Extemporanea
Seminar went well (I think), which is particularly reassuring when this is pretty much a new area for me - no syphilis, no masturbation, and only a very tangential mention of birth control. Also, no-one did that heart-stopping thing of bringing up in discussion someone working on/producing theoretical insights about the same stuff, of whom one has never heard, never mind read. (however, I do note a paper at forthcoming Wells conference which looks as though someone else may be working on Vague Utopian Movements of the period).
Apparently they put up podcasts on their website: is it massively egotistical of me to enquire whether anyone would be interested in my posting the link when this happens?
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I do quite see that the clitoroplasty thing is majorly about intersex and fears of sexual ambiguity, but I do also wonder to what degree there are also instances there of 'normalising' female genitalia seen to be inappropriate in some way in the absence of any other indications of intersexuality. Or maybe I'm just reading forward from those C19th writers who were 'large clit = tendency to prostitution OR nymphomania OR sexual inversion' (did I really, really see someone actually claiming in a recent blog post that lesbians have larger clitorises?? - has someone been at the Cesare Lombroso, or what?) and adding that to the elective labioplasty thing ('women's untidy genitalia need tidying up!') and drawing a wrong conclusion.
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Having been thinking that there's probably a scale along which one can grade degree of emotion from slight miffedness to deep angst at LJ defriending/DW removal from subscription list. From person whom one friended as a gesture of reciprocity but never really interacted with much up to serious intertwining of lives.
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I had two luggage dreams over the weekend. One was a fresh riff on the lost luggage motif, in which I had managed to walk off with someone else's case instead of my own and then had to try and get back and sort it out, and in the other one I was packing to go to Glasgow for a very short trip and nearly forgot to take my netbook, and then saw there was room in the bag I was taking to fit it in.
I also had a dream in which I was taking photos with my digital camera in a garden which was sort of like and sort of really unlike the garden of the family residence.
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