@atthecenterofeverything / atthecenterofeverything.tumblr.com
the essay is finally out!
in which I try to delineate a harm reduction approach to self-harm and a rejection of capitalistic conceptions of cutting, substance use and other behaviors parsed as self-harm; in opposition to the imposed necessity of recovery, sobriety, and the monitoring (self-imposed or not) in all discussions of self-harm.
full body autonomy for cutters now!
has the author of the body in pain always be called elaine scarry
making this post to support the campaign of @kawlafamily7 who is @fidaa-family2 ‘s sister
kawla has three young children. her daughter was injured from falling shrapnel and rubble and also has a glucose allergy. she needs special milk without glucose which is very expensive.
“She needs glucose-free soda milk, and her growth is bad so far. Her teeth will not grow due to allergies and lack of growth, and she is one and a half years old.”
please take a second to share and donate to this campaign. people are living in unbearable conditions, every donation makes a difference
$8,372 out of $20,000
The Private Life of a Cat 1946 | dir. Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Deleuze and Guattari
got into a #seinfeldstyle predicament today. a bit annoying but also really fucking funny.
so my laptop's case is broken, right? it doesn't close properly cause it got damaged, so I take it to the computer repair shop. the guy tells me he'll fix it and to come back in an hour. I come back, I say thank you, I leave.
once on the bus, I try turning the laptop on. it doesn't react at all, even though it was working while charging earlier. it feels light, like the box is empty. I assume there's a problem with the battery now.
next day, I go back to the shop. same guy is there. I explain the issue to him, he apologizes, tells me he forgot to put the battery back in, that he'll fix it now. after 5 minutes, he gives me the laptop back, it works now. he apologizes again, I say it's no problem, he gives me a free box with a pair of headphones for my troubles. I say thank you, I leave.
once on the bus. I open the headphones box. it feels light. like the box is empty. I open it and there's just. no fucking headphones inside 😭😭😭😭😭
I'll tell you one thing if the Berlin Wall was still there these German motherfuckers would not be getting away with this that's for sure
struggling to understand how people can act THIS shocked whenever another TME theorist/activist (especially a cis 70s feminist) gets revealed as having written super transmisogynistic texts and palled around with TERFs. surely this cannot come as this much of a surprise. people are so incredibly reluctant to question the politics of the Established Feminist theorists. maybe someday having been "kink critical" and talking about the Unique Oppression of (cis) Lesbians and repeatedly drawn trans woman and lesbian as two separate categories and having attended fucking michfest will be enough for people to realize that without acting so surprised like come on now.
I feel like creating these loose, ill-defined chains of culpability taking people who, while imperfect, have specifically spoken in support of trans women when push comes to shove, and then linking them to people who are more actively transmisogynistic, bears a lot of resemblance to the sort of disingenuous tactics used in callout posts. I don't think this is a good thing to do.
the reason callout posts are bad is because they target marginalized communities, especially trans women, who rely on community support for survival and isolate them by turning people against them for ultimately trivial acts that are not condemned the same way when coming from tme people. I with my 300 followers do not in any way have the power to meaningfully "call out" dead established feminist theorists nor do I want to. feinberg being explicitly, clearly friends with adrienne rich and other TERFs is not loose or ill defined this is documented history. bell hooks using transmisogynistic rhetoric against the protagonists of paris is burning is just as clear. what does having "spoken out in favour of trans women" mean in this context. if you can understand how someone can say "support trans women and fuck terfs!" and still be violently transmisogynistic this shouldn't be that much of a puzzle
Starting a collection
If you have more I'd love to see them this is my favorite meme format ever
(x)
and it's also very telling, regarding Molina's character in Kiss of the Spider Woman, that, well -
it's an extremely common trope to have the femme fatale be ordered by the villain to seduce the hero in order to obtain crucial information from him, only to then side with the hero instead when she falls in love with him, notably in detective and noir fiction. you are also often expected to discard most, if not all of what the femme fatale says to the hero prior to the revelation that she was planning on betraying him all along! her past, her opinions, her tastes, her origins, her priorities - it is understood that it was all woven together for the purpose of seducing the hero. the ambiguity of the character - the uncertainty about her, the intricate lies - is usually what makes a femme fatale compelling.
Molina's story follows these plot beats pretty much from start to finish - but she is TMA. and therefore analysis after analysis, critic after critic characterizes Molina as idolizing a conservative and outdated image of womanhood - as an apolitical romantic, who cares only about beautiful movies - and is too archaic to want better for herself than a husband for which to cook and clean. it doesn't seem possible at all to anyone that Molina might have constructed this image specifically for the purpose of better deceiving Valentin and achieving her goals. that she might have lied or embellished or recontextualized some elements in order to present herself as an innocent character incapable of double-crossing him - that she might be an unreliable narrator.
which fails the character in 2 ways - 1. it doesn't take into account the ways in which Molina's fantasies of a stable husband are instructed by the dangers of transmisogyny - a common trope in which trans women are the ones reifying gender, instead of being hurt by it and 2. refuses to imagine a possibility of a trans character being cunning and smart enough to play the prison wardens, Valentin, and the reader all at once
i really cannot be assed to do the whole "tiktokers use gaslighting when they just mean lying!" or "don't call your abusive parents narcissistic, it's a real personality disorder" or "bpd doesn't make you a bad person" or any kind of defending violent psychiatric terms from the "pop psychology version".
like I get the impulse but it feels infinitely more humiliating for me to argue that actually, being diagnosed with the Shit Selfish Person disorder doesn't make me a shit selfish person, than to question the foundations of these terms at any turn and the structures of power that impose and created this diagnosis. anyone who genuinely believes that those diagnoses are an objective appreciation of a prediscursive illness will not be moved by you going to bat for BPD anyways.
This is all that stupid ass baby hippos fault
I'll tell you one thing if the Berlin Wall was still there these German motherfuckers would not be getting away with this that's for sure
struggling to understand how people can act THIS shocked whenever another TME theorist/activist (especially a cis 70s feminist) gets revealed as having written super transmisogynistic texts and palled around with TERFs. surely this cannot come as this much of a surprise. people are so incredibly reluctant to question the politics of the Established Feminist theorists. maybe someday having been "kink critical" and talking about the Unique Oppression of (cis) Lesbians and repeatedly drawn trans woman and lesbian as two separate categories and having attended fucking michfest will be enough for people to realize that without acting so surprised like come on now.
kind of insane but not surprising that I have yet to find a singular published work about Kiss of the Spider Woman that like explicitly reads Molina as trans lol. an essay called "Femininity and Effeminophobia in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman" (!!) straight up includes the phrase "I admit that i was surprised by this turn to the transgendered, and even initially somewhat uncomfortable with what seemed like a surprising leap". brother we're talking about a character who consistently uses she her pronouns for herself and says the phrase "since women are the best there is, I want to be a woman". think what you want about gender in context in the mid-70s but acting like a reading of her as a trans woman is far fetched is like. especially coupled with the common reading of Molina as a regressive, stereotypical, submissive image of a woman. so nakedly transmisogynistic
the essay is finally out!
in which I try to delineate a harm reduction approach to self-harm and a rejection of capitalistic conceptions of cutting, substance use and other behaviors parsed as self-harm; in opposition to the imposed necessity of recovery, sobriety, and the monitoring (self-imposed or not) in all discussions of self-harm.
full body autonomy for cutters now!
i'm sure this is common knowledge among many of you but just in case -
whenever you want to access an article that is available on jstor but you, obviously, do not have any kind of academic account and the article is too short or too unknown to be listed on libgen, the trick that has worked the best for me was:
