about what the material evidence will be of this apocalypse we are going through. And then the third part is actually what I am writing right now. It’s called “DUB: Finding Ceremony.” Which is another way of saying yes, this is an oracle. And what’s cool is that it still functions as an oracle for me, even though I’ve read it more than a hundred times.  And the other thing I love is that other people are using it as an oracle. A few weeks ago a healer was doing tarot readings paired with pages from Spill on Facebook. I was like, “Wow! Draw one for me!” And it was right on point! So the primary ceremony I think Spill calls for is for Black women, all of us by the way, cis and trans, to recognize ourselves, each other, our ancestors and what we’ve been through. And to recognize the love and life-making that has also been there the whole time and is still there. And the secondary ceremony is for everyone who doesn’t identify as a Black woman to also understand that their healing is bound up with ours too.

How would you describe Spill in terms of genre and intent?

I think of the pieces on each page as scenes. I think of the book as a whole as a poem (#epic) and I think of every scene as poetic. And I think of it as an index and an oracle and a meditation. My intention is for the technologies of Black women poets, fiction writers, hip-hop artists, priestesses, singers, mamas, fugitives, stylists, and literary theorists to converge in the same space. Sylvia Wynter says, “After humanism — the ceremony must be found,” and I wanted to find a ceremony where we could be together, and where I could be with the revolutionary work of Hortense Spillers and with everyone else I love at the same time. Finding ceremony is a poetic act. So it is poetry.

I think you’ve partially answered this, but as a multidisciplinary artist and Black feminist scholar, what was the impetus for this book at this point in your career and life?

Right, I thought about what my intellectual writing would look like. And I thought about the people whose work has impacted me the most. I thought about Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux, and Barbara Smith and how none of them wrote “novels,” even though the novel was the most marketable form of writing available to them. My dissertation is about the poetics of survival and mothering in the work of those four geniuses and I think about them at all time. I thought about other academic theorists I cite the most: Hortense Spillers, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter, and how, to date, none of them have published a traditional scholarly monograph. They have all these essays collected (or in the case of Wynter uncollected) that change everything.

And so with that in mind I decided that building on the work that I have done to create spaces for my communities of accountability to be with the Black feminist creative and movement writers that I love, I also wanted to have creative space to be with my communities in the worlds created by the Black feminist theorists I love. Also though, it wasn’t a decision like how capitalism and individualism and Western education teach us to think about decisions.

When I decided to do the daily writing process that resulted in Spill, I didn’t really have thoughts about who would publish it, or if it would be published at all. I just knew it was what I should do.  And I’m actually still doing it. First thing every single day. And I am as surprised as anyone by what it looks like. But what I’m not surprised about is that it is infused with love for Black women in every moment. Because that’s the one decision I keep making by continuing to be alive. To love Black women (myself included) with everything I have, every day. That’s what my life is.

At the end of Spill you seem to shift to a longer and broader timeline, moving from individual intimacies to a more collective oracular vehicle, sort of in the vein of Ayi Kwei Armah. Also, throughout the text, rhyme, space, and sound tend to shift the movement of the text at will. What was your decision-making process like behind the movement of the text or what guided the movement?

What a generous comparison! Yes, that’s true. The end of the book is more explicitly collective and intergenerational. The way the scenes appear in the book isn’t the order I wrote them in. It was a conscious decision I made when I was ordering the manuscript to move from the intimacy of the first scenes to the collectivity of the last scenes. And maybe because that’s how my day goes. I wake up very early in the morning to be with myself. And then my partner and I intentionally come together, and then it’s later in the day usually that I’m actually in community. And the way that rhyme and rhythm work in the text … to me it’s a poetics of fugitivity. The sound of being on the run, compelled, but sometimes being able to stop and be with people, stop and be with self, stop and reflect, but then you are on the run again.

Can you speak more to the poetics of fugitivity and fugitivity discourse?

Sure, so Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley get explicit shout-outs in Spill. And they were both enslaved women who in completely different ways spilled out of and upset the container of gendered and racialized slavery.

Fugitivity for me, for us now living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” means that we are still entrapped by the gendering and racializing traps that made slavery possible. But we exceed it. We stay in love with our own freedom. We make refuge for each other. How do we do it? With our movement, with our braveness, with our leaving, with our words, almost always with food involved. So the scenes in Spill are scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity because for me they all feature a desire to be free and the urgent impossible-to-ignore presence of the ongoing obstacles to our freedom. It’s making me think of my teacher, my cherished intellectual mother Farah Jasmine Griffin’s book on Billie Holiday, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery. Our navigation of freedom requires so much creativity, and the work of saying it while also hiding it. That’s a fugitive poetics.

I wanted to ask you personally, why did you include a thank you to me in the book?

Oh girl! Because you completely inspire me in general! But also specifically because when I was writing that scene after Spillers’s words “a question that we cannot politely ask,” I immediately thought of your work and the confrontational, epistemic liberating questioning you do in your poetry. And also your refusal to be limited by the “polite.” How you say, “they say we are strong but they really mean silent.” It’s exactly what I am talking about in Spill. Reading your work while I wrote Spill had a crucial impact on me and I had to acknowledge that.

Reading Spill was deeply nourishing for me. It took me back to my secret life. I think the unwavering radical love that you offer in this book helped peel back my shame. So thank you so much for the opportunity to read and the opportunity to explore with you.

Wow, I am so grateful for that. That’s the ceremony of Spill, I think, to give us space to acknowledge all of it.

How is the eclipse treating you?

The eclipse is amazing! We put candles all over the house and were drumming and dancing.

Yeah? My house is a mess, so I was playing Alice Coltrane and cleaning and went outside to watch the eclipse.

Super powerful and profound energy. Yeah, change is coming; you can feel it.

It’s a potent time to be talking. I appreciate you taking time out your day.

[Laughs.] I appreciate you. They’ll speak about it in legend — “On the day of the eclipse, the Nat Turner eclipse, Joy KMT and Alexis Pauline Gumbs spoke about the healing qualities of literature.”— When we’re really old, they’ll speak about it like this. [Laughs.]

What have you been thinking about Spill?

I just did this reading with an amazing poet named Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, who is an amazing poet, student of Audre Lorde, mother of Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest and Afro-Trinidadian genius, author of many books of poetry, and another person, Raquel Salas Rivera. It was really interesting because a lot of the poems in Cheryl’s newest book of poems, Arrival, are thinking about her family and ritual, and a lot if it is in Trinidadian English, and Raquel’s poems are all in Spanish, and she translates some of them into English; Raquel is a Puerto Rican poet. So I was thinking about, “What is the vernacular of Spill?”

When Black women talk to me about feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like you wrote this just for me,” what makes it feel that way to other people? What’s recognizable? I think some of the vernaculars of Spill have to do with food and cleaning and domestic rituals and domestic work, hair braiding and grooming. I think there’s a lot of tactile language. Language of touch.

I realize that I’m always thinking about Black women and I love Black women, and obviously I was engaging with a Black feminist theorist the whole time I was writing it. But I think what makes it effective, intimate, ritual space for me and for other Black women does have to do with familiar forms of care that are in the book. Even if it’s for a slaver, which it sometimes is, or if it’s considered to be surplus labor, that work that we do to keep other Black people alive, that is not sanctioned by the state.

You asked me, before the interview, about the relationship between Fred Moten’s work and mine. Well, Fred was on my dissertation committee. But before I even met Fred, Fred Moten’s work, In the Break in particular, had me thinking about how powerful Black maternity is. And how scary it is, you know, to everyone in the world who is threatened by that power. And yet, how revolutionary it is to honor it for what it is. That’s actually one of the things that I love about your work. What happens if we understand everything in the world, all of the systems of oppression that target and seek to harm Black women and Black mothers especially. What if we see all of that as proof of and as a response to the amazing power that is Black mothering and that is the Dark Feminine? What does it mean if we acknowledge that? I would say that that’s the primary connection between the work that I’m doing in Spill and the work Moten is doing there. And it’s not a coincidence that that would be the connection because they both come through Spillers.

That’s the thing about Spillers’s work, that has me coming back to it forever and ever and ever ever. It’s the basis for how he develops that theory of Black maternity, also.

Well, I know we jumped right back into the interview, but I wanted to ask you, how have you been?

I’ve been good. I know last time we talked, I had just come back from the dentist and was talking about my dad. I still think about him every day. I was just thinking this morning about the fact that my dad was an amazing friend to me. I never thought about that until literally this morning. About the fact that, “Ah, I was actually friends with this person.” And I feel really grateful for that. That was a really powerful definition of our relationship. And what if I never realized that? I feel like the reason it took me so long to realize that is patriarchy. My dad did not play the patriarchal role, but there is something about the Black longing for patriarchy that’s deep. It’s something that I think is super toxic, hateful, and ridiculous and illogical.

