Les Liens du ... Jeudi?

[highlyeccentric]

So that's where all my time goes, other than Duolingo. I'm reading a lot of longform journalism, apparently.

New policy: Link post goes up on mondays, and a supplementary post on thursdays if I've got too much content.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Lily Cho (Hook and Eye), On being published and having no idea, on some of the more unhealthy clauses embedded in academic publishing contracts. NB: academics do not have agents, and negotiation on contracts is not a thing.
  
• Notches Blog interview with Melissa Hackman re: her book Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa. A bit thin but I'm intrigued by how Hackman frames the concept of 'desire work'.
  
• Mya Nunnaly (Book Riot), on Why so many female-authored fantasy works are awkwardly classified as YA regardless of content. There are some key threads missing from this analysis - chiefly the demise of the sub-genre 'romance fantasy' in the 90s, and the role of comparison texts in book marketing (see longread link on comps below), but still interesting.
  
• Tasnim Sammak (Djed Press), on the vigil for Aya Maasarwe and conversations with her father.
  

  A New York Times reporter joined us. She interviewed me and a friend of mine, at one point stating: “Aya’s father seems very composed in a time like this.”
  I wanted to say yes, he is quite composed. I wanted to say, Don’t you know of Palestinian grief and sorrow? It is our forte. While white men are unhinged over a Gillette ad, Palestinian men’s cheeks are marked with the scars of tears that haven’t stopped falling since 1948. Tears over genocide, settler-attacks, expulsion, home demolitions, imprisonment and now this—rape and murder—where? Clearly not the land of freedom and opportunity, but in a similar oppressive state built on settler colonial, supremacist, patriarchal violence.
  But I didn’t tell this white female reporter any of this.

  
  
• Jennine Khalik, An angel, a diamond: Aiia Maarsarwe's Palestinian identity was erased after her death. Australian media will refer to almost anyone else by their ethnicity rather than their citizenship, but not, apparently, a Palestinian citizen of Israel.
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Emily Rutherford (for History Workshop), Never in the presence of any woman, on homoeroticism and elite education. Why did one benefactor make a condition of his bequest that Corpus build a tunnel between the professor's rooms and the students', that they might visit one another at any hour? Why did that not cause Corpus college a fit of the vapors in the early 20th century? Read and find out!
  

  Second, Warren’s story offers new insights into the history of male homosexuality in Britain and its connection with elite single-sex educational institutions. Historians, including myself, have previously emphasized the importance to the emergence of male homosexual identities of figures such as John Addington Symonds ,who promoted ideas about homoeroticism that de-emphasized sexual intercourse. But new research is showing that sex was more important to how early-twentieth-century elite men conceptualized and negotiated homoeroticism and homosexuality than has previously been supposed. In certain institutional contexts, among certain socioeconomic groups, and at certain moments in the life-cycle, homoeroticism and homosexuality in Britain have been, even if criminalized, also normal and normative. In spending his latter years living in rooms in an Oxford college while privately circulating writings defending a classicized conception of pedagogic eros, Warren was not so unusual as one might imagine. Furthermore, he found a home in an Oxford college because his reactionary and misogynistic views seemed more important to the administrators of that college than his potential to attract scandal.

  
  
• Laura B. McGrath, of the Stanford Literary Lab, who do computational data things to literary topics (for LARB), Comping White - on how the choice of comparison books both affects and reflects systemic race bias in publishing.
  

