Traverse Fantasy

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

Talia Bhatt wrote a really good essay called “ The Third Sex ”, about how the third-sexing of individuals who display male-to-female cross-sex behavior/characteristics marks them for ostracization and violence in their particular societies. In other words, taking traditionalist Hindi society as an example, the classification of MTF individuals as hijira is not motivated by an enlightened sense of gender diversity (especially as opposed to ‘modern’ notions of transness), but rather by a patriarchal imperative to punish those who dare to forsake the male pedestal and instead associate with the female sex, since doing so problematizes the base assumptions of patriarchy that sex is immutable and that the male sex in particular is superior to the female sex. “The ‘gender binary’ is a misnomer,” Bhatt argues; “gender has always been a hierarchy.” It’s a really good essay, one that speaks to how ‘pre-modern’ patriarchies rationalize the existence of trans people as well as contextualizes ho...

I was reading the so-called ‘Blue Book’, a cheeky nickname for Fight the Constitution , a collection of essays published by Cosmonaut , the magazine of the Marxist Unity Group, a Kautskyist caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America. Whew. You get all that? Anyway, I didn’t particularly care for it. The essays kept feeling like they were explaining the same concepts over and over again, so they lacked systematic cohesion in contrast to (say) the Little Red Book (which is impressive in that it accomplishes more despite being... littler). I joked with Ènziramire that I was tired of Marxist groups saying they would offer a practical program when instead it just vomited more theory. I don’t know that “We need to recruit more people” is a strategy as much as what you’d want to accomplish with a strategy. It felt less stupid than PSL’s Socialist Reconstruction , at least, but only in as much as it didn’t suggest outright stupid things. But it gets no points for lacking ambition. Ènz...

Consider this a late entry to Prismatic Warren’s (look, we need to distinguish the blog and the guy) cleric blogwagon. Or don’t. I meant to write something for it because I loved the movie Conclave , but ended up having a crazy month where I thought less about this blog than I had for the other months of this year. This has nothing to do with Conclave or D&D though. Bon appetit. I was talking to a friend and her boyfriend who were recounting their recent adventure while church hopping, the result of the boyfriend getting kicked out of his church band because his girlfriend (my friend) moved in to live with him. A fourth person in all this had invited them to their church, a Lutheran one, and the couple was totally surprised by what they had encountered. Never mind the support dog the congregation just had around as a conversation starter (“Did you meet this dog that’s gone out of its fucking mind?”). They were surprised that the church, despite being ‘Christian’, was very ‘Catho...