#invisibilisation

[not-poignant]

I think it’s so strange how fictional characters can become motivation. Like, when I tell myself it’s okay to have more than a protein shake I also say Efnisien and Flitmouse from your Underline the Rainbow stories are working on it (even if they don’t completely want to), so I can too. Fictional people are helping me tell myself that food isn’t bad 🤦‍♀️

Anon every single character in the Underline universe (except the evil villains) would be so so proud of you for having more than a protein shake. And the ones who are working on it at the same time would give you a nod of solidarity

Food stuff is hard! And all we can do is our best <333

[hahahax30]

Queer people will claim that clothes don't have gender but in the next breath they'll say that they do, however, have a sexuality

[overelegantstranger]

something something something "feminist" posts that homogenise the lives of Victorian women [and earlier women] into certain frameworks, like let's say posts that talk about women in the home, and women who were forced by their families to stay in the home, actually - and actively - invisibilise not only the women who did not live that way, but also the women who did.

[thebusylilbee]

keeping prev tags bc they feel important to share

honestly one of the things that's been wild for me to learn lately is that israel was responsible for enforcing the idea that the holocaust was an unparalleled genocide that stands apart from everything else that's happened in the course of human history. even before i understood well enough how deeply interconnected all genocides are, when i was a kid, i really fucking hated it. it felt so wrong to me for the holocaust to be The Genocide of human history. it felt disrespectful to other groups who had gone through genocide and it felt like weirdly dehumanizing and tokenizing to us. i didn't want to think of jews as The Group Who Went Through A Genocide, i wanted to see us how i was familiar with in our culture our holidays our art our singing our prayers. that's how i wanted other people to see us too! not that i was ashamed of what we had gone through but i just didn't want people's perception of us to just be that we were victims and i didn't want other peoples victimhood denied to them through that either. but yeah kind of wild to learn that israel and zionist rhetoric seems fairly responsible for this pet peeve of mine from childhood before i even really had a greater consciousness of solidarity or anything.

[metamatar]

a particularly annoying kind of analysis pervades across the landscape which argues that recognising difference is the source of/reinforces discrimination and asks us to take this level of stupidity seriously. it will specifically burden the left and the oppressed with the charge of reinforcing bigotry by recognising it. my upper caste mother thinks that caste based organising makes casteism persist, the white liberal thinks that anti racism is encouraging segregation, trans women are told they make transmisogyny worse merely by articulating something more than we are all oppressed lets suck and fuck. saamdaamdandaurbhed (rip) articulated it best on here, undertheorizing is the privilege of the best off – it invisibilises both elite capture and the actual mechanics of oppression.

[communistkenobi]

yeah, its easy to say transphobia is primarily directed at women when you dismiss how its directed at men lol

all of you crybabies complain about being invisibilised because you see the constant hyper-visibility of trans women as a secret privilege unfairly denied to you (by trans women!), simultaneously claiming special victim status as a result of this “denial” while dismissing the actual violence wrought by said hyper-visibility. your primary theoretical contribution to discussions of transphobia (“transandrophobia”) is dogshit because you are incapable of opening your mouths without uttering the phrase “what about me.” It is an embarrassment sharing space with you

[transmutationisms]

quite insidious actually how often people on here just operate under the assumption that anyone who is not sufficiently ~recovered~ is simply too stupid or ill-informed to identify or advocate for their own best interests. there is no other reason you may be living in a way deemed (or even genuinely experienced as!) dysfunctional, so you obviously need 97 condescending posts per day explaining that therapy exists. health as a standard imposed externally & therefore under no obligation to align with the individual's own values, desires, or stated needs. once you start noticing this logic it's hard to invisibilise it again lmao

[lesbianyaomo]

it's actually very nice that apothecary diaries chose maomao as the protagonist, a girl who was raised in the pleasure district and severely under-ranks(?) many of the other characters in the story. through her, we get proximity to the status of those who were expendable to the royal court, a fact that she herself is highly aware of, and because of this she routinely positions herself between those who are of high rank and low rank. i really like that the series draws attention to notions of hierarchy and expendability, again without being preachy about it, because to be sure, it's not gritty at all, it tends to maintain a lighthearted tone with a focus on interpersonal relationships.

but this direction contrasts strongly with the dozens of western historical/historical fantasy dramas that focus mostly on the upper class and invisibilises the labor that sustains their lifestyles. meanwhile apothecary diaries leans into maomao's skills, the certain amount of ingenuity and knowledge that comes from her being poor and growing up in the pleasure district, and the way her rapport and proximity to the servants of the court enable her to reach places the high-ranked characters can't.

