mik-mania · 1 year ago
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speaking of masks. yall who have masked trolls... how did u come up with the mask designs?
every time i try to make one, it just feels off to me.
also i wrote a novel in the tags about it, but if anyones got some good research sources too, im all ears 👂
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st-just · 3 years ago
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Barely coherent rambling about nation-states, culture, the Hapsburgs, and Canada
Because why have a blog except to occasionally purge one of the essays floating around half-formed in your brain. To be clear, it’s still half-formed, just on tumblr now. 1,666 words, here’s the Deveraux essay mentioned. Book is Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs: To Rule The World
So I’ve had like, nationalism on my mind recently.
And so there’s a kind of recurring beat in left-of-centre American political discourse (like, not ‘internet rnados screaming at each other’ discourse, ‘people with doctorates or think tank positions having debates on podcasts or exchanging op eds’ discourse) where you have some people on the radical end list some of the various horrible atrocities the country is built on, the ways that all the national myths are lies, and how all the saints of the civic religion were monsters to one degree or another – this can come in a flavor of either righteous anger or, like, intellectual sport. And then on the other end you have the, well, Matt Yglesiases of the world. Who don’t really argue any of the points of fact, but do kind of roll their eyes at the whole exercise and say that sure, but Mom and Apple Pie and the American Way are still popular, and if you’re trying to win power in a democracy telling the majority of the population that their most cherished beliefs are both stupid and evil isn’t a great move.
Anyway, a couple weeks back Deveraux posted an essay for the 4th of July (which I don’t totally buy, but is an interesting read) about why the reason American nationalism is so intensely bundled up into a couple pieces of paper and maybe a dozen personalities is precisely because it isn’t a nation at all. Basically, his thesis is that in proper nation-states like England or the Netherlands or wherever, there really is a core population that is the overwhelming demographic majority and really have lived in more or less the same places since time immemorial, and that once the enthographers and mythologists finish their work, all those people really do identify with both the same nation and the same state as its expression. America, by contrast, is by virtue of being a settler nation whose citizenry was filled by waves of immigrants from all the ass ends of Eurasia in a historical eyeblink, even before you add in the native population and descendants of slaves lacks any single core ethnicity that is anywhere close to a majority, as well as any organic national traditions or claims to an ‘ancestral homeland’ that aren’t obviously absurd (and we are trying to include the descendents of slaves and the native population these days, to varying levels of success). All this to say that his point is America is a civic state, not a national one, with the identity of ‘American’ being divorced from ethnicity and instead tied to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the whole cult around the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and [FDR and/or Reagan depending on your politics].
Which, like I said, don’t totally buy, but interesting. (to a degree he overstates how homogenus ‘actual’ nation-states are, he makes America sound very special but if his analysis holds that it’d presumably also apply to several other former settler colonies, in the American context there’s a fairly solid case to be made that the whole ‘nation of immigrants’ story and the racial identity of whiteness were constructed to function as an erratz national ethnicity, with incredible success, etc, etc).
But anyway, if we accept that the American identity is bound up in its civic religion and the mythologized version of its political history, it’s absolutely the case that there’s several segments of the left who take incredibly joy in tearing said civic religion and national mythology apart and dragging whatever’s left through the mud. I mean, hell, I do! (reminder: any politician whose ever had a statue dedicated to them was probably a monster). And, well, call it a greater awareness of historical crimes and injustice, or the postmodern disdain for idols and systems leaking out through the increasingly college-educated populace, or the liquid acid of modernity dissolving away all unchosen identities, or a Marxist cabal undermining the national spirit to pave the way for the Revolution or whatever you like, but in whichever case, that critical discourse is certainly much more prominent and influential among left and liberal media and politics types that is was in decades past.
And, okay, so I finished Martyn Rady’s The Hapsburgs a few days ago. And I mentioned as I was reading it that the chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries reminded me quite a bit of courses I’d taken in school on the late Ottoman Empire and Soviet Union. Because all three are multi/non-national states (Empires, in Deveraux’s terminology, though that’s varying degrees of questionable for each, I think. Moreso for the Hapsburgs than the rest) who outlasted their own ideological legitimacy. And in all three cases it just, well, it didn’t not matter, but even as all the ceremonies got more absurd and farcical  and the politics more consumed by inertia punctuated with crises, things kept limping along just fine for decades. Even in the face of intense crisis, dissolution wasn’t inevitable. (The Ottomans are a less central example here, admittedly, precisely because of the late attempt to recenter the empire on Turkish nationalism. But even then, more Arab soldiers fought for the Sultan-Caliph than ever did for the Hashemites, and most prewar Arab nationalism was either purely cultural or imagined the Empire reformed into a binational federation, not dissolved).
But as Rady says in the book – losing WW1 crippled Germany, it dissolved Austria-Hungary. And in all three cases, as soon as they were gone, the idea of bringing them back instantly became at least a bit absurd.
And okay, to now pivot to talking about where I actually live but about whose politics I (shamefully) know significantly less than America’s. I mean, maybe it’s because most of my history education from public school was given by either pinko commies or liberals still high off ‘90s one-world universalism, or maybe it’s just a matter of social class, but I really can’t remember ever having taken the whole wannabe civic religion of Canada seriously (the only even serious attempt at sacredness I recall was for Remembrance Day). Even today, the main things I remember about our Founding Father is that he was an alcoholic who lost power in a railroad corruption scandal.
Really, in all my experience the only unifying threads of national/particular Canadian identity are a flag, a healthcare system, those Canadian Heritage Minute propaganda ads, a bill of rights from the ‘60s, and an overpowering sense of polite smugness towards the States.
And that last one (or, at least, the generally rose-colored ‘Canada is the good one’ view of history) is taking something of a beating, on account of all the mass graves really rubbing the public’s noses in the whole genocide thing. At least among big segments of the intellectual and activist classes, most of the symbols of Canadian nationhood are necessarily becoming illegitimate as Canada is, in fact, a project of genocidal settle colonialism.
But it really is just purely symbolic. Most of the municipalities who cancelled their Canada Day celebrations are going to elect Liberal MPs and help give our Natural Governing Party its majority in the next election, no one of any significance has actually challenged the authority of the civil service or the courts. And, frankly, most of the people who are loudly skeptical of all the symbols of the nations are also the ones whose political projects most heavily rely on an efficient and powerful state bureaucracy to carry out.
(This is leaving aside Quebec, which very much does have a live national identity insofar as the vigorous protection of national symbols is what wins provincial elections. If I felt like doing research and/or reaching more there’s probably something there on how pro-independence sentiment has largely simmered down at a pace with the decline of attempts to impose a national Canadian identity).
I mean, Canada does have rather more of a base for a ‘national’ population core than the US (especially if you’re generous and count the people who mark French on the census as a core population as well). At the same time, no one really expects this to continue to be the case – even back in Junior High, I remember one of the hand outs we got explaining that due to declining fertility most or all future population growth would come from immigration (I remember being confused when my mother was weirdly uncomfortable with the idea when it came up). I suppose our government gets credit for managing public opinion such that anti-immigration backlash hasn’t taken over the political conversation. Which you’d think would be a low bar but, well.
But anyway, to try and begin wrapping this rambling mess up – it does rather feel like Rady’s portrayal of the late Hapsburg empire might have a few passing similarities to the future of Canada. A multinational state whose constitution and political system and built on foundations and legitimized by history that no one actually believes in anymore, or at least no more than they have to pretend to to justify the positions they hold, but persisting because it’s convenient and it’s there and any alternatives are really only going to seem practical after a complete economic collapse or apocalyptic war. (Though our civil service is a Josephist’s dream by comparison, really.)
Or maybe I’m premature, and the dominant culture will just be incredibly effective at assimilating immigrants into that civic identity. Anecdotally, the only people I know who are at all enthusiastic about Canada as an idea are first generation immigrants. I could certainly just be projecting, really – I’ve never really been able to get all that invested in the nation-state as an idea of more moral power than ‘a convenient administrative division of humanity’, and certainly liberating ourselves form the need to defend the past would certainly rectifying certain injustices easier.  
Or maybe I’m just being incredibly optimistic. Half the economy’s resource extraction and the other half’s real estate, so decent odds the entire place just literally goes up in flames over the next few decades. BC’s already well on its way.
