Weekend Reading is back

It's been a month and a bit since my last reading update, in which you may recall I mentioned a great transphobic school text debacle. That, plus moving house, plus cat acquisition, plus the three schools I did grade for in the end, has chewed up about six weeks of my life on nigh-essentials-only mode.

I have read quite a lot of things in that time. One of the best was Jules Gill-Petersen's essay When did we become cis. I found it very validating in terms of my understanding of how gender works at large, although, paradoxically, in that understanding I would be assuming that I am, functionally, a woman and not any flavour of trans, an assumption is that is seeming increasingly precarious.

Gill-Petersen argues that the term 'cisgender' simply does not do 'what we want it to do'. It completely fails to adequately describe any individual's gender. It does what it was coined to do, namely, to describe a *social apparatus*, but it fails utterly at the individual level.

Some good pull-quotes:

I was born three decades later, one the eve of transvestite and transsexual giving way to a whole new word—transgender—and yet I, like Kathryn, never had that childhood moment of letting trans words get inside me. Actually, even once I did read a lot of them in college and graduate school, they didn’t tell me a single thing about myself. So, what gives? Why don’t powerful words mean what they say, and why doesn’t their meaning tell us who we are? Is this all bad news? I don’t think so.

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John Money, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, knew that finding a biological basis for sex could never be the justification for enforcing a match between anatomy and identity. Instead, he changed the terms of engagement. From now on, the issue was not if humans were biologically binary, but rather “the life adjustments of patients in our series”—how normal they felt, or how well they adapted socially.[1] With that twist, a gender identity that did not conform to a binary body could be subject to medical control because it might lead to social stigma, not because there is anything unnatural or unhealthy about it.

[...]

With this tectonic shift, gender became cis. And what’s “cis” about gender from then on is the way that social norms can be coercively enforced to prevent the perceived stigma of being different. In other words, gender becomes cis when it demands a match between anatomy and identity not because that is natural, but because it’s how society functions. It’s a tautology, it’s we live in a society on steroids, but it’s worked quite effectively. To put it a little more precisely: gender, as a system for categorizing and governing our bodies, identities, and social recognition, is cisgender in this specific way. Cis isn’t an identity. It’s a diagnostic, a description of a system organized to subject people to the authority of institutions: the state, medicine, law—and the university, to go back to that meeting I was conjuring earlier.

I don't know what to do with this, because I read it and a. it's RIGHT, it's accurate; b. i feel it gives me rather more breathing room as a gender-non-conforming, genderqueer, etc, person to just... eh, roll with it. Keep ticking f on boxes, recognise that doesn't really describe much about me. And yet, for all sorts of reasons, people want to know if one is cis. And what they want to know when they ask that, unless they're a doctor, is 'do my preconceived expectations of how people assigned f at birth and still calling themselves women experience gender, perhaps adjusted for race and class and sexual orientation'. And by and large, what people who know are engaged enough in trans-affirmative politics to ask that question expect of cis women isn't indicative of me. But of course saying 'woman but don't call me cis' is the domain of transphobes at the moment!

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Currently Reading:
Fiction:

Anne... la maison aux pignons verts, Radio Canada e-book. Spending more time in Avonlea than in the real world in my head as a child gave me a very peculiar dialect, and massively skewed sense of social norms: let's see what Anne-immersion for French practice gets me as an adult!

Cleanness, Garth Greenwell on hiatus. I read the first two stories, including the one about the hookup-site-enabled bdsm scene gone wrong that I believe was republished in Kink. Whether or not it should have been in an anthology advertised as making bdsm fiction accessible to the general public, I am neutral (it certainly seems realistic, if not A Good Example, and it's too brutal to be erotica), but damn, it was incredibly well-written. The first story, in which Our Protagonist tries to give advice to a young queer kid in love, was also good.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter: also on hiatus

Poetry: NOTHING FOR ONCE
Lit Mag: None, they all pile up, including the TLS
Non-fiction for personal interest:

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel: swinging wildly between feeling Validated, and feeling alienated and frustrated at the relentlessly heterosexual and cisgendered perspective. There's, like, one footnote acknowledging this omission and her awareness that there is likely significant overlap between what she's writing about and the experience of trans women and other queer people, but that's not for her to explore. Okay. Except there's already work out there on desire, inhibition, and expectations by a whole range of queer people! Katherine Angel is writing as a white women, but she has obviously read, and frequently makes nods to, work specifically by and about Black (straight) women - why not queer and trans women?

Several other things on hiatus

For work:

Mostly I'm wading through multiple editions and translations of the Roman de la Rose.

Nicole Sidhu, Indecent Exposure

Recently Finished: This will be an incomplete installment, I'm afraid.

Canterbury Tales by Susanna Davidson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


HUH. Fairly good for its target market; I have a few Questions (TM) about certain choices, which you can find here: https://twitter.com/ChaucerCommode/st...




Trans Like Me: A Journey for All of Us by C.N. Lester

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading this was like being wrapped in a nice blanket and offered a cup of tea and a chat. Most of its content isn't new to me, but the way it's strung together is beautifully clear, and accessible, and Lester's historical research interests mean it speaks to me in a way that many 101-level books don't. I'm filing it under academic reading as well, because I suspect I'll be coming back to Lester's revision of Serano's "subconscious sex" as "prorioceptive sex", that makes a lot of sense to me. Including, perhaps, why my own relationship with my sexed body is a bit skew-whiff from that of many cis people while lacking the sense of dissonance that many trans people have: I literally have a disorder that impairs prorioception.

Snatched: Sex And Censorship In Australia by Helen Vnuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a fascinating read from the days of early-internet Australia. It's largely engaged with the ratings regime as it applies to movies and to hard copy magazines (did you know that there's content which Cosmo can legally print, but Playboy can't, because the "context" of the magazine as erotica means they can't give detailed descriptions - eg, how-to-guides -of cunnilingus or fellatio, and os on? WEIRD AND WRONG). It's a bit sad how few of Vnuk's optimistic hopes for the internet have held true, while so little has changed or indeed gotten worse in terms of distribution (the Australian pornographic movie industry collapsed, insofar as any dvds are available they're all illegal imports, etc, and now we have the Online Safety Bill, ugh).

I could have wished for a little more engagement with radical queer anti-censorship politics, although of course Vnuk notes the biases in whose sexual media is most strictly monitored. Vnuk's own intense straightness, and that of her interviewees, shows up at times - at one point she's interviewing a woman who curates a 'porn for women' site, and the interviewee complains that all of the 'lesbian' porn she finds involves strap-ons. Vnuk finds this to be evidence of The Male Gaze. I. Uh. I don't know what was out there in video format 2003 (the Crash Pad series hadn't kicked off yet), but On Our Backs definitely existed and is not devoid of strap-ons. Even if the magazine itself didn't reach Australia, I'm willing to bed the erotica collection they put out did (as an illegal import, natch). Not to say the videos Vnuk and her interviewee had in mind weren't necessarily 'lesbian-for-male-gaze' but the strap-on isn't the thing that makes it so.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read this one for high school exams, and enjoyed it more than I expected. The framing device, with the narrative to 'you', the American interlocutor, really makes it - the life story is fairly pedestrian aside from it's function in illustrating the failures of the American Dream and the process by which the protagonist came to empathise with anti-American, even extremist, politics. I was particularly irritated by the shallow and symbolic character of Erica, his white American love-object who never really loves him back.



View all my reviews

Online Fiction

No Man's Land, by Izumi Sizuki, trans. Daniel Joseph. Extract from a story called 'Women and Women', in the collection Terminal Boredom. I was both uncomfortable and sceptical with this at the start, and then as it began to reveal the unreliability of the narration I became curious if uncomfortable. I think I want to follow up the book.

Once and Future, by Dan Mickelthwaite, at Podcastle. Charming and a little heart-wringing.

Report of Dr Hollowmas on the Incident at Jackrabbit Five, by T. Kingfisher, at EscapePod. Being Ursula's work you know you're in for some good wry humour, and this is BRILLIANT. Amusing, down-in-the-grubby-details-of-life sci fi slice of life, made absolutely priceless by the format of the narrator, who is incredibly Done, futilely snarking at an archival AI. I strongly recommend this to everyone but especially kayloulee. Well. Everyone who hasn't had a traumatic labour experience, perhaps. The gory details are of an animal labour, per the content warning, but there are humans in Tense Delivery Situations as well.

Up Next: I'm really looking forward to getting back to work-related reading, but His Whiskers resents me reading books (he's okay with me reading the TLS, for some reason) or even my phone, which is... difficult.

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Some links, by no means a comprehensive accounting:

Sara Ahmed (TSQ 3.1-2, 2016), An Affinity of Hammers. I actually read this as a PDF from the 'transreads.org' wordpress site that's now disappeard. It's dense. It's good.

Laurie Penny (Longreads), Tea, Biscuits and Empire: the Long Con of Britishness. I don't normally find much in Penny's work but this is Good, Actually.

Justin Parkinson (BBC News Magazine 2015), Almost 300 years without a duvet. This article answered many of my doona questions, like: how come my family call doonas a 'quilt' when they are not quilted (answer: they were marketed as the 'continental quilt' in the UK and Aus in the mid-20th century), and why in the UK and Aus they at *least* go with a top sheet, and in my family - and everyone I knew growing up - they were a bed-topper, not your only blanket.

Robin Craig (Shado Magazine), Looking at porn: why I'm writing about taboo fetishes

Ashley Spencer (Insider.com), An oral history of Tom Holland's sensational 'Lip Sync Battle' performance.

Jill Richards (ModernsismModernity), Claude Cahun's pronouns. This isn't an essay about Cahun's life, but about the author's relationship with Cahun's life as a researcher, the author's changing gut feeling on which pronouns are best used for Cahun, and Cahun as a figure of reception, recognition and re-imagination.

Rachel Boddie (The Conversation Aus/NZ), Long before Billie Elish, women wore corsets for form, function and support. I've long wanted a handy go-to for 'no, corsets don't by default restrict movement' (because no one takes 'I used to wear a corset, quite a rigid one, and while restrictive it wasn't debilitating' as Valid), and here it is.

Carmen Maria Machado (NYT), Banning my book won't protect your child.

Charmaine Chua (The Disorder of Things), In non-places, no one can hear you cry. Another from that anthropological blog series on long-distance shipping. This time, through the concept of the 'non-place': : The idea of the non-place, often invoked in writing about infrastructures of transport, provides a helpful analytical framework. But it also betrays the texture of life on the container ship – a place of transit, to be sure, but unlike other spaces of transit, acts both as workplace and living quarters to sailors who spend up to seven months at a time on board.

Heidi S. Bond, aka Courtney Milan (Michigan Law Review, 119.6, 2021), Pride and Predators. MLR apparently has a running thing where it publishes legal appraisals of classic literature. Bond's take on Pride and Prejudice is... well, frankly, it made me appreciate P&P rather more!

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most beloved romance novels1 of all time and needs very little introduction. For those who need a refresher on the plot, Pride and Prejudice details the community-wide damage that can be laid at the feet of serial sexual predators. It details the characteristics of predators, discusses the systemic social failures that allow predators to abuse others, and grapples with difficult questions of how communities should deal with those predators.

Anjali Enjeti (Electric Lit), 7 books about the partition of India and Pakistan. I've a long slow personal reading project for Partition-related fiction, and there's some interesting non-fiction here too.

Hey, look, only 7 weeks behind in my pinboard saved links. \o/