[linkedsoul]

This is a wonderful list but I'd like to point out that some of these authors are not AAPI.

Adiba Jaigirdar is based in Ireland and both these books take place in Dublin. Rin Chupeco is from, and still living in Manila, in the Philippines. They're not Asian-American, they're not even on the American continent.

Please be mindful when using the term AAPI for lists of books or authors, not all of us are Asian-American, and Pacific Islanders also deserve to make it into these lists. There's nothing wrong with calling it a list of "Books by Asian authors" if that's what you mean! I know it's AAPI month but once again: not all Asian authors are Asian-American so please be sure when you make "AAPI authors" list that the authors listed all actually identify as Asian-American and Pacific Islanders.

Mainland Asian authors who write in English and get published in the US exist without being Asian-American. Same for every part of the Asian diaspora that is not in the US/Canada (we're exist across all continents!). I beg you to remember this before you shove us all under a label we do not belong to just because it has so often been misused a synonym for "Asian".

Some books by AAPI authors that I’ve read & enjoyed in the past year to support this May!

[txttletale]

internet safety is important ofc but i think a lot of abuse is invisibilised and institutionalised to the point that people forget that no internet groomer preying on unsupervised kids online has the level of access, power, and protection enjoyed by the far larger number of predators that operate within churches, schools, & families themselves and whose grooming tactics are broadly endorsed by society at large

[this-is-exorsexism]

the phrase "why is it only ever afabs identifying as nonbinary huh?".

not only bc it's implying that nonbinary ppl are "attention seeking girls", but also bc the answer to the question is that there are millions of amab nonbinary ppl, but most of them are either viewed as strictly trans women or cis men by society

this is exorsexism.

a lot of the people who complain about there "only being afab nonbinary people" are also the people erasing, ignoring and invisibilising amab nonbinary people, and then blame it on afab nonbinary people. it's misogyny and antitransfemininity as well as exorsexism.

[pefkaes]

27.09.2024 // day 218 // quiet days on campus

reading about everyday trauma that is invisibilised has been affirming because I've been grappling with the idea that that I may be dealing with trauma ("lower case t"). it is a word that I shy away from, reluctant to impose it on myself. in fact, i have repeatedly dismissed the word; after all, my experiences haven't been "catastrophic" enough in the grand scheme of things. i don't know if articulating my feelings and experiences as trauma is correct or will help me find meaning and acceptance. but I find myself arriving at the word time and again as I follow the threads, or the "breadcrumbs" that Cvetkovich writes about (in the context of queer and sexual trauma). slow forming thoughts that may or may not lead somewhere.

[familyabolisher]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say much about loveday before, if the mood strikes you I'd love to hear what makes her compelling to you!

oh god you can really pinpoint how long someone’s been following me based on whether or not they’ve ever seen me (or anyone) say much about loveday. i will try to make my handful of thoughts here brief—a lot of this is somewhat corollary to my fucking massive backlog of takes about cytherea, which i feel is fitting considering we can pretty much only get a sense of ms heptane through what we know about her terrible terrible girlfriend.

i think the main thing i find interesting about loveday heptane is her role as this kind of invisibilised governing structure that, like, scaffolds the discourse of gtn. if the core drive of the book is (as i would argue it to be) gideon “learning” cavalierhood, and by extension us as readers understanding what cavalierhood “means” relative to the discourse of the text, then part of how this process of elucidating cavalierhood-as-subject-position takes place is in this three-way interplay that happens between gideon, loveday, and protesilaus relative to cytherea. put simply, gideon, loveday, and protesilaus can be understood as cytherea’s three cavaliers, and placing them in this equivocal discursive position allows us to draw useful conclusions about how we might understand the nature of cavalierhood, and how that understanding might be informing the wider narrative.

