#struggling reading

[strugglequill]

"And anyway, you have to do what you need to do to keep yourself running well. It's not as if stopping yourself from being happy will make any of this any better."

"No," Kit said after a moment. "It's just that... I don't know." He laughed helplessly. "I get guilty."

Djam made a noise exactly like a horse snorting, so that Kit had to keep himself from laughing at that, anyway. "Guilt! Guilt's what the Abnegate uses to keep us from doing our work, my advice-master says. After the fact, when it comes as fear we've done something wrong; or before the fact, to make us afraid we're about to do something wrong. The food metaphor— When you're working, why would you starve yourself of what will keep you doing your work well? That makes no sense. We've come a long way to do this, so let's do it right. If taking some time off from the distress helps us do our work better, so be it. Yes?"

- Kit Rodriguez, Djam, and Cheleb, in Diane Duane’s ‘Lifeboats’ set in the Young Wizards universe.

[suic1cidetextsofbells]

"do you have a crush on which character of the losers club?"

bitch that's my children wtf you on about

[strugglequill]

It seemed, increasingly, like the ability to live in an intersex body - unmonitored, unharassed, with some modicum of joy or pleasure in one's embodied experience - was impossible. In some instances, that possibility is eradicated before birth or immediately thereafter; in others, it is robbed by athletic regulatory agencies. In all of these instances, though, intersex bodies are understood as disordered, in need of repair.

My body is a whole lot of things - strong, vulnerable, sensate, sometimes injured, sometimes ill - but when and if it needs repair has absolutely nothing to do with being intersex. The harms it has accrued - the bodily trauma l've lived - stems directly from the gender normalization efforts I've had coercively imposed upon me. I dream, daily, of a world wherein that ends. Where intersex bodies aren't regulated out of existence. Where we don't need to be fixed.

- From Hil Malatino’s Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (p. 70)

[strugglequill]

When intersex conditions come to be understood as disorders rather than monstrous wonders, they are no longer an affront, a transgression, or a confounding limit-instance. Instead they become invitations to diagnosis, and intersex people become experimental subjects on which the medical apparatus may machinate and elaborate its account of the constitution of sex difference in a way that all too often denies our autonomic capacities, exhorting us to, as Foucault writes, "wake up… from your illusory plea-sures; strip off your disguises and recall that every one of you has a sex, a true sex.” This exhortation is familiar not only to intersex folks but to genderqueers, nonbinary and agender folks, trans folks, and gender-nonconforming queer folks. It is this demand to discover our "true sexes" that gives intersex an intelligible position within the law while relegating the enactment of something like intersex subjectivity to the status of impossibility. One can be intersex but only if it's a trait or disorder; one is always, despite being intersex, also irrevocably male or female — and it's the job of modern Western medical science to discern which of those one is.

- From Hil Malatino’s Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (p. 53)

[strugglequill]

I had always understood queer to mean existing outside of traditional, rigid ideals of what normative sexuality and gender look like. But what I learned from trying to engage in queer spaces while ace was that, next to trauma and discrimination, many queer people center sex in their queerness and conceive of sex acts as the catalysts for queerness itself. And if that's where queerness was located, and could only be located according to some, then where did that leave me? I wasn't fucking back against heteropatriarchy, and what's so radical about not fucking back? What's so queer about not fucking, not dating, not loving in the way that society pedestals as the most significant?

- Sherronda J Brown, in Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture (p. 30) 💜

[strugglequill]

"You're all crazy," Parker said amiably. "I'm getting out of here." He put on a little speed and had soon nearly disappeared into the blinking shadows.

"He thinks we're queer for each other," McVries said, amused.

"He what?" Garraty's head snapped up.

"He's not such a bad guy," McVries said thoughtfully. He cocked a humorous eye at Garraty. "Maybe he's even half-right. Maybe that's why I saved your ass. Maybe I'm queer for you."

"With a face like mine? I thought you perverts liked the willowy type." Still, he was suddenly uneasy.

Suddenly, shockingly, McVries said: "Would you let me jerk you off?"

Garraty hissed in breath. "What the hell -"

"Oh, shut up," McVries said crossly. "Where do you get off with all this self-righteous shit? I'm not even going to make it any easier by letting you know if I'm joking. What say?" Garraty felt a sticky dryness in his throat. The thing was, he wanted to be touched. Queer, not queer, that didn't seem to matter now that they were all busy dying. All that mattered was McVries. He didn't want McVries to touch him, not that way.

"Well, I suppose you did save my life -" Garraty let it hang.

McVries laughed. "I'm supposed to feel like a heel because you owe me something and I'm taking advantage? Is that it?"

"Do what you want," Garacy said shortly, "But quit playing games."

"Does that mean yes?"

"Whatever you want!" Garraty yelled. Pearson, who had been staring, nearly hypnotized, at his feet, looked up, startled.

"Whatever you goddam want!" Garraty yelled.

McVries laughed again. "You're all right, Ray. Never doubt it." He clapped Garraty's shoulder and dropped back.

Garraty stared after him, mystified.

- Ray Garraty and Pete McVries, in Richard Bachman/Stephen King’s The Long Walk (p. 253-4) 🛣️

[strugglequill]

Medical technologies around sex and gender should be available to all who need and desire them, and the existence of such technologies have powerful utopian dimensions for trans and intersex subjects in need of or desirous of medical intervention, but it is crucial that we also theorize the very availability of these technologies as predicated on nonconsensual interventions on intersex, enslaved, and incarcerated bodies. A powerful politics of solidarity around transgender, decolonial, intersex, and feminist struggles, then, would recognize the capitalist and biomedical production of gender and sex as bound up with historical violence, even as the technologies associated with both may also promise and often offer liberatory possibilities. It would also attend to class and race divides as they structure both transgender and intersex politics and forms of identification and vice versa. We need a vision of a world in which the technologies of gender and sex are not tied to capital accumulation and to regimes of biomedicine that privilege scientitic innovation over consent and intellectual property over collective forms of knowledge.

- Christopher Breu, in In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (p. 37)

[strugglequill]

Warnings cracked out sporadically. The soldiers on the halftrack were back up to the mark; the one Parker had killed had been unobtrusively replaced. The crowd cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.

How would that be? Just how would that be?

- Ray Garraty in Richard Bachman/Stephen King’s The Long Walk (p. 286-7) 🛣️