Nonfiction
Milena Popova, Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent:I’d previously read a version of one chapter in Porn Cultures on Omegaverse, aka “dogfucker rapeworld.” Another interesting chapter is on arranged marriage plots in fanfic and what they suggest about how social and legal power structure sex (and pleasure and love); another is about hockey RPF dealing with a rape allegation against the celebrity corresponding to a popular character. A lot of interesting stuff here. One passage that really struck me: “There is a dominant view in our society that the only act that ‘counts’ as sex is penile-vaginal intercourse. This is so pervasive that even feminist researchers and activists working on consent negotiation define intercourse as the only act that requires consent. They conceptualize actions such as kissing, touching, and undressing as expressions of consent instead.” I didn’t find the treatment of consented-to-but-unwanted sex as coercive all that convincing-it conflated sex pressured by social conventions with sex to please a partner who might just have a higher desire for sex-but then again fanfic is not known for presenting some of these scenarios that are common in the real world (I love my partner but am not sexually attracted to them anymore is the one I read in a lot of the advice columns) which is indeed part of its charm. I think a more productive approach would be to acknowledge how consensual sex can also be bad sex in various ways, and how consent is not the same thing as pleasure.
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: Charmingly written history of Egypt’s ancient rulers from what we can and can’t know from their artifacts. Not very much about ordinary life or details of how pyramids were built, but gossipy discussion of various rulers and of the nature of knowledge of/speculation about the distant past.
Angie Maxwell, The Indicted South: History of the reaction-formations induced in white Southerners as a result of criticisms of the South (or really of its whites). Maxwell argues that “southern white identity has allied itself with the unifying sense of inferiority,” leading to positions that go beyond explicit racial and gender commitments to rigidity on religion (conservative Christianity/creationism), education, science, and government’s role. Intriguingly links the New Criticism to other reaction-formations (the Scopes monkey trial and its aftermath including hardening of fundamentalism, as well as Massive Resistance after Brown), deeming New Criticism fundamentalist in its insistence on the primacy of the text over the text’s history and context and in its elevation of the feelings of critics over other forms of knowledge.
The book seemed to attribute responsibility to the South’s critics for making the things they criticized worse, which I don't think is either fair or a pointer to useful alternatives. E.g., “Public criticism of southern racial practices had sparked the fire [of Massive Resistance to desegregation].” Or maybe it was … being ordered to stop segregating? Like, I’ll accept that scorn doesn’t work on many racists, but I do note that the least contemptuous person in public life, MLK Jr., was assassinated for asking for justice without H.L. Mencken’s vitriol. Maxwell identifies him as one of the critics who spurred backlash by pointing out that the civil rights movement was in favor of justice, thus (shockingly/insultingly) implying that its opponents were against justice, which of course they in fact were. Also, Maxwell notes the existence of Southern white self-criticism, but doesn’t blame them for sparking backlash or investigate what gave those whites more self-doubt/moral clarity. She spends no time on unpacking the “no true Scotsman” denunciations of white Southerners who supported at least some reforms. As she notes, Roy Carter Jr. found that, though segregationists constantly denounced the biased media as never presenting the “Southern” [white] perspective, in 12 Southern papers, 27% of the coverage was of pro-integration stories, 12% was “progradualism,” 30% prosegregation, and 31% neutral. The “[p]erception [of lack of media support] mattered,” she says, despite the reality. But Maxwell doesn’t address the fundamental issue surfaced by this mismatch: to this group of whites, any criticism was too much criticism.
Her project is very much to understand people who wrote things in 1928 like “There were people in New England who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America by freeing the slaves. They were not very intelligent people; so they didn’t know precisely what they wanted to destroy. … These privy-to-God people were sending little pamphlets down South telling the Negroes, whom they had never seen, that they were abused.” I would like to spend just enough time learning about them to know how best to fight them politically and rhetorically, and yeah, contempt probably won’t convince them (though it seems to be working fine for Trumpists’ attitudes towards us). But the fact that segregationists have lifeworlds too does not to me provide a justification for blaming their radicalization on people who disparaged the South (truthfully) as having more lynchings than universities, even if those condemnations were often issued by whites with racism problems of their own (looking at you, Mencken). And I wonder why it’s important to understand these guys without contrasting them to the people engaged in the violence that they only tacitly approved-formally disavowing violence but blaming Emmett Till’s murder on civil rights activists. Without comparison to their more integrationist or more violent white counterparts, Maxwell gives us no understanding of what the alternatives were for these semi-polite racists.
Maybe the most sympathetic reading is that she’s showing how backlash worked in practice: Hardened views meant a consolidation of antigovernment, fundamentalist, antieducation, antiscience, antiprogress views in a white Southern identity that admitted no nuance in things like constitutional interpretation. Despite being released before this round of white moral panic, the book definitely makes clear that the current hysteria over “critical race theory” is the same renamed racial anxiety that has stalked the US-including the white Michiganders who now embrace the Confederate traitor flag their forbears died to fight-for a long time, both as an undercurrent in the Scopes trial/bans on teaching evolution and in Civil War apologism taught in schools. And the historical links with the New Criticism reinforce my conviction that anti-“CRT” legislation embraces the idea of the objective correlative-that simply teaching particular things will create shame and guilt in white students-in excitingly racist ways. (One of the Virginia segregationists she writes about said that the worst thing about the fight over desegregation was how it generated guilt in whites. Also, today’s right-wingers are furious over any attempt to show that racism was integral to American history, whereas yesterday’s were furious that liberals portrayed racists as un-American in their racism and that liberals also portrayed Brown as the realization of the authentic American ideal, so there’s that bit of irony as well.)
Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America: How Amazon shaped local, regional, and national policy; it’s a book of contrasts. Amazon’s direct employees in Seattle have access to specially constructed orbs full of carefully curated greenery to help them “find their inner biophiliac that really responds to nature.” Meanwhile, Amazon negotiates secretive deals to locate warehouses that provide huge tax incentives-making it more likely that the surrounding areas will deteriorate and making Amazon warehouse jobs look like better alternatives. Time and again, Amazon gets sweetheart deals and isn’t asked to provide anything in return, like bulk discounts for schools and public agencies (anyway, those would all have to come from Amazon’s already-squeezed suppliers). Virginia built a new power system for Amazon with a monthly fee on all ratepayers, not just Amazon, which sought a special discounted rate for power at its data ceSnters. Meanwhile, its dominance in data storage let it subsidize low prices for retail, undercutting retail competitors. “Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there.” But they also had a goal of “securing $ 1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.”
One excellent chapter examines how Amazon contributes both to homelessness in Seattle and to the backlash to it in an ostensibly liberal city. “Seattle had become proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors. Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities.”
This has toxic effects on mobility as well-moving to a big city without a college degree means a job that doesn’t pay much more than a job in the rest of America, but lots more housing costs; this chokes off sustainable growth even in the big cities. The book makes the case for having a lot of small capitalist “greedy fucks” rather than a few giant corporations with no interest in investing in areas outside the really big cities.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: Charmingly written history of Egypt’s ancient rulers from what we can and can’t know from their artifacts. Not very much about ordinary life or details of how pyramids were built, but gossipy discussion of various rulers and of the nature of knowledge of/speculation about the distant past.
Angie Maxwell, The Indicted South: History of the reaction-formations induced in white Southerners as a result of criticisms of the South (or really of its whites). Maxwell argues that “southern white identity has allied itself with the unifying sense of inferiority,” leading to positions that go beyond explicit racial and gender commitments to rigidity on religion (conservative Christianity/creationism), education, science, and government’s role. Intriguingly links the New Criticism to other reaction-formations (the Scopes monkey trial and its aftermath including hardening of fundamentalism, as well as Massive Resistance after Brown), deeming New Criticism fundamentalist in its insistence on the primacy of the text over the text’s history and context and in its elevation of the feelings of critics over other forms of knowledge.
The book seemed to attribute responsibility to the South’s critics for making the things they criticized worse, which I don't think is either fair or a pointer to useful alternatives. E.g., “Public criticism of southern racial practices had sparked the fire [of Massive Resistance to desegregation].” Or maybe it was … being ordered to stop segregating? Like, I’ll accept that scorn doesn’t work on many racists, but I do note that the least contemptuous person in public life, MLK Jr., was assassinated for asking for justice without H.L. Mencken’s vitriol. Maxwell identifies him as one of the critics who spurred backlash by pointing out that the civil rights movement was in favor of justice, thus (shockingly/insultingly) implying that its opponents were against justice, which of course they in fact were. Also, Maxwell notes the existence of Southern white self-criticism, but doesn’t blame them for sparking backlash or investigate what gave those whites more self-doubt/moral clarity. She spends no time on unpacking the “no true Scotsman” denunciations of white Southerners who supported at least some reforms. As she notes, Roy Carter Jr. found that, though segregationists constantly denounced the biased media as never presenting the “Southern” [white] perspective, in 12 Southern papers, 27% of the coverage was of pro-integration stories, 12% was “progradualism,” 30% prosegregation, and 31% neutral. The “[p]erception [of lack of media support] mattered,” she says, despite the reality. But Maxwell doesn’t address the fundamental issue surfaced by this mismatch: to this group of whites, any criticism was too much criticism.
Her project is very much to understand people who wrote things in 1928 like “There were people in New England who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America by freeing the slaves. They were not very intelligent people; so they didn’t know precisely what they wanted to destroy. … These privy-to-God people were sending little pamphlets down South telling the Negroes, whom they had never seen, that they were abused.” I would like to spend just enough time learning about them to know how best to fight them politically and rhetorically, and yeah, contempt probably won’t convince them (though it seems to be working fine for Trumpists’ attitudes towards us). But the fact that segregationists have lifeworlds too does not to me provide a justification for blaming their radicalization on people who disparaged the South (truthfully) as having more lynchings than universities, even if those condemnations were often issued by whites with racism problems of their own (looking at you, Mencken). And I wonder why it’s important to understand these guys without contrasting them to the people engaged in the violence that they only tacitly approved-formally disavowing violence but blaming Emmett Till’s murder on civil rights activists. Without comparison to their more integrationist or more violent white counterparts, Maxwell gives us no understanding of what the alternatives were for these semi-polite racists.
Maybe the most sympathetic reading is that she’s showing how backlash worked in practice: Hardened views meant a consolidation of antigovernment, fundamentalist, antieducation, antiscience, antiprogress views in a white Southern identity that admitted no nuance in things like constitutional interpretation. Despite being released before this round of white moral panic, the book definitely makes clear that the current hysteria over “critical race theory” is the same renamed racial anxiety that has stalked the US-including the white Michiganders who now embrace the Confederate traitor flag their forbears died to fight-for a long time, both as an undercurrent in the Scopes trial/bans on teaching evolution and in Civil War apologism taught in schools. And the historical links with the New Criticism reinforce my conviction that anti-“CRT” legislation embraces the idea of the objective correlative-that simply teaching particular things will create shame and guilt in white students-in excitingly racist ways. (One of the Virginia segregationists she writes about said that the worst thing about the fight over desegregation was how it generated guilt in whites. Also, today’s right-wingers are furious over any attempt to show that racism was integral to American history, whereas yesterday’s were furious that liberals portrayed racists as un-American in their racism and that liberals also portrayed Brown as the realization of the authentic American ideal, so there’s that bit of irony as well.)
Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America: How Amazon shaped local, regional, and national policy; it’s a book of contrasts. Amazon’s direct employees in Seattle have access to specially constructed orbs full of carefully curated greenery to help them “find their inner biophiliac that really responds to nature.” Meanwhile, Amazon negotiates secretive deals to locate warehouses that provide huge tax incentives-making it more likely that the surrounding areas will deteriorate and making Amazon warehouse jobs look like better alternatives. Time and again, Amazon gets sweetheart deals and isn’t asked to provide anything in return, like bulk discounts for schools and public agencies (anyway, those would all have to come from Amazon’s already-squeezed suppliers). Virginia built a new power system for Amazon with a monthly fee on all ratepayers, not just Amazon, which sought a special discounted rate for power at its data ceSnters. Meanwhile, its dominance in data storage let it subsidize low prices for retail, undercutting retail competitors. “Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there.” But they also had a goal of “securing $ 1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.”
One excellent chapter examines how Amazon contributes both to homelessness in Seattle and to the backlash to it in an ostensibly liberal city. “Seattle had become proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors. Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities.”
This has toxic effects on mobility as well-moving to a big city without a college degree means a job that doesn’t pay much more than a job in the rest of America, but lots more housing costs; this chokes off sustainable growth even in the big cities. The book makes the case for having a lot of small capitalist “greedy fucks” rather than a few giant corporations with no interest in investing in areas outside the really big cities.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.