highlyeccentric: Vintage photo: a row of naked women doing calisthenics (Onwards in nudity!)
highlyeccentric ([personal profile] highlyeccentric) wrote2019-02-25 11:43 am
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Les Liens du Lundi

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:



Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other
  • Hannah McCann and Lucy Nicholls (Inside Story), Gender Troubles, on the boogeyman of 'gender ideology' and disciplinary/ideological divides within feminism:

    A more generous reading of both the utopian and the pragmatic politics of many gender theorists could reduce the intensity of the reaction among gender-critical feminists. While gender theorists undermine some of the easier conceptual givens of some earlier feminisms, such as the reality of biological sex, they are not denying that we live in a world where binary ideas shape opportunities and expectations. In the words of original radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, “we are talking about radical change. And though indeed it cannot come all at once, radical goals must be kept in sight at all times.”

    Lived experiences of gender are much messier than any neat theoretical divisions suggest. Rather than hyper-focusing on trans activists as a problem for feminism, feminists could unite pragmatically on specific issues, such as violence, reproductive rights and harassment, around a common ethos such as the reduction of harm. This would not require complete consensus but would focus on real threats to liberation rather than imagined, abstract ones.


    I'm a little skeptical of what might be glossed over by 'would not require complete consensus' (who's going to be asked to sacrifice their dignity in the name of pragmatics? Not white cis women), but otherwise, this is a sensible piece.
  • Gary Pearce (Overland) reviews Jeff Sparrow's 'Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right', and it looks like it might actually be a decent journalistic-historical book on how the right came to position itself as the bastion of free speech. Given the title, I'm skeptical, but... I might give it a shot. I used to like Jeff Sparrow's work.
  • Fransjohan Praetorius, for The Conversation UK, offers a historical explainer on Conversation camps in the south african (Boer) war.
  • Sonja Erikanien (University of Edinburgh Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society), On Being, Unquestionably, A Woman (piece on the persecution of Caster Semanya and the regulation of women's sports).
  • Sarah Kurchak (Far and Wide), 12 Tips for Travelling with Depression. A bit fluffy but much of it rings true for me.
  • Alexandra (Sugoi.com) interviews Erica Friedman (founder of Ozacu, Yuricon, and ALC publishing) on the genre history of yuri manga. There's a spanish version at below the English, too.
  • Gay Lynch (Meanjin blog), On Decluttering, Narratives, and Stuff.
    Raised in a peripatetic family that moved every two years from one old, stone, bank premise to another, we were adept at fast transitions. We arranged the same furniture, pictures, ornaments and vases in the new space and added fresh flowers. Within two days of arrival our living space signified our ongoing family identity, one that relied on heritage and the slow accretion of material things by annual gift giving. I might interpret Mother’s dedication to cherishing her material world as a longing for her widowed mother, eight hours drive away, and the aesthetic values she had instilled. In each of our homes, she set up a realizable world that worked, a metonym for her childhood home, adding nostalgic objects that triggered memories of her exile in various Australian country towns.
    [...]
    This essay is not, however, just about decluttering, but the relieved gasp of a second-generation, hard core, collector-conservator, whose documentation of history had enslaved her body and crushed her spirit. How did this happen? Like Stewart, I believed that collected historical objects, including ephemera—theatre tickets, launch invitations, school reports—became ‘a mode of knowledge’ that was more than a hobby because I taught history and restored houses (161). My need to conserve and supplement, then display historical items became close to pathological and it generated work for which I had little time, outside teaching loads and unpaid farm labour.


Items of practical interest:
  • Judy at The Woks of Life has a piece on how to set up a steamer which finally made sense of steamers for me! Including how to use them to reheat food, which I expect will be very useful to me in Japan.


I have a LOT more links stored, but I think I'll put them off to Thursday, spare your reading lists.

Read anything cool on The Internets lately, folks?
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kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)

[personal profile] kaberett 2019-02-25 12:22 pm (UTC)(link)
THOUGHTS ON THAT TWITTER THREAD before I get any further (since you said things don't quite sit right)

5. Conflating "policing what someone is allowed to feel" with "monogamy" is some bullshit; people are (on this topic as so many others) allowed to feel whatever they feel; "monogamy" is an agreement to a particular set of behaviours, and does not inherently involve anything about What Feelings Are Permissible.

