[ID: Screenshot of a tweet by @/hasbypop1. Text reads: there’s something so intimate about being handled gently by someone who knows how heavy your mind gets. /End ID]
Summer has dug her nails in my flesh. She's sinking her teeth in my bones, like she wants me to burn.
The memories of a season that once felt joyous drag me down, into misery and deeper still. Yet somehow the pain in my head that I'm living with feels nothing compared to how my heart aches
[ID: A printed poem entitled: I don’t want a trans president. Text reads: I want trans doctors / performing my surgery / trans journalists reporting / the news, trans historians writing / textbooks. I don’t want trans capitalists / walking on wall street or trans cops / patrolling my neighborhood. I want / trans musicians playing on my stereo / trans designers crafting my clothes / trans chefs filling my stomach / trans farmers planting my food / and trans gardeners picking / flowers for my funeral. /End ID]
This poem is by H. Melt in their 2021 book entitled ‘There are trans people here’.
When I get blood samples at work sometimes they’re still warm from being imminently inside the patient’s veins and my hands are always cold because all the labs Ive work in are in the basement and they keep it kinda cold for whatever reason (and I’m also just a chilly kid).
And I clutch the little warm tubes of blood and feel this sick person warming my hands and I think about how kind you might be and how I wish I could hold your hand and how badly, how really really badly, I want you to get better and stay warm and hold someone’s hand again.
And anyway sometimes it’s better to not think so vividly about the people I’m doing tests for. I’m a good little cog in a vast machine of people all trying to heal and cure, and my cog feels so fucking small sometimes. But I hope the blood I prepare for you helps you breathe better and laugh and wake up feeling well rested.
We’ve never met but you warmed my hands and I want you to know I love you and I’m rooting for you.
sometimes when i remember i’m trans and autistic, i just feel all warm and safe inside. despite the horrible things people do and say to us, we have such beautiful hearts and precious energy. i love being trans and autistic, it is truly a peak state of being.
we are so worthy of being celebrated. our bodies and minds go through so much every single day, whether you are trans or autistic or both, and i don’t think we get enough credit. we all deserve beautiful, happy, and full lives.
my lecture notes on the Sociology of death (UK history of death and the dead body 1700-present)
Part 1: burial conventions, corpse medicine, and embalming
1700s =the enlightenment and modernity brought the birth of reason and scientific method. also liberal societies across europe, industrialisation and capitalism
this meant an ‘administration’ of death, meaning ppl documented the number and types of death
biopolitics = a term for the way that everyday life (and the ways we think about and understand stuff) is shaped by biological aspects (Foucault)
Foucault argues: the ‘ologies’ eg natural sciences, have power over the norms for how we should live and how things should be.
within death studies, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ means that there are dominant constructions/messages about how we should handle and think about death and the dead body.
within the enlightenment, there was a data-focused approach to death; it was measured and catalogued at scale. there were also spatial changes as, during urbanisation and industrialisation, ppl moved to cities more and lived in more concentrated groups.
this meant they could no longer bury ppl in shallow graves. doing so in cities meant that the smell reached a lot of ppl, which harmed morale and led to social unrest. so they formed the social convention that dead bodies should be buried at 6 feet.
urbanisation also led to modern problems of death, such as the pandemic. bc more ppl lived closer together, diseases spread more. cholera outbreaks produced the idea of the dead body as infectious. and so, part of the reason we bury bodies at 6 feet deep is because of the increased focus on public health in these times.
‘Corpse medicine’ = the use of parts of a dead body for medicinal purposes. eg. when beheading a person, you collect their blood to cure epilepsy. some Monks made jam from blood in order to heal skin disorders. and ppl also rubbed detached hands to cure some ailments.
still, there was a growing view that the dead body was unhygienic. Mary Douglas (Book: ‘Purity and danger’) argued that, within modernity, culture changed towards viewing certain things within or to do with the body as dirty and dangerous, eg. blood or the dead body.
Ideas of the dead body changed from wanting to consume it (as part of healing medicinal practice), towards wanting to control it (eg. separate it from the living, in order to prevent the spread of real or perceived infection)
there was a rise in practices of embalming. it used to be primarily employed through stuffing dead bodies with herbs to stop ppl smelling when they died on military duties. but it became more widely used for the everyday man.
this increasing use was partially facilitated by developments within medical science such as the development of Formaldehyde. This stops decomposition but it also makes the skin appear really grey. So ppl also use colourants while embalming to make the body look asleep not dead (mcr reference intended)
im literally never active on this blog but i will warn everyone who forgot they followed that i will be making a grand comeback by infodumping about my module on the sociology of morbidity, corpses, and death ONCE i finish these notes. youre welcome tumblr dot com
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