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butchspace · 7 years ago
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Butch-Fem History / Butch Identity Reccs
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[Image description: an anonymous ask to butchspace that reads “If you have personal essays or blog recs or books about b-f history or individual butch experience, especially about the b-f dynamic, that would be perfect. A mix of long and short would be great, and links of PDFs would be ideal. I actually meant OFOS, as in old-fashioned old-school butch/fem (@persistentlyfem is a fem example), and by “traditional” I mean the original incarnation of butch as the opposite and lover of the fem. I hope this helps you and thank you very much for your help!” End ID.]
Okay so! I’ve got sucked into making this post and I’m just gonna go ahead and publish before I add even more on and forget to sleep again. Putting it under a cut because of length, if anyone wants a non-readmore version of the post just let me know.
Caveats:
I focused mainly on works I could provide links to; this means that what I’ve provided isn’t necessarily my first pick, but it’s still some good stuff so whatever. (See the Offline/Extended section for more reccs.)
A lot of the pdfs were transcribed in the course of a sleepless night so there’s bound to be typos; if  you wanna tell me about them just message/ask @holzes to avoid clogging this inbox up.
Sadly, most of these works are dominated by white, cis, and able-bodied perspectives. This is especially something I want to remedy in the future in my additions.
It should go without saying, but: I don’t endorse every single opinion in these works or their authors (who for the most part I know little about), they don’t necessarily align with my own views and/or preferences, and I recognize that some of them have issues such as cissexist language and framing (see Content Warnings for more detail). Unfortunately when it comes to LGBT history, a lot of the most prominent texts are outdated or otherwise flawed in some areas and you just have to kind of trudge through it and read critically.
I included dates next to the works for a reason! Some (basically everything written in the early to mid 90s) emerged from a specific time in the lesbian community and obviously some of their statements only make sense in that context (mostly the lesbian feminist movement and its aftermath tbh). Just keep this in mind, it shouldn’t matter too much because those texts are history but just in case…
Just because I couldn’t find a work online doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist out there somewhere.
This is a deeply incomplete list. If you have suggested resources like these (preferably ones available online) including books, essays, articles, blogs, films, youtube videos, etc…. Let me know @holzes.
Content Warnings:
The Q slur (in just about every context), D slur, anecdotal homophobia, mentions of homophobic violence, outdated trans terminology, cissexism / cissexist language, discussion of sex (both academic and semi-explicit), cussing, frequent discussion of bars / probably a mention of alcohol once or twice. Sorry for not providing individual content warnings, this post is already bulky enough. If there’s something you’re rlly concerned about just mssg me @holzes and I’ll do my best to help you out.
And with all that out of the way…….. the actual post begins.
History
“Butch-Fem” by Teresa Theopano (2004)
An extremely succinct, balanced overview of butch-fem best suited for absolute beginners (aka, “what the hell is butch/fem” level). Also a good jumping-off point for anyone lacking historical context for butch-fem. Covers origin, application, and controversies. [Link]
“Lesbian Identities and the Politics of Butch-Femme” by Amy Goodloe (1993)
A rigorous essay that in many ways is a more detailed version of the above; packs a wide range of butch-fem history, controversy, and popular interpretation into a relatively short essay. A nice crash course with a killer annotated bibliography to build off of. [Link]
excerpt from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline Davis (1993)
This excerpt from the introduction explicates the existence of working-class lesbian bar cultures in North America from the 1930s to the 1950s as well as the butch-fem dynamic that accompanied and shaped these cultures. The second section of this excerpt is perhaps best read as a companion piece to The Return of Butch and Femme (see below), especially as relates to Kennedy and Davis’s criticism of Faderman’s attitudes toward butch-fem. The entire book is well worth the read, but if you’re pressed for time, Chapters 5, 6, and 9 will be most relevant for your purposes. [Link to excerpt] [Link to full book]
“The Return of Butch and Femme: A Phenomenon in Lesbian Sexuality of the 1980s and 1990s” by Lillian Faderman (1992)
A thorough examination of how butch-fem became deeply “politically incorrect” through the lens of 1970s lesbian feminism, as well as its persistence throughout that decade and its restoration (and transformation) in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps Faderman’s most balanced examination of butch-fem (but don’t worry, she still throws around every anti-butch-fem critique and stereotype that she can justify including) and an informative history of how modern butches and femmes arose and if/how we differ from our predecessors. Read with section two of the above for best results. [Link]
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman (1991)
Might as well, yeah? The book is a very interesting/enlightening semi-comprehensive history and a groundbreaking work in lesbian history literature. If you wanna cheat, Chapter 7 is the one that focuses primarily on butch-fem. [Link]
Personal Narratives
“Double Trouble” by Lesléa Newman (1995)
A brief personal reflection by a femme on her traditional femme-butch relationship. [Link]
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme eds. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman (2011)
An interesting collection of a broad variety of fem and butch perspectives. Essays range from emotional personal narratives to a mix of historical and personal analysis. I’ve provided links to a few that seem most relevant to your interest.
“Femme Butch Feminist” by Jewelle Gomez [Link]
“No Butches, No Femmes: The Mainstreaming of Queer Sexuality” by Victoria A. Brownworth [Link]
“What We Know to Be True” by Sasha T. Goldberg [Link]
“Spotlight” by Debra Anderson [Link]
Gender Troubles: The Butches (2016, dir. Lisa Plourde)
You might have seen this going around back when it was free to watch for a few months. It’s basically a long string of interviews with a few butches and it’s a nice watch, although I’m not sure how/where you can watch it now. [Link]
Extended (aka Stuff I Haven’t Read Yet and Am Thus Nervous to Recc)
In no particular order,
A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987)
The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader ed. Joan Nestle (1992)
I haven’t read either of Nestle’s groundbreaking works because I’m Fake but she’s probably the most influential writer on butch/fem by far so she can not be recommended highly enough.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)
A biomythography that focuses partially on lesbian bar culture in NYC, Connecticut, and Mexico. The plain text is online if you can work with that. [Link]
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993) 
This one’s only not in the main section because I figured you already knew about it, since it’s legally free online. It’s a novel, which I learned only recently. [Link]
Final Notes
For further reading and essays/books, I highly recommend digging through the notes/sources of the works I’ve linked above and jotting down anything that looks interesting or that gets mentioned a lot.
In terms of access–if you’re a college student or live in a college town, go to the college library (or public library, although these have been far less helpful for me) and find their LGBT section. Some places might surprise you. If you’re a college or high school student, go to your school library’s webpage and look for any access to databases you might have as a student, and exploit the hell out of whatever you find. If you’re not a student and/or don’t have access to a good library (or cannot use whatever resources you do have due to risk of outing yourself), stick to whatever you can find online.
Finally, I remembered @closet-keys‘s butch/femme research guide shortly after finishing this post. So, here’s that. [Link]
Thank you so much if you made it this far and I hope this answer helps out you, anon, at least a little, as well as anyone else who makes use of it!
-Mod P
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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago
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Hyperallergic: Required Reading
Photographer John Kucko captured this icy home in Webster, New York. Kucko told Colossal that the building is roughly 20 feet from the rocky shores of Lake Ontario. (via Colossal)
The “Schultz storm” of the Whitney Biennial has dominated art world headlines all week, and one of the most extensive — and well-researched — pieces is by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye in The New Republic:
In her painting, Schutz has smeared Till’s face and made it unrecognizable, again. The streaks of paint crossing the canvas read like an aggressive rejoinder to Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that he be photographed. Mobley wanted those photographs to bear witness to the racist brutality inflicted on her son; instead Schutz has disrespected that act of dignity, by defacing them with her own creative way of seeing. Where the photographs stood for a plain and universal photographic truth, Schutz has blurred the reality of Till’s death, infusing it with subjectivity. The angle of the painting’s view is directly over the body as if Schutz is looming in her imagination. The colors are pretty. Looking at it is like stepping inside a dream that Schutz had about Emmett Till in his coffin. Since this case is one so importantly defined by visual legacy and competing narratives, an artist seeking to paint him ought literally to know better.
Tom Finkelpearl writes about the impact of the NEA, NEH, and other supporters of culture on New York City:
Last week a new study was released that shows how culture functions on a neighborhood level. The report by the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, is titled “Culture and Social Wellbeing in New York City.” Funded by the New York Community Trust’s Cultural Agenda Fund and The Surdna Foundation, it is based on reams of data from several city agencies, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources. Their analysis says that the abundance of cultural assets in neighborhoods correlates with improved outcomes for crime, education, and health. One intriguing finding is that the improvements are more pronounced in lower- and moderate-income communities. That is, high rates of cultural assets in well-off neighborhoods do correlate with improved social indicators. But in the lower income communities there is greater benefit. This research looks at community ecologies, interlocking multiple measures of well-being. Cultural participation predicts lower rates of serious crime, lower rates of child abuse and neglect, and better results in public schools. Culture is good for the spirit and good for the city as a whole. Now we have a study that supports the idea that culture is an integral ingredient of a thriving neighborhood.
Some thoughts by Richard Brody on British actors playing American (and specifically African-American) roles:
The fundamental question that Jackson doesn’t address—but that his remarks imply—is whether the imaginative leap that it takes to do a part well contributes to or detracts from a performance. In other words, do actors’ efforts to create characters strip away what’s interesting about the actors themselves, as people rather than as bearers of skills? In the case of Kaluuya, the gap between the experience of being a black person in Great Britain and the United States is perhaps not as wide as Jackson assumes, which is something that Kaluuya addressed in a recent interview in GQ. “The Brixton riots, the Tottenham riots, the 2011 riots, because black people were being killed by police,” he said. “That’s what’s happening in London.” When it comes to the experience of racial minorities, appearance is, to a significant extent, experience; a Klan member or a racist police officer won’t ask a black person for a passport—any more than for a diploma or a bank book—before launching an epithet or an attack. Kaluuya acknowledged as much in the same interview when he said, “I resent that I have to prove that I’m black. . . . I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.
Why did Thomas Campbell leave the Metropolitan Museum? Well, it’s complicated, and the reasons appear to include this:
Another problem was Campbell’s friskiness with certain women on the staff. He had been warned about it early in his tenure but still carried on. More recently a legal action was brought against him and the Met, but it was settled.
Emoji 5.0 is in the pipeline, which means there will soon be lots of new emoji to use. Gizmodo has ranked the candidates for you:
FBI officials arrested a person in Maryland who reputedly sent a strobing image to political writer Kurt Eichenwald that caused him to have a seizure:
“What Mr. Rivello did with his Twitter message was no different from someone sending a bomb in the mail or sending an envelope filled with anthrax spores,” Lieberman says. “It wasn’t the content of the communication that was intended to persuade somebody or make them feel badly about themselves; this was an electronic communication that was designed to have a physical effect.”
All signs are pointing to the White House preparing to purge its ranks of federal employees not deemed sufficiently loyal to the President:
Conservative news outlets, including one with links to a top White House official, are singling out individual career government employees for criticism, suggesting in articles that certain staffers will not be sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump by virtue of their work under former President Barack Obama.
The articles — which have appeared in Breitbart News, the Conservative Review and other outlets — have alarmed veteran officials in both parties as well as current executive branch staffers.
After the US banned laptops and tablets on certain flights from West Asia and North Africa, one corporation used the opportunity to throw shade at a certain government:
i believe this is shade http://pic.twitter.com/8SJfnrvhNn
— Self Own (@SubMedina) March 23, 2017
This is the most insanely elaborate and well-researched article about how professional basketball players all came to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before games:
The legend has been passed down by NBA generations, chronicled like a Homeric odyssey. The tale they tell is of Kevin Garnett and the 2007-08 Celtics, and the seminal moment of a revolution. Bryan Doo, Celtics strength and conditioning coach, recalls it as if it were yesterday, how before a game in December of that season, an unnamed Celtic — his identity lost to history, like the other horsemen on Paul Revere’s midnight ride — complained to Doo of incipient hunger pangs.
“Man, I could go for a PB&J,” the player said.
There was a #pizzagate rally in DC this weekend, and it’s fascinating that so many still stand by the conspiracy theory. They also made some interesting signs:
Lot of aesthetics at today's Pizzagate rally http://pic.twitter.com/kLiEaKMpiI
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) March 25, 2017
Some things you can’t explain:
Okay. I know this cake is a number 1 and it says “Emma," but it LOOKS like a dick with balls that says “WEED" http://pic.twitter.com/3NZfwA4DCg
— Elizabeth Sampat (@twoscooters) March 24, 2017
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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