Hortense Spillers writes about this as well in her essay, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of Daughters and the Fathers.” There’s no such thing. There’s no Black patriarchy, there’s not gon’ be no patriarchy, there’s really no such thing as fathers and daughters in relationship to what Black life has meant. The essay looks at a short story by Alice Walker and the strange incest story that the guy in Invisible Man tells. It talks about these stories as examples of how ownership, the way a father owns a daughter in patriarchy, is not Black relationality and is sick and disgusting to begin with. And that these stories basically offer how absurd that is but also how harmful the desire for that is. And as usual — this is what I love about Hortense Spillers so much — in conclusion, Black people are inventing a whole different type of life. Basically we’re doing a whole other thing that makes all these other things possible. At least for me, that’s the queerness with which I read Spillers’s work. It’s like okay, if there’s no such thing as Black fathers and daughters, then what are Black relationships built on? Black social life and Black community? If we know we cannot own anything, even our bodies and even our loved ones, then what is our relationality made of? It’s not made out of property, but we’ve been made into property.

What does she say relationships are made out of?

Let me go ahead and open the book. So I don’t misquote, but basically she talks about our relationships being built on choice, our relationships being built on shared ritual practice, our relationships being built on creativity, creativity that can’t be necessarily owned. So that’s a general paraphrasing. Of course the way she says it is going to be beautiful and incredible and impossible to paraphrase, but …

Would you say that interpretation of Spillers’s work is the foundation for how you approach Spill? And also, it’s funny that we started on this path of conversation, because one of my questions is: What do you see as the relationship between Black masculinity and Black femininity in Spill?

That’s a good question. And yeah, it’s very much framed by those questions. And you know, that essay is not an essay that I cite in Spill, but I got back into that essay — it has always been one of my favorite essays of hers — trying to process my grief around my father and not wanting my grieving process to be shaped by patriarchy. So I actually ended up writing some other scenes that are not in Spill, that have a similar process based on quotations from that essay, and some scenes that are based on Sylvia Wynter’s work, which is what the third book is.

Is that M or the next work?

It’s the next work, called Dub, Finding Ceremony. But this piece in feminist formations is me processing around my father and it cites this essay and it cites ethno and socio poetics, by Sylvia Wynter. I think it’s coming out soon because they just paid me for it today. I think it’s coming out today. Who knows? Sorry, I have you on speaker phone and I’m climbing my book shelves looking for this book.

It’s okay.

Yeah, but the relationship between masculinity and femininity, I mean I think one of the things I was present to, especially in the section, “what he was thinking” was just the violence of masculinity. A lot of the violence that the feminine figures in the book are fugitives from is masculinist energy, but it’s also the predictable result of the imposition of masculinity. I felt like those were scenes that made it visible in a particular way, and there is a scene in there where I’m very much thinking about Invisible Man, that scene where a young man is seeing his mother being disrespected over and over again by a paternal figure. The imposition of masculinity, especially in terms of Black social life, has been profoundly destructive. And Black femininity has been in fugitivity from that in a particular way. I think that might be one way that it shows up in Spill. But then, I think that there’s a lot of different possibilities. Some of the scenes around Black masculinity and femininity in conflict, I’m definitely drawing on Alice Walker’s work, I’m definitely drawing on Zora Neale Hurston’s work, I’m definitely drawing on — I think about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I think about masculinity in Jamie’s life as something that comes through the scenes in Spill. I think about “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, and the ending of the book is definitely an offering in reverence to that story.

So yeah, I would say that the relationship between masculinity and femininity and the work in Spill is a relationship that is also — the masculinity and the femininity of the people in the book are fugitive from patriarchy. It’s also fugitive from binary. It really is trying to escape that. So part of what Spill is about is how sometimes you don’t escape something until it’s impossible to ignore how violent it is. And at the same time, whatever the revelation is within that violence is what is making it possible for something else to happen beyond that binary. Beyond what patriarchy has made masculinity and femininity. So you know I think about that in the way that Toni Cade Bambara talks about in “On the Issue of Roles,” which is definitely another influence on Spill. But I think actually the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Spill is as complicated as the relationship between the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Black women’s writing. As we know, at the very outset of what literary historiographers call Black women’s writing renaissance, when Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison had these widely deep texts that were centered on the experiences of Black women, that were probably the most widely acceptable that texts about Black women that had ever been, by Black women, immediately the pushback was around the portrayal of Black men. That it was unfair to show the forms of violence that Black women experience. It hasn’t stopped, as we know. That’s the archive that I am soaked in, that spilled out in Spill. And at the same time, like how June Jordan writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s work in contrast to Richard Wright’s work, saying whereas Black masculinist impulse in protest literature is like, “ F you white man!” and this is why we need to destroy this terrible racist society — which June Jordan definitely agreed with — but if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as your model for what Black literature is, you see the relationship between Black people invested in within the work of Black women. I wouldn’t make a gender binary around that either. But what she’s saying is if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as our model, that’s what we are going to have again and again. We’re going to see that the revelations, the complexity and the nuance is really in relationships between Black people, and what about that as an argument for the world that we want to create. Not only relationships between Black people and white people. So I would say Spill is that too, saying that there is something to be learned in the gendered relations of Black people that is key, core, really primary. And it’s learned. And if healed, would absolutely change everything. Who is considered family? What Spillers is saying is that, Black family is based on who preserved life and the calling for life. Who creates kinship? It’s not going to be based on patriarchal traceability and lineage. Because people have been sold away and are being dispersed over and over again and displaced. Revolutionary mothering is the way that I think about it. Who is participating in the preservation of life? That’s the vernacular of Spill. If you go back to what I said in the beginning, that’s what’s happening. Cooking is happening. Cleaning is happening. Hair is being done. You know, all of that is happening. People are being warmed.

I’m such a baby trying to get into this Spillers. But I appreciate the challenge of her work.

It is complicated, what Spillers is saying, and it’s almost impossible to say. Given the language and structures and thought that we have all been trained into, how deeply her work unsettles those it’s almost impossible for her to say what she’s saying. And at the same time, it’s really simple but it only requires the small thing of forgetting everything you know. For me, that’s the poetic imperative. Every poet is saying things that’re unsettling and making possible ceremonies for something to be said, that couldn’t be said otherwise.

I wanna talk about craft with you a little bit. What, in your writing, signaled to you the evocation of ceremony? What are the components of language that create ceremony?

The first scene in Spill, the person tried every possible ceremony they knew about and it’s still as bad as it looks. They had candle, they had the food in the corners, all of it. The ceremonies that had been known up till then were not sufficient to the reality and in a certain way had to either be what offered that clarity or be left behind. And similarly, making the greens, that ceremony changes. The way that person makes the greens changes throughout that scene. There’s something important about that, that the ceremony that they started with and the ceremony that’s available is asking for something else to be created. So how does that happen? Writing can be like a wormhole, a nonlinear path to a space from where one started. That’s the fugitive technology.

For me, the repetition of rhyme is the fugitivity. The arrival at the urgency that’s asking for your own revelation. Fugitivity for me is like, okay, so we have this flight and we’re compelled and propelled and the momentum of the pieces of Spill is evoking that through the rhythm. What does that embodied experience give and demand? It demands ceremony in a particular way. Fugitivity demands many ceremonies. One of the things I talk about in the beginning note is, “we have to create the space now we gotta leave.” The rhythm shapes that movement.

The other thing I would say is listening. The major skill that I had to develop to be present for this work was to listen. Hearing different people read them, I can tell that it is what I heard when I hear people read the scenes at performances. That’s important because the words are there or the punctuation that we have access to, and you know I’m doing weird stuff with punctuation, it’s not a given that it would sound like what I heard when somebody brings their own voice to it, but I still hear the rhythm that I heard. It means that rhythm holds the possibility for that ceremony. The shifts in the rhythm signify the shifts in the ceremony. I think that’s how it shows up in the language. That’s the language that gets you to get into the rhythm that makes this possible.

It’s not to say that the language is a signifier or that you could substitute any word as long as it had the syllables, I’m not saying that at all, what the language references is also important, domestically ceremonial and creating and providing intimacy and access in really important ways. The actual content of the language is what has my neighbor be able to be like, “Oh, this makes me think about my mom and my aunt.” But at the same time there is something rhythmically happening, and it was transformative for me to be able to experience those rhythms in the process of making this work.

You said you were listening. What were you listening to?

I needed to hear the phrase. I had written down the phrases [from Spillers’s work] and I would open up the notebook that had the phrases outside of their context, and I would work with the one my eyes fell on. Then I would cross it out after I worked with it. I was distilling it in that way because I had to look at the phrase and not then go, well here’s what she meant by that. Here’s what I think about it. I had to not let my brain fill the space. I had to leave a space and listen to where the phrase took me. Who is this? What is the scene? Where? As I was hearing it and writing it and seeing it, the rhythms were very different. Sometimes there was a breathlessness at the end of writing it. Sometimes I would reread it and be like woo! Sometimes the experience was like um-hm. Sometimes it was a feeling of being transported and traveling back into my actual life. Who has the actual expertise to tell this actual story is who I had to listen to, and understand that I’m in relationship to who that is through my intimacy with Black women’s writing, and that legacy of listening. Listening to storytellers and also listening beyond, listening to the silence of a room, that those writers have been doing. And realizing that it was all there. Like if I had been a lot more quiet a lot earlier in life I would have heard this before. And it was these phrases of Hortense Spillers that could get me to have the level of stillness and listening to hear whatever it was. It was the technology for it.

I wanted to ask you about your next work, M. I got the sense from the description that it seems to build on Sylvia Wynter’s discourse on humanism. Can you talk a bit about M and the connection between Spill and M?

First of all, Sylvia Wynter is always there. I first heard about Sylvia Wynter from Brent Edwards. I went to this summer thing at Dartmouth and I had this one conversation with Brent Edwards who was a speaker. He mentioned ethno and socio poetics by Sylvia Wynter — and this is the deep generosity of Black scholars without which I could not participate in intellectual life in the way that I do — he mailed me a photocopy of this essay. That was very important because it was only published in the journal of this conference in 1979, so it wasn’t very accessible. The context of this essay is that the conference seemed like it was for anthropologists who were interested in poetics, like do certain poetics come from certain ethnicities, preserving indigenous language and poetics but in a super colonialist way, so I don’t even know why they invited Sylvia Wynter to this conference unless there was some subversive person that wanted them there. In this essay, Sylvia Wynter breaks down the entire invention of what you think a human is. She’s like, let me go through the medieval times, the sense of God, Robinson Crusoe, and basically she’s breaking down all of Western civilization to say that there is no ethnopoetics, there is no ethno — there is no us, because what you all have done is to create a them and then said that hat them has no language. So this entire project that you think you’re doing, you can’t. You’re not. But, there’s such a thing as Black poetry, and there’s such a thing as Indigenous poetry. It’s not along the lines of ethnicity that you are thinking about. It is the possibility of being able what is impossible to say. For me, that was a very important moment in my life because I was like, “That is what we’re doing!” Yes. Yes. It is the impossible daily work. Black artists and Indigenous artists in particular, we’re using these languages that are literally what makes it impossible to say what we gotta say, do what we gotta do, be with each other, be here. From then on I was like I have to read everything by Sylvia Wynter. She’s saying, none of this stuff is natural, none of this stuff is permanent, so we can think of some other stuff and do it and the sooner the better because this particular train of thought is destroying everything. So back to the question. M, the citations from that work come from M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing, so it’s a similar process that I did for Spill but a completely different set of essays that took me to totally different places and post-apocalyptic futures. One of the things about this future is that the perspective is from someone who is archiving the material evidence of the end of humans. But that does not mean that there are no beings, or no beings related to those of us who are the current humans or not humans based on anti-Blackness. But it does mean that that category has expired. And it may actually mean that we all die. There are multiple possibilities in the text, but it does imagine what is after the human, and Sylvia Wynter says that after the human the ceremony must be found. So what are the material components of that post-human ceremony? What are the memories, what are the practices, what are the rituals that constitute that? And how would someone describe it who could see it as history? And definitely, there’s nothing that I’ve written before I read Sylvia Wynter and definitely after I read Sylvia Wynter that’s not in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. Not a tweet. Everything is in conversation with Sylvia Wynter in some way.

So, final question: What’s your recollection of how we met?

From my perspective, it was like the hugest gift that you came to DC from Pittsburgh and were like, “Hello, I heard you were doing oracle readings, I’m here to open the oracle.” The way I got to DC, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival had a special thing they were doing about Black adornment called “The Will to Adorn,” inspired by how Zora Neale Hurston talks about Black adornment. They asked me to come, and I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but what I knew there was to do was to create this wearable oracle created on a daily basis out of Black feminist texts. I remember what was going on in your life but I don’t remember what your question was. I remember you talking about Oshun and the cinnamon and cleaning the new space you were in and the artist grant you had just gotten. I’m just really inspired by you and your life, and how you understand everything to be a part of your creative practice, like the ants and how you dealt with the ants by putting cinnamon down. And you know I’ve never stopped reading your work and I’ve never not been blown away by the brilliance, the honesty, and the rituals that you create in your community. I just feel like we have the same religion.

Yes, I feel similarly. I feel like much of my work is in conversation with your work. Did anybody ever tell you that talking to you is like talking to a nourishing whirlwind?

[Laughs.] No, but I like that though. I should put that in my bio. I like that! I identify with that. I know it’s a lot. I know I’m all over the place, but I’m glad it’s nourishing. I’m glad it’s clear that it is all love. That’s all it can be.

Joy KMT is a healer, poet, and ritual artist. She is the founder of the Tabernacle of Immaculate Perception.

The post We Stay In Love with Our Freedom: A Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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