highlyeccentric | Some very belated links (Reply)

Saved as far back as June, I think...

Sophia Siddiqui (Institute of Race Relations), Feminism, Biological Fundamentalism, and the attack on trans rights. As well as covering the incompatability of transphobia with feminism, it does a solid job of walking through the links between white supremacy and transphobia in far-right movements across Europe.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (The Hedgehog Review), Straightness Studies: Who do we think we are?. The premise of this piece is catnip to me - I read a lot of interrogations of 'heteropessmism' around this time - but the execution disappointed and enraged me. Some parts were extremely perspicacious! (eg: If you’ve only ever experienced heterosexuality as an imposition, a request out of step with your wiring or politics or however you understand it, you may be inclined to imagine that everyone experiences it as stifling. Indeed, scholars of straightness overemphasize the aspects of heterosexuality that involve people acting against their true (queer) desires and underemphasize the part where men and women fall in love with each other or jump eagerly into bed. If the aim is to shed light on straightness itself, the bafflement of nonstraight onlookers can only go so far.) And yet much of the article seems to be devoted to trying to be... a straight Bindel? Poking fun at newfangled genders and sexualities, AND at lesbians who think straight women are 'boring'. Also, did not appear to consider that not all 'nonstraight' women onlookers are unattracted to men. Like. If her argument holds up, the ideal position from which to analyse (women's) straightness is that of a bi woman. This does not appear to have occured to her.

David (own substack), Good Advice, Bad Gay: On dyke bed death. I just really like how David writes about a lot of things.

David (own substack), David Davis 28 part 1: on cringe and David Davis 28 part 2: on ruined orgasms. The first is about Fifty Shades and responses to; the second works through Simone Ngai's theory of the gimmick, which I found difficult to process but intriguing.

Claire Potter (own substack), A History of the 1980s Sex Wars You Don't Know. Inteview with Lorna N. Bracewell, who identifies four, rather than two, sides to the sex wars.

Aminatta Forna (LitHub), Chasing a waking life: on the pains of being an insomniac. What it says on the tin.

Frank Bongiorno (Inside Story), On the preservation of pure learning. Despite the poncy title, a vr good incisive essay on the state of Australian higher ed in 2021.

Katelyn Burns (Medium), 'Trans widows' aren't trapped in loveless marriages. There was a spate of horrible, mostly UK-centred, discourse about 'trans widows', ie, cis women still married to trans women, who will often refuse to grant them either a divorce or spousal approval for a GIC. I was consistently baffled about how they claimed to be 'trapped', when absolutely none of them reported that their spouse was blocking access to divorce (in the UK you have to have mutal agreement to a no-fault divorce, at least for... five? ten? years). You can just get divorced! It's that easy!

Luke Pearson (NITV), What is a continuous culture, and are aboriginal cultures the oldest?. I really liked this, very incisive. The term ‘continuous culture’ should be a source of pride, but it is also a concept that needs to be unpacked. Viewed through the wrong lens it can also be seen to suggest that because we had a ‘continuous culture’ for over 60,000 years that there were no changes, no adaptations, no innovations, and was not influenced by individuals of great talent and skill. Aboriginal cultures in Australia maintained certain consistencies, but we also know that it survived through significant periods of change and needed to be able to grow and to adapt to survive and thrive in these changing environments.

James Shackell (Guardian Aus), Most of Australia's literary heritage is out of print. A project called Untapped is working to rectify this via e-books.

Daniel Davies (Avidly), The social life of the Riverside Chaucer. We had a round of this conversation about our copies of the Riverside, and those of parents/teachers/etc, a few years back which devolved into bickering about how to have had access to a parent's copy is showing off your gross class privilege. I was slightly unnerved that didn't come up at all in this essay but still. I enjoy a good noodle around people's marginalia.

Catherine Denial (Hybrid Pedagogy), A Pedagogy of Kindness. On a change in pedagogical approach as a result of the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington.

Costica Bradatan (LARB), Why we fail and how. On the philosophy of failure (via Diogenes), and the failures of philosophy.

Paige Turner (own blog), 'Stop texting to see who your friends are' is just relationship testing.. This is both true, and... sometimes it is entirely reasonable to stop doing the initiating-lifting and see if the other party has any intention of picking up the load.

Ask A Manager, My office wants my pronouns but I'm still figuring it out.

Lauren Gutterman and Justin Bengry (Notches Blog), Her neighbour's wife: a history of lesbian desire within marriage. This is actually a youtube discussion, not sure if I included it in the listening post at the time.

Kai Cheng Thom (Xtra Magazine), Ask Kai: I want more sex than my partner does. How do I get my needs met without pushing her boundaries?. I just like how Kai writes about things, mostly.

Emily VanderWerff (Vox), How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.. You've all read this by now, I'm sure. On a recent-re-read I was struck by how Fall states that what she wanted was the story to be recieved as by one "who knows what it is to be a woman". It just struck me that... she apparently had no idea, and nor did Neil Clarke, that what the queer readership demands is that queer and trans stories be written by someone who knows what it is to be QUEER and/or trans. (Despite the transmisogyny involved in some of the worst "this feels like it was written by...", there were initially trans women who were suspicious of and parandoid about the story, too!) Is this good? Not entirely. But also, it's a strange sad tragedy to hang one's own gender identity on whether one's story is recieved as "by a woman". That's... not... how gender works. Or how writing works.

Ben Purkett, interviewing Bianca Stone (Guernica), Back draft: Bianca Stone and Ruth Stone. On poetry.

Jonathan Zittrain (The Atlantic), The Internet Is Rotting.

Elise Kinsella and Andy Burns (ABC Background Briefing), Mhelody Bruno's killer was jailed for 22 months. This is the information the court never heard. CN: murder of a trans woman. I don't normally post current affairs but this was, as well as topical at the time, a fascinating deep dive into how evidence gets excluded.

Michael Colbert (Electric Lit), The Leftovers is teaching me who I want to be after Covid. I don't want to watch this show, or indeed any show, but I liked this response to it.

Julia Skinner (JStor Daily), Libraries and Pandemics, past and present. On how the 1918 flu shaped libraries (US) as centres of community care.

Donna Mazza (The Conversation AU), Gender-ambiguous author Eve Langley is ripe for rediscovery: a new biography illuminates her difficult life. Appears to be no relation to Doreen Langley, but fascinating.