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highlyeccentricSomething I'm thinking about a lot this year is an occasion when, in hindsight, I was actually sexually harrassed at work. I didn't notice at the time, because I was newly aware of myself as queer, and I registered it as *homophobic* hostility, albeit of a generalist masculine display sort rather than directed at me.
I was working as a waitress, the summer after my undergrad, in the same place I had worked the previous year. One of the apprentice chefs - I think he may have been the senior, and certainly he was the most dominant character in the group - stepped out of the kitchen (male space) while the front of house staff (all women that day, all women and teenage boys as a rule) were setting up, and showed my colleagues something on his phone that made them scream with disgust. Then he showed me.
It was a still shot of three older men having sex. I did not react in disgust, but with curiosity: and I panicked, knowing I had to tamp down the part of me that found this scene interesting (and potentially even attractive to me): what had brought these men together? Were they an established triad, or two partners and a third, or three friends, or three men who had never met? What were the character dynamics, were they related to the positions they were in, what would happen next in the encounter, what would happen after? I would have read a goddamn novel about these three guys living their best life. Was the shot from professional porn or a home sex tape? I hoped the former, because the thought of three older blokes uploading their home tape only to become a laughing stock was... off. At least the pornographers got paid.
All that went through my brain, and I could tell that the aim of the exchange was to get me to react: in my struggle to not give away my empathy with the presumed gay men who were the object of this homophobic prank, I completely failed to notice that I, a young woman, had also been the subject of an act of heterosexual harrassment.
It says something... very specific about my experience of queerness and gender that *even though I had only been aware of my attraction to women for less than a year*, and had not changed the slightest thing about my presentation, I identified myself firstly with the men depicted, and secondly as the target of an exercise designed to prove heterosexuality: I needed to not react, so as not to reinforce the homophobic joke, but also not betray any personal investment. If I thought with pity of anyone else, it was of the possibility that one of the other men in the kitchen, who had all viewed this picture and jeered at it, might himself be gay. To me, the other women screaming and covering their eyes were not fellow victims, but part of the trap. I understood it to be a prank in which they had been unwillingly exposed to something that disgusted them - and that that was, ultimately, funny to them as it was to the agent of the prank, and as it was neither funny nor disgusting to me.
These days, I am researching intersections between disgust and humour: why is disgust fun? Why is it funny to disgust others? It turns out that still shot I was shown is part of the Internet Hall of Fame: it's known as 'Lemon Party', and like Goatse and Two Girls One Cup, it is one of the pornographic counterparts of the humble RickRoll and the NumaNuma song. One tricked one's internet peers (and sometimes ones real life peers) into viewing undesirable content: Lemon Party and Goatse because they are explicitly or implicitly homoerotic; Two Girls (and to an extent Goatse) because of the scatological humour / kink intersection. RickRoll is genuinely harmless, its joke resting on the overly earnest and unfashionable popsong, while the NumaNuma video's prank appeal rests on combined fatphobia and mockery of the chap in question's earnest enjoyment of the song. Somehow, as an odd badge of pride, I can tell you I've never been internet-pranked into any of these: I somehow became skilled at spotting and dodging them, and Lemon Party simply never crossed my radar. Consequently, it wasn't until I read mentions of it in academic literature that I realised it was a specific meme-based prank and not a random act of homophobia that I had encountered in late 2008 or early 2009.
Now, when I think about that exchange in the restaurant, it seems glaringly obvious to me that I, and the other female staff, were subject to heterosexual sexual harrassment: pushing pornography into our working relationship was obviously an act of sexualised intimidation. Even the intent to disgust is wrapped up in ye olde hetero power dynamics: eliciting an affective response over us, in the domain of sexuality, without touching us or even implying sexual interest in us. But I do think there's something different here to, say, showing het porn that the aggressor might presumably enjoy - perhaps that's what lifts it into the realm of humour? There isn't a sense of unwanted intimacy, such as even something relatively tame like pin-up calendars elicits (now you know exactly what kind of big tits your colleagues like). I'm fairly sure my straight women colleagues would have reacted differently to straight porn, or lesbian porn (either true dyke porn or girl-on-girl-for-male-viewers); and the kitchen blokes would not have found conventionally attractive gay porn a site of riotous amusement.
