#and not a single character involved in any of these exchanges is heterosexual

[prokopetz]

Works of what is ostensibly a visual medium where people constantly post screenshots of their favourite moments and it’s just three hundred words of colour coded dialogue:

Homestuck

17776

Disco Elysium

#media #comics #webcomics #gaming #video games #homestuck #17776 #disco elysium #dialogue #and not a single character involved in any of these exchanges is heterosexual

[auburnflight]

In the brief program preceding the special screening of the film, Children of the Sea promises to be about "the mystery and joy of life." That premise is compelling in the first half of the film, which abounds with vivid imagery of living things in the ocean. It ties the fateful meeting of its characters, and the ensuing festival, to memories meeting and being exchanged in a fleeting moment in time. This framing makes me think of the nearly incomprehensible diversity of life, with countless species and harmonizing movements across endless seas.

In contrast, the latter portion focuses almost exclusively on a "festival of birth"—more specifically, of conception. The film references various binaries in exploration of its themes: sea and sky, male and female, egg and sperm. The oceanic imagery and themes are reduced merely to a backdrop, to the setup, to only one half of the binary. It's not that I disagree that there is something miraculous about the existence of self-replicating life. But, watching as a woman and as a nonbinary lesbian, the film's presentation of this theme was far more frustrating to me than it was inspiring.

Because by focusing on this festival, and using it as such a critical vehicle in addressing its themes, the film boils “life” down to “conception”. The main protagonist Ruka gets entangled in the film’s plot ultimately to play a part in this conception: her role is to carry a meteorite in her stomach to the epicenter of the ritual. The visuals of this festival climax with a juxtaposition of things incomprehensibly large (stars, galaxies, the universe) with things incomprehensibly small (cells, atoms). These opposites are framed together through detailed imagery of conception and birth: the chamber that Ruka is held in is similar to a womb, the image of Umi entering the space to take the meteorite has echoes of a sperm cell penetrating an egg cell, among other references to this biological process. 

Scientifically, this is a fascinating concept to explore. And in some ways, the film does nod to its scientific origins. (I was nerding out so much about how many species of fish I could identify in the backgrounds.) But, we are urged by the director not to think, but to feel. And emotionally, the film’s reduction of “life” to “conception” didn't sit right with me. Conception is just one tiny (though important) instant, and framing that instant as the crux of life seems careless to me. Why do we live to begin with, if not to enjoy the experience of living, to create art, to tell those stories that we must pass down? Is that one tiny instant somehow even more important than the decades that we spend actually living out that life we are given? Yes, it's a miracle of science and nature that beings can reproduce and carry on their stories in their DNA. But for that to be the "mystery and joy of life"—for "life" to be defined as "conception"—is what upset me. We are not alive simply to pass on our genes and then die. The human experience is about actually living--not mere existence.

Furthermore, as a nonbinary asexual lesbian, I don't see myself or my relationships as fitting into the binaries prescribed by society and perpetuated in the film. I have no desire for a relationship that results in the creation of progeny. Yes, humanity as a whole must pass on its genes to perpetuate its stories. But the film ties procreation to Ruka’s, and by extension a human being’s, purpose for living. Why is the film’s sense of fascination so dependent on the meeting and joining of two discrete opposites in a heterosexual relationship? And what is my role in passing on these memories that are so valuable if I choose not to bear children, if I am neither male nor female? The film’s eccentric oceanographer character Anglade declares toward the end of the film that life can be viewed, not from a variety of angles, but “in one of two ways”. In presenting life as conception, and further as strictly binary, I feel that the film does many actual lives a great disservice.

Distilling Ruka’s role to being the carrier of this meteorite begets another problem that isn’t immediately obvious on one’s first watch through: Ruka never asks or expresses a desire to play this role in the festival. She isn’t even given a chance to know what it entails. In meeting Umi and Sora, she grows involved with bringing these two opposites together through her curiosity and fascination with the sea. But as the theme of conception develops throughout the film, the scene where Sora transfers the meteorite to Ruka mouth-to-mouth takes on a more serious meaning in retrospect. Ruka has been chosen to carry this “meteorite” without any say in the matter. The scene becomes not just a forced kiss, but a forced impregnation. I have little else to say to express how infuriating this scene is looking back on it.

I find it hard to think of the film now without that poor impression coloring it, so I’ll do my best to close this out eloquently. Science is important, and conception is no doubt one of the many important moments in a single life. But portraying conception as the purpose of life or the definition of life, when the character who becomes the vehicle has no agency in that conception, and when there’s so many vivid and fascinating things around us that enrich the time that we spend here on this earth, does more harm than good. Whether you look scientifically, emotionally, or any other way, it’s plain to see that life can’t truly be described as black-and-white, and adhesion to these binaries leads to so much injustice--to say the very least about my experiences as a queer woman. Binaries as ideas can help us begin to understand complexity. But when the film clung so strongly to those binaries and entangled them in its assertion of the meaning of life itself, I found myself wishing I had simply stopped watching after the first half.

#children of the sea #negative #aki likes analyzing things #maybe it was my fault for going into this movie expecting one thing #but tbh I did NOT enjoy what I got #please just give me pretty fish and take out the conception stuff

[curious-minx]

Review of the first episode of The Great North (plus some sad Bob’s Burgers’ news)

2021.

I was going to begin my review of the pilot episode of The Great North, the sister sister series of Bob’s Burgers, with my trademark  snarky and slanted curlicue wit... Instead, I am reckoning with the headline of the death of Bob’s Burgers character designer, Dave Creek.

Dave Creek.

Type his name out and put it in comic sans and you can see it’s a name meant to be involved with TV. One of the rare individuals to pass away from something other than Covid-19 or our rising totalitarian government. The artist contributed to the show in many ways, most profoundly with the design of Lady Tinsel from the Bleakening, one of Bob’s Burgers most visually ambitious episodes to date. I am ill-equipped to eulogize the man like his fellow peers are doing, but as someone who writes and thinks about the Bob’s Burgers series it is impossible to not address his passing.

//////

The Great North.

“Sexi Moose Adventure”

Look up there! What Do You See? Nature and stuff Like a rock And a tree Oh, The Great North Way up here we can breathe the air Catch some fish Or gaze at a bear Wow! Oh, The Great North Here we live, oh, oh Here we’ll stay, oh, whoo From longest night To longest day In The Great North

An Alan Thicke bop or the wimpy Cheers theme this aint. A jarring theme. I had to transcribe it to lay it out in front of me to see how wordy it is, but to my surprise the theme song looks more concise on paper. Still, I am not sold on this theme song. Mainly because I prefer the misheard lyric of “Here we’ll say (it’s actually “stay”): oh, whoo,” digging further into the regional grunts.

1:24, One minute and twenty four seconds in and there is already a  little bit of winking scatalogical humor by the ever youthful Paul Rust, or as I am sure he’ll be known for generations, Ham Tobin, the middle of the three Tobin sons. Compounded within these first two minutes is a stylistic swivel away from Bob’s Burgers comedic well with a Brokeback Mountain themed wedding cutaway joke with real-world celebrity cameos. Speaking of celebrity cameos, how about a side character conversation with an Alanis Morrisette  constellation (and she’s a recurring character!) you’ve never seen that in Bob’s Burgers! In the first three minutes and thirty seconds we have two instances of explicitly expositional dialogue, the first is the cleaner introduction of eldest Wolf Tobin (voiced by Will Forte) and his fiance Honeybee Shaw who has just moved to Alaska from Fresno and helps set up the reverse All in the Family Meathead and Gloria dynamic. What comes next is once again another moment I can only describe as jarring when the inexplicably normal named Judy Tobin explains to Alanis Morrisette constellation exactly what is wrong with sweetly overbearing father. The reason involving a somewhat convoluted background story about the former Tobin matriarch's  abandonment of the family and Beef, the Tobin patriarchy, is in denial of this  fact. Beef prefers to live in the reality where no wife of his would leave him she could only have been eaten by a wolf.  

What goes on throughout the episode is what I believe is a cardinal sin of episodic storytelling: Making jokes and observations at the expense of an off screen character. There are already WAY too many characters being thrown at me and not once throughout the episode was I able to identify any of the characters by any names other than the name of the celebrity voice actor. Minute six and yet again we are hit with Honeybee  generating another celebrity name for a joke and I really hope that the writers develop more of a game for her. Oh wait a minute the episode reminds me again at the eight minute forty sixth second mark that she is in fact from Fresno. More diarrhea and fart jokes snaking their way back into the scene as well, but Jenny Slate has always relished in the poopier jokes (see: any of her stand-up, Kroll work, or Obvious Child).

At the ten minute mark there is a quality character defining joke when Wolf distracts Beef by pointing out an indoor potted plant in a mall, which causes Beef, ever the Nature man, to take matters into his own hands by trying to rescue the potted plant. Beef is basically a combination of the two Rons from Parks & Rec, the emotional frugality of Ron Swanson and a touch of Sam Elliot’s Ron Dunn Earthiness. Julio Torres’ mall juicer character is also introduced with a perfunctory but enjoyable deadpan exchange with the awkward Judy, but it’s the kind of performance Julio Torres could give in his sleep (and probably did).

The eleven minute mark introduces a character that I was initially pretty jazzed about, Judy’s boss at the mall photography store Alyson Lefebvrere (gosh I hated typing out that name >.<) voiced by long-time Molyneux collaborator, Megan Mullally. On paper, much like the theme song, a heated exchange between an emotionally vulnerable Beef and a character voiced by real-life wife Megan Mullally should be dynamite, instead much like their podcast it feels like a wet fart in the sheets. Mullally’s work on Bob’s Burgers as Linda’s sister Gayle is terrific and with the power of animation having her play an unconventional looking character really works to her advantage. Alyson’s character design is boring and conventional cartoon  attractive as she’s clearly being set up as a potential love interest for our leading Beef man, but the whole thing in execution falls completely flat. The extended 69 joke between Beef and Alyson is supposed to be funny because we know it’s between a real life publicly beloved celebrity couple. You cannot coast on innate chemistry alone! The setting up of the love interest isn’t even coy, we see Beef get heart eyes and drool over Alyson, which is just the most predictable and least interesting choice. A route this show seems dangerously flirtatious with.

Finally, at minute:second mark 13:15 we get introduced to a potentially fun and quirky sitcom character, Londra the neighboring fish mongerer. Voiced by Judith Shelton, an actor I am sure we all remember as Sally from Seinfeld and Angela from the Gregory Hines Show. Instead she gets instantly shut down and shuffled by in favor of advancing the plot of the episode. Moving on to the birthday party. Yep Honeybee makes another pop culture reference this time the Minions (it was Squidward last time, but I was too faint of heart to mention it at the time). We also find out in a forced confession from Ham that he is gay. I am glad the show has hired an openly gay actor like Julio Torres to play a bit recurring character, but it feels weird having Paul Rust a thoroughly heterosexual actor portray a gay goofball character. I feel like there easily could have been an actual gay goofball Paul Rust type out there deserving of the job, but this show does do right by having Dulce Sloan as Honeybee and Aparna Nancherla as MVP, Moon Tobin (Who I’ll get into later). Therefore I should not let this irk me, but clearly this show and I are not seeing eye to eye. In an era of gestures towards meaningful representation I would just like to see some consistency. Rust will probably go on to join the ranks of the many other hetero men who have also portrayed perfectly competenent and sensitive gay characters, but with gay characters should come paychecks for gay voice talent. In the end of this dead end debacle I much rather  Paul Rust have the role  and be spared the unimaginative Randy Rainbow casting. Back on track.

There’s a four square action sequence of the four siblings that also feels like the show attempting another stylistic flourish to separate itself from Bob’s Burgers. The episode, all one straight ahead single narrative, comes to a happy ending to also establish that the Bob’s Burgers sister sister series is also interested in being a sentimental sitcom to its core. An unfortunately okay first episode that got worse for me with a repeated viewing. The only character and overall performance that sticks out to me is Aparna Nancherla playing what is essentially the show’s Tina and  Louise lovechild of a character Moon Tobin, an animal identifying gender flipped peculiar savant-like child. She’s one of those comedians that I will always root for and appreciate whenever she pops up and I really hope that this show treats her right. She really elevates the material. Everyone else does just fine. The first episodes and first seasons of any sitcoms are rarely all that innovative or memorable so I am certainly going to allow this show to grow on me.

For the time being, this first episode of the Great North is deserving of Two Sexy Moose Antlers out of Five Forced Pop Culture References

#TV Series #Bob's Burgers #The Great North #Fox #adult animation #Animation Domination #Sitcom #TV Review

[c-atm]

Halloween tradition

Welcome, hunters! Defenders! Protectors! Human and not! Singled and partnered! Welcome to the Halloween Hunter Horde!" The master of ceremonies, a large, snow skinned person dressed in a ringmaster attire, yelled from their balcony perch to the crowd below, getting cheers and lift of wine glasses in their honor.

As was the tradition of the 'Hunters Horde.'

An annual party for hunters by the 'powers that be,' as the hunters recognized them. Truthfully, they were those who provided hunters help and assistance through various means.

Shops to exchange gems for standard currency, buy gear and accessories, and even buy domestic items. They provided information on hunts, places for hunters to exchange information, and settled disputes, and every year they did this.

Why?

Demon hunting is a lucrative business.

For the 'powers that be.'

Dressed in a purple-and-red, tattered coat with a frilly shirt, pink vest, pair of black pants, leather boots with metal soles and toes, a pair of gloves, a diamond necklace; Steven sighed as he looked at the drink in his hand, a cranberry wine, very sweet and tangy, the velvet red color was pleasing to the eye, but it wasn't his taste. Symbolic of his feelings towards this event.

There are a million things he wished he could be doing right now. All involving his firey mistress right now. Hunting with her, trick-or-treating with her, which was fun last year, dressed as Mirai Kuriyama and him, Akihito Kanbara from beyond the boundary.

"Simply adorable, she was." He mused, thinking of how excited she was to do something so child-like. How her face glowed with pride every time they were stopped for a picture or got a statement on how cute their couple cosplay was. The times when she acted in character, reciting the characters' infamous 'unpleasant' line as she adjusted her red frame glasses. She was entirely in character that year...a little to perfect.

"Still cannot believe she learned a bit of enchanting magic to create a blood blade," He muttered with a loving smile, "though she's also done one who learned demon transformation magic, so in retrospect maybe it's not insane." He shook his head; he was talking to himself, literally as violet was out on the floor, either watching and dancing with Ames or about to cause havoc with Ames. Either would be fine at this moment.

"Where is she?" He wondered as he looked around the room of their peers, hoping to see if his lady was still present, as she arrived before him from her day job or if she completely bailed and went home, leaving him alone in this...Networking event.

"No...she's still here. Just hard to tell with these senses diluting glyphs in place." Steven whispered, but he still felt her presence in the manor, scattered but there. 'Concerning in a way. Though, doubt anyone here would do anything that might put them in opposition with the 'powers that be.'' Steven thought to himself.

