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littleeyesofpallas · 10 months

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Bleach’s Issue with Queer characters (3/3)

So then there’s Giselle (and to a less canon extent Shutara) who I think Kubo erroneously categorizes as similar to both eachother and to the above gay men stereotypes. And I think understanding Kubo’s approach to Giselle hinges on what he set up (but didn’t follow through on) with Shutara.

I’ve mentioned before, but I’m pretty certain think Shutara Senjumaru is meant to be a kabuki onnagata*. Not in-world, mind you; I don’t think she is somehow employed as an actor in a literal kabuki theater. (i would hope that was obvious, but one can never be too sure...) Just like Tier Harribel isn’t literally a light skinned, dark haired person doing gyaru/ganguro fashion, her presumably naturally tan skin and blonde hair is based on the general aesthetic. Shutara likewise is channeling distinct look and feel that draws from a mix of oiran, geisha, and kabuki aesthetics. (granted all three are closely related in influencing one another’s aesthetics in the first place)

But while the look and even the demeanor tend to play all three ways, I think the particular fixation on clothes, costuming, and the somewhat adjacent theme of “disguise” that Kubo has shown to put emphasis on in this kinds of situations, as well as the fact that he gave her a distinctly masculine name, Senjuumaru, point to her being some form of queer, albeit something Kubo seems to pretty clearly lack the understanding to better articulate himself. Is she a trans woman? Gender fluid? A male identifying transvestite? There’s not enough real material for us to draw that particular line, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that she’s not a cis woman.

*Kabuki is traditionally an all-male theater form, and “onnagata” refers to actors who specialize in playing women roles. Generally all actors train in the delineated masculine and feminine styles, but an actor’s career sticks to just one or the other...

...There is a whole big thing about how cultural institutions like kabuki and takarazuka theaters’ creation of socially acceptable and even celebrated, public and professional genderqueer spaces creates a myriad of gender dynamics that just don’t exist in the West, and it’s something that has made the attempt to adopt a globalized understanding of queer identity a little trickier in Japan:

In the West the gender binary was rigidly enforced such that to explore alternatives was basically uncharted territory (that’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean; There’s a lack of contiguity with those who came before) but with japan there were already nonbinary spaces in place, and the lines around those don’t neatly line up with the ethnocentric western ideas some people try to pigeonhole those into. In general, it gets dangerously close to just flat up colonizer rhetoric.

(forgive the outdated reference image, but honestly I don’t know what even counts as a recognizable example of a “““trap”” character these days. And I use that term with GREAT reluctance, but I want to differentiate the exploitative cliche usage of a trans caricature from any actual representational trans character.)

Anyway... That all just leaves Giselle. And let’s be real, there’s no excuse for this one. Maybe that seems like a weird anticlimactic place to take this series of posts... like, after all this, maybe it feels like I should’ve had some equally obtuse logic to explain this one away as a matter of escalation or as a Rule of Threes. But no, not really. I just think it’s a little unreasonable to treat the massive screwup that was Giselle’s portrayal as part of some sort of bigger ongoing trend, when it’s really more of an unrelated outlier in a bigger umbrella subject.

She is in fact a bad case of the long standing anime/manga fetishization of transwomen as a concept, as a spectacle to be gawked at and made the butt of jokes or to be included specifically as an anomaly. And in Giselle’s case her specific depiction as a depraved, physically/sexually abusive villain on top of that is an explicitly toxic combination.

In spite of that, I still don’t think Kubo actually meant for it to reflect poorly (not that that matters or diminishes its harmfulness) I think he genuinely just has no real grasp of what that kind of characterization means. I say that largely because of the way he treats a lot of her role in the plot. Not that she’s integral to moving it forward, but that she occupies space and survives in the plot as long as she does, even when she could've been conveniently (and frankly more neatly) written out;

He seems to like drawing her and gives her a range of expressions and gestures (something he doesn't afford all his characters, even some of his major ones)

He likes to expand on her powers and gimmicks beyond what was necessary if he'd been aiming for minimum effort

He even paired her off against his personal favorite character, Mayuri.

Point being, Kubo seems to personally like Giselle as a character, but he took a horrible insensitive and ignorant path in writing her character.

But an undeniable fact is, she’s not alone as this kind of villain, she’s just the only one that happens to be trans.* Mayuri himself, Aaroniero, Szayelaporro, Zomarri (just a little bit), Tousen (at the very end), Tsukishima, As Nodt, Gremmy (a little), and Askin all to some degree dip into this shtick Kubo does where his villains aren’t just sadistic but ecstatically so, to the point of intoxicated, gleeful derangement. Yet in spite of that, those characters are all usually meant to be “cool,” not detestable.

Remember, Mayuri was initially written as, hands down, the most despicable characters in Bleach —he was abusive and sadistic, misogynistic, actually physically grotesque, predatory, dishonorable sneaky & underhanded, complicit in a genocide, just in general a clearly communicated mad scientist villain, and he was all of this in direct and deliberate contrast to Uryuu’s chivalrous personality type(already established in his defending Orihime from Jiroubou) as well as Nemu’s noble stoic subservient victimhood— and yet he’s also Kubo’s favorite character in the series. Kubo doesn’t actually write Giselle any particularly worse than the others, BUT he also doesn’t disassociate her being trans from her being villainous, and again, even incidentally, that manages to perpetuate a harmful narrative in the overall.

*(Actually, I’ve kinda touched on it before but I sort of suspect Mayuri could be trans, in which case; OOPS, that makes two, and that doesn’t make it better....)

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#bleach #bleach meta #KUBO TITE #senjumaru shutara #giselle gewelle #geez this thing is so old that bridget wasn't even reintroduced to guilty gear yet #in fact strIVe wasn't even a thing on the horizon this far back #also weird that preupdate drafts still adhere to outdated formatting #because typing these tags now and editing these drafts #is working on weird janky tumblr formats that i kind of forgot existed #anyway like i already said in the tags of part 2 #im kind of super not satisfied with the wording on a lot of this #feels muddled #and i think i sort of lost track of the root of things #where someone was calling kubo ''obviously'' transphobic #and i think that's not entirely accurate #even if the bottom line almost doesnt make any difference #but there's a difference between ignorance and insensitive #and just outright malice #but the former is very much fixable and even reclaimable #the latter is absolutely not #again tho i get why to a lot of people that doesn't really make a difference #even this far out i dunno how i thought i was gonna end this #or how id do it any differently if i tried now

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haggishlyhagging · 4 months

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Two quotes I read today. Written 50 years apart but discussing the same phenomenon of female oppression.

The first is an excerpt of Kate Millett’s masterful takedown of Freud’s conclusions (which were foundational to much of the USA’s mid-20th century backlash to feminist advances) in her work Sexual Politics:

The three most distinguishing traits of female personality, were, in Freud's view, passivity, masochism, and narcissism. Even here, one can see a certain merit in the Freudian paradigm taken as pure description. The position of women in patriarchy is such that they are expected to be passive, to suffer, and to be sexual objects; it is unquestionable that they are, with varying degrees of success, socialized into such roles. This is not however what Freud had in mind. Nor had he any intention of describing social circumstances. Instead, he believed that the elaborate cultural construction we call "femininity" was largely organic, e.g., identical with, or clearly related to, femaleness. He therefore proceeded to define femininity as constitutional passivity, masochism, and narcissism. . . .

In convincing himself that the three traits of femininity were in fact constitutional and biologically destined, Freud had made it possible to prescribe them and for his followers to attempt to enforce them, perpetuating a condition which originates in oppressive social circumstances. To observe a group rendered passive, stolid in their suffering, forced into trivial vanity to please their superordinates, and, after summarizing these effects of long subordination, chose to conclude they were inevitable, and then commence to prescribe them as health, realism, and maturity, is actually a fairly blatant kind of Social Darwinism. As a manner of dealing with deprived groups, it is hardly new, but it has rarely been so successful as Freudianism has been in dealing with women.

The second quote is from Yagmur Uygarkizi’s piece “‘Feminism Allowed You to Speak’: Reinforcing Intergenerational Feminist Solidarity Against Sophisticated Attacks” which was published in the anthology Spinning And Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century. Uygarkizi is here discussing the foundational tenets of queer theory and its attendant postmodern analyses of women as socially-constructed entities:

Finally, and most importantly, sex roles are no longer imposed but ingrained: gender becomes an identity. If you as a woman are foolish enough to abide by the stereotypes that constrain you, then that's your problem: you could have just identified your way out of it. This is the message the disparaging "cis women" expression hides.

We are witnessing an essentialisation of our oppression: what men do to us is who we are apparently. If they rape us, we are the rape. If they veil us, we are the veil. If they stereotype us, we are the stereotype. One can sense a hint of victim-blaming here: just like a woman in prostitution/pornography might feel that she is only good at that, queer theory rehashes that yes, that is very true. Instead of taking material biological reality as the basis of an identity, socially constructed practices are taken as accurate indicators of someone's identity. What this means is that any criticism of those practices becomes a criticism of the person. Whorephobia. Islamophobia. Transphobia. The basis of the discrimination shifts from the female sex to the sex-based discrimination itself.

The link between Freudianism and postmodern queer theory is a simple one: women exist to be oppressed. We have simply shifted from it being seen as a natural phenomenon, based on the material reality of sex, to a chosen one based on the psycho-social assumptions based around personal identity.

#female oppression #kate millett #Yagmur Uygarkizi #freudianism #postmodernism #queer theory

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orangerosebush · 1 year

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People online refer to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity frequently. Understandably so! But to understand the idea, it's valuable to not just rely on random people's (often well-articulated and helpful) presentation of their individual understanding of the theory.

All too often, the role of heterosexuality in gender performativity is ignored -- which is a pity. Understanding the link between "correctly" performing one's gender and heterosexuality is key in contextualizing how and why it was difficult historically to, for example, access any form of medical transition unless one played the role of a heterosexual during intake interviews with clinics. Ray Blanchard, the father of many transmisogynistic discourses today, specifically divided trans women into two categories: heterosexual trans women (whom he "pitied" and deemed "worthy" of a tenuous, conditional validation) and bisexual/lesbian trans women (whom he deemed as being incapable of "truly" being trans).

And this did not just play out in medical contexts, as I know I have somewhere on my blog Lou Sullivan's correspondence with another queer trans man regarding the ways in which their shared experience of queer attraction called their transness into question socially -- even amongst other heterosexual trans men, who saw their political brothers' attraction to men as somehow incompatible with masculinity.

I think that this article also highlights that the process of being 'taught' the kind of ways we should perform our gender occurs both in public and in the privacy of the family. This process is neither passive nor harmless, regardless of whether one is cis or trans. Butler highlights extensively that this process is key to assimilating each generation into patriarchal modes of relating to one another and patriarchy, sensu lato -- an example being how (many) little girls are punished throughout childhood within a family unit for not adhering to the specific roles they "must" play within the family; roles that, in fact, are not at all specific to any family, but rather are roles that are particular to the prejudices within the society they were born into.

To be clear, I do not take Butler's writing on gender performativity as a dogma with how this accounts for the historical complexities of politicizing and policing the body. Many academics, activists, and everyday people have built upon and transcended the ideas articulated in Butler's work here. However, I think it is always helpful to know the legacy we inherit from the thinkers who came before us!

"Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" (1988)

“Philosophers rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense […]

When Beauvoir claims that 'woman' is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological [...], and gender, as [...] cultural interpretation or signification [...]. [T]o be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to a historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.

[…]

The contention that sex, gender, and heterosexuality are historical products which have become conjoined and reified as natural over time has received a good deal of critical attention[.]

[…]

Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions, is clearly not a fully individual matter. Here again, I don't mean to minimize the effect of certain gender norms which originate within the family and are enforced through certain familial modes of punishment and reward and which, as a consequence, might be construed as highly individual, for even there family relations recapitulate, individualize, and specify pre-existing cultural relations; they are rarely, if ever, radically original. The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again”

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bodiesbodiesbodiesx3 · 1 year

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Lesbophobia and transmisogyny in fandom: the favouritism towards m/m media and the false idea of escaping misogyny by embracing a world without women.

This discussion and thus, this piece was first mentioned on Twitter with a mere note apps picture and thread talking about how f/f media will always be seen as second fiddle to m/m ships and artwork even in fandoms where there’s a female-oriented or non-gendered cast. The response was worrying, to say the least, with transmisogynistic, misogynistic and lesbophobia rhetoric being slung left and right to justify this occurrence.

One, in particular, was that it was to “escape misogyny” but that reasoning to say the least is heavily problematic. By enforcing the idea that women cannot exist as the focus in, say, a manga or a fanfic is giving into internalised misogyny in a sense. Annihilating women from the narrative does not necessarily get rid of misogynistic gender roles such as “smaller is submissive”, “the strong protect the weak” etc, it just delegates to the male characters and in any case where there is a female character, she’s treated as an obstacle or underdeveloped for the sake of the male leads. She’s still treated with misogyny regardless. It’s disturbingly and eerily similar to men declaring that they don’t write women because they don’t know how to write them. If you read BL/MLM fics to escape misogyny, it’s not to truly escape, it’s simply to import it to more “suitable” targets without actually combatting or analysing the societal misogyny we face.

Another defence is the mere idea that criticising this ideal is going against “queer afabs” (actual wording). This is blatantly and very obviously transmisogynistic. Including the context that this argument was used against a trans woman, the idea that to criticize the disregard of WLW relationships is to criticise “AFAB people in fandom” as a whole is a gross assumption that sapphic transfem people (who were the ones mostly criticising this aspect in fandom) do not experience misogyny and that’s blatantly incorrect and a way of enforcing TERF ideology as misogyny being something only AFAB people can face and be affected by. This strange separation of “queer afab population” and sapphic transfems is disturbing as we’re not seen as “woman enough” to be able to spot issues and misogyny in fandom.

In fact, this entire “discourse” revealed how transmisogyny-exempt people (TME) cannot choose between calling sapphic transfem people criticising the clear chasm between MLM and WLW fan content “man-hating TERFs” for calling out misogyny or “dirty misogynistic males” for daring to say anything that hurts their feelings, that they themselves feel disturbed at an accurate analysis of their behaviour. That, because we are AMAB or intersex, that our opinions come from a place of HATING them instead of concern of repeating the cycle.

In relation to this argument, the massive and most upsetting defence is the belief that wlw media, especially the Japanese medium yuri was created to cater to men and was written by men. This is falsely equated to the majority of western “lesbian” pornography and BL, often written for women by women. This is ahistorical and troubling, to say the least. Yuri as a medium was created by sapphics, especially lesbians, for other sapphics in Japan and while not without issues (the strange lack of butch women in the medium), it’s just as abundant with variety as BL and often closer to the sapphic experience.

However, another reason for the disdain of yuri/wlw media is the belief that women straight up cannot exist in fan content or media without a reason.

To use terminology that originated in fandom, female characters and therefore female-oriented casts were approached with a “Doylist” mindset while male characters are approached with a “Watsonian” mindset. The woman has to have a real-life justification for being that way, for having certain traits and is disregarded while a male character can have the exact same traits and role but fandom will see it in an in-universe sense, “he’s like that because of [in story explanation]” while the female character would be “she’s like that because the writer hates women or wants to subvert expectations”, it’s bizarre and an obvious point towards misogyny but it’s ignored because acknowledging it means acknowledging the problematic way to criticising writing women.

This very reasoning also extends to fan content where fans will refuse to write women for this exact reason: they see a woman have the same trait as a male character and wave her off as badly written for daring to even have it. Many traits male characters are applauded for, and female characters are degraded for having even unknowingly by the audience.

This goes doubly so for any lesbian character existing but instead, the disdain comes from a self-righteous idea that she exists to please men by being sapphic (lesbianism as a fetish) rather than being created for the sake of women. She has to exist for the pleasure of men and men alone and any qualities she has is immediately degraded for the sake of the male characters even if she exists beyond them. Out of the need to defend women from misogynistic characterization, it further inflicts it by assuming all female characters are written with this in mind and thus strips them away in favour for the male characters.

In fact, even blandness is accepted with men within media when it comes to fandom while a common criticism of WLW media is the “blandness”, seeing the same old trope play over and over as if it isn’t extremely common in BL and especially heterosexual romance. Although, this point is slowly being rectified as BL and heterosexual romances have also began facing criticism for overuse of cliches.

In conclusion, most of the defences for wlw media being frankly unpopular and disregarded are founded on transmisogyny, lesbophobia and a misguided yet failing attempt to absolve oneself from misogyny which only allows fandom to reinforce the ouroboros that is the societal hatred of women, both in real life and online spaces.

#long post #tumblr version of article #rikka.txt #queer discourse #yuri

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theromanswerequeerwillelaborate · 4 months

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Blue Eye Samurai and Gender

I posted this to my Reddit, but wanted to put it out here too. Honestly, would make a video essay about it if I had time.

TLDR: this show does really interesting things with gender from both a modern and historical perspective.

Disclaimer 1: I am a queer person who enjoys applying a queer lens to media. I think it reveals interesting aspects of a text that are fun to engage with. If you do not like that sort of thing either for being averse to LGTBQ+ topics or just do not like analyzing media because you prefer to just enjoy a show for its "hell ya" moments, that is not a problem. I would obviously disagree with you, but there is no "right way" to engage with media and we can be respectful of each other's preferences.

Disclaimer 2: This show is set in Edo era Japan, or at least a stylized interpretation of it. Applying modern concepts of gender or modern standards and categories relating to gender must be done carefully and with caveats. As an example, the British Museum recently recategorized the emperor Elagabalus as a woman due to how that individual seems to have identified themselves. While it is cool to see recognition of queer people in history, I do not think that it is historical to say that Elagabalus was a trans woman because the category of "trans" did not exist for Romans as it does for us today. There has to be an appreciation for the historical context in which a person existed, and applying our modern lens to things is ultimately a distortion that needs to be accounted for.

Right, that being said, this show does some cool things with gender.

Off the bat, Mizu is depicted as embodying the social role of a man for the majority of the show. She dresses as a man and performs as a man in most social situations. This is necessitated for her by a number of factors. First, there is the in narrative need for her to maintain anonymity. If her pursuers and advisories see her as a man, she is able to better avoid them. Second, being perceived as male removes the bias that adversaries would have against her in battle. If they knew she was a woman, they would be less likely to be intimidated in a fight. Third, there were social barriers in the Edo period for women that Mizu needs to avoid to accomplish her mission. The most obvious example is working with Sword Father. Mizu binds her chest to seem more male while working with him. When Mizu leaves sword father, he refuses to allow her to reveal that she is a woman as this would be a socially-enforced taint on his work. In this context, it is better for Mizu to be genderless or to embody the gender of a man.

We can see this addressed further when Ringo reveals that he knows Mizu is a woman and she threatens him to not tell others. It is clear that Mizu sees the need to continue to be seen as a man to operate within her cultural context in the way that she wants to. When Mizu spars with Mikio, demonstrating her skills in a fundamentally masculine art, he calls her an "abomination." This mirrors the use of this term as it is repeatedly applied to her being of mixed ancestry. Mizu violates social norms by her mere existence and further violates them by being skilled in combat. While she can do nothing escape being of partially white ancestry, she can adopt the persona of a man to mitigate the degree to which she is perceived as an abomination, and so she does. Finally, in the climatic clash with Fowler, he discovers Mizu to be a woman, and perceives this as giving him power over her that he did not hold when they were on the equal footing of combat. The introduction of her being a woman to the scenario changes things and unbalances their dynamic.

Indeed, in most circumstances, a gender imbalance grants Fowler and other men power over women. This is seen most especially in the courtesans and other sex workers. As women and as sex workers, they are tools or things for the men to use as they see fit, to gain sexual gratification. The social norms of Edo japan dictates that women are subservient to men, and this expectation is often shown throughout the series. For this reason, Mizu sees the need to escape her woman-hood and adopt the guise of man. She transcends what should have been her social station through gender performance. We might draw a parallel to how she conceals her eyes with glasses. Just as the glasses cover an aspect of her that ought to ostracize her from society, so too does the guise of man cover her being a woman and allow her to step outside of societal limitations.

However, we can see Akemi's journey as a foil to that of Mizu's. Akemi begins her story very much trapped by the gendered expectation of her society. Her father plans to marry her off as he sees fit, and she is unable to exercise agency over her life except through placating him in a manner that conforms to gender expectations. She must play the role of a subservient daughter to get what she wants and marry Taigen. But this modicum of control is proven false when her father changes his mind and decides Taigen is unworthy and she is to marry the Shogun's son. The gendered role of subservience is seemingly proven too much for Akemi to overcome. She is trapped by it.

But then we see Akemi attempt to defy her father and strike out on her own. In that act, she finds the best way for her to actualize her desires is to again conform to a gender role, that of a courtesan. In that role, and using her sexual appeal as a tool, she is able to convince the flesh-seller to take her where she wants to go. This pathway of sexuality as a tool for agency is then reinforced Madam Kaji's business where we see sexuality as an area in which women can demonstrate power over men. It is arguable that the power they exercise here is not actual, as it is still within the framework of men receiving what they desire from the appearance of subservience to women, but the men still hold all the power in the exchange. They are the one's paying for it. It is a service and as such is something they engage with willingly and in the "real world" of day to day life women are still ultimately subservient to men. The momentary reversal of power dynamics in a way reinforces the status quo because the men chose when that role reversal happens and when it ends. (I would draw a parallel to Saturnalia ultimately acting as a reinforcement of slave/free power dynamics in ancient Rome.)

Nevertheless, Akemi has found one area in which she can exercise power. It is still within a system of patriarchy, but while she cannot escape that system she can find expressions of agency within it through her sexuality. We see this when she marries the Shogun's son and earns his trust and affection through her sexuality. The act of her doing so is framed as her backing off of an aggressive action and assuming the role of a subservient wife. Her tone of voice and word choice makes this clear. She embodies the role of the placating woman so as to better position herself to later exercise power. This is perhaps why she does not want to run away with Taigen at the end of the season. Akemi has found that she can be powerful by embodying her social role rather than by running from it. This is a clear contrast to Mizu who found power and agency by refusing the societal role of her gender.

To be clear, I am not about to argue that Mizu is trans. As I said above, that would not be historically accurate to label an Edo era person by modern categories. Moreover, while Mizu is clearly fine being seen as a man when it suits her, she never directly identifies as such. Indeed, in an exchange with Mikio, Mizu expresses that she has felt forced to embody manhood out of necessity and her mother's demands for secrecy. I am unsure if the creators of the show have commented on this, but I would argue that Mizu is cis-gendered who willingly violates gender roles of her society without that violation being part of her identity.

Finally, there are a number of points that we could find further aspects of gender being explored. Seki comments how he tried to be a good "mother" for Akemi, despite being a man. Taigen shows clear sexual attraction to Mizu despite it being ambiguous as whether he knows her to be a woman. Sexuality in general is an interesting topic for this show, as it is most often framed in terms of gendered power dynamics (as discussed above), and homosexuality only appears in contexts meant to denote sexual perversion. That and an inferred chemistry between Mizu and Akemi, but that is head-cannon territory.

I hope this is a good avenue for further discussion on this topic, and I hope we can engage in it respectfully and productively. Please, tell me your thoughts on what I have laid out and if there is anything I missed.

#blue eye samurai #media analysis #gender stuff

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mogai-sunflowers · 8 months

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Is it okay to be a butch and to like using dresses and skirts? I don't feel feminine in them, and honestly my entire identity and self lives and breathes masculinity, but I feel I don't really play the part of a butch

woooooh baby here's something i could talk about for hours: butch is so much more than a fashion style. people do tend to place a lot of importance on that when talking about being butch, but just as with any other queer identity, there are as many ways to be butch as there are butches. for one person butchness may be about dressing in a traditionally masculine way, for someone else it can be taking T, for someone else it can be just being queerly masculine- it's all subjective but in relation to queer masculinity. if butch feels like it fits for you, then you're a butch, no matter whether or not you also like/embrace femininity. hell, the whole point of butchness in the first place is that it challenges cisheteronormative gender roles- so fuck them. there is no gender role of being butch that looks the same for every single butch. butch isn't one thing and it would be counterproductive to take a term about freedom from gender roles, and turn right back around and enforce it as a strict role that can't be flexible or mean different things for different people.

#🌌written in the stars ; asks🌌

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celluloidbroomcloset · 7 months

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Queering Steed

A few thoughts I been thinking, with the obvious caveat that these are just my thoughts and are neither comprehensive nor meant to be the sole reading. I'd really just like to have the discussion.

Placing a queer reading on Steed is entirely legitimate, but I think it can carry with it some assumptions about gender and sexuality that actually becomes slightly more regressive than is intended.

Obviously, The Avengers aired during a time when you could not have explicitly queer characters in mainstream TV or film. So any depiction of queerness—essentially anything that was not aligned with heteronormative culture—had to be placed in subtext, to greater and lesser degrees. This leaves out the intentionality of the writers/producers themselves in conceiving of Steed, and very likely of Patrick Macnee himself. Steed, onscreen, cannot be gay.

Steed's nearest secret agent counterparts are James Bond, himself a deeply stereotypical male role, complete with aggressive misogyny, and Napoleon Solo, less stereotypical and aggressive, still relatively sexist. Bond himself was supposed to be a model for Steed, which Macnee dismissed out of hand. The Avengers increasingly and deliberately played with gendered and sexual stereotypes, subverting established roles. This in itself reads as queering the characters, to a degree, because they're stepping outside of heteronormative assumptions about masculine and feminine roles. Later seasons come to rely on camp aesthetics to further enforce the heightened, comedic nature of the show and its relationships.

But I think that part of the success of The Avengers was in showing ostensibly heterosexual characters relating to each other outside of heteronormative roles. Steed clearly sleeps with women - early episodes show him dating women, flirting with women, and imply that he goes to bed with women. But he is also represented as a heterosexual man who sees women as equals, in direct contradiction to his nearest secret agent brethren. He is represented as a heterosexual man who can be bested by a woman without it reducing or "questioning" his masculinity, either for himself or for the audience. Steed is represented as a heterosexual man who is not a danger to women—he is not going to harm, assault, attempt to seduce (or rape) any woman who comes within his orbit.

Steed's implied heterosexuality I think is important, at least as a potential reading (even if other potential readings are equally as valid in their own ways), because it is one of the few representations of a heterosexual male character, and a secret agent at that, whose heterosexuality is not dangerous or inherently predatory. He belies assumptions that straight men are "natural predators," the argument made by characters like Bond.

#the avengers #john steed #patrick macnee #james bond #queer readings

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sir-klauz · 1 year

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Finally going to see Placebo this month as a gift to myself after very difficult few years, my Gender band. What I mean by that, is I come from living as a very sheltered home educated kid with not really much exposure to people my own age and whatnot unless they were my family or step family, and adding to that the closest town were also classed as the arse end of nowhere as well.

Before the internet thank fk finally boomed with pride and freedom for trans people, I didn’t have a clue about anything to do with how I’d been feeling since I could perceive myself I guess, and a sit reached it’s peak by 14 or so when distanced myself (already wanted to for years) binary clothing that made my days 10 times worse, along with expectations of gender roles and more. I started dating as a queer I suppose, androgynous person after finding Placebo and learning about Brian Molko and with him being androgynous and bringing expression to their shows about this, about he was a guy wearing a skirt, about queer love, sex and relationships, and helping me find pieces together and smooth my brain ache from not fitting with the binary and expectations I was pressured to endure masquerading as a cis het.

This later on, by about 16 (came out at 17 or end of 16 and figured I was bi when I was 16 properly and came out), (around the time I noticed the boom in acceptance for us and community building finding one another online) paved the way to finally realising to the full extent of what I 100% am, and which is a bisexual/queer/gay man who cross dresses regularly and enjoys it but remains happy with his masculinity and femininity but is very much the soul of a man who enjoys divine clothing if it wasn’t for the difficulty of expressing that freely in life (got assaulted over it and abused in the past for it or not accepted by loved ones all so it made me less confident at points) and sexually correctly and have been mostly ever since unless I was being abused into performing once again as my assigned gender with the promises of “I’ll love you more now/ill love you that way/I am not gay, but if you’re straight edge binary I will date you/I’ll date you, build the bond, then try convert you to being binary for my own sake/I see you as my Brother from a partner whilst they were dating me, ew, to try and get rid of my cross dressing etc. or enforce it beyond what I was comfortable with for my own presentation or not idk tbh they didn’t wanna be classed as gay either”. It’s been a whirlwind on that level but I found people absolutely not like this to continue on the dating path and whatnot which lead to the discovery I was polyamorous and unfortunately met a couple of people who said they were poly but just cheated on me or tried cheating on their partners with me and expecting everyone to just Be Hurt at their cheating whims. Poly people are not cheaters. Keep that in mind. We won’t cheat with you if we are practicing polyamory how it’s meant to be done. I’ve gone onto a tangent a little but in my head it relates to my sexuality as well and coming out in other ways so I included it.

So this band means a lot, on the level MCR does to me and if you have been around for a while and know me, you know how much I adore that band as well. It’s even more great that MCR are also pioneering lgbtqia+ rights as well as once again expressing their own part in the community and how they feel and dressing how they want to.

I’m very excited, I just need to dig out some of my old skirts now and do ye olde makeup. 💄 I cannnotttt wait. That’s two gigs for the first time in years and I am Living that it’s two bands that mean the world to me and help with my understanding of myself and growing up with things I love in a town or village that just don’t really accept, support or understand it. That one goth andro dude in a skirt at the park with his mates who were all hippies or wore mainstream stuff, it Did Not Work but they loved me during that time even though they had no idea what was going on aha, and eventually a few others came out and that’s what I feel privileged for, that I can pass on what I know too and be the arms they can come out to when they aren’t getting that anywhere else in sheltered or fascist filled places around the world. I try do so online, no so much anymore and I can’t put into my activism as much as I’m a tired parent now but I do try here and there as they’re my firm beliefs I hold dear, and they supported me when I had nothing. Nothing in a sense of nothing to understand what was happening that was killing me, or people who even got it, but I’ve found a few more and learned a lot, and many on the internet, and it’s been wonderful to of found this band funnily enough suggested to me by someone who wasn’t even keen on me coming out in the first place but I think she got over it. Charming young man in a skirt and eyeliner? It’s not that hard to sway a beautiful lady that way haha.

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aloverpriedout · 2 years

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Im gonna ramble about gender just need to vent feel free to ignore it but if u have some advice uh pls? help?

...

So Ive been questioning my gender lately and honestly its been gettin increasingly annoying to try and talk to people about it. And I havent been talking to cishet people btw

I start to explain what lead me to question my gender, how I spent a week dressing and behaving in stereotypical "male" form and how I liked it. The overwhelming reaction has been "the things that you said made you question your gender arent specific to guys" and "gender is a social construct you dont have to be restrained by it"

Just to be clear, the things I described were: using clothes from my male friends, not using any makeup, always be using a sports bra so flatter chest, no water to shower so always sweaty and hairy, just hanging out with guys while drinking beers, getting euphoric feeling when somwone told me my voice sounded deeper, getting euphoric feeling when sitting down and realized I was manspreading and it kinda seemed like there was something in my pants, hearing a trans gay guy describe how one way he knew he was trans was that he didnt feel like he liked man the way women do and relating, feeling euphoric when using a strap-on,...

I feel like all of these things combined are a strong indicator but everytime I try to have this conversations people get stuck in the "a girl can do all those things they arent specific to guys" and "gender is a social construct you can just dismiss it :)" argument. Ive tried to explain that yes of course it is but i dont wanna dismiss it! i like to be called pretty boy and boyfriend and dude it makes me happy! Being a girl with underarm hair is cool but u know what would be cooler? being a guy with underarm hair!! They just go back to explaining why gender is a framework that u dont have to exist in

I think theyre just really passionate about the way they interact with gender? or maybe theyre scared I havent thought about that possibility and are trying to get me to see all possibilities? I just feel like people should be more careful with that stuff because it just comes out as dismissive.

Ive always been playful with gender and never enforced gender roles or signifiers and Ive always identified as queer which in my mind extended to gender stuff. But to openly say that I might be trans is hard and the way people are dealing with it is not making it easier

anyway thats all rant over

...

actually rant not over I lied. This is hard to say because I absolutely love my gf but she has been uh not completely cool?

As soon as my gf showed an interest in girl clothes i gave her my clothes to try on, and I started using more girly ways to adress her (like calling her pretty instead of handsome) so she could see how she felt, and I avoided any type of negative comment when related to an expression of femininity. Basicay I just tried to make it a safe space for experimentarion.

Meanwhile when I shaved my head my gf said "you almost look like a boy! Thank god u dont actually look like one or we would have to break up". I just feel like thats the type of thing you should be careful with. That set me back a whole year on experimenting with gender. It really hurts that she was so careless when shes supposed to know how important this stuff is

....

Ok rant over now no one has to read it Im just used to talking to my gf about this but its not really an option now so Im writing it out

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leministfesbian · 4 months

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Do you know how being homosexual is considered "a lifestyle"? I am so tired of being stuffed into a box for happening to be romantically and sexually attracted to women. It feels like I and others are being Othered intentionally, even if we did nothing wrong. The only thing I do is watch EmiSue clips, read F/F fanfiction, and basically crave for anything women related because I am tired of men taking everything all the time. I am not even dating anyone, yet I am still pointed at solely for my attractions, like I am gross for not liking men.

I understand your frustration. It really shoudn't be considered a lifestyle. I think it has all to do with gender (as a heteronormative construct that is used as a tool by patriarchy to oppress women).

Gender as I see it is constructed to put women in a subordinate role and men in a dominant role. They are enforced in all aspects of society, also in straight relationships (which lead to reproduction and the enforced dominant role of the father/husband). Gender roles are "naturalized" (read: enforced/uphold) in straight relationships.

By being gay/lesbian and not participating in these straight relationships, you are viewed as a "threat" to these gendered structures.

I believe this is why lesbians and gay men are so othered and prosecuted throughout history/the world. You are seen as a gender traitor. At my high school, you would be bullied and accused as a lesbian if you performed femininity incorrectly (and if you were a feminine boy you would be called homophobic slurs). In the first half of the 20th century European sexologists considered homosexuals as sexual inverts and sometimes even as the third sex. In cultures that have "third gender roles" you see most often very feminine gay men being pushed in the third gender, so they are literal outcasts of patriarchy.

Luckily, in an increasing number of countries we have fought successfully for equal laws for LGB people (I don't know where you live of course), but societal sctructures/beliefs are hard to break down. Conservatives sometimes still see same-sex attraction as a threat to "family values" and therefore a "dangerous lifestyle".

So being gay/lesbian is associated with otherness/gender traitors. And because we are put in this specific space of otherness and try to build community together and advocate for our rights, we also get subcultures among LGB people themselves. It becomes more than just a sexual orientation.

While of course, being gay/lesbian is just being exclusively attracted to the same sex. It is a neutral scientific category. I believe if we wouldn't live in patriarchy, we wouldn't have homophobia or at least not in the same way... It would still be a minority sexual orientation, so some people might have prejudice or make jokes about it, but it wouldn't be institutionally discriminated against.

This is why I think it is important for our gay activism to state that being gay/lesbian/bisexual is just a sexual orientation, a scientific category, which is a minority but normal and healthy. It shouldn't mean anything more. And this is also why I'm opposed to queer theory, which is all about breaking norms and being proud that you are "weird/other" (which enforces the idea that being gay is weird...). Or breaking down categories and saying homosexuality/biological sex doesn't exist (which is obviously harmful for lesbians/gay men).

#asks

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significantouther · 5 months

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About classifications such as neutral being used universally as abinary. Etymologically neu means neither, and utrum (tral) means either, grammatically denominating common gender in lexemes.

So I believe it's justified at least to group unaligned with neutral and nonbinary. Neutrois used to mean nonbinary and nonbinary used to be a nongender (negation of binary).

I tend to be generalist about my gender so I believe it's all intertwined.

I also experience an identity that's often classified as simply transfem third gender by minimalists. And there's an overlap in certain cultures that orientation nonconforming people were also grouped with third sexes, just because they deviated from norms and had lexemes to describe such experiences way before homosexual and transgender were coined.

So it's binaristic/dualistic not just genderly but also orientationally. It enforces a currently false rigidity in concepts.

But at the same time I feel the need to describe a neutral aliagender (or a singular/monogender/single/monolithic nonbinariness) that isn't otheringly

Words, specially such that are complex as gender words, are more than their etymology, but "neutrum" is actually the Latin term for neither and it's formed by ne- (not) + utrum (whether, both, either), so basically "not either"

When I came out neutrois was one of the few terms those outside the binary had to describe our genders beyond terms relating to male or female, fem or masc, or terms like bigender, genderfluid, demigender, etc (that describe the how and not the what), but it wasn't synonymous with nonbinary

There was a clear division between androgyne (which encompassed anything in between/a mix/ a combination between male/masc and female/fem) and neutrois (which emcompassed anything unrelated to male/masc and female/fem)

Nonbinary wasn't a thing yet. Terms like genderqueer and intergender (og non-exclusive definition) were used instead

And there's an overlap in certain cultures that orientation nonconforming people were also grouped with third sexes, just because they deviated from norms and had lexemes to describe such experiences way before homosexual and transgender were coined.

Orientation and gender have always been interwined, even in western binary cultures. not queer person is fully inside the binary (although they can be aptobinary), because the binary not just legitimate maleness and femaleness, but specific types that are cis, gender conforming, perisex, allo and peri-hetero. The difference is that while western society still tried to binarise the very same people it excluded, these societies recognised and still recognise queer people as distinct social categories with different roles than pericisallohet men and woman.

(we could also discuss how gender is always cultural and how the universalisation of man and woman are also part of colonialism and binarism and that gender actually shouldn't be translated, but 99% of people aren't ready for that conversation)

Colonialism not only affected gender expressions, but also orientations that diverged from western binary ideas, and "third gender" was an easy way to clasify all these divergent identities, not only to easily study them, but also to easily and legally erase and persecute them.

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candytheartmajor · 9 months

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5 things to Know about Social Media Policy and Community Standards

What if you were working for a platform, but you weren’t getting paid for it? What is a platform decided to silence you? Here are some ways you might be being exploited by online platforms.

Digital Labour

Monitoring discourse is a very important task in social media as we have all experienced. Though this is not ideal for most people this is something that most platforms do not feel that they are responsible for. As a result, it is up to the users to take on that role, not just by creating content that will keep the platform active and alive, but also to police that content without pay or any form of compensation, These people are regarded as venture community managers. An example of this would be people who tweet and post responses to misogyny and racism online

2. Black Twitter

A more specific example of this would be black twitter. Black twitter is a very core part of twitter that often is at the forefront of modern trends. This online space is comprised of black people who post for black people. Black twitter is comprised of a lot of people that take on these roles of online policy enforcers, reporting users who participate is racism, homophobia, and many other forms of bigotry. People of colour, particularly women of colour, according to Lisa Nakamura are prone to taking these roles across all platforms. (Nakamura, 2015) I myself have experienced this as a woman of colour. Constantly feeling obligated to report misogyny and racism online.

3. Online Discrimination on Facebook

Why aren’t the policies being enforced by the platform itself? Bigotry is clearly against their policy guidelines so one would think that community guidelines should be enforced by the platform, but what if the platform is the source of the problem. In 2017 a study was done that showed fakebook’s moderators artificial and real are trained to favor majority groups over minorities. One of their training tests revealed that the platform favored white men over women who drive cars and black children. These kinds of things that cause people to have to moderate themselves. This is what happens when you cannot trust the very platforms you sign up to use.

4. The TikTok Algorithm

TikTok is another company who has shown clear bias in regard to the minority groups among community members. In September of 2022 TikTok was accused of censoring content pertaining to The LGBTQ+ community. They have done this through something called shadow banning, which is when the platform will, unbeknownst to the users, will reduce the visibility of content be banning a hashtag or a particular content creator for their own purposes. These actions to censor the LGBTQ+ community was to appease conservative countries. The platform was banning particular words that would lead people to LGBTQ+ content. They also shadow banned content relating to the Black lives matter content during the George Floyd protests. Banning words and content means that the user would only be able to search for particular hashtag or creator in order to access their content. The hashtag and the creator would be virtually invisible to mainstream media.

5. The Influencer Economy, Brand Safety and LGBTQ+ Community

Influencers are now a billion-dollar industry for advertisers and a lot of these influencers overlap with the LGBTQ+ community. There is a $1 Trillion blind spot for marketing when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. This is because queer and non gender conforming creators are deemed as unsafe for brands. An example of this would be the Dylan Mulvaney. A trans creator who in early 2023 was offered a brand deal with Bud Light. Dylan appeared in a video where she was seen receiving a custom can with her face on it and drinking the beverage. This video sparked outrage in among Bud Light’s Conservative base, with them sharing videos of destroying Bud Light products. While this was occurring, Dylan was personally being attacked online and in real life. She began to fear for her safety and fled from the US. Bud light did not support her throughout her horrifying experience and have not contacted her since.

Related Sources:

Nakamura, L. (2015). The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call Out Culture As Venture Community Management. New Formations, 86(86), 106–112. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.86.06.2015

Trusolino , M. (2023). Social Media Policy & Community Standards [Power Point Slides].

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caffeineandsociety · 1 year

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I feel it's long past time to put "if you're not X, you benefit from people hating X" on the shelf and not bring it back down for ANYTHING except discussions of racism specifically as it was meant for, because...it's just straight up not true about most anything else.

Sure, in zero-sum games like hiring pools or classrooms full of raised hands, where one person being knocked out of the running increases your odds, then not being part of the immediately dismissed outgroup is an unearned benefit, but-

1: Other axes of marginalization are not as visible nor as permanent as race and its related factors. Racism was convenient to invent because it's about hereditary markers that are usually VERY visible. You are the same race from birth to death, no matter what you do (though Jewishness as an ethnicity carries some exceptions to that point, but that's a can of worms WAY too big for this post). Your kids will not be a different race from their parents, so their roles will not change along family lines (hence why interracial relationships were - and to many assholes still are - a big deal hot button issue). Racism is as clean-cut as an axis of oppression gets (which is STILL extremely messy) about who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group.

Other axes are not so simple.

Race is the main thing people are oppressed on that is pretty strictly hereditary - it's in your genes, no way in, no way out, and the odds of surprise discovery that you're not the race you thought you were are very low (though importantly, not nonexistent). On the other hand, anyone's kid can turn out to be queer or disabled, and in fact, anyone can become disabled at any given moment. Both of these factors are often invisible. Women can be born to anyone by the basic nature of how human reproduction works; roughly half the population at any given moment will be women whether by birth designation or transition - which ties back to the previous "anyone in the in-group can become the out-group" factor again. As such, these things are enforced differently. A racist will ignore and/or abuse people who are visibly, or invisibly but known to be, not white. A misogynist will also ignore and/or abuse people who appear to be women...but they will also abuse people who appear to be men who present too feminine, because they're failing to live up to their assigned gender role and, especially now in the midst of a moral panic, they may be on the verge of Joining The Enemy. In fact, they may already BE The Enemy - no willful misogynist thinks of trans men as men! They see a man who's a bit short, maybe a bit wide-hipped, a little baby-faced, and they'll start bullying him relentlessly and trying to ~revoke his man card~. If they find out he IS trans, he's at risk for corrective rape and other violence to ~teach him his place~. The systemic restriction and ignorance and underdevelopment of gynecological healthcare is a construct of misogyny, but bigots consider it a BENEFIT when it can be used against trans and intersex men as well for Being Men Wrong, because anyone with a vagina or a uterus or ovaries or fallopian tubes or whatever is Lesser to them, and they HATE that they can't always tell who that is; someone who has them "in secret" is typically considered by a bigot to be even MORE deserving of abuse than a cis woman. A queerphobe isn't JUST going to attack people with pride gear, people who are openly affectionate toward their same-gender partner(s), non-passing trans people, or whoever else is well and truly openly, visibly queer - no, they're going to go after ANYONE whose behavior overlaps even a LITTLE with common things in queer subcultures, flip absolute shit over platonic displays of affection, and invent new hand-based phrenology to try and figure out Who The Enemy Is. Disability? Society hates disabled people so much that it built itself around systemic denial of human limitations - it demands too much of even abled people; it's just WORSE to disabled people, because it wants to filter out the ~unworthy~, whether they have a diagnosable disability or not.

No one benefits from these systems, not even the enforcers who are holding themselves and each other to an unreasonable standard of conformity because they think they're playing a huge high-stakes game of Among Us. No shortage of people who, nominally, are not part of the intended out-group are STILL attacked as such because you just can't tell. Any random person is at risk of sexist and queerphobic violence. Anyone is at risk of ableist bullshit. Even the most benign nonconformity with no links whatsoever to any kind of formally recognized marginalized status can be attacked, because it's about stupid, pointless, reactionary fear of the unfamiliar, AND about trying to suss out visible markers of who The Enemy really is. Absolutely no one, save for the grifters stoking the fear of People Being Different so they can sell scared people a solution, sees what I would consider a true net benefit from this!

2: "If you are white, you benefit from racism" is only about 10% at most about ANY of that; it's more about how much of American and white European cultures are BUILT on the exploitation of POC. In America specifically, it was mostly enslaved Black people who built the south and a good chunk of the north. This isn't something we can keep sweeping under the rug. If it weren't for chattel slavery, one of the absolute worst atrocities humanity has ever invented, this entire country would look EXTREMELY different. Thanks to a history of Jim Crow laws, an "it's only illegal if you get caught" attitude toward modern nondiscrimination laws (which is not exclusive to racism), and the nepotistic nature of racism, the benefits are STILL mostly concentrated in the hands and control of white people. America is built on stolen land; very little would change for the average American if we remedied this today and what WOULD change would be a gentle transition for most, but the infrastructure we have now wouldn't look the same had it been built cooperatively as the myth states, and in fact it might not be as "impressive" according to our current cultural values - not because indigenous people are stupid savages, but because the construction was so obscenely exploitative; white colonizers valued unsustainable, artificially accelerated growth and "modernization" as a marker of Civilization(TM). Many of the necessary, life-sustaining functions of society that are hidden from the average white American, from manufacturing of medication to the food supply chain, that labor is STILL largely performed by exploited, underpaid POC immigrants and enslaved prisoners (i.e., largely Black men).

While other oppressed groups are frequently exploited for labor (see: Goodwill paying subminimum wages to disabled people and claiming it to be charity because they're so graciously LETTING them work), NONE of these things can be said of any other axis of oppression.

This is ESPECIALLY pertinent - and the abuse of the language especially insulting - when it's used for infighting amongst queer subgroups. No, Becky, ace girls DO NOT benefit from lesbophobia; they are exploited by it, they're constantly scrutinized to make sure they're Feminine Enough but not in like a gay femme way and pressured into relationships with men they don't even like to "prove" they're not lesbians. Cis lesbians are not exempt, let alone benefitting, from transmisogyny; have you not heard of how many cis butches have been assaulted in bathrooms because someone thought they were trans? In fact, sexuality be damned, do you think sexually violating children for playing sports too well not only doesn't hurt them but BENEFITS them if the genital inspector says "congratulations, your pussy passes the vibe check, welcome back to the team!"? Trans medical gatekeeping laws may have transandrophobic justifications, but I don't exactly see them NOT getting used against trans women, and they make life for intersex people even more complicated when a medical team isn't sure what framework to use to violate our bodily autonomy and force us to conform. Hell, even straight men do not benefit from homophobia against gay men; they're just forced deeper and deeper into an ever-shrinking box that demands they break and numb themselves out of feeling anything but anger, greed, and WOOOO SPORTSBALL AND EXPLOSIONS!! and neglect their basic living needs, because if they clean their asses and learn to feed themselves and do their own laundry that's ~GAAAAaaAAaaAaAY~.

The only people who benefit from any form of queerphobia are far-right grifters and their benefactors. End of.

"But, hold on, they still do benefit from not being part of the intended target group! They may not be exempt, but they are at LOWER risk of being hurt by these things! That counts for something!"

Be that as it may, consider the linguistic implications here. People may be less DISadvantaged by their non-marginalized identities, but they do NOT inherently BENEFIT from the bigotries - saying "you benefit from [BIGOTRY]" to mean "you are at lower risk of direct violence based on [BIGOTRY]" implies that being at high risk for violence is what we should accept as a baseline, and low but extant risk is a luxury.

Which.

Uh.

No.

This language does not work for anything but racism. Applying it to anything else is not only naively racist but also actively detrimental to whatever cause you're applying it to.

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sistahscifi · 2 years

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Yall know we love recommending An Unkindness of Ghosts! It's science fiction, queer, and Black AF. We have our last set of signed hardcovers of the title that @akashicbooks made available to us. Ten years from now you will be able to tell your SFF book club you have Rivers Solomon debut novel in hardcover signed by the author. They will look at you in disbelief, and one smart alex will say "Impossible. It was printed straight to paperback." Then you will take out your signed hardcover! Purchase link in bio: @sistahscifi | www.sistahscifi.com Reposted from @anishinaabekwereads 💫 An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 💫 I was obsessed with every page of this book. I only had a vague idea of what I was getting into. All I really knew was this was sci fi and had a wide range of diverse representations regarding sexuality, gender, race, and neurodivergence. You know how sometimes you read books that feel almost like the rep is in it just to check a box? Yeah, 100% NOT this book. Every single character and element felt as if they were created effortlessly with important roles to play in this story set on the SS Matilda, a large spaceship (?) in search of a new world. The ships inhabitants, including our main character Aster, are generations removed from having fled earth for reasons that are never entirely clear. What is clear is that humanity has carried on in earnest with enforcement of caste and enslavement, especially as it relates to the color of one’s skin. Aster is a lowerdeck person who has incredible medical knowledge and assists Matilda’s Surgeon General. I want to say here that Aster is consistently referred to as “she” throughout the novel, but Aster makes clear gender is more complex than that, even if society is determined to treat one’s body as “male” or “female.” Listen, there’s a lot to this novel, but reading this as Roe v. Wade was overturned made me focus keenly on all the ways many characters in this novel try to attain bodily autonomy in a world where hierarchy, gender, and race give a select few power over how we move through the world (or universe). #SistahScifi #anunkindnessofghosts #riverssolomon #blackscifi #blackscifiauthors https://www.instagram.com/p/Cgu7QHJPMKD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#sistahscifi #anunkindnessofghosts #riverssolomon #blackscifi #blackscifiauthors

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