throbbing light machine

Black Alabama Man Thought He Was Mayor. White Folks Said 'Naaah.' 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

via highlyeccentric, some interesting links on the term "heteropessimism":

On Heteropessimism, by Asa Seresin

from Heteropessism, by Ellie Anderson

two things make a post:

-I'm starting a first watch of Lois & Clark; i hear it gives good het, and Dean Cain is a toothsome fucking morsel. 20 minutes into the first ep and I'm (mostly) hooked: the 90s gender stuff is egregious, but the Due South-y/Quantum Leap-y sugar and social responsibility vibe is v. nice. And also damn the old lady reciting Chekhov in the condemned theatre is giving me all kinds of feelings about my own grandmother and maybe choking me up a little.

-Apparently the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman this week is actually going to be really exciting? ( could be spoilery i guess? )

(there's going to be so much scholarship. like, easily a decade of publications. a big first wave in a year or so. I can't wait.)

things that are making me want to ragequit the universe, racism edition:

The Economist thinks that slavery was a perfectly cromulent economic strategy, the City of Ferguson thinks that an all-white PR firm is just what they need right now, and white teachers in the New York City public schools seem to be of the opinion that wearing t-shirts in support of the NYPD isn't a massive fucking betrayal of their students of color, a clear sign that the halls of public education aren't for Black children or their police-brutality-resultant trauma.

I am sick with horror at events in Ferguson, Missouri, because once again white pride has trumped the right of black children to exist. I am sick with terror at events in Ferguson, Missouri, because this is the creep of violent fascism in action, and we should fucking all be afraid.

And I feel sick with grief, too. That poor beautiful little boy.

Had a fight this morning with my Mormon friend, who for whatever reason saw fit to break our usual detente with a bunch of crap pro-violence pro-war bullshit; I ended up yelling and hanging up on him, but it's kept bothering me. I hate having to know that people I like - well, I guess that's what comes into question, isn't it? if they really are people that I can like. G. repeatedly described himself this morning as "pro-imperialism," and I sort of think you can't come back from that. He doesn't get it from nowhere - like Orson Scott Card, my friend did mission work in Brazil, and however much they dress it up as charity or whatever the Mormon missionary scene is totally imperialism in practice. And, no matter the polygamy bans, the Mormons are really patriarchal, moreso than I think people understand. This is the religion that makes eighteen-year-old white boys "priests" with all these "spiritual powers." See the recent excommunication of Kate Kelly for Mormon patriarchalism in action.

but we're getting old enough that this shit is no longer cute.

It's always creeped me out a bit that my family contacts with Mormons have been so gendered: we've got G. and an older friend of his, a painter like my mama, and the both of them do this man-about-town skirt-the-rules thing where they drink cocktails and mama's friend paints nudes. Mama and her friend go gallery-hopping in New York, and he's married, but his wife is never with him: he explores the city art scene while she, seemingly, stays home with their children and obeys the laws of their church. It's like the men have the authority to bend the rules, and so can make fun playmates for leftist folks like me and mine - but that actually kind of makes it all worse, because they're not only cult members, they're hypocritical cult members who subject their women to harsh standards that they themselves cannot keep to.

(The OSC link above goes to a fascinating chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of Speaker for the Dead. before reading through it, I'd managed to forget enough of the book to think that I liked it better than Ender's Game,, and had tended to position it as the one thing of Card's that was maybe still worth it. There are now a number of things freaking me out about my own personal relationship with Speaker. I'd managed to miss the implication, as a child, that Novinha and her family are Black, and it's breaking my brain, because on the one hand, I'm not surprised that OSC didn't succeed in getting a message of diversity across - and then on the other I wonder if I wasn't engaging in defensive ignorance, because as the linked decon shows, Ender's interactions with the Ribeiras are fucking horrific if he's the lone white dude on a Black planet. Even as a twelve-year-old, I knew I didn't want to read an interracial romance authored by Card! I kind of wish I didn't have to know now! but then again, erasure and whitewashing are, we know, not cool responses to a text. Gahhhh. In even further "I don't know what to do with this," I was also struck, given the really really central place that Komarr has had in my ability to think through my abuse, with how much Speaker felt similar: I can really see Miles/Ekaterin as a rewriting of Ender/Novinha, even down to the role of the children. idek man.)

(I've been feeling angry and bitter and intense and fighty a lot of late, and idek about that either. are things more shit than usual in the world, or is it just me?)

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.

On the one hand, the workers' rights advocate in me is horrified by the fact that so many American businesses are going to be open on Thanksgiving this year. My mama tells stories about having oddly-timed holidays as a girl because my grandpa often chose to work at the steel mill on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day - but since that was an oldschool union job, he had the choice, and the reason he chose to work was that he got time and a half and every little bit helped. It's really terrible to think about similar families now being torn apart on holidays against their wills because workers no longer have rights to holidays or even the right to request unpaid time off. It reminds me of indenture. It feels really wrong.

But on the other - oh how I long for a War On Thanksgiving to be properly fought and won. I don't know if my dislike of potatoes is a factor here, but I hate hate hate Thanksgiving. Bland-ass food, and sure you can dress it up to taste better but why eat turkey and potatoes when you can eat red curry or beef bourginon or spicy tortilla soup? There's a reason we only eat traditional Thanksgiving foods once a year, y'all. Thanksgiving break cuts academic semesters really awkwardly - just as students need to be gearing up for finals, oh, no, go home for a week and forget everything you've learned since you left high school. Thanksgiving break comes when I least want to see people, when I'm most tired and irritable and overworked and underpaid and no I don't want to drive nine hours north, thanks, can't I just stay home?

And the racism. Columbus Day might be the most overtly racist of all US holidays, but Thanksgiving was the one they got me on back then; I was raised by a leftist family with a pretty good grasp on decency around diversity, but Thanksgiving was one major vector of racist indoctrination they missed. Year after year as a child I was encouraged by teachers and grandparents and other adults to bedeck myself in construction-paper-feather crowns, wear lipstick "war paint" and two fat blonde braids and brown-colored clothes and the pink fringy moccasins that I got every summer up on Mackinaw Island. So shamed of that shit; can't believe they let me do it, can't believe I didn't get that it was wrong. I was a dressup queen who'd grown up watching a blonde white Tiger Lily dancing with Mary Martin's Peter Pan singing uggawug songs. Blonde girls playing Indian Princess was modeled behavior.

And I got told stories about Squanto, about Pocahontas, about "The First Thanksgiving," came away with the impression that NDNs were all gone now, wasn't it sad, nothing we can do about it. Indiana, they called this place, the land of the Indians. There are burial mounds on the farm where I live, or we think that's likely what they are; no matter how good it feels to walk barefoot in the grass here and feel the vitality of the soil under my feet, this is not actually my land. My own relatively recent immigrant progenitors might not have been around to contribute to NDN genocide and marginalization, but we profited by it, picking up the good land that had been taken from native peoples. This is the knowing that Thanksgiving covers up: celebrate your harvest, sure, because winter gets long, but don't act like we have some sort of peaceable history with the native inhabitants of the land you live on, the land whose bounty you celebrate. Wouldn't a just and historically-minded nation have a day of restitution, or mourning, or anything other than self-satisfied celebration? We survived another year at others' expense, go us, let's throw ourselves a party.

I do not know what to do with the amount of humor that George Zimmerman and his people seem to be approaching this trial with. From the defense attorney's kids posting jokes about their dad "killing it" (IT!) in court, to said defense attorney's fucking knock-knock jokes, to George Zimmerman fucking CHUCKLING in court - what the fuck is this shit?

At first I thought it was a weird tactic, because in order to find Zimmerman innocent, the jury is going to have to believe that he felt threatened by Trayvon Martin, that he was afraid - and that laughing shithead does not look like someone who went through that kind of fear. But I figure - they know just how stacked this deck actually is, and that's got to be why they're laughing. Because they know that, in this case, history is on their side. Murdering Black children has historically been something of an American value. LeVar Burton's point, that he takes the precautions with the police that he does BECAUSE this is America, not in spite of it, is demonstrated in these jackholes' laughter and smirks.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and I am wholly disgusted with my country.

I took the first two seasons of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman out of the library, on a whim and because I think Jane Seymour is really really hot and I enjoy looking at her shiny shiny hair. I kind of embarrassingly love it? It reminds me so much of the "benevolent" liberal rubbish I was raised on: "The Song of Hiawatha" and the Just So Stories, being encouraged to dress up as cultures for Halloween because it provided the opportunity for cultural education (so we read a bunch of books and then put on bathrobes and painted our faces and trick-or-treated as geishas. so much side eye, parents), and American Girl dolls (I had the Black one and the Mexicana one, and while I do think it's no bad thing for white girls to grow up playing with dolls of color, there's still something uncomfortably consumptive about the whole scene), and YA Holocaust novels (I had a phase. It was a shameful one).

I'm never quite sure how to feel about that particular kind of rubbish. Because obviously it's wrong; Dr. Quinn is alternatingly making me squirm with happy id satisfaction and go "impure impure impure" while making the sign to avert Nice White Racism. But I also kind of see the logic - I don't like it, but I see it - of incremental education in anti-racism. I feel like Nice White Racism helped render me receptive to Black and Chicana feminisms when I encountered them, which in turn have made me much more willing to try and ditch Nice White Racist stuff like the Tone Argument, or the fantasy of the White Savior (tho I apparently still kind of fetishize the Barbarian Lover; sexuality forms around kyriarchy same as anything else). To some degree, I maybe do it with my students, in that I deliberately never let myself be judgmental of racist ideas they communicate, because I want to keep them on my side, where I feel like I can still maybe have some effect. I try to set up easy paths for them: last semester, I started with "There was racism in the past and it was bad," which seems to be pretty easy to get people signed on to, and then did "History still impacts us now," and only then pulled the two moves together into "racism still impacts us now and it still is bad."

But at the same time, while I find nostalgic pleasure in some Nice White Racist stuff, I would feel really weird about giving it to a kid, or engaging with even fannish people about it that I didn't already know were committed to anti-racism. And I definitely don't plan on letting my own hypothetical children do cross-cultural Halloween dress-up.