![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
That's two fortnights now I've resumed my average of 3 books/2 weeks. At this rate I won't make my goodreads goal, or have read nearly all I Ought to have read for work, but it's something.
This past fortnight, a lot of reading and feels have circled around Gender. In Bowden's anthology of 18th c Chaucer modernisations, I found a 1715 Reeve's Tale in the style of a mock epic, which does some really odd stuff around the daughter: calls her the miller's 'female son', and a 'filiaster', and stresses her towering height and girth, in a way that if it was a text from 1915 I'd be happy calling transmisogyny - not that the daughter has ever been anything but assigned female, but in that by that time I'd be confident the joke was "she looks like a man in a dress". Here, I'm less sure. I talked about it a bit on the COMMode project twitter account. In part I'm hesitant to call it transmisogyny because the mockery relies on *person assigned female fails to grow up physically feminine OR act feminine* (elsewhere the poem stresses her failures in cooking, and her clumsiness), in a way is more reminiscent of the combo gender-policing and transphobia that trans men get, in being seen as defective women. Or, for that matter, the gendered mockery directed at cis women who just happen to fail at feminine tasks and tropes - I'm a pretty clumsy gal myself, clumsiness as unfeminine is *absolutely a thing*. Anyway, I settled on calling it 'oppositional-sexism based misogyny' (I'm not quite sure there's any other kind of misogyny, but so as to distinguish it from, say, oppositional-sexism based toxic masculinity).
At the same time, I was reading Kate Bornstein's 'Gender Outlaw' (updated edition) - I know Bornstein's been something of a contentious figure, and can see why from the book, certainly. What really struck me was the part where, under definitions of gender, she breaks down a list of bodily, behavioural and social codes that make up 'feminine' and therefore 'woman'- things a trans woman has to do in order to override automatic gendering based on facial structure, for instance. She talked about not meeting people's eyes as you walk around in public; flirting by looking at-and-back; various spoken language codes; ways of holding your body; ways of relating to others. Some of them had never occurred to me at all (not looking directly at people on the street? I mean, of course I do, especially if they're coming toward me and we have to non-verbally negotiate who's going to dodge). Bornstein describes them all as, in essence, signals of submission, which: huh. (I think that's not entirely true of some of 'feminine' conversational patterns - asking more questions than you give opinions isn't necessarily submissive.)
I knew I had never fully internalised the norms of young women's behaviour, because everything ever written about how girls (especially co-ed educated girls) behave in classrooms is entirely inaccurate if applied to me. And I knew that when I was put through actual workplace communication training, in a govt job, I was punished for offering constructive critique ("okay, but what about x?") without padding it with praise in a way that both the men in the room and the woman with an MBA were not. I put it down to neuroatypicality: I just missed the memo on a lot, which was mostly productive in terms of my self-esteem and confidence, but increasingly likely to backfire as an adult. But that those codes, combined with certain codes of body language and eye contact, are codes of submission - well I assume I don't have those mastered either (idek, everyone agrees I Make Good Eye Contact, but if women are supposed to make less of it, perhaps I am OVERdoing it). Which probably explains why in sex-positive spaces I get read as Dominant with a capital D even when I'm not trying to be (and/or why men who think of themselves as Dominant with a capital D saw me, when I was younger and more impressionable, as secretly craving submission).
Ugh. Genders. Why. And you're about to say 'that's not gender that's gender roles / misogyny / etc', but it -is- gender in the sense that it's used to either gender you (determine what gender you are) or to react to you based on a system of gendered norms (aggressive for a woman is assertive for a man - variable by race, mind - intense intellectual engagement in a same-gender context reads as intimate in an opposed-gender one, and so on).
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: I'm a little way into Balli Kaur Jaswal's 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows' and am currently annoyed with the protagonist and the premise (specifically that she gets a job teaching writing classes with no writing CV. C'mon. This is 21st c London, even if you limit to the Sikh community there should be a small handful of experienced writers desperate for that job). Three Daughters of Eve on hiatus again - I'm still enjoying it but you know how you avoid the Inevitable Embarrassment in romcoms? I'm avoiding the Inevitable Seduction By Teacher part even though I expect it to be done interestingly and well.