  Comps are about books, but they’re also about writers. This seems too obvious a claim to make, but it’s an important one. Because sales figures are determined by the size of the potential audience, editors pay special attention to these hypothetical readers when selecting comps and acquiring new titles. One editor explained, “You get into the type of author that somebody is, and the type of audience that they’re reaching more than you do content. And that is very voice-driven. […] There’s a limited number of readers for a book like that, and you kind of know who they are and what books those people are responding to.” The writer’s identity — their voice — matters significantly to editors because it needs to align with a particular audience. Comps are proof of that author-audience alignment.
  And if there’s no comp to be found? If a book hasn’t ever “worked” because it hasn’t ever happened? If the target audience for a book isn’t considered big or significant enough to warrant the investment? “If you can’t find any comps,” one editor explained, grimacing, “It’s not a good sign.” While intended to be an instructive description (“this book is like that book”), some editors suggested that comps have become prescriptive (“this book should be like that book”) and restrictive (“…or we can’t publish it”).
  Comps perpetuate the status quo, creating a rigid process of acquisition without much room for individual choice or advocacy. One problem with the PW Salary Survey is the tacit assumption that People = Publications. If there were more people of color working behind the scenes, the thinking goes, then there would be more books by and about people of color published. But this assumption reduces a systemic problem to an individual problem. It assumes that “minority employees,” or, more broadly, “advocates for books involving people of color” might simply choose to acquire, market, and sell more diverse books. And, quite simply, acquisitions don’t work this way. The system, more than any individual, reinforces discrimination.

  
  
• Judith Butler, (New Statesman), The backlash against 'gender ideology' must stop. None of it new news, but useful if you need a clear and straightforward primer on key concepts like sex vs gender, both being socially constructed, what 'constructed' means, etc. Notable for being the first actually lucid writing I've ever read from Butler. If I was teaching lit/gender stuff at the mo I'd be using it at once.
  

  We are assigned a sex, treated in various ways that communicate expectations for living as one gender or another, and we are formed within institutions that reproduce our lives through gender norms. So, we are always “constructed” in ways that we do not choose. And yet we all seek to craft a life in a social world where conventions are changing, and where we struggle to find ourselves within existing and evolving conventions. This suggests that sex and gender are “constructed” in a way that is neither fully determined nor fully chosen but rather caught up in the recurrent tension between determinism and freedom.

  
  
• Anna Hájková (Notches blog), Queer History and the Holocaust. Really good intersectional work here.
  

  Queer victims rarely feature in the historiography of the Holocaust. One of the reasons for this neglect is that they complicate the dominant categories of analysis: we usually regard persecuted homosexuals as gentiles and Jewish victims as heterosexual. The very idea that these two categories could intersect often provokes discomfort, rooted in a historic homophobic stance towards same-sex behavior in the concentration camps. This essay offers a historiographical discussion of this intersection: how queer history has been debated in Holocaust history, and how queer historians have approached Jewish and Holocaust history. Although histories of the Holocaust do not usually acknowledge the possibility of intersecting or multiple identities — say as Jews, homosexuals, or men or women—we can, in fact, find traces of queer Jewish Holocaust victims. Recognizing these multiple identities, I argue, and analyzing them in connection to one another, contributes to a better understanding of Holocaust history.
  [...]
  Overall, for women as for men, persecution often took place intersectionally – that is, same-sex sexuality was rarely the only factor. The repressive climate against female conduct in general, and queer women in particular, also played a role. Further, persecution for sexual orientation is usually recorded only in documents relating to men (for whom there was a specific paragraph), but not for women. Consequently, historians can normally only trace female stories when they already know that a woman engaged in same-sex sexual acts. And in the camps queer women were not identified with the pink triangle. Austrian women arrested for same-sex activity were usually marked as “criminal” or “asocial,” further complicating systematic research. By contrast, additional reasons for the arrests of queer men are often omitted by historians. I suspect this may have a more recent political function: gay historians who wished to create an imagined community of §175 victims – men who were arrested because they were gay and for no other reason. This kind of simplification distorts our understanding of historical persecution generally, and further marginalises the persecution of queer women specifically.

  
  
• Stephen Jorgenson-Murray (CityMetric) Ducks and the City: How Birds Thrive in Urban Spaces - great read on urban avian adaptation, urban bird conservation, and fun bird facts. Marred by the inexplicable assumption that Australians regard kookaburra laughs as annoying (wtf? has this man ever spoken to an Australian?).
  
• Karl Smallwood (Todayifoundout), Do scientists ever name creatures out of spite? Answer, not normally: the parasite named after Obama, for instance, is described by its discoverer as 'It's long. It's thin. It's cool as hell.' However, Papa Linneaus himself named a 'useless weed' after a botanist he disliked. (H/T conuluy for the link)
  
• Stephen T. Wright (Ars Technica), The Linux of Social Media, on the history of LJ. (Also H/T conulyContains the delightful fact that LJ comments came into existence because Brad wanted to post a snarky reply to one of his friends' posts, back in the day. Also contains proof that, yanno, the internet hasn't changed much, eg:
  

  Paolucci sums it up best: “Back in 2007, at the height of the burnout phase, when we were all going for the gallows humor, we joked that we would post in the news journal that we were giving everybody $100, a pony, and a latte, and the first five comments would be people objecting that they couldn’t have caffeine, somebody saying they were allergic to ponies, and somebody going to a screed about how free money is the root of all evil in society,” she recalls. “It was black humor, but it was kind of true. There was an antagonistic relationship between the ‘power user’ and the people emotionally connected to the community versus the people making decisions for the product. There was no trust in either direction. That antagonism is really what doomed it.”

  
  
• Michelle Alexander (NYT), on Palestine solidarity and the legacy of Martin Luther King.
  
• Miriam Berger (Foreign Policy magazine), Palestinian in Israel, on the increasing unpopularity of the official government category 'Arab Israeli', and growing preference for identification as 'Palestinian' amongst those groups.
  

  Arab-Israeli—the official media and Israeli government term for the 20 percent of Israel’s almost 9 million citizens who are Arab-Palestinian—is increasingly unpopular among the people it’s meant to describe. Only 16 percent of this population wants to be called “Israeli Arab,” according to a 2017 survey by the University of Haifa professor Sammy Smooha provided to Foreign Policy.
  “The largest now and the most growing identity is a hybrid identity, which is ‘Palestinian in Israel’” or a similar combination, Smooha said. “I think that’s what’s going to take over.”
  Last summer’s adoption of the new nation-state law, which demoted the status of both the Arabic language and non-Jewish minorities in Israel, accelerated an ongoing shift in the public identity of the Palestinian population in Israel. It is a political statement to use Palestinian as a modifier—a link to cousins in the West Bank and Gaza and an identity distinct from fellow Jewish Israeli citizens.
  But this shift is notable not only for semantics but also because of how it’s changing the terms of the debate. Both the Israeli and Palestinian and Arab narratives of what the conflict, and any future resolution, looks like have long sidelined the Palestinian community in Israel. Continuing to ignore this population, while relying on tired terms, is consequently perpetuating an incomplete picture of who Palestinian people are and what they want. Indeed, while many Palestinians have internalized a distinction between Arab and Palestinian, the increasingly assertive identity of Palestinians in Israel runs parallel to an ongoing reframing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a civil rights struggle, both in Israel and the occupied territories.

  
  
• Also Miriam Berger (Columbia Journalism Review), on the limitations of Palestinian journalism within Israel.
  

Items of humorous interest:

• Hannah Turner on etsy is selling adorable handmade egg cups in the shape of assorted birds. One day, when I have both stable abode and money!
  
• Xavier Chillier, Petites Histoires Caustiques de la Chimie, in the form of a 'humourous alphabet', sounds like fun. Interview with RadioTelevisionSuisse is on my to-listen list.
  

Comments

[used_songs]

I know doing a links list like this is a lot of work, so I wanted to thank you. I generally scroll past a lot of links lists because they're visually overwhelming. However, your list with the short summaries and the pull quotes (you even cut the longer ones) is very readable and I've actually opened up a lot of your links in other tabs (that's a whole other story!). So thank you!

[highlyeccentric]

Formatting makes a huge difference with long posts, I find! I've (re)started using Semagic, which has allowed me to click a button and be given the html for a formatting feature, and thereby expanded my range a lot. I hate using rich text editors, but I also have a limited memory for html I haven't been using recently.

[greghousesgf]

if I ate soft boiled eggs I would totally want those egg cups!

[highlyeccentric]

I know, right? SO CUTE