#i can be quite black and white about categories and dichotomies

[hermitagereheadcanons]

I feel like my tagging system is kind of lacking in terms of type of content, but I have a lot of trouble sorting things into subjective categories. Even just a vent or play regression tag feels difficult to decide, because a lot of my posts don’t have a distinct “this character regresses for fun” or “this character regresses to cope” theme.

I want it to be easier for people to both find and avoid specific types of headcanons but I’m not sure how to go about it. If anyone has tips, I’d love to hear them.

[woman-loving]

Stud and Femme Identities in Chicago

Selection from "Black lesbian gender and sexual culture: celebration and resistance," by Bianca D.M. Wilson, published in Culture, Health & Sexuality, Vol. 11, No 3, April 2009.

One of the main questions of the focus group protocol was, ‘Are roles or labels like butch or femme or aggressive or passive important in sex and sexuality? How so or why not?’ This question was eventually rephrased to include the term stud as another term for butch since this was the term most often used by participants to describe masculine gender identities, reflecting ethnic differences in masculine identity terminology in the city. Every focus group chose to devote significant time and energy to answering this question. Participants consistently highlighted lesbian gender roles as a key organizing construct of African American lesbian sexual life. Four participants claimed these labels for themselves. Several other participants supported women’s adoption of these roles. The ways in which participants spoke about stud and femme categories indicated that these ways of constructing lesbian gender were part of an overarching sexual cultural norm of which all were aware. Within every focus group, participants conveyed a sense that the expectation to adopt a label and to operate within the category was a strong message throughout the Black lesbian community. Hence, expectations to be a femme or stud appeared to be a sexual cultural script for this Black lesbian community. Participants indicated that this cultural script was communicated in several contexts, including romantic relationships and community settings. [...]

The deep roots of the social pressure to date within these roles were also evident within my observations at the open mics. Most women that appeared to be coupled off, as evidenced by them kissing or cuddling with each other, were a clear butch and femme couple. Using the language suggested by Moore (2006), only one couple was a ‘gender-blender’ couple. They were a younger couple, maybe in their early twenties, and were each dressed in both feminine and masculine clothing. I did not observe any couple that was composed of two women who were traditionally feminine and observed only one couple in which both were dressed and acted in traditionally masculine ways. An inherent aspect of sexual discourse and cultural scripts are the potential disconnects between expected norms and individual transgressions against those norms (Parker 1991; Schifter and Madrigal 2001). This one masculine-masculine couple appeared to be participating in this type of transgression. Recognizing the discrepancy between their coupling and the cultural sexual scripts expectations, I asked that couple that night whether they had experienced negative reactions to their being a couple in which both women appeared masculine identified. They explained that they had received harsh reactions and lack of understanding from other African American lesbians. However, they felt that they were no longer into labels and loved each other. They had been together for over eight years and people knew them as an established couple so left them alone.

Constructing the dichotomous stud-femme label system With regard to non-sexual roles within romantic relationships, the extreme stud and femme labels carried expectations around partner choices. In particular, femmes are supposed to date studs and vice versa. Focus group participants and my participant observations suggest that there is little tolerance for femmes or studs dating one another. Once choosing a partner of the other lesbian gender, participants mentioned a few relationship roles that each person was expected to fill. Participants within several groups talked about being with a stud or femme partner who was disappointed that they would not follow the ‘rules’ of lesbian gendering. For example, Dalia indicated that she was expected to act more ‘mannish’ in her gestures when she was with a femme partner (FG3). Another participant, who was partnered with someone who identified as a hard stud, in turn expected her partner not to cry in order to live up to the masculine image (FG4, Cynthia). Similarly, participants who were with partners that were studs were expected to act in certain ways to be considered good femmes, such as in the case of Bré who reported that she was expected to sleep on the inside of the bed in order to be protected (FG7). The expectations and tendencies to date within a stud-femme dyad participants reported were very similar to those reported in Moore’s (2006) study of New York Black lesbians, suggesting Black lesbian cultural script that spans the boundaries of one city. [...]

Masculine expression Lesbians who expressed a highly masculinised gender were labelled ‘hard studs’ and hard studs had relatively strict guidelines for sexual practice. For example, participants talked about the, ‘hard studs that will come out and say, ‘‘I don’t want my woman to touch me. I want to be the total pleaser’’’ (FG2, Leslie). Contrasting femmes and hard studs, another participant claims:

“… because studs mostly in traditional situations, they’re usually the one who initiates, they’re usually the one, who, if you have oral sex, they usually the one who would initiate having oral sex on that particular person, when they want, on a femme. I know a lot of studs. They don’t like to be touched to a certain point, you know, you can touch them in certain places, but you know, you can’t really touch them like on, on their, you know, vagina or so things that may make them feel feminine.” (FG5. Jay)

These participants’ descriptions of the hard stud with which they were familiar is similar to the stone butch described in the fictional autobiography of Feinberg’s (1993) ‘Stone Butch Blues’ and discussed in Halberstam’s (1998) critique of the tendency to pathologize the stone butch in her book Female Masculinity. As such, it is possible that the language of hard stud is an ethnic-specific term that denotes a lesbian gender category identified in other ethnic communities. While a few participants who identified themselves as either aggressive, tomboy or dominant volunteered that they usually or rarely allowed partners to penetrate them, it is important to note that focus group participants were not asked to describe their own sexual lives. Hence, data from this study cannot confirm or disconfirm the extent to which these ‘hard’ or ‘stone’ sexual scripts resonated with the sexual practice of the women in the study.

Illustrating how hard stud sexual scripts were understood by many Black lesbians in the community, two primary reasons were provided by participants for why hard studs would demand that they not be touched during sex. One explanation was that hard studs were not comfortable with the parts of their bodies that defined them as female, mainly their breasts and vaginas. As such, a successful performance of the ‘male’ role during sex required that the hard stud’s female body parts not be touched. Another reason concerned the meaning of being touched and seduced. That is, participants talked about the importance of maintaining the appearance of dominance in the sexual act for hard studs and how being touched sexually or being the ‘bottom’ took away that sense of dominance and control. The vulnerability of being sexually aroused and pleasured threatened the image of the dominant sexual partner. The contrast between these two explanations is significant. The first explanation, rejecting femaleness, is similar to the comments made by some transgender people regarding discomfort with their biological body parts that dictate mainstream society’s current gendering system. However, the second explanation, maintaining dominance, is not about denying one’s femaleness as expressed through the body but instead about accepting a view that being sexually pleasured and aroused by another makes a person vulnerable. Being vulnerable does not fit with the hegemonic masculine image and, hence, does not fit with the image of a true stud.

This study was designed to examine sexual discourses – essentially, how Black lesbians discussed sex and what cultural level sexual scripts were recognized in the community. While examining conflicts between cultural level norms and individual behaviour was not the aim of the current study, some participants noted that there is some evidence of transgressions. Participants in two focus groups (FG1 and FG9) discussed studs they knew who had recently had vaginal sex with men and had children, behaviours that did not fit into the masculine lesbian gender identity role. It is quite likely that many studs and many ultra-femmes engaged in sexual behaviour that transgressed expected community norms (beyond the mainstream norms they already transgress through sexual orientation and gender presentation), as was found in a study of the level of congruence between butch global presentation and actual self-presentation in sexual settings within a predominantly White sample (Rosenzweig and Lebow 1992).

Feminine expression Within the masculine/feminine dichotomy that was discussed by participants, there were also the pillow princesses and ultra femmes at the other end of the lesbian gender spectrum. Similar to the hard stud category, these extreme femme labels have clear sexual behaviour roles. In this study ‘Ultra femme’ was a label given to women who expressed themselves in high-fashion feminine ways, usually including heels, make-up and contouring or revealing clothing. Relevant to the current study, ‘pillow princess’ was a special label for the ultra femme that alluded to the sexual context. In particular, this label described a lesbian who prefers to be the receiver of sexual pleasure and acts, such as having oral sex performed on her. She is not expected or likely to perform any sexual acts on her partner. In a sexual encounter, the expectation is that ultra femmes are the ones that will be vaginally penetrated with sex toys or fingers. While not all participants spoke to the relationship between sexual penetration and femme identities, one group agreed that a requirement to being labelled femme was that an individual liked penetration (FG1). It is notable that outside of acknowledging that this role may be a little selfish, no pathology related to body image or gender identity was ascribed to the role of pillow princess. In general, it was the role of hard stud that engendered the most resistance, as will be described in the next section.

Debate within the community about lesbian gender As Burch (1998) has noted, some activists and theorists argue that the adoption of femme and stud roles and labels is an attempt to replicate the gendered sexual norms in which lesbians were raised in the mainstream heterosexual society. Several community leaders and focus group participants thought similarly. For example, in FG7, Wanda talked about the differences between White and Black lesbians that she saw:

“They are, and not just Whites, but [also] other non-African American lesbians see it as we are just two women that love each other. Whereas Blacks say we are two women that love each other, however we do have roles. You know, and we are trying to in a sense maybe ascribe to a heterosexual way of life, or way of operating, in our relationship.” (FG7)

Similarly, one of the community leaders whose work focused on sexuality and spirituality, Vicki, discussed her own experiences with previously claiming a butch identity. She indicated that letting go of this identity represented seeing it for what it was, a replication of heterosexuality. Kendra, another community leader who works in lesbian and gay health arenas, also reported that she felt that femme and butch labels appear to mimic traditional gender roles. However, she cautioned against the assumption that mimicking traditional gender roles automatically made lesbian gender label expression ‘artificial’. That is, many African American lesbians genuinely feel masculine or feminine and are truly attracted to ‘opposite’ lesbian gendered women. Nonetheless, these same women who identify as butch or femme are sometimes frustrated with the strict rules regarding these labels and identities.

In contrast, one focus group participant, Gail, who identified as femme and as a member of the ‘butch-femme community’, also conveyed to the group that there was a renaissance in the butch-femme movement that included reconfiguring butch and femme to mean more than a replication of heterosexual gender roles. She felt that contemporary butch-femme communities were more egalitarian than they had been when she was younger, where femmes were no longer placed in a subservient or domestic role. Some scholars have argued that femme and stud labels do not attempt to replicate heterosexist norms, but serve as mechanisms for de-gendering gendered lines by claiming masculinity in women’s bodies. The butch lesbian in particular functioned as ‘images to contradict the prevailing image of female sexuality as passive or even nonexistent’ (Burch 1998, 361). However, this argument suggests that lesbians who adopt lesbian gender labels do so as a political statement. While a masculine identity may operate as a radical rejection of traditional female expectations, no data from this study suggest that the adoption of lesbian gender labels among African American lesbians was intended to be a purposeful and political affront to mainstream gender expectations.

Despite the large role that lesbian gender played in organizing Black lesbian sexual life, every focus group discussion revealed individuals’ (within the group or people known by group participants) conscious and purposeful rejection of femme and stud labels/roles. There were several strategies used to reject the femme and stud categories within African American lesbian communities: refusing to label oneself; feeling bothered by labels; feeling hopeful that the cultural scripts will change; and avoiding hanging out with people who like labels. [...] [S]ome participants refused the labels for themselves and also expressed being bothered or irritated with the community trend to adopt labels. However, they also conveyed acceptance or tolerance for those that chose the labels. Further, the comments made by Tracey in FG6 indicate that the choice to refuse labels for oneself is not incongruent with having an attraction to women who possess the characteristics those labels define.

In contrast, other focus group participants expressed rejection or avoidance of femme and stud identified women. As discussed above, Gail was a participant who had previously avoided Black gay spaces because she had experienced butch-femme culture as oppressive, but then later came to adopt a femme identity. In contrast, the two other participants in her same group expressed strong negative judgments of the lesbian gender labels, particularly those expressed by stud or butch women. In particular, Anna evaluated masculine identified women in this way by making racial identity confusion analogous to masculine expression (e.g. scratching your crotch) among women:

“…if I walked around saying, ‘I’m White, so please address me as such’ I think I’d have a mental problem. If I walk around as a woman … and I’m scratching something I don’t have, I also see that as a slight mental deficiency.” (FG8) [...]

Between the extremes Despite a consistent description of femme and stud at the extremes of lesbian gender expression, participants also discussed several labels that fell between the ultra femme-hard stud ends of the continuum, such as ‘soft stud’ and ‘aggressive femme’. Labels like these represented lesbians that blended both masculine and feminine ways in their public expression and/or sexual behaviours, but with a purposeful leaning toward more masculine or feminine identity. The use of these terms appears contrary to the reports that there were dominant expectations of highly masculine or highly feminine modes of expression. Yet, the sets of sexual discourses that comprise a group’s sexual culture are inherently contradictory and often disjointed from one another (Schifter and Madrigal 2001). There was a collective acknowledgment that dominant sexual discourses in Black lesbian communities emphasized an expectation for choosing identities representing opposite sides of a single feminine-masculine continuum. Yet, this expectation did not prevent the existence of informal, less dominant sexual scripts that created room for blending characteristics along both masculine and feminine continua.

One of the community leader interviewees, Kendra, suggested that the mere presence of these alternative labels was evidence of a loosening of the hold that the traditional conceptualization of lesbian gender had on African American lesbians in Chicago. She asserted that the creation of new labels is one form of resistance to the strict dichotomy of stud and femme that arose out of the ‘old school’ African American lesbian sexual culture and provides more freedom for people to act in various ways and date different types of people. In this way, the development and adoption of more labels, and thus more roles and conceptualizations, could represent a quasi-organized movement towards changing the current gendered sexual discourse among Black lesbians.

Another core feature of sexual discourses, particularly those that are more formal (i.e. explicit) and dominant, is that they engender resistance (Schifter and Madrigal 2001). It was in the theme of lesbian gender that forms of resistance were most evident. As noted above, resistance strategies ranged from individual choices to not identify with femme or stud roles, to open rejection of other lesbians who chose those identities. Additionally, some Black lesbians discussed the adoption of labels that represented a blend of feminine and masculine traits which simultaneously embraced preferences for gendered ways of relating sexually and romantically and rejected strict rules for lesbian gender roles. Most of the resistance discussed centred on disagreements with the concepts of prescribed roles in romantic and sexual relationships. In cases where the frustration was directed specifically at those who identified with the labels, the discontent was with masculine women, not the femmes. This theme has been observed in other work documenting the experiences of Black studs and agressives (Moore 2006). This is notable because it indicates that resistance against femme-stud lesbian gender expression is not an unqualified rejection of all Black lesbians who express themselves in gendered ways. The Black lesbians in this study who disagreed with lesbian gender roles were not arguing for a movement toward the androgynous images that characterize many White lesbian communities (Taylor and Rupp 1993). Instead, the resistance is centred on the rejection of masculine women, studs, who dare to transgress the mainstream cultural expectations for proper female expression as well as a possible mainstream Black women’s cultural expectations of women to operate somewhere between gender-blending and feminine expression.

A radical side to lesbian gender sex roles The butch/stud and femme phenomenon as discussed by study participants also represents a shift from traditional notions of masculine and feminine expressions of sexuality, even though these views were not labelled as forms of resistance by participants. Though many focus group participants, community leaders and poets at the open mics argued that studs and femme roles were replications of heterosexual male and female sexual relationships, the sexual scripts for hard studs and pillow princesses appear to turn the traditional conceptualization of fe/male sex roles on its head. Heterosexual men may be expected to be the sexual aggressors (as studs were described to be by participants), but they are typically not socialized to view sexual pleasure of their female partner as the primary outcome. For example, in her historical analysis of the invention of the vibrator, Maines (1999) identified three steps of sex within the dominant US cultural script for sexuality: (1) foreplay or preparation for penetration; (2) penile intercourse; and (3) male orgasm. This type of sex is regarded as the ‘real thing’ in popular US culture. In contrast to this dominant script, masculine identified stud women prioritized the feminine partner’s orgasm. Similarly, whereas pillow princesses and other femmes appear to fall in line with heterosexual conceptualizations of sexual roles for women, where the woman’s role is the passive and non-assertive partner, they represent radical departures in other respects. In particular, participants indicated that ultra femmes and pillow princesses fully expected that the sexual act ended with their sexual climax. This appears to be a re-conceptualization of the connection between femininity and sexual prowess, deeming the feminine partner as the primary physical beneficiary. In essence, the feminine partner can be viewed as receptive, rather than passive (Burch 1998).

[the-fae-folk]

Story Masterpost

Hey! This took a while to make. But here, as promised, is my story masterpost. I’ve organized some things so you can find them easier, though I’ll admit that “Beauty, Secrets, and Magic” is just the stuff I couldn’t really sort into a smaller category. Of the Fae Unaware Directions Come Running Water Distant Wars Wishes of the Sea In Order To See You Must... An Offer Those who say... Respect is Due An Exchange Cage Come to Us Ancient Wars The Age of Iron What are you? Immortal Hidden Among You First Music The Distant Days Count them with Letters Flower Wars Eyes? The Lost Ones We Fade Believing in Death Prices to pay Dance with the whole World Dreaming Lure *Click* Giants Asleep Fears of Darkness Bigger Problems Listen to the Giants Sweet Faerie Wine The Largest and Tiniest Decay and Dreaming Eyes and Earth Walking Mountains Battle Standard Gnaall Fictitious Dichotomy Faltering Heartbeats Among You Pixie Wings Unable to Perish Bridge trolls What is Fairy Ring? Terrible Wars Beautiful Dreams Kisses in the Night The Will of Trees Make no Mistake Have you Eaten? Beauty and Fashion Can you Calculate the Mind of the Fae The First Skies Do Fae Children Age at the Same Rate? A Dark Memory Black Dwarfs and Dark Futures The Conversation Vows of Love Ship of the Skies Reaching Hands The Little Folk The Prophet of Silvamune Damhán Alla Feasting Lost in the Deep Woods A way out? Faerie Dance Thrice Said is True Fools rush in The Deep Woods Welcome to the Deep Woods Places We Know Silence No Journey Will-o-the-Wisp Where are the Deep Woods? A Dreaming Memory Running Who Knows the Path? Unknown Footsteps Who Speaks? Go Home Whispers in the Mist Mossy Glades Old Gate An Echo of Footsteps Follow Me Tragic Ending The Way Forward is Still Barred Don’t Follow the Wisps Postern Never Know Waterfall When you Go Out Gold-Eyed Beast The Nightmare Step Lightly Bones Alone Golden Eyed Beast In Hiding Forget what comes Something Powerful Standstill Death Beware the Beast The Encounter Companion in the Cold Slumbering The Hunt Begins Again Well of Dreaming Light Screams in the Night Where is the Gold-Eyed Beast? Fear Something has Changed …3 …2 …1 The Crown of Shadow 7 Broken Mirrors Seven Seven Shattered Mirrors Places of Faerie A Faraway Place You The Places Between Distant Wars Buried beneath the Sand Wandering Blind The Lake A Flowered Ocean Exist? Or Not? Life’s Flow Door without a way Time Never Passes Here Only the Stories Remain Cracking Ice Fractal Prison Enough? All that remains is Dust Devastation of Dark Fire More of the Flowered Ocean Cliffs of Illithia and the Naiuruin Forests Beware the Wisps Stardew Deep Furnace Lanterns Lanterns On the River’s Edge The White Hound Do the Fae have Animals? An Old Lantern Lost Letters The Lament Fragment Silent Screams The Wait Together A Near Forgotten Letter Letter from a Brownie Tell a Story Lured Away From the Sea and Shore Warnings Never Free Don’t Stop Eat Not The Rule of Names Defiance Pretend Not To See Swamp Water Trust Me Do not Take Do Not I Seek A Warning

8 Tales at the Hearth’s Edge The Hill A tale of Three Gifts She and He A Chance Meeting The War  (Coincidence?) The Girl and the Road Silver Charity A Tale of Autumn Strange Beings The One Who Grieves The Lady The Librarians Not Quite Human Dark Eyed Forge Fires Together the Light She danced upon the Earth Crows for Eyes Wings Aeon Circling A Laughing God Sssssss... Broken Tomb She danced in the Snow The Dragon in the Well What Became of Her... The Prisoner in the Dark She Knows Adventure A Firebird Imprisoned The Child Mine Spoken Before The Descent The Courts of Season The Autumn Days Great Sorrow In the darkest days of Winter The Winter Remains Awakening of Spring End of Summer Wine and Summertime Blustering Winds The Lord of Autumn The Winter Queen Frost The Autumn Court Winter Masque A Cold Truth The Winter Court Nearly Time The End of Winter The Lord of Springtime The Court of Spring Spring’s Song Lovers of Springtime Light after the Rain The Time you Need The Story of the One Who Grieves Nobody Answered ... It Comes Closer Before the Silver Blossoms A West Wind It is Time The End of Spring Other Courts A Courtly Vision A Constellation of Myth Court of Ashes Hosts of Myrkvatn Aiolion Tribes Court of Dawn Castle inside a Raindrop Order The Rivers of Athu The Sidhe The Valley of Ga’Maldor Empire of the Seven Blossoms Canyons of Mür ‘gra Crowns Long Ago Legends Key to Destiny The Second Key The Third Key Three KEYS? About the Cave Crown of Sunlight New Moon Summer’s End What do the Crowns look like? Court of Shadows Autumn to Winter Songs Seek Listen Unknown Follow A Dark Call Burning / Why is it burning? Forgotten Prisoner Chains Come to the Faeries Thorns and Dreaming I Dreamed I Walked Fernweh Stories Told Poetry Bluest Sky Blue Red Yellow Orange Loving Winter Fire and Bone Requiem of a Love Song Eye See You Green Sleep among the Bluebells Song of Stars Night Companion Dancing in the Forest Moon Waters Memory in Sepia Lilies Scream. Cry. Silence. Drifting Faerie Ring Count Them Carefully Fairy Ring Dance Other Tales The Pied Piper Apples for Eternity The Dam Is anyone there? Call to the Sea Warmth Midas Grove of Shadows Resting Place All Hallows Evening Tale The Great Tree Sister of Mine Wit and Words Bread and Circuses Forest and Sea in Sorrow Reflection of the Heart Part 1 The Boy, The Troll, and the Bridge Between Them. The Raven and the Stone Crow Houses and Homes Beauty, Secrets, and Magic Seed Rain Brings Life Such Dreams If Wishes The Ancient Magic Beginning or Ending? Dive Into Silent Unknowns Eternity Like Leaves Imagine you walk across the sand Power of the Moonlight Enchanted Trap Rage Confusion Gifts of Stone Longing for Other Selves Darkened Waves Hunt of the Owl Not You Forgotten. Fairy Tales Curse Ravens Come Look Sun Stars Autumn Reflections Drift Gold beneath Grey Union Incomparable Names Life’s Road Fire in the Heart A sort of Balance Beauty of a Rose Not what they seem Glamour Humanity’s Treasures Compliments Infinity Why must you reject happiness? A Sounding of Silence Winds of Change The Blessing of Indifference In Tears we Grow Beauty A Raindrop The Trouble With Masks Lunar Eclipse Fly Ahead Be Ready Ugliness and Beauty The Secret of Bridges Morning? Wasting Time Widdershins Equilibrium Snail at Home Is it enough? Seven Poisons A Nexus of Roads Silence with us In the Face of Silence Cycle of Burning A Sky full of Joy Cloistered Grove Choices Fly Butterfly Fly Blooming in Adversity Distant Endless Moors Sweet Berries A Dreaming Once Met Seas of Black Sky Heaven’s Peaks Together upon the Road Written in the Stars Stolen Wishes Anew Blooming to the Music Sing A New World Song of Stone Love is... Water to the Soul Eyes will Watch Sometimes its nice Explore Change in the Air Drowning in the Dark The Song Plays On Furnace of Creation A Gemstone Found Upon A Hill Have you? Sometimes the Tree Dies Hold my hand A Simple Magic Of Course New Fallen Snow Seedlings Sleeping Wheel Still Sleeping Snowdrops Enjoy the Spring Cloying Beauty Soft Silence Mystery of the Rose Just Be When We were Here Last Ship Swift River Broken Painful Awakenings The Story of a Butterfly Such Beauty Play On Strawberry Mother and Child Strange Places Beyond Black Suns The Shallow Sea A Foundation of Nothing Awake in the Darkness Endless Darkness Absolutus Infinitus Twilight to Dawn The Burning Light Ruins, Somewhere Quotes from the Writer Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iota Kappa Lambda Mu Nu Xi Omicron The Journey The Lonely Tree Consider the Stars First City Only the Future Left What makes a Monster? A Secret Place Not Far Off

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

do you have any spicy hot takes you wanna drop 👀👀?? i will drop one as well, i think that everyone got carried away with the whole sympathetic and unsympathetic stuff -💫

okay so i read the first sentence and i was like ‘fuck yes time to talk about the sympathetic/unsympathetic thing’ and then i read the rest of it and yeah okay so we’re on the same page here. i have a feeling this is going to get extensive so if you don’t want to hear me complaining about stuff that you may or may not like don’t go reading under the cut. Also it's not going to be very coherent

disclaimer: i am not trying to police the fandom or trying to tell anyone that they can’t write stuff. i do my best to stay in my lane and read/consume content that i want to. these are just. feelings i have.

so on the one hand i sort of understand where the whole concept sprung from. it’s hard to write interesting longform stories without a villain of some sort, it’s not as if there’s all that many characters in the first place, and sometimes using the Dragon Witch doesn’t quite cut it. and honestly if you take away the whole ‘they’re all part of the same person’ thing it would’ve been pretty easy to assume that Deceit was the bad guy when he first showed up. he went the whole ‘ominous smirking, evil laughter’ route because he’s a dramatic little bastard, and some people were like 'my son, I love him' and others went 'evil man! Evil! He's planning bad things' and on a purely mechanical level having tags that distinguish people who think a character is good vs people who think a character is evil is a good thing, it helps you distinguish content you want to look at from the content that you don't!

HOWEVER. I think the idea of characters being 'sympathetic' or 'unsympathetic' in the way that this fandom uses those terms is innately flawed. It's black-and-white thinking and it veers close to the whole puritan thing that tumblr is so fond of. And in most cases 'unsympathetic' is just an excuse to write characters as toxic, abusive, and just downright cruel without having to explain yourself. Which is. Hm. And also just lazy writing.

This bit might be tmi but: Patton actually used to be my favorite Sanders Sides character. But back when i initially got into the fandom, I hadn't quite worked out how to filter the content I looked through yet, and I just kept seeing this... constant stream of stuff involving him being abusive to the others in a way that was hm how shall i say this. Uncomfortably familiar. especially with a lot of religious guilt themes. It's not anyone's fault, precisely, but it did tinge a lot of my fandom experience, and it maaaay be why i'm not great at writing him. Doesn't matter. The point is... There wasn't a point. I'm just still bitter about that and wanted to mention it. Maybe i'm angrier about this than i thought i was. Let's not talk about that. Let's move on with this discussion.

You'll notice that i used Janus as an example up there at the top. I can't be sure (and actually it grimly fascinates me so if anybody who's been around here longer than I have has any info on this send it over, I'd love to know) but I think that Deceit's appearance in CLBG may have marked the beginning of this whole unsympathetic/sympathetic split in the fandom. It seems a safe enough bet, anyway, especially since the earliest example I can find of any fic being tagged 'unsympathetic' in the AO3 archive is from 4th February 2018, literally the day after CLBG went up. (damn, guys, moving fast). 

The first occurrences of the 'sympathetic' tag crop up about a month later. Tumblr is impossible to search so I don't know if there was any discussion about terms, or if it was just a kind of snowball effect with people seeing the tags and tagging their own fics as appropriate (and this is a fascinating phenomena in itself!) but either way - i have absolutely no idea what happened to make people go from 'we're divided on whether this character who presents himself a villain is actually doing bad and detrimental things to the other sides/thomas/the world as a whole/innocent puppies' to 'hang on what if the other sides were kicking puppies also?'

So now this has turned from a rant about terminology into me being genuinely curious about this whole thing. I will put the rant on pause while I go scour AO3 to see when the first occurrences of the tags popped up. Please hold.

Okay. I'm going to ignore the unsympathetic tags for anyone who's not a side because i don't hate myself nearly that much (but uh for the record. There is a part of this fandom that thinks the LITERAL CONCEPT OF SLEEP IS EVIL and i'm not sure if i should be impressed or horrified. What? What???)

All of these numbers are up-to-date as of 17/06/2020, which is when I'm posting this. I'm probably not going to update that, so keep that in mind if you're reading this in the future.

In order of chronological appearance:

Unsympathetic Janus ('Deceit' at the time, of course) - first appears 12 March 2018, 191 works Unsympathetic Roman - first appears 10 February 2019, 102 works Unsympathetic Logan - first appears 24 June 2019, 59 works Unsympathetic Patton - first appears 2 July 2019, 228 works Unsympathetic Remus - first appears 17 July, 2019, 121 works Unsympathetic Virgil - first appears 31 July 2019, 71 works

...I genuinely don't know what I expected.

The fandom was much slower to spark with Unsympathetic Remus content after he first showed up, which is kind of interesting. Unless they just didn't bother to tag it? Like, I'm working with the assumption that everyone's tagging all of their content, which might not always be the case

I thought there'd be so much more Janus and Remus-tagged fics than there actually are.

It does not surprise me that Patton has the most in this category. It makes me sad but it doesn't surprise me. Why are you guys so intent on making him evil

And on the opposite side of the sympathy spectrum (similarly chronological):

Sympathetic Janus - first appears 7 March 2018, 1920 works Sympathetic Remus - first appears 2 July 2019, 965 works Sympathetic Patton - first appears 31 July 2019, 71 works Sympathetic Virgil - first appears 1 August 2019, 69 works (nice) Sympathetic Logan - first appears 8 August 2019, 41 works Sympathetic Roman - first appears 20 August, 56 works

It's actually wild that 'Sympathetic [Janus]' seems to have appeared several days between Unsympathetic Jan made any appearance.

There were several Remus fics that were backtagged to before DWIT was released. I ignored them because it was throwing this off a bit. there may be other problems to this effect in any of the other stats, but i’m too lazy to go back and check those all one-by-one

Sympathetic tags in general seem to be used as, hm, there's a word here i can't quite think of. Basically, 'Sympathetic' seems to be the default setting for characters like Virgil, Patton, Roman, Logan (the 'Light Sides', although i take issue with that terms as well. This isn't the time for that, though. Statistics!!) which 'Unsympathetic' used to be the default for Janus and Remus. That's become slightly more elastic of late, though. Basically if you're using the Sympathetic tag for anyone who's not a 'Dark Side' you're usually doing it to make a point of something. e.g. if you have other sides who aren't usually unsympathetic as such and you're trying to clarify that yes, these specific ones are Okay. Or if you're just being thorough. Anyway that's why LAMP seem to have less works tagged as Symp than the other two.

All the sympathetic tags for non-Janus characters seem to have sprung up in quick succession over a short period of months! I have no idea what this means but it's strange and cool to look at

If you're wondering about the discrepancy between this information and my earlier note that the first appearance of 'unsympathetic' as an AO3 tag was the day after CLBG came out - that fic in question had a general 'unsympathetic dark sides' tag, no specific tags mentioned.

Okay statistics segue over. The only point of that apart from scientific curiosity was to try to puzzle out where the fuck this all stemmed from. I still have no answers.

I need you all to understand that 'Sympathetic' no longer looks like a real word to me.

So. Remember how i mentioned how this fandom managed to make unsympathetic!Remy/Sleep a thing? Yeah. That baffles me. I haven't seen unsympathetic Dr Picani anywhere yet but I know it's only a matter of time and that lowkey horrifies me. But that's not really the most baffling thing because, uh

Well. earlier this week I accidentally stumbled into a corner of tumblr that's dedicated to unsympathetic character Thomas content. If you're a fan of that, i'd advise you to click away from this post now because i'm about to get very angry about that and i don't want to make you upset. Thank you.

What the fuck. literally all of the posts in this corner of tumblr are about c!thomas abusing the sides and being a terrible person??? ??????? ????? WHAT? can we just take a step back and. WHY? WHY are you doing this? Are we watching the same show? from a psychological standpoint, that's self-abuse and self-harm and i suppose it might be interesting if you explored it as such but APPARENTLY NO. apparently that's not what this is about. This is just about writing about someone being abusive to other people for the sake of it. there were so many posts about him 'abusing the sides by telling them they're not real people' and. OKAY so a) he wouldn't do that b) THEY AREN'T. THEY LITERALLY AREN'T REAL PEOPLE WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

[deep breath]

so actually i think that kind of leads me back to the point of this whole thing.  I had a point, what? It surprises me too, don't worry. The point is (roughly) that writing characters as 'unsympathetic' isn't something that i have an objection to at all. Everybody has the capacity to be cruel! Nobody's perfect!! But with the sympathetic/un labels it seems to enforce this strict dichotomy of good vs bad. Either Logan is an abusive monster OR he's a perfect angel. Guys. That's not how it works. And it's not INTERESTING if you do that sort of thing because then you've got people being unnecessarily cruel and evil for the sake of it. They turn into 2-dimensional caricatures that only exist to be bad people. 

People make mistakes! I write about characters making mistakes all the time! Janus and Remus pulling the whole trolley problem thing in Pick A Side definitely wasn't a great thing for them to do, but I didn't tag them as unsympathetic at the time and i have no plan to do so because i don't want to write them as two-dimensional caricatures who are only capable of one of two settings on the morality meter.  (same goes for the next chapter, whenever that comes up but... let’s talk about that when i post it, maybe)That's boring. If you're going to take characters and make them into antagonists just because you can't think of anyone else to fit the role, and you're doing it by stripping away everything that makes them Them, then you might as well just stuff a paper bag with straw and cast a scarecrow as the villain instead because buddy. You're making a strawman. That's what you're doing. You can't have Patton without kindness and well-meaningness, just as you can't have Patton without the mistakes caused by those two things. Same goes for the other sides and their flaws and strengths.

And then there's the other thing that's definitely more specific to this fandom, which I think was best summarized with something i said in the comments section of Pick A Side with len at like ten minutes past midnight that one time:

(...) and not necessarily related to anything you said, but - this fandom is kind of unique in that... there's no actual bad guys or villains. (at least that's how i perceive it.) The Real Villain Is Your Poor Mental Health. people are always like 'unsympathetic deceit' or 'unsympathetic patton' and point to different points in the videos as evidence, ('i give you permission to think those thoughts' patton's being controlling - that's abuse) but like. it's all the same guy. he's giving himself permission. he's doing it to himself. imagine if we tagged other fandom characters with like 'Unsympathetic Harry Potter' when he was being mean or critical to himself. wild.

 So yeah. In conclusion: obviously people should write what they like. If they see characters one way and they want to write about them being two-dimensional monsters that's fine. I kind of wish you'd put more thought into it and make it at least interesting if you're going to do that sort of thing, but you do you i guess.

That being said. If I see any more unsympathetic!Patton content I will start crying. i want to love Goofy Dad Man the same way i used to 

[woodedcove]

Stereotypes, Bigotry and the like

Photo provided by my sweetheart, Dave Hogan.

If I was going to rely on a stereotype of white trash, I can see why many people would place my family in that category. My parents had bad teeth and almost never went to a doctor. The kind of medicine that I grew up with mostly came from old wive's tales. We lived in run-down rented houses out in the country or the poor side of town, drove old cars, and yes, we had a dead car lot along with a lot of other junk both inside and outside the house. Someone shot out my dad’s windows in his old pickup truck which he used to get to the jobs he was working and we couldn’t afford to fix them, so in the winter our dad drove the truck with a garbage bag in the window on the passenger's side to cut down on the freezing wind while wearing a cheap coat and hat to protect him from the cold coming in on the driver's side. Oh, and our dad did own several guns. All of this fits very neatly into the “white trash” stereotype that so often we were considered to be.

But anyone that would take the time to know us would have found a different story. My mother had a college education and had been a teacher, but decided to stay home to raise her children. My father, though he didn’t have a college education was a person who read quite a bit and taught himself many things. Both my sister and I were encouraged to go to school and complete an education. There was music in our home. We had a grand piano, though it was ancient and many times out of tune ... or at least until we could get a piano wrench and learn a little about tuning it ourselves. Our dad played the saxophone, clarinet, and guitar, our Mom played the piano. We were encouraged to play any of these instruments and to sing. When our parents saw that we both had artistic abilities they encouraged us to develop those abilities by providing pencils, paper, paints, and brushes. Our mother taught us about opera and kept a small library of books for us to use when we needed to do research. Our dad liked to experiment with food and taught my sister and me how to raise a garden. Both my parents could be very kind people and we often saw them do things that were compassionate acts for people no matter what their race, creed, or financial standing might be.

Do you begin to see the dichotomy?

I used to be infuriated by people I met who dismissed my family as “white trash” when they had never taken the time to get to know us. This is why I think stereotypes are for the intellectually lazy and empathetically bankrupt. They describe neat little boxes of information in which one can place a whole group of people, and there is where their mental exertion towards that group ends. They don’t have to think about it again for the rest of their lives.

Some may be tempted to say “well, stereotypes come from somewhere”, and yes, I will agree to this. But usually, stereotypes focus on the negative traits found in a small sample of a much larger group. They often are taken from those that misrepresent that group by being the “bad seed”. This isn’t right and it is something that needs to stop. Unfortunately, it can’t be stopped through legislation. We want to think that one protest or one law passed will end this sort of thinking but it won’t. It’s going to be harder than that, a lot harder. The fight against bigotry is going to take personal daily effort on the part of every individual on this planet. It’s going to require introspection and study and a willingness to reform our attitudes and throw out those things that we’ve relied on to make quick and easy judgments. It’s going to take compassion and a desire to reach out and understand those around us. It will take turning off the TV, or YouTube, where a lot of shows feed into those stereotypes. It’s going to take people openly talking to people, no matter what their background, color, or creed and maybe even helping them out. It may be difficult, and sometimes inconvenient, but it can also be a humbling and enlightening experience.

The following was part of a statement from a man named Russel M. Nelson. He is a leader in my church and we believe that he is a prophet of God:

“The Creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God’s children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent!

“During the Savior’s earthly mission, He constantly ministered to those who were excluded, marginalized, judged, overlooked, abused, and discounted. As His followers, can we do anything less? The answer is no! We believe in freedom, kindness, and fairness for all of God’s children!

“Let us be clear. We are brothers and sisters, each of us the child of a loving Father in Heaven. His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, invites all to come unto Him—“black and white, bond and free, male and female,” (2 Nephi 26:33). It behooves each of us to do whatever we can in our spheres of influence to preserve the dignity and respect every son and daughter of God deserves.”

What will bring about change? We will. As each one of us reaches out in love with a willingness to serve we, by the grace of God, can bring about change. Pray about it and the Lord will show you what you can do.

[mimzy-writing-online]

Plotter or Pantser (Plontser?)

There’s a strange dichotomy that the writing community has created for itself. Two separate categories that don’t quite divide the writing community, but seem to be treated as separate entities that can never cross-mingle.

“Two styles, both alike in dignity,

In fair Writeblr here, where we lay our scenes,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the writing ways of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers write their drafts;

Whole misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury the writers' strife.”

 Note: Did I spend too much time on this parody of Romeo and Juliet? Maybe. Do I regret it? Not in the least. 

Additional Note: I tried to keep the syllable structure intact. 

Onto the Guide:

 Plotter versus Pantser.

What are they?

Plotters are writers who carefully plan their story before they write a single word. Their planning includes thorough research, outlining their story, character profiles, character backstories, aesthetic boards, all that. Good stuff really. It takes a lot of dedication, patience, and dutiful note-taking to do this.

Pantsers are writers who have a spark of an idea and take to a page instantly. It starts with a sentence and they continue on. They have ideas of scenes locked in their minds and stored in wonderful movie daydream format, waiting to be written but being put on hold until the pantser knows how to get there. They tend to whirl through a draft it seems. To be a pantser takes a special kind of determination and self-discipline. It’s easy for a writer to lose steam and stare at their draft wondering what comes next, and it takes a lot of hard work to keep going even when you’re stuck and force yourself to discover the parts of your story you’d never thought of before.

Both are valid methods. I admire both.

Because I am both.

Yes, you heard me. The dichotomy isn’t as separate and black and white as it seems.

In my particular case, I tend to get the spark and take to the page like a pantser. I have a couple of scenes in mind; the characters and character dynamics are a loose, vague idea; and an even vaguer idea of the plot. And I want to get it all on paper before the idea is gone. The inspiration is here, let’s make the most of it.

I tend to pants write anywhere between the first 5k to 20k words. In this time, I learn the characters, introduce myself to them and who they are, how they talk and how they act. I visualize their home and their hometowns and their world. I start to figure out the problem. And it all came from a few minimal scenes in my head that had no solid form. They needed to be developed.

I usually get stuck somewhere between the 5 and 20k, not knowing where the plot is going or what to write next. That’s when the planning begins.

I make an outline, I write down the details and history of my characters, I do research, I make aesthetic boards, I make a writing playlist specific to that story (almost like a movie soundtrack, if that makes sense). I do all those fun plotter things.

Plotter. Pantser. Plontser.

There’s not one method that’s superior to the others, or less effective than the others. It all depends on the writer and how they best write. What works for one doesn’t work for the other, and that’s why so many different writing methods, routines, and styles exist.

So go on and enjoy your favorite method of writing.

 * * *

Hmm, I’m really keeping to that “Late Night Writing Advice” title on my blog. It’s now past 2am but I was struck by the inspiration to write a quick explanation on plontsing. I’ve been asked two or three times over anon if I’m a pantser or a plotter, and the above explanation is usually (though less eloquently put) how I respond.

Follow this blog for: advice guides, advice guides specific to writing blind characters (as this blogger is blind themselves) relatable writing problems and writing memes, writing memes that come with image descriptions no less, advice guides sourced from other wonderful writeblrs (check out the tag ‘writing advice not written by me’)

I also answer anonymous questions on various topics, with a lot of them being centered on specific problems with writing blind characters. I fully encourage you to send me an ask if you want, you’re never a bother, I promise.

You will also find updates and excerpts on my work in progress, A Witch’s Memory: a contemporary fantasy about three teens at an American boarding school. Ulric is a werewolf who doesn’t know the truth about how he went blind. Anna and Felix are two witches who don’t know how many memories they lost to a curse. They need each other to find the truth. Half of the characters (main and secondary) are LGBTQ+ as well.

Link to that here: About A Witch’s Memory

You can also check out the tag ‘a witch’s memory’

Writing A Blind Character Masterpost

Twitter Account: Mimzy Reiner

Ko-Fi (which goes to a savings account dedicated to the self-publishing costs of A Witch’s Memory) link is (here)

[thepillareddark]

Blunt Repetition in The Mountain Goats

This happens a lot, doesn’t it?

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway

Is that it's you and that you are standing in the doorway

-Going to Georgia

 This seems like a good place to start with it, because it’s the most direct part of a direct song, and it’s early on in the career. The actual effect is in a sense obvious: it’s a doubling down on a thought to give a quick psychological insight which propels the focus and intensity of the speaker, the kind of “I don’t care about anything but this right now”. Out of all of JD’s narrators it seems the “Going to Georgia” type does this the most, the extremely intent, slightly psychotic, deliriously happy guy who has reached the end of a kind of pilgrimage, and is a touch self-destructive.

A funny thing is that this trope, which I don’t have time to document every single instance of, starts to appear a lot more in his later work, and happens a lot on Transcendental Youth. Here are all the instances I obviously see on that album:

 I hide down in my corner because I like my corner

Every dream’s a good dream, even awful dreams are good

Nothing in the shadows but the shadow hands

And you can't tell me what my spirit tells me isn't true

I don’t have to be afraid, I don’t wanna be afraid

 I once wrote an essay on what repetition means for poetry and here are some ideas that arose in that essay:

1. When you repeat something you can’t miss the fact that you’ve repeated it, but you can miss the fact of a connection between the old word and the new word if you chose a new one

2. The first use of a word threatens the repetition of the word because the second time it is used it has to justify itself in a way it didn’t have to before

3. When we repeat, the space inbetween the repetitions can often imply a liminal space during which something changed

4. Most obviously, obsession with repetition betrays a desire to live in the past or to recall the sweetest first glimpse of a strong emotion

 Safe to say when I say “obviously see” I mean that compulsive behaviour performs the same effect in the speaker from our point of view, the reduction of life from a complication which is too awful to bear (illegality, drug addiction, total torment) into a series of actions which you can handle:

“Dig through the trash, sleep on the grates, and watch for the cars with the counterfeit Florida plates”

Or the directness of

“I am just a broken machine and I do things that I don’t really mean”

And this happens also in You or Your Memory where the hook acts to refocus the speaker by honing in on his eyes in the mirror, and on a few objects which, by having names that don’t immediately imply their properties as drugs, highlight their own existences as things to be focused on:

And when I came back I spread out my supplies

On the counter by the sink

I looked myself right in the eyes

St. Joseph’s baby aspirin

Bartles and Jaymes

And you or your memory

I don’t know the exact grammatical term for what happens in Counterfeit Florida Plates and a lot of other TMG songs- it’s not parataxis, I don’t think- but it’s that proposal of a sentence which floats as if to indicate that the noun is a definite article:

Steal some sunscreen / From the CVS

Like it might be “THE sunscreen”, that sunscreen is an essential activity which is part of a day that is composed of schizophrenic activities and survival, or when establishing “Wear Black”:

Rain everyday

Fog all night

Wind in the evergreen cypresses

(these lines may also be gothic fantasies, but I also could have picked surrounded, “Pale white moon, quaking aspens etc.)

That is, these things are turned into essential categories as a way to cope. To return that to Transcendental Youth it helps us reaffirm the obvious, which is that this is a survival technique. You refocus down onto one thing, and in a song this is greatly effective because the listener naturally expects a varying ending, but doesn’t get one. It’s kind of motivating and powerful. I don’t really need to explain the effect, you know what I mean and how it feels. That type of repetition sits explicitly at the centre of two songs on the album:

Stay alive, just stay alive

If this article has any point apart from pointing out a nice trope, it’s to touch on a much larger subject which deserves a separate study, which is this:

Poets can’t write lyrics

Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen are actually good examples of this, and it obviously doesn’t mean that their music is bad, but it becomes quite clear that both writers cross into spoken word because they prioritise words over how they fit into songs.

Deciding whether Bob Dylan deserved a literature prize (he didn’t) was so difficult because he was very, very good at balancing directness and poetry. Obviously I love JD but it would be a lot easier for judges, who clearly don’t think about this sort of thing enough, to disqualify him from literature prizes because his lyrical power is so often (but not always) dependent on being direct, as a lot of songs are. He’s more of a lyricist than a poet, and his prose writing shows great similarity with his lyrics. 

If you disagree with my general gist, then try writing out a song which you think is very poetical as just the lyrics, and then comparing it to a good poem. You’ll almost definitely find that the song has a storytelling quality, not just because songs are so typically stories, but because connective language and concrete direction of the song (songs are always the same length and speed) will always tend us towards storytelling, rather than poetic ambiguity. This is NOT intended as a judgement on quality, as literature JD’s lyrics are a lot better than a lot of poems I know (see a much earlier article of mine on why calling something “poetry” shouldn’t be a value judgement), it’s just a comment on how different writers approach literature.

Now I KNOW that this is hugely simplified- good poems aren’t always ambiguous, some very good songs are abstract, and directness vs abstraction is a bad dichotomy to look at anything by- but I think my point, which would need a book-length study to explain in full, is essentially clear.

Love,

Alex

[leftpress]

Reimagining the Working Class: A Roundtable on Economic and Racial Justice in the Age of Trump

By Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Sue J. Kim, Keona K. Ervin, Andrew Hoberek, Min Hyoung Song, Curtis Marez |  JANUARY 14, 2017

ANDREW HOBEREK: Since November 8, there has been a lot of talk about how Donald Trump appealed (or Hillary Clinton failed to appeal) to voters on economic issues. This discussion has generally focused, in an extremely limited way, on a real or imagined group of white working-class voters in the “Rust Belt,” with the unfortunate effect of reigniting debates about the difference between class and identity politics — as though economic justice were not also crucial to people of color and other minority groups. Moving forward, how can we overcome this false distinction and think about economic issues in a way that encompasses — while taking full account of the differences among — various groups?

KEONA K. ERVIN: In the cacophony of voices weighing in on the meaning of Donald J. Trump’s presidential election victory, an old construction, the “(white) working class,” has reemerged in public discourse. Embedded in this concept is the assumption that the American working class is not only white, but male. Pundits have been telling stories about the forgotten and ignored “white working class,” suggesting that Trumpism is what results when white working-class resentment goes unacknowledged. The outcome of the election, we are told, may best be understood as the failure of the Clinton campaign and the effectiveness of Trump strategists to appeal to (white) workers’ economic concerns. Decades of alienation and hardship have resulted, according to this narrative, in an economic resentment forceful enough to transform a quintessential Wall Street tycoon into a so-called populist savior. The election of Trump, commentators tell us, was an understandable response to years of neglecting white working men.

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We’ve been here before. Associating white masculinity with “the working class” has long served particular political and economic purposes. Throughout American history, white, male, able-bodied, industrial, and trade unionist defined the American working class. This understanding shaped public policy, American trade unionism, notions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, and designations of which laboring bodies mattered to the state.

Studies have, of course, taught us differently. Workers of color and women workers of color were much more than simple contributors to the story of the making of the American working class. The labor they performed — confined as they were to menial, low-wage jobs — became critical arenas for class formation, working-class struggle, and class consciousness. One need only look to the corpus of works on capitalism and slavery or those which address black women’s labor within the carceral state, for example, to discover how our story of American labor fundamentally shifts when we bring forgotten laboring bodies into the story of the “house of labor.” Meanwhile, labor historians have interrogated the racial and gender categories of whiteness and white masculinity that have undergirded our traditional conception of the working class. Such works radically disrupt and move beyond the false binary of class versus “identity politics.”

For one thing, invocations of the white working class often ignore the ways in which the economic resentments of white working-class people are conceptualized and expressed through race. Moving from the assumption that invoking class automatically means that race isn’t at work, commentators who cited white voters’ support for Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections as evidence that white working-class voters for Trump weren’t motivated by racism, for instance, missed how race, as George Lipsitz says, “takes place” or finds expression through economic entitlement and possession. Trump supporters’ racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and support of mass deportations, a wall along the US–Mexico border, and a Muslim registry are inextricably bound up with their economic resentment. In this respect, the “white working class” construction fails to confront Trump supporters’ erroneous zero-sum calculation that advancement for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities and women means economic misery for them. The act of making “white working class” synonymous with “Trump supporter,” moreover, diverts attention from the cross-class and cross-gender unity among white voters for Trump. What about white middle- and upper-class Trump supporters, and the white women who supported his candidacy? It also makes monolithic assumptions about the politics of white working-class people, erasing white working-class men in the rural- and post-industrial-Rust-Belt-America, for example, who hold anticapitalist and antiracist views.

And yet, the economic suffering of the white working class is real, and our political discourses have, in fact, often ignored white working-class suffering for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Neoliberal policies, corporatization, deindustrialization, the erosion of the social safety net, the gutting of public institutions, expanding marketization, and rising inequality eviscerated the working class in general. And while it is clear that economic restructuring since the 1970s differently impacted the segments of this class — and that these differential impacts matter — we can’t lose sight of the serious precarity that all working people face. The problem with discussing the white, male working class is not that it has not also suffered from these shifts, but that unexamined constructions of labor as white and male incorrectly advance a line of thinking that people who are understood to “bear” race — immigrants of color, Muslims, blacks, Latinxs — lack class concerns. Let’s engage the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, BYP100, and Angela Davis, for example, to understand why such conceptualizations are a dead-end.

The “white working class” construction thus flattens our analysis and stifles our political imagination. It renders workers of color invisible and ignores their economic concerns. Constructions of the “white working class” also tend to render working-class struggle itself, especially that which emerges from mobilizations by workers of color and struggles that exist outside of the traditional framework of industrial trade unionism, as politically unintelligible. Yet working-class movements like the Fight for $15 and struggles waged by the National Domestic Workers Union and the Chicago Teachers Union — some of the most important of their kind today — would have been impossible without the innovative political leadership of women workers of color. Worker centers like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and Latino Union of Chicago do critical work in merging struggles for immigrant rights and worker power. UNITE HERE, a union for workers in the hospitality industry, is among the leaders of its kind as it builds a multiracial worker movement; its culinary union Local 226 was crucial to one of 2016’s few Democratic Party wins in Nevada, a “swing” state.

There are many more examples (too many to cite here) that are not only disrupting long-held ideas about the composition of the American working class, but are also advancing innovative tactics and strategies of worker self-organization. To imagine alternative futures we need to build a labor movement that centers social justice. We need to reignite efforts to mobilize and establish solidarity among members of the real American working class, efforts that necessarily involve the struggle to “free white working people from the paltry wages of whiteness,” as Robin D. G. Kelley has put it. Visionary struggles — past and present — that have accurately defined the working class and have imagined working-class struggles in the largest and most inclusive terms serve as models for identifying and targeting common enemies and working toward a better future for all workers.

SUE J. KIM: As with the phrase “regular Americans,” the term “working class” often refers implicitly to white workers, but quite often these days, the actual phrase “white working class” is used. These terms generally refer to those in rural and urban areas devastated by deindustrialization. We must, we are told, feel their pain. Such insights have gone hand in hand with the exhortation to leave behind “identity politics” and “diversity,” which have, so the claim goes, distracted liberals and the left generally from the problems of the working class.

I will be among the first to admit that there are problematic forms of identity politics — particularly the sort of liberal multiculturalism which focuses on simply adding “diverse” folks to existing corporate, governmental, and institutional structures. But critique of these problematic and ultimately superficial forms of decolonization is not the object of these recent appeals. Rather, the “class versus race” dichotomy is designed to defang progressive movements seeking to undo the ravages of both.

The idea that we should pay attention to the white working class instead of “identity politics” ignores the actual history of how issues of identity and class have always been intimately interconnected at least since the beginnings of capitalism. Learn about the origins of colonialism with the Dutch East India Company or the British Royal Niger Company, or read the work of Manning Marable and Angela Davis. Study the history of most Asian groups in the United States — our polyglot histories are more often than not the results of a combination of commerce/labor needs, colonialism, and the Cold War. The issues informing the Dakota Access Pipeline protest did not suddenly arise in 2016. Issues of race, gender, and class are by no means “new” issues — they are literally woven into the fabric of American and Western society. It’s only the explicit discussion of these histories and ongoing processes that is relatively new.

So attempts to divorce class from race have two major implications. First, they suggest that issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, et cetera, are at best distractions from the “real issues,” at worst exercises in self-affirmation. While issues of identity formation are critical — especially for the young — almost all such movements are also critiques of structures and systems of exploitation and oppression, ranging from the prison-industrial complex to reproductive access to education. Progressive anticapitalist, antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, climate change, and other activists understand that identity is always embedded in social structures — including the identity category of “white working class.” Only an extremely superficial notion of identity politics or diversity asserts that the main issue is individual identity.

Second, such stances often imply that poor- and working-class whites are somehow subhuman. Many seemingly compassionate gestures participate in a long history of “sympathy” that in fact dehumanizes the other. Coded in such conversations is an undercurrent of blame of “others” who live only in certain parts of the nation (the South, the deindustrialized Rust Belt). An atmosphere of melancholy and mourning, hilariously depicted in Dave Chappelle’s Saturday Night Live’s sketch about election night 2016, haunts the disbelief of white liberals in particular. As Patrick Thornton puts it, we need to “stop infantilizing and deifying rural and white working-class Americans.” Rather, we should treat working-class people — like all people — like human beings, which means listening to their concerns as well as holding them responsible for their thoughts and actions.

The difference is between “blame” and scapegoating, on one hand, and understanding causes, on the other. It’s one thing to understand that the system is broken for a lot of people. It’s another thing to blame the disastrous results of this election on the sheer ignorance of “deplorable” members of the lower classes. We must hold people accountable for their views, but by the same token, we must examine our own complicity in producing the terrible state of education, health care, child care, jobs, prisons, drug addiction — the list goes on. Post-election stories on NPR and in other venues repeatedly suggest that we should try to understand these natives from a foreign land called the “white working class,” rather than examining the histories and reasons for why social groups have taken certain forms.

Some poor whites voted for Trump. But so did suburbanites with no good reason other than a combination of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, et cetera. In fact, the majority of people whose income is under $50,000 voted for Clinton. White people across the board — in terms of education, age, economics — voted for Trump and his particular brand of white supremacy and xenophobia. A study of far-right movements in the United States and Europe that was conducted before the election found that “far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state. The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim.” And yet the narrative we keep hearing is that “the white working class” voted Trump into office.

The Democratic Party in the United States — by shifting to the center/right during the Clinton era — turned its back on the working classes and people of color, and these multiracial working classes are struggling. Yet despite this, many working-class whites and people of color I know did not vote for Trump. Even knowing that the Democrats would not necessarily make their lives substantially better, they chose to vote for Clinton. Their votes were acts of self-sacrifice and generosity on a scale that pundits and politicians seem incapable of comprehending, and that we seldom hear about.

So my ire is reserved for the significant portion of upper-middle-class voters who voted for Trump, as well as for those who refuse to examine why the working class across the board may have felt at best tepid about the Democratic ticket. As Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writes, “One of the worst and most dishonest liberal sayings is ‘It’s not about race, it’s about class,’ as though race and class are not as uniquely intertwined as every other demographic […] It’s about class, it’s about race. And we’re all fucked because of it.”

CURTIS MAREZ: Both sides of the class versus race debate in critical accounts of Trump’s election presuppose the question, “What do white working-class voters want?” This of course centers whites and marginalizes people of color in representations of the working classes (and the plural here is important). Since so many of Trump’s white supporters are middle and upper class, the focus on “the white working class” defines class in abstract, culturalist ways at some distance from material realities. Many Trump fans, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, experience their class via their race and gender (and vice versa).

At the same time, most of the Muslim, Mexican, and black people whom Trump has vilified labor for a living. He has thus pitted different workers against each other while imaginatively excluding people of color from the category “worker,” here imagined to mean “deserving, white worker.” Trump’s agenda was, arguably, not so much to exclude workers of color as to discipline them and “put them in their place.” Women of color in particular bear the brunt of such attacks. And commentators who have unthinkingly reproduced traditional conceptions of a white, male working class have been complicit in these assaults.

It is almost as though scholars in Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and related interdisciplinary fields have not spent the past quarter century, at least, analyzing inequality in terms of intersecting hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. In a foundational 1991 article, for example, UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw famously theorized the concept of “intersectionality,” and her discussion of Trump in this essay was prescient, to say the least. Drawing on the work of another black feminist scholar, Valerie Smith, Crenshaw analyzed intersections of race and gender in the Central Park rape case, where the young men of color accused (and subsequently exonerated) of raping a white woman were racialized as “savages,” “wolves,” and “beasts.” “Given the chilling parallels between the media representations of the Central Park rape and the sensationalized coverage of similar allegations that in the past frequently culminated in lynchings,” Crenshaw wrote, “one could hardly be surprised when Donald Trump took out a full page ad in four New York newspapers demanding that New York ‘Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police.’” In the period when Trump was focusing attention on the Central Park case, many equally horrific rapes occurred, the majority of whose victims were women of color. Yet none “elicited the public expressions of horror and outrage that attended the Central Park rape,” leading Crenshaw to conclude that black women are devalued both because they are black and because they are women.

I was reminded of that part of Crenshaw’s essay when Trump launched his presidential campaign by foregrounding the figure of the Mexican rapist. A blatant appeal to white nativists, this figure not only vilified working-class immigrant men but also implicitly invoked violated white women while diminishing the violence faced by women of color. And even as Trump has launched assaults on people bearing the disproportionate burden of intersecting inequalities, he has set out to undermine the interpretive frameworks that would help us to understand these people’s struggles. Trump stands on the shoulders of decades of right-wing efforts to discredit education in general and research and teaching about intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality in particular. His criticisms of “political correctness” can be traced to the early 1990s, when — as Chris Newfield details in Unmaking the Public University — conservative intellectuals and think tanks began using the concept in an effort to defund public universities. The revived battle against political correctness that was already underway in red state legislatures before Trump took the wheel is partly a war on working-class students of color and their worldviews. As Roderick Ferguson argues, the student demands of the 1960s and 1970s prioritized the dramatic redistribution of resources and greater access for working-class students of color, and Trump’s reanimation of “political correctness” is a club wielded against such aspirations.

Similar logics are at play in campaigns against Ethnic Studies in Arizona high schools and elsewhere, and more broadly, in the state-level gutting of public education from colleges to K–12. All the news stories of Trump-inspired hate speech in high schools and elementary schools suggest the culmination of a long reactionary march though the public school system, aimed at bullying the next generation of low-wage workers of color and reproducing white-nationalist constituencies.

Liberal political analysis and representation that focuses on children is sometimes criticized for displacing a larger critique of structural violence with sentimental invocations of threatened innocence. But I want to end by discussing a different sort of child-focused movement operating at the intersection of class, race, gender, and generation. Shortly after Trump announced his campaign, a group of fifth graders from Bell Garden Elementary in Montebello, California, a significantly Latinx area and school district, lobbied the California State Legislature to pass a bill encouraging public school teaching about the era of mass deportations in the 1930s. This was the era during which as many as a million people of Mexican descent, including a number of US citizens, were deported from California to Mexico. As fifth grader Nicole Sandoval told reporters, “My whole class felt that this is wrong […] It happened to kids like us who are Mexican Americans, and we do not want history to repeat itself.” Participants in the artificial class versus race debate would do well to ponder the fact that we now live in a world in which working-class girls of color represent the oppositional vanguard.

IGNACIO M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO: If one brackets Donald Trump’s victory, the most dangerous thing that occurred in the 2016 presidential election was the transformation of both the Democratic and Republican parties into full-fledged cultural parties. They both have bases thoroughly defined by clear identity coordinates. The former is, roughly, a multiculturalist urban coalition tied to a progressive form of identity politics (anchored in the expansion of racial and gender rights) while significantly committed (albeit not without dissent) to creative-class neoliberalism — gentrification, innovation, et cetera. The latter is, at its core, a white-supremacist party encompassing a series of radicalized (and occasionally contradictory) right-wing cultural identities — libertarians, Evangelicals, deindustrialized working classes, suburban economic elites — that coalesce around a reactionary nostalgia aimed at the destruction of social institutions created by and in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movements. Without denying that the former coalition constitutes a lesser evil — and recognizing that the Sanders movement may have planted the seeds of a different Democratic party — it is important to recognize that, in their current form, both institutions resort to voter suppression (through voter ID laws, gerrymandering, negative campaigning, misinformation, inaccurate polling, and targeted data-based electoral ground games) to try to win elections on the basis of their existing constituencies. They each represent around 25 percent of the electorate, which means that their strategies ignore roughly 50 percent of the electorate. Most elections are noncompetitive, and the parties have devoted themselves to building up safe districts and territories, that, when they turn “competitive,” can still be won or lost by a small number of points produced by turning out (or failing to turn out) the party bases.

There is no American exceptionalism here. This electoral process is part of a long-term, global erosion of the political that has taken place under neoliberalism. Silvio Berlusconi, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Mauricio Macri, and Álvaro Uribe are all figures embodying the same logic as Trump: the emergence of reactionary right-wing nationalism to channel the anger of declining middle classes into an adversarial relationship with marginalized constituencies of all sorts (black people, migrants, Muslims, peasants, et cetera). This strategy in turn grows out of the long-term erosion of the middle classes that has already been extensively studied using a number of different names: “Undoing the Demos” (Wendy Brown), “Expulsions, Brutality and Complexity” (Saskia Sassen), “Precarization” (Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey). Of course from a global perspective what is problematic about all these accounts is their nostalgia for a past that was never as rosy or just as it sometimes looks in retrospect. That the Fordist mode of production is now seen as a dream world by many critics of neoliberalism is depressing at best.

What is missing from the conversation is an idea of the future, of utopia, where the divisions of the present can truly be overcome and not simply preempted by the traps of a contemporary discourse that falsely poses the “white working class” and “identity politics” as oppositional terms that one must choose from. Although a few recent writers (like Fredric Jameson, Erik Olin Wright, and Peter Frase) have ventured to speculate what an economically just utopia would look like, contemporary politics are largely held hostage by what Svetlana Boym has called “restorative nostalgia,” a structure of feeling organized around past idealisms or past wrongs that actively blocks our potential futures. This is why the projects that we group under the name “identity politics,” understood as the action of self-asserting marginalized groups to render visible and fight against their oppression, have begun to show their limits and to backfire. Although no one in their right mind would deny the concrete oppression of specific groups and the need to recognize the racialization and genderization of injustice, we must also acknowledge that a significant number of the practices and vocabularies that proponents of identity politics have developed have been co-opted and weaponized by the enemies of justice (men’s rights activists, Christians committed to politicizing what they see as their victimization, critics of political correctness masquerading as champions of the First Amendment, and so forth). To recognize this is not to demonize “identity politics” or to demean the repertoire of political strategies and discourses deployed by peoples marginalized by race or gender. It means, rather, that there are limits of that repertoire that must be acknowledged, both in terms of their political efficacy in addressing their goals of inclusion and justice, and in their heuristic understanding of what marginalization or justice means. That the utterance of “working class” or the idea of class in itself triggers rejection because it is mistakenly identified solely with the white proletariat of the Fordist era, and the fact that our reifications of the concept of race blind us to the marginalization of working-class white subjects, render visible a problem of political forms of mobilization that fail to account for the actually-existing version of the working class today.

We thus need to imagine a future for economic justice that requires neither annulling the plight of individual groups (whether they be Black Lives Matter or the precarized white working class) nor imagining a working-class politics that is inherently white or US-based. For better or for worse, we have very significant solidarity gaps, both within the United States (between whites and nonwhites, but also between and within nonwhite identity groups) and internationally (American workers who fear competition from immigrants, or who want “their” jobs to stay in the United States at the expense of fellow workers in Mexico or China). With the rise of a CEO from the fast-food industry to head the Labor Department, it becomes patently urgent to understand the working class in the racially diverse, multigendered, geographically decentered way it functions today. That entails not only recognizing the differences among workers, but also understanding that any form of engagement that does not account for their relationship to capital and production is bound to fail as a politics. Identity politics, white nationalism, and nation-centric forms of left politics alike are all mechanisms which support neoliberal capital by forestalling the sort of wide, united-front politics necessary to rethink justice. And the sort of white-nationalist reawakening we see today is only possible in the void of economic ways of thinking marginalized subjects at large.

MIN HYOUNG SONG: In 1944 and 1945, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 94 percent. This meant that any income above $200,000 (or roughly $2.7 million in today’s dollars) would have been taxed at this rate. So, if you made $100 over this limit during either of these years, you would have kept just six dollars of this amount. This is the highest top marginal tax rate ever achieved in this country. Remarkably, this rate stayed over 90 percent until 1964, when President Kennedy finally lowered it to 77 percent. In 2013, the top marginal tax rate was 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent the year before. As sensational as these facts are, we should keep in mind that very few people ever paid this rate and those who did had the bulk of their income taxed at much lower percentages. Nevertheless, as symbol, a steep progressive tax rate speaks to a period of high civic mindedness.

It can be easy to feel nostalgic for this immediate postwar period, when even taxes spoke to a desire to distribute wealth evenly and reflected, if not helped produce, the familiar bell curve of income equality that was the hallmark of this era in American history. We must, however, approach this nostalgia with skepticism, as we know this brief era was marked by all sorts of racial exclusions, along with gender and sexuality discrimination. Someone like me, who was born in Asia to a working-class family, would not have been allowed to immigrate to this country. African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx would have, alongside Asian Americans, encountered intense housing discrimination, numerous barriers to educational advancement, and few opportunities for work, much less workplace promotion. Homosexuality was labeled an official psychological disorder, white women had few opportunities outside the home, and women of color were disadvantaged in even more daunting ways. It’s easy, of course, to flatten out the past, and exaggerate its worst features. But it’s equally easy to give the past the glow of a golden age that never existed.

I was once asked by a teacher to write about a historical era in the United States that I’d like to visit. I chose the 1920s, mostly because I had just started to read the writings of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but even then I felt an uneasiness about the kind of racial denial my selection entailed. If I were being honest, I should have written that I wouldn’t want to be an Asian American before the 1980s. Even in the early 1980s, when I was a young boy growing up in a Detroit suburb, I experienced a lot of racism. Strangers yelled slurs at me from passing cars. Service at restaurants, like the local Denny’s, could be noticeably bad, even hostile, when my family and I went out to dine. Students in my middle school teased and bullied me when they weren’t actively pretending I didn’t exist. I would come home and cry in my dining room because I was so miserable. In high school, I worked one summer as a busboy in a restaurant in downtown Birmingham, which was — and I assume remains — an upscale town full of trendy shops and highly educated people. A diner said to me, “It’s hot outside. But your people are used to the heat, so it probably doesn’t bother you.” In the age of Trump, such experiences have again become common occurrences, if they ever went away.

My memories of such racial harassment are, however, tempered by fond memories of the time I spent with my next-door neighbor Art. I was at the time maybe seven or eight, and he was already retired. He liked to hunt and make things. He set up a box with a trap door in his backyard, and a string that led to his back window. When a bird went into the box, he’d pull the door shut. I sat with him for many hours waiting for a bird to do exactly this. Whenever we caught one, we’d let it go. He also took me fishing, and taught me all sort of useful things, such as how to tie a knot properly — which, sadly, I have since forgotten. He would even take me out to eat and introduce me to his friends, all of whom were white like him and some of whom were decidedly less friendly to me. Their curious gazes, barely tolerant because of Art’s presence, called to mind how generous Art himself was.

Art was as far as I know a union man who worked in the nearby automobile assembly line, just like my father did at the time. I like to think that his treatment of me was typical of the world of fraternal solidarity around which the working classes used to organize themselves. Historical accounts speak of how unions hosted reading groups and even sustained theatrical productions among its members, and of course one of the great perks of a job in an automobile factory was that you earned enough not only to own a house and keep you and your family well fed, but also to engage in all sorts of hobbies, like the kind Art excelled at. I always feel lucky to have had Art in my life because he showed me such kindness at a time when I needed it most, and because he allowed me to see a social world that has largely been lost to us. The opportunities for play and socialization that were so obviously a part of working-class experiences don’t seem to exist anymore. Blue-collar jobs don’t pay as well, they don’t offer very good benefits, and they are a lot less secure. While it could be racially exclusionary, it also seems plausible to me that racial boundaries were more permeable than we remember, and that worker solidarity could take many surprisingly capacious forms. The loss of this working-class world is, among other things, something to be mourned. Could it be a model for the kind of world we’d like again to make possible? Or is this merely a flawed left nostalgia?

At no time, it seems to me, has a cross-racial and international popular social movement focused on a coordinated redistribution of wealth downward ever been so urgently needed. Liberal calls to forget identity politics simply do not help in this regard. Mark Lilla’s article in The New York Times is probably the worst example of these calls, though hardly the only one. Lilla insists that

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another.

This argument mimics the kind of nationalism that Richard Rorty advocated for in one of his final books, and it’s no surprise perhaps that Achieving Our Country has also been widely cited as a prophetic work that somehow anticipates our moment.

My problem with both Lilla and Rorty is that they place the blame for our divisions squarely on racial minorities, women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, immigrants, and Muslims. We are the ones who are too focused on what sets up apart, and as a result we fail to see what we have in common, which presumably is our national identity. Not only does this blame the very people put most at risk by a Trump presidency, it also echoes the thinking that allowed Trump (just barely) to be elected. And like all forms of nostalgic nationalism, its vision of the future is built on an idealized vision of the past. What Lilla in particular seems oblivious to is how the emergence of Trump is not an isolated event, but one that is connected to the emergence of far-right leaders in Europe, Russia, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. What arguments like Lilla’s and Rorty’s miss, then, is the need for greater economic equality that cuts sharply across national boundaries and shores up badly damaged civic institutions in each country.

There have been many recent instances of popular revolt against inequality and for greater democratic forms of government, from the WTO protests in the late 1990s to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, Black Lives Matter, the massive anti–Park Geun Hye demonstrations, Standing Rock, and others. On one hand, there are these movements for greater democracy and more equality. On the other, there are forces that extoll authoritarianism and promote ever greater levels of inequality. If the former are to succeed in countering the rise of what increasingly looks and feels like fascism, they will have to be attentive to differences of every kind. They will have to learn from our hard-fought efforts to be more inclusionary and more respectful of each other. They will have to respect the disabled and the queer alike. They will have to promote women’s reproductive rights and acceptance of religious differences. They will have to fight against the criminalization of the poor and racial minorities. They will have to honor the rights of native peoples everywhere. They will have to understand how local struggles are inextricably part of struggles in far-flung places. And they will, most of all, have to take account of the fact that these struggles take place during a time of intense and increasing ecological crisis. As Jedediah Purdy succinctly observes, “The politics of the Anthropocene will be either democratic or horrible.” Democratic movements cannot afford to pit social and economic populisms against each other. How to maintain the idea that both are, in fact, inextricably bound up with each other — at times perhaps even indistinguishable — is one of the most pressing intellectual questions of our time.

Andrew Hoberek is Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where he teaches classes in 20th- and 21st-century literature and other arts.

Keona K. Ervin is assistant professor of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She received her PhD in History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009.

Sue J. Kim is professor of English and co-director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Curtis Marez is a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Min Hyoung Song is a professor of English at Boston College.

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[ionecoffman]

Millennials Are Sick of Drinking

On January 20, 2017, Cassie Schoon rolled into work with a hangover. It was the morning of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, and Schoon, who doesn’t count herself among the president’s fans, had gone out for drinks with friends the night before to take her mind off it. The evening’s distraction left her in pretty rough shape the next day. “I was in this meeting feeling absolutely miserable and I was like, you know, this is not what grownups do,” she says.

Since then, Schoon, who is 37 and lives in Denver, has cut way back on alcohol. “[Drinking] has to be more of an occasion for me now, like someone’s birthday or a girl’s night,” she says. “So it’s once every couple of weeks, instead of a weekly occurrence.” Drinking less wasn’t always simple for her: Denver is a young town with a vibrant brewery and bar scene, and Schoon’s social circle had long centered itself around meeting up for drinks. But avoiding booze has been worth it. “I started to realize there’s no reason I can’t see these people and go to museums or go out for waffles or something,” Schoon says.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from more than 100 Americans in their 20s and 30s who have begun to make similar changes in their drinking habits or who are contemplating ways to drink less. They have good company: Public-health efforts have helped drive down adolescent drinking rates, and American beverage manufacturers are beginning to hedge their bets on alcohol’s future. Media, too, has noticed that change is afoot. Recent months have seen a flurry of trend stories about millennials—currently about 22 to 38 years old—getting sober.

But sobriety, a term that generally refers to the total abstention practiced by people in recovery from substance-abuse problems, doesn’t quite tell the story. What some have been quick to characterize as an interest in being sober might actually be more like a search for moderation in a culture that has long treated alcohol as a dichotomy: You either drink whenever the opportunity presents itself, or you don’t drink at all. Many millennials—and especially the urban, college-educated consumers prized by marketers—might just be tired of drinking so much.

There isn’t any great statistical evidence yet that young adults have altered their drinking habits on a grand scale. Changes in habit often lag behind changes in attitude, and national survey data on drinking habits reflect only small declines in heavy alcohol use. (For men, that’s drinking five alcoholic beverages in a short period of time five or more times in a month; for women, it’s four drinks under the same conditions.) From 2015 through 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the rate of millennials who report that they have consumed any amount of alcohol in the past month has remained pretty steady, at more than 60 percent.

But there are limitations to this data that would make it difficult to capture the types of changes that people described to me. Someone who has cut back from regularly having two or three glasses of wine with dinner to only having a glass once a week, for example, would still fall into the same statistical category, eliding shifts that might make a huge difference on a personal level. And a desire to drink less doesn’t mean that people no longer enjoy drinking. Instead, it might be that alcohol-centric socializing has crept into more parts of people’s lives and stuck around for longer than previous generations had to contend with it.

For young Americans, drinking is very social. “I drank pretty regularly in my 20s, especially in social situations,” says Leanne Vanderbyl, who lives in San Francisco. “It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I realized that alcohol was no longer my friend.” A few decades ago, marriage and children might have moved urban, college-educated young adults away from social drinking naturally, but fewer millennials are taking part in traditional family-building, and the ones doing it are waiting longer than their parents did. Now, the structure of social life isn’t that different for many people in their mid-30s than it was in their early 20s, which provides plenty of time spent drinking on dates and with friends for them to start to get a little tired of it.

For a generation that’s also behind its forebears when it comes to wealth accumulation, whether or not it’s a good idea to buy a bunch of beer or several $13 cocktails three nights a week can come down to practical concerns. Alex Belfiori, a 30-year-old IT professional in Pittsburgh, decided recently to stop keeping beer in the house. “I’ve already calculated how much I’m saving by not drinking, and I’m thinking about where I can put that money now,” he says. Nina Serven, a 24-year-old brand manager living in Brooklyn, is similarly over it. “Drinking just feels boring and needlessly expensive,” she says, even though she feels social pressure to drink. “I just started a medication that shouldn't be mixed with alcohol, and I'm relieved that I have an easy out.”

Britta Starke, an addictions therapist and the program director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center at the University of North Carolina, sees a similar malaise in those seeking guidance from in her practice. “There does come a time when there has to be some introspection,” she says. “Folks in the millennial generation have maybe a better sense of balance. Some do yoga or meditation or are physically active, so they don’t need to find stimulation and stress-reduction in substances.” That mirrors the generation’s general interest in maintaining its health, and for those questioning their habits, realizing that a healthier relationship with alcohol doesn’t require most people to give up drinking might ease people’s social concerns.

Still, Starke has noticed some worrying attitudinal trends toward alcohol among her younger patients. Millennials who haven’t developed their generation’s signature coping skills often use alcohol heavily. Starke sees an alarming number of people under 35 with advanced liver disease or alcohol hepatitis. As attitudes may be moderating for many young adults, plenty of others are struggling: Nearly 90,000 people still die from alcohol-related causes in America every year, and that number hasn’t started to meaningfully improve.

Moreover, drinking doesn’t exist in a substance-use vacuum. All the other things millennials are well-known for ingesting play a role in its shifting popularity. “It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever-more-common legalization of cannabis plays a big role in that.

Among the people I spoke with in detail, several mentioned replacing their evening wine with an evening bowl. “I smoke weed to unwind—thank you, California,” says Vanderbyl. For her, cannabis lacks the lingering effects that drove her away from alcohol: “I can wake up in the morning feeling ready for the day.” She’s not alone in making that switch. A 2017 study found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared to similar counties without weed. Recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible.

Millennials have also shown what Starke says is worrisome interest in other drugs, the abuse of which may be diverting some of their attention from alcohol. She sees many patients looking for help with opioids, as well as benzodiazepines like Xanax. Just because young people want to drink less often doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better off: Suicide rates are up among young adults, and prescription abuse is a problem the country is only beginning to address.

The beverage industry does seem to see the writing on the wall. Over the past decade, a tide of artisanal alcohol businesses met the swelling millennial market for booze-based socializing, including innumerable microbreweries and distilleries, as well as high-end cocktail bars and wine shops targeting younger clientele. Now, 2018 Nielsen data shows that sales growth across alcohol categories is slowing. Bon Appetit estimates that the market for low- or no-alcohol beverages could grow by almost a third in just the next three years.

If he spaces in which alcohol is consumed will also have to change to meet shifting consumer demands. It’s become notably easier in recent years to find alcohol-free cocktails in urban bars across America. In New York City, a few young entrepreneurs are opening up new kinds of spaces to serve the tastes of their peers. Listen Bar, a clubby pop-up that gives patrons a chance to party without alcohol, is crowdfunding to lease its first permanent location. In Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, Getaway, a bar so dedicated to being booze-free that it won’t even use bitters that contain alcohol, is opening in a few weeks.

Getaway’s owners, Sam Thonis and Regina Dellea, left careers in media to open the bar, which was an idea inspired by Thonis’s brother’s recovery from alcoholism. So far, the reception the pair has received bears out the broader generational shift they’re anticipating. “It feels to me like the older people are, the more they see [our bar] as a thing for sober people. They see it as black or white—you drink or you don’t drink,” says Thonis. “With younger people, there’s a lot more receptiveness to just not drinking sometimes.”

Instead of being the tipping point of any grand trend in alcohol consumption themselves, millennials might simply be the canaries in the coal mine. Statistically, it’s Gen Z, the age group currently in high school and college, that may force a sea change in America’s relationship with alcohol. They’re drinking at lower rates than adolescents have in generations, and so much about a person’s lifetime relationship to substance abuse and consumption is set by usage in early life.

For now, many young adults seem relieved that pressure they’ve internalized to drink is easing and more options are opening up. Drinking’s spot in people’s lives doesn’t have to be as all-or-nothing as American culture has long regarded it. “For many people, when they’re honest with their friends [about wanting to skip out on drinks], their friends are like, ‘Oh my god, I was thinking about that too,’” says UNC’s Starke. “I don’t know too many people who have gotten a negative response.”

Dellea has also noticed a mix of excitement and relief among her bar’s prospective patrons. “An Instagram account put up a picture of the bar,” she says. “A lot of the comments were just people tagging their friends.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[nancygduarteus]

Millennials Are Sick of Drinking

On January 20, 2017, Cassie Schoon rolled into work with a hangover. It was the morning of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, and Schoon, who doesn’t count herself among the president’s fans, had gone out for drinks with friends the night before to take her mind off it. The evening’s distraction left her in pretty rough shape the next day. “I was in this meeting feeling absolutely miserable and I was like, you know, this is not what grownups do,” she says.

Since then, Schoon, who is 37 and lives in Denver, has cut way back on alcohol. “[Drinking] has to be more of an occasion for me now, like someone’s birthday or a girl’s night,” she says. “So it’s once every couple of weeks, instead of a weekly occurrence.” Drinking less wasn’t always simple for her: Denver is a young town with a vibrant brewery and bar scene, and Schoon’s social circle had long centered itself around meeting up for drinks. But avoiding booze has been worth it. “I started to realize there’s no reason I can’t see these people and go to museums or go out for waffles or something,” Schoon says.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from more than 100 Americans in their 20s and 30s who have begun to make similar changes in their drinking habits or who are contemplating ways to drink less. They have good company: Public-health efforts have helped drive down adolescent drinking rates, and American beverage manufacturers are beginning to hedge their bets on alcohol’s future. Media, too, has noticed that change is afoot. Recent months have seen a flurry of trend stories about millennials—currently about 22 to 38 years old—getting sober.

But sobriety, a term that generally refers to the total abstention practiced by people in recovery from substance-abuse problems, doesn’t quite tell the story. What some have been quick to characterize as an interest in being sober might actually be more like a search for moderation in a culture that has long treated alcohol as a dichotomy: You either drink whenever the opportunity presents itself, or you don’t drink at all. Many millennials—and especially the urban, college-educated consumers prized by marketers—might just be tired of drinking so much.

There isn’t any great statistical evidence yet that young adults have altered their drinking habits on a grand scale. Changes in habit often lag behind changes in attitude, and national survey data on drinking habits reflect only small declines in heavy alcohol use. (For men, that’s drinking five alcoholic beverages in a short period of time five or more times in a month; for women, it’s four drinks under the same conditions.) From 2015 through 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the rate of millennials who report that they have consumed any amount of alcohol in the past month has remained pretty steady, at more than 60 percent.

But there are limitations to this data that would make it difficult to capture the types of changes that people described to me. Someone who has cut back from regularly having two or three glasses of wine with dinner to only having a glass once a week, for example, would still fall into the same statistical category, eliding shifts that might make a huge difference on a personal level. And a desire to drink less doesn’t mean that people no longer enjoy drinking. Instead, it might be that alcohol-centric socializing has crept into more parts of people’s lives and stuck around for longer than previous generations had to contend with it.

For young Americans, drinking is very social. “I drank pretty regularly in my 20s, especially in social situations,” says Leanne Vanderbyl, who lives in San Francisco. “It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I realized that alcohol was no longer my friend.” A few decades ago, marriage and children might have moved urban, college-educated young adults away from social drinking naturally, but fewer millennials are taking part in traditional family-building, and the ones doing it are waiting longer than their parents did. Now, the structure of social life isn’t that different for many people in their mid-30s than it was in their early 20s, which provides plenty of time spent drinking on dates and with friends for them to start to get a little tired of it.

For a generation that’s also behind its forebears when it comes to wealth accumulation, whether or not it’s a good idea to buy a bunch of beer or several $13 cocktails three nights a week can come down to practical concerns. Alex Belfiori, a 30-year-old IT professional in Pittsburgh, decided recently to stop keeping beer in the house. “I’ve already calculated how much I’m saving by not drinking, and I’m thinking about where I can put that money now,” he says. Nina Serven, a 24-year-old brand manager living in Brooklyn, is similarly over it. “Drinking just feels boring and needlessly expensive,” she says, even though she feels social pressure to drink. “I just started a medication that shouldn't be mixed with alcohol, and I'm relieved that I have an easy out.”

Britta Starke, an addictions therapist and the program director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center at the University of North Carolina, sees a similar malaise in those seeking guidance from in her practice. “There does come a time when there has to be some introspection,” she says. “Folks in the millennial generation have maybe a better sense of balance. Some do yoga or meditation or are physically active, so they don’t need to find stimulation and stress-reduction in substances.” That mirrors the generation’s general interest in maintaining its health, and for those questioning their habits, realizing that a healthier relationship with alcohol doesn’t require most people to give up drinking might ease people’s social concerns.

Still, Starke has noticed some worrying attitudinal trends toward alcohol among her younger patients. Millennials who haven’t developed their generation’s signature coping skills often use alcohol heavily. Starke sees an alarming number of people under 35 with advanced liver disease or alcohol hepatitis. As attitudes may be moderating for many young adults, plenty of others are struggling: Nearly 90,000 people still die from alcohol-related causes in America every year, and that number hasn’t started to meaningfully improve.

Moreover, drinking doesn’t exist in a substance-use vacuum. All the other things millennials are well-known for ingesting play a role in its shifting popularity. “It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever-more-common legalization of cannabis plays a big role in that.

Among the people I spoke with in detail, several mentioned replacing their evening wine with an evening bowl. “I smoke weed to unwind—thank you, California,” says Vanderbyl. For her, cannabis lacks the lingering effects that drove her away from alcohol: “I can wake up in the morning feeling ready for the day.” She’s not alone in making that switch. A 2017 study found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared to similar counties without weed. Recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible.

Millennials have also shown what Starke says is worrisome interest in other drugs, the abuse of which may be diverting some of their attention from alcohol. She sees many patients looking for help with opioids, as well as benzodiazepines like Xanax. Just because young people want to drink less often doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better off: Suicide rates are up among young adults, and prescription abuse is a problem the country is only beginning to address.

The beverage industry does seem to see the writing on the wall. Over the past decade, a tide of artisanal alcohol businesses met the swelling millennial market for booze-based socializing, including innumerable microbreweries and distilleries, as well as high-end cocktail bars and wine shops targeting younger clientele. Now, 2018 Nielsen data shows that sales growth across alcohol categories is slowing. Bon Appetit estimates that the market for low- or no-alcohol beverages could grow by almost a third in just the next three years.

If he spaces in which alcohol is consumed will also have to change to meet shifting consumer demands. It’s become notably easier in recent years to find alcohol-free cocktails in urban bars across America. In New York City, a few young entrepreneurs are opening up new kinds of spaces to serve the tastes of their peers. Listen Bar, a clubby pop-up that gives patrons a chance to party without alcohol, is crowdfunding to lease its first permanent location. In Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, Getaway, a bar so dedicated to being booze-free that it won’t even use bitters that contain alcohol, is opening in a few weeks.

Getaway’s owners, Sam Thonis and Regina Dellea, left careers in media to open the bar, which was an idea inspired by Thonis’s brother’s recovery from alcoholism. So far, the reception the pair has received bears out the broader generational shift they’re anticipating. “It feels to me like the older people are, the more they see [our bar] as a thing for sober people. They see it as black or white—you drink or you don’t drink,” says Thonis. “With younger people, there’s a lot more receptiveness to just not drinking sometimes.”

Instead of being the tipping point of any grand trend in alcohol consumption themselves, millennials might simply be the canaries in the coal mine. Statistically, it’s Gen Z, the age group currently in high school and college, that may force a sea change in America’s relationship with alcohol. They’re drinking at lower rates than adolescents have in generations, and so much about a person’s lifetime relationship to substance abuse and consumption is set by usage in early life.

For now, many young adults seem relieved that pressure they’ve internalized to drink is easing and more options are opening up. Drinking’s spot in people’s lives doesn’t have to be as all-or-nothing as American culture has long regarded it. “For many people, when they’re honest with their friends [about wanting to skip out on drinks], their friends are like, ‘Oh my god, I was thinking about that too,’” says UNC’s Starke. “I don’t know too many people who have gotten a negative response.”

Dellea has also noticed a mix of excitement and relief among her bar’s prospective patrons. “An Instagram account put up a picture of the bar,” she says. “A lot of the comments were just people tagging their friends.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/millennials-sober-sick-of-drinking/586186/?utm_source=feed