Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I have for some years now read, with fascination and frustration, a genre of essays (and occasional short story) which I short-hand under heteropessimism, although much of it is in fact so earnest (Sereisin's description of heteropessimism begins with Maggie Nelson's "heterosexuality always embarrasses me", requires a sort of ironic self-deprecation) that it might better be described as Sad Girl Content. It is the literature of shared (hetero) feminine abjection (in at least one prior post I called it the disappointment memoir mode).

I don't quite know what to do with this fixation, as I am no longer a usefully called a woman. The only kind of woman I find myself reflexively thinking of as akin to me is bi women, and so it continues to frustrate me that bi women are utterly absent from the communal literature of feminine (women-who-date-men) abjection.

There's a lot to commend in this recent essay by Ellie Anderson, on heteropessimism as feminist complaint. Anderson rightly takes a scalpen to Sareisin's slipshod use of "performative" to mean insincere.

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaints may have intrinsic value even in cases when they do not aim for a transformation of circumstances in the way Ahmed describes. Norlock suggests that complaining can be recognized as valuable in itself once we take seriously the "interaffective dimension of ethical and social life." Specifically, complaint is a plea for validation that "one's pains are not insignificant," and for the company of others who recognize one's suffering as significant. Complaint has historically been disparaged by virtue of its associations with the feminine — specifically, with the feminine desire to share one's pains rather than remain an upright individual who acts in the public sphere — as in Aristotle and Kant. Norlock argues that rejecting this masculinist value system reveals that complaining is an activity that "regulates the emotional life, articulating and discerning the causes of pains, affirming the feelings of others or oneself, or inviting disclosure and commiseration." Complaining performs key functions in our collective and individual emotional lives.

This is true, and yet. Sara Ahmad, who Anderson cites extensively, would also direct us to attend to whose complaints are given space. Whose complaints are able to become a point of community, are allowed to make meaning. (Interestingly, the genre of heteropessimist complaint has several well-established women of colour in it - Christine Emba, for instance. Class, and access to the opinion essay industrial complex, seems a key factor.)

Bi women are not afforded the same authority to complain. The very structure of the complaint - that dating men flays one's dignity alive, and yet, one must, or withdraw entirely - means bisexuality is impossible. Perhaps some bi women married to men (especially, I expect, those with children) do participate in this discourse, but I can't remember the last time I read an essay grappling with the realities of heterosexual partnership/marriage from a bi perspective (maybe back in the era of feminist blogs? Perhaps these essays exist, and I'm not seeing them because of the glut of "I am an invisible queer" content from bi women; but I'd expect a good essay from a bi woman about having queer experience/identity and yet being stuck in the Crane Wife/Cat Person universe to generate HUGE amounts of biphobic discourse, the kind the "invisible queer" essays regularly attest to). The women writing the heteropessimist essays don't even seem to be aware that bi women are among them! This includes both Anderson and Sareisin (nb: Sareisin has since come out as nonbinary, but was writing as a lesbian at the time).

Sareisin rages that the heteropessimist does not meaningfully disengage from heterosexuality, Anderson argues that complaint is meaningful (but does not, I note, argue that constitues disaffiliation). Neither seem to have any sense what "disengage" or "disaffiliate" might look like. I did not get the sense, when I first read the Sareisin essay, that the author would have any time for me, a bi queer (then)woman who didn't move in lesbian circles.

Meanwhile, for a long time, I have felt that I had more in common with ostensibly straight or bi women who were single by choice or not seeking to date anymore than I did with most lesbians. Is that not also a form of disaffilation from heterosexuality? It certainly puts those women outside of many of the privileges of heterosexuality (economic, social, etc), while not actually marking them as queer unless they also display some other marked trait.

I don't have an answer. I don't even need to answer the question of which group of women I affiliate with, any more. And yet.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction:
- Omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms books, still. Slow going but still pleasing.
- Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man, in audiobook. It is not read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, so I am sad. The voice actor DOES do a good job of "Educated German-speaker speaking English" accent, though, and it's set in wine country, and I'm sort of... whatever the opposite of homesick is. Not even homesick for Switzerland, exactly, but nostalgia-frustrated because I have some cultural context for that area of DE but didn't spend much time there. Anyway. I am soured on Peter Grant (see below), but it has been suggested that I might resent the tie-ins less. We shall see.
- I am in fact partway through the short story The Death Haiku of the Azure Five, in Clarksworld (by L Chan) and enjoying it but I keep forgetting I'm reading it and reading some piece of news or essay or something instead.
Lit Mag: I have, in the past month, been picking up and putting back down the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue. This is improvement upon not picking it up at all.
Poetry: Nil, nada
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- I am finally making headway in Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". For a bunch of reasons, it's a perfect sort of book to keep in my go-bag for on site work at my current job, and on some remote work days I have a weird amount of standby time where it is preferred that we read books rather than be on our phones. I have learned a lot about the London wool staple!
- Still pottering through Danny Lavery's "Something that may shock and discredit you" for the second time, reading aloud to my partner.

There are many more things which I am nominally reading but haven't really picked up since last post.

Recently Finished:
Actually Recent:
Archer: the First Nations Issue by Maddee Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me a damn long time, but I finally finished this.

Two stand-out essays:

Q&A with SJ Norman

Anonymous: Pronoun Trouble

Neither makes me comfortable, and maybe I'll talk somewhere else one day about what in them hit home and what hit a nerve. Not on Goodreads, I think.




Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things this was:
- a fun historical romp through periods and subjects largely outside my prior interests (except for Lord Byron, bless his weird over-dramatic socks)
- a MASTERCLASS in accessible citation. I listened in audio, and I had no idea there *were* footnotes at all, because Jenner weaves "as the such-and-such scholars say" in so well.
- a MASTERCLASS in breaking down theoretical concepts, see above

I also keep thinking about the section on celebrity photographs and early photographic manipulation. One actress, whose name I forget (and I can't check because I don't have hard copy) sued over manipulated images of her face over risqué nudes, and lost. I keep thinking about this in context of the current SAG strike, and AI, and being confused that no one is pitching hot take essays about the connection.



Semi-recent, IE, this year:
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved the opening, framing, premise, and most of the execution of this. I enjoy the podcast, and I *particularly* appreciated the way that chapters of this sewed together what had been 2 or sometimes 3 podcast episodes to produce a chapter which had a sort of... preview and a chunky case study (Bosey and Roger Casement were a great combo).

However, I have two complaints:

1. the conclusion was MEH. It did not say anything the introduction didn't say and it said it more boringly. Perhaps this is a product of the public history style? But I have definitely read pop history which doesn't do that (see: Greg Jenner's Dead Famous).

2. The final chapter, which sewed together Andrew Sullivan and Pym Fortuyn, with a contextual segue through the AIDS crisis, was a HOT MESS. It gave no specific contextual attention to AIDS or gay public health in general on the continent, aside from one note that Amsterdam had dealt pretty well because of pre-existing good links between gay community and health services over a hepatitis outbreak. In general, it was written as if the US's approach to AIDS was paradigmatic for the world, which it just wasn't. Australia in general, and Sydney specifically, was a lot closer to Amsterdam (perhaps because of better responses to earlier outbreaks? I don't know and my epidemiology history insiders are only confident to speak on AIDS>COVID trajectories). There's a lot that Pim Fortuyn and centrist-to-right US gays have in common, of course, but you can't just take New York's AIDS history and treat it as standard for the developed world. And the authors should BOTH KNOW BETTER and also have the resources to do better, because one is English and one is an American working for the Gay Museum in Berlin!

I am still, however, very much on board with their project of "bad gay" history: the history, specifically, of how "reclaiming" gay figures from the past has fed into dubious contemporary politics. Something I feel the trans community should think more carefully about before going all in on reclamatory and redemptive premodern narratives, but I appear to be rowing my boat upstream on that count.



View all my reviews

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a difficult and important read. I marked it to-read back when I was madly collecting books about the trauma of being Assigned Girl, hoping that reading enough feminist rage and trauma would anchor me in my assigned gender. By the time I got around to reading it, that was a lost cause.

This was very much a book about early (peri-pubsecent) sexualisation, and the project of reclaiming one's sexuality from a barrage of constant sexual predation. I was about to say that "although I was in an abusive relationship, Febos' experience is wildly different to mine", but it... isn't, not entirely. The age parameters, now that I think about it, are oddly similar, but the frequency and (forgive the legalese) severity, and above all the impact upon me, are widly different. I can't even put that latter down to gender, because I know many trans men whose lives and indeed adult selves walk much closer to Febos than to me.

I spent most of this book ping-ponging between "yoewch, to accurate", and "... wtf i thought this sort of thing was mostly a scare story they told you in school health class". Much like how I offhandedly said to a friend a while back "everyone knows Go Ask Alice was a hoax, that's not how peer pressure ACTUALLY works" and the friend went... "well i read it and it seemed pretty close to my experience. I'd call it plagiarism rather than a hoax." (the author of Go Ask Alice, in case you didn't know, was a conservative therapist working with young women).

Things I particularly resonated with:
- Febos' description of how her parents were not at all prepared to either help or protect her from what was going on. Same, except wildly different. Mine, for instance, were not equipped to help a kid who didn't experience sexuality as just... a natural thing that happens. Who might need to THINK, read, compare, consider, etc. I don't think they'd have coped better with Febos per se, but they were running on a script for a normative daughter halfway between us.
- The chapter about the cuddle party, and feeling obliged to offer affection/consolation to the Sad Man. I particularly appreciated that Febos gave equal weight to discomfort with the attentions of an Enthusiastic Woman And Her Male Partner, because were it about Sad Man alone... I'd be thinking of all the weird physical dynamics which come up with people OTHER than the Sad Straight Man.

Things I didn't but which were elucidatory: I won't go into all of them. But even though I've ditched my project work on Chaucer, I retain my fascination with Kim Zarins' "Sometimes We Tell The Truth". Her WOB's prologue gave me instant "erk". Like... okay, I get where you're going here but this feels wrong, it feels like a story they tell in health class not... a thing that actually happens. (A friend who HAD been subj to advances from older men at age 12 thought I meant I didn't think anyone was. No, I get that... happens... but something about the narration felt like an /extrapolation/ of how that might happen rather than either actually how it happens or how the young girl in q might re-tool the story later) On first read of Febos I didn't make the connection. On second read... the way Febos characterises her younger self feels like the kind of narration Zarins' WOB didn't hit; but Zaris' 17 y old Alison doesn't sound as far removed from Febos' 12 y old self as I thought. If that makes sense? Of course adult Febos isn't trying to paper over her wounds: her whole brand is Trauma Writing. But if she did... maybe it might come out closer to Zarins' Alison than I initially thought.



All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proper review coming but:
1. Rounded up by reason if “I like to read about people like me”.
2. However, I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear from Yves 2025 than Yves “I could never use a men’s bathroom” 2021. There’s a lot that’s gauche here, and ffs. Your trad pub memoir doesn’t count for “publish or perish”. The academic audience might not be here in 2025 but the queers will.

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23.07.23 Note from later me: I read this as audiobook, I don't have a hard copy, and I'm really not up to re-considering the Saga of Nonbinary Academic right now. Maybe another year. Maybe another decade. This memoir was immensely important to me but didn't review it at the time and I cannot now.



Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


THAT WAS BOTH VALIDATING (yes, i guessed who nona was) and NOT WHAT I EXPECTED AT ALL. A+, ROUND OF APPLAUSE.

...

HOWEVER I would like to register a growing sense of wtf re the charactisation of the genocidal apocalypticist as Maori? It became really explicit in this book and ... no? Love the kiwi localisation, but... Uh. Weirdly I have seen no pushback, and I am not committed enough to this book or genre, nor informed enough about the NZ context specifically.

I note my discomfort, I hope it doesn't snowball, and in the meantime I will do as I have resolved to do instead of pontificating about Books I Read For Fun: bump something else up the tbr. In this case, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book.



Bonus: One(1) Deep Backdated Review. The next in queue is Manion's "Female Husbands", and I do not have the werewithal. But I promised a trans woman pal I'd dig out the applicable-to-her-interests bits, so I might re-read it soonish and then it can go into the recent queue again. Instead:

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am really souring on these books, which I don't think is necessarily a flaw in Aaronovitch's work so much as my increasing distaste for the built in copaganda of much crime fiction. I remain UGH that Peter has not left the Met.



Online Fiction: two recent two backdated
Recent:
- Kehkashan Khalid, The Petticoat Government (Fantasy Magazine). Set in something approximating Mughal India, I think? It actually provided a fleshed-out sense of how female regnancy could work in highly spatially segregated societies, something I *technically know* with my research into gendered space in high and late medieval Europe, but haven't got a really graspable characterised handle on.
- L Chan, Re/union (Clarkesworld). One daughter, of several siblings, is the only remaining family member observing the pious New Year rituals with the ancestors: who are now, for both better and worse, represented by AI simulations at a banquet table. I don't have the cultural context for this and yet it both gripped and gutted me in places.

Backdated
- Rob E Boley, The Assembly of Graves (Diabolical Plots). Sometimes, I read depictions of lesbian relationships, written by (apparently cis and straight, although frequently one only assumes that because Queer Authors have their ID front and foremost) Men, which seem incredibly realistic and Relatable (TM) to me. It is possible this is a sign of my Gender (TM), given I frequently have the opposite relationship with Lesbian Fictions (TM). I dunno. I do know this is a neat horror story and I did not predict the twists to it even though perhaps I should have.
- Cheri Kamei, Blood in the Thread (Tor dot com). This is, I think, a pretty good story in its own right. Nevertheless. I said; I have said over and over and I'm sure more often than that but in keywords I can't recall to fling at site search; that I wanted a queer take on the Cat Person/Crane Wife problem. This is not what I wanted. If I wanted the abjection of the More Queer (butchness optional) partner faced with a Femme and/or Bi partner I could consume anything from The Well of Loneliness to Rent. And yet. I don't think this is a BAD short story, just. One I'm inclined to be bristly at.

Recently Added To The TBR:
Fiction:
- Alis Hawkins, "A Bitter Remedy", from a series called The Oxford Mysteries. KJ Charles gave it a mixed review but I think I like the things she likes and the things she dislikes in this one would be balanced out by my love of weirdly specific academic history.
- Patrick DeWitt, "The Librarianist". Got the rec from the twitter account "Caustic Cover Critic", who is one of my few sources of non-gay capital L Literary recommendations.
- Bruce Pascoe, "Salt: Selected Stories and Essays". I've had Dark Emu on my kobo for ages, but first burnout happened and now my work reading needs to be hard copy. I am intruiged by the idea of mixing fiction and essay, and have earmarked this as a possible library read, esp when I run out of work-appropriate things from my already owned hard copy pile.
- Se-hee Baek, "I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki". I saw a really strong rec for this as a depiction of Depression Et Al, and hey, I've never read Korean fiction before.

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Some links: past and present:

Past: The dates on these are mid 2021, and hoo boy, let me tell you, scrolling back two years in my pinboard is, quite literally, scrolling back two years in terms of gender dysphoria and career anxiety. Still. Some stuff that, now that I look at it again, stuck with me!

- Isabelle O'Carrol (Refinery29), ADHD and gaslighting in women. TLDR neurodivergent women (people? I suspect people) more vulnerable to manipulation.
- Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future. I get a lot of reading recs from SE Smith on Twitter and I think this is one of them.
- Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. By now, in 2023, most of the Long Covid content i see online (perhaps due to Twitter algorithm) is outright misinformation, albeit often driven by understandable trauma and self-protection. I believe I was already noticing this trend by 2021, and this particular article did not trip that alarm. I'm interested in MAST cell activation syndrome, in and of itself, because friends have it and I suspect at least one relative does, and also it's weird and I am interested in weird things.
- Paige Turner (own blog), The healing process can be traumatic. I got bored of Paige's blog within six months of this post, but this one remains both short and true.

Recent: Other than ones linked earlier in this post, I give you the following:
- The Carapan gallery of Mexican art (own blog), What is an Alebrije: TL;DR man has hallucinations in the 1930s, makes art, accidentally sets off a folk art tradition.
- JP Brammer (own blog), Food Fight: on "ethnic" food and percieved authenticity. I love many things Brammer writes and this is a fine example.
- Chelsea Watego (Indigenous X), Voice To Parliament: Why Mob Are Staying Silent.
- Joseph Earp (Guardian), My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write then he plagiarised my work. Supplementary to, and bafflingly uncited in, the next link;
- Anna Verney and Richard Cooke, Being John Hughes (The Monthly). I was fascinated and apalled and at times discomfortingly empathetic to Hughes. I, too, was a kid from the periphery of the Hunter Region, said to be brilliant and promising. But I didn't go to Newcastle for uni, and I was not said to be the Next Big Thing (even at school: partly gender, but lbr the only Next Big Things my school at large was interested in was next big evangelist, and so my male peers as scholarly high achievers were in fact less lauded than I, at least I had the humanities teaching lead on my side). I too went abroad for a PhD and came home less than I had hoped to be. But I came home crippled by all the things I could not speak to, while Johnny Boy seems to have come home and determined to... speak to everything, by plagiarism if he can get away with it. (The worst is his remixing of the Bringing Them Home report's accounts, but he also felt the need to plagiarise a relatively privileged male student? Why?? Baffling.)

The ancestral recipe for this is the King Arthur Flour Co's recipe, with the "hot coffee + cocoa" trick borrowed from "Jan's Mud Cake" in the Penninsula Community Pre-School Cookbook 1994 (I think 1994. Maybe 1995?). I've posted it before, but hey, let's do it again. I just made a version for the Tortenessen festival in Bern, which I managed to figure out to be vegan, gf, soy-free, lentil-free, free of unspecified lethins, and nut-free. And it still tasted good!

( Accessibility and dietary notes )

( What You Need and What You Do With It )

( Suggested icing )

This will never be the prettiest or the most impressive cake available for any given dietary exclusion, but it tastes good, and it's so simple that it does cover a whole slew of exclusions in one go. If you were allergic to maize starch, say, as well as gluten, a bit of experimenting with diy flour mixes would probably work. If it fails to rise, you end up closer to a soft chocolate slice, but it still tastes okay.

Meanwhile, the Tortenessen was fun. I will post about my adventures signing up for "check and restock the toilets" at anarchist off-grid camp on a NOT food related post, I think. But the cake. I've never seen so many gluten-free cakes in one place. Amazing.

I do not have capacity to update my Goodreads rn. Haven't since December. The task gets Worse by week.

What I am currently reading:
- the poems and essays for the next 3 weeks of teaching
- More about John Donne than I'd planned, for same
- the 2021 anthology "Nonbinary Lives" ed Meg-John Barker et al.
- Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon "Gender Failure"
- re-read of Monstrous Regiment
- The Play issue of Archer mag
- a bunch of other stuff on hiatus

Why YES there's at theme there why do you ask.

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Some much belated but interesting links:

Kirby Conrod (own blog), So you're ABD and you're beginning to suspect you have undiagnosed ADHD

Alexis Nowicki (Slate), "Cat Person" by Kristin Roupenian drew specific details from my life. This pales in comparison to the later Bad Art Friend debacle, but what's fascinating is that I HATED Cat Person and I found Nowicki's account of her actual experience much more compelling.

Ange Mlinko (LRB), Waiting for the Poetry, on Adrienne Rich.

Huw Lemmy (own blog), Meanlingless Sex. Has some great stuff on queer storytelling.

Aviva Stahl (New Inquiry), Trust in Instinct. I've still not read Conflict Is Not Abuse, but between observing the kind of people who evangelise that book, and this (and a few twitter threads) response, I am no longer interested in doing so. As well as a response to Schulmann, this has some interesting things to say about harm and shame.

Joe Pinkser (The Atlantic), School Days start and end too early

Lincoln Michael (own blog), Art should be a doorway, not a mirror. Response to the Isabell Fall fall-out, but insightful in its own right.

Christina Tesoro (The Toast), "Not So Bad": On Consent, Non-Consent, and Trauma.

Benjamin Riley (Overland), How To Come Out At The End of Queer Community. Aside from talking queer community dynamics at large, this one might be of interest to those of you who are churchgoers or involved in other religious communities - it's got a chunk talking about how MCC (Sydney's Officially Gay Church) is now attracting more "unchurched" young people than gay Xns.

Da'Shaun Harrison (own blog), Committing harm is not the same as being abusive.

Rafael Tonon (Gastro Obscura), The team resurrecting Ancient Rome's favourite condiment

Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future

Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark.org), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. Might be out of date by now.

Kirsten Leng (Notches blog), Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany 1900-1933.

Cathy Free (WaPo), Three women dumped their cheating boyfriend and went on a road trip together

Maclean's magazine (CA) 1962, How to tell the Grits from the Tories. This is marked fiction but I suspect a metadata error. It reads like moderate political satire.

Matthew Sherril (Outside Online), The ghost trail hunters of Mount Desert Island

Kyl Myers (Archer Magazine), Gender socialisation: rethinking our inherited structures. I know there's a lot of pushback at the moment to the concept of "socialisation" because somehow it's taken that if
[transmasc / cfab / tmab / whatever term we're using to catch both trans men and enbies who were assigned-and-parented-and-may-have-continued-on-assumed-female today] talk about being socialised female/girl it must be the case that trans women and trans femmes were (assumed: successfully) socialised male/man. This... does not seem to me to be at all obvious! I have no idea why everyone assumes there must be polarity at all times! (When trans women assert they in fact internalised harmful female socialisation, eg, that femininity requires subservience, they do not usually imply that trans men 1:1 picked up the corresponding male socialisation and privileges?? I don't think??) Here endeth my necessary disclaimer for this link.

Craig Robertson (Places Journal), The filing cabinet and 20th century information infrastructure. This was, no joke, one of the best things I read last year.

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.

It has been a LONG time since my last audio content post. I no longer remeber every single thing I've listened to. But here's some recommendations:

Non-fiction and Topical Discussion:

Continuing my interest in Two Bi Guys. I particularly enjoyed Bad Bisexuals with Jacob Engelberg; Jane Ward on sex between straight men and the follow-up; and the most recent episode with A Billy S Jones-Hennin and Chris Hennin-Jones.

Various of Productivity Alchemy by Kevin Sonney with Ursula Vernon, although I've definitely over-binged on that one.

The Gender Reveal podcast, from which I particularly enjoyed (links go to transcripts due to website layout): the revised 101 episode; the Cis Day of Visibility episode with Carmen Maria Machado, in which Tuck Woodstock talks with Machado about the existential horror of "having a gendered body"; episode 96B with John Paul Brammer aka Hola!Papi; Episode 82 with Kai Cheng Thom; Episode 62 with Cyrus Dunham; episode 67 with Niko Stratis.

The BBC podcast My Nonbinary Life, from the distant past (2019) when the BBC didn't unilaterally loathe an undermine all trans people. Bit surface-level, but also quite fun.

I returned to the Slightly Foxed podcast, and was pleased in particular with the episode on picnic at hanging rock for making multiple queer boarding school recommendations, and some non-white recommendations, even if the attempt to talk about Australian gothic and colonial anxiety was a bit ham-handed. It's an improvement for Slightly Foxed to even ATTEMPT that.

The Ezra Klein Show interview with Amia Srinivasan, which has a silly title but a really deft take on the "must we politicise our sexuality" question.

The High Theory Podcast episde with Eric Wade (medievalist) on Lust

The Menkind Podcast, starting with the episode with some bloke named Fred Langridge, most notable for having been in a *marbles cooperative* as a child; and followed up by the episode with Jay Hulme, which I enjoyed a surprising amount given my general leeriness of devout religious queer content AND my specific (no seriously, it's faintly ridiculous but it is A Thing) backstory with sexualising gothic architecture.

The LGBTQ&A podcast (I think run by one of the US media franchises?), two interviews with Kate Bornstein, who I continue to adore.

That is not all the things I have been listening to, but you'll have to wait for another night to hear about "shitposting in podcast form" and "podcast fiction". And more non-fiction, even, I've got several less queer podcasts on the go!

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.

-

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/

Something I'm thinking about a lot this year is an occasion when, in hindsight, I was actually sexually harrassed at work. I didn't notice at the time, because I was newly aware of myself as queer, and I registered it as *homophobic* hostility, albeit of a generalist masculine display sort rather than directed at me.

( Read more... )

These days, I am researching intersections between disgust and humour: why is disgust fun? Why is it funny to disgust others? It turns out that still shot I was shown is part of the Internet Hall of Fame: it's known as 'Lemon Party', and like Goatse and Two Girls One Cup, it is one of the pornographic counterparts of the humble RickRoll and the NumaNuma song. One tricked one's internet peers (and sometimes ones real life peers) into viewing undesirable content: Lemon Party and Goatse because they are explicitly or implicitly homoerotic; Two Girls (and to an extent Goatse) because of the scatological humour / kink intersection. RickRoll is genuinely harmless, its joke resting on the overly earnest and unfashionable popsong, while the NumaNuma video's prank appeal rests on combined fatphobia and mockery of the chap in question's earnest enjoyment of the song. Somehow, as an odd badge of pride, I can tell you I've never been internet-pranked into any of these: I somehow became skilled at spotting and dodging them, and Lemon Party simply never crossed my radar. Consequently, it wasn't until I read mentions of it in academic literature that I realised it was a specific meme-based prank and not a random act of homophobia that I had encountered in late 2008 or early 2009.

Now, when I think about that exchange in the restaurant, it seems glaringly obvious to me that I, and the other female staff, were subject to heterosexual sexual harrassment: pushing pornography into our working relationship was obviously an act of sexualised intimidation. Even the intent to disgust is wrapped up in ye olde hetero power dynamics: eliciting an affective response over us, in the domain of sexuality, without touching us or even implying sexual interest in us. But I do think there's something different here to, say, showing het porn that the aggressor might presumably enjoy - perhaps that's what lifts it into the realm of humour? There isn't a sense of unwanted intimacy, such as even something relatively tame like pin-up calendars elicits (now you know exactly what kind of big tits your colleagues like). I'm fairly sure my straight women colleagues would have reacted differently to straight porn, or lesbian porn (either true dyke porn or girl-on-girl-for-male-viewers); and the kitchen blokes would not have found conventionally attractive gay porn a site of riotous amusement.

This past week I read NSFW: Sex, Humour and Risk in Social Media (well, read the intro and skimmed the rest for content specifically addressing gross-out pranks). What that book *doesn't* address sort of confirms that my first read on the situation might not have been so wrong: I think, at the time, the disgust > humour link was so strong, and the homophobic element so obvious, that many victims embraced the joke (and then passed it on). The authors of NSFW address Goatse and Lemon Party in the same context as 'Nimping' (of which I had never heard!), a prank that installed an app that played inescapable gay porn and shouted "hey everyone I'm watching gay porn!" across your workplace. They talk about how there's humour in disgust, in reasserting heteronorms via disgust-pranks; and about the humour of incongruity, as in the presence of porn in the workplace.

They DON'T talk about the specific dynamics involved in victimising certain people for these pranks - perhaps because Goatse, like Rickroll, seemed so all-pervasive at one point. But something like Nimping? Don't tell me that wasn't deliberately sent to men who were somehow failing to win at workplace masculinity. Part of the TEST is that the victim had to both perform disgust *and* treat it as a successfully executed amusing prank - by failing to perform disgust I violated the Rules of the exchange, and if I were read as a man or possibly even as a dyke at the time I would have opened myself to further homophobic harassment in so doing; but if I treated it as sexual harassment directed at me as a woman, I have absolutely no idea what would have happened, the violation of the prank rules of engagement was so inconceivable at the time.

I do think that even if it is the case that most people in the sphere of these pranks thought of them as pranks rather than harassment, an academic study ought to probe further. It is striking that the authors of NSFW quote studies which interviewed people about workplace humour, or about work/life boundaries and smutty jokes on social media (some one who was photographed holding some 'cock soup' - tinned soup with a cockerel on it - while on mental health leave, and the photo made it to facebook), they don't interview or cite any interviews with anyone who *disseminated* goatse, lemon party, two girls, or nimping; nor anyone on the receiving end. Even in the section entitled 'Harassment, Sex, and the Workplace', they focus on the fact that things which are harassment in one context may not be in another - without ever addressing the fact that these pranks *could be used to harass*, and who might be the most likely victims. Even when mentioning the homophobic nature of the joke, they don't address the probability that queer people would therefore be targeted. It's... disappointing, honestly.

And yet, while failing to treat gross-out pranks as harassment, they *also* don't address consensual gross-out practices! I am aware of people who trawl the A03 for the grossest or most pathetic or worst written or preferably all three porn they can find; I assume this happens with video porn, too (how else did Lemon Party end up screencapped?). Some people think its fun to seek out gross content: they then either spring it on unconsenting people, or, I've been told, engage in group competitive gross-outs with similarly minded friends. I am fairly sure that some of *that* underlay the viral success of goatse, lemon party, two girls, etc.

All up, useful but disappointing. I did get some interesting anthropological cites on disgust, however, and will keep forging ahead. I've been reading up on intentionally disgusting literature, too, but most of what I've found is writing about disgust as deliberately challenging / edgy, not deliberately FUNNY. But there are many genres of disgusting literature that are not that: Paul Jennings is no William S. Burroughs, and 18th-cent Mock-Epic has more in common with Captain Underpants than with Samuel L. Delaney.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other - not much progress here.
Poetry: Still plodding onward with Paradise Lost
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: Made some headway with Feminist Theory from Margin To Center, am enjoying it. Foucault and Bond Stockton remain on hiatus.
Lit Mag: Some minor progress with the winter Meanjin, but not enough. Also, as if I didn't have enough of a backlog with Meanjin, i leveled up in bougieness and took out a TLS subscription. I keep picking up links to articles by medievalists and not being able to read them... so, I have three months electronic and hard copy, we'll see if I use it and if it's worth keeping up the hard copy.
For Work: Mary Devlin's Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage, aka 'Esmerelda from Hunchback goes on pilgrimage with Chaucer, and also with a woman who has been married five times but is less mouthy than the Wife of Bath so makes a less threatening POV character'. Hines' The Fabliau in English. Annotating Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, still.

Recently Finished: Quite a lot, actually.

The Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This was going to get a 3 or even round up to a 4, but the ending was a complete cop-out AND not even plausibly excused as a 'retraction' à la Chaucer.

The Canterbury Tales by Seymour Chwast

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It's hard to feel like Chwast actually LIKES the CT's, except maybe the Knight's Tale? And totally baffling dedication to doing The Whole Thing, including the cook and Melibee. Interesting to have a Prioress' Tale from a Jewish adaptor, but he ... doesn't... actually do anything interesting with it.


Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays by Sharon Friedman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Extremely useful and relevant to my interests.


100 Demon Dialogues by Lucy Bellwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Absolutely adorable: 100 slice of life comics featuring discussions between the artist and her own inner demons.

Plus Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates, which is pretty good if out of date now. Neat format choices - it's a monograph but it's got textbook-like chapter blurbs and summaries, and discussion prompts. Also the intro to Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, which gave me some good cites, but is bafflingly ONLY about inter-religious polemic (Xns on Jews and Muslims, Jews on Xns and Muslims, Muslims on both), and doesn't address any of the three's depictions of heretics and or schismatics, or the sort of polemic that demands reform within a religion.

NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media by Susanna Paasonen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Both really interesting, and oddly gappy - f'r ex, despite sections entitled 'sex, harassment and the workplace', and despite addressing gross-out pranks, fails to actually grapple with gross-out pranks as either heterosexual harassment or homophobic harassment in the workplace. Weird.

And finally, I revisited the entire 'Circle of Magic' series by Tamora Pierce. Unlike the Song of the Lioness books, which I adored as a kid and still love, but which I see more and more holes in every time I read them, my respect for these ones only grows. Although this time I did have some side-eying about the depiction of the Traders (a mix of traits associated with Judaism and with the Roma, the latter mostly stereotypes; early on I thought Tammy Pierce took good and careful care to distinguish between antisemitic/racialised tropes believed about the Traders and what is actually truth of them, BUT. Their attitudes to outgroups were very heavy-handedly done: they seemed to genuinely believe non-traders were 'not real people', a belief which, afaik, is really only found to be *seriously* held in imperialist societies toward subordinate groups; if professed by a minority moving through a larger community it has a completely different valence). Nevertheless, as expected I was particularly struck by the epidemic in the fourth book: Briar resenting masks. Logistics people unprepared! Quarantine-dodging! Yeowch. The third book with its setting of a bad wildfire season was also tough to read after 2019 in Aus: I could feel the smoke scratch every time the text described Tris coughing.

Online fiction

Keerthik Sadisdharan (Mint Lounge), Krishna Speaks to Jara on his last night on earth. I did not understand this as well as I would like, but am filing it to return to later.

Maria Dhavana Headly (Tor.com), The Girlfriend's Guide To Gods. Not as impressed with this as I might have been a decade ago. It is, however, interesting in that I think it belongs in that genre of 'Heterosexual Disappointment Literature' I posited last week, but because it's so much less realistic than Cat Person it won't get put together like that.

Up Next:

Despite the long list of things finished, I have acquired EVEN MORE THINGS. A guide to mock-epic as a genre is probably next up.

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Some links:

Laura Dzubay (Electric Lit), Everyone else is in love and I'm just listening to Taylor Swift. There is a lot of good stuff here, but I particularly liked its perspective on the function of songs as giving shape to what love and desire ought to feel like. I remember being fascinated by certain songs because they grasped something that no amount of reading - not fantasy lit, not my Guide to Puberty book, not Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' and not the teen novels that were YA-before-YA in Australia - articulated for me.

Captain Awkward (Own Blog), I put my emotions in the fridge and went away for a few years and now I'm afraid of what's growing in there. The Captain is on a good streak lately - the one about the Gasp! Bisexual! Friend was good, too.

Greg Mania, interview with Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends is Scripture for Gay Dysfunction. Another for my growing list of not-saccharinely-wholesome-rep queer lit.

Liz Janssen (LARB, 2015), Uses of Displeasure: Literary Value and Affective Disgust. Reviewing Delaney's 'Hogg' (Content warning: everything), considers the way that disgust scrambles our normal habits of evaluating literature. I hated it but it's good. It's terrible but impressive. Brilliant but one star.

Macquarie Dictionary Blog (2015), Do you skull a beer?. I read something referencing the scandinavian toast 'skol', and hoped it might be linked to the Australian ritual of 'skull, skull, skull', because I have never been satisfied with the explanation that you skull a beer in one long sweep like you row a boat (why skull, and not just 'row' then?). That sounded like a backformation based on the popularity of 'boat race' drinking games.

R.O. Kwon (The Cut), The willful misunderstanding of kink. I wasn't happy with this: very simplistic 'kink is not abuse; if it's abuse it's not kink' stuff. I hoped for better from the Kwon & Greenwell collaboration. Alas, I then found this scathing negative review by Daemonium X of their anthology Kink, which was enough to convince me not to bother reading it at all.

Mya Byrne (Country Queer), Trans country artists you need to know, and Rachel Choist (Country Queer), Your guide to the butches of queer country.

Liat Kaplan (NYT), I was your fave is problematic. The person behind YFIP, then a teenager, regrets her life choices. Although as the person I got the link from (Waverly SM on twitter) pointed out, there are some ways in which this piece doesn't seem to accept accountability for what she actually did (as opposed to the role she may have played in Cancel Culture At Large, which I think she overstates): there's a glancing reference to 'a feud with a YA author over his inclusion', which probably refers to the part where the blog turned accusations of pedophilia and/or general sexual harassment against John Green into a fact Everyone Knew, on the basis not even of a first-hand submission but someone reporting that their friend said that he hugged her without permission. I... don't know what's the correct point at which to move stories like that from whisper network to exposé, but YFIP's interests were never with the victims, or even with warning people *for their safety*, but with hurting the named people and shaming those who like them (thus the 'your fave' framing). In this article she talks about wanting to make people hurt, but not so much about the shaming of her peers aspect, which I always thought was stronger.

Robin Dembroff (pre-print of an article for TSQ), Cisgender Commonsense & Philosophy’s Transgender Trouble. This is a really good read on the topic of 'why are so many philosophers transphobic as fuck'. I would like to get further confirmation about certain basic methods of analytic philosophy - Dembroff cites a professor who, when he was a student, responded to his promise to 'read more on the topic of X' with 'don't read, THINK', and links that with the broader unwillingess of mainstream philosophers to read trans philosophy, feminist philosophy, or philosophers of colour. The assumption is, apparently, that one should start from commonly agreed facts and build up; the idea that one might need to research, or that commonly agreed facts might be wrong, is, per Dembroff, anathema. This is... certainly an explanation for Philosophy Bros in lit classes, but so wildly different from how philosophy is approached by lit scholars (Dembroff does note he's talking about analytic philosophy; and lit scholars love continental philosophy, perhaps that's the difference) that, I, er, want to read more on the topic.

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).

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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.

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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.

I am overwhelmed with incoming content. I still use an RSS reader, but I’ve come to accept that it’s primary function is to aggregate things I /might/ read, or used to read and don’t want to let go. I keep an unread list in pinboard and open tabs in my phone browser. And then there’s the Saturday Paper subscription and the Meanjin one. Too many things!

I know too many books not enough time is hardly new, and that the intelligentsia classes of a century ago kept up a brisk flow of letters where we have social media, but still. Were I a lady of letters in 1920 I’d have a couple of academic journal subscriptions, a couple of literary magazines (Meanjin not yet founded, but the Bulletin still going strong) and probably an actual daily paper. Maybe a pull list with a bookseller, like comics readers have still. And I’d be living in the lap of luxury (and consequent blind privilege- which, lol, my best off ancestors were farming chickens and tomatoes in 1920, not reading literary magazines).

I’m currently ensconced in a hotel in Geneva, wanting the security of being near L while I try out new meds. Thus the email post.

Currently Reading: Fiction: I think only the Shafak, which slipped into hiatus again.
Poetry: Still forging ahead with Paradise Lost. I’m about halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’, which... the combined power of wit is spoiled rather by the transphobic weight of ‘Mrs Tiresias’. And I’m conscious of how few of them characterise their female protags as actually /desiring/ their husbands... which isn’t surprising, the unsatisfactory nature of heterosexual marriage is a longstanding feminist talking point. And yet. It strikes me that very often /neither/ lesbian feminists like Duffy not straight feminists seem to actually want to grapple with the fact that many women genuinely desire men: sometimes even the same men they’re married to!
Non-Fiction for fun: all on furlough
Lit Mag: autumn Meanjin, still
For work: Still working through Heng’s The Invention of Race; Jost’s collection of essays on Chaucer’s humour (mostly terribly stuffy)

Recently finished:

No books, but I recommend these two pieces of fiction:

T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon (Uncanny Magazine): Metal Like Blood In The Dark

Ladee Hubbard (Guernica, 2018): False Cognates (1991). The ending to this is skillfull and unsettling.

I don’t often put poetry in these posts (poetry comes up over at speculumannorum, currently dubiously formatted as I work out the limits of email posting), but I strongly recommend Julia Rios (Strange Horizons), Where To Find Strange Horizons, and how to get there, both as a generous hearted commentary of The State Of SFF and because it contains the line ‘Space is made of trains’.

Up Next: I’ve got Marcia Williams’ reportedly very weird comic form Canterbury Tales with me this weekend.

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Some links, although my patience for hand-coding them in email wanes:

Joe Van Malachowski, interview with Lady Kitt (Unicorn Mag), Sappho, Sculpture and Social Practice.

Chris R Morgan (Lapham’s Quarterly), The Art of Upsetting People. On Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade.

Eba (a Good Dog) as ‘told to’ Amy Sutherland (Hakai Magazine): Coastal Job: Whale Dog. Part of a series interviewing people (and dogs) who work on the Salish Sea.

Eleanor Parker (History Today), The Lives of Others. Learning about the past frequently means trying to understand people who are fundamentally unlike us in countless ways, formed by cultural values, social expectations and life experiences that no one today can entirely share. A bit short and maybe rather shallow in its brush over ‘distasteful’ aspects of history, admittedly.

Regan Penaluna, interview with Briana Toole (Guernica): How To Corrupt The Youth. Toole founded a non-profit that runs intro to philosophy courses in predominantly Black schools.

Daemonum X (Dead But Delicious, own blog): Leatherdyke Gender Technology. Stepping into leatherdyke community, it’s a totally normal thing to reimagine gender in ways that might make people’s heads spin—a woman daddy fucks his creature boy in both of it’s cunts at once. This is the perspective with which I engage with the world and I have no time for modern queerness or feminisms that severely lack gender imagination or project notions of respectability onto bodies..I... this essay! Made things go whirr in my brain!!!