#werewolftrial

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

But werewolves are sexy, the anthropomorphic wolf like werewolves to be honest.

I would say that werewolves are much less sexy than humans. In fact, werewolves are not even really animals – they're just part of the human imagination, like angels, phantasms, fairies, vampires, spirits, or monsters (like the Big Bad Wolf).

But I like you anyway

[osmanthusoolong]

For those who were friends with @werewolftrial on here: Apparently the laptop with the tumblr login info broke at customs, though the visit was otherwise a good one. And despite technical issues, @werewolftrial is otherwise safe, accounted for and wishing us all well.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

That post strikes me as odd because the most common thing I see in "women can be bad too" arguments isn't an assertion that some women REALLY ARE backstabbing bitches or conniving seductresses, it's people of various genders talking about women are complicit in social ills associated with men and male perpetrators. If OP reads someone talking about their abusive mom/ex-gf/teacher and writes them off as a virulent misogynist that's their problem.

there is smth to this critique—that most of what the post is responding to is implicating women in broader and already-recognised patriarchal problems—but i dont think its really my own objection, which is less systemic

there are, in fact, a lot of women who treat others (incl. men) like scum and tools to be exploited. many women really do take advantage of people’s sympathy towards them to manipulate situations to their advantage and fuck men (and more!) over. sometimes this is underwritten by differences along other authority relations and "axes of privilege," but sometimes its not. this isnt to make any claims about its relative prevalence, or its systematicity, or its broader cultural roots. its just a first-order claim that there are plentiful female abusers and wrongdoers, including with male victims

the principal reason i say this isnt as a point of entry for sociological theorising but bc there are a lot of ppl vocally committed to denying it. op is one of them: their pinned post is a link to the big famous book by known human refuse landy buncroft, who has staked his career on claiming female-on-male abuse is functionally nonexistent. so i dont think i have a quarrel with op about what follows from our shared fundamental principles: i think our mutual objections trace to the root

hopefully this doesnt come across as hostile to you; i agree with yr observation, i just think my own contributions are different and a bit more simplistic

[tanadrin]

You're right about the infantilization. Shrier even directs it towards people in their mid-to-late twenties. Later on in the book she talks about Ash Hardell, a non-binary Youtuber who's currently 29. She fixates on Hardell's youthful appearance, comparing him to the Artful Dodger(!). She also objects to the fact he had top surgery as an adult (because it's mutilation, I guess). It's weird stuff.

Oh yeah! Eris mentioned him specifically in her review. One wonders when a putative woman, in Shrier’s view, truly acquires the competence to declare themselves trans, and be seen as a man. (The answer is never, obviously, because being born with a uterus makes you soft in the head.)

[nostalgebraist]

I dreamt last night that Frank reblogged a political thread with glib commentary. After that, people denounced Frank as a psy-op created to "derail" important discussions. They wrote these furious posts about how we all fell for the cute bot, or whatever.

This is the kind of thing where I have both the reaction “yeah, that sure sounds like a weird dream!” and “yeah, that sure sounds like something that would really happen!”, and the two reactions happen separately and each one is completely sincere, and it’s only a moment later that I recognize how weird each of these reactions looks in light of the other one

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

I'm sorry for your loss. Grieve whatever way feels right.

thanks friend

it's been four years and currently i cope by being a mess for several days leading up to hallowe'en and then posting a lot of tam lin related shitposts. will this ever change? who knows

is this probably a kind of proxy grief my brain latches onto in order to process other shit it doesn't know how to deal with? i expect so. but sometimes you just have to like. hold those feelings gently even if you know they're pretending to be something else

[solipsistful]

Do you guys enjoy Hannibal at all? I feel like you would, but can't remember if you posted about it.

wayy back when NBC Hannibal’s was still in progress, we were really into it, including producing fanfic (which has since been cast adrift into the wide AO3 sea of “orphaned work”)

i’m not actually sure if we ever finished season 2, though lmao. keep meaning to, like... fully watch it again... but it is so hard to motivate ourselves to watch tv shows specifically. a large time commitment, right?

also, you know, the other Hannibal material is cool too. :V

- ace

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Do you have opinions on Between Men?

Do you?

(I ask because I am curious as to your relationship with this specific book that would compel you to ask about it. :P)

It’s certainly an important work, and one that I think does a good job of taking earlier feminist arguments and integrating them into a queer theoretical approach, while also being decidedly critical of the assumptions and frameworks of those earlier feminist theorists (many of these women were of the radical camp). It’s a work that has an easy template for analysis and is obviously widely applicable - I cited it in my undergrad thesis - but for me, it’s probably the least engaging of her works that I’ve read. It lacks the maturity and self-awareness of her later works, as well as her open-endedness and method of letting contradictions speak for themselves or create new avenues of possibility. Even Sedgwick herself in a later essay commented on feeling amazed and rather disconcerted at how straightforwardly self-assured she was in that work.

Her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” which I’ve been rereading and intending to do a write-up on, is also in many ways a self-reflection on her own past critical habits, and I would say Between Men (along with Epistemology of the Closet) both very much constitute paranoid readings - I mean, her understanding of the societal framework that facilitates male-male bonds is one that almost inherently imbues those bonds with homophobic anxiety. (From my memory of her close readings - it’s been awhile since I read the book.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of approach - and Sedgwick herself is clear about that in “Paranoid Reading” - but it’s equally clear that it’s a methodology she later wanted to move away from.

Also, it offers comparatively little insight into Sedgwick as a person, with her wry self-commentaries and self-deprecations, which is one of the more compelling factors of her writing for me.  

[woman-loving]

Hi Tree, do you have a list of favorite blogs which post quotes from books on LGBT subjects? I really enjoy that style of blog (your blog among them).

I don’t, unfortunately. :/ If anyone else has recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

[elucubrare]

I like your tag for the things you choose to read. It's fun and interesting to hear your opinions, so thank you for sharing them. : D (Sorry if I just sent a duplicate of this message-- I got distracted, lol).

Thank you! I love talking about books and also hearing other people talk about them, and so many of my favorite posts have been my favorites because people join the conversation :)

[earlgraytay]

werewolftrial replied to your post “so my friend lifa sent me a knockoff roomba and I’ve been setting him...”

I hope you enjoy having cool hair in the dumb cyberpunk future

@werewolftrial Aw thank you! 

That means a lot. I cut and dyed it myself, so... ^^;

[queerplatonicpositivity]

You don't have to apologize to anyone for participating in a society where people interpret you in a way that feels inaccurate and uncomfortable. It sucks, but it's not your fault. Hang in there.

Aw, thank you so much for this, werewolftrial.  It’s very validating to have someone say this. ❤️

[bimboficationblues]

Congratulations on getting the position! And good luck.

Thank you so much!! I also got asked to assist part-time on a critical analysis of “end-demand” models, so I’m pretty excited for the summer :)

[borrowedfeathers]

Since you asked for advice-- if it's possible, I would practice creating a mantra for when you get intrusive ageist thoughts. Don't argue against them. Don't try to figure out what they say about you. Just have a stock thing to say that shuts down whatever the compulsion usually would be, so you don't go into the OCD spiral. Also, you certainly aren't the only person who's struggled with bigoted content in intrusive thoughts. It sucks. : (

Like, I once knew a guy who had very ableist intrusive thoughts. He knew they were wrong, and it made him feel bad-- but unfortunately that wasn't in itself enough to stop the OCD spirals around those themes. It's definitely a difficult situation to deal with-- not to say that we have no responsibility for these things, but OCD cycles require a specific approach to confront. Simply "that's a shitty thing to think" won't help, sadly.

Yeah, I know, I’ve had bigoted intrusive thoughts too. :(Thanks for the advice though. I’m publishing this in the hope that it can help others — let me know if you would want me to delete it.

[motherboxing]

Would you recommend Tales of the City? My school LGBT Center had these omnibus editions in their library, and I'm curious about reading the series

HMM I mean I would, with a few caveats:

1. I have, as stated, never been to San Francisco so if the books are a totally inaccurate and offensive depiction of San Francisco I wouldn’t know. 

2.  The books’ handling of race is often…….. not great. There is a plot point early in the series that involves one character literally living in blackface because she’s a model and the modeling industry wants “a black girl who isn’t really black” – Maupin clearly meant this as a commentary on, you know, racist beauty standards, and the narrative is  clear that this character’s decision here is fucked up, but as a storyline, it’s really A Lot.

3. In that vein, there are some content warnings that should probably apply for a number of situations that characters find themselves in; in book one, for example, a main character walks in on an acquaintance of hers having killed himself and discovers his body, and the central plot is organized around someone trying to blackmail another main character over her trans status. A number of the books take place during the AIDS crisis and deal with a seropositive protagonist watching his friends die. I could probably do up a non-spoilery list of content warnings for the first three books, which I have, if people want, but I’d have to get the rest from the library.

4. The characters themselves are all kind of archetypal, and in that, sometimes their backstories and actions can seem sort of stereotypical. This is handled, I find, with a lot of fondness for the characters and a tongue-in-cheek approach that I appreciate, but I grant that it might just not be everyone’s bag.

This might make it sound like the books are kind of a drag, but mainly the reason I recommend them in the end is that they are honestly really fun. The characters weather dark situations with humor, friendship, weed, and sex; none of them are perfect, and most of them make terrible decisions all of the time, but the point of the books is the broad range of humanity expressed by all of the characters. I like that the stories allow them to kind of fuck up repeatedly and still find and be good and supportive to each other in their own ways. It’s very much a “we’re all just PEOPLE” sort of thing, which is cheesy at times but is also nothing if not sincere. 

It helps, I think, to read them a bit like you’d watch a soap opera. They are absolutely chock full of juicy drama and wild mysteries and general hijinks. I’ve described them as being like Grey’s Anatomy only instead of taking place in a version of Seattle where gentrification doesn’t exist, they take place in a version of San Francisco where gentrification doesn’t exist, and instead of everyone being doctors, everyone’s just kind of gay and/or trans (with the occasional stray cishet who gets adopted because someone suspects they might turn out to be a closet case, and sticks around because they genuinely like everyone). I think that’s probably the most apt description of them I could give. It helps that all of the protagonists are IMMENSELY likeable, even at their most disastrous. 

I think it’s kind of a spiritual precursor to Alison Bechdel’s serialized DTWOF strips, and it’s probably worth exploring on those merits alone. Though if you can’t deal with Maupin’s clumsiness about race and etc, you could also just read DTWOF. 

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Also, what is your blog title a reference to?

the medieval irish hero cú chulainn is usually described as a "beardless boy", it's one of his most common descriptors. i've done some academic work on queer/trans readings of the táin and i'm also a transmasc person myself (i.e. a beardless boy) so it seemed appropriate!

lancelot is also described as a beardless boy in lancelot du lac, tho, and so is the poet néde in immaccallam in da thuarad, which is where i got the name néde from (if anyone was wondering -- it is a deeply obscure joke that precisely nobody has got without me explaining it)

basically i collect medieval beardless boys and am also kind of a beardless boy myself! but when i made this blog it was specifically a reference to cú chulainn, and particularly to trans readings of him (hence my url)