This past week I read NSFW: Sex, Humour and Risk in Social Media (well, read the intro and skimmed the rest for content specifically addressing gross-out pranks). What that book *doesn't* address sort of confirms that my first read on the situation might not have been so wrong: I think, at the time, the disgust > humour link was so strong, and the homophobic element so obvious, that many victims embraced the joke (and then passed it on). The authors of NSFW address Goatse and Lemon Party in the same context as 'Nimping' (of which I had never heard!), a prank that installed an app that played inescapable gay porn and shouted "hey everyone I'm watching gay porn!" across your workplace. They talk about how there's humour in disgust, in reasserting heteronorms via disgust-pranks; and about the humour of incongruity, as in the presence of porn in the workplace.
They DON'T talk about the specific dynamics involved in victimising certain people for these pranks - perhaps because Goatse, like Rickroll, seemed so all-pervasive at one point. But something like Nimping? Don't tell me that wasn't deliberately sent to men who were somehow failing to win at workplace masculinity. Part of the TEST is that the victim had to both perform disgust *and* treat it as a successfully executed amusing prank - by failing to perform disgust I violated the Rules of the exchange, and if I were read as a man or possibly even as a dyke at the time I would have opened myself to further homophobic harassment in so doing; but if I treated it as sexual harassment directed at me as a woman, I have absolutely no idea what would have happened, the violation of the prank rules of engagement was so inconceivable at the time.
I do think that even if it is the case that most people in the sphere of these pranks thought of them as pranks rather than harassment, an academic study ought to probe further. It is striking that the authors of NSFW quote studies which interviewed people about workplace humour, or about work/life boundaries and smutty jokes on social media (some one who was photographed holding some 'cock soup' - tinned soup with a cockerel on it - while on mental health leave, and the photo made it to facebook), they don't interview or cite any interviews with anyone who *disseminated* goatse, lemon party, two girls, or nimping; nor anyone on the receiving end. Even in the section entitled 'Harassment, Sex, and the Workplace', they focus on the fact that things which are harassment in one context may not be in another - without ever addressing the fact that these pranks *could be used to harass*, and who might be the most likely victims. Even when mentioning the homophobic nature of the joke, they don't address the probability that queer people would therefore be targeted. It's... disappointing, honestly.
And yet, while failing to treat gross-out pranks as harassment, they *also* don't address consensual gross-out practices! I am aware of people who trawl the A03 for the grossest or most pathetic or worst written or preferably all three porn they can find; I assume this happens with video porn, too (how else did Lemon Party end up screencapped?). Some people think its fun to seek out gross content: they then either spring it on unconsenting people, or, I've been told, engage in group competitive gross-outs with similarly minded friends. I am fairly sure that some of *that* underlay the viral success of goatse, lemon party, two girls, etc.
All up, useful but disappointing. I did get some interesting anthropological cites on disgust, however, and will keep forging ahead. I've been reading up on intentionally disgusting literature, too, but most of what I've found is writing about disgust as deliberately challenging / edgy, not deliberately FUNNY. But there are many genres of disgusting literature that are not that: Paul Jennings is no William S. Burroughs, and 18th-cent Mock-Epic has more in common with Captain Underpants than with Samuel L. Delaney.
Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other - not much progress here.
Poetry: Still plodding onward with Paradise Lost
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: Made some headway with Feminist Theory from Margin To Center, am enjoying it. Foucault and Bond Stockton remain on hiatus.
Lit Mag: Some minor progress with the winter Meanjin, but not enough. Also, as if I didn't have enough of a backlog with Meanjin, i leveled up in bougieness and took out a TLS subscription. I keep picking up links to articles by medievalists and not being able to read them... so, I have three months electronic and hard copy, we'll see if I use it and if it's worth keeping up the hard copy.
For Work: Mary Devlin's Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage, aka 'Esmerelda from Hunchback goes on pilgrimage with Chaucer, and also with a woman who has been married five times but is less mouthy than the Wife of Bath so makes a less threatening POV character'. Hines' The Fabliau in English. Annotating Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, still.
Recently Finished: Quite a lot, actually.
The Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was going to get a 3 or even round up to a 4, but the ending was a complete cop-out AND not even plausibly excused as a 'retraction' à la Chaucer.
The Canterbury Tales by Seymour Chwast
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It's hard to feel like Chwast actually LIKES the CT's, except maybe the Knight's Tale? And totally baffling dedication to doing The Whole Thing, including the cook and Melibee. Interesting to have a Prioress' Tale from a Jewish adaptor, but he ... doesn't... actually do anything interesting with it.
Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays by Sharon Friedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Extremely useful and relevant to my interests.
100 Demon Dialogues by Lucy Bellwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Absolutely adorable: 100 slice of life comics featuring discussions between the artist and her own inner demons.
Plus Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates, which is pretty good if out of date now. Neat format choices - it's a monograph but it's got textbook-like chapter blurbs and summaries, and discussion prompts. Also the intro to Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, which gave me some good cites, but is bafflingly ONLY about inter-religious polemic (Xns on Jews and Muslims, Jews on Xns and Muslims, Muslims on both), and doesn't address any of the three's depictions of heretics and or schismatics, or the sort of polemic that demands reform within a religion.
NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media by Susanna Paasonen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Both really interesting, and oddly gappy - f'r ex, despite sections entitled 'sex, harassment and the workplace', and despite addressing gross-out pranks, fails to actually grapple with gross-out pranks as either heterosexual harassment or homophobic harassment in the workplace. Weird.
And finally, I revisited the entire 'Circle of Magic' series by Tamora Pierce. Unlike the Song of the Lioness books, which I adored as a kid and still love, but which I see more and more holes in every time I read them, my respect for these ones only grows. Although this time I did have some side-eying about the depiction of the Traders (a mix of traits associated with Judaism and with the Roma, the latter mostly stereotypes; early on I thought Tammy Pierce took good and careful care to distinguish between antisemitic/racialised tropes believed about the Traders and what is actually truth of them, BUT. Their attitudes to outgroups were very heavy-handedly done: they seemed to genuinely believe non-traders were 'not real people', a belief which, afaik, is really only found to be *seriously* held in imperialist societies toward subordinate groups; if professed by a minority moving through a larger community it has a completely different valence). Nevertheless, as expected I was particularly struck by the epidemic in the fourth book: Briar resenting masks. Logistics people unprepared! Quarantine-dodging! Yeowch. The third book with its setting of a bad wildfire season was also tough to read after 2019 in Aus: I could feel the smoke scratch every time the text described Tris coughing.
Online fiction
Keerthik Sadisdharan (Mint Lounge), Krishna Speaks to Jara on his last night on earth. I did not understand this as well as I would like, but am filing it to return to later.
Maria Dhavana Headly (Tor.com), The Girlfriend's Guide To Gods. Not as impressed with this as I might have been a decade ago. It is, however, interesting in that I think it belongs in that genre of 'Heterosexual Disappointment Literature' I posited last week, but because it's so much less realistic than Cat Person it won't get put together like that.
Up Next:
Despite the long list of things finished, I have acquired EVEN MORE THINGS. A guide to mock-epic as a genre is probably next up.
Some links:
Laura Dzubay (Electric Lit), Everyone else is in love and I'm just listening to Taylor Swift. There is a lot of good stuff here, but I particularly liked its perspective on the function of songs as giving shape to what love and desire ought to feel like. I remember being fascinated by certain songs because they grasped something that no amount of reading - not fantasy lit, not my Guide to Puberty book, not Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' and not the teen novels that were YA-before-YA in Australia - articulated for me.
Captain Awkward (Own Blog), I put my emotions in the fridge and went away for a few years and now I'm afraid of what's growing in there. The Captain is on a good streak lately - the one about the Gasp! Bisexual! Friend was good, too.
Greg Mania, interview with Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends is Scripture for Gay Dysfunction. Another for my growing list of not-saccharinely-wholesome-rep queer lit.
Liz Janssen (LARB, 2015), Uses of Displeasure: Literary Value and Affective Disgust. Reviewing Delaney's 'Hogg' (Content warning: everything), considers the way that disgust scrambles our normal habits of evaluating literature. I hated it but it's good. It's terrible but impressive. Brilliant but one star.
Macquarie Dictionary Blog (2015), Do you skull a beer?. I read something referencing the scandinavian toast 'skol', and hoped it might be linked to the Australian ritual of 'skull, skull, skull', because I have never been satisfied with the explanation that you skull a beer in one long sweep like you row a boat (why skull, and not just 'row' then?). That sounded like a backformation based on the popularity of 'boat race' drinking games.
