At a conference yesterday, an older academic said "I gave my daughter a copy of Wuthering Heights when she turned 18. Every woman should have a toxic relationship, and hers might as well be Heathcliff"
Digam-me lå outra vez como o Ronaldo nos ia provar a todos o que ele ainda pode fazer pela seleção? Ah, bem me pareceu! Puta da diva parece que tem medo da bola, acha que lhe vai estragar o botox ou o caralho!
EmpatĂĄmos e jĂĄ vamos com sorte! Ă o que dĂĄ jogar com 10 jogadores em campo, porque bem se vĂȘ que a tĂĄtica "passa ao Ronaldo" atrapalha mais do que ajuda!
Out of control Edwardian youths refuse to clap at production of Peter Pan, force distraught J.M Barrie to pull out rarely seen "Tinkerbell Fucking Dies" ending
You probably know this but shitpost ruining fun fact for anybody who doesnât:
When the play first was performed, JM Barrie et al were so concerned this might happen that they instructed the orchestra to drop their instruments and clap at this point, just in case
Children not clapping did happen too, (and some were even expected to have hissed, which was later written into the 1928 playscript and 1911 novel). But my all time favourite anecdote about it is from Pauline Chase (who played Peter)'s intro to Peter Pan's Post Bag 1909:
Children love to clap their hands at the play because then they feel that they are really part of it, and you can see them holding their hands poised ready to seize an opportunity. Their great chance is when I ask them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and so save Tink's life. But they are very wrathful if any one claps who has the reputation of being a cynic, and once there was quite an uproar in the front row of the dress circle because of a girl who clapped. Those about her pulled down her arms angrily. "How dare you clap," they cried, "when you know you don't believe in fairies!"
There was one dreadfully hard-hearted little boy who came to the theatre not to clap. That was his object for coming, and he came round "behind" to tell me so in the middle of the play. His teeth were firm set. "I won't clap," he said doggedly; "I'm not going to clap." And when the time came he didn't clap; above the clapping of all the others I could hear him shouting from a box, "Peter, I'm not clapping."
The thing thatâs always missing from the âwomen didnât fight for the right to work they were already working they fought to get paidâ is that many women also very much wanted to work.
Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.
I know not everyone is born with intellectual curiosity or drive or determination but some people are and many of those people are women.
Being loved is NOT a reward for being beneficial or useful in any way. You don't become less deserving of being loved if you aren't productive for a day or if you have a bad day and can't get out of bed.
I promise. Being loved has nothing to do with how you "help" the world or those around you.
Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.
Every time I catch myself thinking my gender studies degree is useless, more shit ideas like the ones OP highlighted come out. We are definitely in a scary time, and there's no doubt there has been a widespread backslide on feminism and progressive ideas in general.
If you're interested in feminism and gender theory but are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there, here are some good places to start:
Race and Representation. bell hooks, 1992. (Spec. Chapter 2: "Eating the Other." and Chapter 7: "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.")
See also: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. bell hooks, 2004.
See also: Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. bell hooks, 1999.
The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977.
Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview. Bonita Lawrence, 2003.
An Affinity of Hammers. Sara Ahmed, 2016.
The Codes of Gender (kanopy). Sut Jhally, 2010.
Might be a little dated now, but I find it still very relevant in terms of gender & media. Everyone watches this documentary in first year, and I find it really encourages critical thinking.
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Adrienne Rich, 1980.
Female Masculinity. Jack Halberstam, 1998.
Chapter rec: "Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum."
Further recommendations:
Judith Butler ofc, though I wouldn't say Butler is very beginner-friendly. I still struggle with Butler's theory sometimes. For more queer theory, see Eve Sedgwick and Gayle Rubin.
John D'Emilio actually helped me understand a lot about gay identity and its relation to capitalism (don't stop halfway, let him finish!!), in: "Capitalism and Gay Identity." It's one of those essays I kept re-reading throughout my undergrad just to look at it with different eyes.
I haven't read This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 20 years, but my recollection is that it would be a good addition. Plus, it's on Open Library.
This bridge called my back by CherrĂe Moraga, Gloria AnzalduÌa, Toni Cade Bambara, 1983, Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press edition, - 2nd
You can read the Jack Halberstam piece over here for free. It's an interesting peek into what the discourse looked like in the late 90s trans and cis lesbian communities. But it is dated af.
And one of the ways it's dated is that it's mostly about the transgender-vs-transsexual battle, and trying to decide where butch enbies fit into that dichotomy. Which eventually shook out into terms like "nonbinary" and "trans butch," and a general acceptance that nonbinary and binary trans people are all part of the same community.
I swear I saw an anthology of transbutch voices a few years ago that I would recommend instead of Halberstam.
I can't find it, but I did find this list of absolutely stellar butch memoirs, like Hijabi Bitch Blues, Gender Failure, and Brown Neon.
New coming-of-age memoir Hijab Butch Blues comes out tomorrow.
I'd also say that Julia Serano's Excluded: Making Feminist And Queer Movements More Inclusive is an absolutely CRUCIAL work on what feminism needs to learn from liminal, erased groups like bi+ and trans women.
Buy it as soon as you can. Read the PDF or find it in a library, if you can't buy it yet.
Read her other work too. Especially her subsequent book, "Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism."
And her 2022 book, "Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, And How We Can Fight Back" looks great.
Judith Butler is more of a philosopher, IMHO. As in, it seems like a lot of what she does is experiment with different concepts to see what their breaking points are and what we can learn from pushing and pulling them.
Which is very useful work in some ways. It's just not the same thing as getting a basic education in feminist arguments and actions.
(She's also on my shit list for jumping the gun to write high-profile pieces claiming that no sexual assault occurred on October 7, despite the enormous amount of evidence of sexual assault, sexual torture, and sexual mutilation that had already begun to emerge. Judith! Nobody aaaaassssked!)
If we're talking about Jewish feminism, though, there are a lot of books here that look really good.
Including, but not limited to:
Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940;
Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement (a decade old, so I'm very curious about whether it predicted All This);
JewÂish FemÂiÂnists: ComÂplex IdenÂtiÂties and Activist Lives;
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women;
The New FemÂiÂnist AgenÂda: DefinÂing the Next RevÂoÂluÂtion for Women, Work, and Family.
Shit, I almost forgot: Adrienne Rich's piece on Compulsory Heterosexuality has NOT aged well.
Or maybe it has, in the sense that a lot of people in the TERF orbit still really embrace the idea that if you find yourself attracted to women when you'd thought you were attracted to men, you were just wrong, not bisexual.
Rich makes some good points about how it's possible to just assume you're experiencing the norm - in this case, heterosexuality - if you've never had access to information about any other experiences. But she also really flattens the concept out and extends it too far.
We need an updated look at this. There's probably one in some of the trans feminist writing above.
If you search for "compulsory heterosexuality" on my blog, you'll find a lot of debate and analysis of how the concept gets weaponized. (Fortunately, that's all from 8+ years ago, when it was being weaponized against aces and aros, and I haven't seen it get hauled out lately.)
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