because the narrative focalises gideon as our protagonist, we could argue that she takes primacy within this triad, so perhaps another way of putting it is that everything she does relative to cytherea (and, later, harrow, though i think it’s significant that cytherea acts as a catalysing force towards the creation of that cavalier subject position that drives the book) ought to be examined with reference to a) protesilaus and b) loveday. as i said, all three occupy a discursively equivalent position relative to cytherea—that of the cavalier. so when we see this kind of courtship unfold between cytherea and gideon, and take on the language of grooming, objectification, predation, etc., alongside this process of, like, subjugating her, subduing her into a position whereby cavalierhood becomes a coherent possibility, we can understand one dimension of cavelierhood as a subject position to involve a form of sexual subjugation made somewhat salacious by its being socially taboo. at the same time, protesilaus as functionally cytherea’s cavalier is a dead body being reanimated, wholly at the behest of cytherea’s will, and loveday as cytherea’s cavalier is long dead, mourned, batterised, and made into a symbol of devotional grief (‘cytherea loveday’). when gideon ‘learns’ cavalierhood, she is ‘learning’ how to become the reanimated corpse and the beloved battery and the site of sexual availability. all three are then operating in tandem to make the nature of cavalierhood legible to us.

(i think this is at its most salient in the avulsion scene, which is one of the few moments in the book where we see cytherea make a fairly straightforward reference to loveday with “I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.” there’s also this—

She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?” [...] The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”

—preempting her much later and more straightforward claim to palamedes that she & loveday went through with the lyctoral process because she “thought it would make me live.” this alongside the suggestion that she looks ‘regretful’ and the attention paid to gideon in a sentence that seems to be covertly about cytherea’s grief imo makes a fairly solid case for reading this exchange as another passing reference to loveday; there’s an emphasis, however covert, placed on cytherea’s grief and guilt in this chapter that hasn’t thus far made itself especially apparent. & it’s significant that these references crop up alongside a scene which has gideon acquiesce to being subjected to a brutal process of batterisation which serves as a fairly efficient metonym for the entire lyctoral process, and arguably by extension the entire state of cavalierhood, and also sees cytherea use language like ‘darling,’ ‘good girl,’ ‘poor baby,’ ‘i’ve got you,’ &c. &c. specifically to facilitate that process; these complex, overlapping networks of sexuality & subjugation & death & grief & lyctorhood are being put to pretty significant work in that chapter.)

re. loveday specifically—i’m really interested as well in the fact that, like, the seventh house seems to have this specifically chivalric culture attached to it (more so than some of the other houses, though it’s seemingly present across the whole internal body of the empire to some extent). we see this in, for instance: cytherea and dulcinea are duchesses when a duchy is a medieval apportioning of land; protesilaus and [presumably] loveday’s title is ‘the knight of rhodes’; dulcinea’s name references don quixote, which examines and parodies the conventions of chivalric literature and culture in spain. gideon and cytherea’s relationship is conducted rather like a courtship between a knight and a lady; though this speaks more to empire-wide social conventions around cavalierhood as a whole, i think it’s interesting that the narrative focalises cytherea (of venus!) when drawing attention to dynamics of love & sexuality within the relevant social order. all this is to say that i think cytherea and thus loveday by extension fit pretty coherently into the chivalric cultural narrative that muir is working from, and i think this gives us a lot of scope for thinking about what the two of them are ‘doing’ wrt gender.

& i think it’s fairly plain that the text is, among other things, interested in interrogating contemporary articulations of ‘lesbian gender’ abstracted through the various lenses that allow for diegetic consistency. what i mean by this is that, for example, we as contemporary readers who attach meaning to ‘butch’ as a descriptor know that gideon is a butch and we are to make sense of her character as such, but that’s not a gender framework that she has available and thus not a meaningful diegetic descriptor; we can’t say that gideon says or does X or Y or Z because of extant cultural norms around butchness, because those cultural norms don’t exist for her. we can, however, notice how the attention paid to rendering her as legibly ‘masculine’ in-text run parallel to (among other things) a particular kind of masculinity articulated in the language of chivalry, knighthood, &c.—which is legibly present in the text as cavalierhood, and is thus explained, historicised, problematised, all while acting as a vector by which we can think about the legibility of butchness in an imperialist social order.

(i feel like a proper reading of what tlt “does” with gender is its own post—real aveheads will remember—suffice it to say that i think the above is part of the fabric from which that discourse unfolds itself.)

i bring this up because i think loveday is something like the ur-text for this specific reading—which is why i’m so interested in her and the force she exerts over the narrative in gtn. most people seem to lean towards reading her as a butch (as a character we ought to understand as a butch &c.), and i would agree; i think it’s significant, however, that we can draw that conclusion based on cytherea’s demeanour/preferences (lol) and a handful of characteristics attributed to her in the very sparing accounts of her that we have in-text. however reliable or otherwise the accounts we have of her might be, i think it’s noteworthy that her lover remembers her as a ‘nice girl [who] died for me,’ clearly agentive in the decision to effectively sacrifice herself for cytherea (“i didn’t want to do it at all [...] she and i thought it would make me live”), memorialised in what to me reads as a symbolic marriage (‘cytherea loveday,’ the taking of the partner’s name—this along with the fact that john misremembers cytherea’s surname as ‘heptane’ and we never find out her functional ‘maiden name’ means that i think my reading of it as a gesture to marital conventions is more than fair), whereas eg. mercy and augustine remember her as ‘looking like she wanted every one of us beaten to death,’ seemingly generally unpleasant and antagonistic. this idea of someone who comes off as aggressive, unfriendly, standoffish to outsiders, but is loving, self-sacrificing, devotional to an excessively servile degree in romantic relationships is very much—not stereotypical, necessarily, but archetypal, and especially archetypal to the ‘chivalrous butch’ that i think muir is employing. add to this the things i said above about the seventh house seeming to operate on a culture of chivalry, her title being that of a knight, the kind of necromancer-cavalier relationship that cytherea solicits from gideon closely resembling a chivalric courtship, and i think there’s a case to be made for loveday as a stand-in for this archetypal ‘chivalrous butch’ that the text then probes and problematises. 

this is interesting to me because i think it allows us to read loveday and her presence in gtn in particular as something of a discursive signifier rather than a fully fleshed-out “character”; i mean, crucially, she’s not fleshed out, she’s entirely subsumed by cytherea! if (and i realise i’m going a little crazy here; blorbo from my autism, &c.) we read the version of cytherea and loveday present as disciples at canaan house as representative of how butchfemme negotiations of gender can be subsumed into an imperialist social ordering via the conditions of chivalry, we can think about loveday then being collapsed into a signifier for a discursive position such that her presence in the text governs how gideon navigates cavalierhood and how we as readers understand and interpret it (cf. how i opened this piece, talking about the gideon-loveday-protesilaus triad), and how by extension the imposition of subjectivity via subjugation eschews the agency of the subject in favour of transforming them into a set of signifiers, symbols, representations, &c. (this is—i have to say it—this is the crux of the argument i make in salolita, and, as we all know, lolita is a huge part of the scaffolding of these books.) it also allows us to read cytherea as we receive her in gtn as a kind of unravelling or destabilising of that signifying dynamic, which we can of course extrapolate onto the destabilisation of the necromancer-cavalier-lyctor thing as a whole that gtn introduces and articulates through her.

and i guess i just—i’m interested in this! i think the gender angle and the subjugation angle are my two preferred ways of approaching these books, and i think it’s pretty easy to eke out some v compelling readings by kind of throwing loveday heptane at the frameworks and seeing what happens.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

when ppl make jokey sweeping declarations about how gays or women or whatever are all terrible at math, i think more than anything this is intended to give the speaker and their (imagined) similarly situated audience psychological permission to be bad at math. this is indicated partly by the fact the tone is of giggling camaraderie rather than dejected commiseration, partly by the fact it is so often given in the context of "how dare you expect me to do math!"

this may not be a very productive or statistically accurate attitude to take, but its certainly understandable. shame at ones perceived poor mathematical abilities is a pretty widespread and well-attested phenomenon. and its certainly not helped by ppl responding to the collective self-denigration with indignation that they are somehow being snubbed or invisibilised or whatever as women/homosexuals who can do math well and know it. surely yr proficiency and self esteem wrt this highly valued and valuable skill should suffice to compensate for whatever social slight might emerge from ppls misdirected public self-soothing over a really pervasive and harmful sense of humiliation

[the-delta-quadrant]

when did the gender reveal podcast go from just interviews with all kinds of trans people to constantly platforming people who are antitransmasculine and exorsexist? even tuck themself keeps leaning into the antitransmasculine exorsexist bit, despite him being nonbinary and transmasc.

like they had a binary trans woman on who kept going on rants about trans men and nonbinary people on her twitter. i can't remember her name for the life of me. but WHY would you platform someone who openly hates on other trans people? i know for a fact they wouldn't have invited buck angel who does the same shit because when a trans woman does it it's seen as "punching up".

then not that long ago tuck literally said that transmascs shouldn't talk about their oppression in front of trans women because "it might be annoying to them". oh no. how annoying to know that other people in your community are also oppressed.

and today he's platformed the worst person yet: a self-identified transsexual woman (probably binary and white, prove me wrong), who

thinks the word transgender is bad because it includes both men and women, and she doesn't want to be associated with "male privileged" trans men, and then she said "i'm including nonbinary people in that" because somehow we're men now who have binary and cis privilege

thinks "transgender" is a bad term because by being gender neutral it centres trans men (literally WHERE, trans men have historically been invisibilised and erased and actually thrown out of the community, most people who hear the term transgender picture a trans woman, not a trans man, or let alone a nonbinary person who of course is included in "men"

says all these baeddelist things and then in the last 5 minutes trying to denounce radical feminism by denouncing the terms TMA and TME (the only based thing she did, but it's hypocrisy)

thinks the term transgender is bad because it was created by multigender/genderfluid people who didn't medically transition in the 60s whom she sees as "not committing" because they "don't want to give up their privilege, something that's said about nonbinary people and/or trans people who don't medically transition all the time today, and she denounces the term transgender because why would she be associated with dirty nonbinary people who don't follow the same path she does? not to forget that transgender wasn't actually coined by those people, it was coined as a medical term and then adopted by them, but sure, write a history book while actually getting history wrong i guess, she'd also just call these people cis men despite them actually having said that they're both a man and a woman. of course you demonise and erase multigender people even in the past

thinks trans boys have an easier time transitioning than trans girls

as a medically transitioned, probably binary, trans woman talks as if she knows anything about the lives of nonbinary people, afab trans people as a whole & trans people who don't medically transition

thinks that "not transitioning" is becoming a more popular choice for trans people (??????? most trans people literally at least change their pronouns when they come out, unless of course you're talking about medical transition, in which case you're probably a truscum because social transition is transition)

acting like nonbinary transmascs are actually just trans men who don't want the responsibility of male privilege, something that tuck has also basically said before

using the terms transmasc and transfem interchangeably with trans men and women and of course with medical transition

acts like she cares about material realities but probably hasn't listened to more than one trans man, nonbinary person or non medically transitioning trans person because she's too busy speculating on what it's like for us (apparently we have male privilege while also basically being cis women)

just overall framing nonbinary as an inherently privileged identity, which is why there are less amab nonbinary people because all the afab male privileged people identify as nonbinary or whatever flawed logic (binary people shut up challenge, you can't be exorsexist towards amab multigender people by calling them cis men and then wonder why no amab nonbinary person comes out to you)

and the whole transmedicalist undertone of the show for a WHILE now that trans = medical transition, applying the term transsexual to all trans people, acting like being transsexual is a better way of being trans, acting like not wanting medical transition isn't valid; the only reason someone wouldn't medically transition is due to lack of access.

like holy shit what the fuck happened to this podcast.

the blatant exorsexism and antittansmasculinity doesn't become less hurtful and harmful when it's coming from and promoted by a nonbinary transmasc person.

[communistkenobi]

Hey, I made a couple tweaks to one of your comments about trans men and I'd just ... like you to read it back to yourself, and then think about how it comes off.

Anon: Yeah it's easy to say homophobia is primarily directed at gay people when you dismiss how it's directed at bisexuals, lol

You: all of you crybabies complain about being invisibilised because you see the constant hyper-visibility of gay people as a secret privilege unfairly denied to you (by gay people!), simultaneously claiming special victim status as a result of this “denial” while dismissing the actual violence wrought by said hyper-visibility. your primary theoretical contribution to discussions of homophobia (“biphobia”) is dogshit because you are incapable of opening your mouths without uttering the phrase “what about me.” It is an embarrassment sharing space with you

We've dealt with this kind of queer exclusionist stuff before on Tumblr. It has never, not even once, ended with people thinking "You know, the folk bashing and shitting on other queer people and denying their experience of bigotry as legitimate? I think they were in the right."

This analogy is completely off-topic - I am not denying that trans men are transgender/a “real” member of the queer community/face systemic discrimination (which is the substance of the denial of biphobia - you even use the term exclusionist as a shorthand for this discourse), I am dismissing the reactionary idea that there is a material ‘misandrist’ equivalent to transmisogyny in the world. The fact that you think this is even in the same universe to anything I’ve said is like, laughable