Non-fiction for Personal Interest: Only The Queer Child, still on hiatus.
Poetry: I haven't listened to Paradise Lost for quite a while, I should fix that.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly working through Autumn Meanjin...
For work: I'm partway through The House of Fame on audiobook, and still puttering through The New Companion to Chaucer at times. Main focus at the moment is Forni's Chaucer's Afterlife, which is giving me even more things for the TBR. I've ordered a personal hard copy, as this one is due back soon.
Recently Finished:
Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales by Betsy Bowden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Actually WAY more interesting than I expected. I now need to know a lot more about mock-epic, stat.
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ooof. Big. Wide-ranging. Incredibly useful. I'm aware of the trenchant critique esp of her treatment of Islam, but as that hinges on 'too reliant on the literary imaginary' it's not a huge barrier for me. I *am* rather more skeptical of the last two chapters, on the Mongols and the Romani respectively - the former, for about half of it, doesn't seem to as carefully distinguish between 'to European observers Mongols SEEMED animalistic because of...' and giving an emotive paraphrase of 'they were x and y'... Heng is much more careful with this re: Islam, and, hmm. Ditto the Romani chapter: I don't know enough to critique the historical claims but it seemed very obvious to me that a lot of the authoritative secondary sources she quotes are deeply prejudiced, and she doesn't really get into that (eg: why assume that the Romani devised the story about wandering in exile due to ancestors having abandoned Christianity as a _cunning plot_, at all? Given many Romani are *now* usually Catholic, could not the same influences identified as giving them the info on Christianity needed to devise such a story actually have resulted in conversions and the creation of such a narrative within some groups?).
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is... a bit patchy, variable, I think? I haven't read the first edition, so I don't know how much of that comes from the updating process. There are certainly things in here that I stared at and thought "... if a trans woman said that on Twitter she would be excoriated by other trans people at the speed of retweet". In particular Bornstein seems comfortable attributing some women's discomfort with her 'male energy' early in transition to her own 'vestigal male privilege' and to her having not fully adopted the less explicit codes of feminine body language and communication at that stage, which... is not something most trans women would endorse as an explanation, let's say. Anyway. Bornstein has been thoroughly cancelled at least once in the internet age, and survived it, so, let's not hash that out.
Without necessarily ENDORSING that, I did really appreciate how much Bornstein talked about gender's implicit codes of body language and communication - somewhere she describes femininity's signals as all 'signals of submission', and, uh. Oh. Right. Yeah. That would explain a LOT of gendered social problems I encounter, both in very everyday spaces and in queer / sex-positive spaces.
I don't feel like I can give a coherent review because the book itself isn't trying for coherence. I can say that what REALLY stood out to me was the playscript at the end - I want a production, at once. I want to LIGHT a production, there's so much scope for storytelling through lighting there.
Online fiction: Patrick Dacey (Guernica), Counter Waves.
Up Next: More work stuff, at as quick a clip as I can manage.
Links of note, assorted:
Guy Rundle (Crickey), The Uniquely Australian Violence of the Brereton War Crimes Report, and
Boubuq Sayed (Meanjin), A New Generation of Australian War Criminals. These two make very similar points, with the exception that Sayed also notes that the major outlets, by providing links to veterans' counselling services but nothing for or about Afghan Australians, are continuing to centre soldiers over victims. Guess which of the two got splashed over the Murdoch press and hounded on social media and had his follow-up essay rejected by the Guardian? No prizes for guessing.
Damon (own blog), The uncanny valley of culture: on making english-language media while not being American.
James Wright (Triskele Heritage), Medieval Mythbusting blog 2: the man who invented the spiral staircase myth.
Naaman Zhou (Guardian Au), Australia's delivery deaths: the riders who never made it and the families left behind. Naaman Zhou (the man who brought you 'Australian scientist gets magnet stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device) is honestly one of the best culture/society-side economics reporters out there at the moment. Which is to say he's not reporting from parliament or on business forecasts, but on the practical realities: delivery drivers, university enrolments, underpayment scandals, and so on.
Michelle Toole, Brendan Crabb and Suman Majumdar (The Age), Blaming and shaming breaks a cardinal rule of public health.
Jamey Jesperson (History Workshop), Honouring trans lives, historicising trans death.
Shookofeh Rajabzadeh (ACMRS Arizona), Is your bread white enough? King Arthur baking company's racist marketing history.
Dan Charles (NPR, 2019), From cullinary dud to stud: how dutch plant breeders built our brussels sprouts boom. TL,DR, unlike most things, mass-market brussel sprouts have got rapidly BETTER in the last twenty years.
This past fortnight, a lot of reading and feels have circled around Gender. In Bowden's anthology of 18th c Chaucer modernisations, I found a 1715 Reeve's Tale in the style of a mock epic, which does some really odd stuff around the daughter: calls her the miller's 'female son', and a 'filiaster', and stresses her towering height and girth, in a way that if it was a text from 1915 I'd be happy calling transmisogyny - not that the daughter has ever been anything but assigned female, but in that by that time I'd be confident the joke was "she looks like a man in a dress". Here, I'm less sure. I talked about it a bit on the COMMode project twitter account. In part I'm hesitant to call it transmisogyny because the mockery relies on *person assigned female fails to grow up physically feminine OR act feminine* (elsewhere the poem stresses her failures in cooking, and her clumsiness), in a way is more reminiscent of the combo gender-policing and transphobia that trans men get, in being seen as defective women. Or, for that matter, the gendered mockery directed at cis women who just happen to fail at feminine tasks and tropes - I'm a pretty clumsy gal myself, clumsiness as unfeminine is *absolutely a thing*. Anyway, I settled on calling it 'oppositional-sexism based misogyny' (I'm not quite sure there's any other kind of misogyny, but so as to distinguish it from, say, oppositional-sexism based toxic masculinity).
At the same time, I was reading Kate Bornstein's 'Gender Outlaw' (updated edition) - I know Bornstein's been something of a contentious figure, and can see why from the book, certainly. What really struck me was the part where, under definitions of gender, she breaks down a list of bodily, behavioural and social codes that make up 'feminine' and therefore 'woman'- things a trans woman has to do in order to override automatic gendering based on facial structure, for instance. She talked about not meeting people's eyes as you walk around in public; flirting by looking at-and-back; various spoken language codes; ways of holding your body; ways of relating to others. Some of them had never occurred to me at all (not looking directly at people on the street? I mean, of course I do, especially if they're coming toward me and we have to non-verbally negotiate who's going to dodge). Bornstein describes them all as, in essence, signals of submission, which: huh. (I think that's not entirely true of some of 'feminine' conversational patterns - asking more questions than you give opinions isn't necessarily submissive.)
I knew I had never fully internalised the norms of young women's behaviour, because everything ever written about how girls (especially co-ed educated girls) behave in classrooms is entirely inaccurate if applied to me. And I knew that when I was put through actual workplace communication training, in a govt job, I was punished for offering constructive critique ("okay, but what about x?") without padding it with praise in a way that both the men in the room and the woman with an MBA were not. I put it down to neuroatypicality: I just missed the memo on a lot, which was mostly productive in terms of my self-esteem and confidence, but increasingly likely to backfire as an adult. But that those codes, combined with certain codes of body language and eye contact, are codes of submission - well I assume I don't have those mastered either (idek, everyone agrees I Make Good Eye Contact, but if women are supposed to make less of it, perhaps I am OVERdoing it). Which probably explains why in sex-positive spaces I get read as Dominant with a capital D even when I'm not trying to be (and/or why men who think of themselves as Dominant with a capital D saw me, when I was younger and more impressionable, as secretly craving submission).
Ugh. Genders. Why. And you're about to say 'that's not gender that's gender roles / misogyny / etc', but it -is- gender in the sense that it's used to either gender you (determine what gender you are) or to react to you based on a system of gendered norms (aggressive for a woman is assertive for a man - variable by race, mind - intense intellectual engagement in a same-gender context reads as intimate in an opposed-gender one, and so on).
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: I'm a little way into Balli Kaur Jaswal's 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows' and am currently annoyed with the protagonist and the premise (specifically that she gets a job teaching writing classes with no writing CV. C'mon. This is 21st c London, even if you limit to the Sikh community there should be a small handful of experienced writers desperate for that job). Three Daughters of Eve on hiatus again - I'm still enjoying it but you know how you avoid the Inevitable Embarrassment in romcoms? I'm avoiding the Inevitable Seduction By Teacher part even though I expect it to be done interestingly and well.
Non-fiction for Personal Interest: Only The Queer Child, still on hiatus.
Poetry: I haven't listened to Paradise Lost for quite a while, I should fix that.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly working through Autumn Meanjin...
For work: I'm partway through The House of Fame on audiobook, and still puttering through The New Companion to Chaucer at times. Main focus at the moment is Forni's Chaucer's Afterlife, which is giving me even more things for the TBR. I've ordered a personal hard copy, as this one is due back soon.
Recently Finished:
Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales by Betsy BowdenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Actually WAY more interesting than I expected. I now need to know a lot more about mock-epic, stat.
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine HengMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ooof. Big. Wide-ranging. Incredibly useful. I'm aware of the trenchant critique esp of her treatment of Islam, but as that hinges on 'too reliant on the literary imaginary' it's not a huge barrier for me. I *am* rather more skeptical of the last two chapters, on the Mongols and the Romani respectively - the former, for about half of it, doesn't seem to as carefully distinguish between 'to European observers Mongols SEEMED animalistic because of...' and giving an emotive paraphrase of 'they were x and y'... Heng is much more careful with this re: Islam, and, hmm. Ditto the Romani chapter: I don't know enough to critique the historical claims but it seemed very obvious to me that a lot of the authoritative secondary sources she quotes are deeply prejudiced, and she doesn't really get into that (eg: why assume that the Romani devised the story about wandering in exile due to ancestors having abandoned Christianity as a _cunning plot_, at all? Given many Romani are *now* usually Catholic, could not the same influences identified as giving them the info on Christianity needed to devise such a story actually have resulted in conversions and the creation of such a narrative within some groups?).
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate BornsteinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is... a bit patchy, variable, I think? I haven't read the first edition, so I don't know how much of that comes from the updating process. There are certainly things in here that I stared at and thought "... if a trans woman said that on Twitter she would be excoriated by other trans people at the speed of retweet". In particular Bornstein seems comfortable attributing some women's discomfort with her 'male energy' early in transition to her own 'vestigal male privilege' and to her having not fully adopted the less explicit codes of feminine body language and communication at that stage, which... is not something most trans women would endorse as an explanation, let's say. Anyway. Bornstein has been thoroughly cancelled at least once in the internet age, and survived it, so, let's not hash that out.
Without necessarily ENDORSING that, I did really appreciate how much Bornstein talked about gender's implicit codes of body language and communication - somewhere she describes femininity's signals as all 'signals of submission', and, uh. Oh. Right. Yeah. That would explain a LOT of gendered social problems I encounter, both in very everyday spaces and in queer / sex-positive spaces.
I don't feel like I can give a coherent review because the book itself isn't trying for coherence. I can say that what REALLY stood out to me was the playscript at the end - I want a production, at once. I want to LIGHT a production, there's so much scope for storytelling through lighting there.
Online fiction: Patrick Dacey (Guernica), Counter Waves.
Up Next: More work stuff, at as quick a clip as I can manage.
Links of note, assorted: