#str-ngeloop

[librarycards]

what's your take on carol v world. (coming from someone who hasnt seen the show)

perhaps the most compelling thing about carol to me is that the woman with the most sheer obnoxious persistence to resist alien viral hegemony & 'save the world' as it were is the very person most alienated by a world that repeatedly rejected, violated, and tormented her for who she was. not just as a lesbian, but as an angry, difficult, Mad, resentful person. i see the ambiguity of the show less as a "is the hive right or is carol" -- to me, both textually and in my own POV, the hive is pretty unambiguously sinister.

what's more ambiguous is carol's approach to her own individuality vs. the collective good that she herself imagines. that is to say that carol is lonely, scared, angry, abandoned, and constantly tempted, sometimes successfully, by plurb's overtures, sexual and familial and emotional all. she hates it. but she craves it. because she has never felt loved, she has never felt whole, she has never –– even with a wife who loved her deeply –– felt loved. there was a distance between her and other people she found uncrossable, and what's on offer is a way to close that gap, completely and permanently. she craves it, even as it disgusts her, and even as she revels in her own unpleasantness.

at the same time, the horror of the hivemind is the horror of the conversion camp, the prison, the psych ward, the fascist nation. the horror of absolute sameness, absolute compliance, absolute unwillingness and inability to resist. that level of submission is one carol knows well. it's a price for conditional acceptance she already chose, as a teenager, not to pay; one she presumably chose again and again as she navigated life as a lesbian up to this point. she masked, in some ways, writing a straight romance she didn't want to write. she attempted, sometimes pathetically, to fit in. in this way, the hivemind is teaching her the limits of her own ethical orientation, her own trueness to her desires. the issue comes in (and will continue to come in) when her desires for love and acceptance come into conflict for this drive toward independence –– as often happens in abusive, controlling relationships, especially those undergirded by hegemonic violence (ie pretty much all of them) –– and she is forced to continue torturing herself for the greater good of a planet that also treated her like garbage.

[exitwound]

whats the deal with supernatural. like why that

the most honestly i can answer this is its the same as asking why do we die

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

what do you think of king gizzard and the lizard wizard

love them. 

[librarycards]

what's the liberatory value for you in tying transness with madness so closely? i feel like a lot of people would take issue with the idea that they're so interwoven

hope you don't mind the asks, i'm curious about your framework

for me, i use transMad to acknowledge a couple of overlaps: one, that transness will always and already be "Maddened" under a cissexist conceptual framework, and Madness will always, likewise, be tied to gender noncompliance/transgression

two, that trans studies and Mad studies share very similar generative research impulses in terms of like, methodologically and epistemologically disrupting what it means to be a knower, to have legitimate knowledge, to find/evidence/cite one's claims

and three, that given these realities, solidarity among all Mad and Maddened people –– including those Maddened on the basis of sexgender difference –– is necessary to disrupt a fascist medical/social system bent on eliminating all forms of difference. the same can be said for other forms of oppression/alternative forms of knowledge production, too, but i focus on the transMad because i think that's where i can make the most difference & have the most expertise.

[librarycards]

isn't it sort of backwards to go like "poisoning and toxicity is only something the bad ideologies get worried about so that's why it isnt a big deal"? like isnt that mixing up the logical levels a little bit?

I didn’t take that post as delegitimizing rightful concerns around lead toxicity. It was challenging the discourse that’s been floating around on here attributing gen alpha’s (and others’, too) rudeness/cognitive problems/etc. to lead exposure rather than crumbling social/educational infrastructure. Also, it was a critique of the ableism implicit in pathologizing said crumbling social and educational infrastructure as merely resulting from “brain damage,” rather than conscious efforts by capitalistic fascists to destroy public life + appropriate public goods for profit at the expense of the rest of us

As leftists we have good reason to be worried about toxicity and poisoning, especially as a labor issue. But this post is addressing an entirely different and more sinister set of arguments that I reference above.

[librarycards]

in what way do you propose the affirmation of illegibility or incomprehension you might say in a way that enables liberation? curious because in my experience/opinion illegibility and incomprehension can be quite painful and disruptive to agency, and i'm curious how you construct your understanding of anti-understanding in a way that doesn't just negate things like critical thinking etc. is it a means of bypassing oppression?

i may have answered this in my other response, but to put a finer point on it - opacity is not in and of itself a path to liberation. it is a way of, to paraphrase hil malatino, "survive the interregnum" while surrounded with transparency-hungry reactionaries and the institutions that bolster their ideologies.

& to be clear, i am not anti-understanding, but i am pro-defying simple comprehension. that is, i think it is wrong to promote an ideology that discourages curiosity and rigor, *and* i think it is important to promote our collective ability to resist easy interpellation. here's an example from the paper/my research: miss major changed her legal sex back and forth a couple times on her documents, to keep the state on its toes. this is not an act that quashes curiosity / investment in trans subjectivity, but it IS one that makes the state big confused and big mad. and that's the goal.

[librarycards]

what does opacity in a transmad context mean to you and in what way can it be liberatory? do you mean in like a sense of privacy and agency through obscurity?

you've got it! opacity is a longstanding tactic marginalized people have used to obfuscate pleasure + education + resistance and more from carceral oppressors, even in the face of a lot of surveillance, e.g. under slavery/colonial conditions, within prisons and psych prisons, in locations with draconian anti-gay and anti-trans laws.

i think where my argument goes beyond privacy and agency, though, is the way opacity can in and of itself be a source of pleasure and affirmation. we can see this on here with people who use deliberately convoluted and complex pronoun sets, names, and sets of often self-made identities, plural systems who value their internal complexity and often ambiguity between fronters, etc. sometimes, people take on these identities because they're fun and silly. sometimes, they are the only accurate ones they've ever found. usually, it's a mix of both.

we see this sense of affirmation, with people who value dense and elliptical prose simply for the joy of making + deciphering it, and/or as a sort of methodological accompaniment to a theory of opacity itself. (deleuze and guattari are famous for doing this).

so, yes, much like my other theories of transMadness, this is play, survival, seriousness, humor, sincerity, and irony all-in-one!!

[librarycards]

augh the """job market""" is so fucking evil lately i hate fucking everythingggggggggg

REAL just submitted more apps. it's miserable