#which very explicitly emphasizes class and social status as the framing

[finelythreadedsky]

euripides in the bacchae is really like “the sacrificial crisis but remember. a sacrifice is something you eat in honor of the god. *margaret atwood voice* the kingdom of god is within you because you ate it. and that’s ecstatic worship babe!”

[faelapis]

picturejasper20 replied to your post:

I feel i kind of share part of the blame here since i have written tons of posts about this (have people noticed this strategic thing just now?). I don't where this Steven "never cares about others" comes from. The whole problem with him in future was how obsessive selflessness was becoming really toxic for him and how he let his relationships be defined by helping other people.

i don’t think you’re at fault here! i think the strategic angle IS important. it’s something i used to emphasize a lot when people framed the conflict as “shattering the diamonds would fix everything, steven is just too much of a coward to do it”, which... woof. i had so many problems with that sentiment.

like. let’s talk about a huge point of the shattering pink diamond story - why it doesn’t fix everything. it was a last-ditch attempt, and it scared homeworld gems away, but it was still a band-aid. it didn’t change gem society. cutting off the snake’s head doesn’t break thousands of years of homeworld indoctrination upon pink’s followers.

as you would expect, the exact opposite happens: rose underestimated how much of a BELOVED and REVERED figure pink was. jasper, the diamonds, etc - they mourned her. they hated the CGs more and each came to earth explicitly because of that hatred. and so, surprise! homeworld got angrier! they hate the crystal gems more now!

it’s also frustrating how it goes with this “Great Man History” thinking where the whole of society accepts a new way of thinking as soon as you kill their leaders and replace them. 

again - all the diamonds are worshipped and adored. if you kill them, you are an enemy in the eyes of the general population. some will admire you, sure, but that’s not really dismantling their mindset, it’s just a new form of “might makes right.”

i also take issue with how like... “oh, sure, the underclass of this society has been indoctrinated, but the diamonds and uppercrusts? nah,” when in reality, eeeeeveryone believes in their role. 

the diamonds believe they’re doing the right thing. they’re not generic, power-hungry villains. killing them without trying to help them is essentially the moral determinist’s argument: “sorry, we know your mindset was formed over millennia and that every gem has an innate need for purpose, including you, buuuut despite the forces shaping you being bigger than yourself, we’re gonna act like the people in the lower classes are the only ones capable of change.”

and that is, genuinely, how a lot of people see it. even though homeworld has never been exposed to another way of thinking, sorry, you were Innately Corrupted by the accident of your status at birth. sucks to be you, now die.

but morality aside, i also have to ask... how. 

just... how would you kill them. would white bend down politely and stop piloting others’ bodies as soon as bismuth approached her with the breaking point? because from white’s perspective, stopping bismuth is extremely easy lmao. literally just take over her body and poof, white has the breaking point now.

so even putting morality aside... strategy matters. SU is very much a world where “we will win because we’re GOOD and we have FRIENDSHIP” is not how it works in a fight. the relative strengths of each group is significant and changes your strategy fundamentally. homeworld is stronger than them.

the crystal gems are a small outpost of rebels, who are up against pretty much their entire species, including their gods. many homeworld gems like the system, the ones who don’t are usually the ones with the least social power within it, and the least physical might to match. 

so... yeah. this idea that the crystal gems would even have the chance to shatter a diamond is... very romanticized. it’s a shounen trope that doens’t respect the rules of the world in question, which are far more politically realistic.

i’ve said before that blue zircon’s theories are told through a homeworldian lens, and they are (for instance, stereotyping pearls, minimizing their agency and assuming love for diamonds)... but one thing she’s right about is that it’s extremely hard to shatter a diamond from “the outside.” in enemy territory, they often come with an entourage. they’re extremely powerful. white can control any gem. so like... good luck.

strategically, steven does the smart thing - and bismuth gives the Audience At Home (tm) a solid rundown of what he’s trying to do: “let me put this in earth terms for you: you're about to enter the "lions' den". luckily, you're a "lion" too! you gotta roar at them in their language; you're the one that has to do it.”

essentially, steven has to find a way to use his privilege in order to dismantle it. this includes talking to indoctrinated and priviliged relatives so they can understand that the hierarchy isn’t actually justified. imagine that.

btw, because the diamonds are BOTH a “resource” and the uppermost class... destroying those resources would mean you could never heal the corrupted gems. so... you got revenge for no reason and saved no one. hurray. 

so we’re sacrificing this beautiful scene, and almost every CG (who were corrupted or shattered), for the sake of vengeance. good job keeping your moral purity by not engaging with the enemy at all, 10/10 solution to the material problems of this world /j.

[spilledreality]

Sporting vs Herding

i.

I wanna talk about two blogposts, Seph's "War Over Being Nice” and Alastair's "Of Triggering & the Triggered." Each lays out the same erisological idea: that there are two distinct modes or cultures of running discourse these days, and understanding the difference is crucial to understanding the content of conversation as much as its form. Let's go.

One style, Alastair writes, is indebted to the Greco-Roman rhetorical and 19th C British sporting traditions. A debate takes place in a "heterotopic" arena which is governed by an ethos of adversarial collaboration and sportsmanship. It is waged in a detached and impersonal manner, e.g. in American debate club, which inherits from these older traditions, you are assigned a side to argue; your position is not some "authentic" expression of self. Alastair:

This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.

All in all, it is a mark against one in these debates to take an argument personally, to allow arguments that happen "in the arena" to leave the arena. This mode of discourse I see exemplified in LessWrong culture, and is, I think, one of the primary attractors to the site.In the second mode of discourse, inoffensiveness, agreement, and inclusivity are emphasized, and positions are seen as closely associated with their proponents.  Alastair speculates it originates in an educational setting which values cooperation, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, affirmation, and subordination; this may be true, but I feel less confident in it than I am the larger claim about discursive modes. Provocatively, the two modes are dubbed "sporting" and "herding," with all the implications of, on the one hand, individual agents engaged in ritualized, healthy simulations of combat, and on the other, of quasi-non-agents shepherded in a coordinated, bounded, highly constrained and circumscribed epistemic landscape. Recall, if you are tempted to blame this all on the postmodernists, that this is exactly the opposite of their emphasis toward the "adult" realities of relativism, nebulosity, flux. Queer Theory has long advocated for the dissolution of gendered and racial identity, not the reification of identitarian handles we see now, which is QT's bastardization. We might believe these positions were taken too far, but they are ultimately about complicating the world and removing the structuralist comforts of certainty and dichotomy. (Structureless worlds are inherently hostile to rear children in, and also for most human life; see also the Kegan stages for a similar idea.)  

In the erisological vein, Alastair provides a portrait of the collision between the sporting and herding modes. Arguments that fly in one discursive style (taking offence, emotional injury, legitimation-by-feeling) absolutely do not fly in the other:

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge.

ii.

Seph stumbles upon a similar division, though it is less about discursive and argumentative modes, and more about social norms for emotional regulation and responsibility. He calls them Culture A and Culture B, mirroring sporting and herding styles, respectively.

In culture A, everyone is responsible for their own feelings. People say mean stuff all the time—teasing and jostling each other for fun and to get a rise. Occasionally someone gets upset. When that happens, there's usually no repercussions for the perpetrator. If someone gets consistently upset when the same topic is brought up, they will either eventually stop getting upset or the people around them will learn to avoid that topic. Verbally expressing anger at someone is tolerated. It is better to be honest than polite.

In such a culture, respect and status typically comes from performance; Seph quotes the maxim "If you can't sell shit, you are shit." We can see a commonality with sporting in that there is some shared goal which is attained specifically through adversarial play, such that some degree of interpersonal hostility is tolerated or even sought. Conflict is settled openly and explicitly.

In culture B, everyone is responsible for the feelings of others. At social gatherings everyone should feel safe and comfortable. After all, part of the point of having a community is to collectively care for the emotional wellbeing of the community's members. For this reason its seen as an act of violence against the community for your actions or speech to result in someone becoming upset, or if you make people feel uncomfortable or anxious. This comes with strong repercussions—the perpetrator is expected to make things right. An apology isn't necessarily good enough here—to heal the wound, the perpetrator needs to make group participants once again feel nurtured and safe in the group. If they don't do that, they are a toxic element to the group's cohesion and may no longer be welcome in the group. It is better to be polite than honest. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, it is better to say nothing at all.

In such a culture, status and respect come from your contribution to group cohesion and safety; Seph cites the maxim "Be someone your coworkers enjoy working with." But Seph's argument pushes back, fruitfully, on descriptions of Culture B as collaborative (which involve high self-assertion); rather, he writes, they are accommodating in the Thomas-Kilmann modes of conflict sense:

iii.

Seph and Alastair both gesture toward the way these modes feel gendered, with Culture A more "masculinized" and Culture B more "feminized."[1] While this seems important to note, given that a massive, historically unprecedented labor shift toward coed co-working has recently occured in the Western world, I don't see much point in hashing out a nature vs. nurture, gender essentialism debate here, so you can pick your side and project it. This is also perhaps interesting from the frame of American feminist history: early waves of feminism were very much about escaping the domestic sphere and entering the public sphere; there is an argument to be made that contemporary feminisms, now that they have successfully entered it, are dedicated to domesticating the public sphere into a more comfortable zone. Culture B, for instance, might well be wholly appropriate to the social setting of a living room, among acquaintances who don't know each other well; indeed, it feels much like the kind of aristocratic parlor culture of the same 19th C Britain that the sporting mode also thrived in, side-by-side. And to some extent, Culture A is often what gets called toxic masculinity; see Mad Men for a depiction.

(On the topic of domestication of the workplace: We've seen an increased blurring of the work-life separation; the mantra "lean-in" has been outcompeted by "decrease office hostility"; business attire has slid into informality, etiquette has been subsumed into ethics, dogs are allowed in the workplace. Obviously these changes are not driven by women's entrance into the workplace alone; the tech sector has had an enormous role in killing both business attire and the home-office divide, despite being almost entirely male in composition. And equally obvious, there is an enormous amount of inter- and intra-business competition in tech, which is both consistently cited by exiting employees as a hostile work environment, and has also managed to drive an outsized portion of global innovation the past few decades—thus cultural domestication is not at all perfectly correlated with a switch from Culture A to B. Draw from these speculations what you will.)

There are other origins for the kind of distinctions Seph and Alastair draw; one worthwhile comparison might be Nietzsche's master and slave moralities. The former mode emphasizes power and achievement, the other empathy, cooperation, and compassion. (Capitalism and communitarianism fall under some of the same, higher-level ideological patterns.) There are differences of course: the master moralist is "beyond" good and evil, or suffering and flourishing, whereas Culture A and B might both see themselves as dealing with questions of suffering but in very different ways. But the "slave revolt in morality" overwrote an aristocratic detachment or "aboveness" that we today might see as deeply immoral or inhuman; it is neither surprising nor damning that a revolting proletariat—the class which suffered most of the evils of the world—would speak from a place of one-to-one, attached self-advocacy. One can switch "sides" or "baskets" of the arena each half or quarter because they are impersonal targets in a public commons; one cannot so easily hold the same attitude toward defending one's home. This alone may indicate we should be more sympathetic to the communitarian mode than we might be inclined to be; certainly, those who advocate and embody this mode make plausible claims to being a similar, embattled and embittered class. A friend who I discussed these texts with argued that one failure mode of the rationalist community is an "unmooring" from the real concerns of human beings, slipping into an idealized, logical world modeled on self-similarity (i.e. highly Culture A, thinking over feeling in the Big 5 vocabulary), in a way that is blind to the realities of the larger population.

But there are also grave problems for such a discursive mode, especially when it becomes dominant. Because while on the surface, discursive battles in the sporting mode can appear to be battles between people, they are in reality battles between ideas.

iv.

As Mill argued in On Liberty, free discourse is crucial because it acts as a social steering mechanism: should we make a mistake in our course, freedom of discourse is the instrument for correcting it. But the mistake of losing free discourse is very hard to come back from; it must be fought for again, before other ideals can be pursued. 

