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1487011938
| 9781487011932
| 1487011938
| 4.22
| 479
| Sep 05, 2023
| Sep 05, 2023
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really liked it
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Oh boy, I don’t know if this was the best time or worst time to read The Age of Insecurity. It was certainly A Time. Written just prior to Donald Trum
Oh boy, I don’t know if this was the best time or worst time to read The Age of Insecurity. It was certainly A Time. Written just prior to Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures for 2023 nevertheless capture the zeitgeist of the 2020s with uncomfortable clarity and, dare I say, prescience. This book is not a salve for our age, alas, but it might be a good treatment nonetheless. Taylor’s lectures, organized as always into five chapters or nights of lecturing, focus as the title implies on the topic of insecurity. Specifically, she believes that insecurity is one of the primary tools capitalism uses to keep workers beholden to the powerful. So much of what drives our economy and our efforts is the fear of insecurity—a fear shared by the rich, Taylor points out, as well as the poor. This book took me a while to read. In part that’s just because it is dense, well referenced, well argued. In part because I needed frequent breaks, for the topics Taylor covers are not easy. I am a fairly secure, middle class, privileged white woman here in Canada. I have a good union job, benefits, a pension. Yet Taylor describes my condition exactly in these pages. She seizes upon the fear I experience, along with the rest of the middle class: the fear of falling. The fear of our quality of life decreasing, of a reduction of station. The precarity we feel is the insecurity, she argues, that drives our fears of socialism, fears of helping people more marginalized than ourselves. Taylor weaves an insightful and interesting history lesson throughout each chapter. From there, she actually gives prescriptions on what she thinks we can do. Always, her advice centres on organizing. The power of collective action. This, I think, is what makes this book so redeeming despite its fairly bleak outlook at the big picture: Taylor is not beaten down, and she isn’t suggesting we accept defeat. I’m not sure who the audience for this book is. Maybe it’s me prepandemic? I think the past year or so have honestly woken a lot of people to the issues Taylor covers here, though I guess that the connective tissue of her exposition and history lessons helps too. If I have a criticism, it’s simply that, like most of the Massey Lectures, this one opts for breadth over depth. Taylor touches on so many issues: Indigenous land defence and sovereignty, insurance and subprime loans, housing, food, etc. She does a great job showing us how everything is connected, yet at the same time, I suspect most people will need additional texts to truly grasp most of the issues she mentions here. The Age of Insecurity is an intriguing starting point yet far from an endpoint. Not the greatest Massey Lecture I have ever read but certainly one of the most urgent, most topical entries. Well done. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 05, 2025
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Apr 18, 2025
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Apr 24, 2025
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Paperback
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151791910X
| 9781517919108
| 151791910X
| 4.58
| 24
| Mar 25, 2025
| Mar 25, 2025
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it was amazing
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Most of you probably know already: Star Trek is my first science-fiction love. Before Stargate, before Buffy, before even Supergirl, I grew up in the
Most of you probably know already: Star Trek is my first science-fiction love. Before Stargate, before Buffy, before even Supergirl, I grew up in the nineties watching the bright primary colours of TOS on a 13-inch CRT TV. I eschewed for a long time the muted, overly polished sequel series—the simplicity of the 1960s original made more sense to my kid brain. Yet I eventually succumbed (DS9 is my favourite, though TNG is an easier rewatch), and I was hooked. My first online community when I joined the internet at fourteen was a Star Trek roleplaying community. So any time I get to read an academic book about Trek, I will do so. Late Star Trek is such a book: a work of primary criticism, grounded in reference to primary and secondary sources, that explores the era of “Nu Trek,” starting with the connective tissue of Enterprise and going all the way through the Kelvinverse movies into Discovery, Strange New Worlds, Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy. It’s forthright and honest and insightful, and it’s exactly the kind of analysis I love reading about science fiction. I received an eARC from NetGalley and the University of Minnesota Press in exchange for a review. Adam Kotsko is—and I say this as the utmost compliment—a huge nerd. Like, he spends time in the introduction explaining how he rose to the rank of Commander in r/DaystromInstitute because of how much time he has spent in the trenches there. Respect. It’s not a competition, but because it is relevant I want to highlight how Kotsko has clearly spent more time in the world of tie-in media—especially the novels and comics—than I have. (Though, nary a mention of any of the tie-in video games except for Star Trek: Online. Hath thou no respect for Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen, Adam???) Indeed, one of the tensions Kotsko explores here is how the revival of Star Trek’s Prime timeline beginning with DISCO but felt more deeply with PIC overwrote the “Beta canon” of the novelverse and how the novelverse itself reacted to that by trying to deal with this in-universe (god, I love science fiction writers so much). More broadly, however, Late Star Trek encapsulates, as its subtitle implies, the ways in which the weight of the franchise has changed how people write and produce Trek in this era. Although canon and continuity are one dimension Kotsko analyzes, they aren’t his primary focus. Instead, he examines how cultural shifts—in values but also in more mundane things like the nature of the television industry and capitalism—have placed different constraints on modern Trek producers. While TOS might have suffered from increasingly constrictive budgets and flagging support from its network, it was unburdened by the expectations of fifty years of franchise. In this way, Kotsko argues that what he calls “late Star Trek” can measure its successes and failures not only by how its stories are received by fans (new and old alike) but by how well its multiplicity of series has weathered the ups and downs of a streaming era marked as much by corporate cynicism as by corporate greed. Early on, Kotsko makes an interesting claim that gave me pause (emphasis mine):
At first I was like, “Nah,” but then I pondered, nay, I ruminated, upon this proposition and eventually had to concede Kotsko has a point. As he argues, pretty much every installment of the franchise post-ENT has, in one way or another, foregrounded our twenty-first-century obsession with terrorism. And I think this observation is as fascinating as it is true simply because it’s not one that I have really seen before in my perusal of Trek commentary. Late Star Trek goes on to analyze each aspect of the modern franchise. It begins with a post mortem of the much-panned ENT. Kotsko is more sympathetic to this series than I am—I always have at least once Trek series rewatch on the go, and it has never been ENT! Nevertheless, I see his point. From there, he examines the novelverse that took off during the dark times between ENT and DISCO, and he also devotes a chapter to the Kelvinverse movies. Then he gives DISCO and PIC their own chapters, respectively, before a single chapter looking at the “minor triumphs” of Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds. The book is pretty much up to date on all new Trek stories, though Kotsko notes his coverage of season 5 of DISCO is lighter because the book went to press just as this final season was airing. I’m glad for this, particularly given how the reveal about Crewman Daniels from ENT in the finale of DISCO corroborates Kotsko’s argument that one of DISCO’s primary legacies will be the way it cemented ENT into the Trek canon in a way that ENT itself could not have achieved were it still the final Trek television property. The only thing it really can’t comment on is the critical and commercial failure of Section 31, though given Kotsko’s critique of the over-reliance on this shadowy organization in the book (I concur, btw), I can guess what he might have to say about it. This method of organization works great, and Kotsko’s writing is similarly fluent and easy to follow. Though academic and well-supported by references to various scholars, fan writers, and the primary texts themselves, Late Star Trek reads more like fan commentary than a dense academic text, and that’s all to the good. Basically, if you like reading hot takes on clickbait-heavy pop culture sites, Late Star Trek is exactly that—just much longer and with fewer ads. I was pleased by how much I agreed with Kotsko despite notable points of disagreement too. For example, his critique of DISCO writing itself out of Trek canon (almost) with its constant, insecure need to reinvent itself culminating its flight into the timeline’s far future matches a lot of my feelings about this series. On the other hand, he is far more forgiving of the first season than I am—I famously disowned the show back when it premiered, though my stance softened over the years and culminated in a more philosophical outlook on the series. Similarly, Kotsko echoes some of my feelings about the first season of PIC, and though I did not write about it, I seem to be in the minority of fans who share Kotsko’s view that the third season’s fan service was, shall we say, cringey, and might be one of the weakest Trek seasons of this entire era. All of this is to say, there is plenty in this book to think about, agree with, or disagree with. This is a book written by an avid fan for avid fans. It is a labour of love that pulls no punches when it dissects the quality of various series’ storytelling even as, overall, it clearly stakes a position that the current era of Trek is a good thing. Indeed, as I have said before, it blows my mind we live in a world where there is more new Trek broadcasting these days than at any other point in the franchise’s history. However, too often the criticism of newer Trek has been simplistic: this or that series is garbage; this or that series if for “real fans” versus the “new fans” or “fake fans” or whatever gatekeeping nonsense has seized a small yet vocal minority of the fandom. In reality, criticism needs nuance. No series—not even ENT!—is without its redemptive qualities. Similarly, being a fan of the franchise does not mean one must hold one’s tongue in criticizing any or all of the new series. Late Star Trek boldly goes forward with this mindset, and the result is a rewarding read for any Star Trek fan. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 06, 2025
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Mar 08, 2025
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Mar 23, 2025
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Paperback
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1250276624
| 9781250276629
| 1250276624
| 4.33
| 756
| unknown
| Sep 19, 2023
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really liked it
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This was a tougher read than I expected. I was about to write “not being a sports girlie myself” but stopped because I do play sports now—but I only g
This was a tougher read than I expected. I was about to write “not being a sports girlie myself” but stopped because I do play sports now—but I only got into that last summer, and it’s recreational, co-ed, and very inclusive. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting Fair Play to hit me as hard as it did considering it’s about transgender issues. Katie Barnes covers the debates around the inclusion of trans people in sports with sensitivity and dedication. What I most value about this book is something many other reviewers seem to have disliked: an emphasis on feelings over facts. Barnes is a sports journalist by trade and a former participant in women’s sports. They are also nonbinary. They use all these experiences to shape Fair Play, which ultimately revolves around the question of how to include gender-nonconforming and -expansive athletes in sports segregated by sex/gender. The book starts with a brief history of sex segregation in sports and some of the controversies over inclusion of women in men’s sports, etc., before quickly focusing on the last twenty years and how the question of trans people’s participation has been politicized as trans people ourselves have become more visible. The book is organized like a series of case studies; each chapter covers either a specific athlete who became a flashpoint for controversy or a related topic. At the end, Barnes offers up their own views, as well as an epilogue that gives the most up-to-date status of gender policies at the time the book went to press. Fair Play focuses almost exclusively on American sports and politics, venturing into international territory only insofar as it starts mentioning the Olympics or international sports bodies. Barnes covers South African runner Caster Semenya, for example, as a notable controversy over differences in sex development in athletes. This is an exception in a book that otherwise focuses on high school and college sports. As a Canadian, it mostly got me wondering about trans inclusion policies in my country (I know some premiers have taken up the transphobia from our neighbour to the south and started talking about restrictive policies). Nevertheless, this information is useful given how much influence domestic American policies still have on the global athletic scene. Similarly, it’s important to note that even though this book is less than two years old, parts of it are already out of date. The second Trump administration has, in its first month at the date I am writing this review, already taken a hard aim at transgender participation in society, including sports. Barnes anticipates this in their epilogue, which is literally subtitled, “The March Toward Restriction.” They and trans advocacy organizations knew what was coming even though it wasn’t a forgone conclusion at the time that Trump would be reelected. As it is, most of Fair Play is relevant as an informative chronology and analysis of “how we got to here.” The rawness of connecting this book’s coverage to what is currently in the news is one reason why I found this to be a tougher read than I expected. I mistakenly assumed my privilege as a white, well-educated trans woman living in a tiny corner of northern Ontario would insulate me from feeling some kind of way about the trans kids whose athletic aspirations are being crushed, or the trans athletes who are having to choose between being their authentic selves or staying in the closet to participate in the sport they love. Oops. Guess I am not so hard-hearted after all. And this is why, unlike some reviewers, I am so pleased Barnes chooses to focus on storytelling over statistics. That is to say, we know from extensive research that facts are not as effective at changing people’s minds. You say you want data—you really don’t. As Barnes notes, there is a dearth of data on trans people in sports and how sex-linked hormones like testosterone affect the performance of trans people who are taking hormone therapy. Few people have chosen to do the research; fewer still have received funding; for some reason, there aren’t enough trans athletes to study sometimes (funny how that works, huh?). I saw one reviewer insist transphobes would somehow drop their objections to the inclusion of trans people in women’s sports if only there were more data to back up the idea we aren’t a threat … and I am here to tell you, definitively, that won’t happen. Transphobic people are not transphobic because they lack data. They are transphobic because they don’t see trans people as authentic, and no amount of facts will change that. For the record, I think it’s great that Barnes parlays with the facts as much as possible, if only to belie the moral panic. It is very important to repeat how few openly trans athletes are playing sports in high school and college right now, let alone at a professional level, and how none is dominating their sport in the way transphobes claim. The idea that any sports, including women’s sports, is under threat by the inclusion of trans people is categorically false by any metric. That being said, I deeply believe this is a situation where feelings matter over facts, and to that end I appreciate the tack Fair Play takes. Over and over, Barnes says, “I am going to give you all the details from the beginning.” They cut through the sound bites most of us probably heard about Semenya or Thomas or Yearwood. They relate everything, chronologically, and illuminate their audience about the more obscure collegiate or international rules we might not be aware of if we don’t follow sports. To say this humanizes these athletes is, um, depressing but also very accurate. And that is what we need. The chapter that stuck most with me is Chapter 8: “The Breakup in Women’s Sports,” wherein Barnes discusses women’s sports activists Pat Griffin, Donna Lopiano, Felice Duffy, Doriane Coleman, and Nancy Hogshead-Makar. All these cis women (some queer) meeting to talk about trans participation in sports without trans people in the room, a fact Barnes notes, even as they laud some of these women for their role in blazing a trail for women’s and girls’ sports in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is the fundamental tension at the heart of the debate over trans people in sports: sex segregation in sports is rooted in misogyny, yet simply eliminating it would eliminate opportunities for women and girls, and no one wants that. So these activists are, in some dimensions, doing important work. Yet some of them are also incredibly transphobic. (Two things can be true!) Barnes quotes Griffin, who says, “I think, fundamenally, [Lopiano, Coleman, and Hogshead-Makar] don’t see transgender women as women…. I think they see them as men.” Indeed, not a day after reading that chapter, I saw someone sharing a screenshot from a recent New York Times article wherein Coleman says, of Trump’s newest executive orders, that they are “both wrong on the substance and understandably scary for trans people.” In other words, while Coleman is literally getting what she wants (trans women banned from women’s sports), she worries it’s coming across as mean. Because she wants her bigotry to feel more palatable. I don’t know. Barnes is so much more professional in this book than I think I could be in their shoes. They are trying really hard to extend grace to the Colemans of the world to whom they feel a debt of gratitude for carving out women’s sports. I get it. I want to agree with Barnes that this is a nuanced issue, one where policies need to be flexible yet realistic. I definitely agree with them that neither they nor I have enough expertise to opine on what kinds of hormonal level restrictions (if any) should exist at elite levels. However, over and over, as I read this book, I couldn’t shake the one unmistakable feeling rising within me, which is simply that the majority of people who oppose the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports do so because they see us as men. Full stop. No amount of hormone therapy, of testosterone reduction, of living as our authentic gender for any period of time, will ever change that for them. That is why Fair Play rightly focuses on the personal stories of trans athletes. Because the majority of Americans reading this book are doing so in a climate where they have been misled about the dangers trans people pose to society. They have been conditioned not to see us as human. So as much as I hate it, the stories humanizing us are the way to go right now. Trans people belong in sport. Trans women deserve to participate in women’s sports. The idea of sex-segregated sports deserves reexamination and perhaps revision in a way that still acknowledges the effects of patriarchy on sports participation. At the same time, none of this can happen as long as trans people are forced to fight merely for survival. Fair Play is a comprehensive and careful look at gender policies in sports in the US. Beyond that, however, it touches a nerve—it did for me as a trans woman, but I hope it does so for cis readers too. Barnes reminds us that participation in sport, especially for children, should not be about winning or losing. Sport is a fundamental human experience, and we need to keep it that way. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 10, 2025
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Feb 16, 2025
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Mar 10, 2025
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Hardcover
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ALOK
*
| 0593094654
| 9780593094655
| 0593094654
| 4.48
| 13,074
| Jun 02, 2020
| Jun 02, 2020
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liked it
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I picked this up on a whim at my local indie bookshop. It’s a trim and cute little volume, definitely pocket-sized (and yes, many of my dresses have p
I picked this up on a whim at my local indie bookshop. It’s a trim and cute little volume, definitely pocket-sized (and yes, many of my dresses have pockets). Beyond the Gender Binary is an essay about exactly that: what does it mean to be nonbinary? Furthermore, how can our society itself move beyond the idea of binary gender? Alok Vaid-Menon relates some anecdotes from their own life while passionately breaking down the myths, stereotypes, and common nonstarter arguments against a more expansive and inclusive approach to gender. Many people labour under the misconception that moving our society in a less binary direction means everyone needs to ditch gender and become nonbinary. I say this because I thought that way once, long long ago. I had to take a dreary sociology course in first-year university, and the professor had us read The Left Hand of Darkness and discuss (in an online forum) whether gender was necessary in our society. I passionately argued, as far as I can recall, that eliminating gender was not as desirable as eliminating gender roles and stereotypes. Maybe eighteen-year-old Kara deep down sensed that strong internal gender identity that even then was yearning to tell her she was actually a woman, I don’t know. I just remember bristling at the thought of a blanket agender society. This is not, of course, what Vaid-Menon or any gender activist is arguing! They address this in Beyond the Gender Binary, as does pretty much every nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer person who has a conversation with ignorant schlubs like myself. Rather, Vaid-Menon points out how dismantling the gender binary involves challenging our assumptions about what gender means and how we have baked it into everything from conversation to cooking to clothes. At sixty-five A5-size pages, this essay is not a long or difficult read. It’s not really meant for trans people or even cis people who are relatively aware of the current state of this discourse. The target audience is likely cis people who are curious but who have also heard a lot of misinformation, or who want to arm themselves with a little more knowledge. Vaid-Menon doesn’t go into detail while debunking any of these myths, however, so if you are looking for facts, statistics, or a more thorough explanation, you’ll want to read further. Ultimately, this is the kind of essay that probably works better as a digital artifact to be shared in inboxes and on feeds. Nevertheless, the print edition is still cute, and the words are still full of conviction and power. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 08, 2025
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Feb 08, 2025
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Mar 02, 2025
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Paperback
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0593230388
| 9780593230381
| 0593230388
| 4.50
| 40,818
| Oct 01, 2024
| Oct 01, 2024
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it was amazing
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Some books are plodding and predictable (even if they are ultimately rewarding). Others are byzantine and meandering (even if they are ultimately rewa
Some books are plodding and predictable (even if they are ultimately rewarding). Others are byzantine and meandering (even if they are ultimately rewarding). The Message is a secret, third type: it is a careful bundle of missives about the struggle for liberation. Writing about events and stories across space and time, Ta-Nehisi Coates unifies these long essays under the guise of talking to his workshop students about writing. The title belies its simplicity by taking on so many meanings. First, Coates visits Dakar, Senegal, and ruminates on being an African American visiting Africa. What does it mean to be Black in a country populated mostly by Black people? I am reminded of Esi Edugyan’s similar reflections in Out of the Sun . This theme, of the way place can reinforce how much race is just a social construct, continues throughout The Message. Coates seeks to understand how even though different communities around the world experience oppression in slightly different ways, we are all connected; the fight is one. This first essay gives way to a longer, more drawn out meditation on resistance in the United States. Located temporally in 2020, that fateful summer of protests triggered by George Floyd’s murder, this essay is spiritually connected to the previous one. What I learned here—what I have been learning, the more I read Black authors like Coates and Lorde and Oluo and others—is how deeply the tradition of African American scholarship goes on the subjects of freedom and struggle. It’s very easy for those of us who are not Black and (in my case) not American to view these subjects in facile ways, to understand the history of enslavement in the Americas as a simplistic story of good people and bad people, White people vs Black people, and so on. Coates’s discussion is a rich one, but he built it on the shoulders of the giants who came before him. There is so much in this essay that I recognized—either as something I related to, or as something familiar to me from my different positionality. For an example of the latter: Coates mentions being a lacklustre student when he was younger, for school didn’t challenge him, yet this was viewed as defiance and noncompliance by his teacher. As a white educator, I am complicit in a similarly racist system here in Canada, where Black students are disproportionately disciplined or viewed as more aggressive than their peers. From here, Coates moves on to discussing the rise in book bans, censorship, and other ills insidiously making their way through classrooms and legislatures in the United States (as well as Canada), including his own personal connection thereto. He deftly weaves in and out of his personal narrative while still offering a wider perspective. At one point, he says:
Mmm. Yes. As an English teacher, as a book reviewer, as a media criticism podcaster … yes, I feel this so hard! I teach English to adults seeking their high school diploma; most are not “readers” in the classical tradition I have grown into. They want a diploma and the skills needed for college courses or the workplace. Yet I never stop trying to connect our English lessons to social justice, to history, to geography. I never stop sneaking in personal essays by marginalized voices or history lessons in the guise of “analyzing a text.” I say sneak, yet I am also explicit with them: I teach about storytelling, and why it is important beyond entertainment. For, as Coates says above, the stories we tell are the constraints we create for the society we can imagine. The next essay underscores this vividly when Coates describes his visit to Palestine and Israel—mere months before the October 7 Hamas attack that initiated Israel’s most recent episode of genocide against Palestinians. While it is important, as Coates notes, that we listen to Palestinian voices on Palestine, his voice here serves an important role as interlocutor and interloper. In the US, Coates is marginalized: a Black man in white supremacist society. In Israel and Palestine, his status is more conditional. Depending on how he is read, which gate he goes through, whom he’s with, he might first be pegged as Muslim, or he might be read as an American. One interpretation gives him far more status than the other. This essay is Coates discovering and attempting to come to terms with America’s inextricable complicity in Israel’s settler colonialism—and by extension, his own complicity. He connects this to the absence of Palestinian voices from the news rooms and journalism circuits where he himself has often been the lone Black journalist. Throughout, Coates writes with an enviable and exquisite command of language. His diction is delectable; his sentence structure second to none. Reading The Message is like floating along a river that is provoking you into deep thought. Whether or not you are well versed in the issues Coates covers here, you owe it to yourself to read this book, for it is simply beautifully written. The Message challenges, documents, describes, decries, and clarifies. It is meditation, mea culpa, and even manifesto. It is a book unfortunately appropriate and sorely needed in the current times, with a second Trump presidency looming and the genocide in Palestine continuing seemingly unabated. With such darkness, hope sometimes feels fleeting. What can I do? What can I do? It seems trite to say that reading is resistance, but reading The Message, with its intention to spur his fellow writers into action, certainly feels like resistance. I guess what matters, of course, is where our reading and our writing goes from here, and the possible politics our art creates. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 15, 2024
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Dec 21, 2024
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Dec 28, 2024
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Hardcover
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0374610320
| 9780374610326
| 0374610320
| 4.20
| 35,506
| Sep 12, 2023
| Sep 12, 2023
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liked it
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Wait, this book isn’t by Naomi Wolf? Why did I even bother … jk. Although, ironically, I haven’t read anything by Naomi Klein previously, and I’ve rea
Wait, this book isn’t by Naomi Wolf? Why did I even bother … jk. Although, ironically, I haven’t read anything by Naomi Klein previously, and I’ve read two books by Naomi Wolf (more on that in a bit). I don’t think I personally have conflated the two Naomis myself, but I’m sure that’s just the lack of opportunity. Doppelganger intrigued me because I wanted to hear about Klein’s deep dive into the world in which Wolf has immersed herself and what lessons that holds for the fragile state of our democracies. Though this book is built on premise of people mistaking the two Naomis to a ridiculous degree online, Klein makes it clear that this book isn’t so much about Wolf as it is about the crowd she hangs out with these days. Klein is interested in this “mirror world,” as she calls it, and how Wolf went from third-wave feminist darling to conspiracy-theory monger and general alt-right poster woman. So she listens to Steve Bannon’s podcast, plumbs the depth of Wolf’s Twitter, and generally examines the ways in which the alt right and adjacent movements use, manipulate, and take advantage of media (both traditional and social) to sway people to their cause. Because we are living in a unique tipping point in history. Mass literacy battles with mass media illiteracy. Even critical thinking doesn’t exempt one from falling prey to misinformation, of course. One of Klein’s key points is that Wolf is a smart person and a deep thinker—many prominent people in these movements are, and it would be a mistake to underestimate them or label anyone associated with them as less intelligent. Rather, Klein wants to figure out what makes the mirror world so enticing. Doppelganger is one of an emerging genre of pop culture political books looking at the effect of the internet age on politics and society. Some of Klein’s most important takeaways come from reflection on how the internet encourages us to become doppelgangers of ourselves (in how we perform ourselves online). As someone who “grew up” on the internet—on Neopets and Geocities and message boards and live chatrooms and whatnot—I feel this. To this day, I might spend more time on any given day talking to people behind my “tachyondecay” username and an avatar than my real name and face. On an individual basis that’s fine. But when you scale this up to a societal level, Klein points out, cracks appear that leave us vulnerable to the misinformation that fuels conspiracy and polarization. In this way, Klein scatters references to different forms of doppelganger throughout the book. She did a deep dive into doppelgangers in literature and film (she talks a lot about Philip Roth, shrug). I watched Dual because she mentions it here and it has Karen Gillan in it (it’s weird and not at all satisfying, IMO). Though there’s something amusing imagining Klein obsessively consuming all of these books and movies for research purposes, all in all I don’t know that she successfully connects her doppelganger discussion to her broader points about the mirror world. I understand that she’s trying to say Wolf is more a doppelganger of herself than she is of Klein, that Wolf’s trip through the looking glass has resulted in that kind of self-doppelganging. But it feels like a slightly contrived twist. As far as Wolf herself goes, well … I read The Beauty Myth when I was 22, young, naïve (though I am pleasantly surprised to find I didn’t go gaga over it and therefore can honestly say I had my own reservations). Then five years later I read Vagina and criticized it for much the same reasons Klein criticizes Wolf: mistaking anecdotal evidence for science, confirmation bias, etc. Both of these reviews are real trips to read now, given that I was writing them back when I thought I was a cisgender man (oops). But I stand by my work. I respect Klein taking the high road and refusing to dangle Wolf in front of us like a cautionary tale. Still … she is. Like Klein, I can’t speculate about the precise factors that galvanized Wolf’s slide towards authoritarian militancy and conspiracy theories—but I can watch it, judge it, and remind myself that we are all vulnerable here. That’s what Klein realizes as she canvasses for her husband in the Canadian federal election and visits with people who should be sympathetic to the NDP but are raving anti-vaxxers instead. Doppelganger offers up some cogent and prescient (in the sense that even for a relatively recent book, it feels like Klein anticipated some of what has happened since it was published) analysis of the cracks in our media world. It stumbles a bit as Klein dances around her various topics of doppelgangers, propaganda, etc., and as a result it feels a little longer and more repetitive than it needs to be. This is a book that I would recommend if, like me, you are a sucker for discussions of media literacy, awareness of conspiracy theories, and how we can strengthen our democracy. It has enough substance to be worth the read—yet having read it, I don’t feel like I particularly learned much I didn’t already know. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 09, 2024
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Jul 15, 2024
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Aug 06, 2024
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Hardcover
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125027141X
| 9781250271419
| 125027141X
| 4.04
| 23,314
| Sep 13, 2018
| Mar 08, 2022
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it was ok
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Women are some kind of magic, to quote amanda lovelace, so it’s no wonder the patriarchy thinks we’re witches. The metaphor (and, for parts of history
Women are some kind of magic, to quote amanda lovelace, so it’s no wonder the patriarchy thinks we’re witches. The metaphor (and, for parts of history, literal belief) of woman-as-witch is a potent one. In Defense of Witches seeks to connect contemporary feminist struggles with the legacy of the witch hunts and trials that ran through Europe and America. Mona Chollet, translated here by Sophie R. Lewis, looks at a number of themes, like beauty standards, or the decision whether or not to have kids. I’m not sure how much I learned from this book, but it has some good synthesis of second- and third-wave feminism and presents a more European perspective than I’m used to. The chapters are long: in addition to the introduction, there are only four: “A Life of One’s Own,” “Wanting Sterility,” “The Dizzy Heights,” and “Turning the World Upside Down.” Averaging fifty pages, each chapter packs quite the punch. Chollet begins by examining the desire for independence beyond the home. From there, she talks about the pressure to procreate, followed by the idea that women have an expiration date, that after a certain age we just can’t be successful or desired anymore. The book finishes on an optimistic note, referring to progress Chollet sees through movements like #MeToo, and a reminder that we can take control of our bodies without being essentialist about gender. If I am disappointed in In Defense of Witches, it’s only because I was expecting more … witches? Like I kind of thought this book was about witch hunts and trials. Chollet really only references these in passing, however. There are a few juicy quotes from primary sources and researchers’ materials. But mainly she’s using the idea of women as witches as a lens to examine the tension between feminist writings of the twentieth century and broader society’s pushback. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but the way the book’s title, subtitle, and design lean so heavily into it, I feel like I’m sensible for expecting there to be more of a connection. As it is, I really enjoyed how many French writers and thinkers Chollet mentions and quotes. My feminist reading (most of my reading, let’s be real) is in a bubble of American, British, and occasionally Canadian authors. I don’t recognize a lot of the names Chollet drops—and that’s a good thing. I commented to a close friend of mine who is French that I felt like I was getting a window into what it’s like to come up into feminism in France. On top of this, of course, Chollet’s view itself is informed by French culture and standards—as evidenced by the very casual way in which she discusses wanting to have a lot of lovers, lol, and takes shots at American culture for being far less tolerant of this attitude among women. Chollet’s attitudes and arguments are firmly rooted in segments of second-wave feminism; indeed, In Defense of Witches can in many ways be viewed as a love letter to Gloria Steinem, whom Chollet quotes and praises interminably. On one hand, I appreciate this because my view of second-wave feminism is a little jaded and has been coloured by its appropriation by TERFs. On the other hand, although Chollet’s analysis makes offhand noises towards inclusion of queer and trans identities, it stops short of a full-throated attempt to integrate trans and nonbinary people. So in this respect, I ran up against the limits of this book’s analysis fairly quickly: it pulls together some interesting ideas, but it also doesn’t bring up anything all that new or radical. Probably the most enduring theme here is rationality versus irrationality and the way the former is inevitably masculine-coded, the latter, feminine-coded. Chollet argues that irrationality and emotionality are not the same. Patriarchy’s attempts to restrict women’s power and influence are rooted, in part, she maintains, because male-dominated institutions feared the power, creativity, and efficiency of women’s emotions. Hence the attempts to paint us as “hysterical.” Chollet makes the case that emotionality, while not an essentialist quality and something that many men can possess as well, is key to a more compassionate and just future in our society—something with which I am sympathetic. If there has been any theme to my overall arc, it has been moving away from the highly rational, academic mindset I cultivated in high school towards a mindset that embraces the irrational when needed (is it any wonder I found my true gender along the way?). In Defense of Witches is an all right book, and for others, could very well be revelatory. For me it was a fine way to pass the time, and it exposed me to writers and ideas that I might not have otherwise heard on this side of the pond. However, it wasn’t quite the book I was looking for, and in some respects, it doesn’t go as far as I wanted it to. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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Hardcover
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0062666975
| 9780062666970
| 0062666975
| 4.23
| 6,671
| Jan 21, 2020
| Jan 07, 2020
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really liked it
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We have all heard the tired refrain “boys will be boys.” Challenging this adage has been one of the main undertakings of feminism in the past half-cen
We have all heard the tired refrain “boys will be boys.” Challenging this adage has been one of the main undertakings of feminism in the past half-century. Yet how successful have we been in dismantling rape culture and teaching consent? More broadly, what messages do boys and young men receive about sex and sexuality, and how is that influencing their behaviour as they navigate their first intimate relationships? In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein explores these touchy subjects by going to the source: interviewing young men in high school and college. This 2020 book is a follow-up to Orenstein’s 2011 Girls & Sex, which I haven’t read. I might go back and read it someday. I chose to read Boys & Sex because I feel like I have a strong grasp on how girls and women are told to deal with sex. Despite living the first thirty years of my life as a man (I realized I am trans in 2020), I don’t have any clear idea of what is expected of men when it comes to sex. Reading this book was a revelation in the sense that it confirmed this feeling: none of the experiences described in this book remotely resemble anything I thought, felt, or did during my adolescence or young adulthood. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to being trans and how much to attribute to being ace, yet here we are. What an affirming read in that sense. Orenstein covers a lot of broad themes chapter by chapter. Some of these include porn, hookup culture, queer men, race, consent, compulsory sexuality, toxic masculinity, and how to talk to our boys. She editorializes a lot, interjecting with her own opinions and estimations of her interview subjects. I think this is a good thing; it is a poor journalist who uncritically reports on what her sources say without offering context, correction, or in some cases, rebuttal. At the same time, Orenstein does her best to “get out of the way” of her subjects, seeking not to tell their stories for them but instead share their unique perspectives. She has a whole chapter on queer and trans men, noting in her introduction that she regrets Girls & Sex overlooks trans women. I found this chapter in particular super interesting. Although the experiences of trans women and trans men are often thought of as inverses, they are not symmetrical. So it wasn’t so much that I was like, “Oooh, this person is ‘going the other way’” as I was fascinated by the idea of a person who had the experience of compulsory sexuality from a young woman’s perspective before ultimately transitioning and looking at it as a man. In contrast, as I said above, I feel like I noped out of that from the start, so I’m tabula rasa in that regard. The same was true of the chapter on hookup culture. As Orenstein shares subjects’ stories of feeling the intense pressure to hook up and how many of them regret it as they have aged or are glad they’ve moved away from such behaviour, all I could think was, “That was not me.” Not in a superior kind of way, just a bemused, “Was this happening all around me in high school?” (It was!) and “Is this what I was ‘missing’ in university?” In this respect, Boys & Sex is enlightening for me because I never talked to my peers about this stuff back when we all thought I was a boy. Orenstein reminds us that boys and men are, contrary to stereotypes, incredibly thoughtful when it comes to these subjects. They’re just often discouraged from talking about it. The book finishes with an intense chapter around how to have difficult conversations. Orenstein shares the story of a young man who eventually realizes that he was the perpetrator of assault on a woman he hooked up with in college. At the time, he didn’t see it that way and saw himself as a “good man” who respected women and looked for consent—but as he started to understand how she remembered that night, he was ashamed. Orenstein shares how he and the woman have undergone a kind of restorative justice process. It’s a fascinating story because it speaks to something I think we often overlook. Lots of people say, “Men are trash,” and then the defenders of our young men say, “Hashtag not all men.” Which is true! But if that is where we stop, without doing anything about the men and boys inculcated into rape culture, then we aren’t changing anything. Orenstein points out that our current system is raising really flawed (and fucked up) boys and men, and they need compassion and grace as we deprogram the toxic parts of their masculinity. That doesn’t mean unconditional forgiveness or freedom from consequences—but it has to mean a more nuanced conversation. Boys & Sex is a valuable contribution to that social conversation. It’s thorough yet not too long. It does its best to be intersectional—I didn’t talk too much about it, but I really liked the chapter on race—I think the one lens I really noticed was missing was disability. Obviously, Orenstein’s is not the last word on this subject. This is one important contribution among many others that have come before or since. But if, like me, you feel particularly out of the loop when it comes to how boys and men in Canada and the US are raised to think about and act on their sexuality, this book will open your eyes. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 03, 2024
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Jun 09, 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Hardcover
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0807006475
| 9780807006474
| 0807006475
| 4.32
| 11,666
| Jan 10, 2023
| Jan 10, 2023
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really liked it
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Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose
Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon debunks twenty prevalent anti-fatness myths. Anti-fat bias is consistently the only form of discrimination that has increased over the past decades (other types have decreased or stayed roughly the same), and sometimes it is so pervasive that we don’t even realize we are engaging in it. Gordon, a white fat woman and cohost of the podcast Maintenance Phase, organizes her myth-busting into four parts: “Being Fat Is a Choice,” “But What About Your Health?,” “Fat Acceptance Glorifies Obesity,” and “Fat People Should….” She makes it clear that this book is an introductory guide aimed at thin readers like myself and designed to get us thinking about our implicit biases and the systemic biases of society. Most chapters include calls to action at the end: concrete steps someone can take to challenge the discrimination described in that chapter. Some of these myths I had already heard debunked, many from a longread written by Michael Hobbes, Gordon’s podcast cohost, in The Huffington Post called “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.”. I already knew that being fat is not a choice, that exercise is not usually an effective way to lose weight, that there are many factors—some genetic or epigenetic—that contribute to weight gain. I knew the BMI is racist and anti-fat bullshit. Nevertheless, it was good to refresh myself and to hear about more of the science (or questionable science, in the case of studies that supposedly validate anti-fatness). I’ve long wondered how to take action against anti-fatness with what power I have as a thin person and an educator. Once upon a time, a student of mine chose to write a research essay all about the obesity epidemic. She tried to argue that fat acceptance is unhealthy. I remember being so uncomfortable reading it, but I also wasn’t sure how to challenge the student effectively. How do I speak up on an issue with which I have so little experience? Then again, I challenge students who inadvertently share racist myths all the time—why should this be different? So reading “You Just Need to Lose Weight” is important to me professionally as well as personally. On a personal note, there are connections I made while reading between Gordon’s discussion of body acceptance and my own journey in my thirties with transition. Even as my dysphoria decreases, I find myself surprisingly vulnerable to the anti-fat messages our society targets all women with. I find myself far more concerned about, obsessing over, my weight and my body shape than I did pre-transition. I won’t equate this to the struggles of fat people (especially fat trans women), for that would put me into Myth Nineteen territory—but I wanted to share for a moment the connections I was making to my own experiences. What I took from this was how, like any liberation in our society, challenging anti-fatness “lifts all boats.” It helps thin people as well as fat people—and I am not saying that’s why we should do it; obviously we should challenge anti-fatness simply because it’s the right thing to do. But I think it is important to note that anti-fatness shares its roots with anti-transness, anti-Blackness, etc.: white supremacist and patriarchal desires to control people’s bodies, particularly the bodies of people who aren’t white men. For that reason, I’m pleased that Gordon’s thesis trends more towards the systemic rather than the individual. Her points at the end of each chapter are individual actions (because that’s all we can do as individual readers). Yet her aims are social and systemic. This isn’t just about being “nicer” to fat people or more tolerant. This is about moving the fucking needle, about dismantling the systems that make it hard and expensive for fat people to fly or find clothing, the medical biases that prevent fat people from receiving dignified care. This slim volume packs more of a punch than you would expect, and I highly recommend every thin person reads it. I love how careful and inclusive it is when talking about gender, race, and disability. I love how focused and organized it is. I love how Gordon doesn’t coddle the reader, challenging us while simultaneously—I hope—motivating us to do better. This is a book that should make a difference. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 27, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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Paperback
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052551144X
| 9780525511441
| 052551144X
| 4.13
| 644
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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liked it
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Amid the calumnious pushback in the United States against so-called “critical race theory” (it’s not) in schools remains the single truth: you don’t l
Amid the calumnious pushback in the United States against so-called “critical race theory” (it’s not) in schools remains the single truth: you don’t learn the true history of the US in school. The same goes for Canada, where we learn about the enslavement of African people in the US, but we don’t learn about slavery in Canada or our own history of anti-Black racism following abolition. So I do my best to read and learn, especially from Black women. In You Get What You Pay For, Morgan Parker engages with the legacy of slavery and nearly four centuries of anti-Blackness on this continent. Her tone is brutally forthright, holding nothing back as she looks at how the shape of American society has influenced her life. In an era that has too long billed itself post-racial or colour-blind, Parker insists that, yes, you need to see her race in order to see the arc of her life so far. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Penguin Random House in exchange for a review. This is an essay collection loosely masquerading as memoir and following a rough chronology of Parker’s life. She returns to a few regular motifs throughout: her next therapist, the slave ship as a metaphor for living under white supremacy in the US, the impossibility of survival for so many Black people as a result of police brutality. Many of the essays engage with seminal moments of the American zeitgeist in the past couple decades: the ascension of Serena and Venus Williams, Ye’s infamous remark about George W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the trial of Bill Cosby. Parker acknowledges the complexity of her subject while writing with an appealing simplicity. Some of her discussions of her therapists reminded me of It’s Always Been Ours , by Jessica Wilson. Both books were illuminating. We white women often fail to consider race as a factor in our professional interactions, whether it’s therapy, treatment for eating disorders, or in my case, teaching. Which is not to say that race is the only factor in finding a good fit with a professional. But as Parker makes clear in this book, it wasn’t until she found a Black female therapist that she was finally able to connect in a way that was authentic and useful for her. Her white therapists prior lacked the experience and ancestors required to see all of Parker. That’s what we are talking about here. Seeing. Seeing the weight of intergenerational trauma. Seeing resilience not as a buzzword (“oh, you are so strong”) but as a rebellion against being put into a box. Seeing and understanding that racism isn’t simply, “Oh, people are mean to you because of your skin colour?”—racism is a kaleoidoscope of Rubik’s cubes of dominoes that fall every single day. It’s a behemoth, visible and invisible at the same time. You Get What You Pay For is dolorous at times. It lacks the rah-rah inspirational tone that we have come to demand from racialized writers. This is my first time reading anything by Parker that I can recall, so my point of comparison is to Roxane Gay, who is likewise unapologetic in her take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards her opinions. This is something we unthinkingly praise in white writers but often see as too adversarial or cynical in Black writers. While Parker has obviously met with a fair amount of success, she opens up and discusses how that hasn’t always translated into better mental health. This reminds me of Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey’s Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”. Before I read that article, I probably would have labelled Parker’s description of her experiences as imposter syndrome. Now I know better. Now I know that the driving force is systemic, misogynoir. At the same time, I think it’s important to emphasize that this collection is not hopeless. It’s just honest. You won’t exit it with a warm, fuzzy feeling, and you aren’t meant to. Now, that might not be what you want on your reading schedule right now—and I don’t blame you; I won’t pretend that I revelled in reading this. At the same time, I did fly through it, for as bleak as this book feels sometimes, Parker’s writing is also compelling. Intergenerational trauma is no joke. White supremacy is alive and well in the US, as well as here in Canada. You Get What You Pay For brings a powerful voice to the conversation. Above all else, Parker insists that survival is not enough. She wants her life to be hers, as she should. Freedom on paper is not freedom in reality. Not yet. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 12, 2024
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Mar 14, 2024
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Mar 29, 2024
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Hardcover
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1942254199
| 9781942254195
| 1942254199
| 4.36
| 193
| unknown
| May 20, 2023
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liked it
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When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It
When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It shouldn’t be surprising I have spent a great deal of time in recent years thinking about this, yet I don’t know that I am any closer to an answer. So I was very intrigued by Gender Without Identity, by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. This discussion of gender formation from a psychoanalytical perspective, along with thoughts on practical application to the field of analysis, seeks to challenge a lot of ideas about what’s “normal” for gender. I received a review copy. I went into this book hoping to be challenged. It has been almost four years now since I transitioned. Much of that time has been spent rebuilding my identity around my new understanding of my gender. It isn’t easy. I know, and am confirmed in this knowledge with each passing day, that I am much, much happier living as a woman in this world (despite all the challenges attendant in our misogynistic, patriarchal, transphobic society). Transition has not only been a joyful experience for me; it has provided me with perspective and courage to grow in ways beyond or in addition to gender. At the same time, four years in, I’m not sure I have any better grasp on what gender actually means to me. Am I a woman because the label of “woman” enables me to feel more comfortable expressing myself in the ways I want to express myself? Am I a woman because there is, deep down within me, something intrinsically and ineffably feminine? I just don’t know. Gender Without Identity takes the perhaps unsettling position that this uncertainty is irrelevant, because gender itself is process rather than permanence. Key to this book is Saketopoulou and Pellegrini approach to gender, which rejects what they call “core gender identity” in favour of
They are quick to establish, however, that they are not seeking to invalidate how queer and trans people express the “story of their own origin” even if it includes “born this way” or other such core narratives. Rather, their approach to gender without identity is one of psychoanalytical praxis: it is most useful, they argue, for analysts to look at gender in this way, whether the subject they are working with identifies as cis or trans. Reading this made me think of Julia Serano and her theory of intrinsic inclination as outlined in Whipping Girl . Serano, a biologist, was unsatisfied with the idea that trans people’s identities are purely social construct yet also thought that locating transness within a purely biological cause was insufficient as well. At first glance, one might think this is incompatible with Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s conception of gender as experience rather than identity. I’m not so sure. I think that both interpretations have value. Certainly, I recognize now in hindsight that I have always had inclinations towards the feminine long before I understood that being transgender was an option for how to label myself. On the other hand, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s framework helps elucidate why so many trans people, myself included, only come to realize ourselves later in life. It isn’t just that I didn’t know that being trans was an option; additionally, I hadn’t yet reached a point where I was ready to improvise in that way. So I appreciate that this book did indeed challenge me to think carefully about what I even mean when I say “gender.” I also appreciate Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s unequivocal affirmation of the validity of trans and nonbinary identities:
I am not at all familiar with psychoanalysis and am perhaps wary of it (or maybe just wary of Freud, let’s be honest). My experiences with psychotherapy have been positive. Nevertheless, I know I am an outlier among trans people in that regard, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that psychoanalysis as a field needs to grow. Hopefully books like Gender Without Identity have the desired effect in that regard. For those of us outside the field, this book can still be useful (as my earlier musings demonstrate). However, be forewarned that the writing is clinical, full of jargon and vocabulary that, quite honestly, challenged even me. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are not writing for a general audience—which is fine, not a criticism of the book but definitely a caution for the general reader. I won’t pretend I understood fully everything that they discuss in the book. But I did enjoy this glimpse into how analysts and therapists approach these concepts, as well as the challenges of dragging the field kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. So from this position, I found Gender Without Identity to be what I expected: challenging, occasionally inscrutable, yet altogether quite clever and thought-provoking. While I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to just anyone, for someone who is curious about the intersections of psychology and gender, I think this is an important and powerful read. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 05, 2024
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Jan 14, 2024
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Jan 29, 2024
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Paperback
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0306827697
| 9780306827693
| 0306827697
| 4.47
| 231
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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really liked it
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Bodies are complicated. In addition to the indignity of merely having one, the way it constantly needs maintenance and has such a limited warranty, bo
Bodies are complicated. In addition to the indignity of merely having one, the way it constantly needs maintenance and has such a limited warranty, bodies are one of the primary ways we interact with our world. And our world is racist. It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies is Jessica Wilson’s attempt to sort through how anti-Black racism permeates diet culture and eating-disorder treatment when it comes to Black women. I found it super insightful and easy to read; Wilson is making a valuable contribution to what should be a much larger conversation. I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for a review. First, my positionality in the conversation on body image, body liberation, and most importantly, race and racism. I’m a white woman, and I am tall and thin. I have the economic purchasing power to ensure I can buy the Healthy foods and products we’re supposed to buy, and I have the privilege of looking such that when I choose to buy junk food, people don’t roll their eyes or mutter under their breath as I do so. My upbringing, education, and access to opportunities and healthcare—none of these things have been adversely impacted by racism; if anything, I am the beneficiary of white supremacy in our society. My identity as a transgender woman complicates this story of privilege. As Wilson herself notes in this book, queer bodies also get policed. I have a complicated relationship with my body and how I am read (or not read) as conforming to feminine beauty standards. But mine is a white queer body, not a Black queer body; I don’t intend to equate my struggles with body image to the struggles faced by Black women and people of marginalized gender experiences. As I hope I made clear in my introduction, I loved this book. However, I’m also not the best qualified to critique it—Wilson explicitly states in her introduction that this book is intended for Black women. So I just want to foreground the voices of some Black reviewers: Christina, Sarah, and Nariah on Goodreads. As I discuss my impressions of this book, keep in mind that my opinion and perspective aren’t as attuned to what Wilson is trying to accomplish as those of her target audience. When I started reading It’s Always Been Ours, I was expecting a book that discussed medical anti-Black racism and threw lots of facts about Black women’s bodies at me. I thought we would get a lot of history of anti-fatness and wellness culture. Indeed, these elements run through the book. However, Wilson more explicitly and emphatically grounds her narrative in discussions of white supremacy and the need to dismantle it. In other words, this book is actually very aligned with a lot of the antiracist reading I’ve been doing, a perfect addition to that shelf, if you will. Wilson is critical of any analysis of eating disorders and diet culture that acknowledges racism’s role in these issues as only one of many factors. She observes,
This hit me because I am absolutely guilty of minimizing racism in this way. Look, language is complicated. The terms we use to describe the struggle are always evolving. Sometimes—especially, I think, those of us who are more verbose—we trip ourselves up in our desire to be as expansive in our terms as we can be. When that happens, we actually end up erasing important differences (a good example of this is the tendency to lump together very disparate experiences under the umbrella label of “BIPOC”). So I appreciated Wilson’s adamant stance that we treat racism as baked in to diet culture. In other words, there should be no conversation about Black women’s bodies that does not explicitly centre the role of white supremacy in creating the standards for those bodies. This thesis might seem obvious. Yet Wilson shares many stories from her experience as an eating-disorder specialist that belies this. Most of her patients come to her seeking quick fixes, reassurance, granular plans to adjust their eating habits to help them feel better about their bodies. They resist doing the work she asks them to do to dig deeper. Similarly, her colleagues (particularly her white colleagues) resist her attempt to discuss diet culture and eating disorders in this way. In other words, there is a deep, structural desire to maintain the status quo. Although Wilson’s intimate narrative positions her as the brave rebel and maverick in this scenario, she undercuts self-aggrandizement by sharing examples of her own development along this axis. She critiques her performance in her first two years as a dietitian, recapitulating this at the end of the book by sharing how a longtime client of hers noted that, years ago, her advice would have been dramatically different. In this way, Wilson reminds us that no one comes to antiracism work already knowing all the answers. Doesn’t matter how you are racialized. We all internalize white supremacist ideals as we grow up, and it takes work to unlearn that (that is exactly what getting “woke” meant, after all, before the right decided to appropriate and distort the term). Wilson’s very personal and careful anecdotes of her experiences both as a practitioner and a Black woman are the heart of this book. To others in positions of power (and I count myself as one of these in my role as an educator), she is saying that every day is another opportunity for you to do better. To the Black women reading this book, she concludes on a note of celebrating Black joy. She wants Black women to know that their bodies—whatever their shape or size—are not a problem. On that note, however, I was also happy to read such a deep and incisive critique of the body positivity/fat liberation movements. I have heard a little bit about this here and there, particularly how it intersects with Instagram. Basically, there is a fine line between advocating for a positive view of one’s body, especially when one is fat, versus enforcing a kind of toxic positivity that can backfire. Wilson draws on the experiences of activists in this space. While none of what she has to say in these chapters strikes me as particularly new, it’s all a very useful summary of these issues. Again, I’m a very thin woman. I won’t pretend I don’t have body image issues or a complicated relationship with food. But I can generally find clothes that fit me, and people don’t look askance when I wolf down a cheeseburger. It’s Always Been Ours establishes how, for Black women of any size and shape, food is just another item on the list of mental gymnastics they complete each day. Hair too kinky? Eating too much or too little? Clothing too tight or too loose? When you add anti-Black racism on top of misogyny, you get misogynoir, as Moya Bailey coined, and it’s a hell of a thing. Speaking of new vocabulary, this book introduced me to the term food apartheid. This term complements and builds on the idea of a food desert (which I was already aware of); as Wilson explains, it clarifies that such areas are not naturally occurring but rather deliberately constructed as a result of racism. Neat! (The learning, not the racism.) It’s Always Been Ours is moving, well organized, funny, and helpful. This is a book about racism. Its language is more accessible than that of an academic press book, its stories more personal. But it is a book about how our society polices Black women and what Wilson thinks we should do about it (hint: resist). She challenges us to do better instead of simply going along with the narrative of the status quo because it is easier and lets us stay comfortable in the power we have. I’m glad I picked this one up! Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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Jul 26, 2023
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Hardcover
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1479823961
| 9781479823963
| 1479823961
| 4.64
| 11
| unknown
| Nov 22, 2022
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really liked it
|
Thunder Bay is not the most diverse place, demographically, in Canada, but that has been changing. For various reasons, more immigrants have been arri
Thunder Bay is not the most diverse place, demographically, in Canada, but that has been changing. For various reasons, more immigrants have been arriving here in recent years from a wider array of countries. This includes many Muslim immigrants, as well as people from MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) countries. Not only do these newcomers often face challenges with language, but my city can be a racist place. So I was intrigued by Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion because I hoped that I could learn more about the systemic anti-Muslim racism in our society. As is often the case, this book primarily talks about the United States yet the lessons are applicable to Canada as well. Evelyn Alsultany speaks from a potent combination of lived experience and scholarly knowledge. I received this book for free in exchange for a review. This is an exquisitely organized book. The introduction and epilogue are excellent end caps, wherein Alsultany lays out her thesis about how Muslim inclusion primarily works through a kind of neoliberal crisis diversity. Each of the five main chapters explores how this crisis diversity (dys)functions. Chapter 1 discusses stereotypes in entertainment; Chapter 2 is about the limits of increasing representation in industries like Hollywood or even politics. Chapter 3 introduces the idea of racial gaslighting, i.e., that how authorities and media downplay crimes against Muslim people (and other marginalized people) when classifying them as hate crimes is, Alsultany argues, important. Chapter 4 looks at examples of what we often call cancel culture: the purging of prominent individuals after they do or say something so racist that their sponsoring organizations have no choice but to distance themselves. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at the issues with diversity and inclusion on college campuses and similar places. Throughout, Alsultany establishes a firm line when it comes to not letting institutions off the hook. At the same time, I really appreciated her ability to empathize with people’s ignorance and prejudice. I am definitely biased, but I think she portrays other perspectives fairly and with nuance. This is particularly true whenever she discusses anti-Palestinian discrimination: she is unapologetic in her analysis of Israel as an apartheid state and condemnation of how Zionist groups weaponize and distort the definition of antisemitism; however, she also recognizes that Muslims and Jews both face a lot of discrimination. Indeed, a great deal of her discussion in Chapter 5 relates to how systems try to divide and conquer, pitting different minority groups against one another. I really appreciated the wealth of examples and analysis that Alsultany brings to each chapter. She looks at specific TV shows, such as All-American Muslim and Shahs of Sunset. She engages with specific scholarship, citing her own contributions to research (like the Obeidi-Alsultany Test) as well as those of scholars whose names I recognized and many I did not. This book is a great entry point into the wider literature around anti-Muslim racism (Alsultany explains in her introduction why she prefers this term to the more common Islamophobia, a distinction I found very interesting!). The nuance I mentioned earlier is also present in how Alsultany discusses improvements we have seen so far. Notably, her analysis of Shahs of Sunset points out that while the show is far from perfect, there are aspects of it that improve the portrayal of Muslims on screen. But she is adamant that there is no “quick fix” for diversity on or off the screen. I think this is an important takeaway—so often people are looking for the easiest, fastest solutions, but the problem here is neoliberalism and a deeply baked-in white supremacy that will take more than bandaid solutions to fix. Broken is a very considered and detailed exploration of an important topic of our day. If we are going to make our society a better place for everyone, we need to make it a better place for Muslims. I appreciated the solidarity Alsultany shows to trans people here, and I hope other non-Muslim trans people will return that solidarity—we are all in this together. Allow this book to arm you with the knowledge you need, regardless of your background or privilege, to change the systems that have failed for so long to include Muslim people in authentic and compassionate ways. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 20, 2023
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Jun 25, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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Hardcover
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0231556608
| 9780231556606
| B0BMWQ8DY4
| 3.14
| 14
| unknown
| Jun 06, 2023
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it was ok
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First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence
First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence of one here is notable. Anyway. Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet caught my eye because the history of computing, intertwined as it is with the history of mathematics and the history of feminism, interests me a lot. Ted Striphas discusses how we conceptualized both the word algorithm and the word culture prior to “algorithmic culture” emerging as a more recent phenomenon from the past few decades. This book is really not what I expected from the description, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad time. Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the eARC! Striphas takes a very intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to answering the question of, What was algorithmic culture like before we had the internet? These chapters span centuries, languages, and draw on everything from philosophy to computer science to linguistics and semiotics. It’s truly impressive how Striphas synthesizes writings and ideas from these various fields into his presentation. He references entire areas of study and scholars I had no idea existed (and I have degrees in math and education as well as minors in English and philosophy!). In particular, Striphas grounds his approach through his own expansion of Raymond Williams’s Keywords publication/theory. Look, I’m not going to pretend I have enough background to evaluate this approach. Readers more familiar with this angle of attack and Williams might be better poised to critique Striphas’ strategy. As it is, I liked the emphasis on looking at language as something constructed by and responsive to changes in our society—along with the potent reminder that even a concept like culture, whose meaning we might assume is to be taken for granted, shifts over time. So Striphas definitely exposed me to a lot of new (old) ideas, got me thinking, and that alone is something I appreciate in a nonfiction book like this! On the other hand, this means that Striphas often gets bogged down in the weeds of theory. So much so that I’m not sure each chapter actually accomplishes its mission of supporting his overall thesis. Striphas attempts to trace the history of the word algorithm, then culture, and finally algorithmic culture, but along the way he gets lost in discussing, say, the historical context of the Cold War, suspicion and oppression of gay people in civil service and academia, etc. I’m not dismissing that these could be relevant threads to his argument, but the amount of digression feels, if not boring, then distracting enough to divert me from the overall point he’s trying to make. As a mathematician, I really liked the chapter about the origins of algorithm, algebra, and al-Khwarizmi. I learned a lot I didn’t know. Striphas carefully questions the “official,” simplified narrative we often learn (if we are lucky) in our math classes. He makes it clear that he isn’t trying to downplay al-Khwarizmi’s role, or the wider role of Islamic mathematicians, when it comes to their influence on European mathematics. At the same time, he points out that a reductive approach—tracing algorithm back to al-Kwharizmi’s name, algebra back to a book he wrote (on a method that he probably did not originate)—actually does an injustice, flattening and erasing the complexities of that time period and al-Khwarizmi’s life. I really appreciate how Striphas clearly acknowledges the power dynamics at play, both in contemporary writings of each period along with modern views, the roles of racism and sexism, etc., influencing our perception of algorithmic culture. He references many luminary scholars whose names I’ve heard of (Ruha Benjamin) or work I’ve read (Safiya Umoja Noble). In this sense, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet continues the intertextual conversation, not just engaging with it but building it and then throwing the ball forward, into the future, hoping that someone will pick it up and engage with Striphas later down the line. This book is very specifically targeted towards an audience with more knowledge of this field than me. I think some people might pick it up (as I did) because of its title and description, expecting a more straightforward history (as I did) of computer science prior to the computer and the intersections with culture. But this is an academic book, not a pop history book, and it shows. If you’re willing to wade into deeper intellectual waters, then you will find parts of this book rewarding—challenging but rewarding. If you’re not wanting that workout right now, then you should skip this one. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 27, 2023
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Jun 2023
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Jun 11, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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1839975229
| 9781839975226
| 1839975229
| 3.79
| 162
| 2023
| Mar 21, 2023
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liked it
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Another in the slate of ace-focused books released recently by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, who through NetGalley provided me with an eARC that I am f
Another in the slate of ace-focused books released recently by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, who through NetGalley provided me with an eARC that I am finally getting around to reviewing! Ace Notes: Tips and Tricks on Existing in an Allo World by Michele Kirichanskaya is a kind of how-to guide for being asexual in a world that privileges sexual attraction and desire. It’s not prescriptive (as Kirichanskaya notes, there is no one right way to be ace!) but it is very thoughtful. There are two stand-out features of this book: in-depth interviews with other ace-spec people and a very holistic consideration of how asexuality extends beyond the world of sex. All of the ace books I have read recently have, in one way or another, dispensed advice to their audience. This book takes it one step further in that it is meant to be an advice book. The chapter titles, such as “How to Identify an Asexual” or “Explaining the Different Types of Attraction,” reflect this. And whereas the other titles could, in theory, be useful for an allosexual reader, this book’s audience is definitely ace-spec people. This is a book for us, and it’s great. A great deal of what Kirichanskaya covers doesn’t apply to me personally, mostly because I have been out basically since I knew to use the words ace and asexual. That isn’t to discount the value in this book for baby aces but instead meant to highlight what I want to say next, which is that I still found, as an older person who is comfortable talking about her asexuality, a great deal of new perspectives on these pages. In particular, Kirichanskaya has a whole part of the book devoted to “Religion and Identity”—including chapters discussing asexuality and Judaism. As someone who is not Jewish, this is honestly not something that I had ever thought about! So much of the conversation around religion and asexuality in the West revolves around Christianity, and specifically the ideas of purity culture that have come out of Christianity. A lot of ace talk is about how to distinguish asexuality from celibacy, how to push back against purity culture, how to push back against the idea that we should want or have sex to be fruitful and multiply, etc. Reading chapters about asexuality and another one of the world’s major religious and ethnic identities was so cool and refreshing. It makes me think about how I need to seek out some perspectives from Muslim aces as well. Speaking of perspective, Kirichanskaya also interviews many prominent ace personalities. I hadn’t heard all of these names before but suspect many will be recognizable to people who pick up this book. The interviews are dispersed throughout the book based on where they best fit within the book’s larger organization. This is a really nice strategy that breaks up the flow of Kirichanskaya’s writing. Each interview allows Kirichanskaya to elucidate understandings of asexuality that she might not have been able to discuss as eloquently or authentically herself. One of the interviews was with Maia Kobabe, whose book Gender Queer sounds so good I might actually read it one day despite my deep aversion to graphic novels at the moment. Eir interview resonated with me because e and Kiranskaya talk about how transitioning can sometimes affect the labels one uses for one’s sexuality. People have asked me if coming out as trans means I’m not ace any more, something I addressed in a blog post a few years ago. I really like how Kobabe and Kirichanskaya discuss this idea (spoiler: the answer is not one-size-fits-all!). This book is well worth picking up if you are ace or thinking you might fall somewhere on the ace spectrum and want a volume that, rather than explaining asexuality to you, helps you think about what that will look like in your life. It asks you to consider what you want out of this label, what it means for how you relate to yourself and others, and what you want to do going forward. This focus on action rather than introspection is not for everyone, but it is a great complement to the other books this publisher has put out recently. I recommend. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 04, 2023
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Apr 06, 2023
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Apr 18, 2023
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Paperback
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039388144X
| 9780393881448
| 039388144X
| 3.97
| 944
| Feb 16, 2023
| Mar 21, 2023
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liked it
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One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become
One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced, in fact, that media literacy is the most essential skill English classes can cover. The deluge of disinformation and morass of misinformation out there is staggering. Throw in the challenges of deepfakes, and, well, it’s starting to get depressing, how difficult it is to evaluate the quality of information that comes across my feeds. For a long time, I’ve been using the Bad News Game in my classroom to help my adult learners understand how misinformation works. When I was approved via NetGalley to read an eARC of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, I didn’t know at the time that Sander van der Linden was one of the researchers behind the game! It’s neat to hear him talk more about how the game was designed and other findings about fake news. In the first part of the book, van der Linden discusses the current state of research into misinformation and how it affects us from a cognitive science point of view. Part 2 of the book look at the historical spread of misinformation, from ancient Rome to modern times, and introduces concepts like filter bubbles and echo chambers. Part 3 explains the concept that van der Linden and his team have been researching (building upon older research from the mid-twentieth century)—a psychological vaccine that inoculates us against misinformation. The Bad News Game is an example of such a vaccine in action. My main takeaways from this book (some of which I already knew but which van der Linden explained in more detail): our brains are susceptible to misinformation because of cognitive biases we evolved to deal with environments far different from the ones we find ourselves in today; merely debunking or fact-checking misinformation is seldom very effective; pre-bunking or inoculating people against misinformation can be very effective, but the duration of that efficacy can be variable. Some of what van der Linden says here might seem obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What makes Foolproof so valuable is the way that he grounds these perhaps obvious ideas in actual research stretching back decades. Reading this book reminded me of the incredible power of science: without this research, we would be in a much worse off place than we are today. This book gave me hope and made me more optimistic for our future. As grave a threat as misinformation plagues pose, there are solutions out there. Although van der Linden briefly touches on the role of artificial intelligence (such as deepfakes) in the book, he doesn’t mention generative AI like ChatGPT. This is likely because the book went to press just before ChatGPT and its competitors launched into the limelight. How’s that for timing? While a great deal of what van der Linden says about spotting misinformation applies to these tools as well, I still have questions. ChatGPT and other large language models open up the door to the possibility of generating so much garbage online that accurate information diminishes simply by volume alone. I’m curious if this new dimension to misinformation spread affects van der Linden’s recommendations or his team’s findings at all. Foolproof is a fascinating and edifying story of using science to push back against one of the most pressing issues in our modern society. Highly recommended for tech people, scholars, scientists, and anyone interested in how misinformation spreads and how we can fight it. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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ebook
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1839970022
| 9781839970023
| B0BCC6FLD8
| 3.65
| 992
| Feb 21, 2023
| Feb 21, 2023
|
it was amazing
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Despite loving podcasts, I have never listened to Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca’s podcast of the same name. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Sounds Fak
Despite loving podcasts, I have never listened to Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca’s podcast of the same name. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else because, hey, asexual and aromantic over here! It feels very fitting that I’m writing this review at the end of Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC. This book explores asexuality and aromanticism (which Costello and Kaszyca often refer to under the united umbrella of aspec, not to be confused with the asexual- or aromantic-specific terms ace-spec and aro-spec) by discussing how these identities relate to specific topics in our society. This is a slightly different and perhaps refreshing approach, finding a middle ground between books that take an “Asexuality 101” stance and more academic work like the fantastic Refusing Compulsory Sexuality . It’s definitely accessible, humorous, and empathetic. The chapters are divided very logically: “Society,” “Yourself,” “Friendship,” etc. Costello and Kaszyca share a lot of their own personal journey with their sexual and romantic identities. Costello is aroace, while Kaszyca is demisexual, so they each bring slightly different perspectives to being aspec, which I think is valuable. As the book progresses, they start to bring in quotations from a survey of other aspec people. This adds other voices as we hear from genderqueer aspec people, alloromantic asexuals, aromantic allosexuals, etc. The goal is very obviously to showcase the incredible diversity of the asexual and aromantic umbrellas within the wider tent that is being queer, and I love that. On that note: this is a masterclass in how to write in an inclusive, expansive way. Many writers, both queer writers themselves and those who write about us, often lament how “difficult” it is not to “offend” or inadvertently exclude people with their language. They point to artificially constructed examples of tortuous, often circuitous sentences supposedly designed to avoid such offence and exclusion. Kaszyca and Costello bypass such malarkey. They acknowledge that labels can be challenging, that terms change, that the split-attraction model isn’t for everyone, etc. Then they thread the needle to get to the point, which is that aro and ace identities are united by the fact that all of us on those spectra, to one extent or another, experience romantic or sexual attraction in a qualitatively different way from other people. That is the basic truth to which they speak in this book. The additional voices included throughout allow them to refine the message to speak to more specific experiences as needed. What I loved most about Sounds Fake But Okay is how it simultaneously resonated with so many of my own experiences while also showing me many different ones. I’m an aromantic, asexual woman—but I am also trans, and having transitioned in my thirties, I spent most of my formative youth under the impression I was a man. So while I heavily identify with Costello and the other female aroaces quoted herein, I didn’t quite share some of their experiences of compulsory sexuality and how that is linked to the madonna/whore paradox of our society. Likewise, in their chapter on gender, they discuss how the proportion of aspec people who are trans is higher than aspec people who are cis. Then we hear from a trans person who identified as ace when they responded to the survey but has since settled on the label of bisexual—because her experience of transition has changed how she experiences and understands attraction. Many people have asked me, as I have transitioned, whether I might not identify as ace anymore—so much so that I actually wrote a whole blog post about this for Ace Awareness Week—and while my answer was in the negative, I totally understand how it’s different for some people. Consequently, Kaszyca and Costello have managed to collate commentary that does a very good job of helping us understand the remarkable diversity of aspec experiences. I love it. I love how sensitively they unpack and critique the amatonormative nature of our society; while a lot of what they discussed in these parts of the book was not new to me, it is an essential part of this wider conversation. Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised to see other topics included, like a section near the end about kink and asexuality. In short, Sounds Fake But Okay is a careful, thoughtful work that seeks to go beyond its authors’ own experiences and ideas of being aspec. Though this book will be, I think, most fulfilling for aspec readers, I would recommend this to people who are not aspec as well. This book is probably the most concise exploration of the greatest number of topics related to being asexual or aromantic in our society. For any allosexual and alloromantic folx out there, reading this book would be a great way to educate yourself about some of the challenges that we aspec people have navigating a society that privileges romance above other relationships and pressures us to talk about and even engage in sex that we might not want. As its tongue-in-cheek title implies, Sounds Fake But Okay is about challenging our biases so that we can build a society that is more tolerant, affirming, and compassionate, regardless of the extent or ways in which one feels attracted to others. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2023
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Feb 22, 2023
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Mar 02, 2023
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
1839972629
| 9781839972621
| 1839972629
| 4.44
| 699
| Jan 21, 2023
| Jan 21, 2023
|
really liked it
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Even though I don’t have TikTok, some of the best content always escapes that platform to find its way to me. Such is the case with Cody Daigle-Orians
Even though I don’t have TikTok, some of the best content always escapes that platform to find its way to me. Such is the case with Cody Daigle-Orians, purveyor of Ace Dad Advice. I remember watching some of his videos and thinking exactly some of the sentiments he shares later in I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life, such as “it’s so nice to see an elder ace!” Lol, we’re so predictable. But it’s also true. Ace people aren’t visible enough. That’s changing, slowly, and it’s good to see someone like Daigle-Orians helping to make that happen. My thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC. Although there’s a fair amount of “asexual 101” in this book—and that’s fine—what I value most about this book is exactly what the subtitle promises: the advice. This is a book grounded in Daigle-Orians’ lived experience: that of someone who came out as gay, then came out again as ace after discovering what that was, then started talking about it online and realized he could contribute to the conversation. As he shares his story, he offers advice, yes, but also reassurance. Some of the advice is very quotable, such as when Daigle-Orians reminds us that “labels are tools not tests.” This is such an important idea to internalize, regardless of how one describes one’s identity. Daigle-Orians returns to this touchstone time and again, from an exploration of microlabels to a primer on the history and theory behind the label queer. Much of their journey is very relatable. They discovered the asexuality label on Tumblr. Some people dismiss asexuality as being “Tumblr real,” so I suppose this makes Daigle-Orians somewhat of a stereotype, but there’s a reason it’s a stereotype. Though Tumblr, like TikTok, has largely remained outside my purview, I love how it creates these spaces where queer people can talk, lurk, and just exist, often outside of a cishet gaze. The emotions that Daigle-Orians describes as they navigate the discovery of their aceness—relief, trepidation, excitement, etc.—are going to be familiar to aces even if they came to their sexuality in a very different way. While I came to mine younger than Daigle-Orians and single, I feel like we still have a lot in common. It was really cool to hear them talk about how they had never been to a pride event until recently, for that was true of me as well (and in many ways still is). Similarly, it’s so lovely to hear about his experiences as part of a polycule. I love seeing alternatives to our stereotypical ideas of what a family should be. The way that Daigle-Orians discusses his family, his challenges with dating while ace, the closeness he feels even to those members of his polycule with whom he isn’t in a sexual or romantic relationship—that’s neat. It’s wholesome, even. Some of the advice and perspective here might be hard to read the first time round. At one point, Daigle-Orians levels with us: being ace is not always easy. Boy is that ever true. I really appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat his experiences. Sometimes I swing between these two extremes of thinking “oh man, I’m so glad I’m asexual,” versus, “sometimes it feels like it would be easier if I were ace.” Daigle-Orians addresses the sentiment that some people don’t want to be ace empathetically but sincerely: you are who you are. You can deny that experience, compounding your unhappiness, or embrace going on a journey to discover what that experience means for you. Being ace isn’t the best thing ever, nor does it doom you to unhappiness. It’s just an identity like any other. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to spend some time listening to that elder ace’s perspective while you meditate on what being ace might mean for you. For allosexual readers: while this book cannot obviously capture everything about being ace, Daigle-Orians does their best to articulate one version of asexuality, acknowledging the limitations of this perspective by dint of being an older, white, male-presenting person. You’ll still get an interesting window into what it’s like being ace in a world that vacillates between denying we exist and telling us we’re broken. The overarching theme of I Am Ace is that your asexuality does not need to define you, but it can inform you. If you let it, your asexuality can help you feel more comfortable in who you are—whether you’re cis or trans, younger or older, etc. When we realize that our behaviour is not the same as our attraction, that neither of these are destiny, that we can question and change how we identify throughout our life and build, as a result, a happier life—that’s powerful. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 14, 2023
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Feb 21, 2023
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1568589034
| 9781568589039
| 1568589034
| 4.07
| 3,795
| Mar 07, 2017
| Sep 04, 2018
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liked it
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This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa B
This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa Book Club, and I was intrigued. Well, actually, I wanted to know how to kill a city, should the need ever arise. That’s what P.E. Moskowitz covers in this aptly named book—though I get the feeling they are more interested in fighting against gentrification, and I suppose that’s a good thing. Part geographical rumination, part political manifesto, How to Kill a City is a tour through four major American cities and how gentrification has come for each of them. Moskowitz begins in New Orleans, examining how state and local officials used the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to enact policy that would encourage gentrification, development, and attract “the right sort” (read: white people) to the city. From there they take us to Detroit, which has been hollowed out by recession and foreclosure. Next up, San Francisco, where the tech bubble has priced millennials out of owning houses some of them grew up in. Finally, Moskowitz’s milieu of New York City, which has waged a decades-long campaign of gentrification across multiple boroughs. Along the way, Moskowitz explores what gentrification is, according to various sources, how it begins, and the forces that drive it. Their thesis is simple: gentrification is a local effect, but the cause is national and even global, so the solutions have to be a similar combination of these levels of community and government. Boots-on-the-ground activists are essential but if fighting by themselves are in for a losing battle. Rather, Moskowitz points out the need for policy change that recognizes how gentrification works and especially how it affects marginalized and vulnerable groups. I’ll demonstrate with one example from the book: real estate development. In many cities (I know this is true here in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver), housing prices are on the rise because developers or other wealthy owners buy up houses, condos, and apartments and then leave them vacant for most of the year. And the ones that are occupied are leased, often without rent control. As a result, people are being priced out of their homes in the cities, putting pressure on them to move to suburbs—and without robust public transit into the city from the suburbs, people often have trouble affording to even work in the city. As I read, I pondered how gentrification manifests in my own city of Thunder Bay. It’s a tough one, because I can tell it is operation, but I don’t think it’s as evident as it is in larger cities. Thunder Bay’s commercial districts tend to be dense and clustered, and while there are residential neighbourhoods that abut them, we have a lot less urban infill at the moment. We’ve always had a lot of chain and department stores, with local businesses eternally clinging to life as we lurch from one economic hardship to another. So it was challenging for me to apply Moskowitz’s teachings to my own city—something to think about, and perhaps watch out for. Then again maybe, as Moskowitz themself reflects, maybe I am a gentrifier. I fit the economic demographic of being a white, middle-class, white-collar worker … but again, the neighbourhood is what I struggle with. I’m in a more expensive yet still heterogeneous area of town, heavily residential yet one where walking barely two blocks can put me among houses that are hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference in value to my own. Although How to Kill a City acknowledges outright the links between gentrification and racism, I would have liked to see more discussion of colonialism in this book. After all, the land American cities are built on is stolen from the Indigenous nations who predate European contact. The first European settlers were, in a sense, the original gentrifiers, and I think it’s worth examining how present-day settlers like myself benefit from our privilege even if we are not personally in the midst of a present moment of gentrification. Similarly, while not quite in the scope of the book, How to Kill a City got me thinking about gentrification in Europe. Moskowitz briefly mentions London, where gentrification as a term was coined. So it’s not a phenomenon unique to North America by any means. Yet I wonder how conditions in Europe—differences in population and transport density, differences in culture, as well as states with a heavier lean towards socialism—change the face of gentrification. Again, something to think about. That’s about where I come down on this book: it gives me a lot to think about. It’s firm and opinionated without being strident, yet it also admits different points of view—Moskowitz interviews developers and other gentrifiers who emphatically endorse what they are doing in these cities, and then Moskowitz presents the points of view of activists and those who oppose gentrification, with whom they clearly sympathize more. Still, I appreciate the attempt to explore this issue from different angles. Gentrification is ultimately about space, and space does not have to be limited to the physical. I’ve seen people discuss the gentrification of online spaces as well. So I like how this book has me thinking about our relationship with space, physical or not, and especially how I move through it as a white person. I’m thinking about relationality, how I relate to these spaces, to the people and objects within them, and how these things in turn relate back to me. How to Kill a City is a concrete and careful look at an important contemporary issue. While there is room for more breadth and depth than is on offer here, this book feels like a good starting point on a journey to unpacking one’s own role in gentrification and learning about how policy influences gentrification throughout North America. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 18, 2023
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Jan 29, 2023
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178775698X
| 9781787756984
| 178775698X
| 3.95
| 640
| Dec 21, 2022
| Dec 21, 2022
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liked it
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As I’ve noted in other reviews, perhaps most recently
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, being ace (asexual) in our society is no picnic. While I won’
As I’ve noted in other reviews, perhaps most recently
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, being ace (asexual) in our society is no picnic. While I won’t deny there are benefits to opting out of the compulsory sexuality of our society, the fact that we must, indeed, opt out is problematic. In particular, I think that many a-spec people have a hard time figuring out their labels—partly because asexuality encompasses a lot of overlapping identities, but also because, as a phenomenon, it remains either erased/ignored or misrepresented/misunderstood. With Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace, Eris Young seeks to change that. Thank you to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for a review! Young examines their understanding of their own asexuality (and how it intersects with other aspects of their identity, such as being transgender). Along the way, they cover some basic definitions (ever wondered what the difference is between being demisexual versus grey-asexual?) and include excerpts from interviews and surveys, both ones they conducted personally and others conducted through organizations like AVEN. The result is a book that is at times personal but overall attempts to affirm that there is no one right way to be asexual. This in and of itself is crucial, for one of our major struggles within and outside of queer spaces is being misunderstood. Sometimes it’s a conflation of asexuality with celibacy or prudery. Sometimes we do it ourselves in a rush to explain that “don’t worry, ace people still have sex/‘normal’ romantic feelings!” to make aces seem less Other. Whatever the case, asexuality is as vulnerable to gatekeeping and misunderstanding as any other umbrella identity within the larger queer tent. Let’s get the critiques out of the way first. Young’s writing style, and perhaps more importantly, their organizational style, doesn’t entirely work for me. The book kind of jumps around from topic to topic without a clear through line. This might just be a personal hang-up when it comes to non-fiction, but I actually like a narrative. I like chapters with framing stories and inciting incidents. This book is more of a collection of essays and ideas, and while that isn’t bad, it also hasn’t done more for me than inform me. That being said, I appreciate how this book tries to cover a lot of ground. Young’s voice is passionate, knowledgeable, but also humble. They make it clear that they are not trying to be the authority—or even an authority—on asexuality. This humility makes the book more approachable and accessible. Indeed, I think there are two good audiences for this book. First, young ace or a-spec-questioning people who want to learn more about asexuality without diving too far an academic rabbit hole. Ace Voices definitely checks that “overview/introductory text” box. The second audience, in contrast, would be allosexual/alloromantic people. See, even as publishing opens up its doors to more diverse books, I think we still face a problem of siloing. This is true for fiction—Black authors, for example, are regularly told their books don’t have “crossover appeal,” whereas apparently white authors’ books just appeal to everyone naturally? It’s true for non-fiction too. Memoirs and other books that foreground queer experiences become marketed to queer people—especially young queer people, as inspiration fodder. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. However, I want to challenge non-queer people to seek out books about queerness. I want to challenge allosexual or alloromantic people to learn more about asexuality and aromanticism—and this book would be a good place for you to start. I’m reminded of a similar book about trans people that I read in 2017. The author was cis, and you can imagine how bad it was at covering the subject as a result and accurately representing trans people’s voices (I am not even going to link to it in this review, it was so bad). Young’s authenticity in this space, the way they share their experience while also making room for experiences that are different, is so important. Overall, Ace Voices didn’t jump out at me as something spectacular. But it’s very solid, and it’s exciting to see books like this published, finally. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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4.47
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it was ok
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3.79
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3.97
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3.65
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it was amazing
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4.44
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really liked it
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4.07
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3.95
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Jan 08, 2023
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