R.O. Kwon (The Cut), The willful misunderstanding of kink. I wasn't happy with this: very simplistic 'kink is not abuse; if it's abuse it's not kink' stuff. I hoped for better from the Kwon & Greenwell collaboration. Alas, I then found this scathing negative review by Daemonium X of their anthology Kink, which was enough to convince me not to bother reading it at all.
Mya Byrne (Country Queer), Trans country artists you need to know, and Rachel Choist (Country Queer), Your guide to the butches of queer country.
Liat Kaplan (NYT), I was your fave is problematic. The person behind YFIP, then a teenager, regrets her life choices. Although as the person I got the link from (Waverly SM on twitter) pointed out, there are some ways in which this piece doesn't seem to accept accountability for what she actually did (as opposed to the role she may have played in Cancel Culture At Large, which I think she overstates): there's a glancing reference to 'a feud with a YA author over his inclusion', which probably refers to the part where the blog turned accusations of pedophilia and/or general sexual harassment against John Green into a fact Everyone Knew, on the basis not even of a first-hand submission but someone reporting that their friend said that he hugged her without permission. I... don't know what's the correct point at which to move stories like that from whisper network to exposé, but YFIP's interests were never with the victims, or even with warning people *for their safety*, but with hurting the named people and shaming those who like them (thus the 'your fave' framing). In this article she talks about wanting to make people hurt, but not so much about the shaming of her peers aspect, which I always thought was stronger.
Robin Dembroff (pre-print of an article for TSQ), Cisgender Commonsense & Philosophy’s Transgender Trouble. This is a really good read on the topic of 'why are so many philosophers transphobic as fuck'. I would like to get further confirmation about certain basic methods of analytic philosophy - Dembroff cites a professor who, when he was a student, responded to his promise to 'read more on the topic of X' with 'don't read, THINK', and links that with the broader unwillingess of mainstream philosophers to read trans philosophy, feminist philosophy, or philosophers of colour. The assumption is, apparently, that one should start from commonly agreed facts and build up; the idea that one might need to research, or that commonly agreed facts might be wrong, is, per Dembroff, anathema. This is... certainly an explanation for Philosophy Bros in lit classes, but so wildly different from how philosophy is approached by lit scholars (Dembroff does note he's talking about analytic philosophy; and lit scholars love continental philosophy, perhaps that's the difference) that, I, er, want to read more on the topic.
I was working as a waitress, the summer after my undergrad, in the same place I had worked the previous year. One of the apprentice chefs - I think he may have been the senior, and certainly he was the most dominant character in the group - stepped out of the kitchen (male space) while the front of house staff (all women that day, all women and teenage boys as a rule) were setting up, and showed my colleagues something on his phone that made them scream with disgust. Then he showed me.
It was a still shot of three older men having sex. I did not react in disgust, but with curiosity: and I panicked, knowing I had to tamp down the part of me that found this scene interesting (and potentially even attractive to me): what had brought these men together? Were they an established triad, or two partners and a third, or three friends, or three men who had never met? What were the character dynamics, were they related to the positions they were in, what would happen next in the encounter, what would happen after? I would have read a goddamn novel about these three guys living their best life. Was the shot from professional porn or a home sex tape? I hoped the former, because the thought of three older blokes uploading their home tape only to become a laughing stock was... off. At least the pornographers got paid.
All that went through my brain, and I could tell that the aim of the exchange was to get me to react: in my struggle to not give away my empathy with the presumed gay men who were the object of this homophobic prank, I completely failed to notice that I, a young woman, had also been the subject of an act of heterosexual harrassment.
It says something... very specific about my experience of queerness and gender that *even though I had only been aware of my attraction to women for less than a year*, and had not changed the slightest thing about my presentation, I identified myself firstly with the men depicted, and secondly as the target of an exercise designed to prove heterosexuality: I needed to not react, so as not to reinforce the homophobic joke, but also not betray any personal investment. If I thought with pity of anyone else, it was of the possibility that one of the other men in the kitchen, who had all viewed this picture and jeered at it, might himself be gay. To me, the other women screaming and covering their eyes were not fellow victims, but part of the trap. I understood it to be a prank in which they had been unwillingly exposed to something that disgusted them - and that that was, ultimately, funny to them as it was to the agent of the prank, and as it was neither funny nor disgusting to me.
These days, I am researching intersections between disgust and humour: why is disgust fun? Why is it funny to disgust others? It turns out that still shot I was shown is part of the Internet Hall of Fame: it's known as 'Lemon Party', and like Goatse and Two Girls One Cup, it is one of the pornographic counterparts of the humble RickRoll and the NumaNuma song. One tricked one's internet peers (and sometimes ones real life peers) into viewing undesirable content: Lemon Party and Goatse because they are explicitly or implicitly homoerotic; Two Girls (and to an extent Goatse) because of the scatological humour / kink intersection. RickRoll is genuinely harmless, its joke resting on the overly earnest and unfashionable popsong, while the NumaNuma video's prank appeal rests on combined fatphobia and mockery of the chap in question's earnest enjoyment of the song. Somehow, as an odd badge of pride, I can tell you I've never been internet-pranked into any of these: I somehow became skilled at spotting and dodging them, and Lemon Party simply never crossed my radar. Consequently, it wasn't until I read mentions of it in academic literature that I realised it was a specific meme-based prank and not a random act of homophobia that I had encountered in late 2008 or early 2009.
Now, when I think about that exchange in the restaurant, it seems glaringly obvious to me that I, and the other female staff, were subject to heterosexual sexual harrassment: pushing pornography into our working relationship was obviously an act of sexualised intimidation. Even the intent to disgust is wrapped up in ye olde hetero power dynamics: eliciting an affective response over us, in the domain of sexuality, without touching us or even implying sexual interest in us. But I do think there's something different here to, say, showing het porn that the aggressor might presumably enjoy - perhaps that's what lifts it into the realm of humour? There isn't a sense of unwanted intimacy, such as even something relatively tame like pin-up calendars elicits (now you know exactly what kind of big tits your colleagues like). I'm fairly sure my straight women colleagues would have reacted differently to straight porn, or lesbian porn (either true dyke porn or girl-on-girl-for-male-viewers); and the kitchen blokes would not have found conventionally attractive gay porn a site of riotous amusement.
This past week I read NSFW: Sex, Humour and Risk in Social Media (well, read the intro and skimmed the rest for content specifically addressing gross-out pranks). What that book *doesn't* address sort of confirms that my first read on the situation might not have been so wrong: I think, at the time, the disgust > humour link was so strong, and the homophobic element so obvious, that many victims embraced the joke (and then passed it on). The authors of NSFW address Goatse and Lemon Party in the same context as 'Nimping' (of which I had never heard!), a prank that installed an app that played inescapable gay porn and shouted "hey everyone I'm watching gay porn!" across your workplace. They talk about how there's humour in disgust, in reasserting heteronorms via disgust-pranks; and about the humour of incongruity, as in the presence of porn in the workplace.
They DON'T talk about the specific dynamics involved in victimising certain people for these pranks - perhaps because Goatse, like Rickroll, seemed so all-pervasive at one point. But something like Nimping? Don't tell me that wasn't deliberately sent to men who were somehow failing to win at workplace masculinity. Part of the TEST is that the victim had to both perform disgust *and* treat it as a successfully executed amusing prank - by failing to perform disgust I violated the Rules of the exchange, and if I were read as a man or possibly even as a dyke at the time I would have opened myself to further homophobic harassment in so doing; but if I treated it as sexual harassment directed at me as a woman, I have absolutely no idea what would have happened, the violation of the prank rules of engagement was so inconceivable at the time.
I do think that even if it is the case that most people in the sphere of these pranks thought of them as pranks rather than harassment, an academic study ought to probe further. It is striking that the authors of NSFW quote studies which interviewed people about workplace humour, or about work/life boundaries and smutty jokes on social media (some one who was photographed holding some 'cock soup' - tinned soup with a cockerel on it - while on mental health leave, and the photo made it to facebook), they don't interview or cite any interviews with anyone who *disseminated* goatse, lemon party, two girls, or nimping; nor anyone on the receiving end. Even in the section entitled 'Harassment, Sex, and the Workplace', they focus on the fact that things which are harassment in one context may not be in another - without ever addressing the fact that these pranks *could be used to harass*, and who might be the most likely victims. Even when mentioning the homophobic nature of the joke, they don't address the probability that queer people would therefore be targeted. It's... disappointing, honestly.
And yet, while failing to treat gross-out pranks as harassment, they *also* don't address consensual gross-out practices! I am aware of people who trawl the A03 for the grossest or most pathetic or worst written or preferably all three porn they can find; I assume this happens with video porn, too (how else did Lemon Party end up screencapped?). Some people think its fun to seek out gross content: they then either spring it on unconsenting people, or, I've been told, engage in group competitive gross-outs with similarly minded friends. I am fairly sure that some of *that* underlay the viral success of goatse, lemon party, two girls, etc.
All up, useful but disappointing. I did get some interesting anthropological cites on disgust, however, and will keep forging ahead. I've been reading up on intentionally disgusting literature, too, but most of what I've found is writing about disgust as deliberately challenging / edgy, not deliberately FUNNY. But there are many genres of disgusting literature that are not that: Paul Jennings is no William S. Burroughs, and 18th-cent Mock-Epic has more in common with Captain Underpants than with Samuel L. Delaney.
Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other - not much progress here.
Poetry: Still plodding onward with Paradise Lost
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: Made some headway with Feminist Theory from Margin To Center, am enjoying it. Foucault and Bond Stockton remain on hiatus.
Lit Mag: Some minor progress with the winter Meanjin, but not enough. Also, as if I didn't have enough of a backlog with Meanjin, i leveled up in bougieness and took out a TLS subscription. I keep picking up links to articles by medievalists and not being able to read them... so, I have three months electronic and hard copy, we'll see if I use it and if it's worth keeping up the hard copy.
For Work: Mary Devlin's Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage, aka 'Esmerelda from Hunchback goes on pilgrimage with Chaucer, and also with a woman who has been married five times but is less mouthy than the Wife of Bath so makes a less threatening POV character'. Hines' The Fabliau in English. Annotating Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, still.
Recently Finished: Quite a lot, actually.
The Canterbury Trail by Angie AbdouMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was going to get a 3 or even round up to a 4, but the ending was a complete cop-out AND not even plausibly excused as a 'retraction' à la Chaucer.
The Canterbury Tales by Seymour ChwastMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
It's hard to feel like Chwast actually LIKES the CT's, except maybe the Knight's Tale? And totally baffling dedication to doing The Whole Thing, including the cook and Melibee. Interesting to have a Prioress' Tale from a Jewish adaptor, but he ... doesn't... actually do anything interesting with it.
Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays by Sharon FriedmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Extremely useful and relevant to my interests.
100 Demon Dialogues by Lucy BellwoodMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Absolutely adorable: 100 slice of life comics featuring discussions between the artist and her own inner demons.
Plus Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates, which is pretty good if out of date now. Neat format choices - it's a monograph but it's got textbook-like chapter blurbs and summaries, and discussion prompts. Also the intro to Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, which gave me some good cites, but is bafflingly ONLY about inter-religious polemic (Xns on Jews and Muslims, Jews on Xns and Muslims, Muslims on both), and doesn't address any of the three's depictions of heretics and or schismatics, or the sort of polemic that demands reform within a religion.
NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media by Susanna PaasonenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Both really interesting, and oddly gappy - f'r ex, despite sections entitled 'sex, harassment and the workplace', and despite addressing gross-out pranks, fails to actually grapple with gross-out pranks as either heterosexual harassment or homophobic harassment in the workplace. Weird.
And finally, I revisited the entire 'Circle of Magic' series by Tamora Pierce. Unlike the Song of the Lioness books, which I adored as a kid and still love, but which I see more and more holes in every time I read them, my respect for these ones only grows. Although this time I did have some side-eying about the depiction of the Traders (a mix of traits associated with Judaism and with the Roma, the latter mostly stereotypes; early on I thought Tammy Pierce took good and careful care to distinguish between antisemitic/racialised tropes believed about the Traders and what is actually truth of them, BUT. Their attitudes to outgroups were very heavy-handedly done: they seemed to genuinely believe non-traders were 'not real people', a belief which, afaik, is really only found to be *seriously* held in imperialist societies toward subordinate groups; if professed by a minority moving through a larger community it has a completely different valence). Nevertheless, as expected I was particularly struck by the epidemic in the fourth book: Briar resenting masks. Logistics people unprepared! Quarantine-dodging! Yeowch. The third book with its setting of a bad wildfire season was also tough to read after 2019 in Aus: I could feel the smoke scratch every time the text described Tris coughing.
Online fiction
Up Next:
Despite the long list of things finished, I have acquired EVEN MORE THINGS. A guide to mock-epic as a genre is probably next up.
Some links: