Traverse Fantasy

Try to guess context from this bit from a conversation I had with my friend Ènziramire : when they figure out womb transplants we’ll be back to square 1 gonna be the first tbitch to be denied an abortion and they’ll be like why did you want it you stupid bitch He had shared with me a recent article called “ Reject Transgender Liberalism ” by Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child . We knew someone who was going to see her at a guest university lecture, so we read up on her out of curiosity and felt like that new article was in contrast to certain tendencies in the introduction to her aforementioned book. Earlier, she over-historicized cultural expressions of trans-female experience such as the hijira so as to emphasize differences between those expressions and conceptualize them as categorically distinct: Clearly there have been people in nearly every recorded human culture who have lived in the roles of women, or between specific understandings of ma...

I’ve been interested in Pauline theology for a while: first, for his emphasis on community organization against the norms of 1 st century Greco-Roman politeia ; second, his relatively egalitarian and universal outlook on gender/sex and nationality (in as much as nationality could be said to exist at the time whether on the basis of ancestry, geography, or politeia ); third, his self-understanding as a Pharisee and apostle of Jesus to the Gentiles, which was contrary—or at least orthogonal—to the aims of James’ isolationist assembly in Jerusalem. I also think that Paul’s authentic epistles encode the particular viewpoints of himself and of the first Christians more accurately than either the synoptic Gospels (including Acts) or the inauthentic epistles, which Eisenbaum characterizes as an effort to both discredit the Jerusalem assembly and frame Paul as a convert from Judaism to Christianity. So there’s a lot to glean from Paul and, whether or not we disagree with his conclusions, ...

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in  The Second Sex  first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...

Put some thoughts on a Discord server: was actually going to sleep last night thinking about whether it’s dissonant to have racism/nationalism but not sexism in my home campaign but along similar lines i feel like sexism generally requires women to be relegated to a private sphere that makes them less prevalent in the world (even if the PCs are exceptional) unless the campaign is specifically about sex and that public/private division I don’t know. Maybe I need to self-criticize about this. It’s like I subvert race and sex in D&D orthogonally: I handle race in a realist way which problematicizes the way it’s taken for granted and used as a short-hand for moral nature in fantasy, usually flipping the monster lens onto “races” usually considered good or normal (while emphasizing the symbolic or social basis of that lens); whereas I handle sex by eliminating patriarchy and placing women in socially prominent roles, whether ‘good’ (world-protagonistic) or ‘bad’ (world-antagonistic...

I’ve gotten comments from people asking questions that I thought would be nicer to answer in longer form! Thank y’all so much for your interest and responses :) Question 1: Commodity Fetishism From “ Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 For Dummies ”: I would like to add a thought/question that came to my mind a bit after commenting. You do use the term ‘social ilusion’ describing commodity fetishism and this may just be language issue but i have always had a bit of an issue with the translation of the german ‘Schein’ as ‘illusion’. In some other cases (Kant or Hegel) it gets translated as ‘semblance’. For me, neither seems coneptually accurate. Especially ‘illusion’ might lead people to think that acknowledging it would dispell it. But the fetish of the commodity seems a lot stickier. It is an illusion that only fades when the material modes of social (re)production have changed. Thanks, warenunförmig ! For context, throughout my pamphlet, I describe value (we need not qualify here—read Marx o...

HTML version of my eight-fold zine outlining a more cohesive feminist politics. This one is actually very new; I wrote it both to synthesize what I had been reading and thinking about lately, and to get back into practice working with this relatively short form. Maybe I need a separate 'feminism' tag, but I see feminism as something that pierces and interconnects everything else—yet isn't that true of everything? 1. Our Crisis The US is in a crisis of sexual politics: abortion access is no longer protected on the federal level, allowing states to criminalize it again and surveil women across state lines if suspected; federal courts are ruling against trans people, facilitating the loss of their healthcare, legal recognition, and participation in everyday life; gay and even interracial marriage are next on the table. Republicans may wield the stick, but Democrats wield the carrot: their lack of urgency over the last few decades, and their ‘response’ to our lost rights...

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...