Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Of late my WAYRW posts have been getting bottom-heavy - what started as a few links to online fiction at the end has turned into a linkspam. Linkspams are great, but perhaps this one deserves a separate ritual of its own. I've just discovered that a. Semagic still exists and b. it's interoperable with Dreamwidth (I only stopped using it because when DW first launched I don't think it played nice with Semagic), and can therefore be used to create running drafts! I now have a WAWYR template draft and a linkspam draft and a couple for my fannish alt account as well.

Onwards, to Les Liens du Lundi!


Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Anna Spargo-Ryan (Meanjin blog), The Best a Woman Can Expect



‘Men need to hold other men accountable,’ says the disembodied social justice campaigner. Sure, but women make most household purchases, especially groceries and including grooming products. Women influence almost every buying decision in almost every family unit in western countries. Plus, women buyers represent a more profitable market for Gillette; their razors—this brand included—cost more but perform an identical function.

NY Mag’s Josh Barro says the difference with Gillette’s campaign is that it ‘asks [men] to do something’. He suggests loyal customers may feel ‘accused’ by the brand. And if the public response is anything to go by, plenty of dudes do feel like Gillette is literally saying to their faces, ‘Sir, you are a rapist.’ But they’re a small proportion of the customer base. The point of this vignette is not necessarily to encourage men to self-reflect.

This is not an ad for men. This is an ad for women.



• Tufted Duck gives rise to a 'mega-twitch' in Werribee, Vic


• Alice Yevko's twitter thread on links between her peers being outraged at Marie Kondo and the instability of housing in the UK right now:
  

  The recent #mariekondomethod debate reminded me of when I last moved house (below). This was said in jest at the time, but I think much of the angry backlash against Kondo’s decluttering method in the UK is actually about our depressing housing market https://t.co/6JaufFVvKa

  — Alice Yevko (@aliceyevko) January 16, 2019



• Rebecca Shaw/Brocklesnitch, on the Queerstories Podcast: 102. The Sky is Gay (No transcript yet that I can find). Contains the memorable line 'The rainbow is ours. We won it fair and square in the war of leprechauns vs homosexuals.' It's right on the edge of too-cringey-for-me that a lot of standup lives in, and I have a love-hate relationship with sophistic arguments pursuing improbable ends, but I certainly laughed a lot at this and you might too.


• Tom Gould (the 'You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack' guy), The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering In A Post-Apocalyptic World. Cartoon. Notable panel caption: 'If an item does not spark joy, thank it and quietly send it on its way. But do so very quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the monstrous things beneath the earth.'
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, other

• Kate Wagner of McMansionHell (for Curbed.com), The myth of 'we don't make houses like we used to - material history of US homebuilding trends, H/T conuly for the link.


• Pankaj Mishra (NY Times), on The malign incompetence of the British ruling class, which beautifully combines astute analysis and schaudenfreude.



It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition — the British Empire’s ruinous exit strategy — has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England’s first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.
It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security and customs checks along the British-imposed partition line.



• Gabriel M. Schivone (Electric Literature), Corporate Censorship is a serious and mostly invisible threat to publishing. Covers in detail a story I never heard before, about Warner corporate cancelling not only a Chomsky book but the entire academic publishing arm that had dared to contract it.


• Jill Richards interviews Sylvia Federici for the Boston Review, on the topic of the Wages For Housework movement in the 70s. It explains a bunch of things I never understood about that movement, having only seen it referenced in passing.



Wages for Housework was misunderstood as saying, Give us money so we can stay home, doing the same domestic work. We actually saw wages for housework as a strategy of refusal, as a strategy giving us more options, more power to decide how to organize our lives. We were accused of “institutionalizing women in the home.” But many women we met would tell us that they were already institutionalized in the home because, without any money of their own, they could not go anywhere or they could not leave their husbands even if they wanted to.
Wages for Housework was not the end goal for us, as some critics supposed—which is not to say that it was not a powerful goal in itself. We believed that the struggle for Wages for Housework would be the quickest way to force the state to give us free daycare and other key support services. Unfortunately the women’s movement has still not been able to obtain them! I think this is in part because the movement put all its energy into entering male-dominated spaces, and did not struggle to change the conditions of reproductive work, particularly in relation to domestic work, child-raising, and other forms of care work. Meanwhile, instead of providing more services to women, the state has actually reduced access even to the services that were available. Today it is more difficult to get eldercare and childcare than it was at the end of the 1960s.



