#imperialist norms

[cafeconbrujeria]

It’s simultaneously true that the Latino erasure in American conjure is WILD, and that some people are way too comfortable reading two tumblr posts and going out to shove graveyard dirt into their purse.

[fruiteggsaladit]

Koorime as otters koorime as bears hairy like the yeti crab

[st4rshiptr00per]

thinking about charley sooo hard with my bacteria filled brain thinking about her being Not Immune to Edwardian Values but like in a scattershot has-not-examined-her-own-beliefs way that u get from growing up as a troublemaker in a repressive culture. like, being a Rebel Adventuress and shit but then also having extremely british hangups about politeness or whatever. i think this is canon. anyways the important image here is her laughing at like a minor social faux pas that the average 2020s brain could not even conceive of and then going home to the tardis and walking around in a tshirt and underwear and cutting her hair with the kitchen shears.

[familyabolisher]

hi! i'm a follower, & i enjoy reading your posts and essays. in your recent post about the anti-intellectualism kerfuffle on tumblr, you said, "Part of my communism means believing in the abolition of the university; this is not an ‘anti-intellectual’ position but a straightforwardly materialist one."

i haven't heard of university abolition before, and if you are willing, i would like to hear what it's about. what is the university abolitionist image of a better alternative to universities? should learning still be centralized?

thanks for your consideration. :)

University abolition, as with any other form of abolition worth its salt, understands the role played by the institution of the university under capitalism in sustaining the conditions of capitalist-imperialist hegemony, analyses the institution accordingly, and recognises that the practices that the university purports to represent (that of intellectual production, the sharing and developing of knowledge) will undergo a fundamental overhaul and reconstitution under communism. This means looking at the university not merely as an organic institution wherein we study and develop ideas, but asking what ideas are developed and legitimised, and who is afforded the opportunity to do so, and why the university exists in the first place; we are taking a materialist rather than idealist approach. 

Simply put, the role of the university is to restrict access to knowledge and knowledge production, and to ensure the continuance of class divides and hierarchised labour. These restrictions come about in a vast number of ways; the most immediately obvious is the fact that one must meet a certain set of criteria in order to qualify for entrance in the first place, and this criteria tends to require compliance with the schooling system (itself another such arm of capitalist governance), a certain amount of wealth (and/or a willingness to accrue debt), and an ability to demonstrate methods of intellectual engagement compliant with the standard of the academy. Obviously, there are massive overlaps in this set of criteria; those who come from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to have had a good education and thus can better demonstrate normative intellectual engagement, those who can demonstrate that engagement have probably complied with the schooling system, and so on. The logic behind the existence of private schools is the idea that sufficient wealth can near-enough secure your child's entry into the university and therefore entry into the wealthier classes as an adult, with the most prestigious institutions overrun by students from privately educated backgrounds. Already, you can see how this is a tactic that filters out people from marginalised backgrounds; if you’re too poor, too un[der]educated, too disabled, not white enough, &c. &c., your chances of admittance into higher education grow slimmer and slimmer.

Access to the university affords access to knowledge; most literally through institutional access to books, papers, libraries, but also through participation in lectures and seminars, reading lists, first-hand contact with active academics, the opportunity to produce work and receive feedback on it, the opportunity to develop your own ideas in a socially legitimised sphere. As I explained above, who is afforded access to such knowledge is stratified and limited; the institution is hostile to anyone deemed socially disposable under capitalism. Access to the university also affords access to a university degree, with which you can continue down the research path (and thus participate in the cycle of radical knowledge-production being absorbed and defanged by the academy, and water down your own ideas to make them palatable to institutions which tend to balk at anything with serious Marxist commitments), or gain entry to better-paid, more stable, more prestigious jobs than those which people without degrees are most often relegated to. In this sense, the people who are more likely to be able to meet the access criteria for the university and then successfully participate in it are able to retain their class position (or else promulgate the myth of social mobility as a solution to mass impoverishment) and thus gain a vested interest in maintaining the conditions of hegemony. Those who gain entry into the middle class have done so after undergoing a process of stratification according to means; which is to say, class, race, [dis]ability; and tend to lose interest in defending a politic which seeks to destabilise their relatively privileged position in the pecking order.

Success in a research career, too, depends upon liberties afforded by wealth; can you afford to go to all these conferences, do low-paid and insecure teaching work in the university, churn out research, and support yourself through a postgrad degree without going insane? Not if you don’t have independent means. In the UK, the gap between undergrad and masters funding is absolutely wild—obviously there are scholarships afforded to a limited number of people (another access barrier—the whole institution runs on the myth of artificial scarcity), but broadly speaking, it’s pretty much impossible to put yourself through an MA with just the money you get from SFE unless you work a lot on the side to pay your bills (this is what I tried to do; I went insane and dropped out, lmfao) or have independent wealth. Establishing oneself as an ‘academic’ is simply easier when you have financial security. In this way, the people who make it to the very top of academia (the MAs, the PhDs) tend to be people who come from privileged backgrounds; people who are less likely to challenge hegemony, who will maintain the essential conditions by which the university sustains itself, which is to say the conditions of social stratification. These people often tend to hold reactionary positions on class—the people who are outraged at how little a stipend postgrad students get tend not to think twice about the university’s cleaners being paid minimum wage, or think of working-class jobs as shameful failstates from which their academic qualifications have allowed them to escape (how many people have you heard get absolutely aghast at the thought of ‘[person with a BA/MA/PhD] working a typically working-class job’?). Academic success tends to engender buying into the mythology of academia as a class stratifier and class stratification as indicative of one’s value, even amongst people who probably call themselves academic Marxists.

Universities are also tangible forces of counterinsurgency. I live in the UK, where universities are huge drivers of gentrification; university towns and cities will welcome mass student populations, usually from predominantly middle-class backgrounds and often coming to cities with significant working-class and immigrant communities, neighbourhoods formerly home to those communities will be effectively cleaned out so that students can live there, and the whole character of the neighbourhood changes to accommodate people from well-off backgrounds who harbour classist, racist feelings towards the locals & who will assimilate into the salaried middle-class once they graduate. More liberally-oriented universities will tend to espouse putatively progressive positions whilst making no effort to forge a relationship with grassroots movements happening on the streets of the city they’re set up in; student politics absorbs anyone with even slightly radical inclinations whilst accomplishing approximately fuck-all save for setting a few people off on the NGO track; like, the institution defangs radical potential whilst contributing to the class stratification of the city it’s set up in. 

This is without even touching on the role played by the university in maintaining conditions of imperialism and neocolonialism, both through academic output regarding colonised regions (from ‘Oriental studies’ to the proliferation of white academics who specialise in ‘Africa’ to the use of the Global South as something of a playground for white Global North academics to conduct their research to the history of epistemologies such as race science as transparently fortifying and legitimating the imperialist order) and through material means of restricting access to and production of knowledge based on country of origin (universities in the Global South are significantly limited in what academic output they can access compared to those in the Global North; engagement with Global North academia relies on the ability to move freely, something that is restricted by one’s passport; language barriers and the primacy of English in the Global North academy) keeping knowledge production in the Global South dependent on the hegemony of the North. Syed Farid Alatas has termed this ‘academic dependency,’ as a corollary to dependency theory; academia in the GS is shaped by the material dependence it has on the West, which in turn restricts the kind of academic work that can be undertaken in the first place. Ultimately, all institutions under capitalism must ultimately reroute back to the conditions that favour capitalism, and the university is not an exception.

This is just a very brief overview of an expansive topic; I would recommend going away and examining in greater detail the role played by the university under capitalism, and what the institution filters out, and why. What sort of research gets funding? What sort of knowledge gains social legitimacy? What can the university absorb and what must it reject? Who is producing knowledge and to whom are they accountable? etc.

[snarky-art]

Worst couple you know

Figuring out some Eraklyon stuff rn

Info on some fashion and cultural notes as well as general outline for where Eraklyon is situationally at the start of my rewrite:)

Tl;dr tho: it’s a hellscape lol

Traditionally feminine clothes have rounder gems.

Traditionally masculine clothes have more angular cut gems.

Red is the color of power so the Emperor must always wear it.

Asymmetry is big in style right now and so are pearls. Jewel and pastel tones are the norm for high fashion and the wealthy with most of the nobility sticking only to jewel tones.

The orange gem present in Erendor’s crown and outfit is their most common jewel on their planet.

Lots of golden and coppery color ores and unique rock types there.

The green gem is cut into an octagon to represent the entire Magical Realm, green for the concept of life energy of other beings. Only the Emperor and next in line for the throne may wear green gems in that cut.

The orange color from their gem is claimed to be a sign The Great Dragon blessed them, and they are above the concept of life, that they are a power all their own. The diamond shape is to represent their rigidity in customs and categorization which they claim has lead them to their (once) great power and expanse over everything, the green octagon included as a sign that they reach to and claim power over all in the 8 realms, the rulers of a mighty empire that will one day encompass everything.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out and they only have direct rule of Dyamond and whatever planet I’m having Samara be from (might be Dyamond too, am unsure rn) and have an excellent alliance with Solaria through its Imperialist faction. That’s about it though. They’re considered a Pillar of The Magical Realm because of their industrial prowess but even that is being diminished in its qualifications as magical culture as a whole is redefining what that looks like and means and as other planets are finding more effective or enjoysnle methods for things in ways that aren’t relevant at all to how Eraklyon would go about it. Eraklyon is also trying to push production on mining up through overworking their people to an insane degree and demanding things get done faster and as a result are producing lower quality product. Their whole socioeconomic culture right now is just Late Stage Capitalist Hell Scape.

To top it off, even back when they were still an actively growing empire, Domino was actually trying to get them to stop with using The Great Dragon in the name of their conquests since Domino was starting to work on reparations for the horrors they’d committed in the past right before it fell.

After it’s fall, Eraklyon used that event as a propaganda to say it was proof they were meant to rule after all and that they would be the ones to show The Magical World what needed to be done. Insert an increase in power and claims over planets for about 200 years, and then a steady decline of power followed by a huge dip in the last 150 years.

Eraklyon is a grossly Patriarchal society that holds a lot of views that are directly anti egalitarian in every way it can be in a culture.

A man (very rigid binary structure too with sex and gender being treated as the same thing. Think our current irl world basically. Like our world, the people are getting more and more sick of it, especially since pretty much all the rest of The Magical Realm is like “that’s a really stupid thing to reinforce so harshly and punish people who don’t fit that construct.” More backlash and pushing for it to change from the public, which isn’t vibing with the elites since the government is already in such a precarious position in terms of its power) must rule. A bride must be taken from off planet as a way to strengthen their Empire.

Green is a color of conquest due to its association with The Magical Realm as a whole, so the Empress is always adorned in it since she is a conquest in and of itself. A selection of gems are also chosen by the council of the royal court that they deem suitable for the bride to choose as her identifier when she becomes Empress. Samara was only given green ones to choose from due to the desperate need to try and reinforce strength and power through conquest, which once again she as the bride is a symbol of. Their Empire is basically no more. They are grasping at straws and the bride being used as a propaganda piece is already the norm so it’s whatever they might as well ramp it up. They also tote her red hair as a way to show that The Dragon still favors them, sending her their way, the fire of It present and on display, and even redder than that of the last Queen of Domino. Samara is proof that they can conquer anything, even The Great Dragon, if the people remain loyal to The Crown and The Empire.

Along with The Eraklyon Empire being in ruin, empires themself are very few and overall wildly shunned by the general public, Eraklyon and Solaria being some of the last notable ones, and even then just barely one at all, still using the term as a way to pretend they are still formidable and far reaching in their power.

[ecoterrorist-katara]

love love love ur parentification analysis on sokka and katara especially katara’s section! it puzzles me so when KA’s say ZK’s do not understand the show nor katara when to me it’s so obvious we do 😭

thank you so much anon! I’m so happy that my post resonated with you!

A while back I saw a Tumblr survey about favourite characters and ships. It basically showed that for people whose favourite character is Katara, Zutara is the most popular ship. Obviously the Venn diagram between Zutara shippers and Katara fans isn’t a circle, but I think the overlap contributes to why so many ZKs are passionate about Katara. Also, ZKs who are Katara fans tend to be pretty flexible with Katara ships: many people like Harutara / Jiangtara / Yuetara / Sukitara / Azutara (though most shippers of Azutara tend to be Azula stans first and Katara stans second). What’s really funny and a little sad to me is that non-ZK Katara fans who dislike her canon arc get accused of being ZKs by antis (this happens weirdly often to @sapphic-agent). It’s like some antis can’t comprehend the idea that people might just love Katara without the ship war.

I generally like reading POVs from Katara fans of all ships, but I recently discovered that I tend to disagree with POVs from Zukka shippers. They often try to defend Katara’s “childhood” by pointing out that Katara sometimes goofs off and Sokka also takes responsibility, so she’s not just the “mom friend.” To be clear I’m not disagreeing with those points, but I don’t think downplaying her parentification trauma is defending her childhood, especially since goofing off & being impulsive make her parentification more realistic, not less. It feels kind of disingenuous to accuse the fandom of being the ones to parentify her when The Runaway exists, especially since they downplay Katara’s parentification in order to play up Sokka’s parentification. There’s nothing feminist about ignoring the invisible labour performed by a woman in a cartoon, not when brave women IRL have been agitating to recognize care work for literal decades. I wrote my undergrad thesis on invisible labour performed by women, especially women of colour, in radical activist spaces…so I feel really strongly about this.

I think it’s interesting that a lot of ATLA fans claim Katara shouldn’t be with Zuko on the grounds of her colonial trauma, but refuse to entertain the notion that maybe she shouldn’t be with Aang (a kid who evades responsibility) because of her parentification trauma. The murder of her mother stems from imperialist violence, but her subsequent parentification stems from patriarchal gender norms around divisions of labour and assignations of responsibility. The patriarchy is a thing in ATLA, and it’s canonically something that Katara hates almost as much as the Fire Nation (incidentally, reason 27363729 why the fic Southern Lights is so special to me is how it deftly explores both anger at a colonial apparatus & anger at your own people for their patriarchal oppression).

[opencommunion]

"My analysis challenges a number of ideas, some mentioned above, common in many Western feminist writings:

Gender categories are universal and timeless and have been present in every society at all times. This idea is often expressed in a biblical tone, as if to suggest that 'in the beginning there was gender.'

Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies and is therefore always salient. In any given society, gender is everywhere.

There is an essential, universal category 'woman' that is characterized by the social uniformity of its members.

The subordination of women is a universal.

The category 'woman' is precultural, fixed in historical time and cultural space in antithesis to another fixed category—'man.'

... Merely by analyzing a particular society with gender constructs, scholars create gender categories. To put this another way: by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. The idea that in dealing with gender constructs one necessarily contributes to their creation is apparent in Judith Lorber's claim that 'the prime paradox of gender is that in order to dismantle the institution, you must first make it very visible.' In actuality, the process of making gender visible is also a process of creating gender. Thus, scholarship is implicated in the process of gender-formation."

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) ~

"Feminist anthropologists of racialized peoples in the Americas tend not to think about the concept of gender when they use the term as a classificatory instrument, they take its meaning for granted. This, I claim, is an example of a colonial methodology. Though the claim that gender, the concept, applies universally is not explicitly stated, it is implied. In both group and conference conversations I have heard the claim that 'gender is everywhere,' meaning, technically, that sexual difference is socialized everywhere. The claim, implied or explicit, is that all societies organize dimorphic sexuality, reproductive sexuality, in terms of dichotomous roles that are hierarchically arranged and normatively enforced. That is, gender is the normative social conceptualization of sex, the biological fact of the matter. ... The critique of the binary has not been accompanied by an unveiling of the relation between colonization, race, and gender, nor by an analysis of gender as a colonial introduction of control of the humanity of the colonized, nor by an understanding that gender obscures rather than uncovers the organization of life among the colonized. The critique has favored thinking of more sexes and genders than two, yet it has not abandoned the universality of gender arrangements. ... Understanding the group with gender on one’s mind, one would see gender everywhere, imposing an order of relations uncritically as if coloniality had been completely successful both in erasing other meanings and people had totally assimilated, or as if they had always had the socio-political-economic structure that constitutes and is constituted by what Butler calls the gender norm inscribed in the organization of their relations. Thus, the claim 'There is gender everywhere' is false ... since for a colonized, non-Western people to have their socio-political-economic relations regulated by gender would mean that the conceptual and structural framework of their society fits the conceptual and structural framework of colonial or neocolonial and imperialist societies. ... Why does anyone want to insist on finding gender among all the peoples of our planet? What is good about the concept that we would want to keep it at the center of our 'liberation'?" María Lugones, "Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology," in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022)

[sansculottides]

𝗛𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗦 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗜𝘁𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗙𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀

On June 14, 2024, international news agency Reuters exposed a secret disinformation campaign by the US Department of State meant to discredit Chinese-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines amongst Filipinos. The US anti-vax fake news campaign ran from 2020 to 2021, and involved the use of dummy social media accounts posting false and unscientific information about the efficacy of Chinese vaccines, as well as weaponizing pervasive racist conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was created and spread by the Chinese government.

We demand an immediate investigation by the Philippine government on the matter, and for decisive action to be taken by the government to hold the US accountable for its deception campaign against the Filipino people. The Reuters exposé has uncovered a clear national security threat to the Filipino people. The US carried out its fake news campaign at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the Filipino people, and worsened already widespread anti-vaccination beliefs amongst the public.

We are appalled by the glaring lack of Philippine media coverage on the Reuters exposé. An international scandal has just been uncovered. How can truth be spoken to power, and how can political action be taken by citizens, if the media does not play its part? Silence is silence, whether due to the threat of repression or the suffocating consensus by media capitalists that unsavory things be left unsaid. We call on all media workers, whether working at mainstream media organizations, independent media, social media, or campus media, to take the lead themselves and focus public attention on this issue.

The year-long campaign clearly demonstrates the untrustworthiness of the US as a strategic diplomatic and military partner of the Philippines and of all Global South countries. The campaign was initiated by the Trump administration and was first focused on the Philippines. Later on, the project was expanded further into Central Asia and the Middle East. It took the Biden administration three full months to end the globalized and state-sponsored mass disinformation project.

This issue is not just a problem of specific administrations. The year-long campaign should remind the workers and the masses of the Philippines and the world that the US remains the world’s foremost imperialist power. Its overriding foreign policy concern is the maintenance of its dominant global military and economic position, and its means are deception and force.

The US’ covert effort to corrupt public discourse in the Philippines should prompt the Marcos administration to question the intentions of its close diplomatic and military ally. The disinformation campaign was motivated primarily by the US’ geopolitical rivalry with China, which has, since the former’s Pivot to Asia in 2012, increasingly taken on a more militarized and antagonistic form. US military and intelligence agencies are manufacturing consent in the Philippines to win the hearts and minds of the Filipino masses in its effort to overpower China through military means. This is its real goal, and not to aid the Filipino people to address Chinese maritime aggression.

The US has no legitimacy to pose as a champion of international laws and norms and as a partner to secure the Philippines’ national sovereignty. It conducted its campaign to serve its own geopolitical interests with no regard for the immense need of the Philippines to vaccinate its citizens against the pandemic. Once again, Washington D.C. has Filipino blood on its hands.

US interference in Philippine public life cannot be left without consequences. Philippine foreign policy should pivot away from its longstanding reliance on the US and towards ASEAN, and away from addressing Chinese aggression through militarized means and towards regional multilateral diplomacy. 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚 𝙜𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙚𝙙 𝙗𝙮 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙁𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨. 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤 𝙛𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨!

📷 AP

Reposted from SPARK - Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan (Union of Progressive Youth), a socialist youth organization in the Philippines.

[theotterpenguin]

I really like the nuanced take about Zutara and why it makes some people uncomfortable and I can see both sides of it. I ship Zutara now but at first I didn’t and it made me really uncomfortable but I think it was just because of certain fan content I was coming across. Some people do portray Zutara in an extremely fetishized & creepy Stockholm syndrome way that makes Katara come off like some helpless damsel stereotype. It made me feel really gross thinking about as a young WOC but rewatching the show and seeing the true dynamic of these characters made me fall in love with them again. So I guess my feeling is that in canon i really love the dynamic but I hate the way *certain fans* twist it and refuse to acknowledge the racism & misogyny in what they’re doing

this is a complicated topic with many layers to it but first - i am sorry if you have ever felt unwelcome in the zutara fandom due to experiences with racism/misogyny.

it would be ignorant to claim that the zutara fandom is somehow uniquely unaffected by systemic racism or sexism, but it would also be disingenuous to claim that these issues only exist in certain parts of the atla fandom. racism, sexism, and general bigotry exist in every fandom due to institutionalized inequality in social structures. and to make it clear, i'm not directing this criticism towards you, anon, you are entitled to your own personal experiences, but i have seen a broader trend of people attempting to use fandom racism to moralize their position in ship wars, which is diminishing from the actual problem - the focus should be on acknowledging the existence of fandom racism/sexism, combatting implicit biases, and creating spaces that can uplift marginalized voices, rather than focusing only on optics in an attempt to gain moral high ground in a silly *fictional* ship war.

however, given all this, the reason that i am still in the zutara fandom is because i appreciate how many people in the fandom are dedicated to unpacking issues of racism and sexism and cultural insensitivity in atla's source material, which i personally haven't seen in many other sides of the fandom (that often sanitize what actually happened in the text to avoid acknowledging these issues in their favorite show). of course this is a broad generalization, but that's generally why i stick with the non-canon shipping side of the fandom because fans that are willing to stray away from canon are often less afraid to engage in critical analysis.

i also do think the zutara fandom has come a long way from the early 2000s when the show first aired. for example, when i first joined the fandom i had mixed feelings on fire lady katara, but i have since read some fanfics that have done an excellent job deconstructing some of the problematic ways that this trope could be interpreted and balancing respect for katara's cultural heritage and autonomy with the political and personal difficulties of being involved with an imperialist/colonialist nation. the fire lady katara trope, capture!fic, and other complicated topics/tropes are almost never inherently racist/sexist, but rather, their execution is what matters. and all this is not to say that issues of systemic racism/sexism do not still exist in this fandom, but it personally has not significantly negatively impacted my experience in the zutara fandom due to the wonderful content that so many other fantastic people produce, though everyone's mileage may differ with what they are comfortable with. anon, i hope that you are able to find a place in the zutara fandom for you! but i also know many people that have stepped back from other fandoms due to experiences with racism/misogyny, so i understand that decision as well.

on a final note, i think it's important to acknowledge that fandom doesn't exist in a vacuum and broader issues of racism and sexism are rooted in the media, the entertainment industry, and mainstream societal norms. while i do sometimes focus on fandom dynamics/discourse in my criticisms, i think it is equally as important to acknowledge how issues of prejudice and inequality are perpetuated through larger social structures, which is why it frustrates me when the atla fandom refuses to acknowledge the flaws of the original show, which has far more influence and social power over the general public than discourse over fandom tropes ever will. personally, i don't understand the phenomenon of holding fan-made material to a higher standard than mainstream media.

[etirabys]

one of the toxic things I do with 81k is take a topic we are perfectly capable of debating in a normal polite fashion, but use an exaggerated tumblr slapfight register to discuss it

"I think the anti-spanking position US liberals have taken is imperialist, because many immigrants come from cultures that have a rich tradition of spanking their children"

"I think those immigrants should assimilate because too much cultural heterogeneity threatens social cohesion. They should self-deport if they're not willing to adopt American norms"

"I think we should have an archipelago model of child-rearing policies and not preemptively repress –"

and so on. we would never do this with anyone else but we're both emotionally damaged from spending a decade here, so...

[txttletale]

So I'm a leftist because I can plainly see that capitalism sucks, but I have a really hard time pinning down what I think we should replace it with because I have "agrees with the last theory I read" disease. (Or, more embarrassingly, "agrees with the last Post I read.")

Something I've been wondering about recently is what's the point of planning and arguing over what happens after the revolution anyway? The chances of a successful worker's revolution in my lifetime, let alone the next few decades, feels vanishingly small. The preconditions just feel so far away.

Is there really value in committing to a specific ideology right now, or is it sufficient to say the anarchist future and the ML future (and even, like, the DemSoc future) sound better than what we have now, and require many of the same preconditions, so let's work towards those shared goals now and figure out what comes after in a few decades when the groundwork is actually laid?

i agree with you that i don't think a genuine revolutionary situation will arise (at least, not in the imperial core) within our lifetimes. i also agree that there is a meaningful degree to which the theoretical differences between marxist-leninists & anarchists are far enough from being present and pressing concerns that they should in almost all cases be working together and employing similar tactics and action.

however, i do think there is a value to having an ideological framework: it keeps you consistent. if your ideology is vague and empty, you're liable to (intentional or unintentional) opportunism--you will fill in the gaps or approach new ideas with the default positions, the ones that require the least divergence from hegemonic cultural norms and values.

that sounds a bit ideological-jargony so i'll phrase it another way: if you grow up in a [joker voice] society, you're going to grow up with a lot of assumptions! like, 'cops reduce crime', for example. and if you don't have an underlying theory of capitalist society and how it functions, then it's entirely possible to realize (through experience or analysis) that capitalism is bad and that our society is inherently unjust, but continue thinking 'cops reduce crime' because that's just the default cultural position you grew up with. these two things are pretty impossible to reconcile, right--because of course the actual purpose of cops is to enforce private property rights and maintain the capitalist system of economic relations--but if you don't have a full theoretical framework of capitalism & society that you can use to analyse things, that incoherence is very easy to let slip by!

i also want to say that while i think that anarchists & marxist-leninists (and all other revolutionary) communists share common goals and functionally very similar political projects for our forseeable lifetime, there is a meaningful difference between these two and the 'demsocs' you mentioned. not an uncrossable gulf by any means in terms of working together and forging political alliances--but the steps one takes to agitate and organize the working class in anticipation of a future revolutionary situation, however distant, are imo very functionally different to the steps one takes to advocate for social reform within liberal legislatures. rosa luxemburg put it well when she said there is nothing reformist about supporting trade unions, welfare legislation, as a vehicle for revolutionary class struggle--but when you take these things as ends themselves, i.e., as viable methods for resolving the contradictions of capitalism, you become unable to use them as such a vehicle.

but, yeah. tldr; i think it is far from the most important thing (the most important thing is to be a principled anti-capitalist & anti-imperialist--these are the two litmus tests for whom i can consider a political ally), but it is useful to have an underlying political framework rather than a collection of individual positions, because the latter can lead to contradictory and self-defeating worldviews and political programs

[drdemonprince]

What is your religion?

People who are far better read in theology than me have convinced me that even the category of "religion" is unhelpful for understanding the wide variety of cultural practices and relationships to spirituality that exist in the world.

When we call something a "religion" we are more often than not transposing a Christian and imperialist idea of what faith is onto completely different practices, beliefs, cultural norms, traditions, and personal experiences. This can happen even if we are not personally Christian or even Christian in our background, again because of imperialism and just how strongly American & European Christian culture has been forced onto the whole rest of the world, and along with it, many of our words and concepts.

Put another way, it really makes no sense to put Shintoism, for example, in the same categorical bucket as Christianity. Doing so actually makes it harder for someone who has a Christian reference point for what a "religion" is to understand Shintoism than if they were considered as their own distinct things.

years of working for various Catholic and Christian organizations has left me with no interest in and little respect for organized Christianity. When I was a child in Sunday School I developed the strange belief that God actively wanted me to be an atheist. And that's about all I can say on the subject.

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

I forget how genuinely young some people on this site are.

You guys are aware that marijuana is literally only classified as a major drug because the government wanted to put as many leftists in prison as possible for protesting American nationalism and unnecessary wars in the east during the late-60s and 70s, right?

Like that and a lot of other innocuous social “norms” such as shaving were pushed primarily as a suppression of hippies for being anti-establishment and disrupting the status quo.

I don’t know, I just think it’s necessary to keep that in mind when discussing weed and legalization. I see a lot of people mention that it was only banned in the first place because of tobacco lobbyists, but I don’t see as many people pointing out the fact that you can go to prison for possessing marijuana exclusively because conservatives thought the mere act of protesting their imperialist policies was enough of a threat that they needed to be put away.

[lord-of-hollows]

The Ongoing Hostilty of the Stormcloak Debate

If you're the kind of person who has their politics dictated to them by social media algorithms, it's easy to write off the Stormcloaks. After all, you were told they were Fascist badmen by a reddit user so clearly this must be correct. However, with things coming to light, I have to say that if you're the kind of person who is Anti-Stormcloak but also supports a free Palestine? You're clearly not putting any thought into your own beliefs and I'm not interested in having conversations with people who don't put thought into their own beliefs.

The Imperial argument has been debunked as far back as 2011. They've changed and modified it how they say it but the core pillars have not changed in the past years.

1. The Empire brings peace and stability to Tamriel.

This one's just untrue. Even at the height of Imperial power there were rebellions, succession crises, wars and large stretches of land in "uncivilised" nations that were just ungoverned. Not to mention, it was under Imperial governance that the Aldmeris Dominion rose. The Empire never brought any kind of stability that lasted more than like, a decade.

2. "The Empire is the best chance for victory against the Thalmor."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Imperial supporters seem wonderfully willing to assert this and then immediately launch into a non-sequiter and act as if this proves the Empire has a chance.

The last Imperial victory against the Thalmor lead to Hammerfell being abandoned, religious reform being enforced by their enemy, and Thalmor Gestapo being allowed to roam the Empire wantonly executing Imperial citizens with no due process. If that's a victory you better hope you don't find out what defeat looks like.

3. "Stormcloaks are racist."

I don't believe they're extraordinarily racist for Tamriel, but let's assume they are. However I invite Imperial supporters to also look at the Empire.

"Without us to keep order, the provinces would fall to lawlessness and barbarism."

The Empire at the outset feels that a dominant culture is needed for others to function. More than that, they feel that their culture is justifiably supreme to enforce their will on others. If they didn't feel this was true, they wouldn't be an Empire.

You cannot argue that the Stormcloaks are racist and then handwave the racism of the Empire. You have to pick one. Either it's a negative or isn't. Then we have to identify which of these is more racist.

Imperialists like to point out that the Stormcloaks don't like to let Argonians into the city. This isn't true, my Argonian walked into Windhelm just fine.

"But thats just a game mechanic." - Yeah and the Orc strongholds only let a non-Orc in if you impress Orcs. So you're telling me that Bethesda went out of the way to care about the player characters race in the Strongholds but just kinda stopped caring when it came to the major city of one of the two factions in the war?

I mean, they're lazy, but come on. You can't tell me they're not putting in the effort when you can point at a spot they're putting in that self-same effort for content less players will see.

And even if it were true, under the empire Argonians and Khajiit were enslaved in Morrowind because the Dunmer had a superweapon to trade. So the Empire just turned a blind eye to slavery because "Fuck you, got mine."

But again why would they care about the enslavement of what to their eyes were barbaric races of inferior culture. The use of the word Empire isn't an accident.

And this is why it's so frustrating to talk to Imperial supporters. They easily cast aspersions on the Stormcloaks but when you turn a mirror on them suddenly they stop wanting to discuss.

If you want to call the Stormcloaks racist, you can. They are certainly at least as racist as the norm for Tamriel. If you want to argue it as a reason for siding with the Empire then either you don't know about the Empire or you're being disingenuous.

4. "The Empire keeps the Thalmor out of Skyrim."

This one is asserted by many characters ingame. It's a lie.

In Imperial controlled holds Thalmor Gestapo wander around and can attempt to execute you on the spot if they decide to. No trial. Imperial guards do not rush to help you fight them off. They just stand and stare. In a Stormcloak victory these random encounters stop happening in all holds. I'm not sure about the one where they send Assassins as this encounter generally happens before a Stormcloak victory, but it happens.

As Thalmor only show up in Imperial controlled holds, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is the Empire is what keeps the Thalmor in Skyrim.

5. The Thalmor want Ulfric to win.

No they don't. They said that they didn't. Read their dossier.

6. Ulfric is a Thalmor asset.

An uncooperative asset. The Empire is a cooperative asset.

It's been made clear to me over the years that supporting the Imperial argument is unjustifiable on a moral level and irresponsible on the level of governance.

7. Ulfric as a character is power hungry and only in it for himself.

Assuming this is true...

So?

The Empire is power hungry, as evidenced by the fact that they are an Empire. Are they in it for themselves? Well, if they arent then who do you think they're doing it for?

You're not making an argument against the Stormcloaks.

However I argue that the cause is more than its leader. The Stormcloaks are in it for their own reasons and as a ruler Ulfric must satisfy them. Why wouldn't he? They're one of the pillars to his power, if he can't make them happy he loses any status they give him.

Power is not a permanent thing, you gain it, you lose it.

Now on a meta level I take role-playing rules, the true faction you should support is the faction that's right for your character. I have played characters that supported the Imperial cause. My Orc warrior always wanted to be a legionnaire. My Redoran Dunmer felt resentment toward Ulfric so begrudgingly sided with the Empire out of feeling a mutual enemy. My Breton Knight felt loyalty to the Old Empire.

Despite this, as a human looking at a fantasy world, I cannot look at the Imperial argument with any seriousness.

However since 2011 here are some assumptions made about me by Imperialists.

1. I'm racist.

Probably, I hear nobody is completely free of racist thought. I like to think that I'm less racist than most, though I'm open to the idea that I may be more racist than I assume.

2. I like Trump.

I don't. I think he's a wonderful caricature of what an idiot thinks a high power businessman acts like. I find him funny, but I would never want him in charge of my country and I'm thankful to not be American. I think his presidency is a wonderful argument people like me who live in countries with mandatory voting can point at and say "This is why you don't want 100% voter turnout."

3. I was involved in GamerGate

Insofar as paying attention to it and not believing they're 100% wrong. Yes. I've had no faith in journalism since I myself was a child. To know that a journalist was sleeping with the subject of his articles was unsurprising, even expected. You might say its just fucking video games, and you'd be right. I would ask if you can not trust journalists with just fucking video games, what can you trust them with?

And that was my answer to the whole GamerGate thing. Journalism has never been a profession a person with any expectation of realism should respect. The amount of times I've been reading an article and it turned out the writer knew nothing is staggering.

The answer of course, is don't give journalists money. And that's as far as I ever took it.

However participating in a harassment campaign? No. I've never sent a message to any game developer or journalist I didn't like. I have, as a young man, sent cringe fan mail to Hideki Kamiya telling him I'm a fan of all his work. The same goes for Kojima and Yoko Taro.

My disappointment in GamerGate was that it's supporters never made that step into ignoring journalists and refusing them money. They continued sharing their articles.

4. I'm a fascist.

I think in order to make this argument you have to ignore a lot about the Empire. Like, a lot. They rely on exploitation of the provinces, rule by might as evidenced by the Legion being the only thing keeping Skyrim from a full succession, benefited from slavery and were built on the back of a war of conquest. When their power was broken just about the only thing keeping them together was wealth. I do not have it in me to respect power built like that.

They're a mirror of Rome, certainly. I put it to you that Rome was an exploitative Empire that irreparably damaged every culture it touched.

It's for these reasons I've now decided that in order for me to engage with an Imperial supporters arguments, they have to first prove to me they put enough thought into their beliefs to justify them. They also have to prove they play the game enough to know things about it. For instance most imperial supporters act like they don't know the Thalmor want to avoid a victory for either side.

That's kind of why I'm thankful the Stormcloak debate got so hostile. It provided a wonderful litmus test on who actually thinks about what they believe. I saw an account posting Anti-Stormcloak arguments, then I clicked on it to see what theyre like and saw that they had Free Palestine posts and I just had to stop and think for a moment. I've been treating Imperials as if they understand their own beliefs. Then I realised they're probably just very young and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I can't do that anymore.

And that's really what the Imperial Stormcloak debate taught me about politics. Well, about social media politics. You cannot enter these arguments assuming that the people you're speaking to understand their own beliefs. You have to assume that anyone who wants to talk politics with you online doesn't understand politics. Because most of them don't. You see, I don't listen to people who were right wing up until 2016 and then made the switch as Trump was being elected. They call it a deradicalization, I call it your politics being dictated you by social media. If YouTube algorithm changed the way you view the world, I don't want to hear from you. Your principles are fragile. If your recommended videos can twist your beliefs in such a way, I believe you're not going to say anything I haven't heard before. Go regurgitate Contrapoints to someone else. And it's these same people who will tell you the Empire is the only morally acceptable choice.

I know based on what I've said you've made assumptions about my politics, I'm not going to elaborate on them. Suffice it to say if you're basing your assumptions of other peoples political beliefs based on a choice they believe is right in a fictional fantasy role playing video game, you are probably not really equipped to be having conversations about politics. It also displays a concerning level of assumption.

[familyabolisher]

Hi! I just wanted to say your deep readings of TLT are so smart! I've been thinking about all the genderfuckery in Nona the Ninth for ages trying to peel apart the layers behind it (the tower princes especially) and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on it?

I do! I did a post that kind of gestured towards my broad thoughts on what Nona does with gender/how it develops the groundwork around gendered relations that Gideon and Harrow lay out a couple of weeks or so ago, but I doubt I’ll be able to find it so this is a good excuse for going into more detail with the sorts of ideas I’m bouncing around.

What I was trying to get at in my earlier post about sexual violence in Nona is that Nona represents a sea change in the narrative terms; that is, the ‘rules’ determining which parts of the whole we are allowed to see at any given time are very rapidly altered such that we're pulled away from this wholly internal imperial perspective into a space which carries its consequences. Where Gideon is about crafting a narrative around a set of sociocultural paradigms, and Harrow is about digging further into both the purpose and internal consequence of those paradigms, Nona is about absconding from the limitations that those paradigms impose. Something of an autopsy of the inner world of the imperial core has taken place in the previous two books; we are presented with the dictates, expectations, and purpose of the necromancer/cavalier subject positions, and the bedrock upon which those positions are built (ie. the particular logics of power and imperialist consolidation and sexual violence), such that (almost) everything we meet with in the first two books ultimately circles back to asserting a particular form of internal/diegetic normativity. The difference in Nona is that, outside of the space where this normativity is the governing social currency and also necessarily socially enforced, the way in which social modes are articulated now begins to fall away from the anchoring of internal imperial logics. 

What this has to do with gender is that the kind of centrifugal force determining how gender & sexuality alike are received within the empire is one of what we might term homonationalism in contemporary parlance, wherein queerness becomes reconstituted within a nationalist imaginary such that queer people willing to meet with the state on the state’s terms can be incorporated into the fold of such a national articulation. As a result, we see eg. butchness (or broader strokes of masculinity expressed by women) as something legible to us as readers who bring our contemporary understanding of lesbian gender formations as counter-hegemonic (or at least, non-normative) to the table (and are expected to do so – the text v much expects us to read Gideon as a butch or functionally equivalent, Cytherea as a femme, etc etc, and proceeds from the assumption that we have picked up on such a signification), but diegetically that masculinity is hegemonically articulable. In other words, the reason we never get a sense of Gideon registering an internal conflict between her traditionally masculine gender markers (name, appearance, relationships, just about everything that’s used in-text to signal her as a butch to the audience) and her being a (presumably cisgender) woman is because those two things are not textually in-conflict, as there exists a normative articulation of womanhood that easily accounts for them. She reads to us as ‘gender nonconforming’ (imperfect term but you get the idea), but in-universe very much does ‘conform’ to the articulation(s) of gender available to her; to call her diegetically gender nonconforming (or even diegetically butch) would be meaningless. This is largely down to the “no-homophobia” premise (which is, ofc, a deliberately homonationalist premise in itself), but gets interesting when we start to see that masculinity articulated through the paradigms of cavalierhood, a subject position constituted around the conditions necessary to sustain imperialism.

My point is—across Gideon and Harrow, everything we receive in relation to gender, contemporary gender nonconformity, allusions to transness (as with eg. the androgynous Canaan House priest, the they/them in Doctor Sex, quiet suggestions that transness is an extant concept at some level), etc., has been presented to us in a format that circles back to the normative state of gender in the Nine Houses, specifically to the purpose of demonstrating the relationship that the subject holds to the imperial body. Gideon as a butch/as a woman/as a cavalier are three states that each make sense of one another and are able to exist harmoniously, and that harmonious existence is designed to tell us something about the internal imperial condition. That Nona is the text which divests from that wholly internal perspective and takes us into the social world of the imperial periphery + operates on a logic external to that of the imperial core is, I think, the reason that gender felt a lot more … like it was being played around with, or like it held less of a cohesive loyalty to particular background strictures that were shaping how it appeared on the page. Even with characters whose gender bears a relationship to that same imperial logic (Tower Princes, ofc; also Paul, Pyrrha, Palamedes), their presence in the text is altered somewhat by the fact that the text is no longer putting itself to the purpose of, like, demonstrating those internal strictures. 

And like, this narrative slippage—from something tightly delineated from which deviation is restricted into something more animate and buoyant and malleable—isn't limited to gender at all, but is happening all over. I flagged in the linked post how part of Nona hinges on the breakdown of John's constructed 'utopia' (his word!) such that things which worked to sustain it in the past no longer hold water in the present. You could even look at, like, the shift in presentation of the Dramatis Personae between the three; from Gideon, which offered this very … precise account of names, titles, ranks, with little diegetic narrative bearing, to Harrow, which mimics the style of its predecessor but manages a level of storytelling and diegetic presence in eg. the substitution of Gideon for Ortus, the establishing of Anastasia/Samael as outliers, and Gideon's name being entirely crossed out, to Nona, where it's … a birthday party invite list being transcribed in-universe. Like, even these minute changes are demonstrative of a shift away from a hierarchy that must be dissected into something of a far more humane texture. These aren't articulations of new gendered hierarchies, they're just … particular gendered modes, playing out with relative reference to a multiplicity of active norms. 

It’s interesting that a lot of the characters who we meet as, like, hotspots of textual gender-weirdness in Nona are failstates for genders that are made legible through the condition of empire as John arranges it. I think it’s fair to read Pyrrha as a trans woman in the same way it’s fair to read Gideon as a butch (in that these are not terms/subjectivities which would make diegetic sense to either, but they are subjectivities that are signaled for the sake of the audience, with the expectation that each will be read with that subjectivity in mind), but Pyrrha is also at once both a ‘failed’ cavalier and a ‘failed’ Lyctor. (A secret third thing, if you will.) So where Gideon’s butchness as we received it in the first two books has an anchor in empire, Pyrrha’s is more like the failure of an imperial gender configuration to fully realise itself, and where her gender becomes interesting & textured is through the production of dissonance (diegetically, her as an incomplete/failed Lyctor and by extension a failed cavalier; to us, as a woman inhabiting a body that we know to have belonged to a man but which is v clearly now being considered hers.) Similarly, the Camilla-Palamedes bodyshare (and then Paul, though I really don’t have a confident reading of Paul yet considering how little time they’ve had in the narrative so I’m going to gloss over them for now) is simultaneously a reversal of the Lyctorhood process (in that the disembodied necromancer inhabits the living body of the cavalier) and its reification (in that it relies on a portion of the process of the Eightfold Word, and you might even make a case for its being another form of instrumentalising and potentially exploiting the body of the cavalier); on either end, it’s definitely not what’s supposed to have happened, and it reflects something oppositional to the ethos with which the original construction was imbued. 

Past that, like, on Lemuria itself we see a multiplicity of gendered/familial arrangements that we can presume emerge as a result of the multiplicity of colonised cultures living in close quarters with one another; like, that multiplicity makes for a narrative expansiveness that I don’t think the tightness and discursive constriction of the previous two books would have allowed for. 

& the Tower Princes, similarly, are like … articulations of gender within empire, yes, but they’re specifically an articulation that can only take place once the old order (ie. Lyctors) is near enough gone, and we receive them through an external observer (ie. Nona) such that moments like Ianthe’s first introduction when we slowly realise that we’re seeing her possessing Babs’ corpse become a lot more fun. There’s a layer of ambiguity going into how Nona receives gender—from her switching between they/he/she pronouns for Ianthe-in-Babs to her they/themming a lot of characters before their gender is made explicit in-narrative, ie. not having a heavy reliance on visual cues to determine gender at a glance to the application of traditionally masculine descriptors to women (Cam, Pash, and Corona each get described as ‘handsome’ at some point)—that was nowhere near as present in the other two (as I explained above: there’s no dissonance in Gideon’s gender, there’s no sense that she’s anything other than a woman and no sense that her form of womanhood has ever been anything other than completely normal and legible in the social world she occupies). I think the Tower Princes would have made sense in any of the three so far, but they just feel a lot more fun in Nona thrown in amidst a book where gender is, in general, being treated somewhat playfully—with a lot of plasticity and malleability that I appreciated & that feels incredibly close to contemporary lesbian gender articulations.

(I keep returning, for example, to the implication that Pyrrha is passing herself off as a man in at least some contexts on Lemuria and the circles of identification and shared experience that that manages to draw between trans women closeting themselves in particular contexts and so-termed ‘passing women’ ie. butches who passed(/continue to pass) themselves off as men for safety. Like, I think it’s fair to say we can read Pyrrha as a butch or similar, and that we can read her as a trans woman, and that particular dimension is subtle but v compelling to me.)

(It’s also interesting how much we see the fixities of the imperial core echoed in the periphery in new contexts that kind of seem to extricate those behaviours from the violence they denote. John playing with Barbies as a child becomes the basis for the creation of Alecto, which of course is the inciting action towards the establishment of his empire & the social paradigms that sustain it; Kevin, too, is a boy who plays with dolls. Ianthe & Kiriona are women referred to with masculinised titles—ie. the Tower Princes—and both Pash and the Angel are women referred to as ‘sir,’ or like, Corona takes on a similarly masculinised title in BOE; you could even add an extra layer here about Kiriona and Pash and Corona and Ianthe each being related as cousins/sisters respectively, idk. EVEN something about Kiriona and Pash as, like, nepo babies to John/Wake respectively, except that the nepotism in question garnered them like vastly different levels of social rank/social currency. I don’t know that I can develop this take all that far, but like—interesting? The sense that like, queerness, gendered ambiguities, whatever else, can and should have a presence outside of an allegiance to imperialism, maybe?)

Anyway, like! These are very scattered thoughts, but hopefully they're of some use. I don’t know that I have an overarching argument besides just like, the changes present in Nona have a lot to do with how Nona moves our perspective out of the imperial core for the first time in the series and that includes how gender functions in the narrative, but hopefully you can see the arguments I’m gesturing towards at least lmao

[screambirdscreaming]

I used to like saying "gender is a social construct," but I stopped saying that because people didn't tend to react well - they thought that I was saying gender wasn't real, or didn't matter, or could be safely ignored without consequences. Which has always baffled me a bit as an interpretation, honestly, because many things are social constructs - like money, school, and the police - and they certainly have profound effects on your life whether or not you believe in them. And they sure don't go away if you ignore them.

Anyway. What I've taken to saying instead is, "gender is a cultural practice." This gives more of a sense of respect for the significance gender holds to many people. And it also opens the door to another couple layers of analysis.

Gender is cultural. It is not globally or historically homogeneous. It shifts over time, develops differently in different communities, and can be influenced by cross-cultural contact. Like many, many aspects of culture, the current status of gender is dramatically influenced by colonialism. Colonial gender norms are shaped by the hierarchical structure of imperialist society, and enforced onto colonized cultures as part of the project of imperial cultural hedgemony.

Gender is practiced. What constitutes a gender includes affects and behaviors, jobs or areas of work, skillsets, clothing, collective and individual practices of gender affiliation and affirmation. Any or all of these things, in any combination, depending on the gender, the culture, and the practitioner.

Gender encompasses shared cultural archetypes. These can include specific figures - gods and goddesses, mythic or fictional characters, etc - or they can be more abstract or general. The Wise Woman, Robin Hood, the Dyke, the Working Man, the Plucky Heroine, the Effete Gay Man, etc etc. The range of archetypes does not circumscribe a given gender, that is, they're not all there is to gender. But they provide frameworks and reference points by which people relate to gender. They may be guides for ways to inhabit or practice a gender. They may be stereotypes through which the gendered behavior of others is viewed.

Gender as a framework can be changed. Because it is created collectively, by shared acknowledgement and enforcement by members of society. Various movements have made significant shifts in how gender is structured at various times and places. The impact of these shifts has been widely variable - for example, depending on what city I'm in, even within my (fairly culturally homogeneous) home country, the way I am gendered and reacted to changes dramatically. Looping back to point one, we often speak of gender in very broad terms that obscure significant variability which exists on many scales.

Gender is structured recursively. This can be seen in the archetypes mentioned above, which range from extremely general (say, the Mother) to highly specific (the PTA Soccer Mom). Even people who claim to acknowledge only two genders will have many concepts of gendered-ways-of-being within each of them, which they may view and react to VERY differently.

Gender is experienced as an external cultural force. It cannot be opted out of, any more than living in a society can be opted out of. Regardless of the internal experience of gender, the external experience is also present. Operating within the shared cultural understanding of gender, one can aim to express a certain practice of gender - to make legible to other people how it is you interface with gender. This is always somewhat of a two-way process of communication. Other people may or may not perceive what you're going for - and they may or may not respect it. They may try to bring your expressed gender into alignment with a gender they know, or they might parcel you off into your own little box.

Gender is normative. Within the structure of the "cultural mainstream," there are allowable ways to practice gender. Any gendered behavior is considered relative to these standards. What behavior is allowed, rewarded, punished, or shunned is determined relative to what is gender normative for your perceived gender. Failure to have a clearly perceivable gender is also, generally, punished. So is having a perceivable gender which is in itself not normative.

Gender is taught by a combination of narratives, punishments, and encouragements. This teaching process is directed most strongly towards children but continues throughout adulthood. Practice of normatively-gendered behaviors and alignment with 'appropriate' archetypes is affirmed, encouraged, and rewarded. Likewise 'other'- gendered behavior and affinity to archetypes is scolded, punished, or shunned. This teaching process is inherently coercive, as social acceptance/rejection is a powerful force. However it can't be likened to programming, everyone experiences and reacts to it differently. Also, this process teaches the cultural roles and practices of both (normative) genders, even as it attempts to force conformity to only one.

Gender regulates access to certain levers of social power. This one is complicated by the fact that access to levers of social power is also affected by *many* other things, most notably race, class, and citizenship. I am not going to attempt to describe this in any general terms, I'm not equipped for that. I'll give a few examples to explain what I'm talking about though. (1) In a social situation, a man is able to imply authority, which is implicitly backed by his ability to intimidate by yelling, looming, or threatening physical violence. How much authority he is perceived to have in response to this display is a function of his race and class. It is also modified by how strongly he appears to conform to a masculine ideal. Whether or not he will receive social backlash for this behavior (as a separate consideration to how effective it will be) is again a function of race/class/other forms of social standing. (2) In a social situation, a woman is able to invoke moral judgment, and attempt to modify the behavior of others by shame. The strength of her perceived moral authority depends not just on her conformity to ideal womanhood, but especially on if she can invoke certain archetypes - such as an Innocent, a Mother, or better yet a Grandmother. Whether her moral authority is considered a relevant consideration to influence the behavior of others (vs whether she will be belittled or ignored) strongly depends on her relative social standing to those she is addressing, on basis of gender/race/class/other.

[Again, these examples are *not* meant to be exhaustive, nor to pass judgment on employing any social power in any situation. Only to illustrate what "gendered access to social power" might mean. And to illustrate that types of power are not uniform and may play out according to complex factors.]

Gender is not based in physical traits, but physical traits are ascribed gendered value. Earlier, I described gender as practiced, citing almost entirely things a person can do or change. And I firmly believe this is the core of gender as it exists culturally - and not just aspirationally. After the moment when a gender is "assigned" based on infant physical characteristics, they are raised into that gender regardless of the physical traits they go on to develop (in most circumstances, and unless/until they denounce that gender.) The range of physical traits like height, facial shape, body hair, ability to put on muscle mass - is distributed so that there is complete overlap between the range of possible traits for people assigned male and people assigned female. Much is made of slight trends in things that are "more common" for one binary sex or the other, but it's statistically quite minor once you get over selection bias. However, these traits are ascribed gendered connotations, often extremely strongly so. As such, the experience of presented and perceived gender is strongly effected by physical traits. The practice of gender therefore naturally expands to include modification of physical traits. Meanwhile, the social movements to change how gender is constructed can include pushing to decrease or change the gendered association of physical traits - although this does not seem to consistently be a priority.

Gender roles are related to the hypothetical ability to bear children, but more obliquely than is often claimed. It is popular to say that the types of work considered feminine derive from things it is possible to do while pregnant or tending small children. However, research on the broader span of human history does not hold this up. It may be true of the cultures that gave immediate rise to the colonial gender roles we are familiar with - secondary to the fact that childcare was designated as women's work. (Which it does not have to be, even a nursing infant doesn't need to be with the person who feeds it 24 hours a day.) More directly, gender roles have been influenced by structures of social control aiming for reproductive control. In the direct precursors of colonial society, attempts to track paternal lineage led to extreme degrees of social control over women, which we still see reflected in normative gender today. Many struggles for women's liberation have attempted to push back these forms of social control. It is my firm opinion that any attempt to re-emphasize childbearing as a touchstone of womanhood is frankly sick. We are at a time where solidarity in struggle for gender liberation, and for reproductive rights, is crucial. We need to cast off shackles of control in both fights. Trying to tie childbearing back to womanhood hobbles both fights and demeans us all.

Gender is baked deeply enough into our culture that it is unlikely to ever go away. Many people feel strongly about the practice of gender, in one way or another, and would not want it to. However we have the power to change how gender is structured and enforced. We can push open the doors of what is allowable, and reduce the pain of social punishment and isolation. We can dismantle another of the tools of colonial hedgemony and social control. We can change the culture!