6. No, your partner doesn't owe you anything simply because they're your partner, but at the point at which fidelity has been agreed e.g. they... owe you EITHER honouring that agreement OR signalling, clearly and unambiguously, that they are no longer going to do so. (This is important because of e.g. knock-on effects on the ability to give informed consent.) My partner doesn't owe me shit, and also it's actually okay for me to want their actions to coincide with their stated intentions.

7ish. I think there's also some conflation of ideas around, mm, the ability to grant permission vs negotiation. I don't get to dictate to my partners where they spend their time and energy; however, a relationship in which I don't get to ask how much time and energy they're intending to spend on me, so I can budget reciprocally, is not a relationship that's going to work for me. "In order for outlay of effort/emotional energy/etc to be sustainable for me in ways XYZ, I would need ABC from you. Are those things you're willing to do/provide? If not, what do you want this to look like?" isn't inherently dictatorial or bad or wrong.

10. No, actually, my partner getting another partner doesn't necessarily "add to" my relationship with them. Unless we're treating "increased risk of being lied to" and "reduced emotional intimacy" as "additions", which I'm not inclined to. (Specifically: at the point at which A & I both started dating someone else, who'd been a longstanding if occasionally fraught friend of mine, A's willingness to act as a sounding board about my feelings about said third party abruptly evaporated. This is fair! It's reasonable! But he's somebody I trust to help me sort through things, who prior to that point had been willing to help me sort through this manner of thing, and I categorically do not view the abrupt absence as "an addition". Similarly, histories of trauma mean that A is... genuinely most likely to substantively fuck up communication with me, up to and including lying in response to a direct yes-or-no question though that's only happened once and we sorted it out, where said communications relate to his interactions with other partners. Again, I am... struggling to see how "actively fucks up communications" constitutes an implied-positive "addition" to my relationship.)


I think there are good points! And I think the follow-up thread gets a bit into some of the issues I'm raising above. I just also think some of them don't... quite land.
meneltarma: black and white image of Rudolf Nureyev sitting on a car (historical: dress to impress)

[personal profile] meneltarma 2019-02-25 10:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Aside the content of the thread of self: so that's where Wilson got to. I followed him a decade ago and then he vanished. I ... have some disagreements about his take on polyamory as a poly-romantic person and I think he's seriously misrepresenting the DC-area specific (we both live here) complaint of "why are all the gays poly" if you are a monogamous person on a dating app looking for a single partner to date because you are VASTLY out-ratioed and it isn't bitterness, it's a literally empty fishpond when 7/10 of bi or queer matches that come up for you will be someone looking for a secondary, and you're looking to be someone's primary or only partner. That's both a literal question: why is the dating scene so small? Where do I go instead? And a legitimate frustration: where are all the single queers? How the HELL do I meet them if they aren't around?

I want to chew on the thread and linked thread and come back to it to make sure I am understand his other points correctly, but... I strongly suspect my sense of being in a matrix of mutually supportive and loving relationships is specific and unique to /both me and my partner being ace-spectrum/ (but then again, the changes in the definition of being ace make me grumpy) and how, then, I have and choose to define concepts like "fidelity", "being honest", "commitment", and even "romantic feelings" and "romantic friendship". In the MOST EXPANSIVE sense of my network of relationships, my biological sister does as much labor-in-the-caring-of-me (and we, my husband and I, of her) as a romantic partner, and Gchat's canned auto-answers clearly indicate the algorithm thinks we're dating, it's indistinguishable from the exterior except that we're siblings.
olivermoss: (Default)

[personal profile] olivermoss 2019-02-25 11:02 pm (UTC)(link)
The article on Brexit effecting copyright was interesting.
greghousesgf: (Bertie's Mouth)

[personal profile] greghousesgf 2019-02-26 12:46 am (UTC)(link)
Poly relationships aren't for everybody but they work just fine for many people as long as everybody involved is honest and not doing anything they really don't want to.
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