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#cultural reappropriation
majorbaby · 1 year
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lrb with that said, i have signficantly less patience for works of fiction that are full of white people (cast and crew) which have been given every possible opportunity and advantage to succeed and then drop the ball e.g. ghost in the shell (2017) is a failure that could only come of white fragility and hubris
on this flip side of that, no amount of racialized cast and crew can save the mcu or whatever the fuck star wars is doing.
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hinderr · 11 months
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Okay wait hang on. Gideon clone oneshot sounds like a sick idea actually
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franki-lew-yo · 2 years
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The "joys" of being low-income but wanting to grow out of it ((pain))
Updating you all on my financial situation. Not linking to anything or asking for anything, I more or less wanna just fast track you on what's going on in my life and why I hate it:
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I’ve been on foodstamps since 2019. They’re a lifesaver, even though I wish I didn’t have to have them. I want to be making a decent enough, taxable income from my art as well as my part time job - but I can’t. What I need to sustain myself in meantime for rent and basic needs are SSI and SSA (disability benefits); SSI especially because I am low-income and have a disability that’s never going away which makes learning to drive a herculean task and prohibiting me from working full time, more hours, or finding a second job. I need to make more money and keep that money in the longterm - maybe eventually not need my low income benefits or foodstamps someday and be able to provide for myself and my dog just on my own earnings…except if SSI sees you’re even in any threat of doing just that they will immediately cut you off.
That’s what happened in 2020. I was making over 100$ a year from my patreon and independent commission work; nothing taxable but still substantial, and when they found that out and that I intended for that to grow, SSI dumped me. Now that 100+ or so can’t go to donations to ‘non essential’ things like indie artists I followed on patreon, NAACP donations, subscriptions I liked to keep, art supplies, vet bills, ect; no now I NEED that money just to be able to pay my rent which I make with my sister. Supplies and hot food really are a giftcard thing.
SSI is set up so that bad actors can’t abuse the system and do literally no work while they let the government pay for everything. In theory this stops fraudsters and rare, disturbing cases of people committing crimes and using their disabled loved ones as money generators: in practice, it means that if you or your loved one ever wants to strive for something bigger in life or -heck- even just be able to make their own earnings - they have to dumb you cuz then there’s a possibility you could be a fraudster. One day you hope to not need social services support on basic living and maybe get a bite of that American Dream once in awhile; to that, SSI spits in your face for daring to think in the long term. You have them and only them. You are dependent and will only be dependent. They want you to be dependent at all costs:
“Oh?! You’re disabled and don’t work but you’re managing to contribute a fraction to your bills through art you do online…ugh….gee…that’s really not the lemonade stand/burger king meal money we expected you to make as a sad little autist with no future soooooo we’re just gonna leave if you’re gonna abuse us like that!”
“You’re homeless? Hmmmm I don’t know…it says here that you have a job and some money from a ko-fi or something. You can pay for your pets food and a gym membership to wash up and -gasp- Del Taco for dinner but you otherwise live out of your car??? Tsk, tsk, how dare you squander from us Mr. Moneybags!!!”
“Oh you got another job- wait? ANOTHER job? Ugh- you’re so selfish! How dare you want to have enough money to send your kids to school or get your adult child into that program that’ll help them find the independence they want when you’re gone! What’s this about ‘stababillity’? Stability is being dependent on us.”
I don’t want to be dependent my whole life. Most people don’t. Contrary to popular belief, most disabled adults don’t want to be living with their families all their lives. We have dreams. We have ambitions. We have wants and goals and in my country the government looks at all that and says “well you aren’t autistic enough to understand that so you’re not worth our time” ((which is really offensive to the people lower on the spectrum by the way. ‘They aren’t aware enough so it’s okay to make them dependent and treat them like manchildren’. Or heck? What about people with Down Syndrome? We have dreams as much as anybody else. I'm so sorry I’m not Tom Hanks and can’t just accidentally stumble into success like a good little autist)).
It’s depressing. And it’s made even more depressing because every support service never wants you to lose your stability and so insists it’s okay actually that you can’t pay taxes like the rest of us. They’ll tell you you can achieve anything because they have to be optimistic - but what they really need is for you to always settle on scooting along rather than achieving what you want.
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disloyalpunk · 1 year
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8 HOURS TIL SUPERBOWL I NEED TO GO MAKE JELLO SHOTS
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spiderfreedom · 1 month
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It's interesting how the same misogynistic trope can reappear, independently, in different countries. I'm reading "Scream from the shadows: the women's liberation movement in Japan" and this section about the connotations of the word 'woman' is interesting:
In the Japanese context, the semantic distinctions between the terms fujin, josei, and onna, which are all translated as “women” and/or “woman,” must be given careful attention, as they often signal political differences. Ribu [women's lib] activists deliberately chose and reappropriated onna, a term for woman that can be used in a pejorative manner with sexual or lower-class connotations. As noted by Kano Masanao, the term onna approximated a discriminatory word (sabetsu go). It signified the raw and total being that had to be liberated. According to linguistics scholar Orie Endo, its strong sexual implications made it a term that could “be substituted for many sexually related terms, such as mistress or prostitute,” and this was considered disrespectful, taboo, even “dirty.”
