i heed but i don't love it

bell hooks ain't wrong. 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.

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.

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.

well, above, bell hooks said it pretty good: we're not going to be able to take our wealth with us through decolonization.

I'm going to try and listen better.

ask for but little and won't stay too long

I've also been thinking about bell hooks' critique of 12 years a slave, because I'm on the record as loving it and wanted to account for the discrepancy.

Looking back at my own viewing notes, I see that I was already uncomfortable with media narratives about Patsey/Lupita Nyong'o. hooks asks us to imagine the movie without her - and for me personally, that's not actually that hard to do, since I connected most heavily with Solomon and Eliza. Adepero Oduye's work in the film has really haunted me, and if I think about it I think I'm really frustrated with how much Lupita has eclipsed her in the public eye. And yes, I do think there are reasons for that that have to do with beauty, and now that hooks has me thinking harder probably there's also some things going on with Patsey in white response to Nyong'o - one thing that's about the slave girl turned award-show Cinderella, how good and meritocratic it seems, and also maybe an erotic thing about her naked and beaten body in the film; it tries hard to short-circuit that, but it's also super possible that the filmmakers overestimated audiences in assuming that a beaten Black body could escape erotic charge no matter what.

I also observe that my notes slide more and more into film language as Patsey's narrative rises; I'm paying attention to how it's done instead of fully empathizing as I had earlier in my viewing experience. bell hooks has to have something about the presence of the gaze; there I am tracking it. there was some amazing manipulation and subversion of the gaze going on, but tbh I'm not sure I think the film would lose all that much if Patsey's body hadn't become so focal. it's the earlier parts at the Cumbermaster's plantation that draw on me most; the roses in the arbor on Sundays, Solomon's feet searching slowly for the ground, the tremendous opening visual metaphor of human bondage and tightening violin strings, Eliza being told by her "kindly" white mistress that she'll soon forget the loss of her children.