Moreover, freedom of discourse is the means of rigorizing ideas before they are implemented, such as to avoid catastrophe. Anyone familiar with James Scott's Seeing Like A State, or Hayek's arguments for decentralized market intelligence, or a million other arguments against overhaulism, knows how difficult it is to engineer a social intervention that works as intended: the unforeseen, second-order effects; our inability to model complex systems and human psychology. Good intent is not remotely enough, and the herding approach cannot help but lower the standard of thinking and discourse emerging from such communities, which become more demographically powerful even as their ideas become worse (the two are tied up inextricably).

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

And on the strength of sporting approaches in rigorizing discourse:

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue

Thus those who wish us to accept their conceptual carvings or political advocacies without question or challenge are avoiding short-term emotional discomfort at the price of their own long-term flourishing, at the cost of finding working and stable social solutions to problems. Standpoint epistemology correctly holds that individuals possess privileged knowledge as to what it's like (in the Nagel sense) to hold their social identities. But it is often wrongly extended, in the popular game of informational corruption called "Telephone" or "Chinese Whispers," as arguing that such individuals also possess unassailable and unchallengeable insight into the proper societal solutions to their grievances. We can imagine a patient walking into the doctor's office; the doctor cannot plausibly tell him there is no pain in his leg, if he claims there is, but the same doctor can recommend treatment, or provide evidence as to whether the pain is physical or psychosomatic.A lack of discursive rigour would not be a problem, Alastair writes, "were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing."

v.

As for myself, it was not too long ago I graduated from a university in which a conflict between these modes is ongoing. We had a required course called

Contemporary Civilization

, founded in the wake of World War I, which focused on the last 2,000 years of philosophy, seminar-style: a little bit of introductory lecture, but most of the 2 x 2-hour sessions each week were filled by students arguing with one other. In other words, its founding ethos was of sporting and adversarial collaboration.We also had a number of breakdowns where several students simply could not handle this mode: they would begin crying, or say they couldn't deal with the [insert atmosphere adjective] in the room, and would either transfer out or speak to the professor. While they were not largely representative, they required catering to, and no one wished to upset these students. I have heard we were a fortunate class insofar as we had a small handful of students willing to engage sporting-style, or skeptical a priori of the dominant political ideology at the school. When, in one session, a socialist son of a Saudi billionaire, wearing a $10,000 watch and a camel-hair cashmere sweater, pontificated about "burning the money, reverting to a barter system, and killing the bosses," folks in class would mention that true barter systems were virtually unprecedented in post-agricultural societies, and basically unworkable at scale. In other classes, though, when arguments like these were made—which, taken literally, are logically irrational, but instead justify themselves through sentiment, a legitimation of driving emotion rather than explicit content, in the Culture B sense—other students apparently nodded sagely from the back of the room, "yes, and-ing" one another til their noses ran. Well, I wanted to lay out the styles with some neutrality, but I suppose it's clear now where my sympathies stand.

[1] It should go without saying, but to cover my bases, these modes feeling "feminized" or "masculinized" does not imply that all women, or women inherently, engage in one mode while all men inherently engage in another. Seph cites Camille Paglia as an archetypal example of a Culture A woman, and while she may fall to the extreme side of the Culture A mode, I'd argue most female intellectuals of the 20th C (at least those operated outside the sphere of feminist discourse) were strongly sporting-types: Sontag, for instance, was vociferous and unrelenting. 

[esqreverblog]

Over 100 Years Later, Photographer Alice Austen Is Finally Being Recognized as an LGBTQ Icon

“Alice had the means to pursue this craft,” Monger explains. “It wasn’t a profession, but she took it seriously and was very technically proficient—it was beyond a hobby.”

During a trip to the Catskills in 1899, Austen met Gertrude Tate, a kindergarten teacher who was recovering from typhoid at a hotel. A small photo album made by Austen documents the relationship that blossomed that summer. Tate, who lived in Brooklyn, began visiting Clear Comfort, accompanied Austen on holidays abroad, and in 1917, moved into the cottage. While Tate’s family objected to her “wrong devotion” to Austen, she lived there for three decades.

Personal photographs of Tate, Austen, and their female friends reveal further insight into Austen’s layered, playful personality. One iconic image, Trude & I (1891), features Austen and her childhood friend, Gertrude Eccleston, an Episcopalian minister’s daughter, wearing masks, corsets, and calf-length skirts, their arms intertwined. Both are smoking—an act women could be arrested for.

In The Darned Club (1891), taken in Clear Comfort’s garden, Austen and three female friends are framed as two embracing couples. Another photo, Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and Self Dressed Up as Men (1891), features exactly that—she and her friends dressed up as men—complete with phony mustaches and cigarettes. Another picture from this series depicts one of the women with a closed umbrella between her legs, suggesting a phallus.

“Alice probably felt she had the freedom to take those photos, because they weren’t necessarily for distribution,” Monger says. “She mocked Victorian society and the restrictions it put on women. At the same time, she was thinking about gender roles and exploring her identity.”

By all accounts, photographer Alice Austen was an extraordinary woman. Born into an affluent family on Staten Island in 1866, she challenged oppressive Victorian conventions by embracing individuality and independence.

Austen roamed around turn-of-the-century New York with camera in hand, capturing street vendors and immigrants. She worked from moving trains and sporting events, creating early action shots, and obsessively recorded the activities of friends and family, as well as her own life. Unafraid to climb a fence post (and risk exposing her ankles) to get the perfect shot, Austen produced roughly 8,000 photographs in her lifetime. In doing so, she helped to pioneer documentary photography.

But there’s an underrepresented part of her story: Austen’s 53-year-long relationship with a woman named Gertrude Tate. “There’s a history of not talking about Gertrude,” says Janice Monger, executive director of the Alice Austen House, the photographer’s Staten Island cottage-turned-institution. Even this place, dedicated to exploring Austen’s life and work since 1985, has promoted varying narratives of its former resident. The reasons why are as complex as the photographer herself.

Austen and her mother moved into the cottage, called Clear Comfort, after her father abandoned them around 1869. Austen’s uncle, a Danish sea captain, let her play around with a camera at age 10; another uncle, a chemistry professor, showed her how to develop the glass plates she exposed. An upstairs closet was converted into a darkroom for Austen, who took painstaking notes about the photo-making process. She was an experienced, exacting photographer by her 18th birthday, and spent the next 50 years perfecting her craft.

Clear Comfort served as Austen’s earliest muse: She photographed her home and the family events it played backdrop to. She shot visits to the beach, picnics in the mountains, and bowling parties at a friend’s mansion. An avid athlete, Austen documented the newly introduced sports of tennis and cycling—even collaborating with a friend on a book depicting the correct positions in which to turn, coast, and dismount a bike. In the 1890s, Austen and her photo equipment travelled around the East Coast and to Europe, where she spent entire summers exploring.

While traveling encouraged Austen’s boundless curiosity, at home, history was taking place in her backyard. She watched the building of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island’s new federal station. Before entering New York’s harbor, each incoming ship was inspected at a quarantine station south of the Austen cottage. The U.S. Public Health Service asked Austen to photograph the facility—an exercise that fascinated her so much, she returned every year for a decade, fervently documenting people and equipment.

Austen’s knack for photojournalism was perhaps most apparent when she ventured into New York City, making pictures of “street types”—street sweepers, bootblacks, fishmongers, organ grinders—that she had copyrighted at the Library of Congress. The nature of this work, and the fact that she never married or bore children, was hardly typical of a Victorian woman. But because she wasn’t paid for her photographs, Austen considered herself an amateur.

“Alice had the means to pursue this craft,” Monger explains. “It wasn’t a profession, but she took it seriously and was very technically proficient—it was beyond a hobby.”

During a trip to the Catskills in 1899, Austen met Gertrude Tate, a kindergarten teacher who was recovering from typhoid at a hotel. A small photo album made by Austen documents the relationship that blossomed that summer. Tate, who lived in Brooklyn, began visiting Clear Comfort, accompanied Austen on holidays abroad, and in 1917, moved into the cottage. While Tate’s family objected to her “wrong devotion” to Austen, she lived there for three decades.

Personal photographs of Tate, Austen, and their female friends reveal further insight into Austen’s layered, playful personality. One iconic image, Trude & I (1891), features Austen and her childhood friend, Gertrude Eccleston, an Episcopalian minister’s daughter, wearing masks, corsets, and calf-length skirts, their arms intertwined. Both are smoking—an act women could be arrested for.

In The Darned Club (1891), taken in Clear Comfort’s garden, Austen and three female friends are framed as two embracing couples. Another photo, Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and Self Dressed Up as Men (1891), features exactly that—she and her friends dressed up as men—complete with phony mustaches and cigarettes. Another picture from this series depicts one of the women with a closed umbrella between her legs, suggesting a phallus.

“Alice probably felt she had the freedom to take those photos, because they weren’t necessarily for distribution,” Monger says. “She mocked Victorian society and the restrictions it put on women. At the same time, she was thinking about gender roles and exploring her identity.”

Such photographs are often omitted in accounts of Austen’s legacy. Many articles I read didn’t even mention Tate, preferring to focus on Austen’s images of street types and Victorian society. The word “lesbian” barely appears on the Alice Austen House website, despite criticism it has received for not acknowledging the relationship to a fuller extent.

Monger, who assumed her role in 2013, has spent the past four years tackling the issue. But it’s difficult to put modern labels on historical relationships, she told me. “Even in the museum world, there’s differing opinions on this. I’m not afraid to call her a lesbian. But using that term would be over-simplifying things.”

Lillian Faderman, an internationally known scholar of lesbian and LGBTQ history, is part of an advisory team the Alice Austen House assembled to help bring Austen’s relationship with Tate to the fore. The word “lesbian,” Faderman told me, carries a connotation that Austen’s social class wouldn’t have identified with.

“Another term around at the time was ‘sexual invert,’ which probably would have horrified them as much as ‘lesbian,’” Faderman says. “It was coined by a sexologist, and suggested pathology.” Other available terms, like “romantic friendship” or a “Boston marriage,” inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, may have been more attractive to Austen.

“Everyone wants ‘evidence,’” Monger says. “We don’t have anything explicitly written that says they were lesbians.”

Looking at Austen’s photographs and other documents, Faderman and others contend, there’s no question about it. “It’s hard to imagine the kind of willful ignorance about homosexuality that existed in earlier eras,” Faderman says. “I would think that if Alice’s family didn’t know, they’d tell themselves they wouldn’t want to ‘think ill’ of Alice and Gertrude. It’d be tarring them with this terrible allegation.”

Similarly, one of Austen’s biographers, Ann Novotny, offered two different versions of her life. Tate is referred to as Austen’s companion in Novotny’s 1976 biography, but as her lover in an article she wrote for Heresies, a feminist art magazine, the following year.

Since Monger’s arrival, she’s worked with the Alice Austen House’s board to incorporate Austen’s personal identity into the cottage museum. They’ve since updated its mission statement and received multiple grants to further contextualize Austen from a number of perspectives, including LGBTQ history. In 2019, the house will unveil a new permanent display, complete with new text panels in current language and photographs that make Tate more visible.

And on June 20th, the Alice Austen House was officially designated a national site of LGBTQ history by the National Park Service. It is the fourth site in New York City, and the first in the city and state devoted to a woman, to receive the honor.

During Monger’s remarks at the ceremony, she described Austen and Tate’s relationship as a story of love and acceptance, and emphasized the responsibility of representing a historical person. “What an incredible day,” she mused. “This moment is a long time coming.”

—Tiffany Jow

Source

ARTSY EDITORIALBY TIFFANY JOW

[riichardwilson]

4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19

[embedded content]

Watch the full session.

Creating brand content during a global pandemic is not on anyone’s résumé list of experiences. Brands now have to rethink their customers’ priorities to determine what’s worth communicating, while balancing marketing agency goals with customer empathy.