As a kid, I never liked the word 'woman' because it often sounded sexual to me, and I hated the way it was used. "My vices are alcohol, cigarettes, and women" - treating 'women' as equivalent as objects. "Love going to Colombia and seeing all the beautiful women" - treating 'women' as sightseeing objects. "You've known her since she was a girl, now watch her become a woman" - being a 'woman' is to be a passive sex object that is (often against her will) penetrated.
I used to think this was my personal issue with the word, but I've since learned other women also felt the same way about the word. And apparently in Japan, the word we foreigners are taught is the default word for woman (we learn woman = onna and man = otoko) is also subject to being sexualized, objectified, and degraded. What the Japanese 'ribu' activists did was to reclaim the word onna to mean a woman who was a subject, who was free to pursue sexual pleasure for herself and not for men. In other words, the degradation of the word for 'woman' isn't just something that happens in English, but in other languages and cultures. In this case, it does not appear to be a result of Western colonization, either.
If you haven't read much feminist work outside your home country (or about the West), I strongly recommend doing so. The more you learn about feminists in other countries, the more you realize that the form sexism takes is eerily universal.
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gaytanic-panic · 1 year
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A girl at my church is a fellow grad student and she's finishing her dissertation where she argues that Modernism was created through reappropriations from colonial societies, that white people, usually from Europe, got the ideas they turned into Modernism from these peripheral, "primitive" cultures.
And as you all know, chess has been my recent special interest. During the Modernist era in art, there was a "hypermodernist" movement in chess. And several hypermodernist openings in chess are called "Indian," and that's because they originated with Indians who had grown up playing Indian chess and brought those ideas to European chess that they encountered in the big cities where the English were. Some of these guys even traveled to the UK and became champs there because they were so good. So hypermodernist chess can be considered another example of taking ideas from cultures labeled "primitive" or "premodern" and rebranding them as the newest developments in Modern European culture.
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the-cimmerians · 2 years
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For the anon who asked for my take on/more info on body neutrality. Please be advised this is just my take on it:
Body neutrality is a fundamental part of intersectional feminism: because beauty standards are rooted in white supremacist culture/ableist culture/heteropatriarchal oppression and capitalist oppression, body neutrality reappropriates and recenters our bodies as OUR vessels/part of us, rather than a site of violence visited on us.
The concept of body neutrality came out of the lived experiences of people with marginalized bodies, who found much of the prevalent discourse about bodies (including body positivity) to be traumatizing.
Bodies are marginalized when they are NOT cis, white, young, able, pain-free, thin, and conforming. This means that almost all bodies are marginalized.
‘So what’s the problem with body positivity?’—the problem is that body positivity focuses on ‘every body is beautiful, every body deserves to be loved’. This is predicated on the idea of expanding existing standards of beauty, rather than striking at the core of how fucked up beauty standards are (see #1 above). It also burdens the body’s owner with the responsibility for loving their body—something that is often difficult to do for people with disabilities, chronic pain, or various forms of dysmorphia.
‘So what IS body neutrality?’ It’s this:
If you’re a human and you’re alive, you have the experience of having a body.
The body that you inhabit is where you live.
The body you inhabit IS NOT a measure of your worth.
The people in your life, and the parts of our society that suggest that your body = your worth are incorrect, and operating from some very terrible and misinformed beliefs (see #1)
It’s okay to love, or not love, the body you live in, or do both at different times. If you’re existing in it, your body is sufficient.
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wordprefect · 8 months
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I'm having a rough time with some of the Hobie fanart. I think some of it stems from how the movie depicted him.
Like all Spidermans, he's from New York. I mean, at least from what I remember in the comics. And as an American born punk, he wears (wore) Chucks.
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But the Hobie from the movie is Bri'ish, idn't 'e? British punks wear Docs. Docs have a shoelace code, like the gay clubs used to have a hanky code: every color means something and sometimes the way you wear that color (left/right pocket, regular/ladder lacing) adds nuance.
A lot of the fan art I've been seeing has Hobie in his British appropriate Docs and, usually, highly symbolic laces.
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Sometimes one or both are yellow, which is super cool and on point meaning anti-racist. The blue laces... The blue laces have some history that, while aesthetically appropriate for our FNSM, are HUGELY problematic in cities whose cops are aware of punk culture. Dating back to the 70s, blue lace read as "cop killer." The punks on the US west coast have been trying to reappropriate it as more "defund police" or cop oversight or other woke idealism - which I love and support.
However, as an elder Millennial/mini Xer, cops have long memories and are not afraid to make that a "you" problem.
So, in your art- do what you feel is right ❤️ you make Hobie however you see him and love him. But if you want to cosplay as Hobie, be very careful with your presentation. Some places, this probably won't be an issue, but I worry about kids going out dressed as a punk and signalling without knowing what they are projecting to the world.
The personal is political and there is nothing more personal than how you choose to dress.
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jeannereames · 2 years
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Dear Professor, elsewhere you mentioned teaching Miller, Barker and Atwood and I was wondering if you could expand a little on your thoughts on their respective retellings.
QUEERING AND FEMINIZING HOMER: MILLER, BARKER & ATWOOD
For my “Ancient Greece in Modern Historical Fiction” course, I assigned three texts that all dealt with the Homeric poems, in order to examine how ancient myth can be reappropriated for modern audiences. These were Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.
There are a lot, and I do mean a lot of retellings of the Iliad or Odyssey. Some, maybe most, do so in a straightforward way, treating the myth like an historical novel. They may try to resituate it in another head, like Helen’s, or Hektor’s, or even Paris’s. But they don’t, otherwise, change much. If anything, they attempt to eliminate the fantastical elements (like gods) and play the story as if it really happened.
Yet the nature of myths makes them different from historical fiction. The latter, for me, has a much higher bar for detail accuracy. A myth begins as fiction, so while I do appreciate various renditions attempting historical accuracy, I don’t see it as essential to a good retelling. And the three novels I chose mostly don’t track in that direction; all retain gods and heroes and at least the patina of the magical.
Part of why I’m less concerned with historical accuracy owes to the fact Homer* wasn’t. It’s hard to have accuracy when the original text was all-over-the-place.
Homer composed a stunning piece of war fiction in terms of its impact on a soldier’s psyche. But it’s crap historical fiction. Let’s just put that out there at the start. Imagine putting Al Capone and 1920s gangsters in Elizabethan England, or maybe, Queen Elizabeth in 1920s Southside Chicago. That’s the time and cultural differential. He’s theoretically writing about events at the tail end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200-1100), but the social structure reflects the Early Iron Age as well as the Late Iron Age, with a few vestiges of the Bronze Age. But accuracy isn’t the *point*, for Homer.
Another point of clarification: the Iliad and Odyssey are about fictional people. There was no Agamemnon, Achilles, Priam, Hektor, or Helen. The Trojan War probably did happen—but not for the reasons or in the way the story relates. It’s a bit like Saving Private Ryan: WW II certainly happened, but Private Ryan is Everyman Lost.
Last, the basic plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey were not invented by Homer. These were well-known epic stories. Homer’s brilliance lay in what he did with them. Ergo, it’s more correct to speak of Homer as the composer of the Iliad and Odyssey, rather than the author/writer.
Therefore, what I’m looking for in modern retellings is what a MODERN author does with the same story. How does she or he use these familiar stories to talk about our present age…which is what Homer did himself, after all.
I’ve talked elsewhere about some issues I have with Miller’s Song of Achilles, but as is probably evident from what I said above, I have absolutely zero problems with her queering the tale. What I find more interesting is how her adaptation of Achilles and Patroklos as lovers speaks to our modern world and modern needs.
Any retelling of the Iliad today will run up against the brick wall of ancient values that were very different—and often rather repugnant—to modern readers. To ancient minds, Achilles was a HERO. Admirable. Worthy of emulation. To modern readers he’s, well, kind of a dick. And a butcher.
I’d submit that Homer meant him to be a jerk, too. Part of Homer’s lasting value is his ability to take a cultural hero and finesse him until he’s maybe not so hero-ish, but still comprehensible in his actions to listeners who had, themselves, experienced combat. Ergo, Homer’s Iliad still has something to say today to Vietnam Vets (as per Jonathan Shay’s brilliant Achilles in Vietnam). But most modern readers are not going to like the guy. He has a terrible temper, throws fits when thwarted, and is repeatedly described as “man-killing” like it’s a compliment.
So, as a modern author with a modern audience, how do you redeem him? (If you redeem him; not all authors choose to.)
Miller turned the Iliad into a love story, told from Patroklos's POV, which makes Achilles more likeable. He's painted by Patroklos’s adoration. In both Miller’s retelling and Homer’s original, Patroklos is depicted as empathic in a way modern readers can get behind, so he’s a good choice of point-of-view character. Yet although he comes off as your basic “nice guy,” in the original he is also a skilled warrior who kills a lot of people. Miller ignores this, making him a healer, not a fighter.
