Wednesday is practically snowed in
What I read
Finished Vibrator Nation, which was very good, and easy to read, and I thought it did a lot of necessary nuancing of the narrative and the problematics of the politics of respectability in order to make your radical project acceptable, and the conflict between Having A Mission and Running a Business, and the perceived if not actual or absolute dichotomy of (gendered/raced/classed) notions of socially valuable work vs soulless business, and what happens when you actually stop being a small business and start being a large one, and labour relations, and so on. But I still felt - in spite of the depth and breadth of the research - that I wanted a bit more - like the ways in which emotional labour is so much part of certain other female-coded retail/service jobs which are not seen at all as feminist projects - and parallels with similar projects, like what happened with Our Bodies Ourselves (and going further back, how the birth control movement developed, and had to start similarly by not frightening the horses with appeals to being All About Lovely Healthy Baybeez for Happy, MARRIED, Muvvers), and that perhaps this was not quite so entirely unique a phenomenon.
Will give it points for only mentioning That Book once in a footnote.
The bit where they try to run the place as a cooperative was wincingly reminiscent of the chapter in the book on abortion provision I reviewed last year about how some of the 70s women's health centres were operating as collectives...
Also finished The Winged Histories, also very good, but somewhat slow going. And probably really needs at least a second reading.
On the go
Elizabeth Moon, Into the Fire (Vatta's Peace, #2) (2018), because I felt I needed to read something linear and fast-moving after that; and unlike the previous volume of this new sequence, it does get going at a fair clip.
Up next
Well, there's still the Marilynne Robinson; or, that Lucy Mangan book on childhood reading is supposed to be out tomorrow... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2732597.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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