Currently Reading in the Midwest

I'm a twenty something from the American Midwest and just finished my MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research at a University in Ontario, Canada. As I leave the academy, for now, I can finally focus on my own self-directed reading. This is just meant as a simple blog to keep track of what I'm currently reading and might include some quotes or thoughts on the texts.

[readinginthemidwest]

John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The boy who was raised a girl. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. 

Read 7/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Barbara Ehrenreich. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. New York: Picador 2009. 

An important, excoriating critique of the confluence of capitalism, hucksterism and a desperate and gullible public. Uberpositive people have always annoyed me, and using that as a jumping off point -something’s not right here- Ehrenreich shows us how ‘positive thinking’ can have diasterous effects, both for the individual and for society. It can also quickly lead to victim blaming and a cruel indifference to the suffering of others (read: they brought that on themselves with their negative attitude/ victim mentality). 

Read: 7/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Susan Richards Shreve. A Student of Living Things. New York: Viking, 2006. 

I’ve had this book for forever and finally picked it off the shelf. A murder mystery set in post 9/11 DC. Was fun to ready now that I’m in DC a lot for work. 

7/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Ross Raisin. Out Backward. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. 

Lots of interesting stuff going on with identity and relationships with animals, the environment and other people. 

Read 6/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Radley Balko. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. New York: Public Affairs, 2014. 

Very scary. An urgent call to demilitarize and scale back policing in America. The book was tinged with a slight libertarian undertone and although it was published in 2014, it already needs updating after #blacklivesmatter but with that in mind I would still highly recommend. 

Read 6/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Simon Lelic. A Thousand Cuts. New York: Penguin, 2010. 

5/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Nanni Balestrini. The Unseen. New York: Verso 2011

I spoke to him I ask myself sometimes now that it’s all over I ask myself what did it all mean this story of ours what was the meaning of all we did what did we achieve with everything we did he said I don’t believe it matters that it’s all over but I believe what matters is that we did what we did and that we think it was right to do it I believe this is the only thing that matters (222)

5/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Jean Genet. Funeral Rites. New York: Grove Press, 1969

3/9/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Eli Clare. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation. Cambridge: South End Press, 1999. 

"At 13, my most sustaining relations were not in the human world. I collected stones -red, green, gray, rust, white speckled with black, black streaked with silver- and kept them in my pockets, their hard surfaces warming slowly to my body heat. Spent long days at the river learning what I could from the salmon, frogs, and salamanders. Roamed the beaches at high tide and low, starfish, mussels, barnacles, clinging to the rocks. Wandered in the hills thick with moss, fern, liverwort, bramble, tree. Only here did I have a sense of body. Those stones warmed in my pockets. I knew them to be the steadies, only inviolate parts of myself. I wanted to be a hermit, to live along with my stones and tress, neither a boy nor a girl. And now 20 years later, how do I reach beneath the skin to write, not about the stones, but the body that warmed them, the heat itself?" pg. 124

"The disability rights movement, like other social change movements, names systems of oppression as the problem, not individual bodies. In short it is ableism that needs the cure, not our bodies. Rather than a medical cure, we want civil rights, equal access, gainful employment, the opportunity to live independently, good and respectful health care, unsegregated education. We want to be part of the world, not isolated and shunned. We want a redefinition of values that places disability not on the margins as a dreaded and hated human condition but in the center as a challenge to the dominant culture." pg. 106 

Read 2/15

[readinginthemidwest]

The Well of Loneliness. Radclyff Hall. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. 

A forceful plea for justice and mercy for gays. Ahead of its time and an important piece of queer history. I'm so glad I had the change to read it. 

...

"These two had been lovers form the days of their childhood, from the days when away in their Highland village the stronger child had protected the weaker at school or at play with their boisterous companions. They had grown up together like two wind-swept saplings on their bleak Scottish hill-side so starved of sunshine. For warmth and protection they had leaned to each other, until with the spring at the time of mating, their branches had quietly intertwined. That was how it had been, the entwining of saplings, very simple and to them very dear, having nothing mysterious or strange about it except inasmuch as all love is mysterious... They had loved because love had come naturally to them up there on the soft, springy turf and the heather. But after a while their dreams had been shattered, for such dreams as theirs had seemed strange to the village. Daft, the folk had thought them, mouching round by themselves for hours, like a couple of lovers." (353-354). 

"And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails, until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered. "God," she gasped, "we believe; we have told You we believe... We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" (437). 

Read 1/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. 

"...There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it... or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be." 

Read 1/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Margaret Atwood. Cat's Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1998. 

My friend gave me this copy of Cat's Eye and I've been saving it for winter. I guess it's as cold as it's going to get in Virginia so I cracked it open. I enjoyed it a lot. It was neat to have some familiarity with Toronto and Ontario and be able to picture some of the places she writes about. As always, the characters and narratives were complex, thoughtful and exciting.

I read most of this book in bed with my cat Midnight by my side so I thought it only right I include her in the picture. :) 

  Read: 1/15

[readinginthemidwest]

Marlen Haushofer. The Wall. Berkeley; Cleis Press, 2012. 

Beautiful! An eco-feminist classic. I saw the film a while back and had to read the book. 

"Since his death I dream about animals a lot. They talk to me like people, and it strikes me as quite natural in the dream. The people who used to populate my sleep in the first winter have all gone away. I never see them any more. In my dreams people were never kind to me; they were indifferent at best. My dream animals are always kind and full of life. But I don't think that's very remarkable, it only shows how people and animals always seemed to me." p. 129

"I have always been fond of animals, in the slight and superficial way in which city people feel drawn to them. When they were suddenly all I had, everything changed. There are said to have been prisoners who have tamed rats, spiders and flies and begun to love them. I think they acted in accordance with their situation. The barriers between animal and human come down very quickly. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations. They suffer as we do if pain is inflicted on them, and like myself they need food, warmth and a little tenderness. 

Incidentally, my affection has very little to do with understanding. In my dreams I bring children into the world, and they aren't only human children; there are cats among them, dogs, calves, bears and quite peculiar furry creatures. But they emerge from me, and there is nothing about them that could frighten or repel me. It only only looks off putting when I write it down, in human writing and human words." p. 207

Read 12/14

[readinginthemidwest]

Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 2007 

In true Morrison style, completely beautiful. 

A meditation on beauty, race, class, gender and the institutional and social structures which underpin each. 

Read 12/14

[readinginthemidwest]

Wally Lamb. She's Come Undone: Pocket Books, 1997

So I've taken a break from reading for a while... almost three months! I started reading some theory, got discouraged, got busy with work and didn't pick up anything until a few weeks ago. Books usually provide a distraction for me but I guess I needed a bit of a break, even from reading. 

I finished She's Come Undone a few weeks ago and really like it. I grabbed this copy in a thrift store for about a buck and moved through it really quickly. Lamb has a lot of empathy for Dolores and I especially like his inclusion of vegetarianism (and how it mixes with sexual politics) in the book.

As much as She's Come Undone is a bildungsroman, it's also a novel about the ethics of care and a meditation on beauty, vanity and affect. I kept thinking about Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just which I read months ago and hated. Would Scarry make the same argument if she were Dolores? 

Read 12/14

[readinginthemidwest]

Jonathan Evison. The Revised Fundamental of Caregiving. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2012. 

I picked up this book in a Norfolk, Virginia thrift shop. I'm interested in the ethics of care and caregiving and I enjoy these themes in novels.

This book is unique in relation to typical writings on caregiving because it centers relations of care between two straight white males. Maybe because of this, Evison invoked some sexist and homophobic language/rhetoric in the book, particularly towards the novels start, which I found problematic. When you see 'fag' etc in a book, you always have to look for context. You also have to ask, is the author presenting the reader with a flawed character, are they trying to demonstrate a larger point, a critical point, with this language or a they just furthering it's normative oppressive connotation. In this case, Evison does the latter.

I found this particuarly troubling because I think Evison used this type of language towards the start of the book as a type of 'hook' for readers. Perhaps he thought this type of language was relatable, particularly for men who might be turned off by the book's title or about care and care giving in general. 

All in all, I enjoyed the book and I'm glad I didn't put it down a few chapters in. 

Read 8/14

[readinginthemidwest]

Scott Herring. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: NYU Press, 2010. 

I picked up this book a while ago at Common Language in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It felt good to read some theory. I've been slacking with a lot of fiction recently.

I think Herring's argument, that centering the city (read: New York, San Francisco etc) in queer theory, queer lives, queer identity perpetuates the ongoing homogenization within queer communities (what Herring would call "metronormativity") was for me something I was feeling but unable to articulate.  

Borrowing from Halberstam, Herring's theorizing about the queer narrative of moving to the city as a second coming out, and the way such narratives flattens queer lives and experiences in rural areas is important for queer folks to think about.  It's definitely provided me with a lot of ideas to think through more. 

Read: 8/14