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[roseoftralee]

My father sent this to me this week so I think it is fitting that I share:

Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

[Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books (available from The Crossing Press). Reprinted in Sister

Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Crossing Press:1984]

[roseoftralee]

"It was a painful moment. I could feel for Allison and for the girl, too, though Connie and I didn’t have any pets, not even one of the new hypoallergenic breeds. There was a larger sadness at play here, the sadness of attachment and loss and the way the world wreaks its changes whether we’re ready for them or not. We would have got through the moment, I think, coming to some sort of understanding—Allison wasn’t vindictive, and I wasn’t about to raise a fuss—but that same breeze swept across the lawn to flip back the edge of the T-shirt and expose the eyeless head of the pig, and that was all it took. Allison let out a gasp, and the dog— that crimson freak—jerked the leash out of the girl’s hand and went right for it."

This short story about a world where eugenics-esque genetic control is widely available (especially to upper classes) and used and how these genetically modified people and animals fit into the world. There is a motif of the supposed control that humans now have over their environment being an illusion through which nature will always emerge. Interacts with both The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and The Cancer Journals in the way it deals with physical augmentation, genetic and medical ethics, as well as silence and conformity. In the way this story fails to address these issues as well as how it succeeds, it reveals the way these issues are thought about and discussed.

[roseoftralee]

I was stopped mid sentence when I read this claim: "Scientists use these samples to develop everything from flu vaccines to penis-enlargement products" (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Afterword, p. 316). The "samples" in question here are genetic samples collected sometimes without ethical transparency by US medical practitioners.

I was sort of stuck on the penis enlargement products because from what I knew of that industry, it was all a sham designed to prey on manufactured insecurity—not related to the trafficking of human genetic material. However, I stumbled across a recent and bizarre trend, not just in penis enlargement, but it cosmetic surgery as an industry: that of stem-cell based cosmetics.

Also populated with false claims and scams, this warning from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons covers how early in development stem-cell treatments are and how they are already being used to deceive consumers. While I don't disapprove of people who want cosmetic enhancement, even penis enlargement—though I stress that there is no evidence of any viable methods for that anywhere they are all scams your penis is fine—as well as many other cosmetic enhancements, there is something vaguely eugenics adjacent about the cisheteronormative construction of ideal bodies that we must all strive to achieve—something that seems to lurk behind certain cosmetic trends. How race intersects with this phenomenon of after-birth feature selection and erasure...it all feeds into this poisonous drive toward the ultimate, the perfect, but only according to dominant standards dictated downward.

[roseoftralee]

by M.K. Dhital

"But fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate response to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence." - Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 6/20/80