#feminist academics

[hamoodmood]

✨Hot girls study hard to have a well paid job ✨

[determinate-negation]

did not fully read the essay this is from yet so maybe im being unfair but you cant be serious now!!

[yourdailyqueer]

Tiina Rosenberg

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: 7 July 1958

Ethnicity: White - Finnish

Occupation: Activist, feminist, academic

[peter1rose]

Quotes on Love

Dolly Alderton | Jacqueline Harpman

[communistkenobi]

whenever you open an academic article about gender and the author only uses the word queer and never mentions trans people specifically it’s gonna be a shit fucking article

[mrcowboydeanwinchester]

🌸 Sapphicnatural Statistics Spreadsheet 🌸

link for the spreadsheet here!

hello hello! in may 2024 i completed a university essay studying the subversive shipping conventions of sapphicnatural fanfic in the Sapphicnatural Collection over on AO3, with the thesis that sapphicnatural ships are often rarepairs with little-to-no grounds in canon (e.g: a guest character/one-off character who have never met on screen), conversely to standard fanfic practice. as part of this, i gathered some statistics about the fics in the collection, got slightly carried away with the scope, and made a giant spreadsheet with 6 sheets of various data. with the project over, i thought it would be nice to share it with tumblr in case anyone else finds it helpful or just interesting!! i'm likely going to post the essay that i wrote alongside this in the next few weeks, so give me a shout too if that's something you'd like to see

to pique your interest, the spreadsheet includes:

Notes on methodology and the vocabulary used

Statistics on the popularity of each sapphicnatural ship in the collection and the frequency of characters featured

Analysis on some significiant ship factors: whether the characters have met in canon and how frequently characters re-occured in the show

'Ship potency', a new framework i'm workshopping to quantify how 'viable/strong' a ship is, specifically when measuring the makeup of femslash ships against mlm ships

i've written up some of the key points i found and some extra analysis about them under the cut, so read more if you're interested! <3

Contextual note: there are 129 fanfics in the Sapphicnatural collection.

Top 5 most popular Sapphicnatural ships:

donna/jody (10 fics)

anna/mary (7 fics)

jo/cassie (6 fics)

anna/ruby (5 fics)

kaia/claire (4 fics)

21 unique ships have 3 fics per ship. 24 unique ships have 2 fics per ship, and 52 unique ships have 1 fic per ship. So, only a quarter (25.3% of ships) have more than 3 fics written about them.

Rarepairs (and thus multishipping) are much more frequent in Sapphicnatural fanfiction than across most fandom fanfic collections which often centre around a specific ship

Have the characters met in canon?

Only 34.2% of ships involve two or more characters who have met on-screen in the show, with 59.6% of ships featuring two or more characters who have never met

4 out of the 5 top ships are between characters who met in the show's canon

BUT the most common dynamic is between two characters who could potentially meet in canon (are alive through the same seasons/at the same location (hell/heaven) at the same time) but who never meet in the show

This idea of 'canon potential' is the most exciting space for a lot of sapphicnatural writers, where finding gaps in the existing narrative and placing two similar women together to explore what their relationship could look often seems to be more inviting than those established on-screen

What is the spread of side/guest/one-off characters in ships?

A third (32.9%) of ships are made-up side/guest character

None of the characters featured are main characters (as none of the women spn characters can be realistically classed as 'main characters' lolol)

17 ships feature at least one one-off character, with 3 being one-off/one-off

Sapphicnatural fanfiction has a unique appreciation for reinforcing attention to minor characters, often as part of a feminist agenda to restore their agency

How frequently are individual characters featured?

Jo Harvelle is the most popular character in the sapphicnatural collection, involved in 15 unique ships across 34 fics. So, over a quarter (26.4%) of the fanfics in the collection feature Jo

Author's note: honestly this could be my individual impact on the collection as a jogirl oops

Mary Winchester is involved in 14 unique ships across 25 ships, so both Jo and Mary are significantly multi-shipped. Mary features twice across the top 5 ships

Sapphicnatural writers often write in service of a particular character rather than a ship - ie. exploring Jo's sapphic identity is more important than who her relationship is with

Charlie, Anna, Ruby, Claire, and Bela are the other characters involved in more than 10 fics each across the collection

Ship potency:

I explain this concept more on the sheet itself, but I essentially assign numerical values to whether a ship is (possible in) canon or not, how frequently characters re-occur in the show, and how popular a ship is respective to the fandom (as sapphicnatural is small, donna/jody is popular with 10 fics, for example)

This is to gain a measure of how 'strong' a ship is, assuming that a standard mlm ship will rank highly in most of these criteria (control variable of destiel ranks 29.5/30, whereas the average potency sum for a sapphicnatural ship is 11.8)

Across the top 5 ships, the average potency sum is 20.9

4/5 of the most popular sapphicnatural ships are in the top 5 for ship potency, with donna/jody, anna/mary, kaia/claire and anna/ruby having strong canon foundations and so high potency ratings.

jo/cassie is irregular as the third most popular ship because they only rank 14th for ship potency, as the pairing have not met on-screen in canon, and features a one-off character

Ships with higher potency sums do tend to be slightly more popular, but there isn't a clear pattern among any of the ships. I'd like to do some more work with this to fine-tune the system

Wordcount, kudos, and hits:

Average wordcount of a fic is 3,511 words. This fits with my other working theory (links to my post about my history essay on women's fiction through the feminist waves) that sapphicnatural writers utilise short stories and one-shots to most succesfully explore sapphic identities

Average kudos is 48, with a median of 13

Average hits is 353, with a median of 122

So: sapphicnatural fanfics receive a fairly low level of interaction, especially when compared to the mlm ships in the Supernatural fandom (destiel, etc). This is in-line with most fandoms and femslash as a whole - a small, dedicated community are reading and writing sapphicnatural

I didn't explore much here, but it would be interesting to go into further depth anout how many fics in the collection are written by different authors, etc

and that's it from me! if you've made it down here, you're an absolute gem and thank you for sticking with me! hope you foundd it as interesting to read through as i did to write up - and that you give the spreadsheet a nosey too if you fancy <3

[cryinginmelodrama]

Sylvia Plath

[darkk-stallion]

Women hate women. And men hate women. It’s the only thing we all agree on.

Barbie (2023)

[femmesandhoney]

no one was gonna tell me the American Folklore Society has a "Women's Croning" ceremony every three years to honor middle age and older women folklorists in their field? why do other disciplines not do such fun things to celebrate women...

[yourdailyqueer]

Chayanika Shah

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: N/A

Ethnicity: Indian

Occupation: Activist, feminist, professor, academic, writer

[padawan-historian]

From @blackwomenradicals

[smilesession]

the most consistently daily source of inspiration to me in any person is anne eickleberg from thinking fellers. I always think if I had a group of friends who were musically and creatively inclined I’d be just fine. I think about the sections she authored in the thinking fellers tour diaries that are available on their website where she wrote extremely candidly, the daily jokes and absurdities shared with her friends but also her deepest desires and secret singular feelings, I can’t help but feel like I should have been her friend and the same age

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Domestically, ribu was born through the contradictions of the radical political formations of the '68 era, including the anti-Vietnam War, New Left, and student movements. Many ribu activists had experienced the radicalism of the student movements and sectarian struggles of the New Left. As defectors from existing leftist movements, ribu activists were conversant and in critical dialogue with the ongoing struggles such as those of the Sanrizuka, Shibokusa, Zainichi, and Buraku liberation activists, the politics of occupied Okinawa, and other movements including immigration, labor rights, and pollution. Following other radical movements of Japan's '68, horizontal relationality was privileged in reaction to the rigid hierarchies of the established left and many New Left sects. The movement involved a decentralized network of autonomous ribu groups that organized across the nation, from Hokkaido to Ayashi; with no formal leader, its leading activists were Japanese women in their twenties and early thirties.

Ribu's birth was traumatic and exhilarating. Having experienced a spectrum of sexist treatment and sexualized violence while organizing with leftist men, from verbal abuse to sexual assault and rape, ribu activists revolted against the myriad ways that sexism and misogyny were endemic across leftist culture. Women typically supported male leadership through domestic labor, by cleaning, cooking, and other housekeeping duties. There were instances when young women activists were referred to as public toilets [benjos] and assaulted and raped by leftist male activists. In some cases, the rape of the women of rival leftist sects became part of the New Left's tactics of uchi geba [internal violence or conflict]. In 1968, Oguma Eiji describes such incidents of sexual violence. Ribu activists spoke, wrote, and testified about their experiences of sexism, assault, and rape at the hands of leftist male activists. Given such forms of sexual violence that were hidden, too often, in the shadows of Japan's 1968, how did ribu women respond?

Never before in the records of Japanese history had ink sprayed such rage-filled declarations of revolt against Japanese heteropatriarchy and sexist men. The slogans of the movement, like the "liberation of sex and the "liberation from the toilet" [benjo kara no kaiho], unleashed an unprecedented flurry of militant feminist denunciations. With minikomi (alternative media] titles such as Onna no hangyaku [Woman's Mutiny] and art evoking images of vaginas with spikes, ribu activists raised a political banner that had never been so explicit and bold in its declaration of sexual oppression and sexual discrimination.

Ribu activists reacted to the counterculture movement of the 1960s and the sexual revolution. Some of its earliest activists, such as Yonezu Tomoko, criticized the "free love" espoused by male activists even while they emphasized the importance of politicizing sex. Along with her student comrade Mori Setsuko, Yonezu named their cell "Thought Group SEX," and painted "SEX" on their helmets the first time they disrupted a campus event at Tama Arts University in Tokyo. Sex and sexuality emerged as key concepts in ribu's manifestos for human liberation. The politicization of sex was a revolt against the sexism in mainstream society and the Japanese left. Heralding the importance of liberating sex also distinguished ribu from former Japanese women's liberation movements, Tanaka Mitsu, a leading activist and theorist of the movement, harshly criticized previous women's movements, saying that the "hysterical unattractiveness" of those "scrawny women" was due to their having to become like men. The brazen and contemptuous tone of their manifestos was a stark departure from past political speech about women's liberation.

This emphasis on sexual liberation evinced ribu's affinity with US radical feminist movements that also exploded in 1970." Ribu activists recognized their shared conditions when they heard news of women's liberation movements emerging in the United States. Information about these movements flowed into Japan via news and alternative media, as documented by Masami Saitō. Japan's largest newspapers, the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun, printed photos of thousands of women protesters in the streets of New York City for the August 26, 1970, Women's Strike. Anti-war posters with defaced US flags decorated the walls of ribu communes and organizing centers." Activists from the United States and Europe visited ribu centers." This cross-border exchange among activists also characterized the internationalist spirit of '68 and a common desire for liberation.

Like so many others around the world, ribu activists were also inspired by the Black Power movement and attempted to follow its lead. This passage from a ribu pamphlet evinces how ribu activists were emboldened by Black Power struggles - as were radical feminists in the United States - and drew new lines of departure and separation from the leftist men with whom they had been organizing.

By calling white cops "pigs," Blacks struggling in America began to constitute their own identity by confirming their distance from white- centered society in their daily lives. This being the beginning of the process to constitute their subjectivity, whom then should women be calling the pigs?... First, we have to strike these so-called male revolutionaries whose consciousness is desensitized to their own form of existence. We have to realize that if we don't strike our most familiar and direct oppressors, we can never "overthrow Japanese imperialism"... Those men who possess such facile thoughts as, "Since we are fighting side by side, we are of the same-mind," are the pigs among us."

For leftist women to be calling leftist male revolutionaries pigs constituted a kind of declaration of war against sexism in their midst and their newfound enemy-sexist leftist men. When women of the left began to identify this intimate enemy, this moment of dis-identification with Japanese leftist men constituted a decisive epistemic break. Their conflict with sexist male comrades forced these women to recognize that they had to redefine their relationship to the revolution from the specificity of their own subject position."

- Setsu Shigematsu, "'68 and the Japanese Women's Liberation Movement," in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 79-82

[incoherentbabblings]

I have several pet peeves about pop discourse on greek myths, and the ones I find most 'most resist urge to scream in the tags' are:

Taking Ovid's 1000 year later alteration to Medusa's origin in order to make her a symbol of assault and loss of automomy whilst Danae and Andromeda's own cases of assault and loss of autonomy and Perseus' role in protecting them is swept under the rug for... reasons. Side note: Why do people dislike Perseus. He's genuinely just some guy. He's fine. His main motivation is to protect the helpless I mean come on.

Making the Hymn to Demeter about how Hades and Persephone's relationship was functional and healthy 'actually' and making it entirely about Persephone's independence (through the overbearing mother and sex=freedom tropes) and ignoring the woman who the story is actually about in the process.

Taking Calypso's rant about the double standard of male gods taking lovers and female goddesses should be able to do the same and that Odysseus doesn't deserve Penelope as a result where in reality Homer describes the man sitting crying on the beach every day for years wanting to go home to his wife but he is literally being held against his will be a goddess and the word 'forced' is used as in she is assaulting him ergo her rant ends up being less about the double standards of female sexuality and more "equality is being able to punch a woman after she slaps me" except its about raping mortals who have no consent to give.

Oddly, I think it's partially people having no idea what to make of mothers. They're in the way of the young women and their stories of sexual maturity. It is a similar thing to the Odysseus story. Young women and the sexuality at the expense of older men and women and the denial of their autonomy in return. It's all very radfem in tone in ways I can't quite verbalise.

[lesbianspaceproject]

Continuing the long process of reading as much as I can get my hands on! But I have so many concepts and thoughts in my head that sometimes I lose track ^^' so I've started doing mind maps and they've really helped! Not just with my mountain of a literature review, but also for writing articles. (the middle pot with the cat was painted by me, I think its so cute :3)

[stopthinkingg]

"Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.."

-Virginia Woolf's Suicide Note

March 28, 1941