tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439throbbing light machinethrobbing light machinethrobbing light machine2023-11-09T16:18:20Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:444944linkspam: trans masculinity, feminism and the Odyssey2023-11-09T16:07:39Z2023-11-09T16:18:20Zpublic5<a href="https://judedoyle.medium.com/trans-masc-misogyny-and-the-red-six-of-spades-f8c167387dc3">Jude Doyle on Trans Masc Misogyny and the Red Six of Spades</a>: Being an attempt to grapple with trans community dynamics and trans guys who yell at women. A very long attempt. You were warned.<br /><br />Long and meaty read. Pull quote: "Again, don’t get it twisted: Trans men are men, and transmasculine people, more generally, are not women. But trans men can’t look at women and say I am the opposite of you. We also don’t get to say that to cis men, my own insecurities notwithstanding. We are like cis women. We are like trans women. We are like cis men. We are a place where the interests of at least three different populations, all of whom are historically in conflict with each other, overlap. No wonder it gets confusing."<br /><br /><a href="https://eidolon.pub/women-who-weave-c3a8dd322447">Yung In Chae, Women Who Weave:<br />Reading Emily Wilson’s Translation of the Odyssey With Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=444944" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:443276linkspam: Black Mayor in Alabama, heteropessimism2023-07-27T20:13:57Z2023-07-27T20:13:57Zpublic3<a href="https://www.wonkette.com/p/black-alabama-man-thought-he-was">Black Alabama Man Thought He Was Mayor. White Folks Said 'Naaah.'</a> He tried that in a small town. By Stephen Robinson. Eye-opening account of very small-town rural political structural dysfunction, racism in the Old South edition<br /><br />via <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://highlyeccentric.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://highlyeccentric.dreamwidth.org/'><b>highlyeccentric</b></a></span>, some interesting links on the term "heteropessimism":<br /><br /><a href="https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/"> On Heteropessimism, by Asa Seresin</a><br /><br /><a href="https://post45.org/2023/07/the-performativity-of-heteropessimism-as-feminist-complaint/">from Heteropessism, by Ellie Anderson</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=443276" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:421025lotesse @ 2021-04-16T14:00:002021-04-16T19:00:20Z2021-04-16T19:00:20Zpublic0an interesting essay on the politics of cruelty to and stealing of children by religious and authoritarian powers, wrt current cruel anti-trans legislation: <a href="https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2021/04/13/the-war-on-children-historical-context-for-the-assault-on-trans-rights/">https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2021/04/13/the-war-on-children-historical-context-for-the-assault-on-trans-rights/</a><br /><br />"It’s no coincidence that religious conservatives target children for conversion, indoctrination, kidnapping, or punishment. The same logic that told them that it was acceptable to take children from their families for the crime of being republican is the same logic that said it was justified to punish girls for the crime of being raped with hard labor is the same logic that demands that trans children be banned from playing sports, denied appropriate medical care, and forcibly converted from their chosen identities."<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=421025" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:386220Insights That Feminism Has Given Me, aged 32 and 1/22018-12-30T20:28:24Z2018-12-30T20:28:24Zpublic3-The first was the insight, visible when I was about 25, that it was my sex, and not me, that was hindering my goals. I had started to go a little crazy, not sure why my excellence and dedication was getting me nowhere fast, as the mediocre men around me took it easy and yet (almost) kept pace with me. Structurally, there were two reasons why I wasn't rising. One was that I like the company of women, and societies formed by outsiders, and so my mentors loved me but had no money or power to share with me. The other was that I failed to position myself sufficiently in re: my gender; I do tend at pivotal moments to default to thinking of myself as just human, and I forget that I have to <i>deal</i> with the situation of gender in a more active way. I think I can come across as both over-feminine and very assumptive of male-typed leadership roles; in University I was very much "boxed" as the feminist, and my male faculty had strange and slightly adversarial relationships with my primary archives that they hid behind overtly progressive-sounding language.<br /><br />-The second was the insight, visible to me only just now, of just how much pressure remains on women to give up their juicy parts, their excitement, their self-exploration, in favor of domestic labor and service to others. Everyone has a different reason, but it all adds up to the same thing: stop having fun and pick up (men's) slack. My now-ex-husband shamed me, once, for writing pornography in fanspace. His reason was that he'd been made uncomfortable, once, in a fannish space on the internet, at a fairly young age. But -- years before that, the boys in our elementary school had been snapping my bra straps. Why is a woman's pleasure, a woman's creativity, a woman's sense of play, so easy to sacrifice? Why does it seem so small and squelchable? My ex needed me to pick up the slack of his life, and tend to his accumulated hoard of <i>stuff</i>, and make him the protagonist of my story; but that made me crazy, in short order. Right now, my feminism is telling me that joyful exploration of the juicy parts of life is essential to living sanely, and it is showing me the forces that want me to forgo that, for their own comfort or profit.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=386220" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:375131lotesse @ 2017-02-25T14:30:002017-02-25T19:30:14Z2017-02-26T02:34:47Zpublic10I don't how how much of this is about being re-het-partnered, how much of it is about cumulative frustration with living around my parents' vague "leftist" anti-feminism for the last few years, and how much of it is the continued fucking wound of how the country was too goddamn sexist to elect the most capable fucking leader we've ever had a chance at, pretty much -- but my feminism's got kind of a hysterical edge to it these days, I gotta tell you. Truth coming out of her well to shame mankind - style. This bubbling well of explosive anger and alienation, like it hasn't been since I was a teenager. I've been the suzy sunshine voice in my friend group in re: the chance of the Trump admin being taken down without the world ending, but I think the unvoiced pain of her non-election -- not just the fear for the world, but the bludgeoning feeling of watching an exceptionally qualified woman be ground beneath the wheel of public sexism before your eyes -- is starting to be a problem for me. But I don't know what to do with it -- the allies I have available to me are not necessarily sympathetic to that particular trauma, and, pragmatically, it feels necessary to swallow my feminist rage and work with my daddy in resistance against Trump. It's not that I'm unwilling to do what's required of me -- it's just that I notice it's warping something in me, a little bit, pulling askew<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=375131" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:344657time to settle the score2015-01-20T20:01:55Z2015-01-20T20:01:55ZFugees, "The Score"public0<a href="http://amptoons.com/blog/2015/01/19/red-pills-and-ants/">this essay at Alas, A Blog</a> about misogyny and academic models and sociobiology is amazing, and I'm going to have to reread it in a moment when I'm not so stirred up; I was interested and nodding along, and then got to the claim that "Both ignore the scale that involves lying naked next to your husband and listening to him say appalling things about his last-boss-but-one, again, and then watching him pick his nose like an eight-year-old, and realizing you’re going to divorce him, even though at that very moment you have no idea how, and life after marriage is a blank, in your imagination, nothing there at all" - and sighed and settled and said oh yes that's right, I know that - <br /><br />and then the essayist brought in T.H. White and <i>The Book of Merlyn.</i><br /><br />why does everything keep connecting back to that<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=344657" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:332070every kitten figures out how to get down, whether or not you ever show up2014-08-09T00:29:19Z2014-08-09T00:29:19ZAni DiFranco, "Not A Pretty Girl"public0<a href="http://balkanist.net/first-night-kyiv/">This essay</a> from an anonymous female international journalist describing her assault by a respected male member of her field is intense and gorgeous: "There’s a little irony I appreciate here because, the evening I got groped and ‘be a good girl’d, the Very Respected Journalist and I had been discussing Philip Roth in the bar where we went for drinks. We talked about the American novel in the twentieth century – he was defending Updike, I was making the case that the line-up would be better if we replaced Mailer with Auster – we were exchanging these ideas as though we were two equals. As though I was a member of the club of Very Respected Journalists who I respected so very much. Two hours later, however, I had nothing intelligent to add as he forcibly tried to prise my legs apart and I just repeatedly, sickly and quietly, 'no, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, please, can you stop.'<br /><br />"I guess if Philip Roth wrote that scene it would be a profound comment on the human condition. I write it and it just makes me – unheroically, so unlike a Very Respected Journalist – want to sit in the shower until I have scrubbed my skin off."<br /><br />(hat tip to Shakesville for the link)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=332070" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:330243he keeps you in a box by the bed, alive but just barely2014-06-26T23:11:29Z2014-06-26T23:11:29ZHole, "Jennifer's Body"public3Dear Mr. Dawkins,<br /><br />in re: <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/482177718541643777">your dumbass tweet</a>,<br /><br /><a href="www.loc.gov/poetry/more_trethewey.html">Natasha Trethewey</a> is a better poet than Shakespeare, <a href="http://lotesseflower.tumblr.com/post/88522135398/deducecanoe-triplash-timemagazine-person">Fabiola Gianotti,</a> Higgs Boson discoverer, is a better scientist than Einstein, and <a href="http://zitkalasachangeagent.wordpress.com/">Zitkala-Ša</a> was a greater musician than Schubert.<br /><br />be pleased to note that this was not difficult.<br /><br />up yours,<br />me<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=330243" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:328987gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor2014-06-03T02:56:44Z2014-06-03T02:56:44ZJoni Mitchell, "The Dawntreader"public6some links, mostly about gender violence, abuse, and affective labor/exhaustion:<br /><br /><a href="http://jezebel.com/very-much-in-agreement-i-keep-on-feeling-like-ive-felt-1582904661">this comment on Jezebel about gaslighting</a> was helpful for me in figuring out why I've found the UCSB murders and the conversations in their aftermath so profoundly triggering<br /><br /><a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2014/05/politics-of-survivor-disclosure/">Re-imagining Disclosure as a Collective Act of Listening</a> over at thefeministwire: "this formulation is that the burden of social change is placed upon those least empowered to intervene in the conditions of their oppression. The figure of the subaltern, or the survivor, gaining voice captures our political imaginary, shifting the focus away from the labor that might be demanded of those in positions of power to learn to listen to subaltern inscriptions—those modes of expression that are often interpreted as ‘silence.'"<br /><br /><a href="http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/abuse-as-ddos">Abuse as DDoS</a> at Model View Culture: "DDoS attacks are so difficult to deal with largely because of their distributed nature. Even if the individual attacks aren’t particularly powerful, deal with one and dozens more will sprout up like some terrible mythical creature. Systemic abuse in the tech industry is also like this. Even seemingly minor acts of misconduct become a problem because they don’t happen in isolation."<br /><br />also from the same issue of Model View Culture, <a href="http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-fantasy-and-abuse-of-the-manipulable-user">The Fantasy and the Abuse of the Manipulable User</a>: "Social media’s social-reinforcement mechanisms are also far more powerful. The “network effects” that make fledgeling social media sites less useful than already-dominant platforms also serve to lock existing users in. It’s difficult to practically set boundaries against existing social media products which have historically served one and one’s friends. People’s natural desire to be in contact with their loved ones becomes a form of social coercion that keeps them on platforms they’d rather depart. This coercion is picked up on and amplified by the platforms themselves - when someone I know tried to delete his Facebook account, it tried to guilt him out of it by showing him a picture of his mother and asking him if he really wanted to make it harder to stay in touch with her."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.hookandeye.ca/2014/06/the-empathy-trap.html">The Empathy Trap</a> at Hook and Eye: "I mean really, what responses are left when faced with someone you ostensibly respect who hasn't found a place in the system? You tell them they matter. The work they do matters. You tell them that it stinks that they don't have stable work and that it is unfair. And probably it is unfair, but there you are, face-to-face, at a stalemate. If you're jobbed and you care then you're inevitably in a position of empathy. You are in a position of relative privilege. If you're not jobbed and you care, then you're in the position of needing to tell the caring person you're ok. You'll manage. Because honestly, it is the system, it isn't them. This, friends, is the empathy trap. It is a real thing and we are all, one way or another bound up in it, be we jobbed, not jobbed, or somewhere in between."<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=328987" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:328752processing the UCSB shooting {triggers}2014-05-26T18:09:54Z2014-05-26T18:12:59Zpublic5been thinking about violence, misogyny, and mental illness. I think that one of our takeaways as a culture NEEDS to be a re-evaluation of the seriousness of sexist hate speech; don't know that it's gonna happen, because we're so saturated in men's words of sex and gender violence that it's genuinely difficult to take them seriously. I don't want to know how much men hate me. I don't want to know that about them. But to brush aside rape and murder threats as "just internet trolling" is manifestly unsafe. when a man writes that he intends to murder women in an act of entitled "retribution," we need to be aware of the very real possibility that he will do so. nothing incomprehensible about it.<br /><br />the fact that his mother noticed, understood, called the police on him, but when they came they thought he was "shy" and "polite" and so did nothing, shows that the flip side of the tone argument is also active and insidious: say horrible things in a "civil" way, and people will excuse you. "civility" is a dirty goddamn word.<br /><br />as always, when a white-passing male pulls this sort of shit, everyone says he's mentally ill. many others have done the important work of showing how this assumption gets the axis of violence in relation to mental illness ass-backwards, indicating us crazy folk as perps when really mentally-ill people are so much more likely to be victims. but I also had the thought, this morning, that ideas about mental illness, violence, and sexism were part of what screwed me over in re: my ex, who was both mentally ill and abusive. When we met he was struggling to function through his OCD; his family hadn't done their research, swung from enabling his neurotic behaviors to asking why he didn't just stop them. he wasn't quite a misogynist, but he was definitely a bitter geeky manchild, and yes the way he talked about the girl he'd been with before bothered me a little. The only reason my mother could ever give me for the way she hit the ceiling when I started seeing him was his mental illness. I wonder, now, if she saw something of what was coming to me, if she perceived his potential for abuse - but because all she could say to me was "not that one he's crazy," and because I saw myself as "crazy," I got tangled up in a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally-ill people are still deserving of love. Not only does the labeling of entitled violence as mental illness contribute to the stigmaticization of non-neurotypicality, it also allows the mis-naming of entitled, violent, or abusive behavior as just mental difference. I'm reminded of Lundy Bancroft's observation in <i>Why Does He Do That</i> that individual therapy can actually make abusers much much worse. In fact, the argument could be made that while the shooter's parents DID get him diagnosed and into therapy, which would have been the right line of action in the case of mental illness, he may have never been crazy at all, just entitled and bitter and willing to damage others in order to ameliorate his own pain. obvs I can't know that, but I do know that I made that mistake with my ex, seeing problems as part of his disorder that we actually part of his assholishness and entitlement.<br /><br />am finding <i>Dark Angel</i> to be sufficiently man-hating escapist catharsis; recommendations for further misandrist viewing would be appreciated. might have to go whole Hepburn tonight and rewatch <i>Adam's Rib.</i><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=328752" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:327025i heed but i don't love it2014-05-10T21:08:40Z2014-05-10T21:10:00ZDessa, "The Lamb"public9<a href="http://feministcurrent.com/8984/bell-hooks-will-save-us-all-from-the-long-slow-death-that-is-popular-feminism/">bell hooks ain't wrong.</a> have been experiencing SO much anger watching as pop feminism and its whiteboy hangers-on dismiss her as old, jelly, a bitch. you sit your ass down so it can get schooled, ms. hooks is willing to dispense a drop of her brilliance & you should be grateful.<br /><br />I've been thinking a lot about Audre Lorde's language, which hooks refers to above: the master's house will never be dismantled by the master's tools. When I first read that back in college I heard it but was resistant, I think because I was still so deeply in at that point with white man's culture. I was all Tolkien and Joss Whedon and I wanted to dismantle patriarchy with Buffy and I wanted it to work. And of course I was just really coming in to "wifely" living with my whiteboy partner.<br /><br />The place where I'm at now? If I could have believed Lorde then, maybe I never would have come to be here. I get why the process was necessary, but - I had thought that I could work revolution from within, you know? marry a man and have his children and raise them to be feminists. get a cozy academic job working with old white culture in new intersectional ways, that'll work out just fine, right? I didn't, I haven't LIKED to acknowledge the depth of white culture's damage and complicity, but I'm realizing now that it's emotionally and psychologically dangerous not to. Like, it should not have been so surprising to me that the Victorian Studies department of Indiana University wasn't all that in to revolution. Lipservice yes, but if you rock the boat too hard stuff gets wet; maybe your scholarship on Dickens stops being seen as so centrally significant, maybe your dept switches places with the black studies dept and YOU have to be the poor underfunded sideshunted ones. <br /><br />well, above, bell hooks said it pretty good: we're not going to be able to take our wealth with us through decolonization.<br /><br />I'm going to try and listen better.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=327025" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:326284for twenty-five dollars and pieces of silver2014-05-06T16:05:23Z2014-05-06T16:05:23ZSimon & Garfunkel, "wed. morning 3 am"public0I foresee a strong need for these arguments in the future, as nerd engagement with the new Star Wars movie ramps up: <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/326284.html#cutid1">why it's not okay to bag on Carrie Fisher about her weight</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=326284" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:325674I don't watch Game of Thrones but I sure like reading about it2014-05-03T19:17:43Z2014-05-03T19:17:43ZKristin Hersh, "Whole Heap of Little Horses"public13<a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2014/05/on-game-of-thrones-part-three-realism.html#disqus_thread">Interesting convo over at Shakesville</a> that deconstructs the "but rape is historically realistic" canard by showing all the historically realistic ways medieval women had to gain power that are written right out of Westeros.<br /><br />More and more, Game of Thrones reinforces my conviction that it's essential to include author positionality in SFF analysis, maybe moreso than in other genres? because of the imaginative freedom/responsibility worldbuilding confers. GoT has some cool-sounding ladypersons in it, but I look at the author and I look at the stans and I don't think their fantasy about ladypersons in a crypto War of the Roses with dragons added is the same as mine. There's an investment in - I don't quite know the word, but bad history and rape culture and something liked medievalist evopsych? which I do not, will not, share. Sometimes you can cut the texts up and rearrange the pieces; but Rape Rape Martin, from what I can see, lays down some hard patterns; those books kind of sincerely scare me, I'll admit it. And the question becomes if it's worth doing the work. <br /><br />Ironically, bc Martin is so often presented as an improvement on Tolkien, Middle-earth is actually much better at allowing realistic paths to power for women apart from fighting or fucking; there aren't many named ladypersons in LoTR but of the few there are two are Ioreth and my personal cotdamn hero Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. And maybe it's part of the reason why I'll always love Narnia best of all: because women in Narnia gain power through insight and imagination, and they don't have to fight OR fuck if they don't want to. It's much easier for me to mentally wander around Gondor or Cair Paravel and add in realistically diverse, complex, and powerful women than I feel like it would be to attempt the same thing around the Iron Throne.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=325674" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:323073fooled heart beating so fast2014-04-17T02:44:01Z2014-04-17T04:51:17ZDavid Bowie, "As The World Falls Down"public0I've spent several hours tonight reading <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/">Love, Joy, Feminism, by Libby Anne,</a> a blog by a survivor of Christian Patriarchy, and I'm nowhere near through. I didn't expect to find personal connection when I opened a link to her so much as sociocultural analysis, but there are a number of interesting intersections between her experiences and mine: a child of a family-centered family with a lot of closeness and some major boundary issues, a former funny old-fashioned little girl who liked to sew patchwork and wear Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses (and also couldn't afford entrance to the worlds of mall fashion and pop music that my peers inhabited), someone who essentially "married" her very first boyfriend as a young teen. Not to mention my years of decidedly secular but also decidedly oddball homeschooling and the distrust for mainstream culture my parents raised me to. Opposite ideological bent, but same basic set of doctrines: question them, they're not to be trusted. The family way is Best.<br /><br />There's a weird balance between liberalism and conservatism in being an outsider, I think; I couldn't have been brought up with more radical politics, and certainly in the eyes of Christian Patriarchalists I have been the worst of sinners, but in other ways I recognize the defensive snobbery of the girl-child who wants to believe that she's better than the other girls because she's industrious and family-oriented instead of crass or materialistic, and I'm not sure it mattered that much that my parents were anti-capitalist intellectuals instead of religious fundamentalists, not in the virtuous outsider social psychology of that sort of thing.<br /><br />But it's awkward, because I still also do often think that the family ways I was raised to ARE Best, really & truly, and I want to be loyal to them.<br /><br />Relatedly (?), I guess my <a href="http://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/312102.html">Mormon childhood bff and intermittent crush object</a> is also moving back up north. I have ... complex? ... feelings about this.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=323073" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:311778just enough science to keep from saying fuck it2013-11-26T20:24:15Z2013-11-26T20:24:15ZIndigo Girls, "Pendulum Swinger"public1At my sibling's poking I'm trying to pick up SGA - but having exactly the problem that I knew I would, which is that I keep peering around McKay and Shepard for Jack and Daniel. This is why I really wish sequels that centered on new characters would at least skip a generation, so that I wouldn't keep getting distracted by how frustrating it must be for Daniel to not go to Atlantis, what do you mean Daine and Numair got oops pregnant and shotgun married, hey no wait what happened to Aang and Sokka and Toph and why are they dead, et cetera et cetera. I just have a really hard time attaching to new characters when previous BSOs keep popping up to draw my eye. so anyway now I'm looping back to SG1 S1. Someday, maybe, I might make it all the way through "Rising" without getting distracted by the JacknDannyness of it all, but today is not that day.<br /><br />links of interest: <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2013/11/absconding-with-ones-fetus.html">this completely terrifying case where a judge chastised a pregnant woman for absconding with her male partner's fetus</a>; <a href="http://www.gradientlair.com/post/60683172439/hello-i-love-your-blog-trudy-first-off-i-want-to">my word of the day, misogynoir, coined by the Crunk Feminist Collective.</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=311778" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:310378and the silent isle embowers the lady of shalott2013-11-17T02:15:18Z2013-11-17T02:17:43ZLoreena McKennitt, "The Lady of Shalott"public13<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/310378.html#cutid1">Downton Abbey and Abortion Stories: A Rant. Series 4 spoilers.</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=310378" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:302620not ready for this sort of thing2013-08-12T20:35:43Z2013-08-12T20:35:43ZThe Brown Derbies, "Anna Begins"public11I was Away From The Internet over the weekend, because driving, and I have to say - I know it's bad to feel gleeful about others' breakdowns, but I am feeling really vindicated by <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/porn-professor-hugo-schwyzer-comes-clean-about-his-twitter-meltdown-and-life-as-a-fraud.html">fake male feminist Hugo Schwyzer losing it all over Twitter over the weekend</a>. Partially because Hugo's actually perceptive enough to lay out some of the toxic shit that drives manipulative men, but mostly I think because my Ex left me with a lot of anger about faux-feminist men who manipulate women with <a href="http://diannaeanderson.net/blog/2013/8/hugo-schwyzer-and-the-consumption-of-redemption">redemption narratives</a>.<br /><br />I had a troubling thought a while back, that I've been turning over and over and trying to figure out what to do about. I've always said that the thing that I like best about Luke Skywalker as a character is the way he wins by practicing nonviolence and nonjudgmental love: he won't kill Vader because he loves him, no matter what, and in the face of that childlike unconditional trust Vader can't hold on to hate or bitterness and the dark side of the Force loses its hold on him, allowing him to die as Anakin, the father to a good son. I always sort of thought of it as being like Gandhian satyagraha, truth-force, confronting the enemy with their own violence and cruelty by accepting it without fighting back and giving violence the pretext to continue; it was a way for me to bring <i>Star Wars,</i> which as Joanna Russ points out <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/16/russ16.htm">has some nasty business what with the One Girl in All The World and the Honky Savior stuff and the thing where the end of ANH is modeled after Nazi propaganda,</a> back in to line with my own personal ethics. <br /><br />But, the thing is, I'm pretty much having to rethink a lot of my ideas about passive resistance, because truth-force didn't save me from my Ex. Like Hugo, he could take talk of truth and make it immaterial to the real power struggle: most of what Hugo wrote was pretty decent pop-feminist stuff, but it was only the vehicle for the very sexist drama of "Hugo and The Women."<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/302620.html#cutid1">cut for length and personal stuff about working through abuse; manipulation and suicide triggers</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=302620" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:300788thoughts on Rachel Jeantel's testimony2013-07-01T22:31:06Z2013-07-01T22:42:41Zpublic1I hadn't watched any of the footage of Rachel Jeantel's testimony or cross-examination until today, because I've been finding the proceedings of the Zimmerman trial unbearably sickening, frustrating, appalling - mainly because folk keep acting like it would be less surprising for Trayvon Martin to have been the aggressor in his own murder than it would be for a demonstrably proven paranoid racist to have killed a Black child, as so many have done before him. But I've been reading a lot about Rachel Jeantel, because media attacks on young fat Black women tend to be something that come up in spaces that I frequent. The reason why I finally opened up a YouTube tab to listen to her speak was that so many of the pieces defending her, or parsing the attacks on her, have included still photos of her, and every single time I've found the look in her eyes absolutely arresting. I know it's not entirely helpful to fight accusations of ugliness with assertions of beauty - it shouldn't matter what Rachel Jeantel looks like, and even if she were ugly as sin it wouldn't change Zimmerman's guilt or innocence - but she's not. She's so beautiful, with her hair shining and her eyes blazing and her mouth held firm. She's so beautiful.<br /><br />I was surprised, though, by what I heard when I started watching video of her. From both troll comments and feminist editorials, I'd gotten the impression of a loud, angry, even maybe rude woman - and because I support her right to be all those things, considering, I'd been ready to cheer her for it. But she was calm and soft-spoke and sure. Angry, yes, but cool angry; angry that knows what's true and isn't going to be flustered. It's the kind of anger I aspire to find in myself; I think a lot of the reason I tend to avoid conflict is that I don't trust myself to control my anger, and when I get angry I get shrill and tearful and other things that make people not take you seriously. She didn't speak unclearly. It was more like Zimmerman's defense lawyer didn't want to hear what she had to say, when he made her repeat herself - or that he wanted her to appear to have spoken unclearly. And, lord, when he asked her if characterizing Zimmerman as a cracker was a racial remark, again and again - that wasn't rudeness, that was knowledge. It is not a racial remark. It is a linguistic reminder of some of our nastier history, when whites - often poor ones - physically abused enslaved Black people. That happened. It was real. And that history still impacts us today, because of course it does! Think how long a simple family disagreement can drag on for! The kind of horror that has been American race relations is not the kind of thing that can be cleared up in a few short decades. "Cracker" reminds us of our place; unlike the n-word, though, "cracker" is an epithet we earned ourselves, because that really truly was our place, one that white America chose. And the murder of Black children has been a tactic of crackers for a long, long time. <br /><br />When I heard him say that, about "cracker" being a racial slur, I yelled and punched my couch until I whopped my thumb on its arm, and I'm neither a Black woman nor a close friend of a murdered boy who had to listen to him die on my phone. I admire her restraint, and I'm so impressed and inspired by the cool certainty of her understanding.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=300788" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:298921a post with actual content!2013-06-13T17:11:42Z2013-06-13T17:14:56Zpublic3<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/298921.html#cutid1">meme responses: stuff about Dollhouse, Star Trek, and Narnia</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br />Also, I want to link to <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2013/06/this-garbage-doesnt-only-happen-in.html">Ana Mardoll's piece at Shakesville</a> on the acquittal of Ezekiel Gilbert for Lenora Ivie Frago's murder, because this is one of those cases I want to point to whenever people (so often in the form of my undergraduate students) assert that we've changed since the (inevitably indefinable) Bad Old Days. It's an impulse that I find really frustrating, because it makes me not want to celebrate our successes, knowing that any mention I make of victory will be taken as a total declaration of the end of the war.<br /><br />eta: also I passed the graduate Spanish test-out I took yesterday! Which is awesome, because it means I don't have to take HISP 492 for the rest of the summer, and have both the foreign language requirements for my degree covered. Which means that as soon as I defend my prospectus, I'll be ABD. I am chilling out today, but this weekend is going to be for writing; I think I have most of my prospectus worked out mentally, but I need to just sort of pound out the words.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=298921" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:281520been a long time since before I've been touched2012-09-01T00:30:39Z2012-09-01T03:08:56ZRegina Spektor, "Dance Anthem of the 80s"public2hang on what do you mean Shulamith Firestone died<br /><br />:/<br /><br />:(<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=281520" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:279547here I am a rabbit-hearted girl2012-07-22T23:54:24Z2012-07-22T23:57:18Zpublic12Oh my god, you guys, I just finished reading through Freud's "Dora" case history in full, and I don't think I'll ever feel clean again. I knew there was some bad shit behind this one - I read about it when I was researching psychoanalytic perspectives on father-daughter incest for a paper on the Donkeyskin fairy tales - but I wasn't prepared for just how horribly obvious it would be that Freud was denying this girl's experience of rape and using her to flatter his own egotism, as well as to bolster his psychiatric career. <br /><br />She's eighteen, she says she was propositioned, touched, kissed, by a friend of her father's. She's close to her daddy; he denies her rape, says she's making it all up. He brings her to Freud; Freud determines that she wanted to fuck the friend, that she wants to fuck her daddy, that she wants to fuck Freud himself, and that she masturbates. Also, he decides that she's abnormal for reacting to a man's advance with repulsion, even though she didn't ask for it, didn't consent to it, didn't want it. It's sickening. Utterly utterly sick. I want to scream and yell and punch something and rend him limb from limb and just. Can I kill them all, please.<br /><br />I ... kind of don't know what to do with the mass of my own anger and repulsion. I've also got "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" on my list, and I've read a lot of that one and know I like it better, know it's one of the ones where Freud is more smart than stupid, but I don't think I can keep reading him right now. If I hadn't been reading on my computer, if I'd had a book, I think I might have torn it down the middle. <br /><br />I kind of actually want to go buy a copy so I can do just that. Instead I'm going to go read Toril Moi's critique of the case history for some second-hand cleansing and catharsis.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=279547" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:272714I don't wanna time-travel no more2012-04-24T17:44:31Z2012-04-24T17:44:31ZErykah Badu, "Window Seat"public13some things make a post!<br /><br />i. I had a lovely encounter with a little old lady outside of the Uni library this afternoon, I was picking up a book and on a meter so couldn't stay long to talk to her, but she was handing out informational flyers about the fact that in Indiana <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2012/04/number-of-day.html">17.3 percent of girls in grades 9-12 have been raped.</a> The woman must have been 75+, and there was something beautiful about the interactions I saw taking place between her, earnestly handing out her flyers, and the teenaged students she was reaching out to her. I admire the hell out of her dedication, drive, and chutzpah.<br /><br />ii. on a less good note: I wish my extended family could grok that the way to help your introverted grandkid is not to poke her about her lack of a social life until she feels completely crushed by social expectation and her failure to measure up. I hate my patterns of response to that sort of thing, because I also recognize that I do need to keep trying to be social, especially in the collapse of a lot of my support structures after The Breakup last fall. But the overwhelming fear and self-hatred that inevitably swamps me in the aftermath of those conversations makes it difficult for me to do anything but retreat to the safety of my room & my computer & my cats. Just. Not helpful, you guys. I love you, but not helpful.<br /><br />iii. on a more geeky note: 12:30 am last night, while hiding from social anxiety with help of internet, I had a brainwave. Steve/Tony = a more sexed-up, contemporary, potentially-edgy rendition of a lot of the things I loved as a kid in Sam/Frodo. Strong fairhaired earnest genuine do-gooder paired with angsty cerebral guilty-about-the-past, not to mention physically damaged by past contact with objects of mass destruction. No wonder this ship is eating my life. It's like a whole bunch of my favorite tropes have grown up with me, and started critiquing heteronormativity and the military-industrial complex.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=272714" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:269760RIP Adrienne Rich2012-03-29T02:23:06Z2012-03-29T02:23:06ZTom McRae, "2nd Law"public0You made the world a more beautiful, truer, better place - thank you for leaving your words & your knowledge for all of us who came after. <br /> <br /><br /><br />Snaptshots of a Daughter-in-Law<br /><br /> Adrienne Rich<br /><br />1.<br /><br />You, once a belle in Shreveport,<br />with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,<br />still have your dresses copied from that time,<br />and play a Chopin prelude<br />called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections<br />float like perfume through the memory."<br /><br />Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake<br />heavy with useless experience, rich<br />with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,<br />crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge<br />of mere fact. In the prime of your life.<br /><br />Nervy, glowering, your daughter<br />wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.<br /><br />2.<br /><br />Banging the coffee-pot into the sink<br />she hears the angels chiding, and looks out<br />past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.<br />Only a week since They said: Have no patience.<br /><br />The next time it was: Be insatiable.<br />Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.<br />Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,<br />a match burn to her thumbnail,<br /><br />or held her hand above the kettle's snout<br />right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,<br />since nothing hurts her anymore, except<br />each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.<br /><br />3.<br /><br />A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.<br />The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,<br />that sprung-lidded, still commodious<br />steamer-trunk of tempora and mores<br />gets stuffed with it all: the mildewd orange-flowers,<br />the female pills, the terrible breasts<br />of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.<br /><br />Two handsome women, gripped in argument,<br />each proud. acute, subtle, I hear scream<br />across the cut glass and majolica<br />like Furies cornered from their prey:<br />The argument ad feminam, all the old knives<br />that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours<br />ma semblable, ma soeur!<br /><br />4.<br /><br />Knowing themselves too well in one another:<br />their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,<br />the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .<br />Reading while waiting<br />for the iron to heat,<br />writing, My Life had stood---a Loaded Gun---<br />in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum<br />or, more often,<br />iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,<br />dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.<br /><br />5.<br /><br />Dulce ridens, dulce loguens,<br />she shaves her legs until they gleam<br />like petrified mammoth-tusk.<br /><br />6.<br /><br />When to her lute Corinna sings<br />neither words nor music are her own;<br />only the long hair dripping<br />over her cheek, only the song<br />of silk against her knees<br />and thesea<br />djusted in reflection of an eye. <br /><br />Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before<br />an unlocked door, that cage of cages,<br />tell us, you bird, you tragical machine---<br />is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down<br />by love, for you the only natural action,<br />are you edged more keen<br />to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown<br />her household books to you, daughter-in-law,<br />that her sons never saw?<br /><br />7.<br /><br />"To have in this uncertain world some stay<br />which cannot be undermined, is<br />of the utmost consequence."<br /> Thus wrote<br />a woman, partly brave and partly good,<br />who fought with what she partly understood.<br />Few men about her would or could do more,<br />hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.<br /><br />8.<br /><br />"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,<br />and turn part legend, part convention.<br />Still, eyes inaccurately dream<br />behind closed window blankening with steam.<br />Deliciously, all that we might have been,<br />all that we were---fire, tears,<br />wit, taste, martyred ambition---<br />stirs like the memory of refused adultery<br />the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.<br /><br />9.<br /><br />Not that it is done well, but<br />that it is done at all? Yes, think<br />of the odds! or shrug them off forever.<br />This luxury of the precocious child,<br />Time's precious chronic invalid,---<br />would we, darlings, resign it if we could?<br />Our blight has been our sinecure:<br />mere talent was enough for us---<br />glitter in fragments and rough drafts.<br /><br />Sigh no more, ladies.<br /> Time is male<br />and in his cups drinks to the fair.<br />Bemused by gallantry, we hear<br />our mediocrities over-praised,<br />indolence read as abnegation,<br />slattern thought styled intuition,<br />every lapse forgiven, our crime<br />only to cast too bold a shadow<br />or smash the mold straight off.<br /><br />For that, solitary confinement,<br />tear gas, attrition shelling.<br />Few applicants for that honor.<br /><br />10.<br /><br /> Well,<br />she's long about her coming, who must be<br />more merciless to herself than history.<br />Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge<br />breasted and glancing through the currents,<br />taking the light upon her<br />at least as beautiful as any boy<br />or helicopter,<br /> poised, still coming,<br />her fine blades making the air wince<br />but her cargo<br />no promise then:<br />delivered<br />palpable<br />ours.<br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Adrienne Rich<br />(1929 - 2012)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=269760" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:265658sometimes I think the suffragists were on to something with that "chastity for men" line2012-02-16T19:59:38Z2012-02-16T19:59:38Zpublic2via <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://delux-vivens.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://delux-vivens.dreamwidth.org/'><b>delux_vivens</b></a></span><br /><br /><object width="480" height="360"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hOI7fokqkFc?version=3&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="sameDomain"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hOI7fokqkFc?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="360" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br /><br />Santorum supporter Foster Friess suggests that contraception can be really cheap - just pop an aspirin between your knees! Even the reporter at MSNBC can't quite take it in.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=265658" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-06-01:397439:251754wandering the streets for a thousand thousand days2011-11-08T23:41:47Z2011-11-08T23:41:47ZFlorence + The Machine, "Lover to Lover"public4<a href="http://acceptableparity.blogspot.com/2011/10/four-ways-men-stunt-womens-careers.html">Four Ways Men Stunt Women's Careers Unintentionally</a>, via geekfeminism. This is one of the smartest acts of deconstruction and assumption-exposing I've ever seen. My head did that turning-all-the-way-around thing when I realized how completely I'd bought the victim-blamey passive-voice rhetoric Acceptable Parity takes apart here. Right. Because the onus really needs to be on the people with power, rather than the the people with none.<br /><br />And, um, because this seems to be going around - yeah, blanket permission giving for podficcing anything of mine ever. The answer is yes!<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lotesse&ditemid=251754" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments