#kyla schuller

[shewhotellsstories]

“When white women are confronted with the possibility they can be perpetrators, and not only victims, of oppressive actions and they burst out crying, antiracist work grinds to a halt. A white woman sobs, and the room falls to her feet. These tears seemingly perform a self-baptism. They cleanse the sufferer of any past wrongs and invest her with a martyred authority flowing from the realm of allegedly indisputable truth: her own hurt feelings. Some of the sanctifying innocence widely afforded to white women when they cry can be traced back to an original wellspring: the inkpot of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

-Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women

#white feminism #kyla schuller #the trouble with white women #strategic white womanhood #white tears

[gatheringbones]

[“Child removal proved to be a profitable career path for many white women. The civilizing machine required humans to run it: white women teachers. The boarding school movement presented them with significant new career opportunities. Middle-class white women in the mid- to late nineteenth century were still largely confined to the private sphere. But civilizing the West was deemed an appropriate extension of women’s domestic duties. This “manifest domesticity,” in scholar Amy Kaplan’s memorable phrase, thrust white women’s work into the center of the settler colonial enterprise. White women could respectably extend their own realm of power and influence through adopting a maternal attitude that saw Natives as children in need of their guidance. According to historian Margaret Jacobs, “the majority of boarding school employees nationwide” were white women.”]

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

#kyla schuller #history stuff #currently reading

[nedfelix]

We can recognize white feminism at work today wherever we see the elevation of a woman, of any race, to the top of the hierarchy on the grounds that she will allegedly redeem it. “The future is female,” an Instagram-friendly slogan proclaims in a sleek sans serif font, heralding in both word and image that progress hinges on the female sex. The phrase sounds new, but it isn’t—it was rediscovered via a 1975 photograph of TERF singer Alix Dobkin wearing the phrase on a T-shirt shortly before she was a ringleader of the protest against Olivia Records because of the presence of Sandy Stone. Yet the slogan is also a slicker version of something Margaret Sanger might have said while insisting that the world’s progress pivoted on the quality of women’s births.

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory to Feminism. For context, Sandy Stone was a trans woman who later became one of the founders of trans studies and theory.

#feminism #words #* #kyla schuller #the trouble with white women #layla reads #pride

[endlessandrea]

"The problem of dissociative style points to the social abstractions that are blurring the background: Kyla Schuller shows in The Biopolitics of Feeling that affective capacity—the capacity to affect and be affected—is not commonly shared, but assigned, split, and kept apart by regimes of racialization and sex difference. Whether one feels as if they are real enough or whether others feel as if they are real enough indexes real evaluations that appear as social relations. In this sense, the performance of showing off intense relationality, as it manifests in demands from radical vulnerability to vibrant matter, often also gets caught up in the aesthetics of the virtuousness of white feelings."

#Kyla Schuller #Biopolitics of Feeling #Maxi Wallenhorst

[barbiebutgayer]

-Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism-

“Yet from the nineteenth century to the present, white feminists have broken through appalling barriers for themselves by reinforcing the barriers faced by others.”

#feminism #lgbtq #white women #white feminism #feminist #kyla schuller #the trouble with white feminism #book quote

[wowwiebaby]

#Kyla schuller #feminism #woman #women #man #men #m*n

[dhaaruni]

Tfw white women are like "White women don't want to be mothers and women of color only want motherhood and don't have any professional ambitions" and think that makes them progressive and not just virulently racist

#feminism #Kyla Schuller is literally white #shut up shut up shut up #Presonal

[out-of-the-forest-i-come]

Feminist Non-Fiction Recs

Because feminism isn't only about your own voice and your own rights, but about the liberation of all women, it's important to uplift the voices of women who are rarely heard. To honour this international day of Women's Rights, here are some recommendations for non-fiction feminist theory books centered on women of colour.

Please note that this is a non-exhaustive list, and that some very important works might not figure on it. Take it as inspiration, not as a binding list of works to have read, and remember that this is only the surface of women of colour's writings on feminism.

all of bell hooks' books, but I would recommend "Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism" to start with intersectional feminism

There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression; by Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider; by Audre Lorde (all of Audre Lorde, actually)

Hood Feminism; by Mikki Kendall

White Tears, Brown Scars; by Ruby Hamad

Mediocre; Ijeoma Oluo

We Should All Be Feminists; by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This Bridge Called My Back; an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Bad Feminist; by Roxane Gay

I Am Malala; by Malala Yousafzai

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; by Patricia Hill Collins

Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging; an anthology edited by Rabab Abduhaldi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism; an anthology edited by Joyce Green

Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women; by Amal Awad

The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism; by Kyla Schuller

A Decolonial Feminism; Françoise Vergès

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; by Brittney Cooper

Women, Race, & Class; by Angela Y. Davis

These books really only scrape the surface of an intersectional approach of feminism focused on race, and if you want to discover more works, I would recommend looking at intersectional feminism and decolonial feminism. Also, if you're not a native English speaker or if you speak fluently multiple languages, I recommend looking for feminist books originally written in other languages that may not have been translated to English, as they offer a perspective that is not so American-centered, which I feel is the case in too much of today's feminism.

#international women's day #feminist books #feminist theory #intersectional feminism #decolonial feminism #women of color #non fiction books #book recs #book recommendations

[adirectorprepares]

okay if no one’s Posting i will have to. the thing that got me the most about polite society is how successfully it gaslit me! i fully believed from 20% in to the midpoint that this was going to be a movie about how ria’s fantasies were hurting her sister, how she had to let lena grow up and move on and stop trying to control her life, how she would be able to revel in her stuntwoman fantasies for fun but would learn that salim wasn’t all that bad and that they could all be friends in the end. it fucking got me!!!

and the reason it fucking got me is because that’s a dominant cultural imaginary - the idea that intense relationships between women (mother and daughter, sisters, “romantic” friendships) are temporary stepping stones on the path to heterosexual stability, a childhood fantasy you move on from. (i disagree with adrienne rich about many things, but she’s right about the inescapability and political significance of this hegemonic idea that female relationships cannot be stable or lifelong, that they evolve into stable heterosexual families. lillian faderman was also right about this.)

and the thing that is driving me towards a category four autism moment is the way that resistance to this idea about female relationships is built into the formal and structural work of polite society. ria criticises lena for acting like she’s in a jane austen novel - because the early novel form as represented by jane austen is deeply intertwined with this hegemonic approach to womanhood! at the start of emma, emma is mourning the loss of her childhood friend miss taylor to heterosexual marriage. she vows herself never to marry, but by the novel’s end she has gained emotional maturity and worked towards her own stable relationship with mr knightley. it’s a bildungsroman-type plot of mature emotional reflection, careful sentimentality, growth and character development. and this intertwining of individualist character development or maturation with the idea of moving from female relationships to stable heterosexuality is precisely what ria must resist to win in the movie. she has to resist the conspiracy theory plot** by resisting the western craft expectations of a specific kind of character growth and sentimentality!! ria cannot have a jane austen response to lena telling her she’s going to marry salim - she cannot reflect inwards and work towards a more ‘mature’ relationship with her sister, one where she is able to ‘let lena go’ and move on. instead, she has to hold onto her ‘childish’ anger, her ‘unrealistic’ stuntwoman mischief, her desire to do brunch brunch brunch dances with lena!!!!

brecht is having a field day about the use of movie fight scenes as gestus to disrupt the illusion that the realist bildungsroman plot is inescapable. elaine scarry is having a field day about all the times ria gets beat up. kyla schuller is having a field day about sentimentality and biopolitics. ALL THIS in a ninety-minute movie that is also the most fun and cathartic and balls-to-the-wall cinematic experience one could ask for. LITERALLY the movie of all time 10/10 no notes.

**which is fascinating and too much for me to coherently analyse at 1.30am, but i’m having an internal meltdown about raheela calling lena’s genes mediocre and framing her clone implantation scheme as a way to have a second chance at a life where she sacrificed herself to motherhood and the connection between nineteenth/twentieth century eugenic feminism and the novel form and artistic experimentation.

#polite society

[transmutationisms]

hi! any reading you'd rec on bio politics\necro politics? i've recently gotten curious about the concepts so forgive if this is vague or not specific lol. tyy in advance ! hope ur day is good

so, the standard recs you will usually see for getting a theoretical foundation here are:

Foucault's 1978–9 lecture series at the Collège de France, "The Birth of biopolitics", and his 1975–6 series, "Society must be defended" (there are print series of his lectures) (<-these are honestly overrated as sources imho b/c foucault never fully developed these concepts. i would read lecture 11 from the 75–6 series if you absolutely feel you need some foucault, and then skip to whatever else seems interesting)

Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019)

Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017)

there are also lots and lots and lots of books that use concepts of bio/necropolitics in their historical and/or political arguments. some i've enjoyed include:

Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (2018: Cornell University Press)

Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017: University of Texas Press)

Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the "Social Question" in Nineteenth-Century France (1999)

Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (2021: Oxford University Press)

Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (2019: University of Washington Press)

Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2017: Duke University Press)

Michela Marcatelli, Naturalizing Inequality: Water, Race, and Biopolitics in South Africa (2021: University of Arizona Press)

Ellen Amster, Medicine and the saints: science, Islam, and the colonial encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (2013: University of Texas Press)

Ron Broglio, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism (2017: SUNY Press) (<-doubles as an introduction into why the 'animal turn' has been such a hot topic historiographically in the past 5 or 6 years)

James Duncan, In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth Century Ceylon (2007: Ashgate)

René Dietrich & Kerstin Knopf (Eds.), Biopolitics, geopolitics, life: settler states and indigenous presence (2023) (<-haven't read this yet! some of these essays look very promising)

#book recs #biopolitics #there is also a very interesting chapter in nükhet varlık's book on ottoman empire & plague that makes an argument for usage of #the biopolitics framework centuries prior to the 'classic' 19thc case study. however varlık's book is very long and mostly not about that

[spookyradluka]

"For nearly two hundred years, a large and vibrant tradition of white women has framed sex equality to mean gaining access to the positions historically reserved for white middle-class and wealthy men. The goal, for these feminists, is to empower women to assume positions of influence within a fundamentally unequal system. Many of these feminists even argue, explicitly or implicitly, that their whiteness authorizes their rights. They weave feminism, racism, and wealth accumulation together as necessary partners, a phenomenon that has a tidy name: white feminism."

The Trouble with White Women by Kyla Schuller

#intersectional feminism #feminism #book quotations #intersectional feminism 101 #white feminism

[shewhotellsstories]

“White women gained authority as civilizers by contrast with Native women, who were portrayed as backward creatures trapped in prehistory who dragged their children down with them. Breaking the tie between Native mothers and their youngsters thus seemed imperative to white reformers. Few reformers realized the truth [Alice] Fletcher had discovered: that many Indigenous cultures were free from patriarchy, and women enjoyed considerable agency, responsibility, and freedom in their tribes.”

-Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women

#white feminism #Native Americans #indigenous people #Alice fletcher #the trouble with white women #kyla schuller

[gatheringbones]

[“For years, Stone related, trans people advised one another on how to navigate gender clinics’ strict requirements: study the manual of transsexuality that the doctors themselves used to assess patients’ likelihood to succeed in society as feminine women—Dr. Harry Benjamin’s 1966 The Transsexual Phenomenon—and perform the type, down to a T. Clinic staff were so eager to codify transsexuality as a new mental health disorder defined by identical characteristics that their own needs for objective, reproducible, standardized criteria made them highly gullible. It took the surgeons and psychiatrists years to figure out that they’d been had.

For Stone, the clinics offered a fascinating example of how gender is constructed in real time. Dr. Benjamin identified “born in the wrong body” as the defining self-understanding of transsexuality. Since his manual was the clinics’ manual, patients repeated this refrain year after year in order to access transition care. Even after physicians realized that their patients, too, read Benjamin, they continued to pose questions that screened out any ambiguity, as Stone herself had experienced. Through these rote scripts, performed by doctor and patient alike, transsexuality solidified into the state of passing from one side of the sex binary to its alleged opposite, a transformation that demolishes any body or experience that came before. In physicians’ hands, transsexuality reinforced, rather than broke down, the gender binary.

The “wrong body” narrative solidified into orthodoxy. In the 1970s, Stone shared, clinics even instructed transsexual women to invent a “plausible history” of their earlier lives. They were to fabricate new childhoods as if they had always been female. In the medical discourse, to transition was not only to erase one’s own past—it was to masquerade as an imaginary person.

“But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear,” Stone objected. Universal, unrelenting passing is not the goal, she urged. Never-ending passing is a form of assimilation—an acquiescence to the status quo. Passing internalizes, rather than resists, the harmful structure of binary gender that delineates masculinity and femininity, man and woman, as fundamentally at odds. She argued that to pass perpetually, in all circumstances and interactions, forecloses the center of a person’s individual power, the complexities, ambiguities, and nuances of actual life experience. And while passing admits one to the realm of gendered respectability, it means being forced to found relationships on lies, instead of on the truths that transsexuality exposes: that all bodies are malleable texts inscribed by power.

Instead, Stone urged, “in the transsexual’s erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender… which can make common cause” with other oppressed groups. She called this new identity the “posttranssexual”—the monstrous body reclaimed, in all its complexity. Closing her manifesto with a thrilling turn, Stone wrote collectively to other academic transsexuals—an audience she had to dream into being in 1991. Stone asked “us” to write our complex realities into history instead of being scripted as monolithic caricatures by physicians, feminists like Raymond, and even ourselves. Refusing assimilation is radical politics, “begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured” body—turning transsexuality into a site of resistance and alliance. She called for “solidarity” with queers and people of color—not individual, stealth access to the status quo through the edifice of binary sex. “Although individual change is the foundation of all things,” she concluded, “it is not the end of all things.”

Trans lives, for Stone, became a jumping-off point for interrogating gender—the social dimensions of sex—and forging collective resistance to racism, capitalism, and colonialism. By contrast, trans-exclusionary feminism honed its project into one goal alone: liberating women from the oppression of men.

The singular identity “women,” removed from the reality of all other social forces besides biological sex, became a mythic category that actually obscured, rather than pried open, the workings of power. But gender—a term many TERFs and “gender critical” feminists today deem tainted by transsexuality—usefully exposed the process through which the identities of man and woman are assigned meaning. The concept of gender provided an angle onto the way social institutions shape personal identity and experience.”]

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

#kyla schuller #sandy stone #history stuff #currently reading #gender stuff

[olreid]

kyla schuller, from settler mothers and native orphans

#currently reading #a long wish to be elsewhere #id in alt #boarding schools cw? ask to tag

[zeus-japonicus]

Hello! I was listening to one of the Below Decks episodes a while ago, and in one, you mentioned how historically, Western gender roles were created/have been used to make colonialism easier. I'm working on an academic thing where I'm considering bringing this up, and I was wondering if you remembered any of the places you read this? Discussion/essay type sources are preferred (for my own readability lmao) but contemporary pieces would also be really helpful! Thank you, and I'm really enjoying the show!!

Hello friend - here are some good places to start, though as ever you'll find some bangers in their bibliographies :D

Reading:

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Contest. Routledge. 1995.  

Redman, Samuel J., Bone Rooms: from scientific racism to human prehistory in museums. Harvard University Press. 2016. 

Saini, Angela. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press. 2019. 

Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Duke University Press, 2018. 

Wickramasinghe, Nira. Colonial Servitude And Resistance In Sri Lanka. Colombia University Press, 2020. 

Watching:

Little Bear, Leroy. “Big Thinking and Rethinking: Blackfoot metaphysics 'waiting in the wings'. Reflections by a Blackfoot.” University of Calgary - Humanities and Social Sciences Congress 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_txPA8CiA4  

Linnaeus Society. "Linnaeus, Race and Sex" https://youtu.be/BliDKUS_XKg (Notes can be found here: https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race)

Hope that helps, and good luck with your research :)

#trice forgotten #ask nemo

[annemarieyeretzian]

Things I was grateful for in July 2023: LUSH Happy Skin facial exfoliator, LUSH Gummy Bear shower jelly, LUSH Sympathy for the Skin body lotion, LUSH Soother toothpaste, LUSH Golden Pineapple lip scrub, LUSH Lip Service lip balm, Sour Patch Kids (my movie candy of choice), a showing of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with my family, the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack, mini golf at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s Buccaneer Bay with my family, a deep-fried Smuckers pb&j, a vegan corndog, ArtCurious by Jennifer Dasal, The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair, The Trouble with White Women by Kyla Schuller, a postcard from @parrnesan on vacation, Sprinkles Cupcakes s’mores cupcakes, Good Omens season 2, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Crowley and Aziraphale Funko Pops, Frostbeard Studios’ Bookstore candle, and Hozier.

#lush #sour patch kids #spider-man: across the spider-verse #mini golf #pb&j #corndog #artcurious #the secret lives of colour #the trouble with white women #books #postcard #cupcakes #good omens 2 #good omens #crowley #aziraphale #funkos #candle #hozier #gratitude #july #2023 #digital art #digital illustration #illustration #photoshop artist #artists on tumblr #artist on tumblr #annemarieyeretzian