#hegemonic white culture

[egoschwank]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1224

first posted in facebook october 14, 2023

reggie burrows hodges -- "bathers and the cleansed: pearl" (2021)

"i start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. i'm painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space" … reggie burrows hodges

"using matte-black paint to render the backgrounds of his canvases, as well as the bodies and faces of his figures, this black american painter makes ingenious use of so-called negative space as both a metaphor for hegemonic white culture and an expression of memory’s blur" … johanna fateman

"in the new body of work 'bathers and the cleansed', hodges revisits the art-historical trope of a female bather and presents her in various states of activity, from a moment of respite to exiting the bathtub. while the expressive marks and layered colors appear soft, even sensual, hodges’s paintings honor the characters—washing away centuries of culturally imposed eroticism on the black female body. by doing so, the painter imbues his bathers with a quiet agency as they occupy and reclaim their histories within the domestic sphere" … portland museum of art

"figures created by hodges are made sharper, and more haunting, not because we see those things in their eyes, we see it in their bodies, their postures, the endless desire for humans not to be alone, and to connect. to that hodges adds all that wonderful blackness" … hilton als

"i wanna see it painted, painted black black as night, black as coal i wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky i wanna see it painted, painted, painted painted black, yeah" … mick jagger

"i see a white tub and i want it painted black" … al janik

[obstreperous-orbisian]

Jsyk academic writers don't know how to use the word "judeo-christian" either

Taken from a school reading, idk the book but the chapter is called "Return of the Mecca" about black art through the lens of Islam, black power, and anticolonialism

[anissapierce]

Unfortunately my reputation is probably this fictional community character played by matt gourley

https://youtu.be/083NxNzhmCU

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.

[akajustmerry]

i just won't argue whether ananormativity is a thing. i am sorry but there literally isn't a single aspect of ananormativity that isn't actually just heterosexual patriarchy. no one is oppressing you for being single or having "atypical" partnerships because of "romantic supremacy," they're oppressing you because we a) live in a society where monogamous heterosexual marriage between men and women is the only truly approved relationship by the state because it upholds patriarchy and the oppression of non-men and b) we live in a hyper-capitalist context that has made living as a single person harder and harder. you are not being oppressed because of rom-coms or valentines day cards or romance because the "romance" of relationships is not what the state weaponises, its hegemonic ideas of gender and sexuality. if the state gave a shit about romantic status then lgbt peoples in couples would have equal privileges to cis-straight ones. if you truly believe that couples have state and cultural privileges because of romance, you're not acknowledging the reality of abusive partnerships, underage "marriages" and so on. the privleges afforded to couples by the state have next to nothing to do with romance, and everything to do with patriarchy, colonialism and upholding exploitive systems that privilege white cis straight men and the nuclear family.

[drdemonprince]

I think a lot of people are having trouble with the difference between "americans have no culture" and "americans have a culture, but it is a culture of erasure/theft/assimilation/alienation, so of course people within that culture are left wanting something more, and those whose cultures are slowly being subsumed within that dominant monoculture culture feel the threat"

and also people are equating this all with being white and white only, despite the fact that every person earnestly entering into this conversation points out how whiteness as a cultural construction harms and destroys every culture and lots of people who are not white are struggling under these same forces.

it is hegemonic whiteness and capitalism that erode cultures into something that feels like the absence of a culture, and you can be pedantic and say "oh but you do still have a culture every group of humans does" and be completely missing the point being made.

this is a culture of erasing cultural ties and communal ties and that's the problem. there's a profound soul rot at the heart of the dominant culture in american and criticizing that has value and can be done without treating any other culture as if it's magical and pure or set in stone. anybody who has had family histories, records, names, lands, practices, etc destroyed by hegemonic whiteness understands that, i think. or should be able to

[txttletale]

While I don’t disagree with the idea that a lot of the US is quite culturally homogenous, I feel like that ignores the parts of the US that are? There are a lot of towns/cities/regions of the US with a majority nonwhite/immigrant population that then influences its own culture; for example, I’m from an area that’s majority Arab, and I think the local culture generally reflects that! I may be missing some of your argument, or you might just be less granular about it (which is, I think, fair since I don’t think there’s as much actual difference between [x] and [y] state as Americans often like to argue), but I’d argue that there’s a lot of areas across the US which are quite culturally diverse due to that immigrant/nonwhite population. I don’t think this is at all unique of course; most countries have immigrant populations that affect their culture, but I do think it has a noticeable impact on culture in different places, including in the US. I may be approaching this from the wrong angle, though.

right, but other countries have this too, is the thing. like obviously areas with large immigrant (or african-american) communities have more distinct cultures than whiter areas -- but there are also immigrant (and Black, and Jewish, and Romani, and all sorts of other minorities that have their own specific cultural identity while being native to the country they're in, etc.) communities in all those european countries. like obvsies i'm not aruging that there's literally no variation in any culture among anywhere in the usa -- what i'm saiyngi s that mainstream, hegemonic (ie: white settler) culture is unusually hegemonic -- and that aside, the comparing of states to different countries is abjectly silly and chauvinistic, because anyone with the slightest knowledge of the wrold would know that comparing the difference between tennesee and california to e.g. the difference between korea and japan or the difference between france and germany is absurd.

[transmutationisms]

could you talk more on eds and biopolitics?

sure, so this is broad strokes and it's also worth reiterating that the energy deficit characteristic of EDs can have a lot of different causes besides intentional food restriction—food insecurity is a huge and underrecognised factor here but there are many others. so when i talk about intentional restriction and the desire to be thin / lose weight, i'm not suggesting these are universal characteristics or causes of EDs.

anyway though, in the context of discussing these things, and particularly the relationship between 'diet culture' and EDs, a perennial frustration to me is that i often hear people fall back on the idea that the desire to be thin comes about as a result of the beauty standards perpetuated in mass media, fashion adverts, &c, without any subsequent interrogation of why it is that beauty itself is now so heavily dependent on thinness. after all, plenty of people have pointed out this is not a universal; beauty varies in different times and places, what is described or depicted as beautiful in historical records doesn't necessarily have much overlap with today's hegemonic standards, and so forth.

so when historicising this phenomenon it becomes very clear that the euro/anglo standard of thinness as beauty is, one, part of the ideological apparatus justifying colonialism thru the creation of race and white supremacy. sabrina strings and da'shaun harrison have written on this. two, the thin ideal is also inextricably tied up in medical discourses defining the ideal body as one that is economically productive, with the promise being that if the populace can be transformed into 'healthy',*** useful, hardworking citizens, the state benefits. control of bodyweight is therefore certainly a means of demonstrating one's supposed self-control, moral discipline, &c, but it is also a demand expressed in medical terms: these two discourses merge and overlap, and are both part of the capitalist state's transformation of its citizenry into a biological resource that can be controlled, managed, and exploited to bourgeois ends (profit): hence, biopolitics.

(***the story of how 'health' itself comes to be so dependent on thinness is obviously a critical piece of all this but this post is long as shit already so suffice it to say that this conflation is also not obvious, necessary, universal, &c &c)

medico-political discourses in the 19th century tended to talk about the dangers of both over- and under-weight more than what we hear now; similarly, if you think about something like wilbur atwater's calorie-value charts, these were explicitly intended to guide labourers to the most calorie-dense foods, because to atwater the central danger to be avoided was starvation among the workforce. these days in wealthy countries like the us, you are much more likely to hear about weight management in the context of demands to reduce; this is of course following moves like the WHO declaring an 'obesity epidemic' in 1997, and the rise in the usa of more explicitly nationalist, militaristic weight-loss rhetoric in the post-9/11 era.

however, my position is that these demands for thinness, and the beauty standard that follows and justifies them, are not a departure from earlier 19th- and 20th-century scientific nutrition advice, just an evolution that, for a multitude of reasons (politics, medical professional interests, insurance company practices, &c) has simply come to focus more on the ostensible economic and national threat posed by fatness. the underlying logic bears the biopolitical throughline: the state has, or ought to have, an interest in enforcing the health of its population, and as part of this demands that you the individual surveil and alter your weight according to the scientific guidelines du jour.

this is fertile ground for the development of what, in extreme form, we regard as ED pathology. first, because even the most purely 'health'-motivated individual engaging in the required degree of bodily monitoring and caloric restriction is liable to respond to energy deficit in ways that can become diagnosably distressing. second, because the morals of 'health' are never far from standards of beauty; thinness is sold in overtly profitable ways (the diet and weight-loss industries) and furthermore, our idea of beauty is often a kind of post hoc justification for the thinness already being demanded by state and medical authorities. which is really just to say, beauty is part of the ideological superstructure both resulting from and invoked as a justification for the material conditions of capitalist biopolitics. again this is very broad strokes, but imo it is a much more useful framework to understand EDs than simply presenting them as a result of desiring thinness because it is glorified in The Media, because... reasons (essentially the rené girard model, lol).

[genderkoolaid]

Unlike the tailors, factory workers and sailors referred to by Jensen and Beaudry, or the professional male embroiderers working before the advent of the Industrial Revolution referred to by Parker, Thesiger and Grier were amateurs who saw needlework largely in terms of pleasure. Equally important is the fact that Thesiger, as a gay man, and Grier, as a black man, existed outside culturally dominant inscriptions of normative masculinity. Their perceived masculinity cannot, therefore, be read as the binary opposite of women as it was also defined in relation to other men. Thesiger and Grier, as men, were subordinated to prevailing models of hegemonic (white, heterosexual, middle-class) masculinity that occupied the dominant position in their specific historical and social contexts. As such it makes more sense to talk about ‘masculinities’, even the ‘pluralities of masculinities’ or ‘multiple masculinities’. R.W. Connell has suggested if we don’t distinguish between men then there is a danger of ‘multiple masculinities collapsing into a character typology’, especially if some men resist hegemony and embody a ‘symbolic blurring with femininity’ .

— from Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Needlework by Joseph McBrinn

[familyabolisher]

you mentioned something about knights when you were talking about Joan of arc and i was wondering if you could expand on it? or link something that shared your perspective?

a lot of what people are drawing on when they talk about eg. "butch knights" or otherwise use knights as an articulation of a particular (generally non-normative) mode of gender is located within the chivalric imaginary. broadly speaking, chivalry as a european cultural phenomenon emerged in the literature of the late crusading era, largely fermented in the chrysalis of nostalgia for christian conquest and rule of the so-termed 'holy land' in west asia; crusading, in turn, was of course a bloodthirsty practice of christian conquest leading to the slaughter of vast swathes of muslim and jewish populations—cf. for example, the rhinelands pogroms or the aftermath of the siege of jerusalem in 1099, or the siege of maarat in 1098. chivalry as a cultural construct was significantly steeped in a desire to reconcile the military practices of knights with the guidance of the church, and the paradigmatic 'chivalric knight' was one whose military prowess or whatever could be matched by his piety. we see this effort to reconcile the 'worldly' with the spiritual as a galvanising force in much of the key works of chivalric lit; chrétien de troyes' perceval being a key example, or the narrative tensions around lancelot and galahad throughout the arthurian canon. the point is: chivalry is a phenomenon loyal to medieval european christianity, and deference to a medieval imaginary is most often reactionary. (cf., for example, the weight held by nostalgia for the 'chivalric era' in the ruling class of the antebellum american south.)

in chivalry and violence in medieval europe, richard kaeuper writes against the impetus to take the romantic image of the chivalric knight (as we may find in, say, chrétien de troyes) at face value, and urges us as historians to understand instead that many of our sources on the chivalric imaginary were produced as part of a reform effort promoting this idealised cultural construct. the natural follow-on here, of course, is that a reform effort must have a particular political tempering, and—imo—a meaningful queer politic of gender should be capable of understanding and reckoning with that political tempering which continues to hold currency in the present day rather than borrowing what we like and discarding what we don't.

like…knights are a state militia, chivalry is a social relation constructed around that fact, steeped in the presumed supremacy of the church, and loyal to the primary governing power. these very vague ideas around deference to 'ladies' (drawing on a romanticisation of the ruling class, ofc) can't really be separated from their broader social setting and the relations of power that chivalry sought to articulate and affirm. in short: it's very very white and it's very very goyish.

this isn't to say that like, everyone who does this has to Stop Immediately or else they're directly endorsing the ideological thorniness that chivalry invokes, but i do think it's worth spending some time with what it is that makes these cultural histories a) hold currency in the present discourse and b) appeal specifically to a lesbian/butch/transmasc/etc. imaginary. what are we trying to integrate ourselves into and what ideological hegemons are we trying to resist, and are we succeeding? can we be more imaginative?

[also—this was a very broad overview off the top of my largely unqualified head. would recommend going away and reading more about the history of chivalry + chivalric lit + the crusades if you're interested; the kaeuper text is a good starting-point.]

[teamloyalty]

the primary question i’ve been looking to answer through reading books about athletic masculinity is why are there so few openly gay professional athletes?

i have little interest in answers to this question entirely dedicated to practical steps towards increasing the number of out athletes, or proposing reasons why gay men might find sporting environments hostile and avoid them. both of these conversations have a place in the discourse but they’ve been hashed and rehashed a hundred times to little material success. the fact is that gay athletes exist in all possible contexts and despite broadening societal acceptance in the west, few of them have left the closet.

when we ask, “where are the gay athletes?” what we are really asking is: “what about men’s sports is so fundamentally, structurally incompatible with male queerness that the idea of a queer elite athlete is unthinkable to so many?”

from my readings so far, the consensus seems to be: because elite men’s sports provides the blueprint for the norms of masculinity our society deems as ideal, norms of masculinity which actively exclude and in fact defines itself against queerness and anything seem as feminine or feminizing.

straight men who might passively consider themselves accepting of queerness still see an inherent contradiction within the mixing of anything outside conventional masculinity in the realm of men’s sports. women, trans people, queer people, disabled people—these are categories of people that, regardless of personal gender identity, cannot access masculinity in its hegemonic, ideal form. they have no place in a realm with which men engage in order to validate their claim to patriarchal power—an aspiration with undeniable roots in eugenics and the eugenic valorization of the young, abled white body.

women, most out trans people, and many disabled people would not make it into the locker room of an elite men’s sports team in general. that leaves gay men as the most common interloper. and when they are there (because they ARE there; sports environments cannot repel queerness and in fact the male camaraderie they offer often serves to ATTRACT gay men) these inherently unmasculine interlopers must stay silent—DO stay silent—lest they undermine the project at the heart of men’s sporting culture: to legitimatize patriarchy.

because if they did speak up, they’d bring attention to what men’s sporting culture is: really fucking gay.

[spookygibberish]

Hiii! I REALLY love your Thrones and I'd like to ask if I could make one as a oc?

I'm not sure if I've shared enough information about their cultural context publicly for people to do this well, but I have helped my friends workshop Throne OCs before.

Some important stuff to know:

There are two broad classes that most Thrones fall into, private and imperial. Thrones which are private citizens can technically be found all over the empire, on account of the fact they're wealthy enough to go and live wherever the hell they want, but you're going to find the greatest number of them in Godtomb and other densely urbanized areas of the Imperial core. All thrones belong to the aristocracy by nature, as they're directly a product of wealth and privilege. If a Throne is not currently wealthy, they are inevitably descended from wealth. They were also a huge huge fad before the creation of new thrones was clamped down on, and nearly every old money merchant empire is a Throne family. Godtomb (the imperial capital) has the highest number of Thrones which are not associated with the government, as it was the birthplace of the literary movement which first spawned them (longish story). It is tempting to say that private citizen thrones are more diverse than governmental ones, but it's more accurate to say they are more diverse than thrones belonging to the tricolor court, which has fairly strict expectations for the appearances of Headless (quadrupedal; preferences for lions, lizards (varanid), oxen, eagles; a set color palette (gold, azure, white); the inevitable 'mantle' of 'petals', etc....)

Imperial Thrones can be divided along the lines of whether or not they are associated with the Tricolor court, A government body made up of regional power centers (Greathouses) which communicate directly with and contribute to the government in Godtomb. Each Tricolor Greathouse has houses under it which may or may not be aesthetically aligned with the tricolor court, if not directly members, depending on how culturally similar they are to the Hegemony. The further you get from the Bitano, the more likely these Provincial Houses are to differ and be more influenced by non-hegemonic local culture.

By necessity, all Thrones, governmental or not, are inexorably associated with the Empire and their existence functions first and foremost to legitimize its authority. Even in the cases of provinces like Lujnola and Sevab, which are each heavily tied to indigenous cultures (and therefor divergent from Tricolor Court aesthetics), they belong to ruling houses modeled on the Hegemonic standard, and are all vassals of the emperor in Godtomb.

Slightly finer categories:

There are Throne Houses which are not themselves Imperial houses, but are in the employ of Imperial houses. Many of the Thrones produced by these families are more or less born and bred for the military. Prominent members of such Houses (need to come up with a name for these...) often marry into Ruling Houses, although rarely TRICOLOR Houses, since they lack the clout to be competitive in that marriage arena.

There are Sansin Thrones. Sansin are an all-male order of magnyd (essentially the same type of being as Unbodied) that staff the Bibat Temples (of the Jacantese State Religion, they make and manage other sorts of Dangyds.) I will elaborate on Sansin later this post has gotten long but theyre just monks. Its an all-male social caste of monks that grow new members in little jars and sometimes they make their own versions of Headless and assemble their own version of Thrones. These Thrones are smaller, usually bipedal, and always sexless.

Other things to know:

Due to the biological reality of thrones there are headless which are born outside of major Houses. The vast majority of Throne-children are Unbodied (the sort which more or less exactly resemble ordinary humans), and those Unbodied inevitably leak out into the general populous. All Unbodied are capable of parenting a child which is Headless (the lower half of the throne). Headless born outside of major Houses will inevitably be snapped up when discovered. Even prior to the existence of Thrones, Houses can be propagated just as well by apprenticeship.

Not all imperial Thrones are lazy figureheads! Just the majority of them. Some Thrones belong to a guild which is basically Throne Interpol, going around and keeping despotism in check. What happens when one of those guys is corrupt? Don't be silly that doesn't happen and isn't a problem (it is.)

It's more common for Thrones to be generals when in military positions. Thrones tend to be high ranking wherever in whatever employ, not really because they're uniquely qualified, simply because they're Thrones. Many of them have fairly insufferable personalities on account of being treated like they shit gold their entire lives. They're not inherently *bad people*, but they're almost exclusively coddled, spoiled, deeply entitled, and profoundly disconnected people. This is isn't true for every single throne, just like, a solid 99% of them.

[germiyahu]

The way in which people on this site and others unironically with not a shred of self reflection, will say things like "I'm America's biggest hater until a Brit starts speaking!" Like, they understand intrinsically what it's like for an outsider to make blanket judgments about the only culture they've ever lived in and ever known and they immediately decide that their feelings about that are true and valid.

And the response is not even "Well you're one to talk about our problems!" or "Um sweaty things here are far more complex than you understand so maybe leave the criticism to Americans," it's usually just "Rah rah bald eagle screeching go America fourth of July beans on toast OI BRUV!" or some other equivalent mockery of a European (or Canadian/Australian) stereotype.

Even if this is just silly joking, they are performing jingoistic nationalism at the slightest prickling of other Western (usually white) people daring to criticize America, even when it's accurate or in good faith. These Europeans (et al.) aren't even calling for the destruction of America, declaring Americans a dirty evil people who deserve nothing but pain and suffering and any calls to wipe them out are justified and any resistance to that is oppressive. They're just making fun of American aphorisms and the response is unquestioned patriotism. And no other super woke Leftie Americans look at this behavior and say "That's actually problematic." They're in on it.

But these same people couldn't possibly conceive of applying this thought process to an Israeli. That's just a non-starter to them. Like there are based Israelis on this site who are patriotic, who make dank memes and all, that much is true. But I'd say for the average Jew (Israeli or not) to react with extreme jingoism at the gentlest ribbing is just unthinkable. They know the optics of that. But Americans can throw a tantrum about being called out as the hegemonic power in the world and expect everyone to think that's actually really funny and cool.

An American can make jokes about "discovering oil" (the subtext being invasion and devastation) when someone from another country says "Wow Americans don't have electric kettles," but an Israeli can't even politely say "I don't think we all deserve to die because our Prime Minister is a corrupt racist shithead." No that's propaganda and genocide apologia. American privilege is real, I think.

[intersectionalpraxis]

Women will never win.

We're 'ugly' if we don't adhere to white supremacist western hegemonic beauty standards and yet we're fake/vain/vapid/plastic hearted if we do go under the knife or get cosmetic procedures done because of the ways in which we are taught cross-culturally that we must place value on our appearances or no one (aka men) will find us lovable, desirable, or worthy of attention and respect.

We are encouraged to change or enhance ourselves constantly by mainstream media and the beauty industry (especially by those trashdashians), and depending on which industries shake hands with these mentalities to fully exploit those insecurities that are taught to us from the time we learned what would happen if we CHOOSE to walk alone at night -that if we do no matter what some fucking person will have something to say... and in this case a plastic surgeon whose entire business relies on these ageist and sexist double standards when it comes to one's looks because goodness forbid we don't look 25 at 50.

I don't care if these women look mature or older for their age and neither should anyone else. Watching this video was just another painful reminder that women can be put on blast by anyone and our societies often just accept it and laugh at it without critically unpacking those feelings/reactions.

[the-dear-skull]

Fixing the New Norm:

Make it from Chaz' perspective.

That has to infiltrate a family from a hegemonic background to trans them all That has to learn about conservative culture war talking points by pretending to be a white cishet boy. Every episode Chaz breaks and yells about how dumb this is, especially in the current climate. The family (especially Norm) learns that it doesn't matter what beer they drink. What matters is maintaining their community in this divisive world. And Chaz learns more about how the right functions.

Chaz could pretend to date the daughter even though that is attracted to only nonbinary furries or something.

Think Invader Zim meets Imperium.

[drdemonprince]

I mentioned some books already about this but reading these two back-to-back a couple of years ago really cemented a lot of things for me and helped me become a whole hell of a lot less neurotic in talking about hegemonic whiteness as a cultural & economic force, I really recommend them! When I talk about neurotypicality being an ideal that no one actually lives up to, it being a false standard rather than a genuine identity, I am strongly influenced by Harkins' writing about how hillbillies were punished as a "failure of" whiteness, and when I talk about assimilation and cultural erasure Painter's history of how whiteness is created and enforced and how its borders continue to change was really helpful to me.