Like her casting of Thetis as bitchy, I have some issues with her decision to avoid dealing with the more brutal parts of Homer’s epic by eliding it. She’s buffed off the ugly rather than confronting it. It winds up feeling like a puff piece, alas, which I don't believe was her intention.
Why it does succeed owes not to the fact it’s a love story, but a queer love story. In antiquity, Achilles was a prince (as was Patroklos): the elite of the elite, the ruling class and conquering heroes. They were, in no way, an oppressed minority. A “subaltern” group.
Yet today, queer people are a subaltern population, although people in the queer community enjoy differing degrees of social acceptance. A black or brown trans woman experiences a great deal more oppression than a white gay guy. Yet public acceptance of queerness in any form is relatively recent, as in, something I’ve seen occur in my lifetime. And of course, now it’s being pushed back against.
So to have heroes who did occupy the ruling class and didn’t have to apologize for who they loved is important. If Achilles is a dick, well, he’s a gay dick (pun intended), and pretty, so we’ll slip him a pass.
Is that wrong? Homer doesn’t have a copyright on Achilles. Or Patroklos. Just as he used Achilles and Hektor and Priam to his own ends, so does Miller. Yet I am bothered by her ducking of the fundamental violence of the Iliad. Homer doesn’t, and it makes his the superior story. (Although topping Homer is rather a high bar.) Grief (and rage) make Achilles into a monster. Empathy redeems him…but it’s not empathy for Patroklos. In fact, his inability to empathize with Patroklos’s own grief gets his friend killed. Homer doesn’t sugar-coat that.
No, it’s empathy for the enemy—for Priam, when Priam evokes the grief Achilles’s own father will feel—that finally gets through to him. It re-humanizes him. He and Priam cry together.
See what Homer did there? That’s why the poem is still read c.2700 years after it was composed. On certain levels, it’s timeless. By contrast, Miller’s rendering is time/situation-dependent. It succeeds now. It wouldn’t have succeeded 50 years ago, if it had even got published, and I’m not sure it’ll be as relevant 50 years in the future. That’s not a condemnation. Sometimes books become important when they’re needed.
Yet, as I have issues with her ducking the story’s inherent violence, I also had issues with her handling of Thetis as one of only two prominent women in the novel. Again, there’s no copyright on Thetis, but in Greek myth, she’s not a cold bitch—in fact, she’s rather the opposite. So, while I think Miller’s queering of the Iliad had positive current social coin, her treatment of Thetis played into negative tropes about women (and mothers) that troubled me.
These are things I invite my students to wrestle with, when we talk about The Song of Achilles.
Btw, I sometimes see Miller grouped with Barker and Haynes and Atwood as “feminist” retellings of the Iliad. In no way is her book a feminist retelling. A queer retelling, but not a feminist one.
Let’s turn then to Barker. The very title of Barker’s book gives us a hint of what she wants to accomplish. The Silence of the Girls recasts the myth as the story of Briseis, Achilles’s war prize. Barker’s is one in a line of attempts to present the Iliad from a woman’s point of view, which goes back at least to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s 1987 Firebrand. Just as June Rachuy Brindel told Ariadne’s story (and Phaedra’s too) from a feminist perspective 40 years before Jennifer Saint (and was nominated for a Pulitzer). Another, more recent approach to this was Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, published just a year after Barker.
[A point: two books published a year apart do not owe to each other. It takes years to write, then publish a novel. But they may reflect current publishing perceptions of market interest.]
Barker makes a concerted effort to take a feminist look at the myth by centering Briseis as the narrator…but only for the first part. By part two, Achilles elbows his way in. Suddenly, it’s no longer Briseis’s story once she’s carted off to Agamemnon’s tent. It seems that Barker just couldn’t unhook entirely from centering Achilles, even if he’s more anti-hero.
We can consider this several ways. It’s possible that she didn’t want Achilles to be as simplistic as Briseis saw him, and therefore needed to get out of Briseis’s head in order to suggest more nuance. It’s also possible that she really does mean her title, The Silence of the Girls, and so silences the girl narrator when handed off to Agamemnon.
I have problems with both readings. First, the need to cast Achilles as more complex than Briseis wants to read him moves the needle away from the female/feminist perspective. Why should it be necessary to give Achilles depth if it’s Briseis’s story we’re telling? Unless she eventually comes to see depth in him…in which case, show us how she comes to that conclusion.
And if she really wanted to “silence” the girl when she became a slave, silence her THEN, not just when she moves residence. She’s no more a slave under Agamemnon than under Achilles. She might lack Patroklos’s support and semi-understanding, but her basic situation has not changed enough to justify a significant change in narrator.
To me, it just seems that Achilles sucked up all the air in the room, as he’s wont to do. He took over her story because Barker let him. It’s still a male-centric view.
This may have happened because Barker, like Miller, didn’t know enough history of the period to thoroughly reimagine the story she’s telling. In this respect, a little more historical accuracy—if not necessary—may have been helpful. How? By recentering the story not only on the female voice(s), but also on non-Mycenaean/Greek voices. Her opening was incredibly interesting, and could have had much more done with it. Marauding Greeks raze her town and take her captive. She comes from a satellite kingdom of the rich and powerful city of Wilusa (Troy), part of the Arzawa confederacy, itself a sometime-tribute group of the even more powerful Hittite Empire. The Mycenaeans are essentially pirates, hated by Hitties (and their allies?). It might have given Barker a two-pronged way to anchor her narrative more solidly: non-male AND non-Greek.
As noted, attempts at historical situating isn’t required. But Barker’s take ended up bogged down by the original Greek-centric view. She wanted to un-silence the girls, but unfortunately, by my reading, she only continued Achilles’s dominance.
So, I see both Miller’s and Barker’s attempts as not quite succeeding—which is interesting in itself. The books are hardly failures, or they wouldn’t have sold so many copies. And they do, in their own ways, take on Homer to resituate it for our era. But neither can quite get away from the historical value systems that make the Iliad problematic to modern readers.
Then we have Margaret Atwood, who takes us to school.
Folks, The Penelopiad is how you give voice to subaltern populations. For such a short book, it has wonderful layers.
First, this is not set in antiquity. Penelope tells her story from Hades, in the “now,” because she wants to correct Homer’s presentation of her (even though Homer’s presentation is overall rather favorable). The tone is modern and discursive. Some find it annoying, but she chooses it for a reason. While the book is not a comedy (unless black), it’s full of intentional, sarcastic humor.
Thousands of years have passed since the events of the Iliad and Odyssey. Penelope remains in Hades, not choosing to be reborn, unlike most of her contemporaries, including her husband…a nice nod to Plato’s Myth of Er where Odysseus is one of several souls who choose rebirth. I don’t know if Atwood is familiar with the story, but it’s Atwood, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she is. It’s an “Easter Egg” the average reader won’t get. Doesn’t matter. Atwood litters her novel with allusions to Greek myth, drama, and philosophy, as well as modern anthropology and Classics. None of it is necessary to follow her tale, but the more you know, the more you’re going to get from it. And the harder you’ll laugh (she spoofs Robert Graves’ White Goddess).
Most of the narrative is Penelope’s metafiction first-person account, but her chapters are broken up by a “chorus” of Penelope's twelve maids, actual figures from the Odyssey, mostly unnamed. Atwood uses them exactly as a Greek chorus in a traditional tragedy (which is what she’s writing). In Homer, the handmaids were traitorous little sluts, as ancient Greek men tended to see slaves, especially slave women. Atwood does something brilliant with them.
The Penelopiad lets women take over the narrative in a way Barker attempted but didn’t quite manage. If the men, Odysseus and Telemechus, are present, Atwood never lets them have a POV. Only Penelope or her maids narrate, and she sets those in tension. Like Briseis, Penelope is a member of the elite: a princess, then queen, however she presents herself in contrast to Helen. She’s a “poor little rich girl.” The twelve maids are manifestly not.
As the story unfolds, Atwood cleverly reminds us of something deeply embedded in Homer: these characters LIE. Odysseus is a magnificent liar, and Penelope lets us know it. “Bent-minded Odysseus” is the typical way he’s described by Homer, and it’s meant as a compliment. Even today, in Greece, being “clever” is better than being “smart.” Homer’s “bent-minded Penelope” is his match. He draws a sympathetic picture of her as Odysseus’s true partner, even if Odysseus entertains dalliances on the side. Of course, in that world, it was expected. Penelope is loyal, waiting at home…not unlike Penelope waiting in Hades here, never venturing out into new lives.
But we must remember: As Odysseus lies about his exploits and life, Penelope lies, too.
As we begin the book, the temptation for the reader—as Atwood intends—is to take Penelope’s account at face value. We may think we’re reading a novel that upends the narrative, centering female voices at last! But as the book continues, the chorus of maids presents us with a different tale, a different view. Then we reach the end and realize what Atwood has so cleverly done.
She truly decentered the narrative.
She’s not just telling Penelope’s story. She’s also telling what happened to the slave women, the twelve maids, who were hanged by Odysseus and Telemachus—in the original epic because they betrayed their mistress/Ithaca by consorting with the suitors. Here, Penelope, who’s just trying to survive, asks them to consort with the suitors to gain intelligence, and some are raped as a result. In the end, they’re executed along with their “lovers.” And Penelope didn’t step in to save them.
They’re expendable.
This is not just a Greek tragedy, but a horror story. Atwood reminds us that although Penelope may be less powerful than her husband, the King of Ithica, she is NOT truly disempowered. She is only half-subaltern. The maids, who are both women and slaves, are the truly disenfranchised. All they have in the world are their looks, and the protection of their mistress…which she doesn’t give.
So, they die.
Most people reading the Odyssey never think about the hanged maids—whether it was a just punishment. It happens in the background; they’re traitors like the suitors. But after reading Atwood, you’ll never read that poem again and overlook them.
Atwood’s novel is not romantic, not poetic, not inclined to have readers read and re-read it to get lost in the romance all over again (as with Miller’s). It’s deeply disturbing. And it’s meant to be.
Of these three novels, this is the one that will still be read, and resonate, fifty years down the road. This is the retelling of Homer that actually manages to unseat the accepted narrative and makes us re-examine the story from the real flip-side.
This one actually “unsilences” the (twelve) girls.
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*I’m not going to touch the question of whether there was a “Homer,” and if so, was it one or two people, a he or a she, etc. There is a veritable tsunami of writing about who “Homer” may have been and the composition of these poems. Just be aware.
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sugar-grigri · 2 months
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hi loulou! i recently finished watching monster and i remember you mentioned it was your favorite manga (?). i enjoyed it but i'm not sure how i felt about it overall yet. i just started watching pluto with a friend and i plan to check out 20th century boys eventually. have you read/watched other manga from urasawa? - seal anon 🦭
Hello seal anon!!! Yes Monster is my favorite manga, that doesn't mean it's the only one, but the mangas that have this rank are the ones that upset me the most
I had read and I also saw the adaptation of Pluto, I liked it a lot but not having followed Astro boy, I don't have all the references, nor this nostalgic factor. However, it was the same for MAPPA's adaptation of Dororo, also by Osamu Tezuka, and I liked the story straight away. I don't know, but Pluto is different. It's a total reappropriation of Tezuka's work (I think with the help of his son), and while I enjoyed it, I didn't feel the same way about it as I did about Monster.
This is purely personal, of course
Monster works a lot for me in terms of landscapes and characters alone. I live in a region of France (the one annexed by the Germans several times) so close to Germany geographically and culturally, so I don't know, the atmosphere in this work reminds me of home.
I started reading 20th century boys but didn't finish!!!!! But I loved the beginning of the work, it had the potential to equal Monster or even surpass it, because the beginning is less... slow? The atmosphere is more original, and I also feel that it's more personal to Urasawa (after all, the main character is a rock fan).
I haven't read Billy Bat, but I'm planning to. I know he has a manga in progress, Asadora, which I also plan to read. I intend to get interested in all these works, but I'll leave myself plenty of time to enjoy them!
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kunosoura · 4 months
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if you wanna get mad about people damaging greek culture through reappropriations in contemporary art discourse I'd think you'd focus on identity evropa type shit before queer myth of persephone shit
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loving-n0t-heyting · 2 years
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Grinds my gears when ppls first classifying instinct with Spinoza is “example of ~Jewish thought~”. Culturally, he de-hebraicised his name, accepted his excommunication, and never looked back. Religiously, he disdained Judaism qua Judaism as much as he did any sectarian supernaturalist religion. Philosophically, any impact unambiguously Jewish writers like Maimonides might have had is completely swamped by the imprint of Descartes—an influence that (rightly!) nobody has seriously suggested means he was a “catholic thinker.”
His entire mature life he spent gleefully abandoning the parochial ways of his forebears and championing the ideal of secular, universalist rationalism; he bore the same attitude towards Jewish scripture as towards the NT: a human product at best to be reappropriated in the name of naturalist pantheism and at worst an illustration of the excesses of human imagination
This gets me less bc I have some attachment to these commitments of his than bc it feels like such a clearcut case of intellectual disrespect; he would regard being bandied about in awed terms primarily as an illustration of ~jewish thought~ as more of a “fuck you” than any bookburning. He was ethnically Sephardic and raised religiously jewish, but taking these as the primary lens by which to interpret him is rejecting everything he did to define himself as a mature thinker
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indexcard · 5 months
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probably one of the deepest & most intractable forms of rot in society right now is the instagram artist grift mill that is almost entirely structured around clapping back at "haters" and functions entirely in the following disingenuous paradigms —
1) "they said i couldn't do it but i did" creates a strawman "hater" object and, in a cultural moment dominated by toxic positivity, profits off the imagined negativity by encouraging positivity groupthink/collective shaming of any dissenters. content is produced largely in response to negative comments. congruent phenomenon to the tiktok movie reviewers who refuse to be called critics (and actually aren't) because they think criticism = negativity = bad
2) "if my art is [ugly/amateurish/wasteful] then why do i have so many followers" fallacious a positioning of the artist as an outsider, when true outsider art does not actually participate in traditional systems of promotion - and i would say, unarguably, instagram has become a mainstream and parallel pathway for an artist analogous to the domination of the gallery system. however, because the gallery system has centuries of cultural cachet, instagram art is still considered to some degree "lowbrow" - though i would say lowbrow art right now holds greater sway over mainstream/popular culture over highbrow art. so in fact, having followers has more cultural & literal capital in it than having approval from the academe, but due to the lowbrow/highbrow distinction this rhetoric is able to be used for successful manipulation of the actual image-economy by instagram artist grifters
3) "i'm just a small-time creator 🥺 won't you please spare a follow, friend?" related to the last but weaponised by people of all levels of viewership. cultivates parasocial relationships on a superficial level. positions influencer status as desirable while also profiting off the general understanding that "popular" doesn't necessarily mean "good" in a détournement/inversion of the previous point - where previously underdog status is used as a marker of authenticity and therefore quality, here, underdog status is acknowledged but not seen as desirable/commensurate with the artist's skill level. of course the paradox of this reappropriation of art as Content is that both are true
— and in answer to the question "why is this a bad thing?" it's bad because the supposed democratisation of art has failed, it has just created an economy of spectacle where hierarchies are reinforced and critical thinking is discouraged. it reduces art to a struggle for viewership and limits the practice of artmaking to an idealised virtuosic display of technique and superficial aesthetics with no room for deeper meaning (and therefore analysis) or engagement with art and culture beyond its own algorithm-driven feedback loop. also most of it fucking sucks
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le-panda-chocovore · 1 month
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Can I ask your top 10 fav fics ever (from any fandom, if you don't mind)?
Also, just curious, is there a story behind your name "le-panda-chocovore "?
Oh I think I can actually answer that without rambling too much !! (<- took an entire week to answer the ask and select the fics, and I commented on each one of them lol) It won't be a Top in order of preference tho, there's no actual classment, it's just the ones I loved the most.
The Way I Behaved - EraserMic (MHA)
This fanfic gave me the inspiration to write my greatest work (still unfinished to this day) and literally changed so many things about me. It also made me discover a whole genre of music that I've never listened to before and with which I am entirely in love now. Prepare to cry tho, because this is deeply heartbreaking. It's a Villain Mic AU where Aizawa was never a teacher. And it is good.
What if Percy did become a God - Percy Jackson and the Olympians (based on the books !!! do not read if you just watched the show !!!)
The title says everything. This is not a happy story, you will cry, I promise. It's short, like a 1k word OS, it's really poetic, it's deep, it's beautiful, and also, it's painful. Humans were never meant to be gods, not even Percy. It's written like a poem, I read it so many times and it hurt me every time.
Demon and Angel Professors - Ineffable Spouses (Good Omens)
Not a fanfiction but a serie of short works about Crowley and Aziraphale and the people around them. A teachers AU very nice to read with many Original Characters (the students) who are all captivating and appreciable. The story is extremely queer-positive and neurodivergent inclusive and physical handicap representative, honestly, you want to read it. There's everything inside it. If you have chronic pain or if you're a closeted queer or even a curious ally who wants to understand their peers, this is what you need. The love is so pure it's overwhelming.
Honor and Vengeance on the High Sea - Zuko (ATLA)
Tbh this deserves to be published, it's a novel itself (I haven't finished it yet). The author reappropriated the Avatar universe to write something completely new. It's an AU where Zuko becomes a Pirate after his banishment and fights against the Fire Nation Navy, and eventually joins the Avatar's team. There's a whole work around internalized homophobia, the discovery of the self, acceptance, injustice, family trauma and everything. Original Characters are cool too. Chapters are long and very, very complete, you can see the author has historical and cultural knowledge.
Strength, the meaning of - Asano Gakuhou (Assassination Classroom)
I can't believe a fanfic about this total asshole made it to my top 10, but it is beautifully written. The progressive mental breakdown of a man who used to stand proud above everyone, the slow fall down to hell without even realizing it. There's also his son's POV here, which is equally beautifully written. I really hate the man and I don't like the fact that the end of AssClass completely disregard the consequences of what happened on the character's mental state, and reading how even him wasn't okay at all is very pleasant to read. That's karma my bitch.
Je suis assis - BokuAka (Haikyuu)
Yeah it's in french and on wattpad. It has been a while since I read it but I still remember the principal. It's a OS anyway so it's not very long (we didn't do that 20k words OS on Wattpad, this madness is only popular on AO3 lol). Since I'm sensitive to everything that is around handicap, it touched me. It ended up being cute and warm. Honestly I was more thinking of another BokuAka fanfiction but I couldn't remember the name nor found it online so I put this one.
25 - Riren (SnK)
Yeah yeah I know, pedo ship etc, but I was 14 and this is a High School AU where they're both 16 so, it's okay I guess. Yes the name of the fanfic is twenty-five. It's in french, it's on wattpad, and there's Eren's POV too. I don't know how I'm supposed to describe it... I think you have to read it, it's not actually strange or weird but, it's a whole experience.
Here there be dragons - Centennial Husbands (the Sandman)
This is the exact definition of love. What is love to me ? This fanfiction. Engagement, devotion, caring, this is it, this fanfic has the meaning of all these words. I had a hard time reading it because I hate ultra-long OS (I need CHAPTERS, give me a BREAK) but it was soooo enjoyable, and I was crying the whole time 'cause it's so pure and beautiful.
Palm to Palm - KaRen (Assassination Classroom)
Yes I am a part of the extremely tiny fandom that ships Karma and Ren (I do ship Karma with multiple people throughout the manga lmao) but only in THIS specific context. And this is beautifully written, I can't stop re-reading it. Also, the name of the ship makes me laugh. Karma and Ren relationship after losing Gakushuu -the boy they both love above everything else- is peak romance.
Le goût du chocolat - L x Light (Death Note)
I honestly don't remember a thing about this fanfiction except a single sentence, but I do know that I totally fell in love with it. It was one of my fave fanfic when I was full active on Wattpad, and I even archived it because I didn't want to lose it. I should read it again now that I found it again.
Alright that's 10 !!! Finally !!
Oh it was so fun to fall back into all the things I read before ! But it was harder than I expected because, well, I only have AO3 for 3 years and I've been on Wattpad for 7 years, but I started reading fanfiction even before that, I just didn't have any account back then. So, I kinda forgot about some of the things I read more than 4 years ago, and I couldn't find the gems I discovered when I was 12. Most of the books that made out to this list are my recent lectures, it's a bit biased I guess.
Anyway, thank you for the ask ! It was fun to analyze all my bookmarks and everything !
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sivavakkiyar · 1 year
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I think what kind of stresses me out about this site is that—-you know about 6 years or so ago, two gateway arguments that Spencer et al made to attract white people to their camp and bulwark white nationalism were 1.) in the current discursive environment, straight white men are in many ways uniquely vulnerable because they are perceived as not being “marginalized”, and the culture is wildly hostile to them and 2.) that you, well meaning white liberal, will never do enough to please to ressentiment driven brown various-gendered hordes, because they are primarily vicious, insatiable and stupid: there is no point in trying really anything, because you will never please them—-the point is to humiliate you.
and I can’t help but feel that part of why that position isn’t really “alt” in any way now—-is in fact astonishingly prevalent amongst the right—-is largely because the liberals covertly agreed, and so it became the status quo, also amongst the left. I think most of the internet, or most of America, would never use that language, but would have to say, in fairness, to look at both sides, that there’s a lot of truth to those arguments, and that it’s of primary importance to recognize that and act accordingly. And the total reappropriation of “POC”, the abject failure of BLM in the public image, the almost complete stop to anti-racism in general “discourse” (because we all learned it already, now we have to unlearn the excesses, and besides doesn’t it surround us? What is there to complain about?)
But this is an era where American “leftists” roll their eyes at you and say “yeah, yeah, “America bad”, everyone knows that, you don’t have to mention it isn’t everyone obviously dealing with that? We have to focus on the problems no one is doing anything/talking about—-China and Russia” with a straight face
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liesmyth · 1 year
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it's irrelavent and will probably never answered, but im super interested in wake's background. i wanna know where she came from, i wanna know about her family and when she linked up to the BOE mission and all. like she's obviously the descendent of one of the trillionaires, which gives interesting basis as to how she was raised and how much their influence over the story of the death of Earth effected her opinions. in my head, i headcanon that at least one of the trillionaires pulled a semi-m night shamalan's Village scenario and started up a little amish-y convent on some planet that eventually got reappropriated by the Cohort as a shepard planet, and i also headcanon that wake was raised at least semi-religiously, so i kinda insert her into that scenario occasionally. if that was the case, then i reckon her radicalisation into commander of a terrorist cell would have a lot to do with the disruption of her community and the impending death of her planet, along with the conflicting accounts of Earth's death she might hear from Cohort officers. a lot of what she says to jod in htn feels scripted, but then there's personal tinges in it like with the "how many babies died in the bomb?" line. feels like she probably lost a lot to get to that detached violence and singleminded mission driven state.
OH GOD SAME! I really want to know more about society and culture in non-House planets, and NtN driving home the point that Wake DID have a family she was close to (and fought for!) vs. her feelings toward Gideon was such a great contrast.
I have 0 guesses on what the environment outside the Houses because it's been 10k years, and I doubt that the kind of social order the people on the FTL ships brought with them survived past the first generation. My vague hc is that someone on those ships pulled an "I have weapons, you don't" style of power grab but your idea is also cool! I too get the vibe that Wake's accusations to John were scripted and I'm DYING to know how much she knew and how much she thought she knew but was inaccurate.
Anyway <3 Wake <3
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