#essentialise

[gothhabiba]

So do you see men as human beings or not. I ask because it's difficult to decipher between the layers of highflown bullshit you sling. Genuinely asking, and before you start screeching how I'm an evil white cis straight able-bodied man oppressing you by asking a good faith question, please know I am not male white cis straight or able-bodied, but am asking in all seriousness.

Addendum, I suppose, assuming you answer in the positive to the former question: what, in your view, should be the ideal social position for men? Everything you've this far posted seems to imply an answer of 'in cages at torture zoos' or 'at the bottom of a cooking vat'.

me when I’m not a misogynist: preëmptively accusing women of “screeching”

[mwagneto]

what's w the male presenting stuff he's literally canonically a woman......whatever

[cruelsister-moved2]

every year we get all this content from bisexuals in opposite gender relationships about erasure and straight passing discourse in which they will act as if bisexuals are a tiny forgotten minority of the lgbt community and being erased is just as bad as being hatecrimed and always shoehorn in the villainous gatekeeping gays (who I feel like in many cases are just the externalisation of the voice in your head telling you that you're not Queer Enough) and so on. and it's never anything new like no one ever has a new perspective on this issue and everything they collectively have ever said can be summarised in like 3 sentences so... can we move on. I think we all get it now. can we please talk about something else💜💜

[lemonsrosesandlavender]

There’s something about a big, buff amab tiefling just pounding Rolan into his desk or a bed. Rolan begging for more as he is reduced to a drooling mess and Tav is like “don’t be greedy” as he smacks his ass

loooook I get this. And I love it. But I gotta say as a cis woman, why can’t MY buff fem AFAB tav also do this? room for both. it’s DnD, we can ALL have implausibly huge muscles and rail Rolan’s ass raw. I certainly want to, lol.

[kkoct-ik]

i love kin but its such a nightmare sometimes because i swear i identify with every character. i also identify As most characters on and off by the day. and even with my highest kin i tend to pick them up in pairs. its nimona And ballister. clover And snake. edward And alphonse. etc

[dykepuffs]

Forever fascinated at those feminist* posts that manage to be about 30% trans-supportive, and go:

"People who menstruate are affected by this terrible law, and men will never know how it feels to have their bodies treated as public property like that."

"If you are someone of any gender who has ever had to wear a bra because your breasts were heavy enough to hurt your back, I bet you wish that you could let men feel that pain for even just one day."

And like... They take such a long detour around saying "women" that you think "Oh, they are deliberately being trans inclusive, they're accepting that trans men aren't women and that trans women might not have this common-but-not-universal experience that is often needlessly essentialised to Womanhood when actually it's more about something unrelated." But then they go "MEN" in a way that slams home "Anyone who doesn't have this experience is ACTUALLY A MAN, anyone who has this experience is ACTUALLY A WOMAN, or if they persist in calling themselves men they should be thought of as a perpetrator of this problem rather than someone who experiences it."

[transmutationisms]

grug need big breasted and wide hipped mother to bear and feed grug’s large children

ok im not like, calling you out here but i do think these types of jokes about 'cavemen' have long been based in racist & colonialist anthropological/ethnological notions of 'primitive' peoples who represent an unevolved, simplistic version of humanity & that includes the 'grug' thing on here and also every iteration of the 'broken caveman grammar' joke. and i think people perceive these jokes as acceptable because their idea of a 'caveman' is like, prehistoric peoples who have literally been dead for 50,000 years. but these sorts of comparisons and judgments of which people and social characteristics are 'civilised' or 'advanced', along with the idea that the uncivilised ones are funny or stupid or whatever, are very much still present in discursive constructions of indigenous peoples, colonised populations, racialised people, &c so i do actually think it's fucked that these jokes are still considered neutral and not harmful. but anyway i do understand the point you were making and yes that is how evolutionary psychology types talk about gender and try to essentialise reproductive roles. now like, unpack the implications of those academic discourses relying on the notion of a primitive prehistoric Male(TM) who is completely at the mercy of his own base biological instincts to reproduce/fuck, and how that relates to, again, current beliefs in hierarchies of 'civilisation' or 'social advancement' &c &c

[mirrorofliterature]

PSA: Alenoah fanfic writers

Stop using epithets reducing Alejandro and Noah to their ethnic, racial or national identities.

Stop referring to Noah as 'the Indian' or 'the Tamilian' or Alejandro as 'the Spaniard' or 'the Latino' or 'the Peruvian'.

Firstly, epithets are inherently dehumanising. They are used when a character is unfamiliar with someone, not their boyfriend.

Secondly, it is deeply uncomfortable and, however unintentionally, reduces these characters to their ethnicity, race or nationality. Most writers probably do not do this in bad faith - but that does not erase its objectively wrong nature.

It is Noah and Alejandro, two men of colour, who get consistently reduced to their ethnicity/background by writers. No white characters get the same treatment. Owen isn't 'the White Canadian' and Gwen isn't 'the White girl'. It is treating characters differently because of their ethnicity and is essentialising - it is not good writing as it breaks people out of the story. It is not good writing because it reduces characters to their ethnicity/race/nationality, which is what not to do when writing characters of colour 101. It others them, particularly Noah, who is as Canadian as any of the other teens. I don't know where this trend started, but it is not on.

Do better, Alenoah fandom. Cut out the ethnic, racial and nationality epithets. Dropping the whitewashing would also be nice.

[communistkenobi]

I think when people describe dark hallways or all-grey office cubicles as “liminal,” they’re using it as a synonym for creepy, which is not really accurate. What’s being reached for is a sense of dislocation, of being in a place that is not meant for you or is otherwise hostile to you in some way. “Liminal” is limited in its ability to describe those feelings, because the word is typically meant to refer to a place that exists only to get you somewhere else (like an airport, for example, or an interstate highway). “Liminal” isn’t synonymous with “a place of horror,” but I think it’s become that in the tumblr lexicon.

I think a much more robust term for what people are trying to describe is ontological (in)security. Ontological security in geographic scholarship means “a confidence that the world exists as it appears to be.” To give a very basic example, there are handles on doors because the function of a door is to act as a gateway to another space, and the handle is there to open that gateway. You trust that doors with handles are meant to be open and stepped through, and you also trust that door handles will always be placed at a standing person’s waist height - if you’ve ever seen a character try to open a door that leads nowhere in a story, it’s playing with your ontological security. Likewise, you see a flight of stairs and understand implicitly that it exists to facilitate pedestrian traffic to and from a specific place. It’s not a place to have a party with your friends, and you wouldn’t think to go to a stairwell to socialise.

To be ontologically insecure, on the other hand, is to exist in a place that is built for purposes that are not available to you. This is most commonly used in disability scholarship to refer to inaccessible entrances or stairwells - these things exist for able-bodied people only, and the structure of the built environment is now acting as a mechanism to divide people into groups who can use the space and groups who cannot. This is part of the way that ableism essentialises disability, which is then reproduced in the built environment - urban structures are taken as neutral, and if you can’t navigate them effectively, something is wrong with you individually (which of course is not true).

But this idea can be deployed for a variety of contexts - suburbs once built for the wealthy car-driving middle class typically do not have sidewalks in them. And now in many places in North America, suburbs are being inhabited by much poorer families (who are much less likely to own a vehicle), who are being driven out of the city core because now that same wealthy middle class has decided a condo is more fashionable than a detached house. This leaves people to live in places that aren’t built “for them,” to walk in the middle of roads or on lawns because there’s no space for them to walk, forcing them into hostile situations to either be hit by cars or yelled at by neighbours for walking on their grass. These spaces produce ontological insecurity, a sense that you are inhabiting a place that is not meant for you, and because of this you are frequently made less safe as a result.

This is where the critique that cities are structurally ableist, or racist, or misogynistic comes from. Urban environments are usually built by the ruling class, whose interests and aesthetic sensibilities get reproduced in the roads they build and houses they erect, and if you don’t happen to fit the profile of the ruling class (ie most people), some parts of a city are always going to be less safe for you. This is why in extremely spread-out, low density cities (LA for example), public transit is difficult to implement on a structural level (on top of all the political pushback), because these spaces are structured in such a way to be hostile to certain modes of travel or behaviour (eg any mode of transit that isn’t a car). They are built for a specific ideal archetype of person, and if you don’t fit into that, you’re much less safe and much less secure.

So if you want to use this in fantasy settings or horror or whatever, you need to approach the built environment as a historical process the same way that a government or law is. Office spaces are not “liminal,” but they can be sites of horror because their physical structure compels certain modes of social behaviour, and trying to work against that grain can make you feel “out of place” - i.e., ontologically insecure.

[mortalityplays]

whats funny is that most ofmd fans are straight women who don't know any lgbt person let alone gay men irl i hope all that lube goes to a gay person at least lmao

this fandom has a track record of insane homophobia in their bizarre 'activism' for sure, but for the record I don't fw essentialising that behaviour to straight women or making assumptions about people's orientations based on the way they react to queer media. we had enough of that james somerton shit.

[familyabolisher]

I am far less interested in the narrative of The Talented Mr. Ripley as one of psychological profiling—as its reception points to, a tale of ‘psychopathy’ or other such voyeuristic projections of lazy and essentialising psychology—as I am in picking at the discourse by which Highsmith and Minghella constitute queerness as a peripheral threat to the confines of heterosexuality; I find that zeroing in on these questions of sexual norms and deviations thereof makes for a useful exegetical practice. [...] Tom Ripley enters the narrative as the threat of homosexual embodiment—though it might be more precise to name him as homosexual contagion. He acts initially as a disciplining structure towards the governance of the family, tasked as he is with the mission to bring Dickie Greenleaf home to America and, presumably, set him on a path that involves gainful employment and reproductive futurity pleasantly ensconced in heterosexuality. Dickie’s having absconded to Italy ushers in the kinds of potentialities encoded in, for instance, a lingering shot of two men embracing on a street corner, or the classical homosexual tradition invoked by Peter, or Freddie Miles’ campily foppish (though heterosexual) demeanour. For all that Dickie Greenleaf is presented to us as rather assuredly straight, the possibility—threat—of deviation from hegemonic sexual paradigms constantly mediates his relationships with men and women alike, and such a deviation comes home to roost when queer contagion in the form of Tom Ripley takes on the form, language, and desires of the American family unit.

back on my patreon bullshit—this time i'm trying out writing some (relatively) short commentary on whatever piece of media piques my interest at the moment. so if you want to read me chucking some ideas together about homosociality, social contagion, & mirrors in 1999's the talented mr. ripley, you can do so for £1/$1 at the link.

this piece will become free for all a month from today.

[littlefeltsparrow]

Even though Rhysand is established as a victim, the text is averse to exploring his trauma in any meaningful capacity that might not serve his masculine image. His trauma is repeatedly framed as a noble sacrifice and at times, is used as a means of communicating his sexual prowess to the reader despite the context being utterly inappropriate. Amarantha’s abuse of Rhysand cannot simply be recognized as the actions of a cruel and perverse tyrant, the text needs the reader to know that Rhysand was not emasculated by that abuse.

Rhysand’s essence is constructed on a foundation of masculinity. He must be masculine at all costs because of the rigid (and often essentialised) gender binary in ACOTAR demands it. Within this dichotomy, the masculine is posited as the dominant party and that dominance must be reiterated in order for it to be understood. However, the reality of Rhysand’s victim status contradicts the foundation of his character and creates a situation where Rhysand (the ultimate masculine figure) was dominated and abused by a woman. This reversal of power shakes the foundation of his character and calls the identity of the masculine figure into question.

To mitigate this tension, Maas takes a few measures to preserve Rhysand’s idealized masculine identity. She frames Rhysand’s SA as a necessary and heroic sacrifice that saved the lives of countless people. This obfuscates the fact the non-consensual nature of Amarantha’s abuse and attempts to lend Rhysand some control in a situation where he had none. Although this might have formed the basis for an exploration of how Rhysand chooses to explain his trauma and cope with that reality, his explanation of events is never framed as unreliable or identified as an unhealthy coping mechanism.

[cruelsister-moved2]

tbh the refusal to acknowledge roma (& other traveller groups) as indigenous is so concerning to me for that reason. it also applies in the colonised/post-colonised world to an extent (like the indigeneity of african-americans often not being acknowledged) but ESPECIALLY for people living in europe if ur definition of indigenous is just something like ‘was here first’ you really urgently need to reconsider that one chief 😭 especially when you also hold romantic notions of indigeneity like “was here first = mystical connection to the land, endorsed to govern the land, presence on the land is most ‘natural’ and should be protected from ‘impositions’” etc. do u want to know who else held those exact beliefs about europe and the people inhabiting it? do you want me to tell you??

[sophie-frm-mars]

trans rights

The basic claim of trans rights isn't that trans people exist (a non-negotiable human fact) but that trans people deserve everything available to cis people, in the same way that the original feminist claim was not that women exist but rather that they are equally as human as men.

The shift in material terms (what opportunities we have, how we are treated and so on) as well as societal understanding of us is that we are not implicitly sexual objects, the same as the original feminist push for change.

Along the way to explaining this to people we have to divorce the notions of sexuality and gender, which many cis people still do not understand as distinct, but although they are divorced, sexuality and gender are not completely alienated from one another. Gender and sexuality are friends with benefits.

Trans people put a lot of labour into their gender.

(Please read Wages for transition if you haven't)

The labour that trans people put into their gender is quite visible in ways that the labour that cis people put into their gender is not. For many cis people this creates an implicit impression that trans people by existing are claiming that their gender is more valuable than cis people's. This exists quite comfortably in a society that never talks about trans people unless it acknowledges their existence as sex workers or fetish objects, but not in a society that would treat trans people as equally human. Therefore a push for social and legal equality for trans people is, in the minds of those cis people, a push for a society in which it is broadly accepted that some people's gender is more valuable.

However, we already live in a society where it is broadly accepted that some people have more valuable gender than others. "Hot" people, many of whom put a significant amount of labour into their gender, are also treated as having more valuable genders than others. I'd like to draw attention to the obvious similarity between transmisogynistic rhetoric and ideology and the rhetoric and ideology of incels. Incels believe in a sexual hierarchy which essentially treats "more sex" as better and reflexively indicative of a more valuable person, rather than a uniquely communicated and negotiated consensual connection between two or more people.

(We could also draw a parallel between people's reaction to nonbinary people and people's reactions to vegans, i.e. "so you think you're better than me?")

Under patriarchy, women are treated as responsible for the reproduction of society, which is often essentialised as an inherent (biological) quality of women. Trans women, assumed by people who are not trans women to not be burdened with a disproportionate share of reproductive labour, are treated by transmisogynists as getting to enjoy all the aspects of being a woman (implicitly under patriarchy being a woman is doing more gender than being a man) without paying the price for being a woman.

When we say that we are gender abolitionists we simply mean that we are feminists, and that we wish to abolish societal hierarchies based on gender and allow people to self-determine and fully control their own gender without it having implications on their social status. Naturally the relations between genders are not abolished unless they are hierarchical because gender is frequently constructed through gendered relations. This, again, is why sexuality and gender remain close despite the fallout from their earlier codependent relationship. We should, in fact, want a billion squillion kajillion genders because allowing people to treat gender as a multifaceted social performance instead of an inherent characteristic rigidly attached to sex, we support implicitly the abolition of cisheteropatriarchy.

[skadedraws]

If I had a nickel for every time I found a horror podcast in which a character named Jo(h)n was vilified for an essentialised monstrosity of which he had no control, of which he was forced to forever and impossibly try to redeem himself, ultimately leading to an estrangement, guilt and learned helplessness that made being human an insurmountable project it would not have had to be if he was recognised as struggling against those aspects of himself rather than feared as an agent of them, I’d have two nickels. Which, you know, makes me kind of fucked up.

[alanshemper]

There are other reasons why environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, as well as over Palestinian villages, most notoriously by the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan ‘Turning the Desert Green’, boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them non-native to the region. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.

...

The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call ‘green colonialism’. But the phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it unique to Israel. There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks – and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish, or simply to live. It has happened again and again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset. Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organisations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context.

...

But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of ‘othering’ – what is described in Orientalism as ‘disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region’. And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction. What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps everything.

We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

2 June 2016