#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

Wait... I've been following you for a whole ass while and i just found out now that your url isn't a supercorp reference? Supercorp is basically ubiquitous on lesbian tumblr. Lmao what Danvers is it referencing?

Mrs. Danvers is a character in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning 1940 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It's a Gothic psychological horror about a young unnamed female narrator who enters a whirlwind marriage with Maxim de Winter, a widowed aristocrat, who brings her to his family home, Manderley. Mrs. Danvers is the housekeeper there. She is obsessed with the memory of de Winter's dead first wife, Rebecca, and torments the narrator with Rebecca's memory in ways alternately subtle and overt. The Danvers character in the original novel is geriatric and was Rebecca's childhood nurse, but in the 1940 film, she is young enough that her obsession reframes their relationship as homoerotic rather than maternal.

Judith Anderson's Danvers is considered one of the icons of gay-coded cinema. Check out 5:28 in the video above for one of the most famous scenes, where Danvers shows the narrator Rebecca's bedroom, clothes, and lingerie. The film and character were included in the groundbreaking documentary The Celluloid Closet. IMO (and I probably got this from some criticism I read, I don't claim this as an original idea) Danvers is the archetypal image of the psychoanalytic lesbian, which is lesbian-as-neurotic, lesbian in arrested development.

The 2020 remake of Rebecca pushes harder on the homoerotic implications of Danvers' character, also, for some reason, styling Danvers as a kind of red-lipstick pseudogoth business mommydomme. For a long while, I had pics of Lily James as the narrator and Kristin Scott Thomas as Danvers as my pfp and mobile banner. Here is the parallel room-viewing scene from the 2020 film:

Other scenes also push the predatory lesbian image, in parallel to the 1940 film, such as in the scene where Danvers tries to drive the narrator to suicide, urging her to jump out of the window and leave Maxim alone with his memories of the superior Rebecca.

At the end of the 2020 version of the film, Danvers explicitly names her relationship with Rebecca: "He killed the only person I loved... I can't let you have Manderley. It was ours, you see." Danvers then kills herself, this being the heterosexual's ideal conclusion to the tale of the psycho dyke. (She does not commit suicide in the book or 1940 film, btw. Which is funny because you'd really think stuff from the 1940s would be more, not less, homophobic!)

She is also my poor little meow meow, so there's that :)

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

I don't mind people arguing that you shouldn't play the new Gogwarts game. I certainly have been the person who chooses to avoid certain properties out of distrust, anger, political disagreement, whatever (ask me my feelings about Tár!). What I hate is the blatant, disturbing fearmongering, exaggeration, and outright lies. You do not need to lie about what JKR is doing with her money, you do not need to lie about what she has tweeted or is tweeting, you do not need to lie about the content of the game itself, you do not need to lie about the depiction of goblins in the original HP property or in subsequent adaptations/interpretations. Every single one of these lies is easily investigated and easily verifiable as lies. Her twitter is public. The content of the game is going to be all over the internet within a week.

You can make an argument--a convincing, solid, and thorough argument--against engaging with the game on the basis of what JKR has done or said or what the property and people associated with it have done or said, without spreading lies and misinformation. To do otherwise is transparently an act of bad faith and all it does is create Fake News, Liberal Edition. We can't be up on our hill critiquing places like Tiktok and Facebook for spreading blatant and easily verifiable misinformation to those silly Gen Z'ers and boomers, then go and argue that JKR is going to use her millions to fund trans genocide and has said so publicly and been awarded a medal for it etc. and have that be circulated to the tune of tens of thousands of notes. Not only is it stupid on a basic level (again, every single one of these things can be fact-checked and identified as false!) but it is also an act of total hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, and frankly, gullibility.

We cannot consider ourselves critical thinkers if this is how we behave. It is actually embarrassing to see people I have a great intellectual respect for taking part in a blatant misinformation campaign with only a threadbare relationship to reality. Do or don't engage with the property; I'm not here to tell you it's good or bad to do it. I will say that if I cut out every person who played a video game I didn't like, given the extremely literal, explicit grounding of so many popular video game properties in violent, exploitative misogyny, I would simply have no friends. But it is time to stop pretending like lying, fearmongering, exaggeration, and black-and-white thinking are bad when Trump fans do it, but totally fine when we do it, because we're on the right side. If the userbase of this site is actually aging, then use your fully-cooked brains for once and think.

#TheBigYell.mp3 #and that's that on that #i'm so sick of every single corner of this 'debate' i could puke #i wish anybody would use their brains

[lizbethborden]

I think one of the challenges of LGBT teen movies right now is that I’m not sure the typical tropes of teen media really apply anymore. I’m sure that in many cases the more things change, the more they stay the same, and teens in HS are always going to be messy, chaotic, melodramatic, and silly, but I do also know the stakes are different these days for gay kids in certain areas. A coworker with a teenage lesbian daughter once chatted with me about her daughter’s circumstances and said that she doesn’t face much, if any homophobia at school—in fact her daughter is kinda a lesbian chad and has a bunch of female hangers-on—but that being gay is super “popular” rn among kids and that “there are the ones that say they’re gay, but aren’t really gay.” This is in a fairly affluent New York suburb so don’t get me wrong, this is NOT universal to all gay kids everywhere, and I’m positive the homophobia train keeps chugging along in 99.9% of the world; but broadly speaking the perspective of teen movies always seems to focus on white suburbanites who would be in this exact situation. And for those of us who are observing Gen Z with fascination and horror, we can certainly see the extent to which gay or “queer” identity has become a fad, and while it’s understandable given that teens are always trying on new identities, it still has implications for the genre that is meant to focus on their experiences and worldview. I wonder if the next generation of gay creators will make media that touches on the way gay identity has become a commodity that is marketed to young people with merch, lifestyle products, and a particular variety of social/interpersonal clout and how alienating that is for those of us who are actually gay, especially for teenagers etc. who are grappling with Real Actual Homosexuality and its implications for their life, while other people wear it like a costume and discard it when they’re done.

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

lesbians having our own spaces, communities, terms, and goals is not oppressive. lesbians being disinterested in men is not oppressive. lesbian existence is not oppressive

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

just saw a post re: this on the dash but i didnt want to derail the op so here’s what i was going to add.

men fail to empathize or understand with women, in history and today, who are devastated and essentially imprisoned by continuous pregnancy bc of the depth of entitlement they have to women’s bodies. they see women as existing For Male Use. i go back to this often but margaret sanger received letters from women BEGGING her for help with birth control. she published them in a book called motherhood in bondage. some excerpts:

Is there much use, dear Margaret Sanger, in living for people like me? I have the fear of pregnancy on my mind all the time. If I try to stay away from my husband, he is terrible mean to me and says awful things to me. He doesn’t seem to think what I have suffered, having my babies and what a terrible worry it is when they are sick and how hard it is to make over old clothing and I don’t know what else. I could go on with my troubles and fill a book, but for God’s sake please help me with your knowledge so I need not have any more as I have heart trouble and I would like to be here and raise these four than to have more and maybe die.

--

I have had five children, my oldest died when ten months old. I expect my sixth next month and this is eleven and one half years in which I haven’t enjoyed no life at all. When my children are small I can’t go nowhere, and as soon as I think I have a little rest from a baby I’m getting another. I am thirty years old and I feel older than my mother which only had two of us. My father would not bring more into the world than he could bring up decent; but my husband is different. He does not want any children, and still he is not careful, but brings them into the world.

--

I have refused sexual relation [after having six children], but this causes awful quarrels, grouches and everything else. If there is anything you can do to help me I would be glad to hear from you at once. My baby is four months old so I must get busy in time or I’ll be gone again without remedy. My family physician says I have fallen womb caused by lifting things too heavy. I wish I could see you face to face and tell you all I want to. I am in despair. Can you help me? Will you help me?

in their full letters these women describe terrible, devastating lives with no rest or recreation--these are all, or mostly i think, from the chapter titled “solitary confinement,” describing the lives these women are leading almost totally alone as caretakers of their children and household. the amount of work these women had to do was astronomical. not to mention the awful effects pregnancy could have on health--that’s the theme of another chapter, where women describe the sicknesses and physical ailments given to them by pregnancy, essentially talking about how these repeated pregnancies are killing them. of course some husbands cared but did they care enough to stop having sex with their wives when it was a coin toss whether or not it would kill her?

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

of fucking course lesbians were the initial target of “genital preference” discourse, because people see a group of women inaccessible to them and the instinct, the desire, is always to destroy the wall that exists between them and the women they want, because the concept of women existing without being available--emotionally, sexually, intimately--to any person who wants them is anathema. that’s really the root of it. i don’t know how anyone can listen to somebody say “i’m not saying you’re a bigot for not being sexually available to me and people like me, but you should just examine it” and not hear the manipulation in that language, and not understand that when it is pointed at a group of oppressed people whose sexuality is already under a constant stream of assault from every side in the form of violence ranging from the purely psychological to the physical fact of corrective rape, that it is not simply a harmless suggestion but simply another one of those assaults, sharing as it does with all of them the common goal of the destruction of women’s boundaries

#TheBigYell.mp3 #i said what i said!

[lizbethborden]

tumblr be like: *elaborate thinkpiece about how lesbianism isn’t real, doesn’t exist, and if it does exist bisexuals should be allowed to call themselves dykes, 20,000 notes*

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

this scene REALLY did something for me in a way that “masculine woman wears dress” scenes rarely do. i think it... actually had the decency to capture anne’s discomfort in a way that wasn’t about fetishizing it; it wasn’t about a duckling-to-swan transformation, and wasn’t about somebody else finding her desirable and ~uwu she can feel pretty and girly too~. beauty transformations that come at the expense of a woman’s comfort but are treated positively for some reason are a trope in media (and people particularly seem to be Into It when it’s masc women who don’t like dresses or other markers of femininity full stop), but the show focuses on how weird and uneasy she feels without ever implying that it’s a worthwhile price to pay for normative beauty.

i think there’s also something to be said about her leery, distrustful engagement with her reflection in this scene:

vs. the casual ease with which she looks at herself at the end of the episode:

plus who anne sees reflected with her in these moments. in the scene in the evening gown, when she’s a version of herself she doesn’t like, mariana is in the image with her; when she’s a version of herself she does like, her gaze into the mirror seems to open it like a portal to ann walker.

#gentleman jack #gentleman jack meta #gentleman jack spoilers / #1k #TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

(quote from joann loulan and sherry thomas’ the lesbian erotic dance: butch, femme, androgyny, and other rhythms)

#gentleman jack #gentleman jack spoilers / #not to show that i'm incapable of shutting the fuck up about this show but #TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

anytime i read a work of Queer History™ it takes me strongly aback because of the way people just. simply lump in ANY kind of sexual otherness, even criminality in under the word “queer,” despite ostensibly using “queer” as an umbrella term for LGBT people as a group. i keep thinking about that rabbi who said potiphar was queer because in a talmudic story, he attempts to rape joseph and has his genitals mutilated by an angel as a result. in this book i’m reading, as an example of Queers doing Queer things, amongst descriptions of male prostitutes and cross-dressers the author includes two priests who exposed their genitals in public. ummmmmmmmm. i feel like some people, at least, would find this off-putting or bizarre if it was under the title of “gay history”; at the very least, the former example would have been offered as an example of homophobic attitudes reflected in historical texts, versus something to, idk, joyfully recognize oneself in as ~queer, i guess? and the latter example would simply and clearly have nothing to do with the subject matter—it was two random men simply doing a random sexual crime. this is why “queer” has such an uncomfortable valence for so many of us, leaving aside all the myriad other reasons to dislike it. not to be a hateful exclusionary lesbian, but i don’t particularly want to be lumped in under an umbrella term with men who expose their genitals in public, and i don’t feel like it’s particularly meaningful for LGBT people to be offered fictional rapists and told we should identify with them because we’re mutually queer. it really is just the old association of LGBT people with rapists and pedophiles, rehashed, except now it’s perpetuated on an academic level and on social media and in popular written works.

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

this screenshot floated by on my dash:

and i’m sure someone else has already made this commentary, but it strikes me as so... so pointed that the individuals gerwig and welch describe see their creative work as a series of locked doors, of spaces which are denied to them. “you’re building a minihouse where you go and live, and i’m not invited.” as though the mental space of their female partners is something they should ordinarily expect to tramp around in.

in the context of the larger article this is particularly striking, since the theme of their fashion shoot is florence as a housewife trapped in her house:

A woman dresses herself, as if preparing to go out. As if preparing to leave. She puts on a pair of smart slacks. A cape. A dash of lipstick. She makes her way tentatively down the stairs, steadying herself against the wall. Day after day she enacts this exact same ritual. She never makes it past the front door. Maybe tomorrow…

[ ... ]

“The theme was dark fantasy, and, in a certain way, Florence already lives there, so I didn’t want to double down on what she’s already made,” Gerwig says. “It would actually be her dark fantasy—trapped in a house as a housewife forever.”

a woman may be trapped in a house in our culture, but within that house, within her head, she can have no space for herself. there are no locked doors allowed; she has to let anyone inside, let them track mud on the carpets, because no part of a woman’s mind or experience can be exclusively her own, not even a creative process which is typically recognized as deeply, essentially private. you’re building a minihouse where you go and live, and i’m not invited.

#TheBigYell.mp3 #me @ me: shut up #me also @ me: No I Wont. thanks

[lizbethborden]

I saw a post about a white male villain from media franchise saying that he has, like, “Karen energy,” comparing him to a fantasy middle aged woman who screams at retail workers at Urban Outfitters or something, and I was like. Bruh. When we’re at the point that people won’t even joke about or describe a murderous white male colonialist in terms of manhood and male evil, but would rather do so through the terms of a misogynist meme, like... YEAH I believe the Karen meme is a low key psyop intended to destroy our language around male entitlement and violence and performative anger in public spaces...

#im using psyop in a hyperbolic way nobody act stupid about itplease #TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

the dismissal of sex-based oppression and the insistence that any afab person talking about their anatomy, their experience of above-mentioned oppression, or the uniqueness of their experience is “t*rf rhetoric,” such that suggesting that sex-based oppression exists and that being afab is a unique and specific position is enough to get you harassed and called out, is just... like can you paint a clearer picture of the utter defanging of feminism, and the destruction of our language and our ability to describe our circumstances? i saw a post that was like “yeah sex-based oppression exists and should be talked about, but you shouldn’t talk about it unless you reblog enough posts about transmisogyny.” like, what? i feel like it can’t be clearer that the position of afab people is exactly what it’s always been, regardless of how the language of gender has shifted: do NOT talk about your experiences, your pain, or your position under patriarchy, otherwise you are hurting everyone else and claiming that no one else in the world suffers, and if you MUST mention it make sure that you let everyone else know that you care about them FIRST before you ever care about yourself. it’s intolerable; it’s honestly crazy-making.

#TheBigYell.mp3 #and before i get another person jumping on me i'm not saying that other forms of oppression don't exist! #i'm not saying that only female people are oppressed! #wake up smell the coffee and use ya brain!

[lizbethborden]

People rly love to mock feminist theorists without EVER reading them, or while knowing them only through quotes, or through a garbled telephone-game explanation of their concepts written up by a teenager who has yet to pass the tenth grade, and then expect to be taken seriously when discussing their work and their ideas—not to mention taken seriously when discussing ideas BASED ON the work of those theorists, ideas that COULD NOT EXIST without the work of those theorists, that these individuals cling to as elements of their self-understanding... While jeering at the intellectual source of it all.

#TheBigYell.mp3

[lizbethborden]

i’ve been listening to peggy orenstein’s cinderella ate my daughter and it’s very interesting but i sat waiting through the whole chapter on britney/jamie lynn/lindsay/miley/selena/etc. for some recognition that it’s not on the women themselves, when they were teenagers, for having constructed images based on the negation or exploitation of sexuality, particularly given the family members and the corporate teams involved in the creation of their public images and the financial exploitation of their fame in many cases from very early childhood. her tone is also particularly nasty when she refers to britney’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder as “unsurprising” due to the “schizoid” [sic] things britney has said in the past. she’s not particularly interested in the biographical details of any of the women she discusses and that’s fair; it’s a critical book about images that are sold and impressed upon young girls, not about the individual personal exploitation of famous women. but although she gives a nod at the very end of the chapter to the fact that “what else could they do?” and that it’s difficult to live under the microscope of fame, she doesn’t seem to care about the fact that--while all of these women are adults now, presumably with a fuller level of control over their own life--their early experiences of fame and being marketed as a product were not theirs to control. and i feel like leaving out the fact that these women are basically, as individuals, put through a meat grinder piece by piece by a massive corporation (disney) in a way that is immediately recognizable as patterned and often leads to the destructive implosion of these women’s personal lives and well beings, is like... a little negligent? because while it’s one thing to talk about disney princess products and american girl dolls and kind of move on without drawing overt conclusions, it’s another to talk about Real Human Women who are turned into living products and not really give this whole cycle its due in terms of acknowledging fully that it is exploitative and horrible to those women as well as having impacts on the young girls who are their fans.

#TheBigYell.mp3 #i'm not finished with the book yet so maybe she ties it all up #but this chapter was very... hm

[lizbethborden]

the lesbian loneliness we’re all constantly talking about isn’t just about statistics (how lesbians are such a small % of women in the world) but also about the wider phenomenon that sees women scattered and isolated in the homes and families of our oppressors. women do not have an originating community or homeland but are isolated essentially from birth to death in the world of men, born into the control of men, marrying into the control of men, etc. and the communities of only women that we DO have are made against the odds and are frequently under attack. (i’m not saying, btw, that families of mostly women or that are led by women don’t exist or that they have no relevance in individual lives, but im talking specifically about the generic patriarchal family structure.) so just as other women are islanded in this sea, lesbians are too, with the double isolation of our profound disconnection from heterosexual goals, ideas, desires

#TheBigYell.mp3