• Camille Nurka, Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: Deviance, Desire and the Pursuit of Perfection (text of lecture given at the Women in Time Symposium, Nov 2018, Hobart). Gives a fascinating (at times disturbing) history of labiaplasty focusing on medical history and racialised european science. Also notable for a great 'mea culpa' re: Nurka's cultural studies background having lead her to dismiss the discipline of history. There are some confronting images from 19th century european medical texts.



I want to contextualise the book as the outcome of a fruitful interdisciplinary intersection between gender studies, cultural studies and history. My disciplinary background is actually in gender and cultural studies, not history, so this book was an amazing learning experience for me in terms of the process of becoming a historian. I am ashamed to say that the budding feminist theorist that I was fifteen years ago would never have approached FGCS from the perspective of history. I read Foucault as a philosopher, rather than as a historian; I used Deleuze and Guattari without fully understanding their historical relationship to Freud and psychiatry; and my work on postfeminism largely failed to interrogate the ‘post’ as a signifier of time. My friend and intellectual mentor Zora Simic had politely suggested that my work needed more historical context, while I thought, rather impolitely, that historians lacked theoretical rigour. I was quite wrong, not to mention arrogant, and I’m proud to have finally come out of the closet as a historian.
[...]
I wasn’t at all convinced that it was driven largely by pornography. And when I sat down to read the plastic surgery literature, I realised that it was actually medicine that needed interrogation. That’s what led me to start investigating the history of medical knowledge about the vulva. It was in writing this book that I finally understood the thrill and allure of the archive: I felt like a detective tracking down significant historical moments because I had specific chronological questions that needed answering. I knew I wanted to go back as far as Hippocrates, who is considered the founding figure of modern Western medicine. [...] When did hypertrophy or enlargement of the labia minora become a recognisable diagnosis among medical authorities? What I found was that when this diagnosis began to appear in the medical literature in the sixteenth century, it was associated first with Egyptian women and then, in the seventeenth century—when the Dutch colonised southern Africa—it shifted to become attached almost exclusively to Khoi women whom the Dutch settlers called ‘Hottentots’. It was then that labial hypertrophy became synonymous with what white anthropologists and gynaecologists came to call the ‘Hottentot apron’. The discussion of the Hottentot Apron in Chapter 4 is pivotal to the book, as this is how the image of pathological labial hypertrophy gained traction in the European medical community. The colonial invention of the ‘Hottentot apron’ is also important because it was part of the invention of race as a biological signifier of an unbridgeable gap between black women and white women. Early nineteenth-century scientific drawings of this appendage would be revived in medical descriptions and discussions of labial hypertrophy into the twentieth century.

Notable DW content this week:

• redsnake05 asks What do we do with a problem like Mariam, or, a narrative interpretation of a Vogue Japan fashion spread through the structure of The Sound of Music. Image-heavy. Lightly delusional feeling to it.


• It has been Declared, by internet consensus, that February shall be Shitpost February. sara makes the case for Shitposting in February, thus:
  

  Since I have suggested it twice in comments and people seem to like the idea, I now propose it formally, a solution to two experiences we might like not to have: one, February, when it rains, or is excessively hot, or is in some other way invariably unsatisfactory! a month from which we would like to be distracted until circumstances improve! and two, this illusion that DREAMWIDTH IS FOR SERIOUS, which...no, I am here to assure you that we have been entirely full of shit on this website since the dawn of same.

  
  I will probably not shitpost in February (because as well as OLD and ERUDITE AS FUCK I am TIRED), but I endorse this concept all the same.


• If you wish to make your shitposting more thoroughly randomised, melannen has built a shitpost topic recombinator.. And a basic javascript guide to walk you through how to build such a thing yourself.


• astolat built a bookmarklet that generates a pullquote from any DW post, with attribution, to be used in similar fashion to a tumblr reblog. Melannen tinkered with it and made a version that will warn you if you're pull-quoting from anything that's locked.
  

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I feel I could easily generate, as a shitpost, a 'list of shitpost i could make but amn't', but obedience to prompts is not how my shitposting muse works