Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Over the weekend the SMH published an article about 'queer fascism' silencing Israel Folau. This was on my social media roundly decried.
  
  • This tweet and thread by joshuabadge pretty much sums it up:
    

    I am about to officially lose it over this ridiculous article about “queer fascism”. How dare you @smh pic.twitter.com/E0fFyxmCSd

    — Joshua Badge (@joshuabadge) May 4, 2019

    
    
    
  • Response from an SMH editor (not associated with this particular article), which I link to not because the response itself is super great, but because the resulting discussion really gets into some of the pitfalls I see in the #ownvoices movement:
    

    I doubt very much we would allow that form of words were they not the chosen words of a lesbian activist and marriage equality advocate. She lived through that era - doesn’t she have moral authority here?

    — Caitlin Fitzsimmons 🧜‍♀️ (@niltiac) May 4, 2019

    
    
  
  
• Speaking of #ownvoices, Mary E Roach hosts an anonymous letter from a friend (bi woman) had her novel rejected at the first pass because she was not a 'gay, like your character'.
  
• The ruling on the Caster Semenya case came down, and I have read many Takes, of which some longer ones below. This tweet is on the money:
  

  Caster Semenya is the latest victim of a patriarchal system which weaponized misogyny and anti-blackness to tell her that she had to CHANGE HER ACTUAL BODY in order to be a woman.
  
  That is not an exaggeration.

  — Heron Greenesmith, Esq. (@herong) May 3, 2019

  
  
  
• I mentioned I was reserving judgement re: the Sri Lankan government's handling of the attacks? Cynicism proven right: they've passed a niqab ban, despite face coverings not having been involved in the attacks
  
• Alleged russian spy whale is refusing to leave and demands attention from Norwegian citizens

Good News:

• UK parliament passed a largely symbolic declaration of a climate emergency.
  
• The White kakakek (native NZ flower) is returning from extinction.
  
• The Woarani won a court case against oil companies.
  
• First hotel owned and run by trans women opens in India

Art-and-narrative:

• The Nib hosts Four Queer artists on creating family.
  
• Alison Wilgus (The Nib), I came out late in life, and that's okay.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Workplace Dynamics and Industrial Relations:
  
  • Claire Cain Miller (NYT), Women Did Everything Right, Then Work Got Greedy. TL,DR, longer hours are worse for the gender pay gap.
    
  • John Quiggin (The Conversation), Ultra-low wage growth isn't accidental, it's the intended outcome of government policies.
    
  • Barbara Pocock (The Conversation), Jobs but not enough work: how power keeps workers anxious and wages low.
    
  • Kate Cantrell and Kelly Palmer (Overland), The casualties of academia: a response to The Conversation. Including the depressing fact that, for a casual academic in Aus, the chances of obtaining a permanent job in the industry are approximately that of a casual Maccas worker obtaining a permanent contract at Maccas.
    
  • Riyah Collins (BBC news), The turban-wearing bus driver who changed the law: on Tarsem Singh Sandhu and the Wolverhampton bus drivers' dispute of the late 60s.

• AusPol special mentions:
  
  • TheAuspolChronicles on Tumblr presents breakdown of all parties that currently hold seats in Federal parliament
    
  • And (for your Senate voting needs), a summary of all the parties who don't have seats but would like them.

• Caster Semenya, the IAAC ruling, and related issues:
  
  • Madeline Pape (Guardian Australia), I was sore about losing to Caster Semenya. But the decision against her is wrong. A solid piece, and also a good answer to the question of 'what's the point of a PhD in sociology?' - it taught Pape to question her previous stance.
    
  • Katelyn Burns (The Establishment, 2016), No, female trans athletes do not have unfair advantages
    
  • Annette Greenhow (The Conversation), It's not clear where human rights fit in the legal ruling on Caster Semenya

• Queer, assorted:
  
  • Taylor, Power, Smith and Rathbone, AJGP 48.3 (2019) Bisexual Mental Health: Findings from the 'Who Am I' Study'. This is the study I linked to press releases about last week - it's gold open access. It doesn't seem to dig very deeply into the associations it found (poor mental health linked with: a. opposite sex partners b. feeling one's orientation is bad or wrong and c. partners lacking understanding). I would really like to know if, if you sorted the data by opposite-or-same sex of partner (discarding nonbinary partners for this purpose), whether there was any difference in frequency of item c.
    
  • Manuel Betancourt (Electric Lit), How Riverdale Turns Masculinity Into A Queer Thirst Trap. Notable for describing Archie as 'a one-man Village People'.
    
  • Joshua Badge (Archer Magazine), Yes one year on: choosing marriage. Badge really gets my ambivalence about the whole... thing.
    
  • Brandon Taylor (Them.Us), Single, Gay, and Happy That Way, except when I'm not

• Miscellaneous topics
  
  • Kerry McDermott (Vogue), 8 of the best: erotic fiction. This annoyed me enormously - most of it's not erotica by the faintest stretch of the imagination. Helen Garner, honestly???
    
  • Jonah Engel Bromwich (NYT), The Raisin Situation. A longread on the Dramatique state of the US raisin industry. It is COMPELLING, you will not regret reading it. Ex:
    

    At 38, Harry Overly was decades younger than the tenured raisin man he replaced as the chief executive of Sun-Maid. But he had experience — as the North American head of the company that makes Bertolli olive oil, and in marketing roles at Wrigley and other food companies. He seemed suited to the job.
    When he came west, though, he was taken aback by the level of animosity he encountered in the U.S. raisin industry, the entirety of which is crammed into a few hundred square miles in California’s Central Valley.
    Three months into his tenure, which began on Halloween of 2017, Mr. Overly attended a meeting of some raisin industry players in the back room of a restaurant in Fresno, Calif. This introduction left him shaken. “I’m not saying this lightly, because — you can read about this in different spots — people kind of think there’s this raisin mafia out there and that kind of stuff,” Mr. Overly said.

    
    
  • Rachel Kushner (NYT), Is Prison Necessary?: profile in prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I have to say, I had never really sought out intro-level prison abolitionist work before, and I really should have. This makes fantastic reading and good sense.
    

    Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”

    
    
  • Maani Truu (SBS news), Why this Melbourn woman is training dentists to care for sexual assault survivors.
    
  • Melanie Hamlett (Harpers Bazarr), Men have no friends and women bear the burden.
    
  • Ben Ratskoff (TruthOut), White Supremacy and Christian Hegemony came to a head in Poway violence. I quote, with the caveat that I have a suspicion that not *all* eighteenth c American thought classifed Jews as white, and I absolutely know that it's a bad idea to generalise American jews-included-in-whiteness outside of the US:
    

    The United States was indeed founded upon white power, a white power that ostensibly superseded Christian unity. The Naturalization Act of 1790 codified the political subject empowered by the United States of America as a free white person, and debates recorded in the Annals of Congress strikingly reveal that Jewish whiteness was never impugned. On the contrary, plantation owner John Page, a delegate from Virginia, argued in favor of Jewish inclusion, asserting that Jewish religious opinion will not “injure us, if we have good laws, well executed.”

    The delegate’s argument marks Jewish inclusion in racial whiteness — which is not to say that all Jews in the United States were then or are now categorically white but rather that whiteness and Jewishness themselves are an unproblematic combination. At the same time, the inclusion of Jews as citizens in spite of their religious difference reveals how racial whiteness, in organizing white Jews and white Protestants as social equals, neutralizes but does not dissolve Jewish difference. White Jews may be friends to white supremacy but remain enemies to Christian hegemony. It appears that the violence we are now facing is the return of this repressed Jewish question, a question of Christendom’s internal and external enemies, a question that the universalist pretenses of democracy failed to answer.

    
    
  • Martin Langford (Meanjin Summer 2018), Free Verse and Its Disciplines. Presents a good formalist defence of free verse, but sadly, although he repeatedly states free verse *has* disciplines, he never defines any.
    
  • Ben Dolnick (NYT), Why You Should Start Binge Reading Right Now.

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.