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fatliberation · 3 years ago

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I’m Abandoning Body Positivity and Here’s Why

In short: it’s fatphobic.

“A rallying cry for a shift in societal norms has now become the skinny girl’s reassurance that she isn’t really fat. Fatness, through this lens of ‘body positivity’, remains the worst thing a person can be.” (Kayleigh Donaldson)

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I have always had a lot of conflicting opinions about the body positivity movement, but it’s much more widely known (and accepted, go figure) than the fat liberation movement, so I often used the two terms interchangeably in conversation about anti-fatness. But the longer I’ve been following the body positivity movement, the more I’ve realized how much it has strayed from its fat lib origins. It has been hijacked; deluded to center thin, able, white, socially acceptable bodies.

Bopo’s origins are undoubtedly grounded in fat liberation. The fat activists of the 1960s paved the way for the shred of size acceptance we see in media today, initially protesting the discrimination and lack of access to equal opportunities for fat people specifically. This early movement highlighted the abuse, mental health struggles, malpractice in the medical field, and called for equal pay, equal access, equal respect, an end to fatphobic structures and ideas. It saddens me that it hasn’t made much progress in those regards.

Today, the #bopo movement encapsulates more the idea of loving your own body versus ensuring that individuals regardless of their weight and appearance are given equal opportunities in the workplace, schools, fashion and media. Somehow those demands never made it outside of the ‘taboo’ category, and privileged people would much more readily accept the warm and fuzzy, sugar-coated message of “love yourself!” But as @yrfatfriend once said, this idea reduces fat people’s struggles to a problem of mindset, rather than a product of external oppressors that need to be abolished in order for fat people to live freely.

That generalized statement, “love yourself,” is how a movement started by fat people for the rights of fat people was diluted so much, it now serves a thin model on Instagram posting about how she has a tummy roll and cellulite on her thighs - then getting praised for loving her body despite *gasp!* its minor resemblance to a fat body.

Look. Pretty much everyone has insecurities about their bodies, especially those of us who belong to marginalized groups. If you don’t have body issues, you’re a privileged miracle, but our beauty-obsessed society has conditioned us to want to look a certain way, and if we have any features that the western beauty standard considers as “flaws,” yeah! We feel bad about it! So it’s not surprising that people who feel bad about themselves would want to hop on a movement that says ‘hey, you’re beautiful as you are!’ That’s a message everyone would like to hear. Any person who has once thought of themselves as less than beautiful now feels that this movement is theirs. And everyone has insecurities, so everyone feels entitled to the safe space. And when a space made for a minority includes the majority, the cycle happens again and the majority oppresses the minority. What I’m trying to explain here is that thin people now feel a sense of ownership over body positive spaces.

Regardless of how badly thin people feel about their bodies, they still experience thin privilege. They can sit down in a theater or an airplane without even thinking about it, they can eat in front of others without judgement, they can go the doctor with a problem and actually have it fixed right away, they can find cute clothes in their size with ease, they do not suffer from assumptions of laziness/failure based on stereotype, they see their body type represented everywhere in media, the list goes on and on. They do not face discrimination based off of the size of their body.

Yet diet culture and fatphobia affects everyone, and of course thin people do still feel bad about the little fat they have on their bodies. But the failure to examine WHY they feel bad about it, is what perpetuates fatphobia within the bopo movement. They’re labeled “brave” for showing a pinch of chub, yet fail to address what makes it so acceptably daring, and how damaging it is to people who are shamed for living in fat bodies. Much like the rest of society, thin body positivity is still driven by the fear of fat, and does nothing to dismantle fatphobia within structures or within themselves.

Evette Dionne sums it up perfectly in her article, “The Fragility of Body Positivity: How a Radical Movement Lost Its Way.”

“The body-positive media economy centers these affirming, empowering, let-me-pinch-a-fat-roll-to-show-how-much-I-love-myself stories while failing to actually challenge institutions to stop discriminating against fat people. More importantly, most of those stories center thin, white, cisgender, heterosexual women who have co-opted the movement to build their brands. Rutter has labeled this erasure ‘Socially Acceptable Body Positivity.’

“On social media, it actually gets worse for fat bodies: We’re not just being erased from body positivity, fat women are being actively vilified. Health has become the stick with which to beat fat people with [sic], and the benchmark for whether body positivity should include someone” (Dionne).

Ah, yes. The medicalization of fat bodies, and the moralization of health. I’ve ranted about this before. Countless comments on posts of big women that say stuff like “I’m all for body positivity, but this is just unhealthy and it shouldn’t be celebrated.” I’ve heard writer/activist Aubrey Gordon once say that body positivity has become something like a shield for anti-fatness. It’s anti-fatness that has been repackaged as empowerment. It’s a striking double-standard. Fat people are told to be comfortable in their bodies (as if that’s what’s going to fix things) but in turn are punished when they’re okay with being fat. Make it make sense.

Since thin people feel a sense of ownership over body positive spaces, and they get to hide behind “health” when they are picking and choosing who can and cannot be body positive, they base it off of who looks the most socially acceptable. And I’m sure they aren’t consciously picking and choosing, it comes from implicit bias. But the socially acceptable bodies they center are small to medium fat, with an hourglass shape. They have shaped a new beauty standard specifically FOR FAT PEOPLE. (Have you ever seen a plus sized model with neck fat?? I’m genuinely asking because I have yet to find one!) The bopo movement works to exclude and silence people who are on the largest end of the weight spectrum.

Speaking of exclusion, let’s talk about fashion for a minute.

For some reason, (COUGH COUGH CAPITALISM) body positivity is largely centered around fashion. And surprise surprise, it’s still not inclusive to fat people. Fashion companies get a pat on the back for expanding their sizing two sizes up from what they previously offered, when they are still leaving out larger fat people completely. In general, clothing companies charge more for clothes with more fabric, so people who need the largest sizes are left high and dry. It’s next to impossible to find affordable clothes that also look nice. Fashion piggybacks on the bopo movement as a marketing tactic, and exploits the very bodies it claims to be serving. (Need I mention the time Urban Outfitters used a "curvy” model to sell a size it doesn’t even carry?)

The movement also works to exclude and silence fat Black activists.

In her article, “The Body Positivity Movement Both Takes From and Erases Fat Black Women” Donyae Coles explains how both white people and thin celebrities such as Jameela Jamil profit from the movement that Black women built.

“Since long before blogging was a thing, fat Black women have been vocal about body acceptance, with women like Sharon Quinn and Marie Denee, or the work of Sonya Renee Taylor with The Body Is Not An Apology. We’ve been out here, and we’re still here, but the overwhelming face of the movement is white and thin because the mainstream still craves it, and white and thin people have no problem with profiting off the work of fat, non-white bodies.”

“There is a persistent belief that when thin and/or white people enter the body positive realm and begin to repeat the messages that Black women have been saying for years in some cases, when they imitate the labor that Black women have already put in that we should be thankful that they are “boosting” our message. This completely ignores the fact that in doing so they are profiting off of that labor. They are gaining the notoriety, the mark of an expert in something they learned from an ignored Black woman” (Coles).

My next essay will go into detail about this and illuminate key figures who paved the way for body acceptance in communities of color.

The true purpose of this movement has gotten completely lost. So where the fuck do we go from here?

We break up with it, and run back to the faithful ex our parents disapproved of. We go back to the roots of the fat liberation movement, carved out for us by the fat feminists, the queer fat activists, the fat Black community, and the allies it began with. Everything they have preached since the 1960s and 70s is one hundred percent applicable today. We get educated. We examine diet culture through a capitalist lens. We tackle thin, white-supremacist systems and weight based discrimination, as well as internalized bias. We challenge our healthcare workers to unlearn their bias, treat, and support fat patients accordingly. We make our homes and spaces accessible and welcoming to people of any size, or any (dis)ability. “We must first protect and uplift people in marginalized bodies, only then can we mandate self-love” (Gordon).

Think about it. In the face of discrimination, mistreatment, and emotional abuse, we as a society are telling fat people to love their bodies, when we should be putting our energy toward removing those fatphobic ideas and structures so that fat people can live in a world that doesn’t require them to feel bad about their bodies. It’s like hitting someone with a rock and telling them not to bruise!

While learning to love and care for the body that you’re in is important, I think that body positivity also fails in teaching that because it puts even more emphasis on beauty. Instead of saying, “you don’t have to be ‘beautiful’ to be loved and appreciated,” its main lesson is that “all bodies are beautiful.” We live in a society obsessed with appearance, and it is irresponsible to ignore the hierarchy of beauty standards that exist in every space. Although it should be relative, “beautiful” has been given a meaning. And that meaning is thin, abled, symmetric, and eurocentric.

Beauty and ugliness are irrelevant, made-up constructs. People will always be drawn to you no matter what, so you deserve to exist in your body without struggling to conform to an impossible and bigoted standard. Love and accept your body for YOURSELF AND NO ONE ELSE, because you do not exist to please the eyes of other people. That’s what I wish we were teaching instead. Radical self acceptance!

As of today, the ultimate message of the body positivity movement is: Love your body “despite its imperfections.” Or people with “perfect and imperfect bodies both deserve love.” As long as we are upholding the notion that there IS a perfect body that looks a certain way, and every body that falls outside of that category is imperfect, we are upholding white supremacy, eugenics, anti-fatness, and ableism.

#body positivity #bopo #body posi #body positive #body acceptance #fat acceptance #fat activism #fat liberation #anti fatness #anti blackness #anti fat bias #lookism #beauty standards #self acceptance

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irisbaggins · 3 years ago

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It’s not ‘just’ a political opinion, folks. It is actively supporting people who have caused harm and wishes to cause harm. Donating to the orange fool and voting for him was an act of supporting a man who’s spread dangerous misinformation, has spread transphobic and queerphobic views, is openly misogynist, openly racist, and openly ableist. This was a vote to extend the fear and pain experienced for four years, and Cawthon openly admitted to supporting a known transphobe that wants us gone. This is not just an opinion, this is dangerous rhethoric that has led to harm and will lead to harm. Voting in the US, especially in 2020, was black and white; if you voted for the orange fool, you voted for four more years of danger, of fear of losing your rights, of the line being shifted more and more to the right. This is not just an opinion; it is a stance on human rights.

Not to mention, Cawthon admitted to donating his money to these people; to people who has supported an act of domestic terrorism, who denied a global pandemic, who tried to sabotage a democratic vote and used dictator-esque rhethoric, and too much more to when get into. This is what’s damning; the unapologetic support for people who wish to silence minorities and skew a vote in their favour. That is what’s being supported.

‘But Iris, Cawthon has donated so much money to pro-queer and POC and disabled causes!’ Yes? I am well aware of this, and commend that, but it doesn’t change the fact his recent actions could have caused so much harm. That it has caused harm. His unapologetic treatment of these facts is what people are upset about; he doesn’t care that he supported people who’s mission was to hurt minorities, it doesn’t change the fact he cannot see why people are upset, nor does it change that he still support those decisions, and implicitly stated he currently support them. He has done good things, but he has also done bad things with horrid implications. He’s not a good person, but I cannot say he is irrevocably bad, only a cis straight white man who fell right into his stereotypical privilege and refuses to change. He doesn’t care about us, not truly, not if he cannot listen to us and why we would be upset, why we would be angry at his statements. The fact he doubled down shows more of his actual personality, and skewes him more towards ‘bad’, but that’s my own biased opinion. I do not support him, and it honestly frustrates and disgusts me that he hides behind religion like all the other cowards like him. It’s a coward’s position to refuse to actually understand why what you did may be wrong, and it’s a coward’s position to state it’s just ‘your opinion’.

Whilst I am on that, yes, it is, in fact, cowardly to respond to all of the sadness, betrayal, and anger with ‘don’t judge someone on their political opinions!!’. You dodge the actual reason for these emotions, and instead dig your head in the sand so you won’t have to hear it. Yet, many of you will turn around to any ”sjw”, ”leftist”, or ”liberal” and cry about their opinions. We are not allowed to hold or express our opinions on politics, because how dare we strive for a better world? It’s hypocritical at best and malicious attacks at worst. This whole event is not just about ‘political opinions’, but about the actual work done to remove the rights of humans. That is what people are mad about. Or have you all forgotten the camps at the border, the limitation of rights, the purposful racism, the denying of healthcare and a global pandemic, the act of domestic terrorism, and the attempt at a coup? These things happened, and this is what Cawthon supported. This is the truth of the person who put on the mask as a kind man who donates money to charities from the money he gained from minorities. This is the truth behind the man. Someone who can ignore all the bad that has happened because ‘oh the economy!’ Horrid excuse for the danger it put us all in. The economy was not in danger, human lives were in danger.

To end this, it is up to you if you wish to support the games or not financially. Security Breach is headed by another study, and if you wish to support them, that is your choice. It is your choice what you wish to support financially, and if you still wish to buy merch. I can and will not make that decision for anyone, because sometimes it’s difficult. I understand that. It can feel conflicting, and it’s OK to take time to find what you’re comfortable with. The same goes with the fandom and the games itself; you can still enjoy it, you can still consume it. Doing so does not make you a bad person, but do not express anger for those who cannot engage anymore due to this. It’s an incredible personal thing, and this has hurt so many. Do not hurt yourself uneccesserily, and do not hurt others. Block and avoid, and take care of yourselves. Cawthon has dug his own grave, you do not need to follow him.

And to those who defend him without even blinking; I hope you can at least open your eyes to why people are angry. Because the truth is, many of you blatantly ignore the facts to just complain about ‘hate’ and ‘cruelty’. This is not what is happening, and I do hope you can at least see the humans behind the words. Cawthon does not need to be defended; he made his stance clear. He does not care about us, and he does not show any regret. If you feel like you support him, then I cannot stop you. I just hope you can see the damage done someday, and improve as humans. The same goes for the man mentioned. He has the capacity to change, and I hope he can. It’s sad to see another creator rip off the mask to show their true colours, and it’s sad to see how many people he’s hurt. It’s sad, and I mourn for what once was. Perhaps he can change, but right now he has to live with the consequences of his actions. He hurt people, and he’s unapologetic about it.

Donating money to charity doesn’t change the fact you did shitty things ✌️

#FNAF #Five Nights at Freddy’s #Scott Cawthon #Scott Cawthon TW #I’m hitting the hornet’s nest because seeing the unapologetic support for him here makes me sick tbh #Like the actual denying of history is SICK and how can you??? Excuse it????#Like I’m sorry but supporting the war on terror and being pro-life on its OWN is honestly Not Good #Anyway he did a bad thing and it’s not just ‘an opinion’ ✌️#I do not support him and I will not support him further #Imagining saying you support queer folk and then vote for a transphobe the fucking HYPOCROSY #Iris Whines #Transphobia //#Homophobia //#Queerphobia //#Racism //#Ask to Tag

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years ago

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Hi! As someone who’s literary opinion I really trust, I was surprised that you’re a twilight fan? I know almost nothing except commen knowledge things about that series, and I always assumed it was actually bad/un-feminist. What is it that you like so much that others seem to miss? I’m just genuinely curious about your take on the hate it always seems to get vs. it’s actual quality. I’m not gonna judge bc animorphs is also one of those books where you see it and assume it’s bad.

In over 14 years of loving this series, I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me why I enjoy it instead of simply trying to convince me that I’m wrong to do so. So thank you for that.

First and foremost, I love the Twilight saga because of the vivid detail in Stephenie Meyer’s writing style. The descriptions are so lush and dense with sensory information that you can practically bite down on them as you read. Bella and Jacob aren’t just sitting on the beach; they’re sitting on a gnarled log of driftwood, worn smooth at the top from where so many Quileute teens have sat upon it during bonfires but still uneven enough to rock on its branches when Bella suddenly stands to rage at her own mortality. Meyer describes that log in Twilight, so tangibly and with such economy of detail, that we recognize it immediately when Bella and Jacob return to that spot in Eclipse. I’ve always disliked the movies, because I’ve always felt that the best part of Meyer’s writing simply did not translate well to the screen.

Secondly, I love the feminism.

Okay, let’s take a quick pause to let everyone gasp and clutch their pearls over me calling Twilight a feminist work. I will address the criticisms later. For now, please just hear me out.

Twilight strikes me as a premier example of what Hélène Cixous means when she calls for “women’s writing,” or writing for women, about women, by women, with a strong focus on the concerns and strengths and desires of womanhood. This is a series about building and maintaining close relationships, both romantic and platonic. It celebrates beauty, and love, and care. Bella moves to Forks because she recognizes that her dad is lonely while her mom is quite the opposite, torn between family priorities. She doesn’t simply subsume her interests to those of other people, but instead actively chooses how and when and where to express her love for her birth family and her found families. Most of the other major decisions throughout the story — Alice “adopting” Bella, Carlisle moving the family to Alaska, Jacob becoming werewolf beta, the Cullens going up against the Volturi, etc. — are motivated by care and devotion for one’s family and friends. Even the selfish or morally ambiguous character choices are shown to be motivated by love. Rosalie tells Edward that Bella died because she genuinely thinks it’ll help him move on. Victoria creates an army that nearly destroys Forks because she’s avenging James. Alice abandons Bella and the others before the final battle because if she can’t save her entire family, then she’ll settle for saving her lover before letting him die in vain.

Not only is there a striking concern with love and care, but there’s also a strong commitment to avoiding violence. Bella’s eventual vamp-superpower proves to be preventing violence and protecting others, an awesome character decision that I’d argue gets set up as early as the first book. She lives in a violent world — this is a YA SF story, after all — but she has the power to suppress violence and create peace, both in herself and others. I was already sick of “power = ability to inflict damage” in YA stories well before I knew the word “patriarchy.” Twilight was one of the first books to convey to me that power could be refusing to do harm in spite of hunger or anger, that power could be shielding ones’ family, that power could be about building enough friendships and alliances to have an army at one’s back when facing an enemy too strong to take on alone.

Closely connected to all of that love and care, I love how much Twilight is about navigating teenage girlhood. Is it empowering, intersectional, or all-inclusive? Hell no. Does it still dare to suggest that a completely ordinary teenage girl could have valid concerns about the world? Yep. The main conflict of the story, as Stephen King so derisively explained, is about the romantic entanglements of a teenage girl, and the book therefore has no literary merit. (To quote my dad’s response: “Bold words from the guy who inflicted Firestarter on the world.”)

There is, indeed, a lot of romance in Twilight. There are a lot of clothes. Alice and Rosalie especially spend a lot of time on makeup, and hair, and choosing the prettiest cars and houses. Twilight embraces all the stereotypically “girly” concerns of adolescence, and makes no effort to apologize for or condemn them. Bella isn’t particularly good at performing them — she likes but doesn’t excel at shopping, fiercely defends her ugly car as ugly, hobbles through prom on crutches — but she can still enjoy the feeling of being pretty in a sparkly dress while dancing with her sparkly boyfriend. And Twilight, like Animorphs with Cassie, takes the daring step of treating that feeling as valid.

Speaking of sparkles, I love the commitment to the fantasy concept in Twilight, including the myriad mundanities that Meyer brings with that commitment. If you have super-speed, why not use it to play extreme baseball? If you’re a mindreader with a clairvoyant sister, why wouldn’t you two play mental chess games? I couldn’t tell you, after seven seasons of Buffy or eight of Vampire Diaries, what Spike or Damien or Angel or Stefan does all day when not brooding or lurking in the bushes to creep on human women. I can tell you what the Cullens get up to. Emmett and Rosalie work on their cars, usually by holding them overhead one-handed. Carlisle and Alice read plays, and sometimes talk the whole family into home Shakespeare productions. Edward and Carlisle debate theology, Emmett and Jasper have dumb athletic competitions, Edward and Esme play music, Alice manipulates stock markets, the twins go shopping online, etcetera. The Cullens feel real, feel like the vampires next door, in a way that Louis and Lestat simply do not.

To get to the elephant in the room — I just described Twilight as a feminist text! — let’s talk about the other thing the Cullens do for fun: they have sex. Weird sex. Kinky furniture-breaking sex. Sex that Emmett (who would know) compares to bear-wrestling. These books suck with regards to queer representation, but they are sex-positive. They feature an old-school Anglican protagonist offering his daughter-in-law a medical abortion. They treat Edward’s desire for sex only within marriage and Alice’s desire for sex outside of marriage as both being valid. Like I said, not groundbreaking, even by the standards of 2005, but still more than most teen novels do even today.

There’s a passage from Breaking Dawn��that people love to pull out of context as “everything wrong with Twilight in two paragraphs” because it describes Bella waking up the morning after sex with bruises on her arms. That moment is shocking out of context, to be sure — but in context, it’s the end result of an in-depth consent negotiation that lasts four books. Bella says that she’d like to become a vampire. Edward says okay, but only if she spends a few more years living as a human and considering that choice. Bella says okay, but only if Edward, not Carlisle, becomes the one to turn her. Edward says they can use his venom, but that Carlisle, who’s an MD, really needs to supervise the process. Bella doesn’t love the idea of Edward’s stepdad cockblocking what’s supposed to be an intimate moment, and so agrees only on the grounds that she gets to have sex with Edward as a human first. Edward’s hella Catholic, so he requests that they get married first. Bella’s super horny, so she demands that the wedding happen within six months. Edward says that he might hurt her during sex, and Bella says that she wants a little hurt during sex. They marry. They bang. During the banging, Edward makes every effort to be controlled and courteous and gentile, while Bella goes wild and crazy. The next morning, she has bruises and he does not. Edward apologizes, but Bella’s actually really into it. She spends a while admiring her sexy vamp-marked self in the mirror, touches the bruises many times, and reminds us yet again that Bella Swan’s whole M.O. is being a monsterfucker. Her kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.

To be clear, I think there are other aspects of the romance that get criticized for good reason. Edward does not negotiate with Bella before sneaking into her room to watch her sleep, and he does make unacceptable use of their power differences when he thinks she’s in danger of being mauled by werewolves. The text condemns Jacob’s “don’t wanna die a virgin” ploy to manipulate a kiss out of Bella, but not the wider conceit of all the male characters as possessing uncontrollable urges. Bella’s struggles to adjust to a new town feel very feminine and realistic; her amused tolerance of Jacob’s and Mike’s sexual harassment as the price for their friendship does not. Werewolf imprinting might be mostly platonic, but that doesn’t make it okay for Meyer to depict it as a form of soulmate bonding that happens with child characters. Those are good points, all around. I just wish that most of them didn’t come up in the context of post-hoc rationalizations for loathing the femininity of a feminine text.

I’m not calling Twilight an unproblematic series. I’m saying that it gets (rightly!) criticized for appropriating Quileute culture, while Buffy’s total absence of main characters of color and blatant anti-Romani racism are (wrongly!) not remarked upon. I'm saying that I’ve been told I’m a misogynist for liking Twilight but not for liking James Bond. I’m saying that there’s a reason people tend to go “oh, that makes so much sense!” when I let them in on the fact that reactive hatred for “Twitards” started and spread on 4Chan, later home of Gamergate and incel culture. I’m saying that Twilight depicts problematic relationship dynamics as sexy — but then so do Vampire Academy, Blue Bloods, Supernatural, Vladimir Tod, and Vampire Diaries. All of which take the time to stop and thumb their noses at Twilight, smug in the superiority of having vampires that fly rather than vampires that sparkle, and for thoroughly condemning teenage girls for being girly while continuing to show men inflicting violence on them.

After all, as Erin May Kelly puts it: “we live in a world taught to hate everything to do with little girls. We hate the books they read and the bands they like. Is there anything the world makes fun of more than One Direction and Twilight?” No one has ever called me a misogynist for liking the MCU, in spite of less than a third of its movies even managing to clear the low-low bar of the Bechdel test. Because people are still allowed to like Harry Potter in spite of its racism, or Lord of the Rings despite its imperialism. Because hatred for Twilight was never about its very real sexism, or the genuinely silly sparkle-vampires, until it had to justify itself as something other than hate for everything that teenage girls have ever dared openly love.

I enjoy the novels, and I enjoy the fan fiction that tries to fix some of the problems with the novels. I appreciate the extent to which Meyer has elevated fan culture, and made an effort to acknowledge her own past mistakes. I would love to be able to talk about my love for the series as a flawed but beautiful work of literature, but for now I’ll settle for asking that the world just let me enjoy it in peace.

#twilight #the twilight saga #breaking dawn #eclipse #new moon #stephenie meyer #fandom #nothing to do with animorphs #misogyny #ableist language #sexist language #long post #sexism #romance #anonymous #asks

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heavydirtysoul-24 · 4 years ago

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It's so weird that people in this country get so accustomed to all crazy shit this government does like literary every f*ckin' day.

I don't usually touch politics here for obvious reasons, but sometimes all this frustration and anger become too much to keep inside.

They are accusing the West of double standarts, and yeah maybe it does happen sometimes, but lying to your own people? Constantly and with every action making their everyday life worse? That is the worst imho.

They're telling us that they want people to be prosperous. In reality they are ruining the economy with every action they make. Through breaking international relationships and laws, putting impossible restrictions on businesses.

They say they stand for democracy. But at the same time every politics who is not with them or do not share their views they see as a threat. And act accordingly. Poisoning is very familiar tactic for them as we witnessed in previous years. Now they are passing the bill, that would ultimately ban all people who dare to disagree with them to get elected.

They say they care about environment. And at the same time spill after spill huge amounts of crude oil is contaminating our rivers, lakes, forests and everything else. Like almost every month there is a new ecological catostrophy.

They say thay care about science. Oh really? The official year of science, how they call it. Then explain to me why so many scientists ended up in prison just this year? One even died during the madeup lawsuit. And it's not uncommon.

They say they support the press. How about other sources than state media? How about independent newspapers? Or even self employed journalists? Locking them up, fabricating lawsuit against them, giving them huge fines. Does not look like supporting the press for me.

They say they support veterans, that the victory in WWII is one and only key 'moral code' for this nation. Military parades? Great! Now how about doing something actually meaningfull for those people, who fought the nazis. Provide them with decent housing at least. Don't use them as posters once in year to convince people that you care. You don't.

They say they are defending family values. Well, it's the complicated one. I'm not even gonna bring up the way of life many of them percieve - it's their own private business. But how about revoking every bill about domestic abuse? Normalizing victim-blaming, bulling? Fighting feminism movement? How is that even family values? Maybe it's more about patriarchy and dominance? Treating queer people as third-class people, banning same-sex marriage and child adoption, constant attacks and rising homophobia? I think That's what "family values" is for them. It's not love, caring, sympathy and all other things normal people associate family values with.

And that is just a sliver of reasons why so many people get frustrated and angry. Some are trying to change something, go on marches, become activists, trying to get in parliament. Some people are realizing that it's just too much for them to bear and leave the country, giving a big FU sign on their way out of here. Some are not that lucky and can't be active or leave the country at the moment. And that is the category I really don't want to fall into.

I decided to write it mostly for myself, like an outlet in some form. I can't use my first language here, at first I don't really like it much, thank you society and school culture for this, and the second reason should be quite obvious by now. So I'll just leave it here.

#random thought #looong random thought

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drsilverfish · 5 years ago

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Nine Minutes to Midnight

5x21 Two Minutes to Midnight

Nine episodes to beat God, and fifteen years since Kripke pitched his original On The Road fan-fiction meets folk horror.

I’ve had a lot of fun in this little corner of Tumblr SPN fandom, over the eight years I’ve been here. I arrived as a newbie in 2012, and people already here were kind to me. I’ve seen people come and go, get disillusioned with SPN and move onto new fandoms, or arrive latterly into this one, brimming with excitement.

This is a weird social media platform, and I doubt it will be around forever, as one of its joys is how singularly bad it has been at integrating advertising.

Some of my favourite things here have been;

Comments in the tags, often funny, thinky, joyful - love this element of Tumblr.

Coda fic - this short-form story-style, which leaps into the fan-fiction gaps, loud silences and lacunae of the text - what a joy.

All the different roles people take on in fandom, as labours of love - gif makers, fic and meta writers, artists, vidders, archivists, signal-boosters, enthusiastic readers and beta-readers, art-lovers, networkers, collaborators, question-askers and answerers, and participants of all kinds (introvert and extrovert).

Completely unrelated to SPN, posts which are full of puns and hilarity, from “lik the bred” to Brits vs Americans on the subject of drinking tea. I still love Tumblr’s collective sense of humour; it’s witty and charming.

The language of gifs; those delightful comtemporary hieroglyphics of emotive expression.

The diversity - English is the shared language, but gradually it’s apparent that despite US dominance of the site, there are people from all over the world here, whose native tongues range from Russian to Italian to Brazilian Portuguese.

The collective meta experience - sharing “live” textual analysis has been huge fun. Viewing a text in a hive mind this way always shows you something you’d have missed on your own. It’s like holding up a crystal to a thousand lights and watching all the different refractions happening at once.

Again, not SPN specific, but experts in various subjects, from Egyptology to Medieval History suddenly emerging from the depths to provide a passionate and erudite exposition on their topic. Often prefaced with, “My time has come...”

Fandom has a dark side. It can be a coping mechansim, for many, in a healthy or less healthy way. There are unfortunately, always the formation of various “in-groups” and “out-groups”, ship wars, harrassment (of other fans, cast and crew), entitlement, and wild unpleasantness. And, that scourge of the internet in general; performative outrage (otherwise known as the outrage economy) which turns up the dial on provocative statements and negative emotion because that acts as catnip for engagement. A lot of people act out their shadow-selves online, projecting their own internal stuff onto others, from behind the screen.

Almost no media texts get to run as long as SPN (fifteen years) but my first fandom was (and is) Doctor Who and that has been going for over 50. It has some absolutely horrendously toxic spaces and places online, and many of pure joy. My advice is - find the joy.

Stories, by inviting us into the shoes of others, teach us at their (and our) best, the invaluable gift of empathy.

Take care of yourselves. Endings are hard, no doubt.

Special shout-out to fellow LGBTQ+ fans - hold onto your hearts.

It can be complicated loving a story telling its queer (romantic/ erotic) love story implicitly (i.e. in subtext).

Don’t forget (as I always say in my tags) subtext is part of narrative - meaning, the totality of a text contains its explicit and implicit elements; its text and its subtext, just like Metatron (aka Robbie T) told us in 9x18 Metafiction.

I wasn’t in the fandom myself, here on Tumblr, but I saw some of the fall-out from BBC Sherlock S4, and it was particularly distressing to see so many young LGBTQ+ fans feeling deeply hurt and even suicidal, because they’d read all the (extensively crafted) queer subtext in that show as a promise which would, inevitably, lead to an unequivocal queer “coming out” for John and Sherlock.

Those queer fans weren’t “self-queerbaiting” - they were just reading the totality of the text. And after all, why not read the subtext that way, as a promise? Being of a generation who’d already gotten to see many explicitly out queer characters on-screen; why not dare to imagine the subtext was a slow-burn romance with an inevitable “out” climax? Especially because Mark Gatiss (one of the writers) is out and queer himself, young queer fans were even more certain that his Sherlock would be the first “out” queer Sherlock on-screen (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1970, which Gatiss is on record as being a fan of, had previously queer-coded Holmes, as indeed does Downey’s version, in Sherlock, 2009, and Sherlock 2: A Game of Shadows, 2011.)

Of course, the corporate and production politics were no doubt complex behind the scenes at the BBC, and Gatiss himself (apparently) saw things differently saying (in an interview in Oct 2010):

“No, I don’t think I’d make a kind of gay programme. It’s much more interesting when it’s not about a single issue. And equally, I find flirting with the homoeroticism in Sherlock much more interesting.” (Buzz Magazine Oct 2010: p10).

All of which, is why I’ve been adding a disclaimer to my readings of SPN’s queer subtext for a while now - namely, that reading the subtext doesn’t promise a rainbow of obviousness at the end.

As I said, take care of your hearts, lovelies.

Perhaps we shouldn’t need the narrative closet any longer.

But, we are walking between worlds, an old one and a new, both of them currently existing simultaneously, especially in a globalised world.

Queer audience fractions are, generally, more attuned to queer subtext, because it often uses codes derived from queer culture (although reading cinematic/ television subtext of all kinds is a learned skill, and no one is born with text-reading gaydar). So, whilst queer subtext may appear “loud” to some audience fractions, it remains invisible to others. That is, historically, by design, because, whilst “out” queer characters have gradually emerged on-screen since the 1950s [and the end of the Hays Code in Hollywood] queerness was, and still is (depending on where one is in the world) subject to legal penalty, state censorship or corporate production censorship.

A contemporary kind of state censorship is e.g. in China, where overt LGBTQ+ themes and characters cannot be depicted on-screen (hence, the queer subtext in The Untamed). A contemporary commodity kind of censorship might be e.g. notes from the Network, or TPTB at Marvel Studios with an eye on box-office. Queer subtext has the ability to slip past the censors, or be tolerated by them; because, now you see it/ now you don’t. A character with a straight “surface” reading and a queer subtextual one may (depending on the film/ TV product and its market etc,) be seen to pose less risk as a commercial product, whilst being able to appeal to different audience fractions simultaneously. For example, Captain Marvel (2019) and, as above, BBC Sherlock (2010-2017).

And yes, it’s complicated, because in the midst of that still extant censorship, which queer writers and other creatives on set may indeed be trying to work around by using queer subtext, we can see another world is possible. More out queer stories are being told. And, although we may love to see implicit queerness rather than no queerness at all, and indeed although implicit queerness may (arguably) have the freedom (still) to tell less boundaried or stereotyped stories than explicit queerness (with powerful effects on the audience fractions, both queer and straight, who do “see” it) we can’t deny that it does suit corporate entities, in some cases, to be able to appeal to a dual audience without the perceived “risk” of “outness”. A form of “queer-sploitation” which leads to the charge of “queer-baiting”.

The issue is, perhaps, particularly one surrounding male hero characters in Hollywood (and here in the UK) a) because “queer stories” are (still) often, not seen as likely to have universal appeal for broader audiences, whereas “straight stories” are not framed as “straight stories” but as universal ones, and b) because of the persistence of the prejudiced belief in particular that “queerness” undermines masculinity, especially “heroic” masculinity (here we have diverged markedly from the ancient Greeks). It’s somewhat different for female characters, but that’s another post. Fantasy, in the on-screen medium (if less so in fiction or comics) appears to be a more regressive genre than, say, comedy, in terms of the depiction of “out” queer central (rather than side) characters, with the exception of the Wachowskis’ Sense8 (2015-18) in which pretty much everyone is queer. I know there’s Ruby’ Rose’s Batwoman (2019- ) which I haven’t had a chance to check out yet, and we’ve got some queer Marvel (side) heroes upcoming, apparently; Valkyrie in Thor: Love and Thunder and Phastos in The Eternals - let’s see how that goes.

Moreover, queer subtext doesn’t have an exact analogy i.e. a “straight subtext” equivalent. Yes, many films and TV shows imply romantic/ sexual tension and interest between M/ F (pre)couples before it is “confirmed” they’re into each other in the text. However, because straight is the default assumption, audiences may muse and disagree about the potential for a M/ F romance at the implicit stage (as they have done in SPN fandom re Sam/ Rowena) but they don’t ask - “Does this mean they might be straight ????” It is assumed. Queerness, on the other hand, in order to be widely recognised (rather than solely by the subtext-reading audience fraction) must “come out” in some manner, explicitly, in the text (I don’t mean graphically, but “beyond reasonable doubt”). In other words, as painful as it is, we are not starting on a level playing field. It’s not fair, but it is the deal.

That doesn’t mean we can’t love contemporary queer subtextual stories, just that it’s important to acknowledge it can be painful, for some, to do so, and just as it’s important to acknowlege it’s OK to find them too painful to love, also (historical texts obviously operated under different circumstances).

Queer audiences are not homogenous. We can, and do, see things differently from one another, perhaps particularly across generations.

It is the case however, I think, that the structuring of a story by the narrative closet, as SPN has been structured by the narrative closet (up to this point, mid S15) (by which I mean its queerness is transparent to some, invisible to others, by design) cannot help but remind many queer audience members of our own struggles with the real world closet. Indeed that may make the story attractive, or unattractive, to different folk.

Incidentally, which is why I avoid it, I think the “it’s canon”/ “it’s subtext” debate is a false dichotomy and a bit confusing, as there are two, perfectly legitimate (within their own terms) definitions of “canon”. In the fandom sense, where “canon” means a romantic/ erotic pairing explicitly confirmed in the text, Destiel (meaning romantic/ erotic orientation between Dean and Cas) is not “canon” (as at 15x11). It is implied. Of course, it is explicit text that they care deeply for one another - “You’re my family. I love you, I love all of you” (12x12 Stuck in the Middle with You), “You’re my best friend” (15x09 The Trap). The exact nature of that relationship remains, however, deliberately, ambiguous.

In the literary sense, in which “canon” means “the official body of work”, SPN’s official body of work contains a metric tonne of implicit romantic/ erotic Dean/ Cas, so, it is part of the SPN “canon” in that sense - “subtextual canon” if you like. Although, of course, because implied, therefore open to interpretation.... deliberately transparent to some and invisible to others.

Despite all this complexity, and, indeed despite other elements of the SPN narrative which I have struggled with personally (the early seasons’ misogyny is off the charts sometimes, the brutally insensitive manner of Charlie’s death) I have loved this story, Supernatural, truly, madly, deeply, in large part because of its (implicit) queerness. And for may other reasons additionally, from its folkloric beginnings and dark initial cinematographic palette, to its melodrama, to its, eventual, Ourboros structure, and its Jungian alchemical journey marrying the cosmic to the earthly.

Reading the show without the queer subtext remains possible, but oh boy is that analogous to only considering the above sea-level portion of an iceberg.

I would prefer a rainbow of obviousness at The EndTM, but I don’t expect one. What I expect is continued, deliberate, ambiguity. Something I am sure we will be debating the ethics of, long after.

I could be wrong :-). But I am taking my own advice, and taking care of my heart.

For now, it’s nine minutes to midnight; let’s see how the story ends.

And afterwards, however the chips may fall, the characters will (as this most meta-narrative of seasons has been busy telling us) be set free of “Chuck’s” control. They will belong to us, in a thousand thousand fan-works, for as long as we care to keep on loving them.

#Supernatural #SPN meta #Meta #5x21 #Two Minutes to Midnight #Endings are hard #Who am I kidding #Fandom is going to go wild #Whatever happens #The great queerbaiting debate #Reading Subtext #Dean is bisexual #Destiel #Still subtext #But subtext is part of narrative

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olderthannetfic · 5 years ago

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It’s International Fanworks Day and also the 30th and final post in this series. If you follow my tumblr, you know that my true fandom isn’t buddy cops or Highlander or any of those things. No, my true fandom is...

WANK

No matter which bitchy piece of fujo-course nonsense you’re looking at on tumblr, no matter which debate about WNGWJLEO or women in slash or fanfiction vs. media you're reblogging, your grandma was having that fight in a zine somewhere in 1985 and at Escapade in the 90s.

Here’s a vid review from 2002:

"History Repeating," [...] was an Amanda vid. In-fucking-credible. Who knew? Who knew I could like Amanda? Who knew there were fresh HL clips I hadn't seen a thousand times before in HL vids? (Of course, as someone pointed out, she had her own spin-off.) This rocked--sharp, fast cutting and pretty, pretty shots, with a hot bisexy vibe running through it. And, you know, people like to say that there's all this self-hating misogyny in fans--you know, that women hate shows about women, hate women characters breaking up the OTP, etc. But when you see a femme-centric vid like this bring down the house, you really have to wonder. Is it misogyny, really, or is just that we usually see a bunch of crap representations of women in media and resist them?

So on the theme of There Is Nothing New Under The Sun, here is a selection of past Escapade panels on gender, representation, and problematicness:

1993 - Anti-Feminism in Slash Fandom (Or, how 'it was never this good with a woman' syndrome... where are the women, and why do we care?)

1995 - Why Lesbians Read Slash - (What's the attraction? Why do they care? Why do they write it?)

1996 - Character Bisexuality: Convenient fiction or character trait? (Is this a good compromise between "We're not gay, we just love each other" and "I was gay all along and just faking it with women"? Or is this too easy? Special mention for the stereotypical bisexual villian who's evil, sexy, and can come on to everyone.)

1996 - Female Heroes: Female Empowerment, or male power in women's bodies? (Give a woman a gun and make her really tough. Wow, cool! yes, or no? Are we celebrating women, or are we merely putting breasts on male action heroes? Heroines under discussion may include (but not be limited to) Sara Connor, Ripley, Vasquez, Thelma & Louise.)

1997 - Gender Astigmatism (The Gender Continuum: in what we read, in what we write, and what we are, there is always a connection with a point on the gender continuum. How do our definitions of "feminine" and "masculine" influence our creativity? Where do bisexual characters fit in? (besides there, you dirty-minded person!)

1998 - Xena: Does Girl-Slash Get Us Going? (Xena is the first show with a feminine couple to be really popular. What kind of slash fans are interested? Does gender orientation matter? Or do slash fans love slashy couples regardless of their gender? Can m/m fans be 'converted' to f/f fans?)

1998 - Bastards & the Women Who Love Them (When Methos says, "you live to serve me," any normal '90s woman says, "I don't think so!... or does she? A happy contemplation on the virtues of handsome thugs.)

1998 - Slash: a Continuation of Women's Writing, led by Constance Penley (In case you didn't know, in her recent book NASA/TREK (yes, the slash is intentional), she addressed slash as a continuum of women's writing, combining women's romance, and the male quest romance. Join her for a discussion of slash -- where it was, where it is, where it might be going.)

1998 - The Trauma of Slash Fans in Het Fandoms (Or, what to do when find women doing all that cool, tough-guy stuff you love.)

1999 - Male Slash Fans - Welcome Voice, or Infringement? (Slash is written by women for women — or is it? The Internet has attracted new fans, including the "male slash fan". Who is he? What does he think of what "we" do? Do we care?)

2002 - Femslash (General discussion on female/female slash fiction. If Buffy wanted something cold and hard between her legs, why didn't she just choose silicon?)

2003 - Slash: Feminist political act or really good porn?

2005 - Where have all the lesbians gone? (When some slash lists explicitly state m/m only, where do you go for femslash? Are there any hot femslash couples? Pimp your femslash fandom here, or bemoan the lack of strung female characters in the current conservative social climate.)

2007 - Femslash: The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Femslash. It's a work that makes some of our hearts leap for joy and inspires complete and total disinterset—or even dislike and disdain—in others. Where can we find the good stuff? What makes it good? And what's up with the haters?)

2007 - SGA: The Women of Atlantis (What do we like about how the women of SGA are written and portrayed, and what makes us wince? What do we think about how their issues are being woven into the show's narrative?)

2008 - Gay is Not Slash (...even though slash is sometimes gay. The current argument about m/m romances by women as taking recognition *away* from male gay writers, depends on m/m writing being intended as gay lit. And slash, for one, isn't, even if there can be overlap. What overlaps? What doesn't? What examples do fans like?

2009 - Female Character Stories: Halfamoon, Full Moon or Just Moony (F/f slash, and other stories centered on female characters, are gaining visibility in fandom. Are there things fens will write about women that we won't about men? (Given MPreg, *are* there?) Should f/f be like m/m, or is it unavoidably different?)

2011 - My ***** is Not Ideologically Driven, But is it Homophobic (Slash fandom often sees itself as a mostly liberal community. IDIC, right? But recently there's been a slash backlash: it's anti-feminist, a 'symptom' of internalized misogyny. We're 'erasing' the women characters after all. Is slash homophobic? Does slash fandom appropriate gay culture? Is it awesome and ennobling as it makes us happy in our panties, or is all that self-hatred bubbling just beneath the surface of our porn?)

2012 - Natural Woman (We've lamented the lack of strong, believable female characters (who dress appropriately). But now we have them: Gemma Teller and Audrey Parker; Salt and Haywire; we've got Bechdel-passing women who look like they can throw a punch. Still, most of them are in the sci-fi or action genre, so are we really seeing progress? And what are we doing with them, as fans?)

2012 - Don't Call It a Bromance (It's Just Canon) (TPTB are increasingly aware of slash, and bromance is regular fare on TV canon these days. Does overt bromance make the fic and art hotter or just vanilla? Is there an anti-slash backlash in our shows? Is the emphasis on men's relationships making women disappear? Inquiring minds want to know. If you have answers, theories, or just want to squee, join in the fun!)

2014 - (The End of?) Ladybashing in Slashfic (Slashfic used to regularly feature bashing of female characters. Now, blatant bashing seems less fashionable. If you recognize this trend, let's talk! Were most ladybashing fics ones for juggernaut pairings in megafandoms, or were they everywhere? What's causing the change: more women in leading roles/ensemble casts, fic writers being more conscious to avoid bashing ladies even if they're not their favorites, more willingness to blame show writers' bad writing (instead of the character being just bad/evil/stupid) for bad female characters, or something else entirely?)

2015 - Fifty Shades of Fandom (Fifty Shades of Grey has become the representation of fan fiction in mainstream culture. It’s bad fan fiction, and it’s being used to ridicule women while making millions off women readers and viewers. Can we connect with these women: proto-fans who would love to read, and maybe write, great fan fiction if they found it? Can we use the FSoG phenomenon to expand our community? Does keeping our doors closed and our mouths shut perpetuate both monetization of our fan culture and misogynist scorn?)

2016 - Who Are We? (How do we define ourselves in this age of so many OT3s and team orgy pairings? Does m/m/f count as "slash"? Is slash-only space slipping away? (And would that be bad?) Do m/m and f/f belong together more than they do with m/f? Is "Media Fandom" a valid term any longer? Who are we if we start shipping het?)

2016 - Ladies Loving Ladies. (There would seem to be enough queer women in fandom to write/want more f/f. Do lesbians write f/f, m/m? Both? Do straight women? Or are we still missing the iconic female characters and relationships that create a great slash fandom? Did they figure out the answer to this question at TGIF/F and if so, what is it?)

2016 - By Us For Us (Fic, even kinky slash, is practically mainstream these days. The ebook revolution puts publishing within reach of almost anyone. Sundance hits have been filmed on iPhones. So why aren't fangirls making more media? Or is it happening right under our noses? Is this a place where our women's gift economy does our community a disservice? Discuss what's out there, what we'd like to see, and what's holding us back.)

2017 - LGBTQIA+ in Slash Fandom (Queer fans have always been here. In a subculture often defined as "for" straight women, what do we as fans have to say about non-straight, non-cis, and non-conventional sexuality and gender in fanfiction, in fandom, and in the larger culture?)

2018 - Confronting the Tensions Between Slash and Queer Representation (Slash fandom thrives on homoerotic subtext. Many queer fans are unwilling to settle for this quasi-representation. Part of every slash fandom seems loudly invested in their ship becoming canon. Some are queer fans who want actual textual representation in their favorite shows, and some are fans using queer politics to fight ship wars. Then the “slash is not activism” posts make the rounds. Is slash activism? Is advocating for slash ships in canon the same thing as advocating for queer representation?)

2018 - Representing Slashers (What does "representation" in the media mean to us? We know what more gay or POC representation means, but what about slash fandom, which is largely female and focused on bodies that don't resemble our own? Would better female characters in media better represent us? Or male characters written for a female audience? Come talk about the intersection of slash, personal identity, and media representation.)

2018 - Anonymity in Slash Fandom: Choosing to Hide (Why do the majority of slash fans hide their hobby? Is it fear of blackmail? Embarrassment? Fear of losing employment? How does this affect your happiness? How does this affect your security? What would an ideal world look like? Who would/have you told about your interest in slash? Who would you never, ever, tell?)

2019 - Fandom Post-Slash? (In an era of "ships" and #pairing #tags on Tumblr and AO3, has the "slash" label lost its meaning? Same-gender pairings are as popular as ever and fans still ID pairings with a virgule between the names, but how many fans still call m/m and f/f slash or femslash? How many fans identify as "slashers?" Het and slash were opposing binaries which few fans crossed. Are these barriers breaking down? What purpose has the term "slash" served? Has fandom moved

past it and, if so, what does that mean?)

#escapade 2020 #escapade con #fandom meta #fandom history

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slaaneshfic · 5 years ago

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There is No Reason for you to Live. Part two: Excess

This is part of chapter I have written in the last two weeks, which uses the game Sticky Zeitgeist: Episode 2 Aperitif by Porpentine and Rook to draw out processes of art practice. I presented the beginning of the first part of this chapter at Beyond The Console: Gender and Narrative Games in London at the start of 2019. This is still very much a work in process, I’ve not even read this section back before posting it here. But I am very interested in the overlaps between Cixous’s figure of “woman”, “Becoming-Woman / Becoming-Girl” in Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille/Kristeva’s “Abjection” and “Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory” in regards art practice and trans* identity.

Part two: Excess “Small salvage is $5. Hear that sis, you’re $5. Nooooo” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

Excess is a concept which arises in many areas of George Batailles work which spans art, literature, politics, economics, anthropology and mysticism. The concept, or rather an aspect of it, is particularly near the surface and therefore easy for us to grasp here, in Bataille’s essay “The Notion of Expenditure” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille begins by stating that while “there is nothing that permits on to define what is useful to man” (Bataille, 1985). Classical utility can be understood as follows;

“On the one hand, this material utility is limited to acquisition (in practice, to production) and to the conservation of goods; on the other, it is limited to reproduction and to the conservation of human life” (Bataille, 1985).

In contrast to utility Bataille positions “pleasure”, which he argues society judges to be lesser than utility in the eyes of society and is therefore permissible as a “concession” (Bataille, 1985). However Bataille proposes that just as a young man’s desire to waste and destroy demonstrates that there is a need for this kind of pleasure even while this cannot be given a “utilitarian justification”, “human society can have, just as he does, an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille sets this up as the tension between the ideological authority and the real needs for “nonproductive expenditure” which are at times not even articulable through the language of that authority. As examples of unproductive expenditure Bataille offers the following list;

“Luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)” (Bataille, 1985).

A handful of these examples are examined further, but Bataille argues that in each “the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for the activity to take on its true meaning” (Bataille, 1985). Just as Lyotard identified affect as the point of excess which marks art apart from other things, and Cixous defines her figure of woman in terms of an unending outpouring, Bataille has identified “the principle of loss” (Bataille, 1985) as essential to a range of activities including but spreading beyond art and literature. The excess in Lyotard as deployed by O’Sullivan is that which is beyond the system of accounting for art, namely affect. In Cixous the excess is the capacity of the artist-figure woman when enacting ecriture feminine, to operate beyond the system prescribed by power to the production of art. As Allan Stoekl notes in his introduction to the edited volume “George Bataille Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927 - 1939”, for Bataille “People create in order to expand, and if they retain things they have produced, it is only to allow themselves to continue living, and thus destroying” (Stoekl, 1985). Bataille’s nonproductive expenditure is what is being freed in Cixous’s process of Ecriture Feminine, and I would therefore further argue, is being deployed in Aperitif, an artwork which deals with excesses both offered and implied (and therefore to be created at the point of interface with audience). More than this though, Bataillian excesses appear within the world of the game which the characters, and by extension us as players occupy. I would like to explore how different kinds of excess appear in Aperitif, and how these fit with Bataille’s observations around class struggle and manner in which those in power retain control of non-productive expenditure, including the expenditure of other beings. Finally I will consider these excess as areas which clarify Aperitif as abstracted horror and Ecriture Feminine.

A point where waste is rendered visible in Aperitif, in The Laugh of The Medusa, and in the work of Bataille, in the act of masturbatation. The character Ever, from whose perspective we begin Aperitif is the sole player character in the episode of the “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist” which precedes it, “Hyperslime” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017) [KEYWORD Link to Smeared into the Environment]. Ever’s story in Hyperslime begins with a scene of anal drug use and masturbation which is interupted by the call to attend work. In the following episode, Aperitif, we learn that this work is in fact community service after Ever “whacked off in public” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This detail of Ever’s life is exposed by Brava but in Ever’s interior monologue we learn that she herself does not fully understand why it occurred. Ever can only speculate on the reason for her doing something she identifies as harmful, and that the experience was like “watching through a window” after which she “blacked out” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). As an aspect of Ever’s character masturbation points to her isolation and desire, and to her struggle with the unbearable tension of shame which she alludes to when considering that “maybe I just wanted what they thought about me to come true” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This enfolding of personal desire, the projection of being seen by another, the need to resolve an uncertainty, and the potential shame which runs through it is precisely how Cixous describes the struggle to produce Ecriture Feminine;

“[Y]ouv’e written a little, but in secret and it wasn’t good because you punished yourself for writing because it didn't go all the way; or because you wrote irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further but to attenuate the tension a bit, just to take the edge off” (Cixous, 1976).

Ever, who the artists attribute the title/archetype/role “The Loser”, seems perpetually to be trying to manage the tension of her desires, with the only temporary resolution occurring in some kind of overwhelming loss of self. The struggle for a creative process which Cixous describes is not something I can identify in Aperitif because it is very much embedded in the experience of the process of making, which I do not have access to. However, I would argue that Aperitif is open to being played in a manner which is analogous if not in a similar affective register to the tension and collapse cycles of Ever. We begin both Aperitif and its prequel controlling Ever, but prior to the narrative beginning and still within the context of the title menu the game instructs us that we can “hold escape until you black out” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). On one hand this instruction is informing player-audience of the keypress which will allow them to exit the game. On the other hand, the use of the term “black out” echo’s Ever’s use of the same. When playing the game-artwork, I feel that the means of exiting has been embedded with an emotional resonance. Playing the game-artwork now has a resonance with Ever’s narrative, even outside of the points of play where I am controlling her character. The emotional content of the game is foregrounded, and the promise of the opportunity to in a manner, ‘lose consciousness’ as an escape from it invites/dares the audience-player to engage more with that content. We have permission to be a loser, to fail.

The concept of failure here is made complex when it is brought into the parameters of the game itself. It becomes an action. Ever berates herself for failure, but the artwork-game does not pass this judgement, and in aligning us with her and with failure, it invites us to not pass judgement either. Returning to Cixous, the other resonance of the allegory of masturbation to Ecriture Feminine is that the writer is given permission to write for themselves and for the act of writing to be self gratifying rather than requiring it before another. In “The “Onanism of Poetry”: walt whitman, rob halpern and the deconstruction of masturbation” the poet and lecturer Sam Ladkin notes the contradiction in the considered works “between masturbation as the failure of fecundity, spent energy without the returns of an investment” and something which has value in sowing “male seed across the typically female gendered earth” (Ladkin, 2015). In Ladkin’s work, the discourse around Onan, the poets being discussed, and the particular queer theory used tends toward the image and language of male homosexual desire but the author emphasises that beneith this the structure of “failed or suspended address” is not specific to a particualr “gendered identification fo desire” (Ladkin, 2015). In Cixous this contradiction between value and waste is articulated as fight to develop one’s own value system. To engage based upon the subjects desire, rather than exchange within an external economy which ascribes or denies a degree of value based on adherence to preexisting parameters. Ladkin explores the potential to “recuperate the wasteful excess of masturbation via the general economy of Bataille” yet in the author’s focus on the ejaculatory “economy of finitude” and the monetary economy of pornography, this avenue is effectively discounted and not further pursued (Ladkin, 2015). However I think there is a different dialectic at play in the systems of Bataille, and which are played out in the world of Aperitif as the struggle between the individual release of excess of the player characters, and the destructive forms of excess employed by power and authority, which render both landscape and those same player characters, as waste.

Bataille lays out his position that “Man is an effect of the surplus of energy: The extreme richness of his elevated activities must be principally defined as the dazzling liberation of an excess. The energy liberated in man flourishes and makes useless splendor endlessly visible” (Bataille, 2013). In Aperitif, this dazzling liberation of an excess is attempted by characters such as Brava, but it is always curtailed by the tyranny of an outer authority, the call to attend community service, the police. The motif of masturbation in Aperitif points to repeated denial of excess in the following of individual desire. As previously noted, character’s remain in a limbo of struggling survival, to “never perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). In this state the following of individual desire into the expression of excess is denied to everyone except those who can afford it, as Brava recalls;

“When the internet 3 was invented the economy of really extra fucked, most stores were automated. Except the usual dollhouse experiments ran by rich people who fantasized about running a restaurant or cupcake shack of some shit” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Bataille argues that “As the class that possesses the wealth -- having received with wealth the obligation of functional expenditure -- the modern bourgeoisie is characterized by the refusal in principle of that obligation” (Bataille, 1985). Bataille maps how earlier structures of social and material power would have led to the possessors of such power and wealth to express this through expenditure such as feasts, sacrifices and the construction of elaborate religious and cultural objects. In contrast to this, the logic of accumulation unders Capitalism leads to a “hatred of expenditure” (Bataille, 1985). In Aperitif this is demonstrated in the quote above from Brava showing that even with full automation, the bourgeois can only either imagine, or allow itself, a useless expenditure which takes the surface form of work by running a “cupcake shack” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

There is a second manner in which excess plays out through the agency of the authority in Aperitif and this is concerned with the rendering of subjects as objects, and then waste. Cultural theorist Sylvere Lotringer attempted to reexamine the concept of ‘Abjection’ in the work of Bataille, identifying a different trajectory from that subsequently developed by Kristeva in “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (Kristeva, 1984). Lotringer’s short essay “Les Miserables” (Lotringer, 1999) positions Bataille’s fragmentary addresses of abjection written in the early 1930s as specifically in response to the “only truly original political formation to have emerged since the end of WWI [...] fascism” (Lotringer, 1999). Lotringer notes that in “The Notion of Expenditure” Batialle deplores the manner in which the bourgeoisie attenuate the damage done and “ameliorate the lot of the workers” (Bataille, 1985) as “abysmal hypocrisy” (Lotringer, 1999); “The ultimate goal; of industrial masters, he asserted, wasn’t profit or accumulation, but the will to turn workers into pure refuse. Instead of extracting surplus value from the wretched population working in [the] factory, they enjoyed a surplus value of cruetly” (Lotringer, 1999).

The world of Aperitif presents a world in which authority has still not passed through its hypocrisy, but nevertheless continues to render the workers as waste. The company that employers Ever and the others to scavenge is represented by a character called “The Therapist”, which at least suggests a role of care, yet the job remains one of collecting scrap from a toxic environment which degrades and destroys their bodies (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Lotringer’s published his essay Les Miserables in the edited book “More & Less” along with Bataille’s essay “Abjection and Miserable Forms” and interview with Kristeva titled “Fetishizing the Abject” (Bataille, 1999; Lotringer, 1999; Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Both Lotringer’s essay, and the line of questioning in the interview are in part concerned with a bifurcation within Bataille’s concept of abjection, which has not been given as much attention in its rearticulation and development by Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and that works continued influence. Lotringer draws from Bataille a distinction between “The union of miserables reserved for subversion” and “wretched men rejected into negative abjection” (Lotringer, 1999).

The difference between the positive abjection which leads to action, solidarity, and perhaps martyrdom, and the negative abjection which leads simply to inertial, apathy, and alienation. The tension between these two forms of Abjection is something which appears throughout Aperitif, as its protagonists navigate a world of trash, see themselves to degrees become or be made trash, and navigate the threshold between agency and alienation. In his summary, makes the following statement about Abjection without differentiating between the positive or negative form;

“Abjection doesn't result from a dialectical operation- feeling abject when “abjectified” in someone else’s eyes, or reclaiming abjection as an identity feature- but precisely when dialectics breaks down. When it ceases to be experienced as an act of exclusion to become an autonomous condition, it is then, and only then, that abjection sets in” (Lotringer, 1999).

It is unclear in this text whether Lotringer is arguing that what he elsewhere describes as people “becoming things to themselves” (Lotringer, 1999) defines Abjection in both positive and negative forms, or whether he is arguing for the primacy of the negative form. It is possible to read this as Lotringer trying to shift the definition of Abject to the negative, and the interview with Kristeva that will be addressed shortly in some ways supports this view.

Returning to Goard’s text on the trans* body and the cyborg it is worth nothing the importance of the process by which either are rendered Abject is addressed, though with different terminology;

“The dream of a world without surplus, illegitimate bodies is not feasible without a society that relies on surplus” (Goard, 2017).

Goard makes steps toward a politics whereby “bodies-made-surplus” (or trans* people and others) are not redefined, rearticulated and included, but simply allowed to exist (Goard, 2017). The politics not of “defining but defending” (Goard, 2017). Goard’s position seems to cut across Lotringer, proposing the act of oneself making and being made a thing as still containing revolutionary agency. In Lotringer’s reading of Bataille’s Abjection, at least in its negative form, is a place without hope of agency, a kind of living death. However Goard does seem to offer a position which is neither that living death, nor the simple dialectical struggle of being labeled abject and owning this label. Goard’s proposal becomes about a surplus yes, but an undefinable surplus which crosses categories of gender, class, race, ability, and attempts to tactically use such categories whilst aiming to ultimately destroy them. Goard articulates this party with the statement that “we should be deeply skeptical of placing value on the acquisition of formal rights when they are used in the legitimation of a violent border regime” (Goard, 2017). At the same time, Goard refuses the dialectic of power vs resistance by pointing out that the tactic entering into established modes of identity such as the gender binary are important at times for safety and so should not exclude a person from solidarity toward a common project of gender abolition for example.

[Footnote: The acquisition of rights for one group used as a means to justify is articulated by post-colonial theorist Jasbir Puar as “Homonationalism” in the 2007 book “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times” and developed further in the text “" I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess": Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” (Puar, 2007, 2012). In the latter text Puar focuses on expanding upon the form’s negotiation between Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality”, “analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation” and an assembalge model which identifies “ the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality” (Puar, 2012). Puar sees these too positions not as “oppositional but rather,[...] frictional (Puar, 2012).]

As has been indicated throughout this chapter, Aperitif frequently plays establishing categories, names, structures, or identities, and having things which are surplus to these, which disrupt with either a counter-order, or the refusal of any order. Characters in some places self-define their identity on an axis of the gender binary, whereas the the game leaves other identity markers not only unknown but unacknowledged. The game frames and withholds information through its limited graphics showing animal ears, and text which trails off to convey emotion through lack of definition. An implication through explicit and implied information is that all characters in Aperitif are “girls”. However this category is broken open so wide as to be more in line with Cixous use of woman as catagory abstracted from sex, gender, or identity. “Girl” can be a category if it is deployed in that way, or it can something less stable.

Something about the four protagonists in Aperitif that remains consistent, and is presented unambiguously, is that the society they inhabit does not value their existence. Throughout the narrative, each protagonist struggles with whether or not they themselves value their own own existence. Society is ordered in a way that each of the four girls needs to undertake a job which is extremely damaging to their physical and mental health. A common thread throughout their conversations and many interior monologues is the consideration of whether than can, or should, survive this. In the interview with Lotringer titled “Fetishizing The Abject”, Kristeva describes her development of the concept through researching “borderline” clinical states in psychoanalysis;

“Without going as far as psychotic persecution, without going as far as autistic withdrawal, [the patent] creates a sort of territory between the two, which he often inhabits with a feeling of unworthiness, of even deterioration, a sort of physical abjection if you like” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999).

It would be out of the remit of this research to follow further into these pathologies. However; the oscillation of internal states, struggle, exploded categories, the question of self worth and being made thing invites another text to placed alongside Aperitif and Abjection. “Sick Woman Theory” by writer and artist Johanna Hedva (Hedva, 2016) is an examination of the politics which intersect in the bodies of disabled people, and offers a figure of protest in the form of the Sick Woman. As Hedva states, “Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible” (Hedva, 2016). Applying Sick Woman Theory to hypothetical borderline case described by Kristeva repositions them as a political agent;

“The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible” (Hedva, 2016).

As the quotation marks around medical terms indicate, Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory is a kind of tactical categorization in order to refute a larger number of categories. Sick Woman Theory reads Abjection not from the position of analyst, but “the person with autism whom the world is trying to “cure”” as well as a multitude of other positions whose comonolity is that they are disenfranchised, suffering, and abused (Hedva, 2016). From the former position, categories become the norm, and things which transgress them a deviation or disruption. From the latter position of the multitude, the transgression across categories is the norm. It is possible to read the category of “girl” in Aperitif as Sick Woman, just as both, like Cixous’s woman’s writing, serve to encapsulate a sea of difference with an act of refusal against categories.

As mentioned previously in this chapter, a focus of Lotringer’s interview with Kristeva is questioning whether Abjection can form an oppositional function to power. Lotringer is particularly concerned with what he sees a broad tendency or movement within art and culture which attempts to reclaim the process of being made Abject and instil it with emancipatory potential. When asked at one point on this Kristeva responds “I feel very ambiguous in relation to this movement [...] I don’t adhere to it, and at the same time I realize that, as a kind of strategy, it is opposed to some kind of intolerable conservatism, so it's hard to adhere to that” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Kristeva’s concession is based in dialectic of Abjection against what must be imagined as a kind of totalitarian homogenous cultural sterility. Sick Woman Theory, is presented as “an identity and body” not against but in place of one of intolerable conservatism (Hedva, 2016). Hedva at point identifies this conservatism as the privileged existence, or “cruelly optimistic promise” (Hedva, 2016) of this existence, embodied by the;

“white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else” (Hedva, 2016).

However, Kristeva seems to be describing an oppositional practice in line with what Lotringer describes as “reclaiming abjection as an identifying feature” (Lotringer, 1999). This Abjection is oppositional, it uses the definition given to it by what it opposes, and defines itself through that opposition. Sick Woman Theory instead repositions itself as the exclusion of what it can be seen to be opposing. Hedva argues that capitalism sets up binary between a default position of “wellness” and deviation from this in the form of “sickness”. To simply embody this deviant category of “sick” would be exactly the oppositional process of Abjection described by Lotringer and Kristeva. However, Hedva also argues that under capitalism “wellness” is positioned as a temporal norm, whilst “sickness” and therefore “care” is positioned as temporary. Hedva’s position can be seen as arguing that a broad encapsulation of vulnerabilities, oppressions, and suffering should be considered the norm. Crucially, care for oneself and for others, could and should follow as another norm. It can then be proposed that Sick Woman Theory, is not a struggle with another, but a reconfiguration of the context underneath both which shifts perspective. This reconfiguration is analogous to an operation I have elsewhere discussed as occurring within horror narratives, using the example of the film “Ringu” (Nakata, 2000). [LINK TO “FROLIC IN BRINE” performance SCREENPLAY]

Hedva’s call for the centering of their broad category of sickness, which includes not just sufferers of illness, but also victims of the violent enforcement of acceptable categories of gender, sexuality, class, etc. does find a direct parallel in Kristeva’s thought;

“These states, far from being simply pathological or exceptional, are perhaps endemic. And it is perhaps against this sort of structural uncertainty that inhabits us that religions are set in motion, at once to recognise them and to defend ourselves against them” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999).

I am wary of pursuing an argument regarding the subjectivities included within Hedva’s Sick Woman predating, and perhaps causing the social structures which their existence transgresses. Such an enquiry would move beyond the scope of this project, which is concerned with the practice of art.

In Fetishizing The Abject much of Lotringer’s direction of the interview focuses on ways in which further discourses, including art, have misincorporated Abjection following Kristeva’s popularisation of the term. While a number of art tendencies and specific exhibitions are critiqued, it is the speculation on what Abjection could do in art that is most relevant here. Both Lotringer and Kristeva agree that when something is placed in a gallery, it “becomes a new identity” and thus “fetishised” it joins other “[i]institutional objects” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Regarding potential to move beyond this, Kristeva proposes that “verbal art, insofar as it eludes fetishization, and constantly raises doubt and questioning [...] lends itself better perhaps to exploring those states that I call states of abjection” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). I am skeptical about the claim that any art form including verbal art might elude fetishization, but the operation of constantly raising doubt and questioning resonates with other observations in this chapter, as well as this PhD project overall. Elsewhere I discussed a concept from my research which I call Incomplete Provocations [LINK TO TEXTS]. Also, the use of unreliable narrators occurs in the majority of what might be called the fiction elements of this project. Something which is important to note regarding at least my use of unreliable narrators is that there is a rarely deliberate deception on the part of the narrator. Deception would necessitate that the narrator knows more than the audience who learns only from that the narrator reveals, at least initially. The application I am more interested in, is the unreliable narrator as point of which by either being cognitively compromised or simply different, has another perspective on events. The ideological position implied through this is that there is no one narrative which could encapsulate the entire event and therefore resolve it. There is always doubt and questions, each of which solicit speculation from the audience. In Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) the line that illustrates this non-deceptive unreliable narrator occurs at the start of the chapter “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…”. While beginning an account of a film, the authors offer the disclaimer, “My memory of it is not necessarily accurate” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The author’s uncertainty in their memory would fall within my description of the cognitively compromised unreliable narrator, and before even getting to the recounted film, doubts and questions are ready to be raised. These doubts and questions do not all have to be positioned in the gap between recollection and what was witnessed, though in this case we could look for differences between Deleuze and Guattari’s account, and the film itself. The other doubts and questions that I am interested in project not backwards in time to the witnessing but forwards. What is interesting to me is not what is lacking from the film in the recounting, but how the recounting is a process of addition which grows from the film even while it might leave out parts of that source material. In this way, the unreliable narrator offers a provocation not for a return to the stillness of certainty, but for the movement of more emerging possibilities. Kristeva proposes something similar in her proposal for future Abject art, which involves processes of “anamnesis on the one hand, and gaming on the other” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). In terms of amnesia Kristeva expands this as “a sort of eternal return, repetition, perlaboration, elaboration” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Within Aperitif the process of amnesia enacted as the player returns to walking a path through the same environment with different characters, as well as through the game form which allows itself to be replayed.

[FOOTNOTE: For a radically different analysis of a comparable creative terrain to Kristeva’s Anamnesis see Mark Fisher’s “Ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures”. “This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted” (Fisher, 2014).]

Kristeva follows Anamnesis with Gaming which involves “compositions, decompositions, recompositions” and is presented as a continuation of the “trajectory” as Anamnesis (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). Examples provided for this process involve the process of chance through rolling dice, and the “glossolalia in Artaud, or like Finegan’s Wake” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). This resonates with Aperitif on multiple levels. At the game level Aperitif, despite being fairly linear in form, composes, decomposes,and recomposes itself continually. From the position of the player audience, this is perhaps most clear as the game shifts its genre and method of play at points. At points the player controls characters which walk around an environment and interact with one another in the manner of a role playing game. At other points the game switches to the form of a medical simulator where the player but diagnose and repair a robotic character with a completely different mode of interaction from the role playing game sections. This medical simulation then decomposes further as the performing of a specific repair sakes the form of side scrolling “shoot ‘em up” as a game within a game within a game. What would however be more in keeping with what Kristeva is describing would be evidence that at some level the making of this artwork included a shift to a less consciously direct mode. The reference to dice alongside glossolalia leads me to conclude that Kristeva’s Gaming is about the movement between conscious decision making, and something else which destabilized it, before potentially returning to conscious decision making. This destabilisation could be through the cold probability of a dice roll, the path for the works creation decided by the resulting number. The inclusion of Finegan’s Wake and Artaud’s glossolalia suggests that the destabilisation does not have to be the surrender to chance. Destabilisation could include the shift to using or creating words based on their sound rather than meaning for example. Cultural theorist Michel De Certeau described glossolalia as “vocal vegetation” not an exceptional thing constrained to the devout and artists, but the “bodily noises, quotations of delinquent sounds, and fragments of others' voices [which] punctuate the order of sentences with breaks and surprise” (De Certeau, 1996). The language in Aperitif, particularly where it comes to building its world through this language feels full of moments of shifts to a destabilised mode. Swamp-Dot-Com is populated with things like “bombo cabbage bludbud”, “lichen mommy board” and “whackback” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

[FOOTNOTE: A methodological decision has been made not to include research drawn from Heartscape and Rook’s other work, in order to focus on how this can inform methods of art practice, rather than drawing out the tendencies of these specific artists. However, it is worth noting that the processes of Kristeva’s Gaming are evident throughout Heartscape’s individual art practice. Heartscape curated the 2018 exhibition at Apexart in New York, entitled “Dire Jank” (Apexart, 2019). Dire Jank included artist Tabitha Nikolai’s video game “Ineffable Glossolalia” (Nikolai, 2018) and “Divination Jam” which invited the audience to “use divination, randomization, etc to make your game. when you get stuck, instead of feeling like shit, let some arcane system decide for you! rolling a die, i ching, tarot, anything that invokes fate! many ancient systems have been digitized, or you can look for randomness in the world around you…” (Heartscape, 2018). Furthermore, Heartscape’s 2016 novel “Psycho Nymph Exile” both contains the same collapsing worldbuilding language as Aperitif, and features such processes within its plot. “The crystal gives them an allergic reaction to language. Each girl has a unique combination of trigger words. They sit on the floor in rows, mumbling under their breath, reading from dictionaries until they find their combination” (Heartscape, 2016).]

This play in language is subtle, but I believe it a shift away from the direct conveyance of meaning to sounds and the joy of what words written down can do.

An area the gap between Kristeva and Lotringer’s Abject Art, Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, and Aperitif widens is with the issue of the abject and identity. Lotringer sees Abjection’s relation to Fascism which he stresses is its origin in Batialle’s text “displaced” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). He broadens this further with the claim that “politics has become the politics of the notion of identity” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). This broad position is agreed by Kristeva who replies “everything has been taken up by the “politically correct” which are in fact identity related claims” (Lotringer & Kristeva, 1999). It is this identity that Kristeva and Lotringer see in what they consider the problematic Oppositional Practice already outlined. I would like to argue though that their perceived problem with Abject identity would not apply to the way identity figures in Sick Woman Theory. Hedva sets out their position with clarity;

“The sick woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence, or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence- of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle class, cis and able-bodied man” (Hedva, 2016).

Sick Woman Theory is not a politics of sexual identity, but a broad identity which encapsulates sexual identity along with bodily, cognitive, and class differences. This is not the sidestepping of class struggle and opposition to fascism Lotringer in particular is concerned with in his observations about previous attempts at an Abject turn in art. Hedva creates an amorphous, fluid grouping, brings to the centre difference and care under the banner of the Sick Woman. Returning to The Laugh of The Medusa, Hedva’s project has strong resonances with Cixous’s; “If there is a “property of woman,” it is paradoxically her capacity to depreciate unselfishly: body without end, without appendage, without principal “parts.” If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organised around any one sun thats any more of a star than the others” (Cixous, 1976).

Cixous frames this “property of woman” within a text which is concerned with the practice of making art, but this practice is part of process which includes woman putting herself “into the world and into history” (Cixous, 1976). Writing, is embedded in a politics of living. For Cixous’s woman to write only in the dominant mode of man’s writing, is to be restricted not only from writing herself (as Cixous would put it) but to enter into the world as a subject, as an agent. If we read Cixous’s woman not in terms of an essentialist category which might be attached to some biological marker, but as a class category, she readily aligns with Hedva’s Sick Woman. Cixoux’s contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of “becoming-woman” which can be considered like the former’s woman but now not a class but a process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). MacCormack gives a succinct explanation of Becoming-Woman, “Woman as minoritarian is defined by lack and failure so an element of woman - gesture, fluid libidinality - taken in or as part of the self will necessarily alter the self” (MacCormack, 2008). In Hedva’s text, the woman is named for the “subject position [that] represents the uncared for, the secondary, [...] the non-, the un-, the less-than” (Hedva, 2016).

Even when addressing cisgendered women, the call Cixous is making entails Becoming, which MacCormack describes as selecting “certain specificities and intensities of a thing and [dissipating] those intensities within our own molecularities to redistribute our selves” (MacCormack, 2008). Cixous calls us to redistribute into ourselves the intensity of fluid libinality which she calls the “unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976). This pull of desire and connectivity reads like an antithesis of Valerie Solanas’s description of “the male” as an “unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness” (Solanas, 1971).

[FOOTNOTE: For a trans* reading of gender in Solanas as creative process see writer Andrea Long Chu’s proposal that “Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.” (Long Chu, 2018).]

The Woman in Sick Woman Theory is similarly a source of creative desire, which Hedva explains through a description of some of their own symptoms;

“Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations” (Hedva, 2016).

These descriptions form part of Hedva’s consideration of political agency of those, who for bodily, social, or other reasons cannot engage in the direct politics of public action. However the language, as with Solanas’s, is as concerned with emotion, affect, aesthetics, and creativity. Solanas’s Male is “incapable of empathizing” (Solanas, 1971) while “Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy” (Hedva, 2016). Solanas’s manifesto is explicitly a response to the boredom society provocokes as it is dominated by the “psychically passive” figure of the Male (Solanas, 1971). Without exoticising and objectictifying illness, mental or otherwise, the subject of Sick Woman Theory is undoubtedly a creative force.

I hope that I have demonstrated that the world, characters, and player-audience experience of Aperitif have a resonance with theories of Abjection, and creative difference connected to a broad category of Woman. Aperitif is on one level, a video game about a group of runaway broken robots, and hybrid animal kids trying to improvise through wasteland failures, emergent tactics of living through giving and receiving care.

Throughout Aperitif, many things are left undefined, or only implied. Dialogues are full of the pointed absence of speech in ellipses. Delivery of information gives way to Gaming. Character’s themselves are unsure of what has happened, cannot remember, are too traumatised, or simply offer a conflicting view of events to one another. Finally the game itself, with its limited interface and graphics which hark back to games long before the turn of the millenium, makes clear that details are being withheld. With this in mind, the group of protagonists being self identified as, or implied to be “girls” rather than Women, can be understood through another Becoming proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and explored further by MacCormack. Within the context of Becoming-Woman Deleuze and Guattari ask “What is a girl? What is a group of girls?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They consider Marcel Proust’s protagonist’s search for “fugitive beings” (Proust, 2010) and conclude that the Girl whether singular or in a pack, is “pure haecceity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

[Mark Fisher defines Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Haecceity as “non-subjective individuation. [...] the entity as event (and the event as entity)” (Fisher, 2018).]

MacCormack states that the Girl is the “larval woman”, but “It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl [...] the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, Girl is the individuation of Becoming-Woman, not attached to any substance or function, or “age group, sex, order, or kingdom” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Girls in Aperitif are undefined, only self identified in one instance and they move “between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They speak in irony, silence, thoughts of sex and unspeakable past trauma and modify their bodies with drugs and used parts. They are elusive, arising moment to moment from encounters. MacCormack notes that the “less defined a term is within majoritarian culture the more larval the becoming and thus the move open to unique and unpredictable folding and unfolding the becoming” (MacCormack, 2008). Girls are capable of Abject art practices in the manner argued by Lotringer and Kristeva, slipping between dualisms, rather than in reactive opposition. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Girls “draw their strength neither from the molar status that subdues them nor from the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). So it is no wonder that the Girls in Aperitif improvise in the wasteland of Swamp-Dot-Com. They are ungraspable in their identities, and forever on the way to something. They tell as much, even though for them the process might be traumatic, to “never perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

#games #.theory #gender #play #waste #excess #porpentine #Deleuze #Kristeva

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fireinanhourglass · 3 years ago

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I work at a youth center, which has served as a walk-in clinic a few times over the past few months. Reasons ppl have not gotten vaccinated to date:

There are very, very few clinics providing services in anything other than English (this includes online or telephone-based clinic locators, on-site clinic providers, sign-in/consent forms, etc)

Healthcare discrimination against people of color and/or visibly queer people hasn’t magically evaporated

Undocumented immigrants/families with undocumented immigrants are concerned that 1) vaccine sites may be raided, or 2) any health information they provide may be subject to government scrutiny when their case is reviewed, or 3) taking the vaccine will count against them for accessing a public benefit when their case is reviewed

Few people can afford to take time off work to get the shot, much less plan ahead/afford to take time off work to get BOTH shots (losing approx. 1-3hours of pay for each shot + AT LEAST 1 day’s with of pay to handle 2nd shot symptoms is financial suicide for a lot of households)

Intense skepticism that the vaccine is really free — as in, $0 for both shots, no copay, no surprise follow-up bills mailed to their residence or automatically deducted from their paycheck

Tons of misinformation (some of which I’ve alluded to in this post) that is very, very hard to mitigate due a combination of healthcare discrimination, lack of TRUSTWORTHY COVID-19/vaccine information in their preferred language, pervasive anti-science talking points (from both liberals and conservatives who will not dare admit how bad the pandemic is or dangerous the Delta variant is, bECAuse ThE EcONoMy), and Biden’s fucking terrible management of immigration issues thus far

Bonus: a lot of these reasons are connected to larger fears spawned by US healthcare’s absolutely evil prioritization of profits over the safety, privacy, and (ironically) holistic well-being of patients. If you want people to get vaccinated in the short-term, pay them to get the shot and take time off work to recover. You want to avoid this fiasco in the future? Dismantle capitalism.

I need y'all to understand that when you say, "haha, let the unvaccinated die," that is eugenics.

That is looking at everyone who legitimately cannot get vaccinated right now, for whatever reason, and telling them, "you are an acceptable sacrifice."

There are disabled people and children and homebound people and people in other countries who haven't gotten the vaccine because nobody has helped them get it. Plenty of people are being actively denied covid vaccinations and care, through no fault of their own.

Not everyone going unvaccinated is part of whatever "lol stupid republican anti-vaxxer" caricature you have in your head.

#sorry if the formatting is janky i’m on mobile #capitalism #COVID-19

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arplis · 4 years ago

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Arplis - News: 2021 LGBTQ Books by Black Authors to Preorder (And 10 That Are Already Out)

Black LGBTQ books got a bump in June of 2020. With the George Floyd protests at their peak and Pride month still happening, lists of queer Black books to buy or preorder built up steam on social media. You Should See Me in a Crown, a Black YA F/F novel, was sold out everywhere. Unfortunately, this follows a pattern that Black and LGBTQ books often see: a peak during Black History Month or Pride month, but forgotten in between. Or, a hateful act will make the news, whether it’s police brutality or violent transphobia or a worrying new law, book lists will go around Twitter, authors will be in the strange position of profiting during a horrible moment for their community, and then public attention will shift to something else. Obviously, these authors deserve support throughout the year. Black LGBTQ novels are still underrepresented — and besides, there are some incredible titles coming out this year even without considering how important the representation is. Not long ago, it would be easy to keep track of all the Black LGBTQ books coming out — or even traditionally published LGBTQ books in general — but luckily, we’re approaching a point where there are enough that you can accidentally overlook a title. Preordering is a great way to both support authors and give your future self a treat! By preordering now, you can help the author, make sure you won’t forget to buy the title, and get fun things in the mail throughout the year. It’s win-win-win! Of course, if you are impatient, there are some Black LGBTQ 2021 titles that are already out, which I will include at the end of the post. You have to read something while you’re waiting for these books to publish, after all! I’ve arranged these by publication date, noted the genre in the title spot, and have indicated the kind of LGBTQ representation included whenever possible. The descriptions are from the publishers. Some of these titles may not yet be set up for preorders: put those on your calendar to order as soon as it’s possible! 29 Black LGBTQ Books to Preorder in 2021 Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir by Hari Ziyad (March 1, Memoir) One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad’s vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future. Queer man How to Dispatch a Human by Stephanie Andrea Allen (March 2, Short Story Collection) In this daring collection of speculative fiction, Stephanie Andrea Allen attends to the lives of Black women, mostly lesbian or queer, all keenly aware of the forces seeking to consume them. A Black lesbian working the gig economy runs into a trio of motorized scooters and helps them escape from Earth. An enchanted sleep mask gives a woman the gift of slumber, but what will it cost her? A suburban housewife is framed for murder by her homophobic neighbor. And in the follow up to “Luna 6000,” a young woman investigates her mother’s untimely death, and learns the truth about her family. How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions is an unapologetic, often humorous, foray into the quotidian magic that envelops Black women’s lives. The eleven stories in this collection are filled with characters who will entice and delight readers as they traverse the worlds around them. With a mix of fabulism, near future, and speculative fictions, Allen reminds us in exquisitely nuanced prose that the fantastical can be found amongst the ordinary. Lesbian and queer women characters Pleasure and Spice (How Sweet It Is #6) by Fiona Zedde (March 2, Erotica) Mayson and Renée are best friends. Two women who’ve known each other for a lifetime and are as different as they are close. Mayson is a free-spirited and out lesbian, and very much desired in her Southern California queer community. Renée, straight and sheltered, is just getting out of a difficult divorce and searching for an escape from her pain. While Mayson slips in and out of affairs, taking pleasure where it bites the sweetest, Renée steps into a dangerous game of anonymous sex-by-dark that transports her to places she’d never dreamed. But the worlds of these two friends are heading for a dramatic collision. At the end of it all, will they or their friendship, survive? **A version of this was previously published as Dangerous Pleasures** F/F relationship Learned Reactions (Higher Education #2) by Jayce Ellis (March 9, Romance) Carlton Monroe is finally getting his groove back. After a year playing dad to his nephew and sending him safely off to college, it’s back to his bachelor ways. But when his teenaged niece shows up on his doorstep looking for a permanent home, his plan comes to a screeching halt. Family is everything, and in the eyes of social services, a couple makes a better adoptive family than an overworked bachelor father. A fake relationship with his closest friend is the best way to keep his family together. If things between him and Deion are complicated, well, it only needs to last until the end of the semester. Living with Carlton is a heartbreak waiting to happen, and once the adoption goes through, Deion’s out. He’s waited two decades for Carlton to realize they’re meant for each other, and he’s done. It’s time to make a clean break. But it’s hard to think of moving away when keeping up the act includes some very real perks like kissing, cuddling and sharing a bed. Even the best charades must come to an end, though. As the holidays and Deion’s departure date loom, the two men must decide whether playing house is enough for them—or if there’s any chance they could be a family for real. M/M relationship Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans (March 9, Poetry) From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself—and us—home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. Queer woman Bruised by Tanya Boteju (March 23, YA Contemporary) Whip It meets We Are Okay in this vibrant coming-of-age story, about a teen girl navigates first love, identity, and grief when she immerses herself in the colorful, brutal, beautiful world of roller derby—from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens. To Daya Wijesinghe, a bruise is a mixture of comfort and control. Since her parents died in an accident she survived, bruises have become a way to keep her pain on the surface of her skin so she doesn’t need to deal with the ache deep in her heart. So when chance and circumstances bring her to a roller derby bout, Daya is hooked. Yes, the rules are confusing and the sport seems to require the kind of teamwork and human interaction Daya generally avoids. But the opportunities to bruise are countless, and Daya realizes that if she’s going to keep her emotional pain at bay, she’ll need all the opportunities she can get. The deeper Daya immerses herself into the world of roller derby, though, the more she realizes it’s not the simple physical pain-fest she was hoping for. Her rough-and-tumble teammates and their fans push her limits in ways she never imagined, bringing Daya to big truths about love, loss, strength, and healing. F/F relationship The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost #1) by C.L. Clark (March 23, Fantasy) In an epic fantasy unlike any other, two women clash in a world full of rebellion, espionage, and military might on the far outreaches of a crumbling desert empire. Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought. Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet’s edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne. Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren’t for sale. 2 queer women main characters Sweethand by N.G. Peltier (March 30, Romance) After a public meltdown over her breakup from her cheating musician boyfriend, Cherisse swore off guys in the music industry, and dating in general for a while, preferring to focus on growing her pastry chef business. When Cherisse’s younger sister reveals she’s getting married in a few months, Cherisse hopes that will distract her mother enough to quit harassing her about finding a guy, settling down and having kids. But her mother’s matchmaking keeps intensifying. Cherisse tries to humour her mother, hoping if she feigns interest in the eligible bachelors she keeps tossing her way, she’ll be off the hook, but things don’t quite go as planned. Turns out for the first time in ages, she and Keiran King, the most annoying man ever, are on the island at the same time. Avoiding him is impossible, especially when Keiran’s close friend is the one marrying her sister, and he’s the best man to her maid of honour. Keiran doesn’t know what to make of Cherisse now. They’ve always butted heads. To him she’s always been a stuck-up brat who seeks attention, even while he secretly harbored a crush on her. Now with Cherisse’s sister marrying one of his good friends he can’t escape her as the wedding activities keep throwing them together. When things turn heated after a rainy night of bedroom fun, they both have to figure out if they can survive the countdown to wedding day, without this turning into a recipe for disaster. Bisexual man (M/F relationship) I’m a Wild Seed by Sharon Lee De La Cruz (April 6, Graphic Memoir) A collection of lively autobiographical comics guiding the reader through an understanding of queerness and what it means to one woman of color. In this delightfully compelling full-color graphic memoir, the author shares her process of undoing the effects of a patriarchal, colonial society on her self-image, her sexuality, and her concept of freedom. Reflecting on the ways in which oppression was the cause for her late bloom into queerness, we are invited to discover people and things in the author’s life that helped shape and inform her LGBTQ identity. And we come to an understanding of her holistic definition of queerness. Queer woman The Essential June Jordan Edited Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller (May 4, Poetry) The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages. Introduced by Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry. Bisexual woman Renunciations by Donika Kelly (May 4, Poetry) An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”―an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends―the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma―a home whose construction starts “with a razing.” Lesbian author Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee (May 4, YA Contemporary) Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe. When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah’s world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page. In this charming novel by Emery Lee, Noah will have to choose between following his own rules for love or discovering that the most romantic endings are the ones that go off script. Trans man, M/M relationship Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon (May 4, Science Fiction) Vern―seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised―flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future―outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it. Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction. Queer, non-binary author (not sure of specific representation, likely F/F) A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (May 11, Fantasy) Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she’s certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer. So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage. Alongside her Ministry colleagues and a familiar person from her past, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city―or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems… F/F relationship Thanks a Lot, Universe by Chad Lucas (May 11, Middle Grade Contemporary) Brian has always been anxious, whether at home, or in class, or on the basketball court. His dad tries to get him to stand up for himself and his mom helps as much as she can, but after he and his brother are placed in foster care, Brian starts having panic attacks. And he doesn’t know if things will ever be normal again . . . Ezra’s always been popular. He’s friends with most of the kids on his basketball team, even Brian, who usually keeps to himself. But now, some of his friends have been acting differently, and Brian seems to be pulling away. Ezra wants to help, but he worries if he’s too nice to Brian, his friends will realize that he has a crush on him . . . But when Brian and his brother run away, Ezra has no choice but to take the leap and reach out. Both boys have to decide if they’re willing to risk sharing parts of themselves they’d rather hide. But if they can be brave, they might just find the best in themselves and each other. M/M crush Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome (May 28, Memoir) Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit’s origin story. But it is Brian’s voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams. Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome’s writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America. Queer man Off the Record by Camryn Garrett (May 18, YA Contemporary) Ever since seventeen-year-old Josie Wright can remember, writing has been her identity, the thing that grounds her when everything else is a garbage fire. So when she wins a contest to write a celebrity profile for Deep Focus magazine, she’s equal parts excited and scared, but also ready. She’s got this. Soon Josie is jetting off on a multi-city tour, rubbing elbows with sparkly celebrities, frenetic handlers, stone-faced producers, and eccentric stylists. She even finds herself catching feelings for the subject of her profile, dazzling young newcomer Marius Canet. Josie’s world is expanding so rapidly, she doesn’t know whether she’s flying or falling. But when a young actress lets her in on a terrible secret, the answer is clear: she’s in over her head. One woman’s account leads to another and another. Josie wants to expose the man responsible, but she’s reluctant to speak up, unsure if this is her story to tell. What if she lets down the women who have entrusted her with their stories? What if this ends her writing career before it even begins? There are so many reasons not to go ahead, but if Josie doesn’t step up, who will? From the author of Full Disclosure, this is a moving testament to the #MeToo movement, and all the ways women stand up for each other. Bisexual woman How to Find a Princess (Runaway Royals #2) by Alyssa Cole (May 25, Romance) New York Times and USA Today bestseller Alyssa Cole’s second Runaway Royals novel is a queer Anastasia retelling, featuring a long-lost princess who finds love with the female investigator tasked with tracking her down. Makeda Hicks has lost her job and her girlfriend in one fell swoop. The last thing she’s in the mood for is to rehash the story of her grandmother’s infamous summer fling with a runaway prince from Ibarania, or the investigator from the World Federation of Monarchies tasked with searching for Ibarania’s missing heir. Yet when Beznaria Chetchevaliere crashes into her life, the sleek and sexy investigator exudes exactly the kind of chaos that organized and efficient Makeda finds irresistible, even if Bez is determined to drag her into a world of royal duty Makeda wants nothing to do with. When a threat to her grandmother’s livelihood pushes Makeda to agree to return to Ibarania, Bez takes her on a transatlantic adventure with a crew of lovable weirdos, a fake marriage, and one-bed hijinks on the high seas. When they finally make it to Ibarania, they realize there’s more at stake than just cash and crown, and Makeda must learn what it means to fight for what she desires and not what she feels bound to by duty. F/F relationship Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (June 1, YA Thriller) All you need to know is . . . I’m here to divide and conquer. Like all great tyrants do. ―Aces When two Niveus Private Academy students, Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo, are selected to be part of the elite school’s senior class prefects, it looks like their year is off to an amazing start. After all, not only does it look great on college applications, but it officially puts each of them in the running for valedictorian, too. Shortly after the announcement is made, though, someone who goes by Aces begins using anonymous text messages to reveal secrets about the two of them that turn their lives upside down and threaten every aspect of their carefully planned futures. As Aces shows no sign of stopping, what seemed like a sick prank quickly turns into a dangerous game, with all the cards stacked against them. Can Devon and Chiamaka stop Aces before things become incredibly deadly? Gay man and lesbian main characters Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia (June 1, Mystery) Harlem, 1926. Young black women like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. Following a harrowing kidnapping ordeal when she was in her teens, Louise is doing everything she can to maintain a normal life. She’s succeeding, too. She spends her days working at Maggie’s Café and her nights at the Zodiac, Harlem’s hottest speakeasy. Louise’s friends, especially her girlfriend, Rosa Maria Moreno, might say she’s running from her past and the notoriety that still stalks her, but don’t tell her that. When a girl turns up dead in front of the café, Louise is forced to confront something she’s been trying to ignore—two other local black girls have been murdered in the past few weeks. After an altercation with a police officer gets her arrested, Louise is given an ultimatum: She can either help solve the case or wind up in a jail cell. Louise has no choice but to investigate and soon finds herself toe-to-toe with a murderous mastermind hell-bent on taking more lives, maybe even her own…. Sapphic main character The Passing Playbook by Isaac Fitzsimons (June 1, YA Contemporary) Fifteen-year-old Spencer Harris is a proud nerd, an awesome big brother, and a David Beckham in training. He’s also transgender. After transitioning at his old school leads to a year of isolation and bullying, Spencer gets a fresh start at Oakley, the most liberal private school in Ohio. At Oakley, Spencer seems to have it all: more accepting classmates, a decent shot at a starting position on the boys’ soccer team, great new friends, and maybe even something more than friendship with one of his teammates. The problem is, no one at Oakley knows Spencer is trans—he’s passing. But when a discriminatory law forces Spencer’s coach to bench him, Spencer has to make a choice: cheer his team on from the sidelines or publicly fight for his right to play, even though it would mean coming out to everyone—including the guy he’s falling for. Trans man, M/M relationship Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (June 22, Short Story Collection) In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty. One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as “a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.” With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it. LGBTQ characters Darling by K. Ancrum (June 23, YA Fantasy) A teen girl finds herself lost on a dangerous adventure in this YA thriller by the acclaimed author of The Wicker King and The Weight of the Stars―reimagining Peter Pan for today’s world. On Wendy Darling’s first night in Chicago, a boy called Peter appears at her window. He’s dizzying, captivating, beautiful―so she agrees to join him for a night on the town. Wendy thinks they’re heading to a party, but instead they’re soon running in the city’s underground. She makes friends―a punk girl named Tinkerbelle and the lost boys Peter watches over. And she makes enemies―the terrifying Detective Hook, and maybe Peter himself, as his sinister secrets start coming to light. Can Wendy find the courage to survive this night―and make sure everyone else does, too? Multiple queer side characters, including asexual, lesbian, and bisexual characters This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron (June 29, YA Fantasy) Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch. When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined–it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri’s unique family lineage. When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it . . . until a nefarious group comes after her in search of a rare and dangerous immortality elixir. Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family. From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes another inspiring and deeply compelling story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her. Queer woman Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson (July 6, YA) A stunning novel about being brave enough to be true to yourself, and learning to find joy even when times are unimaginably dark. Three days. Two girls. One life-changing music festival. Toni is grieving the loss of her roadie father and needing to figure out where her life will go from here — and she’s desperate to get back to loving music. Olivia is a hopeless romantic whose heart has just taken a beating (again) and is beginning to feel like she’ll always be a square peg in a round hole — but the Farmland Music and Arts Festival is a chance to find a place where she fits. The two collide and it feels like something like kismet when a bond begins to form. But when something goes wrong and the festival is sent into a panic, Olivia and Toni will find that they need each other (and music) more than they ever imagined. F/F relationship The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass (July 13, YA Horror) Get Out meets Danielle Vega in this YA social thriller where survival is not a guarantee. Sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston sees dead people everywhere. But he can’t decide what’s worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments on a loop or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep. Both are a living nightmare he wishes he could wake up from. But things at St. Clair start looking up with the arrival of another Black student–the handsome Allister–and for the first time, romance is on the horizon for Jake. Unfortunately, life as a medium is getting worse. Though most ghosts are harmless and Jake is always happy to help them move on to the next place, Sawyer Doon wants much more from Jake. In life, Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he’s a powerful, vengeful ghost and he has plans for Jake. Suddenly, everything Jake knows about dead world goes out the window as Sawyer begins to haunt him. High school soon becomes a different kind of survival game–one Jake is not sure he can win. Gay man main character Busy Ain’t the Half of It by Frederick Smith and Chaz Lamar (August 1, Romance) Elijah Golden and Justin Monroe are uncle and nephew with eclectic careers, friends, and family in LA, trying to center Black Joy in their lives.Then their worlds turn in ways nobody expects. Elijah, a dedicated thespian, auditions by day, does theater by night, and works two jobs on weekends. With enough life for three people, he keeps his recently divorced partner Zaire coasting on bliss…until secrets and real-life dramas test their love. Justin, Elijah’s uncle, is a single father with teenage twins, and a tv journalist who’s been replaced at the anchor desk when new management arrives. No longer in the public eye, living true to his sexuality is something Justin can finally do. Dating and romance—Justin’s ready for fun. Conflicts with fatherhood and career—he’ll have none. Elijah and Justin seek happily-ever-afters, but are they too busy to notice happy when it’s there? M/M relationship No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull (September 7, Science Fiction) One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it. As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters. At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark? The world will soon find out. Trans and asexual main characters Things We Couldn’t Say by Jay Coles (September 21, YA Contemporary) There’s always been a hole in Gio’s life. Not because he’s into both guys and girls. Not because his father has some drinking issues. Not because his friends are always bringing him their drama. No, the hole in Gio’s life takes the shape of his birth mom, who left Gio, his brother, and his father when Gio was nine years old. For eight years, he never heard a word from her . . . and now, just as he’s started to get his life together, she’s back. It’s hard for Gio to know what to do. Can he forgive her like she wants to be forgiven? Or should he tell her she lost her chance to be in his life? Complicating things further, Gio’s started to hang out with David, a new guy on the basketball team. Are they friends? More than friends? At first, Gio’s not sure . . . especially because he’s not sure what he wants from anyone right now. There are no easy answers to love — whether it’s family love or friend love or romantic love. In Things We Couldn’t Say, Jay Coles, acclaimed author of Tyler Johnson Was Here, shows us a guy trying to navigate love in all its ambiguity — hoping at the other end he’ll be able to figure out who is and who he should be. Bisexual man Note: This is not a complete list! We will likely be hearing more about the Aug-Dec releases later in the year. 2021 Black LGBTQ Books Out Now If you’re too impatient to wait for upcoming releases, here are ten 2021 LGBTQ books by Black authors that are already out! They are ordered by genre. Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers (Fiction) When becoming an adult means learning to love yourself first. With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that. This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows. In New York, she’s able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood. F/F relationship 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell (Short Story Collection) An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure―from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama―Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it―or perhaps because of it―they shine. Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human. Queer men main characters The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr (Historical Fiction) A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation’s harmony. With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love. M/M relationship Love’s Divine by Ava Freeman (Romance) Go on vacation? Check. Sip cocktails and relax on the beach? Check. Fall in love? Definitely not on the list. On a whim, Genesis Malone decides to book a solo trip to the island of Barbados. A sunny beach vacation sounds like the perfect way to renew her spirit after a heartbreaking divorce. The trip takes an unexpected turn when she meets a woman who could be just what she needs to move on. That is if her heart, and the universe, will let her. Zuri Baker seems to have it all but what she really wants is someone to share her life with. When she meets Genesis, she is intrigued by her quiet nature and longs to get to know her better. Too bad her on-again off-again girlfriend isn’t willing to let her go quite so easily. When they return to their regular lives and find themselves in the midst of exes, not quite exes, and work drama, will they be able to hold onto what matters most; each other? F/F relationship Masquerade by Anne Shade (Historical Romance) Harlem, New York, 1925 is a mecca of cultural and creative freedom, where masquerade drag balls are all the rage and the music, dancing, and loose prohibition laws unite people from all walks of life. Dinah Hampton came to Harlem for better opportunities for her family but ends up working as a nightclub chorus girl to help make ends meet. Among the nightlife and danger, she finds love in the most unexpected way. When a scandal rocks Celine Montre’s family and sends them fleeing from New Orleans to Harlem, the gorgeous Dinah Hampton helps her to discover that there’s more to life, and love, than she ever thought possible. When a notorious gangster sets her sights on seducing Celine, Dinah and Celine are forced to risk their hearts, and lives, for love. F/F relationship Symbiosis (Escaping Exodus #2) by Nicky Drayden (Science Fiction) Nearly a thousand years removed from Earth, the remnants of humanity cling to existence inside giant, space faring creatures known as the Zenzee. Abused and exploited by humans for generations, these majestic animals nearly went extinct, but under the command of its newly minted ruler, Doka Kaleigh, life in the Parados I has flourished. Thanks to careful oversight and sacrifice by all of its crew, they are now on the brink of utopia, and yet Doka’s rivals feel threatened by that success. The Senate allowed Doka to lead their people believing he’d fail spectacularly—a disaster that would cement the legitimacy of their long-standing matriarchy. Despite vocal opposition and blatant attacks on his authority, Doka has continued to handle his position with grace and intelligence; he knows a single misstep means disaster. When a cataclysmic event on another Zenzee world forces Doka and his people to accept thousands of refugees, a culture clash erupts, revealing secrets from the past that could endanger their future. For Doka, the stakes are bigger and more personal than ever before—and could cost him his reign and his heart. He has fallen for the one woman he is forbidden to love: his wife, Seske. Doka and Seske must work closely together to sway the other Zenzee worlds to stop their cycles of destruction. But when they stumble upon a discovery that can transform their world, they know they must prepare to fight a battle where there can be no winners, only survivors. Sapphic main character Soulstar (The Kingston Cycle #3) by C.L. Polk (Fantasy) With Soulstar, C. L. Polk concludes her riveting Kingston Cycle, a whirlwind of magic, politics, romance, and intrigue that began with the World Fantasy Award-winning Witchmark. Assassinations, deadly storms, and long-lost love haunt the pages of this thrilling final volume. For years, Robin Thorpe has kept her head down, staying among her people in the Riverside neighborhood and hiding the magic that would have her imprisoned by the state. But when Grace Hensley comes knocking on Clan Thorpe’s door, Robin’s days of hiding are at an end. As freed witches flood the streets of Kingston, scrambling to reintegrate with a kingdom that destroyed their lives, Robin begins to plot a course that will ensure a freer, juster Aeland. At the same time, she has to face her long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum twenty years ago. Can Robin find happiness among the rising tides of revolution? Can Kingston survive the blizzards that threaten, the desperate monarchy, and the birth throes of democracy? Find out as the Kingston Cycle comes to an end. Nonbinary love interest One of the Good Ones by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite (YA Contemporary) When teen social activist and history buff Kezi Smith is killed under mysterious circumstances after attending a social justice rally, her devastated sister Happi and their family are left reeling in the aftermath. As Kezi becomes another immortalized victim in the fight against police brutality, Happi begins to question the idealized way her sister is remembered. Perfect. Angelic. One of the good ones. Even as the phrase rings wrong in her mind—why are only certain people deemed worthy to be missed?—Happi and her sister Genny embark on a journey to honor Kezi in their own way, using an heirloom copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book as their guide. But there’s a twist to Kezi’s story that no one could’ve ever expected—one that will change everything all over again. Lesbian main character Yesterday Is History by Kosoko Jackson (YA Time Travel) Weeks ago, Andre Cobb received a much-needed liver transplant. He’s ready for his life to finally begin, until one night, when he passes out and wakes up somewhere totally unexpected…in 1969, where he connects with a magnetic boy named Michael. And then, just as suddenly as he arrived, he slips back to present-day Boston, where the family of his donor is waiting to explain that his new liver came with a side effect―the ability to time travel. And they’ve tasked their youngest son, Blake, with teaching Andre how to use his unexpected new gift. Andre splits his time bouncing between the past and future. Between Michael and Blake. Michael is everything Andre wishes he could be, and Blake, still reeling from the death of his brother, Andre’s donor, keeps him at arm’s length despite their obvious attraction to each other. Torn between two boys, one in the past and one in the present, Andre has to figure out where he belongs―and more importantly who he wants to be―before the consequences of jumping in time catch up to him and change his future for good. Gay man main character Mouths of Rain : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought Edited by Briona Simone Jones (Nonfiction) African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using “Black Lesbian” as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out,” and the erotic. Lesbian Looking for More Black LGBTQ Books? Of course, there are plenty of Black LGBTQ books from years past that are also worth reading! Here are some helpful resources to find more: Black Lesbian Literary Collective Sistahs on the Shelf YA Pride’s Queer YA Books by Black Authors Spreadsheet LGBTQ Reads’s Black History Month post I also discovered Jonathan’s To Be Black and Loved BookTube channel in the course of research for this post, and I sourced some titles from the video “Black & Queer Book Releases 2021 | YA & Adult Fiction.” Here on Book Riot, you might also want to check out: 20 Must-Read Black Authors of LGBTQ Books 6 of the Best Audiobooks by Queer Black Authors The videos Queer 2020 Releases by Black Authors and Black LGBTQ YA Titles Published in 2020 !doctype> #BlackAuthors #LGBTQ #RiotRundownSubjectLinePost #Featured #Lists

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