Still, he was expecting more... chaotic entertainment with a name like a hunter's hoard, so far everyone was tamed-chatting, dancing...info gathering.

"Well, if it isn't the flames witch's devil." A female voice said from the left of him.

He turned his head to see a demon hunter that they've come across a few times. Snow blonde hair, dark skin, voluptuous form dressed as a sexy witch, a small split skirt, tight corset top, purple silk cape, and black witches hat.

"Sarah did your 'nun' drag you here as well," Steven smirked as the witch nodded with a sigh.

"Yup, my sweet demoness thought it would be fun, plus networking is my forte, supposedly." She rolled her eyes while crossing her arms.

"Aren't you the top manager in an electronic insurance firm?"

"Aren't you a bisexual in a seemingly heterosexual relationship."

"Well, damn, who shit in your wine." Steven yielded with his hands up.

"No, I'm sorry." She sighed, "Just being here and not being able to feel Alicia's presence....Being so close to... ' Them.'

Steven nodded. He got it; the 'powers that be' are strangely intimidating, especially since no one knows precisely who they are...That, coupled with the sense dampening spell, would put any right partner on edge.

"Did you come with Alicia?"

"Strange question." Sarah arched her eyebrow, " but yeah...Of course."

"Hmmph. Well, at least you saw your partner."

Sarah's eyes widened at that before she smirked. "You didn't see trailblazer , huh..or what she was wearing."

"You have?" Steven took a sip of wine.

"Oh yeah." She tittered, "Actually, her and Alicia were sticking close to each other, talking with some other hunters."

Steven released a breath he didn't know he was holding. He was more relaxed now that he knew she was at least with a trusted ally. A demoness, yes, but Alicia's a fan of his firey lady and has been one since the azurite case; Where she saved the duo and a few others from a very oppressive spell. She's even the one that dubbed her 'trailblazer' for her aptitude with fire magic and her fierce attitude.

"So... How does my lady look?" His curiosity and enthusiasm in his voice.

"I can not say when you sound so ecstatic. It's like spoiling the climax of a movie."

"Fine, fine. I'll let myself be surprised. Can you at least tell me where you last saw her?"

Sarah was about to point left when it all happened. A body sailed across the sky, above the crowd, landing right between the two hunters.

Looking down, they saw the body was that a man with tan skin, a deep brown comb-over, and a broken, singed nose and cheek, dressed as speed racer; he groaned before losing consciousness.

"Where is that grabby little snake!"

A voice yelled within the crowd, a familiar voice.

A fiery voice.

Steven smiled as he watched the crowd all but part to give room to his blazing contractee as she marched her way through towards her victim and assailant, and his jaw dropped when he saw her.

She was dressed in a steampunk styled costume her consists of a purple and red-trimmed leotard with matching hot pants, a deep blue pleated skirt, black thigh-high socks, white boots, a pair of red mid-finger gloves, a headband, a pink diamond barrette, and ribbon around a lock of her hair. The costume, while not revealing, showed all her curves and brought both her charm and charisma to the surface.

"My Connie." He expressed in a daze getting her attention.

"Steven?" Her eyes expanded as she saw her partner, instantly forgetting the handsy little perv, in favor of her beloved demon embrace. Laughing as his hands found themselves at the curve of her back and her palms found his shoulder blades as she kisses his gem under his shirt. Getting a small shiver of appreciation.

She climbed out his arms, reluctantly to take a look at her partner in his outfit." So it's a costume party, and you came as a demon?" She teased, "a little on the nose there, don't you think."

"Ah, but you see, I'm now a love demon, all for you," he whispered, pulling her back into his hold.

"You gotta show me your credentials, later then."

She giggled, feeling his gentle lips on her shoulder. "So, you didn't say anything about my alchemist costume." She mumbled into his ear.

"Do I have to say how bewitching and tempting you are?" He teasingly admitted as he kissed her blushing cheeks.

"You just did, silly " She sighed, holding him close. She turned to Sarah and pointed toward the crowd, "Alicia's near the punch."

Sarah gave the two a grin before disappearing into the sea of people, leaving the two of them alone.

"So, having fun?" Steven asked, against her collar.

"Yea, it's been a blast." She started sarcastically, "talking shop, exchanging war stories and info about demons sighting called 'slashers'..." She sighed, "all while having people gawk at me with lewd eyes." She huffed.

"Well, you can't blame them. You make such an alluring alchemist." He moved his lips to her ear, "you'd have willing volunteers to experiment all across the land." His teasing cold breath tickled her ear, causing her to giggle.

[[More*]]

"Oh! no doubt," she carried on their play, nuzzling close. "Unfortunately, I have such a terrifying territorial terror as my partner. You'd chase them all away." She clicked her tongue in faux reprimand, kissing his temple. "Scientific succession stopped by my stingy Steven."

"I was yours first. Science can suck it."

"You're mine now."

"I'll be yours forever."

The earnest way he said it made her heart thumped and urged her to give him a tender kiss, humming throughout.

"Can we go somewhere more...Secluded, like.." She nodded her head towards the western wall, where there was a large enough balcony behind two glass doors, and no one was on it. Connie only giggled as Steven scooped her up and moved like a wisp of smoke towards their destination; unseen, and unnoticed by all.

They reappeared on the terrace almost immediately, Steven walking out of the smoke with Connie, still mid-laugh. He sat her down on her feet before watching her walk to the edge and sitting on top of it, facing him. "You'd catch me if I fall, right?"

"Of course, my lady. I am your partner." He smirked devilishly as he glided up to her, resting his hands beside her hips and his torso between her knees. Looking up at her somewhat mischievous face shining in the moonlight. "Are you planning a daring escape?" He teased.

"Actually, I might have...Sort of...Put one into action, already?" She confessed sheepishly.

"Huh?" Steven looked dumbfounded at his love. " What do you mean?"

"You'll find out."

"Does...does it have anything to do with that fool you laid out." He asked.

"Oh, gosh, no!" She exclaimed. "I put this into action, way before he grabbed my and Alicia's butt." She clarified, almost nonchalantly. She pulled him into a hold, feeling the rage from her best friend and partner, "No, we already handled it." She confirmed.

"But he..." Steven began only to be silenced by a small glare.

"It was nothing, my dapper demon. I promise. He touched and was punished for it..." she grimaced" Licia, just about ended his bloodline, if you catch my drift." She said, flexing her fingers as if she was holding something.

"Ooh." Steven breathed out, shaking his head." Still, wished that didn't occur."

"Yeah, cause only you can be perverse with me." She teased.

"Now, is it really perverse when it's with your lover, I prefer, intimate." He spoke in that devilishly dapper tongue that used to (and still at times) make her a blushing mess.

Connie, red face and eyes glowing by another emotional heat, chuckled. "Intimate, huh?" She pulled him closer.

"Yup." he rested his head on hers. "My actions are based on my love for you, my flame ."

"I never doubted that, my gem .." She chuckled. "Speaking of intimate...How long are you gonna keep your lady waiting?"

Steven didn't need anymore coaxing as they shared a deep kiss. Her hand holding his cheek, as he held her seat, her hot tongue twist, caress, and danced with his cooler one, creating a moment of warming love between the two. However, anyone else would see a small purple heart of flame around them.

Then a crash resounded from the inside along with the yells and laughter of Violet and Ames, causing general chaos.

"That's -chu- your -chu- plan?" He smirked through their kiss.

"Um -chu- hm !" She nodded, "let's go get us some candy -chu- get us a demon -chu- get a little hurt, -chu- and then spend the night dressing each other wounds, love demon. "

"Now, That's a plan fit for an alchemist." Steven said, deepening the kiss. " -CHU!- I missed you."

"I missed you too...Nothing like being able to sense you." She sighed as the kiss gain more depth.

-CRASH!-

" Let's not waste their hard work."

Steven smirked as he lifted his lady from the railing holding her in his arms, resuming their kiss as they sank into the sweet shadows that filled their flaming heart.

Off to spend their Halloween, their way.

---------;;;

For @meku95 Halloween contest

#steven universe #connie maheswaran #connverse #steven universe future #steven universe fanfiction #steven and connie #witchy #dapper #older steven #older connie #witch and demon au #halloween party #meku95

[rivalsofnycupdates]

“What doesn’t kill me better run.”

■ ABOUT. ■

name: Jeremy Sinclair age: twenty-seven occupation: devils prospect gender: cis-male pronouns: he/him sexuality: heterosexual

■ HISTORY. ■

The day Jeremy was born filled his mother with relief and his father with displeasure. During her pregnancy, Lily Sinclair, came across many complications and after losing her first child right after delivery Jeremy was her miracle. Her husband, Edward Sinclair, however found himself struggling with hours at his job and a new baby was not something he planned for. Facing shorter hours and now another mouth to feed caused him to turn towards drinking. Amongst the financial stress, and his father’s drinking, the early childhood Jeremy had was one that ended up being full of laughter and love all due to his mother’s efforts. He learned to stay out of his father’s way, their conversations mimicking those of strangers that couldn’t stand to talk.

At the end of his freshman year, Edward was laid off and the Sinclair household changed for the worse. Jeremy found himself constantly in arguments with his father, the man spending hours of each day drinking, spewing out complaints regarding anything his son did. His mother tried a few times to come in between but that just brought forth physical abuse against the two. Seeing this propelled Jeremy to get a few odd jobs, working every night after school and every weekend leaving very little free time to actually do above average in school. He thought that if he kept it up and was able to help ease their financial struggles it would get his dad to back off and keep his mother out of harms way. One of his friends offered to help him by vouching for him into this new position he acquired. Jeremy wasn’t aware that it his friend was even involved in drug dealing but he didn’t have the luxury to complain, especially after seeing how much his friend made. Years went by and Jeremy felt as though he’d accomplished something major by keeping his family intact all the while learning more about how to sell. Soon he was able to quit all the other odd jobs, drug dealing becoming his main source of income. His parents didn’t ask many questions, his father too drunk to notice and his mother too afraid of what the answer would be.

Near his high school graduation and his eighteenth birthday, Jeremy returned home one night to a screaming match between his parents. Not having heard him enter, he was able to catch parts of the conversation, that his mother had found someone else and that she was leaving. At those words Jeremy joined in, refusing to believe what he was hearing, he pleaded with his mom to talk about it in the morning when they were all in a better state. After helping both his parents calm down and go to bed, he did the same determined to keep some sort of peace the next day. But when he awoke he never go that chance, his mother had left within the night without a trace. She’d left a note that she didn’t need this life anymore and that she’d always love him. Jeremy began to feel anger he never felt before, feeling completely betrayed by the one person he thought would be in his corner forever. His father in his daze blamed Jeremy for Lily’s departure, stating that his shady dealings was the reason. Unable to keep his cool any longer Jeremy swung at his father the two exchanging blows until they were both too tired out. That very next night Jeremy packed his things and followed suit, leaving his father and the house he tried to hold up for years behind, the only thing he cared for now was himself.

■ WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? ■

Since leaving his house Jeremy found himself working during the day and finding somewhere to sleep every night. Some nights he was able to get a friend’s couch to lay his head and others he would spend the night with a hookup making sure to be gone before they awoke. He quickly made a name for himself as someone to not get mad, his anger not one he could control for long. He was prone to get into fights when he felt that he was being played or crossed. His friend had caught word of a gang called Quantum of the Devils was moving to New York and decided he would be headed in that direction too. No longer attached to his hometown, and the memories that felt as if they were suffocating him, Jeremy followed suit. Hoping that this new city brought along more money and opportunities. 

■ KEEP THIS AWAY FROM YOUR ENEMIES ■

Since moving to New York, Jeremy became all the more hardworking and kept mostly to himself or the Devils. He didn’t leave a single second to dwell on what his father was up to or where his mother was at, making himself his number one priority. That didn’t last long when one night his path crossed with a beauty by the name of Dilan Osman. The two fell hard and fast, but like fire and gasoline, found themselves in countless arguments. Jeremy didn’t hide much about his life and Dilan’s lack of reservation made him craving her presence wanting her around more than most people. One argument too many ended their relationship, and Jeremy would never admit it but it wrecked him. He felt like an idiot that he let someone in, a mistake he didn’t want to repeat again. 

■ RELATIONSHIPS. ■

■ Foster Richman: Jeremy holds a lot of respect and admiration towards Foster. He always finds himself wanting to learn more from him and feels that he trusts him.

■ Mariss Diaz: Jeremy has grown closer to Marissa being one of the few people he finds comfort in. He find it easy to talk to her and goes to her when he wants to vent or wants good company.

■ Jessica Douglas: Jessica is suspicious of him trying to find him on a charge and Jeremy tries his best to avoid her.

■ CONNECTIONS. ■

■  Dilan Osman > Ex-Girlfriend

■  Scout Holt > Close Friend

■  Ivanna Martinez > Close Friend

■  Skylar Kennedy > Friends, wants to get to know her better

Jeremy Sinclair is a OPEN character and is portrayed by Dacre Montgomery who’s FC IS SEMI-NEGOTIABLE.

#semi appless rpg #bio rp #crime rpg #new rpg #gang rpg #all #men #dacre montgomery fc #jeremysinclair #devils #oc #open #openm

[dtsugabby]

BTS Fic Rec

Bear with me, I’m trying to organize all of my recs from various sources. In the meantime, check out below and also my ao3 bookmarks here if what’s below isn’t enough!

A U T H O R S

Basically, I’d rec anything by these authors. They are incredibly talented and I always enjoy their works.

 dirtysope (ao3, also on twitter)

wispyoongi (ao3, also on twitter)

pauline (twitter)

bri (twitter)

kaythebest (ao3)

metastacia (ao3)

babiesko_o (twitter)

moonlitaehyung (twitter)

bloom (twitter)

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<History> sope au in which murder mystery writer Yoongi joins a new dating app that connects people based on their internet search history. He’s matched up with Hoseok, who, unbeknownst to him, is a notorious serial killer all over the news.

jikook au where idol jimin is having a competition, whoever has the highest scores on his superstar app gets to go on a date with him. only one problem, 90% of the songs have an unbeatable high score all from the same user, "jjklovespjm". that user happens to be the idol jungkook

jikook au where jimin and jungkook are new roommates and jimin finds jungkooks hidden stash of yaoi and boylove manga under his bed but it's funny bc jungkook is straight.

jikook au where jimin and jungkook are both gay af but they think the other is straight. so, they act extremely heterosexual around each other, causing them to believe the other is straight even more. this only leads to awkward conversations and situations.

「 euphoria 」   ✧ jikook au ✧ -in which they were childhood friends. later on they both become part of different rival musical groups, and one day jm finds a love letter from jk which he wrote years ago.

jikook au where well known ceo, jeon jungkook, is seen as a huge playboy by media and the public. nobody knows that hes been married to his childhood best friend for 6 years and has a son.

Jikook AU} Whiskey   In which Jungkook comes back traumatized from war and Jimin is the bartender who lives next door. One day, as he’s coming back from work, he sees Jungkook sitting in his front porch, a bottle of whiskey in his hand.

NamJin AU In which for some reason Seokjin is just really really convinced that Namjoon is a witch. Joon found it interesting and keep taking Jin on a date, disguising it as a "prove research"

taekook au Jeongguk tries breaking up with his boyfriend through an AirDrop note but accidentally sends it to Taehyung instead, which of course, leads to a series of unfortunate events.

[jikook au] where youtuber jimin reacts to jungkook's video and jimin is introduced to the mess that is jeon jungkook

「 vminkook 」♡ hidden where taehyung finds this very popular vminkook stan account that he shows to jimin and jungkook and they spend the whole night laughing at the edits, aus and posts. what they don't know is that jungkook is the person running the account.

「 jikook au 」♤ little do you know when popular kid jeon jungkook's crush is revealed to be a certain park jimin everyone assumes it's cheerleader and social butterfly girl jimin and not nerdy bookworm boy jimin

「 jikook au 」◇ encounter park jimin's idol group makes an appearance on the hottest variety show in korea. he has a big fat secret crush on one of the hosts, jeon jungkook who is very clearly flirting with his fellow member, min yoongi - so jimin becomes petty on national tv.

[NAMJIN AU] “SKY HIGH” Seokjin is a flight attendant who keeps clashing with HR. He gets a final warning letter with one last chance. Desperate, he offers to give a passenger a blowjob in exchange for not writing a complaint, not knowing the other’s true identity...

Jimin is a single father and his little son is the biggest fan of the worldwide known singer Jeon Jeongguk~

[ jikook au ] - show me:  where jimin sent jungkook nudes over twitter but those pictures wouldn’t load on jungkook’s phone so he just replies with an ‘lmao’

[jikook au] solo artist, jeon jungkook, is getting married.

jikook social media au in which jungkook is a very famous kpop idol in the middle of his world tour and jimin is a small nsfw twt acc their worlds collide when korea’s favorite idol accidentally likes a tweet on the latter’s account

yoonseok!au in which hoseok accidentally drunk texts yoongi instead of his ex

yoonseok au where yoongi accidentally sends the wrong picture to his coworker hoseok

Yoonseok/SOPE AU In which amateur police detective Min Yoongi has to solve a series of public murder cases with no witnesses while being assisted by murderer and conman Jung Hoseok who agreed to help as it can shorten his prison sentence

<YOONSEOK/SOPE AU> in which Hoseok confesses to his long-time crush, Yoongi, by sending him a Spotify playlist. Oblivious to what’s going on, Yoongi goes ahead and drags his music choices. [mostly crack and fluff tbh]

[ jikook au ] - time where jimin can see a person’s lifespan and knows that his own time is limited but discovers that whenever he shares physical contact with jungkook he gains time but the thing is they hate each other

[jikook au] — the list nsfw in which jungkook just wants to go grocery shopping and jimin sends him an unexpected list

jikook au where jimin is a popular beauty youtuber, known for his lipstick looks. jungkook is a gaming/vlog youtuber who finally gets the confidence to post his own makeup tutorials that hes been filming for months (secretly) after discovering jimin.

jikook au where jungkook has tattoos, lots of piercings, and always wears black. jimin thinks hes dangerous and bad, until he sees jungkook with a pokemon lunchbox surrounded by dogs at the park one day.

AO3

Dynasty (series, completed, sope, taenamjin, jikook) Royal AU, slight fantasy?, I cried several times 

“Hundreds of years ago, the Gods intertwine the lives of seven boys. They suffer through war, heartache, & separation, but with the help of the Fates & their inner wolves, they all try to find their happy endings.

abo au universe on twitter;; https://twitter.com/dirtysope/status/1054116662620778496″

Peaches (series, incomplete, sope, namjin, vminkook) BDSM 101, somehow the most adorable thing ever, all commissioned

“A very nsfw modern setting AU which is centered around the boys exploring their sexualities predominantly through BDSM. The main ships are Sope, Namjin, and Vminkook, but various pairings will be explored in poly situations in shared BDSM scenes.”

Infinity (series, incomplete, sope, vmin) Vampire AU, all commissioned (I’m part of the commission group!!), sope are soulmates wbk

“This is an OT7 vampire universe that involves all seven of the boys. Main pairings will be Sope, Vminkook, and Namjin. This is your warning for darker themes⚠️ There will be compulsion, mind control, gaslighting, possessive behavior, violence, death, murder, & angst. ~no toxicity occurs within the ships~ Blood drinking will be very relevant and featured heavily!”

Charmed (series, complete?, sope-centric) HP AU! So cute, my first dirtywisp fic and tied for my favorite HP au in the fandom

“Bangtan in the Harry Potter universe.”

Infectious (chaptered, complete, sope, yoonmin, namjin, taekook, jikook, vmin, vminkook) THE zombie apocalypse AU, very angst filled, major character death, semi-happy ending (if you discount the MCD)

“During the first leg of their US tour, BTS, depleted, weary, tempers flaring, step on the stage for the second night of concerts. Little do they know, this is not going to be like any other show of their lives--instead before the end of the first song they are going to be on the run against what they can only call a zombie attack. Determined to stay alive until BigHit can rescue them, BTS is forced to be smart, resourceful, and get over themselves to survive.”

Hand In Hand (chaptered, incomplete, namgi) adoption au, disabilities au, i cried literal tears several times

“Namjoon, a sign language professor, and Yoongi, a songwriter, got certified to foster. But, they never expected that would open the door to love, heartache, pain, and most importantly, family. But, as they figure out this "dad-thing" hand-in-hand, they realize that family isn't made up of blood, it's the love that they have for each other.~or~ Namjoon's a deaf college professor Yoongi is his husband and a songwriter Seokjin is their case manager Hoseok, Jungkook, Tae and Jimin are kiddos with their own set of challenges and triumphs“

Heart of War (chaptered, incomplete, namjin, taegi, jihope) royal au

“For the protection of his people, Prince Seokjin has to marry his fiancé’s killer: the alpha king of the most ruthless and feared kingdom in all the lands with a reputation of being a cold blooded monster on the battlefield. Worst of all, the omega prince doesn't even speak their language.“

Until Dawn (series, incomplete, jikook, sope, namjin) fantasy creatures au, 100/10, tae is in it too, they all come together to save the world from various disasters major and minor, read this series

“The Documented Adventures of Your Favorite Local Supernatural Gang”

Raspberry Vodka (chaptered, complete, jikook) college au, misunderstandings

““You don’t have to make excuses.” Jimin crosses the room and Jungkook follows him to the doorway, all the words he wants to say jumbling together in his head but never making it to his lips. He wants to tell Jimin he’s just inexperienced and way too drunk and all he needs is a second to calm down and reassess his thoughts before he throws up from stress, but Jimin is already opening the door and stepping out into the hallway and oh god, he needs to say something.“I’m a virgin!” Jungkook shouts.“

Like A Hard Carry (chaptered, complete, namjin, yoonminseok, taekook) overwatch au, social media au

“In which: Jungkook, a popular Twitch streamer with both the self-esteem of a wilted piece of lettuce and the impulse control of suicidal squirrel, convinces his best friend Jimin to do a livestream for him; RM, captain of a pro Overwatch team, is suddenly missing a sniper; Jin, in an attempt to make things better, just makes them worse; Hoseok screams in various different volumes and moods; V, a pro-gamer, finds an incredible sniper, a cute boy, and a crush, making the mistake to think that they’re all the same person; Yoongi isn’t sure which one of his friends is going to make him die from second-hand stupidity first; and Jimin is caught in the middle of a love triangle that he’s not ACTUALLY a part of, one that he actually is a part of, and that fact that no matter how much Jungkook tries, Jimin will always be absolutely terrible at Overwatch.“

Vocal Princess (chaptered, complete, yoonmin) crossdressing on a dare au, yoongi is very gay and very confused, Jimin is embarrassed and trying his best

“Fed up with his inability to understand women, Jimin's sister dresses him like a girl. Jimin finds himself working with a producer, Yoongi, and donning his disguise for much longer than he intended. Jimin wonders if he’s losing his mind or if he’s really falling for a guy. Meanwhile, Yoongi is VERY GAY AND VERY CONFUSED WHY HE’S SO ATTRACTED TO THIS WOMAN IN HIS STUDIO. aka Jimin dresses as a girl and Yoongi has a heterosexual crisis.“

City of Stars (chaptered, complete, namgi) hanahaki au, so so good, but fr, FUCK THE ENDING

“hanahaki disease: an illness where the victim regurgitates and coughs up flower petals when they suffer from unrequited love. this can only be cured through surgical removal, however the victim's romantic feelings for their love disappear along side with the infection. yoongi starts coughing petals for namjoon, a witch with a constellation of stars glowing on his cheeks – except, flowers aren't the only things ripping his insides apart.“

jung hoseok writes instruction manuals (while stupidly in love) (series, complete?, sope) so so fluffy and cute, list au

listen to my heart (can you hear it sing) (chaptered, complete, namjin-centric) abo au, namjoon is a big dummy but we love him

“Seokjin wasn't his, but he was still as every bit of 'his' as the rest of the wolves in the pack, and Namjoon was going to have to learn to live with that.In which Namjoon constantly, to everyone's disappointment, fucks up.“

delta (chaptered, complete, namgiseok) very very good poly rapline, canon divergence?, angst but happy resolution

“He was the last person Namjoon expected to hear from - thought he was dreaming when he saw the email in his work inbox. It was short and simple, typical Hoseok. Just: We saw what happened. We’re so sorry. If you need get away for awhile, you’re always welcome to come stay with us - JH. He wonders now if Hoseok was surprised when he said yes. If Hoseok only extended the invitation because he didn’t think Namjoon would actually come.(Or: Namjoon chose a solo career and left Yoongi and Hoseok behind. Seven years later, after being outed by a Korean tabloid, he ends up on their couch in Queens, trying to face an uncertain future. And confront feelings that have persisted for nearly a decade.)“

Good Friends (series, complete?, yoonmin, namjin, taekook, vhope) hilarious, misunderstandings, college au

“Yoongi likes to brag to his friends about his boyfriend. Jimin likes to brag to his friends about his boyfriend. Little do they know there's actually crossover in their friend groups.”

Just Another Game (chaptered, incomplete, yoongi x everyone, many side pairings) a n g s t, I am a beta on this fic, great writing, author is interactive

“Set during 2019, after their world tour and after Answer's release. Min Yoongi's career has put him in bisexual hell: living with six hot bandmates who think it's really funny to flirt and get handsy with him and with each other all the time. Between constant struggles like not knowing whether he and Jimin nearly made out while drunk, to bed sharing with Jungkook every other night, to not being sure how to stop imagining what it'd be like to kiss Namjoon, it's only a matter of time before he loses his mind as he realizes he's in love with six perfect but very straight boys. After Yoongi drunkenly comes out as bi, he can’t remember the confession the next day. Taken by surprise, the boys lightheartedly start a competition to see who Yoongi finds the most attractive in the group. The objective is set to getting a kiss from Yoongi before he finds out about the competition. Though they mean well, things go downhill fast for all of them. As they each realize they are attracted to Yoongi, they start taking things too far beyond what they’d signed up for.”

eternal sunshine (oneshot, complete, sope) canon au, i commissioned this fic!!, I love it so much, slight angst then fluffy sexy times

“Yoongi is having a rough day at practice. He's not focused on the choreo, and no matter how hard he tries he just can't seem to get anything right. But luckily for him he has Hoseok, and he always knows how to put Yoongi's broken pieces back together. “

offer me your deathless death (yoongi is a serial killer!AU) (series, incomplete, yoonmin, namjin, vhope) a bit of an odd read but I loved it, dark, not what you think, pulls at heartstrings

“a peak into the lives of the rich and the powerful (non-linear; no specific order of stories)Notes:mainly yoonmin, but there's namjin and vhope too! :D (also known as the jimin is a ceo!AU and the namjoon is a hospital-owner-person!AU)”

to the moon and back (chaptered, complete, vmin, vminkook) vmin are supernatural hunters, poor kookie, something’s not quite right in this town 

“"The other kids think that Jimin is strange. And he is, to be fair. Sometimes Jimin talks to people that aren’t there. Sometimes he starts crying, randomly, and then a moment later the wailing siren of an ambulance or police car can be heard outside. Sometimes he just shuts down and won’t talk to anyone." Jimin and Taehyung are basically professionals. When they're called in to deal with a werewolf terrorizing a small town, they know the deal. Things are rarely as they seem.”

Spine Breaker (chaptered, complete, sope, namjin, taekook) hunger games/ready player one au, video game brought to real life, plot twists, angst but a happy ending

“The clock is ticking, Jeon Jeongguk only has two bottles of water, one lunchbox, and ten bombs with which he has to kill six people if he wants to live. He's just eighteen and the only experience he has throwing bombs includes sitting in front of his screen, smashing buttons on his controller and swearing at his longstanding in-game rival, VforVictory. Someone has recreated the hit warfare videogame, Spine Breaker, and although Kim Seokjin is the mascot of the game, he knows nothing about how to play it but now finds himself launched in the middle of a stranded island, his bombs missing, his glasses smashed, and a pursuer who wants something more sinister than just his death. Min Yoongi knows why he's here. He knows why everyone is here, but his battles had begun long ago. The clock is ticking and Yoongi is running out of time, but he knows that zero is not the end. It's kill or be killed.”

The Shaman and the Exorcist (chaptered, complete, namjin-centric) SO GOOD, ghost hunter au, seokjin is a fake bitch and namjoon is pissed, angst angst angst, ok ending though

“Seokjin doesn't believe in ghosts. Which would cause a huge uproar if everyone knew since he's kind of a big deal at his university; he's a shaman who protects people from evil spirits. He doesn't remember where he got the idea to do this from, all he knows is that superstitious people pay good money. Namjoon does believe in ghosts. Better yet, he can see them and he can expel them. But there's a certain phoney shaman at his university who's stealing all his clients in his exorcism business, and he's not happy about it because haunted people pay good money. So, what do they do? Figure out whose closet is holding all the skeletons, of course.“

charmed (oneshot, complete, namjin) very cute, existential, seokjin got tricked boo hoo

“"So you’re not going to eat me?" Seokjin asks, just to confirm."Why would I eat you?" "Because you’re a dragon," Seokjin says slowly, because it should be obvious, despite Namjoon not looking very dragon-y at all. Namjoon looks unimpressed. "I may be a dragon, but I’m not an animal."”

Monster Private Eye (series, incomplete, namjin, vhope, jikook) funniest thing ever, namjoon is a detective and kook is his assistant, tae is a mess, jimin is an idol, solve crimes be gay 

“Kim Namjoon (klutz, genius, poet, private investigator) solves cases for the unusual and secretive clientele of Monster Private Investigator. His assistant, Jeon Jungkook (big muscles, bigger heart) helps out. Each story revolves around Namjoon taking on the request of a different member (noted in the title), for a total of 7 cases in this collection, all from Namjoon’s POV. Members also appear in chapters that are not focused on them. All works can stand alone, but I suggest that you read them in order to fully enjoy the characters and relationships as they grow. Enjoy!“

bts hogwarts au (series, incomplete, vmin, namjin, sope) my other favorite HP au, set in the same time as the books but focused on the boys instead with their own storyline, angst, fluff, dealing with coming out and accepting yourself and others

“a series of non-linear snapshots of bangtan’s life at hogwarts. [all ships are main ships] green: yoongi, jimin, jeongguk. red: seokjin, namjoon. yellow: hoseok, taehyung.”

creating a home (series, incomplete, namjin) foster parents namjin kids all the other members, heart wrenching, fluff, would read again and again, follows them as they grow up

“A BTS Foster Care AU”

the professor’s family (series, incomplete?, namjin, taekook) professor! namjin, jungkook is his student, poor kookie, he has the hots for tae

“Professor Kim Namjoon is married. He doesn't have a wife. They have a sort-of son. And Jeon Jungkook just crossed paths with them.”

More to be added!!

#bts fic rec #masterlist

[haila-wetyios]

Character info: Haila Wetyios

full name.  Haila Wetyios pronunciation.  Hey-lla Wai-tee-os nicknames.  Hels height.  Unknown though a tad tall when compared to other Xaela women age.  28 zodiac. Cancer languages.  Common Eorzean, lost tribal Keeper tongue, Bel’ahdian, a little bit of both Hingan and Xaelan.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair colour.  Pure black with a faint streak of grey here and there eye colour.  Left eye is red while the right eye is a light blue skin tone.  Light skin body type.  Slim accent.  Soft British dominant hand. Right posture.  Straight, leaning towards a formal posture. scars.  Faded burn marks on both sides of the face, a triangular scar that seems to have been carved onto the skin on her right arm. Both hands have second degree burns that extend almost to the elbows. tattoos.  A white stripe on both sides of her face to hide previous scars. most noticeable features.  Her mismatched eyes and prominent white limbal rings, burnt hands and long black hair.

CHILDHOOD.

place of birth.  Vylbrand hometown.  Limsa Lominsa siblings.  Hyola Malurie (Half sister) parents.  Wackwrulf Malurie and an unamed mother (deceased). Leofrain Wetyios (adoptive father) parental involvement.  Lived with an abusive father and near absent mother until the age of six, then adopted by a military elder who’s whereabouts have been unknown ever since the Calamity.

ADULT LIFE

occupation.  Researcher, with a casual mercenary job here and there if it’s considered both legit and safe enough by her. current residence.  Kugane close friends.  Alexius Edmont relationship status.  Complicated marriage financial status.  Stable thanks to the accumulated funds from dangerous jobs and a husband with his own business. driver’s license.  Never put to the test, though she did learn every single detail possible about flying different Manacutter models. vices.  Overworking to unhealthy levels. Occasional drinking and obsessing over the protection of her family.

SEX & ROMANCE.

sexual orientation. Heterosexual romantic orientation.  Heteroromantic preferred emotional role.  submissive  |  dominant  |  switch  |  unsure preferred sexual role.  submissive  |  dominant  |  switch |  sex repulsed libido.  Low love language.  Frequent nudges with her forehead against her partner’s side or chest. She seldom says any words of affection after having a troubled past when it comes to relationships. Holding hands, smiling and sharing small bits of what she’s feeling at certain moments are her highest expression towards those she holds dear. relationship tendencies.  Due to having being abandoned more than once after the consummation of her relationship, she tends to keep people at a distance, not just for her sake but for others she does come to appreciate in fear of having her past catch up to them as well. She may lie sometimes on the flirtatious side in an exchange, but whether anything else blooms out of it, is up to the amount of times or memories she makes with someone. After years of hiding around though, most if not all the people she considered friends  or even acquaintances are gone to her.

MISCELLANEOUS.

hobbies to pass the time.  Raising flowers, baking, spending as much time as possible with her son. mental illnesses disorders.  Severe PTSD from several near death encounters including the Calamity. Deppression and anxiety. physical illnesses/disabilities.  Unstable aether left or right brained.  Left-brained fears.  Losing her loved ones, passing away earlier than others, making mistakes, being abandoned (again). self confidence level.  High, while it’s taken quite a long time after a lot of ups and downs, she’s become more confident in herself by accepting what she has to do depending on the situation she’s into. vulnerabilities.  Her own feelings, corrupted aether, the memory of the first partner she ever truly loved. 

tagged by: @truth-of-the-warden

#I know I didn't fill in a couple points #but I really dont have any complex info to add into the ones I ommited #thanks for the tag! #haila wetyios

[queernuck]

Trans-Inclusive Radicalism and Contemporary Feminism in Postmodern Feminist Thought

If one wishes to rescue a concept of political lesbianism, one must recognize both the lesbian phallus as a part of certain lesbian political ideologies, and must further engage in a process of understanding the many differentiated flows of lesbian desire, flows that absolutely must include trans women, flows that take on a radical character in defiance of materialist feminism and not directly as a form of proletarian feminism, and accepting this as part of accepting a certain postmodern posture. There is a fear among certain feminists of the postmodern, of poststructural acts of signification, specifically because of how the ideological structures they depend on are repetitions of an Oedipal burden, are part of a means by which sex is codified and essentialized in order to understand it as a central aspect of oppression separate from conventional historical materialism. 

The definition of these terms: political lesbian, radical feminism, and the lesbian phallus as a demarcation of exactly what goes on in political lesbian acts of filiation, affection, identification is a difficult task specifically because so many of these terms have changed not only in assemblage with one another, but as independent structures of realization, as part of larger assemblages of identity and community. The importance of realizing this, realizing that radical feminism was not and need not be so singularly associated with trans-exclusionary ideology, that the “trans-exclusion” at hand is itself a misnomer, that it in fact welcomes certain realizations of transition as a process and uses them as a means of increasing precarity for trans women both in feminist spaces and in larger communities, as part of making trans women acceptable targets. The presence of a lesbian phallus, that is, the specific conceptual “lack” of a phallus that is filled through the reinvention of Lacanian flows of exchange between women, when previously such flows were conceived of strictly as heterosexual, is discussed by Judith Butler specifically in order to critique the means by which lesbianism becomes clear, becomes that which it is most readily identified as. Frequently, identities such as “butch” or “femme” are understood rather shallowly as mere resignifications of heterosexuality, in the same way that top and bottom are for gay men. Penetrative acts become central in a fashion that first demands the crudely-manufactured phallus become clear, the insertion of discourses of penetrative acts into a voyeuristic understanding of sexual intercourse, sexual intimacy, before the subtler flows of phallic desire are able to exist between two women. The apparent refusal of this by denying any penetrative act, by acting as if penetration cannot be a lesbian act, a process that is frequently realized by admonishing trans women for their heterosexuality even if they are involved in sex with another trans woman, is central to certain notions of political lesbianism that merely resignify feminist action, acts of feminist concentration on womanhood and building community with women over men as not only a substitute for any sexual act, but in fact far greater than it, a more meaningful realization of lesbian identity. 

This is not to say that all “political lesbians” make this distinction: certainly, a bisexual woman who specifically concentrates on building community with women in a fashion that involves an exclusively woman-oriented character in her attraction, expression of desire, expression of her most immediate senses of community could be described as engaging in a certain sort of political lesbianism, but moreover doing so in relief of bisexuality as an identity and a structure of identification. Political lesbianism as a distinction that dictates not the lack of a phallus (that knowingly invites its resignification) but rather a new series of schizophrenic affinities, desires that form along new lines of flight and specifically act in an Anti-Oedipal fashion, thus becomes a potential singularity of identification. This would include recognizing womanhood as a contingent structure, as one that involves both sexing and gendering of the body, in a fashion that implies the two as singular yet separate, a kind of univocality of the body that trans women are far too familiar with. For trans women who are unable to pass, who have features that are commonly understood as markers of maleness, the apparent-privilege they enjoy seems an especially ironic sort of joke: it is those features which mean they are not enough of a woman, and yet those exact features which mark them as a woman especially deserving of violence, a woman who must be tested and observed and studied in order to find possible moments at which she is unbecoming of a woman, a kind of becoming-transgender, becoming-transsexual, becoming-tranny that is not the molecular becoming that belongs to a man, but in fact a far different status akin to the revelation of the “real” seen time and time again in comedies where a trans woman is undressed against her will and made to stand naked, her sex revealed and thus her gender resignified in an instant. For trans women to concentrate on the well-being, safety, happiness of other trans women in a fashion that may involve sexual intimacy but is far more focused on a network of attachment, a rejection of the suturing of the stunted phallus to the body of the trans woman attempted by a kind of reversal seen in the popular discourses around the vaginoplasty that describe it as dead, always bleeding, as the sort of wound the vagina is often imagined to be.

The deeply physical, sex-based language combined with an ontology of performativity often used in radical feminism means that transness is impossible to conceive of except as a sort of degeneracy, akin to most other reactionary notions of it, always coming from an impossible “other” that cannot be truly met, in numerous different discourses coming from an Orientalized Other, a decadent Western influence, the collapse of an arboreal and Oedipal concept of the family as bound through the taboos surrounding the traumatic formation of family bonds, the way in which one creates a transhistorical notion of sex and sexual identity through the colonial resignification of structures of knowing and naming the body as ontically bound to sex and gender, as part of a kind of rhizomal resignification where sex and gender were not only always one another even in difference, but in fact present the sole and singular point at which transhistorical convergence can be noted. There is, thus, a kind of transcendence of the body but moreover a transcendence that is bound to an ascension of the supposed female body into something that cannot be critiqued specifically because it lies beyond coloniality, despite the profoundly colonial character of many discussions of gendering of the body and the attempts to realize the language of gender as inadequate but the most readily available means of expressing certain knowledges of the body in a context of decolonization. Effectively, the sort of desire that radical feminism claims to reject is imposed specifically through a radical feminist epistemology. This is not comprehensive over radical feminist thought, and indeed one can read even explicitly transmisogynist works against themselves in order to develop a kind of trans-focused radical feminism: the example of deconstructing and admiring the SCUM Manifesto as a trans woman is a particularly pertinent one given the way in which it describes a kind of abolition of manhood and makes cast-off remarks about men transfigured into women, men who have become women in order to avoid this cleansing and who instead admire, love, wish to be women. The eventual outcome of this, then, is a refusal to recognize the rather obvious means by which one finds shifting, flowing schizzes and breaks in the manifestation of gender not as genuine changes that can be deconstructed, approached materially, or even affirmed: instead one finds them all as a singular, monolithic whole, gathered into an arboreal singularity of gendered nightmares.

The move away from a strict materialist approach to gender should be one that benefits women of all sorts, including trans women: so much of what is considered “material” is developed out of a range of epistemic holdings that are influenced by an ontology of phallogocentrism, that exclude women by their very conception, are intentionally ignorant on the matter of women and their experiences. Even adapting these frameworks in order to offer a properly historically materialist understanding will be marked by this lack, just as the phallus and its lack are signifiers of the same affinities, same concepts of desire. Postmodernism, as a means of developing through dialectic methodologies a new understanding of deconstruction and its application past traditional notions of textuality, of exactly what a text constitutes, toward the same openings necessary for postcolonial scholarship, critical theory as a vector for decolonization, eco-deconstruction as a part of realizing these potentialities, and numerous other sorts of critique. The importance of gender to these, given the way that postmodernism has so often been driven by women, by women looking through a queer lens at texts, leads to not only the origins of condemnation by supposed-radical theorists, but the reversal of this, the potential for reaching toward radical critique through a specific evocation of reactionary strains of radical feminist thought. By comparing them to other feminisms, attempting to enter into critique that does not presuppose any singular one as an incorruptible source of knowledge-making, privileging any single feminism at the risk of privileging a remaining and lingering ontology of biological essentialism borne out of capitalist and colonialist violence, one seeks to then allow for a genuine process of restorative communal knowledge making which expands phenomenology beyond its primacy as a male way of knowing the world. 

The maleness of phenomenology, the apparent antifeminism of an author such as Merleau-Ponty, is specifically due to a certain lack in their own work, one that Sartre admits about his classic lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”: the frame of reference specifically involves certain points of privileging, certain relationships within one’s material situation that then go on to become realized in one’s phenomenological interfacing with the world at a level below any understood threshold, as a part of the phenomena of life itself. Feminist application of Merleau-Ponty has borne this out: when girls, due to an ontology of biological essentialism, are taught from a young age to behave in a way they are by necessity prevented from understanding, acting in a fashion restricted by pedophilia as a cultural norm, sexualization of unknowing subjects driving restrictions on what girls may wear, how they may participate in valuable spaces of community from sports fields to preschool classrooms, seen as subjects of interest for their male peers in a way their gaze cannot return, girls are refused childhood, are eternally moving toward a teleology of womanhood which is beyond them. That trans women are not understood in the exact same fashion, that their experience is differentiated, does not prevent it from becoming realized in the exact same fashion. Rather, it is expressed in different traumatic realizations, the waves of Oedipal becoming-woman washing across the body in the same way they wash across other women, the acts of restriction and ontological determination forced on the body from birth becoming clear. The notion of “male socialization” as an unbreakable and fundamental aspect of trans womanhood when, in fact, this represents a source of trauma, a specific and important point at which trans women first realize their location as a specific sort of woman, even before being able to name themselves as women, begin becoming-woman, is far more similar to the childhood that reactionary feminists describe girls as having than to the male socialization they imagine.

Thus, in understanding these structures of desire, terms such as “lesbian” and “political lesbianism” one must eventually reach a point at which certain basic assertions are questioned simply because as categorical markers, rather than individual identities, they lead to certain violent acts of demarcation and separation that bear no resemblance to the material or hyperreal processes of encountering gender, becoming-woman, becoming-gendered, becoming-sexed, becoming-trans, becoming-trans-woman that shapes trans womanhood. This is not at all meant to deny the critique that desirability as a singular paradigm eliminates the potential of ugliness, undesirability, community founded in fostering a kind of gleeful embodiment of such qualities and that a desire to be desirable is largely about colonial and capitalist acts of making the body worthless that are repeated violently upon mirrored, desired bodies. It is not a claim that any specific organ, specific woman, specific description of desire is to be ignored, rejected, is to be examined specifically due to trans women. Trans women, rather, are a single group within the larger structure of encounter that forms desire, and the presence of colonial ontologies in founding and maintaining exactly what desire must mean, must present itself as, is part of what exactly makes desire such a precarious point of identification. That is why, then, lesbianism must be extended in a fashion that resembles political lesbianism in some fashion: it is a specific choice regarding how one understands men, chooses to express oneself in relation to the notion of manhood and the phallogocentric necessity of such, to identify as a lesbian. That trans women are prevented from becoming even subjects of encounter unless made undesirable, unless restructured through the same sorts of flows of violent desire derided by so many radical feminists, that trans women are treated in such a specifically ironic fashion, is one of the fundamental inadequacies of certain sorts of radical feminist thought and the point at which radical feminism must thus change dramatically.  

[annavolovodov]

So I read Keep the Home Fires Burning Part Two and I have a few thoughts...

...and when I say a few I mean 2825 words worth. You can probably guess whose storyline most of them are on.

The thing is, the vast majority of this instalment was incredible with two character’s storylines in particular standing out as real highlights for me. Yet the fact that the quality of the rest of the book is so high makes those chapters so glaringly disappointing.

Spoilers under the cut!

Starting with the positives and one of my two favourite characters in the books so far - Pat. Her scenes have been utterly engrossing and I am so, so proud of the way she’s developed since 1x01. She may still be stuck with Bob but she sure as hell won’t let herself be trapped by him. She knows her worth and she’s biding her time.

As I predicted, Pat’s using the Mass Observation columns as an outlet to keep her sane. Since we know she has a literary background and has worked in publishing before, I am PRAYING that the observations she’s been detailing of her life will take off and the series will end with her as a hugely successful writer. Think about it: would it not be the ultimate vengeance against Bob, for her to achieve what he lacked the skill to? Of course I would love Bob to die but that  seems a tad contrived for Home Fires and forcing him to watch the woman he’s abused for years moving onto bigger and better things would be both a satisfying victory for Pat and would fit with the tone of the show.

Side note: I find Pat’s insistence to stick solely to the truth when writing to be an interesting contrast to her husband’s technique. Bob has a tendency to overdramatise aspects of his life and portray himself to be heroic and exciting when in reality, he’s the exact opposite. There’s probably a good meta in there for someone smarter than I am.

I can’t forego a mention of Pat’s quite frankly iconic dragging of Bob for almost a whole chapter. The revelation that she almost straight up murdered him a couple of years ago was unexpected but totally relatable. And some of the quotes from her writing?

“In my experience, men often like to sit around talking about doing great things, but it’s the women who get on and do them.”

“It makes me ashamed that we can be at war with fascist Germany yet exhibit the same base impulse to discriminate against people who simply don’t look like us.”

Pat is a great character.

AND THAT CLIFFHANGER. MAREK’S BEEN WRITING TO HER. HE’S ALIVE. THEY WILL BE TOGETHER AGAIN. FUCK YOU BOB.

As for my other favourite? Erica has been an unexpected highlight in the novels. Of those involved in the crash, I was pretty certain she’d make it. She never quite acquired her own storyline in the show, instead largely popping in and out of others plots as needed. I already had Will marked for death since he'd be killed off sooner or later with his illness so it was a nice surprise when he made it out (after saving Vivian!!! I still cry).

Or at least I thought it was a nice surprise right up till we found out his cancer had worsened and he had mere weeks left to live. When Dr Mitchell explained to Erica and Laura that he was nearing the end? When they went home and Erica decided she had to shoulder the burden and remain strong for the girls? Erica finally breaking down whilst the women of the WI held her? I full on sobbed at every single one of those scenes.

I think a lesser series would’ve killed Will instantly when the spitfire hit the house for the sake of drama and words can’t express how grateful I am that Home Fires didn’t, instead choosing to leave us with a poignant and painfully relatable exploration of terminal illness and grief.

I did appreciate the touches of humour in the Campbell’s storyline. Will literally pulled a “Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you saw the last of me” on Erica like 70 years before the meme was invented. Incredible.

Dr Rosen is... intriguing, I guess. I don't dislike her. I think she has potential, even though I’m sceptical at the addition of yet another character when we have mains from S1 who have yet to make a significant impact in the book.

OH AND THE BATTLE OF WILLS BETWEEN HER AND MIRIAM??? The sort of content I paid 99p for. Poor Erica, getting caught in the middle of that. There were many great lines in this book, but I think this might just be my favourite:

“Erica felt a sudden rush of adrenaline, knowing Dr Rosen might get away with a comment like this with some patients, but not with Miriam Brindsley - a woman the rest of the village knew could single-handedly hold off a horde of invading Nazis with a gutting knife for a solid half-hour.”

If that doesn’t sum up Miriam as a character, I don’t know what does.

Speaking of the Brindsleys, do you know how satisfying it is to see them alive and flourishing after spending 15 months mentally preparing yourself to lose at least one of them?

I do.

I mean, they still have a huge target on their backs (Mim’s words in part one about how they’re blessed and are defo making it through the war? Yikes. An omen if ever I saw one) but considering their lack of page time I’m gonna gamble that we can quit worrying about that until Book 2 at the very least.

Moving on, I really did not go into this book expecting to care so deeply about Frances and Noah’s growing relationship yet here we are. Frances excessively calling to check on him every day was adorable. And this entire exchange with the head teacher was legendary:

"Frances didn't want to have an argument. She never wanted to have arguments with all sorts of people she eventually had arguments with; it was simply in her nature to be more challenging of other people's positions than they were used to. It put them on the defensive, and an argument would inevitably ensue. ‘I don’t wish to be confrontational –‘ There was a sudden snort at the other end of the line. Like the sound of someone choking on their tea, perhaps.”

I laughed.

However, despite the many, many positive aspects of this most recent instalment, there is one storyline in particular that singles itself out as Home Fires’ most glaring weak spot.

Of course, I’m referring to Teresa’s story and the awful place she’s currently occupying in the narrative.

Back when the whole Nick debacle began mid-S2, I figured I might as well give it a chance and see where it went. Simon Block was adamant on Twitter that Teresa’s endgame was not a man and what would be unfurling over the coming episodes was a historically accurate depiction of the trials lesbians faced during such time periods. It wasn’t ideal, nor was it what I expected for Teresa based around the promotional material released for S2, but the show hadn’t let me down yet.

And so I have waited, I have given it a chance, and based on the back half of S2 and the two instalments of KTHFB available so far, I am SO disappointed in what Simon Block has done with Teresa. Sure, things may improve in future novels, but right now I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I hate this goddamn marriage.

Simply put, it is totally unnecessary. Every single aspect of it. Teresa’s chapters in Part Two were awful. I’m pretty sure we’ve established at this point that she is not into men. We do not need to read about her trying and failing to repress her attraction to women whilst having sex with Nick. Even if we absolutely unavoidably had to hear about Nick and Teresa’s sex life, we do not need aforementioned sex scene spread across the whole chapter.

I know this might be hard for Straight Guy Simon Block to understand, but I’m pretty sure exactly zero lesbians are going to want to read about a lesbian character who is struggling with compulsory heterosexuality having sex with a man. I’m bisexual and I found it sickening so God knows how that chapter is going to make lesbians feel. I strongly suspect that some are going to find it triggering, and if the storyline is triggering to the group it is supposed to represent you really have to ask yourself why you are even bothering to write the representation in the first place.

Teresa’s arc in the books so far has consisted of getting married, blaming herself for the crash because she feels like she isn’t taking the marriage seriously (seriously what the fuck was this???), Teresa having conflicting feelings about Annie, Teresa stuck at home worrying about her marriage, Teresa feeling awful whilst having sex with Nick, Teresa worrying about having children, Teresa having more conflicting feelings about Annie and Nick... Do we see a pattern here? Do we get any meaningful scenes of Teresa at school? Do we get any meaningful scenes of Teresa with her canonical close friends Alison and Steph, who she spent S1 and S2 building strong relationships with? Yeah, she occasionally gets a throwaway line in a group scene at a WI meeting, but what does Teresa really get to do outside of being emotionally tortured about her marriage? The change in format to the books has led to characters being isolated in their individual stories whereas the series could allow them to interact more freely, but it genuinely feels like Teresa is stuck in some sort of heterosexual hell and is allowed no reprieve.

And all of this feels completely divorced from S1 and the first half of S2??? S1!Teresa didn’t appear to have any sort of desire to marry a man in order to cover up her sexuality. From the limited screen time we had with them, the main reason the relationship between Teresa and Connie failed seemed to be due to interference from outsiders (aka the headteacher that blackmailed Teresa) and the simple fact that Connie and Teresa wanted different things. Nothing in the series suggested that Teresa was unsure or struggling with her sexuality. Nothing. When the synopsis for 2x04 came out and mentioned Teresa would be asked on a date, everyone immediately assumed it was Annie involved. The prospect of it being a man never crossed our minds because it just seemed so ridiculous.

Another aspect I’m struggling to comprehend is why Alison pushed Teresa towards Nick. There’s no logical explanation for this. Alison knew about Teresa’s sexuality. Alison was fine with it and explicitly wanted her to stay because - and I quote - she “enjoyed having her around”. So how on Earth did we get to this point, with Alison encouraging Teresa to marry a man she barely knows and can never love? The fuck did that come from? The reasoning was murky enough in the show but it’s even worse in the books. Chapter 17 is essentially Alison sitting alone in her house feeling depressed, missing Teresa, lowkey regretting telling her to go but consoling herself because “at least Teresa is in a happy marriage now” or whatever...

In what universe does any of this make sense?

Yet another person being screwed over by this whole shitshow is Annie. Marek was also introduced in S2 as a love interest for Pat yet he’s somehow obtained significantly more screen time and development than Annie. Despite appearing in four episodes and two instalments of the book I feel like we (and Teresa) barely know her, which is absolute bullshit if they’re seriously intending for her to be Teresa’s endgame. They’ve had three conversations! Any romantic relationship between two women should get equal, if not more focus than the hetero ones especially if they’re the only f/f romance on the show. One of the central themes of Home Fires is relationships between women so I cannot understand why the ball has been so spectacularly dropped here. It’s not fair on Teresa to get all this suffering and a half-baked romantic subplot, it’s not fair on Annie to be essentially non-existent as a character beyond her possible relationship with Teresa and it’s certainly not fair on any wlw reading/watching, desperate to see themselves represented and being given scraps.

Even if Teresa's marriage is over soon (which I'm not holding my breath about), I can't see how she'll get a happy ending with Annie in the village. I highly doubt Nick would be okay with her continuing to live with him whilst she was in a relationship with Annie. Getting a divorce and moving in together would arouse a ton of suspicion and defeat the purpose of Teresa’s marriage in the first place. The only way for them to be able to live as a couple would involve moving away and starting afresh... Exactly what Connie proposed in S1, only for Teresa to turn down because she’d feel much more comfortable living a quiet life in the village than going off to a strange place. Having her suddenly change her mind now after clearly explaining her decision to Connie would result in everything post-1x04 feeling utterly redundant.

I just... this whole plot was totally avoidable. It didn’t need to happen. In a more logical universe:

After the First Aid course, Steph notes Teresa’s discomfort at the casual homophobia, and when coupled with her Meaningful Look at Annie as she cycled away, Steph promptly puts two and two together (remember Steph noticing how quickly Teresa wanted to get away after that comment? Remember the close friendship Steph and Teresa have? Simon Block sure doesn’t).

Once she hears about the impending wedding, Steph gently asks Teresa if she’s sure she wants to do it. Teresa half-heartedly assures her that she loves Nick, so Steph - because she’s a good friend and this show is supposed to be about women helping each other - decides to go and speak to Annie.

Annie and Steph end up staging an intervention and in an important and touching scene, tell her she deserves better than having to hide herself in a marriage to a man.

Teresa, feeling supported and loved by her friends, calls off the wedding.

Nick fucks off and becomes irrelevant.

Steph and Annie’s intervention forces Alison to consider why she pushed Teresa away (spoiler alert: it only really makes sense if it was because she was trying to push away feelings of her own).

Teresa, Annie, Alison, Steph and later Joyce start a wlw group during which they talk about how gay they are and how straight people suck. Nothing bad happens to any of them ever.

See how easy that was? The evils of heteronormativity are depicted in a way that doesn’t cause a lesbian to suffer for months trapped in a horrible loveless marriage.

I really can’t express how disappointed I am in this storyline. Home Fires has handled numerous other sensitive topics well but this marriage plot is an absolute mess right now. I do apologise for going on such a rant about it and I hope my comments make sense. As a bisexual, I’m not as qualified to speak on this particular matter as others in the fandom may be and I hope I’ve not stepped out of turn, but I felt that something needed to be said about what’s happening with Teresa right now and I wasn’t sure if anyone else was going to say it.

Miscellaneous things I’m not going to elaborate on because this is far too long already:

I badly miss Sarah, the Farrows, the Brindsleys, Claire and Spencer, and everyone else who is currently out of rotation. Hope you’re all doing well, folks.

Also missing some of the best dynamics of S1/2. As mentioned earlier, everyone is kinda stuck in their own bubble interacting with the same people over and over again. I particularly want more Frances/Joyce, Teresa/Alison and Teresa/Steph interactions.

Of all the random secondary characters in the show, of course it’s Mrs Talbot who returns for the books. I groaned when I saw her name.

Maybe in some ways I’m glad the show got cancelled because at least I don’t have to witness the Teresa/Nick sex scenes with my own eyes. It was bad enough having to read it thank you very much.

If you’ve made it this far you deserve a medal for your stamina and, as ever, my inbox is always over if anyone else wants to discuss/theorise/rant with me.

See you all again on September 21st for what I’m sure will be another 2000+ word rant!

#home fires #home fires itv #itv home fires #home fires spoilers #spoilers #keep the home fires burning #keep the home fires burning spoilers #seriously this contains all the spoilers #also I hope it makes sense #its 2:25am ive spent five days on it and I can't look at it any longer #@ simon block: why. why are you doing this. #why are you ruining an otherwise good book with this shitty plot #anyway goodnight/morning everyone I hope at least one person reads this + I hope no one on mobile accidentally gets spoiled

[andimackfaneditsss]

ABOUT THAT KISS BETWEEN HARRY AND GIL IN DESCENDANTS 2, THE SCENE THAT WAS CUT

****NOT ANDI MACK RELATED BUT I’VE GOTTA GET THIS OFF MY CHEST**** I’ve seen drama queens/kings, people. On both sides. There are those who are so far in their homophobia that they say things like “NoT hOmOpHoBiC BuUuUuUuT ThAt Is S o GrOsS, I hAtE LgBt!!!” And then there are those who are claiming they’d suddenly watch a movie they haven’t given a single thought to all this time if THAT kiss was kept in “I hOnEsTlY wAsN"t EvEn GoInG tO wAtCh It In ThE FiRsT pLaCe BuT lIkE i ToTaLlY wOuLd HaVe HaD iT bEeN kEpT iN”. Why say you hate a group of people if you claimed 0.2 seconds ago that you’re not a hater? Why admit you weren’t going to even watch a movie, have no interest in it whatsoever, but if two guys kissed you’d suddenly be a fan because of that - not even focusing on the characters or story just the “progressive”? As someone who’s part of the LGBT+ community, I can honestly say, personally, I don’t care. The movie was good without the scene, it most likely would have been good with it too. I don’t think that scene affects anything. Now if it were a kiss between Mal and Evie - heyyy😉😘! But let’s acknowledge that if it were a romantic kiss, it wouldn’t have made sense anyway. Not to their characters. Or to the story, for that matter. Heck, I was shipping Uma and Harry and all I got was this kiss between Mal and Ben so you can assume I’m still lowkey salty about this. Now if it were a silly kiss, one exchanged out of random air when Harry is being Harry (a.k.a. a pirate who’ll kiss anything with lips), obviously it’d make sense. He’s silly anyway in the movie so that would be appropriate to his character. I can even picture Gil shoving him away, wiping his mouth in disgust. It’d be pretty funny in all honesty. But a romantic kiss between the two? Nah, that wouldn’t make sense. Harry seemed to be into Uma anyway (even though there was no kiss😒). Now because I mentioned this earlier and I’ve made it clear I’m big on things being coherent, I will address this: no it would not make sense if Mal and Evie kissed. Would it be great? Heck yes! I would explode from excitement!! But it just wouldn’t make sense….to the kids. In my opinion it’s easy (though that’s debatable) to explain to kids that sometimes boys like boys and girls like girls, but anything else is a bit harder to explain - fathom as a child. Though times are changing sooo idek. This is just my opinion, going off what I’ve witnessed of the kids in my own life. As adults, Evie liking Doug but then suddenly admitting a crush on Mal would make sense and we’d label her Bisexual or Pan, possibly. But to a kid, that’s just really hard to fathom and accept. Now, kids are not innately homophobic or even such a thing for not being able to accept that a guy could like a guy, they’re kids and even kissing can be disgusting until they’ve gotten a little older. But still, I’d be against it (for the kids!) but then I’d be for it (because logically it can happen!) so that’s where I stand with that. It’s all kinda ambivalent. Idk… And no, I don’t think Disney is homophobic simply for taking out this scene, I’m sure there are many more (or at least a few besides this) that were cut too, and clearly recent moves they’ve taken with certain shows and movies and characters on those shows/movies have proven they’ve been wanting to be more diverse. Keep in mind, however, they are a big company and the way to get more viewers and more money because of ratings is to somewhat cater to the larger part of their audience - who are heterosexual. Not all kids may be uncomfortable with two guys kissing but certainly a majority of parents would. But if Disney really did remove the scene due to it not making sense, story wise, then that’s fine and completely reasonable too. Whatever the reason, it’s out, let’s get over it. (But let’s just please make Cyrus Goodman canon gay, k Disney?) One more thing I’d like to address! Some people have said it’s good it was taken out because kids don’t yet know about sexuality……but don’t they though? Heterosexuality is presented in nearly everything Disney, yes, even in Descendants 2 with literally everyone who’s crushing on someone or in a relationship. As I’ve said before, it’s easy (and yes debatable) to explain to kids that sometimes boys can like boys and girls can like girls. Keyword: like. As in “crush on”. That doesn’t have to be sexual. You could crush on someone at 5 y/o! It isn’t sexual to kids, WE as adults sexualize everything and THAT has got to stop. If homosexuality shouldn’t be displayed in any Disney film or show simply because it involves the word “sex” in its orientation then, hey, let’s ban hetero"sex"uality as well, why don’t we! Nothing really to do with the movie as much as it is with common sense……..it just really ticked me off.

#descendants 2 #gil and harry's cut kissing scene #garry #mal x evie #malvie #sorry for the tldr #lgbt+

[dweemeister]

My Life as a Zucchini (2016, Switzerland)

For the last few years, The Hollywood Reporter has published several “Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots”. These anonymous commentaries have exemplified the thought process behind select members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS) various branches, of which there are more than 6,000 voting members. Commentary on animated features have been most revealing. From this year’s brutally honest ballots, here are the words of a member of the executive branch:

I saw Kubo [and the Two Strings] and don't really remember it. I loved the music in Moana. I think The Red Turtle is very strong. I loved everything about My Life As a Zucchini — I was very taken with the idea of making a movie about a zucchini. But I voted for Zootopia because it has something important to say about the world. Basically, we all have to be nicer to each other.

Also known as My Life as a Courgette or by its original French-language title, Ma vie de Courgette, here is some brutal honesty: Claude Barras’ My Life as a Zucchini has nothing to do about a zucchini. A zucchini never appears in the film. "Zucchini”/”Courgette” is in the title because the main character – Icare – prefers to be called Courgette because it is important to him (a source of constancy, as his late, abusive mother called him that). For the remainder of this write-up, I will refer to Icare as Courgette. The film is based on Gilles Paris’ novel Autobiographie d'une Courgette – where Courgette is sent to an out-of-the-way orphanage where he learns, loves, and grows. My Life as a Zucchini is one of the tenderest animated films of this new century, showing the beauty of a young boy’s renewal as he sets out to live his life the way he has wanted to.

In the opening scenes, we see Courgette by himself in his room when his drunken mother rampages up the stairs, threatening to beat him. We sense this is a routine that has played out before. Courgette quickly slams the trapdoor leading up into his room on his mother’s head, accidentally killing her. After this macabre introduction, Courgette is taken to an orphanage by police officer Raymond, and meets the other children there. Initially hesitant to talk to the others and bullied by Simon for his peculiar nickname, Courgette eventually settles into his new home when he and Simon exchange stories about why they have come to the orphanage. Simon’s parents are drug addicts, Courgette learns, and the others’ parents have lost custody of their children for reasons of insanity, deportation back to Africa, homicide, and sexual assault/pedophilia. This exchange of experiences, this realization that, “We have no one to love us,” binds the children together as they look out for one another. They will look out for the new girl, Camille, as well. And it is with Camille that Courgette will experience love for the first time and learns how to act upon such feelings.

So often labeled a “genre” for children, animation (which is not a genre; genres exist within the realm of animated film and not vice versa) is attached a stigma that is condescending, dismissive. Sometimes such classifications are warranted, especially given the increasing volume of American feature animation in a CGI-dominated era. It is becoming more difficult to find animated films that can emotionally enrich adults and children as a result, as this American animation arms race can be depicted as a race for the bottom as well as a race for the bottom line. In Europe, films like Song of the Sea (2014), Ernest & Celestine (2012, France/Belgium), and Long Way North (2015, France/Denmark) are filling in spaces that studios like Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli cannot possibly cover alone. The story of contemporary animated film cannot be written from the United States and Japan alone, as Europe and Latin America are beginning to make forays into the industry.

Perhaps moreso than any of those aforementioned films, My Life as a Zucchini – in its alternating melancholy and precious joys – is acutely aware of how mature its child characters are and how much growing up they have yet to do. Barras’ film and Céline Sciamma’s (director/writer of 2014′s Girlhood) screenplay anticipates what these children might be, and exemplifies that their ability to love themselves and others remains, that their traumatic pasts need not cast long, inescapable shadows over the course of their lives that My Life as a Zucchini invokes. The path back from the depths of despair and desolation requires time, reflections, and the company of friends. If this sounds heavy, it is. But Sciamma has written her screenplay in a way that is accessible for older pre-teens as well as adults open to this kind of experience, as adults have enough experience to attest to the transformative nature of empathy and friendship when others are being malicious and manipulative. And perhaps most importantly, Barras and Sciamma allow My Life as a Zucchini to exhale. They understand silence can carry significant meaning. Silence is used here as an economic way to build character as well as allow the audience to collect their thoughts after a peculiar punchline, hijinks, or dramatic outburst.

Though My Life as a Zucchini is very much an animated drama, it is also charming and comical in some parts. A running gag about utterances and behaviors during heterosexual sex is thankfully bereft of sheer pervertedness – the children are of an age where they should be learning about this subject. A vacation including the staff and children of the orphanage to a wintry mountainside resort is irrepressible fun for everyone involved. For such an intimate film, it is remarkable how precise the writing is to allow for such contrasting tones within an all-too-brief sixty-six-minute runtime.

None of this should distract from the fact that Barras’ motion picture is beautifully animated in its stop-motion simplicity. It might not be as technically groundbreaking as the 3D printing employed in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and the style might require significant adjustment for those unaccustomed to the blobby character design, but the emotional range of their eyes and eyebrows are equal to the difficult task of empowering the story at hand – touching upon places within the viewer too rarely exercised when enjoying an animated film.

My Life as a Zucchini’s storytelling mastery also seems to have struck a chord with critics and audiences in Europe. The film was nominated for the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and it has won every single major animation award in the Francophone world (in addition to a Best Adapted Screenplay win at France’s César Awards – to have an animated film win a screenplay award is shocking in any context). It may not reach a large audience elsewhere in the world, but My Life as a Zucchini – which has just been released in North America in limited release – is nevertheless a film that cherishes our loved ones, even if those loved ones might not be a traditional family. Most importantly, it reminds us that Courgette and his friends are survivors and victors in life itself.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating.

NOTE: This write-up is based on the French audio with English subtitles.

#My Life as a Zucchini #My Life as a Courgette #Ma vie de Courgette #Claude Barras #Celine Sciamma #Germano Zullo #Morgan Navarro #Sophie Hunger #My Movie Odyssey

[festivalists]

Reluctant feminism

Film still from Renata Gąsiorowska's Pussy; courtesy of goEast

The Symposium section of goEast is often seen as an opportunity to include academics and researchers in the festival dynamics, yet their work in Wiesbaden seems to occupy a layer of knowledge that goes beyond the interest of the typical event coverage. Without the historical comprehension of the processes that led to the rise of so many artistic and political waves in Central and Eastern Europe, though, one cannot really comprehend what moves these waves, and where to. This is why we are so thrilled that Rohan Berry Crickmar had the time and the courage to delve into the Reluctant Feminism sidebar, and came back with an amazing exchange on Hungarian cinema and feminism with Beata Hock, one of this year's Symposium speakers.

What makes goEast such an intriguing fixture on the film calendar for any enthusiasts and researchers in the region is the fact that it combines a film festival and industry set-up with an academic conference. This year’s Symposium was a real labour-of-love for the triumvirate of German-based academics Barbara Wurm (Humboldt-Universität), Borjana Gaković, and Christine Gölz (GWZO). The working title for the Symposium was For a New Axis – Affirmative Action Now! and once again highlighted one of this year’s festival themes, namely creating a critical opposition to the divisive and regressive ascendancy of chauvinistic and patriarchal politics globally. However, this title was then superseded by Reluctant Feminism: Women Filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe.

A primary critical touchstone for the Symposium’s re-visioning and revaluation of potential “feminist film and film practices” within Central and Eastern Europe could be found within Dina Iordanova’s 2003 study Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. Many of the speakers over the course of the Symposium had to deal with the critical specter of Iordanova’s term reluctant feminism: “leading female directors from the region have distanced themselves from 'feminism', a situation that leaves us facing the curious phenomenon of clearly committed feminist film-makers who are nonetheless reluctant to be seen as such.” The term is freighted with the complicating baggage of state socialism’s need to criticize concrete social issues over more abstract or elusive matters. Filmmakers such as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, and Agnieszka Holland were all caught between a clear adherence to some form of feminist critique within much of their work, but also a dismissive attitude towards feminism, at least within its Western constructions.

Wurm, Gaković, and Gölz's clear desire with this Symposium was to probe precisely what was at issue for many of these female filmmakers within Central and Eastern Europe, as well as looking at a forgotten, or overlooked, legacy of female filmmaking, particularly amongst documentaries, within the region. There was also a committed aim to try and examine how feminist thinking has developed within Central and Eastern Europe, and how this has impacted upon female filmmakers within the region, especially with regard to how feminism may have developed and formed a more coherent socio-political counterweight to the regressive political tendencies of Europe’s largely right-wing governments.

In her introduction to the section in the goEast catalogue, Wurm talks about “the dual shadow existence” that is the lot of female directors within Eastern European cinema. In sketching out the growth of the idea for the Symposium, Wurm recounts the victories for Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland at Berlin this year, as well as giving anecdotal evidence from a visit to Moscow of just how much skepticism Central and Eastern European filmmakers and practitioners have for any idea of a politically-inclined feminist film practice. The Symposium’s line-up of speakers and screenings was very much aimed at provocatively engaging with some of these issues.

That said, I could not help but feel that the presence of filmmakers like Holland and Mészáros somehow inserted a little more caution into critical stances that otherwise might have been far more questioning of how ideas of feminism have been constructed and why so many female filmmakers within the region seem to deeply mistrust what they view as Western feminist constructs that are not coherent with Eastern experiences and realities. Wurm and Gölz put together an effective survey of women filmmakers within Soviet and post-Soviet cinema that laid out much of the groundwork for the other speakers to move out into their narrower areas of focus.

Among the strongest of the Symposium lectures that I attended was the engaging look at feminist film practice in Hungary by Beata Hock (GWZO) entitled I’m the Woman of My Life – Feminist Perspectives on Eastern European Cinema. From the outset Hock established that her paper was not merely about female filmmakers within Eastern Europe, but also about practices within the female creative arts in the region and how they have a pan-European, or global reach. Referring to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, as well as to Kumari Jayawardena, Hock described gender as an analytical category that changes over time and space, and is by no means a stable critical construct. By deploying this formulation, it then enabled her to critique the inherent normative effects of applying historical formulations of gender, entirely inattentive of contemporary developments, nuances, and critical shifts.

Her referencing of Jayawardena extended this idea of gender as an evolving analytical category by applying a radical commitment to a feminist awareness. For Hock, it is problematic to consider feminist movements as having an original location, particularly if that location is as nebulous as a large nation state. By highlighting that US' Second-wave feminism was essentially a liberal, middle-class, white, heterosexual movement, and by establishing how this has been then critiqued by activists, scholars, and theorists lying outside of this narrow strand of US experience, it could be suggested that a similar approach should be taken to what constitutes an engagement with feminism in the Eastern Bloc, where socialist-sponsored emancipatory movements undoubtedly exert a regional effect.

Where Hock’s talk became particularly intriguing was when she turned her attention to looking at the Hungarian situation. The post-WWII film landscape she briefly painted was one in which the bulk of female involvement with film in Hungary was to be found in “traditionally female” areas such as the Costume and the Editing Department. Hock describes Márta Mészáros as the first significant female feature-film director in Hungary, making her debut in 1968 with THE GIRL / ELTÁVOZOTT NAP. Prior to that feature, Mészáros had worked for over fourteen years on short films and documentaries, which may suggest a degree of difficulty for women transferring to feature filmmaking in Hungary, considering the much shorter apprenticeships that male directors of the period serve.

Rather boldly, Hock suggested that Mészáros was an instinctual feminist filmmaker, with a frequent commitment (especially at the start of her career) to making films about woman, but with a question mark over her output in later years. For Hock, Mészáros was a female filmmaker who could, in some cases, stray into misogyny that makes it hard to classify some of her films as feminist. Also, as Iordanova diagnosed earlier, Mészáros frequently expressed her skepticism towards being singled out as feminist filmmaker and also saw no contradiction in her ambivalence about feminism, the ostensible focus on women in her praxis, and her undeniably activist stance. The chutzpah of Hock’s argument has to be placed into the context of goEast’s related Homage program that was showcasing a cross-section of Márta Mészáros’ work, and had actually invited the legendary director to speak at this year’s event.

I caught up with Beata Hock for a short conversation about some of the issues within her talk, her wider research, and Mészáros:


Rohan Berry Crickmar: I found your talk yesterday to be a fascinating and provocative overview of the development of female-focused film in Hungary, and I was wondering if you would be able to expand upon this a little.

Beata Hock: So, I had these analytical criteria, tools identified from feminist film theory. Then I took Hungarian decades, as in overviews of Hungarian film history, it seemed more or less that decades worked fine as a means of periodization. Not only can you characterize decades as mechanical apparatus, but in the case of Hungarian cinema decades really do seem to be distinct passages of time.

RBC: I guess there is something comparable in Polish cinema, where the major events of Polish post-war film history tend to come together in decade-long passages of time through to about the 1990s, when things become a little more complicated.

BH: Yes, it is the same in the 1990s in Hungary. The 1950s are certainly when “the women” appear in Hungarian cinema, working women. [laughing] Now, yes, they are ridiculous from our present perspective, but again, in comparison with pre-war mainstream cinema, where women only really had these decorative side roles, this is a big step forward [the working-woman film]. However, all of these films were still made by men. At the time there were simply no female directors in Hungarian cinema. By the time we enter the 1960s, then there are male directors who are placing women characters at the centre of their historical-set narratives, because – and I have to say this is not my finding, as I was joined on the study by another Hungarian film scholar who proposed – through women characters you may be able to convey more critical positions. This is partly because women are still not taken as seriously as male characters at this point. They are seen as feeble figures, and I point to this because in the talk this morning on the GDR films, Kornelia Klauss was reporting the same thing. In quoting a male GDR director, she showed that he worked with female characters within the framework of contemporary parable narratives, in an attempt to critique the system. In this way women were still being depicted as “immature” political subjects and somehow still being interpreted rather offensively as naïve and feeble. These characters were then allowed to voice more daring critical positions.

RBC: It is almost like they are ciphers or caricatures, ways of getting at authority without suffering any significant censure.

BH: Yes, they are not taken seriously because they are women. Whereas, if a man criticizes something, then it means something, it has more weight. So this is one of the reasons that you get female-centred narratives emerging within the Hungarian case, especially during the 1960s. Then in the 1970s, Hungarian cinema begins to return to, and focus upon, more contemporary issues, especially social issues. There is the major theme of the crisis of the intellectuals, which is one of the areas where you still see male figures predominating. The 1970s was a period when filmmakers were a little freer to express criticism against the socio-political structures of their society, so women within these films are less important as a means of conveying critical positions. What does emerge during this period, however, is a different type of female look. In the 1960s, female characters in Hungarian cinema were still obligatorily pretty figures, but by the 1970s these female faces are converted into a more realistic and everyday appearance, deliberately undermining their previous glamour. However, it is interesting to note that in the 1970s this kind of conversion of female glamour into “realism” is seen as happening throughout global cinema through a feminist intervention into filmmaking. In one of the Hungarian films of this period (Péter Gothár’s A PRICELESS DAY / AJÁNDÉK EZ A NAP from 1979) there is a direct reference to one of Scorsese’s films of the early seventies...

RBC: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974)?

BH: Yes, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. This is shown within the Hungarian film as a film that the central couple go to see at the cinema, a rare direct reference to Hollywood. This is all the more striking, because the lead actress is shown as a rather dowdy and unglamorous everyday woman, even though in reality she was a quasi sex symbol of Hungarian cinema of the period. In that film she isn’t portrayed as being in any way glamorous, and by the end of the film she – her character – and her lover’s wife end up having a long and hearty night together, drinking, and trading confidences.

RBC: So what you are saying here is that there was a conscious effort to downplay the glamour of actresses who would have otherwise been seen as, for want of a better term, sex symbols? I suppose this would favorably compare with the journey of Hollywood actresses like Jane Fonda during a similar period.

BH: Yes and this is where it becomes interesting, as suddenly in the 1970s you can no longer talk about isolated filmmaking practice, because, especially through things like festivals, film begins to become far more transnational.

RBC: I understand this entirely, because this is what I argue you see happening with Polish filmmakers who are exposed to a much wider array of film influences through film school environments and the international festival circuit, and thus take things out into that sphere, whilst simultaneously incorporating elements of other cinemas back into their Polish work. You are also seeing things change at a practical technical level, with state socialist filmmaking practice being mixed with Hollywood studio practice and other complex production structures, which blurs any discernible boundaries between national film industries to a large degree.

BH: Certainly the way creative workers operate is through ideas an images, and these things aren't really restricted or confined by such borders. Returning to my timeline, I would say it is only really in the 1980s that we see female characters emerging fully-formed, within their own right, in Hungarian cinema. This is really the first point where these characters are of interest in themselves and not because they are a site of other narratives. Yet, even at this point, still a great number of these films are made by male directors, as I mentioned in my talk yesterday. That said, it is telling that there are such a number of films that emerge out of Hungary during this period dealing with social issues that may broadly be described as being of significance to women. So even though you have a film being made by a male director within Hungary, it is still a film that looks, say, at the problems of aging for a central female character. Now, these films may increasingly exist due to a greater presence of female figures in all fields of Hungarian society, or may be because of a greater influence of women upon Hungarian filmmaking of the time, or it may be because the state socialist system funds a film based upon the issue it is examining rather than the amount of profit it might make at the box office. So, ultimately, what I am trying to explain here is that there were other ways, rather than a grassroots feminist social movement and the theoretical insights emerging from it, to arrive at a very similar kind of critical film language. So I would argue that this kind of state socialist-supported film culture could quite easily arrive at the same sort of film production and consumption practice as feminist “counter-cinema” of the period advocated. It is also worth remembering that state socialist governments would have implemented female-targeted policies that could have helped promote such an atmosphere.

RBC: If I am right, in your previous research, you were also looking at the role played by performance artists within state socialist societies. Now the question that was gnawing away at me, as I was thinking about your talk yesterday, was do you see any overlaps between that female performance art world and the state socialist filmmaking world, in terms of women from the former making films within Hungary at an underground level, that then came to prominence? So what I mean here is female performance artists making films of their art that dealt with female issues and was for a predominately female audience, as you broke it down in your talk yesterday.

BH: Performance art is a bit difficult to discuss in a Hungarian context, as it was heavily male-dominated.

RBC: This is what I was suspecting...

BH: Women, if they appeared within the Budapest performance art scene, were less the central performer and more of a prop. An exception to this may have been Katalin Ladik, but she didn’t make films, she was more like a sound artist. Then Orshi Drozdik, perhaps the one unproblematically feminist artist in Hungary, she also made performance art, but it was rather captured through photography. But there was a textile artists workshop in rural Velem, where a group of Hungarian women artists came together and started to make performances, amongst themselves. However, almost all of these performances would only remain within the memories of those who experienced them. These kinds of workshops were really sites for spontaneous action, especially when it came to performance. The most you could hope for in terms of documentary evidence was that someone happened to photograph an event. I must confess that textile art is rather interesting, in other countries as well, but especially in Hungary, because it basically became a place of experimentation, as it somehow fell outside of the purview of state censorship. It was just textile art, you know. [laughing]

RBC: I hadn’t actually thought about it in that way!

BH: Again, this was a sphere that wasn’t taken seriously as a site of political critique. It is actually interesting how textile art develops during this period, as it becomes increasingly abstract, and a greater number of male artists begin to become involved in it, taking part in textile art "symposiums" (which you would call today residencies or workshops). These events would really push the limits of what constituted textile art. You might have a television exhibited, for example, with a series of colored lines on the screen, and this became textile art as in weaving. This was just the kind of geometric, abstract experimentation that was otherwise excluded from the official exhibition spaces. These textile art symposiums, or residences, became increasingly important, as a result. They are also important, as it was a medium that was still female-dominated, even if many male artists began to participate. My proposition in this regard would be that in Hungarian textile art, woman artists were among themselves, and the gender relations were toppled, so to speak, in comparison with the mainstream Budapest art scene. I think this is also where women really begin to play around with performance, but those performances are pretty much unrecorded. There is one other performer I should mention, but she isn’t a filmmaker either. No, wait! She turned into a filmmaker, but only really when she left Hungary. She left Hungary in 1980.

RBC: What is her name?

BH: Her name is Judit Kele. Kele left Hungary in 1980, and then a few years later she took to filmmaking, predominately television filmmaking, in France. This is perhaps why she is almost entirely forgotten in Hungarian art histories. The performance work of hers that I discovered is really exciting, but also, alas, not film or video based. She auctioned off herself as an artwork at the Paris Biennale, and that is how she got married and how she got to leave Hungary.

RBC: Now that is most definitely a performance piece. This has really interesting historical resonances I suppose, because certainly within the UK context – rewind 100 years and you have a common social situation of women, in effect, being sold off into marriage by their patriarchally-dominated families.

BH: This would have been the exact same situation in France as well.

RBC: Just to wrap up, can I ask you a specific question about an issue that you raised with Márta Mészáros in your talk yesterday. I felt you were about to make a fantastic criticism of her work, but you appeared to not have the time.

BH: Or maybe it just wasn’t the place. In my book [Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-socialist and Post-socialist Hungary, 2013] I go into this issue in more detail. In FETUS / A MAGZAT (1994) – a superficially similar film to the one showing here ADOPTION / OROKBEFOGADAS (1975) – a woman who cannot have children decides to look for a surrogate mother. Now, the way the woman who cannot have children is portrayed is as if she is almost demonized, and the way in which Mészáros chooses to photograph her suggests almost a moral dislike for her flesh. This was very hard for me to watch. I also think that in her later films, such as her diary films, I am not sure they offer too much in the way of a female perspective or sensitivity. In their portrayals of working women and “non-natural” mothers, these films seem to be recalling the sexist stereotypes of the heteronormative cinema that Mészáros was seemed to so directly challenge. These are films in which the possibilities for female solidarity are violently crushed. Other than given a pathologizing and demonizing portrayal, the childless woman is also a representative of ill-used “worldly” power in other films by Mészáros (political power, higher social standing, or wealth, inherited or acquired through marriage), while the natural mother is “always-already” and morally superior. The overall comportment of the non-natural mother or the woman seeking a surrogate mother is pitted against the self-contained femininity of the natural mother.

#goEast #Festival of Central and Eastern European Film #goEast2017 #Berlinale #Berlin IFF #Barbara Wurm #Borjana Gaković #Christine Gölz #reluctant feminism #Dina Iordanova #Márta Mészáros #Agnieszka Holland #Ildikó Enyedi #Hungarian cinema #gender #Beata Hock #Louis Althusser #Michel Foucault #Kumari Jayawardena #The Girl #Fetus #Adoption #Kornelia Klauss #Péter Gothár #A Priceless Day #performance art #textile art #Judit Kele #interview #Rohan Berry Crickmar

[lgbtspring2017-blog]

Final Paper

Vs.

Every day, at least every person views one form of advertisements through different mediums. For example, listening to the radio on the commute to work, watching the weather channel while cooking dinner, or simply taking a walk through the city. Advertisements are all around the world and appear in many different places. People mostly see advertisements for fashion, food, insurance, medicine, cars, and much more, but do those advertisements support the LGBTQ community? In today’s society, there are few advertisements that support the LGBTQ community, but most advertisements are more dominant by the superior party, which is straight couples.

Most LGBTQ people are label by society. Richard Dyer stated that, “…we get our information about them partly from what other people tell us – although we may not necessarily trust this – and, in fiction, from narrators and from the ‘thoughts’ of the characters, but most of our knowledge about them is based on the evidence in front of us…” (Dyer 297). When we look at fictional advertisements, we try to understand the person, almost trying to un-code how the fictional person acts in the real world. Society stereotypes people, genders, class, race, and the evidence that is right in front of them, instead of trying to get to know someone. Stereotyping someone is trying to see the differences between one’s own social life and pick out the different norms from one’s world. Advertisement’s today try to depict all different races and genders as one, this is seen especially in car commercials.  In 1999, Hyundai created a gay themed car commercial that did spark controversy. The commercial showed a woman driving while a younger handsome male sat in the passenger seat. At the red light, the man who was with the woman, pulls down his seat so you cannot see him anymore. Then there appears to be a man waiting at the stop light in another car next to her. They exchange smiles and the women shows him a male’s dry cleaners shirt. When the light turns green, the woman speeds up and a younger male in the man’s car appears in the passenger seat after raising his seat. It shows the two males exchanging similar smiles as the woman and male did earlier in the commercial with the words saying “the smarter choice” at the bottom (The Ad Show 2010). The commercial is trying to state that Hyundai supports gay couples and that gay couples are just like straight couples, but the message comes off differently than Hyundai wanted. It is important that “…given the important role that media play in our lives as we attempt to gain information’s, stay connected, or just be entertained, we must ask what role they play in our attempts to make sense of the competing cultural meanings about our own and others sexual identities” (Hilton-Morrow 2015). Since advertisements are all around us constantly, it is important to represent the LGBTQ community in a positive and truthful way. The Hyundai commercial depicted gay older men having a “boy toy” or only dating younger men. It also seems like the older gay man is trying to hide his sexuality to women. Also at the end is the commercial trying to say the gay man choose smarter because he picked a younger man or because he picked a man? The commercial is confusing and stereotypes gay male couples. Since advertisements are everywhere, people learn and come up with norms through different types of media.

Social media has become a new form of advertisement that “…has acquired massive influence, providing an attractive and universal platform to every domain of businesses. Social Media has become an instrument to accelerate the process of change where it promotes social awareness and advertising in the society. As advertising mirrors the society, it strongly captures the changing social mores and reflects them through various media” (Chauhan 2016). Social issues are reflected into advertisements that are done through social media and create a large mass of viewers. Since social media can mostly likely be viewed throughout the world, campaigns are a huge advertisement that supports the LGBT community. It is important for advertising campaigns to “…make people aware of their duties towards society and in return, create a favorable image as 'responsible' and 'genuine' brands for a lasting relationship with consumers. Single women, single parenting, LGBT issue are some of the issues raised recently through social media” (Chauhan 2016). Campaigns want to create a trust with the people they are representing so the brand has loyalty from those consumers. Advertising campaigns do a great job at presenting their cause in a positive way, for example Absolut Vodka filmed an LGBT campaign with a hashtag of Love is Love. The campaign wanted to promote that love is love, no matter someone’s sexuality or gender. The film showed two women who were in love and the one women had a surprise proposal for the other. The film showed how one another loved each other and how they are just normal women who like to go surfing, have dates, and be with family (Hendo 2015).  Advertising campaigns want to show the characters of the people involved and the true meaning of the cause and what the brand stands for and supports.

Campbells Soup released an ad with gay dads in 2015 that received a large amount of back lash, but Campbell’s response to people on Facebook was done in a tasteful and funny way. The company stood by their beliefs and even when people said they were no longer going to eat Campbell’s soup, the company did not mind one bit. For example, one person said that marriage is between one man and one woman and that Campbell should stay out of the cultural war and just give the people food. Campbell responded by saying “…it appears your views on the world are outdated by 200 years! We at Campbell’s Kitchen cordially invite you to join us in the 21st century where the rest of the world resides. The future is looking “’Mmm Mmm Good!”’ (Nicholas 2015). The comment back is insulting but in an almost mature way. It also is funny that the comment used Campbell’s punch line. Another example that someone posted was that a family of thirteen was no longer going purchase Campbell’s Soup because homosex is an abomination to God and by supporting same sex marriage, Campbell’s is also supporting them. The response by Campbell’s Kitchen on Facebook was “…We at Campbell’s Kitchen are saddened that you and your family of 13 people will no longer be enjoying our tasty Campbell’s Soup. We must ask you though, why are you bringing up “homosex?” From our best understanding, there appears to be no sexual content in any of our Campbell’s Kitchen ad campaigns” (Nicholas 2015). It is great to see large companies stand up for what they believe in and to realize the homophobia is just fear of someone not knowing anything different. The hilarious responses give an uplifting message to people that no not approve of same sex marriage to join the people of today with accepting all types of people and that big corporations do not care if they lose a little money, they will stick up for what they believe in.

During the San Francisco, Gay Pride Parade, Apple released a video of participants that spoke about their journey and share their stories through social media. The campaign was called #SeeTheRealMe and many people joined in to share about their path of finding one’s identity. A young woman shared her story about being a transgender in middle school, her name was Jazz. Jazz knew she was a girl trapped in a boy’s body ever since she was little. But made it aware to the world in middle school. She was “…diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age five. She recently was named one of Time's 2014 Most Influential Teens and will soon have her very own reality series on TLC, according to US Magazine” (Geller 2015). It seems that Jazz received much recognition because she received her own television series on a popular station called TLC. Another story was about Andreja Pejic, who become popular in 2011 for being a male model for the designer Marc Jacobs and Jean Paul Gaultier. In 2014 Andreja had a sex change surgery and has now walked in dozens of runway shoes, her first show as a woman was at the Giles Deacon’s fall 2015 show (Geller 2015). All these stories were supported by Apple and Steve jobs, which the business and the man behind the business are very well known. Apple and Steve jobs support same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ community, and Apple is still making millions of dollars. Since Apple openly supported the LGBTQ community, the sales have no dropped and it seems the Apple keeps reinventing their technology multiple times per year. Nike, a popular footwear and apparel brand, has also supported the LGBTQ community, yet Nike is still in business and making money. Google has also supported the LGBTQ community, which is the number one internet search engine in the world, people are always using google, even people who do not support the LGBTQ community. It seems that the big, popular companies are proud to share their LGBTQ advertisements and support the cause of diversity.

When AIDS became noticed, advertisements attacked gay couples. Advertisements thrived on the AIDS epidemic with head linings such as “You can die with a bang”. In 1987, Jeffrey Hart wrote an article titled, AIDS Advertising Deflects Spotlight from Gays, the title almost sounds like gays want to be known for AIDS. The article explains how AIDS is being advertised as a heterosexual couple disease, when AIDS is more common in gay couples because it can be transmitted through anal sex. It also says that AIDS is transmitted by the sharing of needles. The article also states that “…homosexuals feel stigmatized by AIDS, and with very good reason. They have every motive to spread the word that the girl next door may have it- when the truth is that she has a remote change of having it” (Hart 1987). Homosexuals were feeling disgraced and not worthy of a relationship among each because of the advertisements stigmatizing gays. AID advertisements stigmatized homosexual couples and people were almost scared of gays because the advertisements allowed people to think all homosexual couples were effected by AIDS. People were scared and dying because of the disease, but eventually advertisements started to promote in using condoms when sexual intercourse occurs. Advertisements should not point the finger at certain people but try to promote safe sex and how to avoid the disease. Today AID advertisements include diversity, in the image above, there are all types of people who activist in spreading awareness of HIV/AIDS; whites, blacks, men, woman, young children, elders, different cultures, celebrities, etc. Spreading awareness in a positive manner allows the matter to become comfortable and lets everyone know that it is ok to ask questions and talk about HIV/AIDS.

 References

Chauhan, G. S., & Shukla, T. (2016). Social media advertising and public awareness: Touching the LGBT chord. Journal of International Women's Studies, 18(1), 145.

Dyer, Richard. (1999). “Stereotyping,” in The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics, pp. 297-300

Geller, H. (2015, ). Making a difference: Representations of the LGBTQ community in fashion and advertising. University Wire

Hart, J. (1987). AIDS advertising deflects spotlight from gays. Human Events, 47(26), 12.

Hendo, R. (2015). Absolut vodka LGBT campaign film 2015 #LoveIsLove [Video file]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/127905766

Hilton-Morrow, Wendy and Battles, Kathleen. (2015). Sexual Identities and the Media: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Nicholas, J. M. (2015, October 15). When bigots freaked out about campbell’s ad with gay dads, this man dad a brilliant response. Retrieved April 27, 2017, from Huff Post website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/when-bigots-freaked-out-about-campbells-ad-with-gay-dads-this-man-had-a-brilliant-response_us_561fc302e4b028dd7ea6d7f3

The Ad Show. (2010, September 7). Toyboy / hyundai funny commercial [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbG9UEfOI0g

[queernuck]

Preference: A Postface

After seeing myself mentioned in regard to a genuinely reprehensible course of action, a way of looking at the self and at the relationship of trans women to other women that was being pushed by violent misogynists on reddit and being reappropriated in earnest by certain radical feminists, I feel it necessary to discuss in affirmation, not only for myself but for others, for other trans women, the way in which our experience stands as a sort of becoming-woman, is included in part of how trans women are not mirroring structures of womanhood but in fact, are part of the structuring of “womanhood” as a state within certain relations of producing-production.

One can ask how a fundamental reversal, binary series of recognitions of different sorts, that may present themselves in Derridean terms, recognition as woman versus as man, can fundamentally be the same kind of violent act. However, this requires an essentialism of the body, of the sexed body as productive force, as a singularity of marking, that accepts the structure of gendered exchange in-itself, the sort of turn that many radical feminists themselves make: recognition of a woman as such is different from what is constituted by the supposed recognition of maleness in a trans woman, is a sort of act that implies the masculine as a sort of marker of unilateral privilege rather than one found in assemblage with other structures. The recognition of subjectivity for gay men is a possible means of describing this: the feminine man, the campy image of a certain sort of gay man, a more effeminate and flamboyant idea of a gay man’s subjectivity, is rightfully understood as commanding a certain homophobic response specifically because this subjectivity is coupled with an assumed response, a structured understanding. However, the opposition, the top to the bottom, the “masc” subjectivity, is additionally alienated and moreover is understood in light of a sort of ideal being subverted, a kind of supposition of masculine gay men as entryism or part of a gay domino theory, an insidious trick intended to lure in straight men by implying that gay subjectivity is not defined by a unilateral expression of the gendered body. The commonality of this sort of identity (often described as “butch”) with that of butch women is important and notable, and moreover is marked by the assumption of an absent satisfaction, a kind of desire for the fulfilment of sexual meeting and shared subjectivity with a man that is imagined as “fixing” a butch woman. The violent, sexualized means through which butch women are imagined, the idea of the “tomboy” as a phase or as part of a show put on for masculine desire, as an expression of certain acceptable desires that border on the homoerotic, the expression of a shared libidinal pooling in male spaces and the matching of that to the figuration of a certain sort of woman, is all part of the sexualization of the butch woman, the gendering-act that occurs in order to bring her into accordance with heterosexuality. 

The recognition of a trans woman as a man is thus of a similar sort to the recognition of woman as woman, is coupled with the recognition of transness, is a measure of disparity such that one finds the trans woman as a subject of violence, her recognition as trans is not one of privileging except in the most vulgar of analyses, ones that would ultimately turn themselves toward the same violent concept of womanhood. The notion that a man would pretend to be a trans woman in order to rape a woman, to effectively create a situation in which the expectation of sex is placed upon a woman (a situation that indeed represents rape) is ignoring that men have no problem with openly and vocally justifying rape even when it is named as such. Rape is horrifying, except insofar as it is delineated as something other than rape, is considered as justified or excusable, is known under another name. This leads to the series of acts that soften, ignore, excuse rape, the notion that only certain actions, certain overt and delineated and intentional acts are ones of rape. It requires a sort of reversal of certain arguments around rape: the idea that statutory rape, as a specific violence that is found around intentionally cultivated disparities in rape, is insufficient to qualify as rape because the same disparity of age can be found in legal relationships, rather than questioning if the legal relationships at hand too represent rape and the same sort of violence, if a process of grooming is only notable if it is sexualized immediately rather than after a certain constructed passage into adulthood. So, a man pretending to be a trans woman in order to pressure a woman into sex would absolutely be a rapist, as would using the structure of trans womanhood as a means of making one a possible subject of lesbian desire. The aforementioned possibility of rape as realized specifically in disparity, in measures of violent tension, is necessary as a descriptive elaboration upon the rape being forwarded as an acceptable act, being justified, by men of a certain ideological position. However, noting that it is as men, as positioned as-such in a specific already disparate relationship that this position is itself realized is necessary to understand the vast difference between these men and trans women. Rather than acknowledging the complicated subjectivities of trans women, a totalization of trans subjectivity as that of a man accepting the violence he will commit in linking together certain flows of libidinal violence, reactionary notions around trans women cultivate the same sort of ideological positioning as a word like "trap" does, in at once acknowledging violence in an act and ignoring the prevalence with which it is directed against trans women. The act of doubt, the way in which a positioning of the phallus at a measure of remove from trans women that can only be realized in violent response. That there are multiple ways of discussing trans women as subjects, as poised to manipulate and deceive, is unsurprising and moreover is in part resultant from a sort of fascist convergence on trans women as ideological structures. Furthermore, that trans women are focused upon by a certain phallic ideology that positions them as objects of progressive libidinal desire is worth noting if only to speak against a different position regarding trans women. The notion of “genital preference” and the socially constructed sphere of attraction, its contingency and the widely malleable character it takes on, is something that has been noted in order to point out the way that trans women are so often only understood as fetish, as aberration, as part of dehumanizing us. To simplify what trans women seek to sexual satisfaction, to a specifically male concept of libidinal expression, is to simplify the very structures at hand, the incredibly high stakes for trans women involved in any discussion of our womanhood.

The reduction of trans women to genitals, the singular intensity of the imagined trans woman’s phallus, similar to the Lacanian-qua-Butlerian idea of the lesbian phallus (conceptual structures that, for some trans lesbians, intermingle) is part of creating an immediate and visceral repulsion that then sets the tone for further realizations of the body and its potentiality, the possibilities of the body: the denial that relations determined by the phallus are realized through violence by men is able to be spoken, to be placed upon the bodies of trans women, and then again realized once the targeting of trans women for violent action is agreed upon and accepted. It is in this singularity, this act of switching, where trans women are excluded from any possible being described by the structure of womanhood, that converging and vital critiques of becoming-woman as a social process are excluded from realization. It is by sexing the body through a collapse of the body to genitals as a singularity of intensity, genitals turned into an ontological determination beyond all others, through a language that assumes trans women as behaving like these men, as rapists, as having a subjectivity that is determined by a desire to rape rather than the violent and lifelong process of victimization that trans women are faced with, that their subjectivities are refused.

Entering into a structuralist critique of this, using the structural boundaries at hand in order to accept and realize that which is necessarily held in a given position and the binary machines that sustain it, leads to the realization that a great deal of the ideology around trans women is in creating a sort of idea of what trans women are, why they accept becoming-women and what becoming-woman must mean for them, starting from a position where womanhood is not only undesirable, but unthinkable so long as one has a certain sort of sexed body. It begins with the means in which transmisogynist and homophobic ideologies converge from early delineations of “proper” childhood conduct, and continues as the undesirability of trans women is used to mark them as undeserving of life itself. Trans women are categorized as outside of the potential expression of desire, and thus any affirmation of them is simply affirmation of the turn toward fetishization necessary to make trans women temporarily acceptable subjects. It is in collapsing trans women to a single means of recognition that the predominant justification process for transmisogynist violence is affirmed, that trans women are denied the most vital forms of recognition and community, that trans women are left to die. That some trans women discuss themselves in a way that includes undesirability as something suffered, something difficult, is not surprising, as it feeds into the realization of just how deeply fetishized trans women are. However, it does not stand as the primary means through which trans women are realized as alienated subjects, subjects made legible through the dual structures of womanhood and transness.

These men do not care about trans women, they do not care about lesbians, they simply care about justifying their rapist ideologies to themselves through fascist turns of ideology. Adopting this, allowing them to determine what sorts of bodies trans women can have, allowing fascist ideology to determine the demarcations of both bodies and possible-bodies, under the guise of protecting women from rapists, is allowing for structures that harm all women to be constructed and redoubled simply because the harm is more apparent to trans women. The structure discussed is not the personal, singular expression of a relationship to the genitals of others, but rather a structural relationship to the phallic relations of an assumed sexed body that is developed as a projection of the ideology constructed within this language. It makes a meaningful and restorative discussion on the ways in which trans women and lesbians and trans lesbians and all other sorts of women are fetishized impossible because it presents itself most immediately as the singular realization of women as merely constituted by their fetishization.

Emphatically, trans women must affirm that, as a way of discussing larger structures of sexual expression and often-traumatic experience, languages of genital preference are at the very least a passable means of describing one’s own desire and that arguing against an individual experience in this is at best useless and at worst indicative of an entitlement that is found in all sorts of disparate sexual relationships, that is realized as a pressure which indeed expresses itself through rape when realized. The individual is unimportant in this discussion. Rather, discussing it to highlight that the development of a singular focus on genitals is part of how trans women and other women converge in experience, are understood in relation to the ideology of the rapist, of women as subjects approachable through rape, to make more clear that trans women must be affirmed as woman in discussing this commonality, is the primary concern. Discussing this in relation to the gendering of violence, the homophobia that informs and characterizes transmisogyny and the converse statement, the assemblages of violence shared in these subjectivities, is instead where one must concentrate one’s efforts.

#rape/// #genitals/// #transmisogyny///