This conundrum has businesses playing themselves, generating nearly identical messaging across site banners and emails. The content din makes it more difficult for audiences to discern one brand from the next.

Despite these new challenges, there is guidance for brands that seek to continue serving and engaging their customers. On Live with Search Engine Land Friday, Meghan Keaney Anderson, CMO of HubSpot, Amanda Milligan, marketing agency director at Fractl and Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank marketing agency, shared some of the lessons they’ve learned while working with clients and marketing agency their own agencies on what brands should be communicating at this point, how to convey the right tone, identify content marketing agency opportunities and finding the right ways to measure success.

How should brands be communicating at this point?

“There are two ways that I would think about this: One is, ‘how do you communicate in direct response to the crisis?’” said Anderson, whose organization initially halted all social promotions and new product launches until it could assess the tone of its messaging. 

“The second piece of this is, after the [initial outbreak] of the crisis, there is a new world that you are marketing agency and selling in, and so how do you reflect those times?” she said, pointing out new brand opportunities, like providing educational content, as people shift their focus to longer-term goals.

“Don’t say anything if we’re not going to be providing some kind of value,” Milligan advised, adding, “there’s a lot of sentiment going around and people are getting kind of skeptical or cynical about brands just saying things that sound nice, but they’re not actually doing anything.” Brands that are able to assist their target audiences, or simply continue serving customers the way they were pre-pandemic, will continue to build trust and an audience, Milligan said.

“Generally, the trend has been to be supportive and empathetic to the customer: to really dig into, ‘How does this current environment change life for our customer and where can we be of assistance?’” Lee said, pointing out that content marketing agency initiatives don’t necessarily have to be framed by the product solutions that a business offers. 

“SAP just did SAP for Kids,” Lee used as an example, “it was a ‘bring your kids to virtual work day’ with celebrities and artists and influencers; it was a really great way for people to turn this live YouTube video on and have their kids sitting there next to them at home and actually take a yoga class or learn how to draw something or make a song,” he said.

How do you balance optimism and sensitivity in your messaging?

“You have to acknowledge that something’s going on, you don’t want to be oblivious … Because then, if somebody’s listening to that and they’ve had a very different experience, they’re not going to trust you anymore,” said Milligan, explaining that, while it is not necessary to dwell on the negatives, businesses must recognize that industries and customers will not return to the same status quo after the pandemic.

“The best way to judge whether something is going to land right is to talk to people within your own company and talk with your customers,” Anderson suggested, noting that both the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 are likely to have affected a member of your own organization or one of their family members, and that taking their experiences into account can help you find the right tone.

“The other thing is, you’re going to make a mistake in this — we’re all going to make a mistake in this,” Anderson added, “And I think part of having that humanity is if you do say something that is accidentally out of tone or gets a bad reaction, to just listen and own that, apologize for it, move forward and not let it keep you out of the arena.” The unprecedented challenge that the world is facing may make for slightly more forgiving circumstances, but this is also a time when inappropriate messaging could strike a fatal blow to some businesses, making it even more important to, as Anderson recommended, discuss your strategy with the client and members of your own organization.

How do you identify content marketing opportunities during COVID?

“The opportunity identified is using search data to understand that there is an increased demand for certain types of products and solutions,” said Lee, emphasizing a back-to-basics SEO Company approach that he says companies should be employing year-round.

“A lot of people are looking to fill in the time that they’re not spending commuting,” he pointed out, “There might be ‘infotaining’ content that your brand could put out — it’s still contextually relevant to your business, but at the same time, it’s entertaining in some way.” Although some of these initiatives may not directly feed into the ROI outcomes that organizations are used to pursuing, audiences will remember the positive experiences that brands provide for them during this time, Lee said.

For businesses whose services or products do not explicitly lend themselves to the crisis, opportunities can still be found by exploring the thoughts, emotions, and challenges that their audiences may be facing right now. 

“Different software that is about efficiency, or like ‘do-it-yourself’ has gotten much trendier now — probably, the sad reality is that people are downsizing and they have to try to make it work,” said Milligan. “So, what I’m encouraging people to do is to take that time to assess: What are the emotions being associated with here and the smaller struggles happening? Any kind of pain point you can alleviate, at this point, is much appreciated, and that could be a design tool that’s free and you can give to your whole team right now,” she said.

Can we rely on the same KPIs as before?

“We’re putting more emphasis on qualitative data than quantitative right now … we’re more okay than we typically are with trying to understand anecdotal evidence and gut reactions because these numbers are different than we’ve seen before,” said Anderson, adding that such qualitative data, once viewed as more of a supplement to cold hard metrics, has taken on more importance for her organization.

Switching to more qualitative measures of engagement has enabled HubSpot’s social media teams to monitor whether their messaging is being received positively or negatively, which helps the company adapt on the fly and informs its subsequent social media posts, Anderson said.

“It’s important to remember that even if you recognize that [KPIs have shifted], you have to set that expectation internally or with your clients,” Milligan said, adding, “It’s you determining, ‘Okay, what is now the purpose of this and what are the KPIs I’m going to assign to it?’ then telling that story internally or to your clients so that everybody’s on the same page.” Setting and communicating the appropriate KPIs helps your team and client understand what they’re trying to achieve, which will increase the odds of success.

More about marketing agency in the time of the coronavirus

About The Author

George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing agency, journalism, and storytelling.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/4-takeaways-for-content-marketers-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/616592734030004224

[scpie]

4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19

[embedded content]

Watch the full session.

Creating brand content during a global pandemic is not on anyone’s résumé list of experiences. Brands now have to rethink their customers’ priorities to determine what’s worth communicating, while balancing marketing agency goals with customer empathy.

This conundrum has businesses playing themselves, generating nearly identical messaging across site banners and emails. The content din makes it more difficult for audiences to discern one brand from the next.

Despite these new challenges, there is guidance for brands that seek to continue serving and engaging their customers. On Live with Search Engine Land Friday, Meghan Keaney Anderson, CMO of HubSpot, Amanda Milligan, marketing agency director at Fractl and Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank marketing agency, shared some of the lessons they’ve learned while working with clients and marketing agency their own agencies on what brands should be communicating at this point, how to convey the right tone, identify content marketing agency opportunities and finding the right ways to measure success.

How should brands be communicating at this point?

“There are two ways that I would think about this: One is, ‘how do you communicate in direct response to the crisis?’” said Anderson, whose organization initially halted all social promotions and new product launches until it could assess the tone of its messaging. 

“The second piece of this is, after the [initial outbreak] of the crisis, there is a new world that you are marketing agency and selling in, and so how do you reflect those times?” she said, pointing out new brand opportunities, like providing educational content, as people shift their focus to longer-term goals.

“Don’t say anything if we’re not going to be providing some kind of value,” Milligan advised, adding, “there’s a lot of sentiment going around and people are getting kind of skeptical or cynical about brands just saying things that sound nice, but they’re not actually doing anything.” Brands that are able to assist their target audiences, or simply continue serving customers the way they were pre-pandemic, will continue to build trust and an audience, Milligan said.

“Generally, the trend has been to be supportive and empathetic to the customer: to really dig into, ‘How does this current environment change life for our customer and where can we be of assistance?’” Lee said, pointing out that content marketing agency initiatives don’t necessarily have to be framed by the product solutions that a business offers. 

“SAP just did SAP for Kids,” Lee used as an example, “it was a ‘bring your kids to virtual work day’ with celebrities and artists and influencers; it was a really great way for people to turn this live YouTube video on and have their kids sitting there next to them at home and actually take a yoga class or learn how to draw something or make a song,” he said.

How do you balance optimism and sensitivity in your messaging?

“You have to acknowledge that something’s going on, you don’t want to be oblivious . . . Because then, if somebody’s listening to that and they’ve had a very different experience, they’re not going to trust you anymore,” said Milligan, explaining that, while it is not necessary to dwell on the negatives, businesses must recognize that industries and customers will not return to the same status quo after the pandemic.

“The best way to judge whether something is going to land right is to talk to people within your own company and talk with your customers,” Anderson suggested, noting that both the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 are likely to have affected a member of your own organization or one of their family members, and that taking their experiences into account can help you find the right tone.

“The other thing is, you’re going to make a mistake in this — we’re all going to make a mistake in this,” Anderson added, “And I think part of having that humanity is if you do say something that is accidentally out of tone or gets a bad reaction, to just listen and own that, apologize for it, move forward and not let it keep you out of the arena.” The unprecedented challenge that the world is facing may make for slightly more forgiving circumstances, but this is also a time when inappropriate messaging could strike a fatal blow to some businesses, making it even more important to, as Anderson recommended, discuss your strategy with the client and members of your own organization.

How do you identify content marketing opportunities during COVID?

“The opportunity identified is using search data to understand that there is an increased demand for certain types of products and solutions,” said Lee, emphasizing a back-to-basics SEO Company approach that he says companies should be employing year-round.

“A lot of people are looking to fill in the time that they’re not spending commuting,” he pointed out, “There might be ‘infotaining’ content that your brand could put out — it’s still contextually relevant to your business, but at the same time, it’s entertaining in some way.” Although some of these initiatives may not directly feed into the ROI outcomes that organizations are used to pursuing, audiences will remember the positive experiences that brands provide for them during this time, Lee said.

For businesses whose services or products do not explicitly lend themselves to the crisis, opportunities can still be found by exploring the thoughts, emotions, and challenges that their audiences may be facing right now. 

“Different software that is about efficiency, or like ‘do-it-yourself’ has gotten much trendier now — probably, the sad reality is that people are downsizing and they have to try to make it work,” said Milligan. “So, what I’m encouraging people to do is to take that time to assess: What are the emotions being associated with here and the smaller struggles happening? Any kind of pain point you can alleviate, at this point, is much appreciated, and that could be a design tool that’s free and you can give to your whole team right now,” she said.

Can we rely on the same KPIs as before?

“We’re putting more emphasis on qualitative data than quantitative right now … we’re more okay than we typically are with trying to understand anecdotal evidence and gut reactions because these numbers are different than we’ve seen before,” said Anderson, adding that such qualitative data, once viewed as more of a supplement to cold hard metrics, has taken on more importance for her organization.

Switching to more qualitative measures of engagement has enabled HubSpot’s social media teams to monitor whether their messaging is being received positively or negatively, which helps the company adapt on the fly and informs its subsequent social media posts, Anderson said.

“It’s important to remember that even if you recognize that [KPIs have shifted], you have to set that expectation internally or with your clients,” Milligan said, adding, “It’s you determining, ‘Okay, what is now the purpose of this and what are the KPIs I’m going to assign to it?’ then telling that story internally or to your clients so that everybody’s on the same page.” Setting and communicating the appropriate KPIs helps your team and client understand what they’re trying to achieve, which will increase the odds of success.

More about marketing agency in the time of the coronavirus

About The Author

George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing agency, journalism, and storytelling.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/4-takeaways-for-content-marketers-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

[laurelkrugerr]

4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19

[embedded content]

Watch the full session.

Creating brand content during a global pandemic is not on anyone’s résumé list of experiences. Brands now have to rethink their customers’ priorities to determine what’s worth communicating, while balancing marketing agency goals with customer empathy.

This conundrum has businesses playing themselves, generating nearly identical messaging across site banners and emails. The content din makes it more difficult for audiences to discern one brand from the next.

Despite these new challenges, there is guidance for brands that seek to continue serving and engaging their customers. On Live with Search Engine Land Friday, Meghan Keaney Anderson, CMO of HubSpot, Amanda Milligan, marketing agency director at Fractl and Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank marketing agency, shared some of the lessons they’ve learned while working with clients and marketing agency their own agencies on what brands should be communicating at this point, how to convey the right tone, identify content marketing agency opportunities and finding the right ways to measure success.

How should brands be communicating at this point?

“There are two ways that I would think about this: One is, ‘how do you communicate in direct response to the crisis?’” said Anderson, whose organization initially halted all social promotions and new product launches until it could assess the tone of its messaging. 

“The second piece of this is, after the [initial outbreak] of the crisis, there is a new world that you are marketing agency and selling in, and so how do you reflect those times?” she said, pointing out new brand opportunities, like providing educational content, as people shift their focus to longer-term goals.

“Don’t say anything if we’re not going to be providing some kind of value,” Milligan advised, adding, “there’s a lot of sentiment going around and people are getting kind of skeptical or cynical about brands just saying things that sound nice, but they’re not actually doing anything.” Brands that are able to assist their target audiences, or simply continue serving customers the way they were pre-pandemic, will continue to build trust and an audience, Milligan said.

“Generally, the trend has been to be supportive and empathetic to the customer: to really dig into, ‘How does this current environment change life for our customer and where can we be of assistance?’” Lee said, pointing out that content marketing agency initiatives don’t necessarily have to be framed by the product solutions that a business offers. 

“SAP just did SAP for Kids,” Lee used as an example, “it was a ‘bring your kids to virtual work day’ with celebrities and artists and influencers; it was a really great way for people to turn this live YouTube video on and have their kids sitting there next to them at home and actually take a yoga class or learn how to draw something or make a song,” he said.

How do you balance optimism and sensitivity in your messaging?

“You have to acknowledge that something’s going on, you don’t want to be oblivious . . . Because then, if somebody’s listening to that and they’ve had a very different experience, they’re not going to trust you anymore,” said Milligan, explaining that, while it is not necessary to dwell on the negatives, businesses must recognize that industries and customers will not return to the same status quo after the pandemic.

“The best way to judge whether something is going to land right is to talk to people within your own company and talk with your customers,” Anderson suggested, noting that both the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 are likely to have affected a member of your own organization or one of their family members, and that taking their experiences into account can help you find the right tone.

“The other thing is, you’re going to make a mistake in this — we’re all going to make a mistake in this,” Anderson added, “And I think part of having that humanity is if you do say something that is accidentally out of tone or gets a bad reaction, to just listen and own that, apologize for it, move forward and not let it keep you out of the arena.” The unprecedented challenge that the world is facing may make for slightly more forgiving circumstances, but this is also a time when inappropriate messaging could strike a fatal blow to some businesses, making it even more important to, as Anderson recommended, discuss your strategy with the client and members of your own organization.

How do you identify content marketing opportunities during COVID?

“The opportunity identified is using search data to understand that there is an increased demand for certain types of products and solutions,” said Lee, emphasizing a back-to-basics SEO Company approach that he says companies should be employing year-round.

“A lot of people are looking to fill in the time that they’re not spending commuting,” he pointed out, “There might be ‘infotaining’ content that your brand could put out — it’s still contextually relevant to your business, but at the same time, it’s entertaining in some way.” Although some of these initiatives may not directly feed into the ROI outcomes that organizations are used to pursuing, audiences will remember the positive experiences that brands provide for them during this time, Lee said.

For businesses whose services or products do not explicitly lend themselves to the crisis, opportunities can still be found by exploring the thoughts, emotions, and challenges that their audiences may be facing right now. 

“Different software that is about efficiency, or like ‘do-it-yourself’ has gotten much trendier now — probably, the sad reality is that people are downsizing and they have to try to make it work,” said Milligan. “So, what I’m encouraging people to do is to take that time to assess: What are the emotions being associated with here and the smaller struggles happening? Any kind of pain point you can alleviate, at this point, is much appreciated, and that could be a design tool that’s free and you can give to your whole team right now,” she said.

Can we rely on the same KPIs as before?

“We’re putting more emphasis on qualitative data than quantitative right now … we’re more okay than we typically are with trying to understand anecdotal evidence and gut reactions because these numbers are different than we’ve seen before,” said Anderson, adding that such qualitative data, once viewed as more of a supplement to cold hard metrics, has taken on more importance for her organization.

Switching to more qualitative measures of engagement has enabled HubSpot’s social media teams to monitor whether their messaging is being received positively or negatively, which helps the company adapt on the fly and informs its subsequent social media posts, Anderson said.

“It’s important to remember that even if you recognize that [KPIs have shifted], you have to set that expectation internally or with your clients,” Milligan said, adding, “It’s you determining, ‘Okay, what is now the purpose of this and what are the KPIs I’m going to assign to it?’ then telling that story internally or to your clients so that everybody’s on the same page.” Setting and communicating the appropriate KPIs helps your team and client understand what they’re trying to achieve, which will increase the odds of success.

More about marketing agency in the time of the coronavirus

About The Author

George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing agency, journalism, and storytelling.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/4-takeaways-for-content-marketers-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/04/4-takeaways-for-content-marketers-in.html

[caveartfair]

This Pioneering Photographer Captured Same-Sex Love over a Century Ago

Alice Austen, The Darned Club, 1891. Alice Austen Photograph Collection. Courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.  

By all accounts, photographer Alice Austen was an extraordinary woman. Born into an affluent family on Staten Island in 1866, she challenged oppressive Victorian conventions by embracing individuality and independence.

Austen roamed around turn-of-the-century New York with camera in hand, capturing street vendors and immigrants. She worked from moving trains and sporting events, creating early action shots, and obsessively recorded the activities of friends and family, as well as her own life. Unafraid to climb a fence post (and risk exposing her ankles) to get the perfect shot, Austen produced roughly 8,000 photographs in her lifetime. In doing so, she helped to pioneer documentary photography.

But there’s an underrepresented part of her story: Austen’s 53-year-long relationship with a woman named Gertrude Tate. “There’s a history of not talking about Gertrude,” says Janice Monger, executive director of the Alice Austen House, the photographer’s Staten Island cottage-turned-institution. Even this place, dedicated to exploring Austen’s life and work since 1985, has promoted varying narratives of its former resident. The reasons why are as complex as the photographer herself.

Austen and her mother moved into the cottage, called Clear Comfort, after her father abandoned them around 1869. Austen’s uncle, a Danish sea captain, let her play around with a camera at age 10; another uncle, a chemistry professor, showed her how to develop the glass plates she exposed. An upstairs closet was converted into a darkroom for Austen, who took painstaking notes about the photo-making process. She was an experienced, exacting photographer by her 18th birthday, and spent the next 50 years perfecting her craft.

Alice Austen and Gertrude Tate, Pickards Penny Photo Studio, Stapleton Staten Island, c. 1905. Courtesy of Alice Austen House.

Richard O’Cannon, Alice Austen seated with Gertrude Tate, September 1944. Courtesy of Alice Austen House.

Clear Comfort served as Austen’s earliest muse: She photographed her home and the family events it played backdrop to. She shot visits to the beach, picnics in the mountains, and bowling parties at a friend’s mansion. An avid athlete, Austen documented the newly introduced sports of tennis and cycling—even collaborating with a friend on a book depicting the correct positions in which to turn, coast, and dismount a bike. In the 1890s, Austen and her photo equipment travelled around the East Coast and to Europe, where she spent entire summers exploring.

While traveling encouraged Austen’s boundless curiosity, at home, history was taking place in her backyard. She watched the building of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island’s new federal station. Before entering New York’s harbor, each incoming ship was inspected at a quarantine station south of the Austen cottage. The U.S. Public Health Service asked Austen to photograph the facility—an exercise that fascinated her so much, she returned every year for a decade, fervently documenting people and equipment.

Austen’s knack for photojournalism was perhaps most apparent when she ventured into New York City, making pictures of “street types”—street sweepers, bootblacks, fishmongers, organ grinders—that she had copyrighted at the Library of Congress. The nature of this work, and the fact that she never married or bore children, was hardly typical of a Victorian woman. But because she wasn’t paid for her photographs, Austen considered herself an amateur.

Alice Austen, Trude & I, 1891. Courtesy of Staten Island Historical Society

“Alice had the means to pursue this craft,” Monger explains. “It wasn’t a profession, but she took it seriously and was very technically proficient—it was beyond a hobby.”

During a trip to the Catskills in 1899, Austen met Gertrude Tate, a kindergarten teacher who was recovering from typhoid at a hotel. A small photo album made by Austen documents the relationship that blossomed that summer. Tate, who lived in Brooklyn, began visiting Clear Comfort, accompanied Austen on holidays abroad, and in 1917, moved into the cottage. While Tate’s family objected to her “wrong devotion” to Austen, she lived there for three decades.

Personal photographs of Tate, Austen, and their female friends reveal further insight into Austen’s layered, playful personality. One iconic image, Trude & I (1891), features Austen and her childhood friend, Gertrude Eccleston, an Episcopalian minister’s daughter, wearing masks, corsets, and calf-length skirts, their arms intertwined. Both are smoking—an act women could be arrested for.

In The Darned Club (1891), taken in Clear Comfort’s garden, Austen and three female friends are framed as two embracing couples. Another photo, Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and Self Dressed Up as Men (1891), features exactly that—she and her friends dressed up as men—complete with phony mustaches and cigarettes. Another picture from this series depicts one of the women with a closed umbrella between her legs, suggesting a phallus.

“Alice probably felt she had the freedom to take those photos, because they weren’t necessarily for distribution,” Monger says. “She mocked Victorian society and the restrictions it put on women. At the same time, she was thinking about gender roles and exploring her identity.”

Alice Austen, Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and self dressed up, sitting down, 1891. Alice Austen Photograph Collection. Courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.  

Such photographs are often omitted in accounts of Austen’s legacy. Many articles I read didn’t even mention Tate, preferring to focus on Austen’s images of street types and Victorian society. The word “lesbian” barely appears on the Alice Austen House website, despite criticism it has received for not acknowledging the relationship to a fuller extent.

Monger, who assumed her role in 2013, has spent the past four years tackling the issue. But it’s difficult to put modern labels on historical relationships, she told me. “Even in the museum world, there’s differing opinions on this. I’m not afraid to call her a lesbian. But using that term would be over-simplifying things.”

Lillian Faderman, an internationally known scholar of lesbian and LGBTQ history, is part of an advisory team the Alice Austen House assembled to help bring Austen’s relationship with Tate to the fore. The word “lesbian,” Faderman told me, carries a connotation that Austen’s social class wouldn’t have identified with.

“Another term around at the time was ‘sexual invert,’ which probably would have horrified them as much as ‘lesbian,’” Faderman says. “It was coined by a sexologist, and suggested pathology.” Other available terms, like “romantic friendship” or a “Boston marriage,” inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, may have been more attractive to Austen.

Alice Austen, Group Apparatus, 1893. Alice Austen Photograph Collection. Courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.  

“Everyone wants ‘evidence,’” Monger says. “We don’t have anything explicitly written that says they were lesbians.”

Looking at Austen’s photographs and other documents, Faderman and others contend, there’s no question about it. “It’s hard to imagine the kind of willful ignorance about homosexuality that existed in earlier eras,” Faderman says. “I would think that if Alice’s family didn’t know, they’d tell themselves they wouldn’t want to ‘think ill’ of Alice and Gertrude. It’d be tarring them with this terrible allegation.”

Similarly, one of Austen’s biographers, Ann Novotny, offered two different versions of her life. Tate is referred to as Austen’s companion in Novotny’s 1976 biography, but as her lover in an article she wrote for Heresies, a feminist art magazine, the following year.

Since Monger’s arrival, she’s worked with the Alice Austen House’s board to incorporate Austen’s personal identity into the cottage museum. They’ve since updated its mission statement and received multiple grants to further contextualize Austen from a number of perspectives, including LGBTQ history. In 2019, the house will unveil a new permanent display, complete with new text panels in current language and photographs that make Tate more visible.

And on June 20th, the Alice Austen House was officially designated a national site of LGBTQ history by the National Park Service. It is the fourth site in New York City, and the first in the city and state devoted to a woman, to receive the honor.

During Monger’s remarks at the ceremony, she described Austen and Tate’s relationship as a story of love and acceptance, and emphasized the responsibility of representing a historical person. “What an incredible day,” she mused. “This moment is a long time coming.”

—Tiffany Jow

from Artsy News