Trying to ease myself back into blogging (LOADS of posts i want to write, but having trouble with inertia in actually writing them). I think more and shorter posts is going to be my aim for a while, and possibly doing this sort of link-posting thing reasonably frequently...
Anyway, some cool stuff i have just found or caught up with...
This post is almost a year old, but i only found it (via random link-clickage) this week... and it makes a fucking brilliant point, as well as giving me something to link to every time i want to say "just because it's a social construct, doesn't mean it's not real". I must remember to blogroll Fetch Me My Axe...
This is even older, but i really, really like it... and this is definitely awesome (and i really want to do it)... ;)
Lindsay of Autist's Corner and Mik of Coffee and Gender have both recently written posts that i really strongly identify with bits of, and need to comment on, but need to put loads of thought into my responses to:
Gender Variance in Autism: How much of it is just sensory?
Gender, Sexuality and the Fluidity of Identity
At ScienceBlogs (on a blog whose usual content is anti-creationism and cephalopods) there was a really good post and comment thread on intersex conditions and nonconsensual surgery on children here...
Also, i found it a month or 2 ago, but i can't remember whether or not i have linked to Eli Clare's website yet. Eli Clare is, IMO, one of the most awesome people in the known universe :)
There are probably more, but these are all the ones i can think of right now...
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
I'm off...
OK, REALLY quick post, as i need to leave the house in about 20 minutes.
I'm off to see some friends in Manchester, then staying overnight there and going to Autscape tomorrow morning. I'm getting back on Friday night, but then within the next couple of days after that i'll be off again to the Camp for Climate Action (see my posts from last year's Camp here)...
I'll blog about Autscape when i get back from it (i don't know if "live" blogging will be possible, cos i'm not sure if there will be internet access there or not). I'll also try to reply to the various comments that people have left that i haven't had time to... sorry, i suck at replying to comments on my blog...
Hope everyone has a good time over the next week or so (this weather makes me feel GOOD :) :) )...
I'm off to see some friends in Manchester, then staying overnight there and going to Autscape tomorrow morning. I'm getting back on Friday night, but then within the next couple of days after that i'll be off again to the Camp for Climate Action (see my posts from last year's Camp here)...
I'll blog about Autscape when i get back from it (i don't know if "live" blogging will be possible, cos i'm not sure if there will be internet access there or not). I'll also try to reply to the various comments that people have left that i haven't had time to... sorry, i suck at replying to comments on my blog...
Hope everyone has a good time over the next week or so (this weather makes me feel GOOD :) :) )...
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Hugely frustrating communication issues, and inadvertently hurting other people.
(This isn't anywhere near as coherent as I want it to be, and a large part of me is certain that posting it will actually exacerbate, rather than clear up, some if not all of the situations it describes. But I'm going to post it as it stands anyway, and maybe edit it later, because I feel a strong need to put it out there...)
I'm really upset and frustrated with this discussion.
This is something that keeps happening to me – I post something in response to something written by someone who (usually) I like and admire, which that person (or someone else) disagrees with part of, or asks me to explain further. I try to explain further, and somehow compound the disagreement, or don't quite express myself clearly enough, with the result that what I said gets misinterpreted, or gets things inferred from it that I didn't intend to imply. I then try to set out my views more clearly, but the compounding of disagreement gets worse, and starts to get interpreted as a personal attack. From then on, my every attempt to correct and clarify – usually with the intention to aim for agreement, since that's nearly always my aim in discussion (and maybe that's something problematic? I dunno) – can only make things worse...
(here and here are other examples, and too many threads on Barbelith, before I gave up posting there, to count...)
The thing that particularly gets me is that, in nearly all of these cases, I really don't want to “attack” or to offend the other person(s) involved – usually, my desire to clarify my views and to get them to, if not agree with them, then at least to see them as reasonable, is so strong because they are people who I like and admire and who have said things that I agree with and find true and inspiring. Unintentionally offending people who I admire is very upsetting for me, and it makes me feel a genuine, heartfelt desire to apologise, to tell them I don't want to make them angry or upset, and that that wasn't my intent.
However, I then get caught in a worse double-bind, because, apparently, it isn't legitimate to apologise to someone for offending them, rather than for what you said - which I also really don't understand. I have always passionately believed that retracting something you have said, if you still believe in it, because you caused offence to someone by saying it, is the height of hypocrisy (which is why it infuriates and disgusts me when politicians do it, as they seem to do all the time, particularly when what they said in the first place was something I agreed with, or that exposed the hypocrisy of other politicians). But I also genuinely feel ashamed and guilty for offending people I like when my intention was not to cause offence - but, then, it seems I am not allowed to attempt to make any kind of reparations for the offence, without retracting what I said - so I really don't know what to say or do when in this kind of situation, especially when it seems not to be the content of what I said, but the "style" of "how" I said it, that has caused the offence (since it is content that I pay attention to, and style, to me, is irrelevant).
In some of these cases, it seems that my writing style is the cause of the offence, as much if not more than the content of my views. This seems to be tied into some concept of "appropriateness" (which is a concept I always struggle with) - that some writing/speaking styles are appropriate for some topics, but not for others, and that this somehow depends on how "personal" the topics are -
which is a completely incomprehensible dividing line for me, as the dichotomy between the "personal" and the "political" (or sociological, or philosophical, or whatever) is one that has never meaningfully existed for me.
Also, it seems that the issues which I feel the most passion about are the issues which I'm most likely to get accused of being offensively “dispassionate” about, and the topics which I have the most personally invested in are the ones on which I'm most likely to be accused of “treating this as if it's just an interesting topic of conversation” - and I really can't work out why this is - although, I'm getting some sort of impression that, for maybe most people, emotional involvement in something and intellectual rigour about it are mutually exclusive (or perhaps that the application of someone else's attempts at intellectual rigour to something that is emotionally important for them is unwelcome) - whereas, for me, the more "personal", the more emotional and directly-relevant-to-me something is, the more I want and need intellectual rigour in thinking about it.
I get the strong feeling that, if I was having some of these conversations face-to-face, I wouldn't get regarded as taking such a “combative” attitude as I do on the internet. Tentatively, I wonder if that might be to do with the size of the “chunks” of conversation in those respective media – in a real-time conversation, people tend to speak in short sentences, with a much quicker back-and-forth rate, whereas on online discussion threads people tend to make longer statements at a time, trying to set out more of a comprehensive position in each one. I don't know if that has something to do with it. I'm fairly sure that, in my case, it can't be the commonly-cited presence or absence of non-verbal in addition to verbal communication, because I basically don't do non-verbal communication in any circumstance, and tend to find online interchanges easier to accurately state my views in as a result of that.
(I also think that I probably come across as more "sure of myself" on the internet than I do in face-to-face conversations, more definitive and authoritative in my views, which might contribute to it. I always thought that was a good thing, but... maybe not...)
This post isn't just to ask “where am I going wrong?” - it's to express my genuine bewilderment at what happens to me in these sorts of interchanges. I am really, utterly clueless as to what I am doing here that seems, repeatedly, to be so offensive – and yet, saying so seems to merely compound the offence. Frankly, this sort of thing makes me want to give up communicating with people altogether (although, of course, I know that that's not what I really want, it's just how hopeless and despairing it makes me feel – that literally whatever I say in an attempt to clear up an accidental offence I've caused to someone by stating my views will inevitably make it worse, but so will saying nothing).
And this, which I sought out in order to try to make some sense of this and see where I am going wrong, actually makes me feel worse, because, according to those rules, with my communication impairments I will *never* be capable of "civil discourse". And I'm not quite sure whether the things that Ballastexistenz talks about in this post (and the other posts that she links to in it) are the reasons why I get this, because that would seem to absolve me of "guilt" for what happens in these kinds of interactions, and I keenly feel that guilt (whether it's rational to or not).
Have any other autistic people encountered this? If so, what tactics have you found to be helpful in dealing with it? I'm really, really not sure if this is an autistic thing, or if tentatively seeing it as an autistic thing is just making excuses for being an asshole (even though I don't want, and am not trying, to be an asshole).
Any responses whatsoever are welcome. I'm not trying to be disingenuous or feign ignorance of anything here. I genuinely am ignorant of whatever social values I'm transgressing. And i know this is going to come across to people as whiny, self-obsessed, passive-agressive and all kinds of other things that i don't intend to be, but always seem to get accused of being (to the extent that i have to conclude that the accusations are accurate, because if everyone other than me thinks that i am something, then the only logical conclusion i can come to is that everyone else is right and i am wrong). But i want to not be those things... which is why i'm, rather pathetically and probably hopelessly, asking for advice...
I'm really upset and frustrated with this discussion.
This is something that keeps happening to me – I post something in response to something written by someone who (usually) I like and admire, which that person (or someone else) disagrees with part of, or asks me to explain further. I try to explain further, and somehow compound the disagreement, or don't quite express myself clearly enough, with the result that what I said gets misinterpreted, or gets things inferred from it that I didn't intend to imply. I then try to set out my views more clearly, but the compounding of disagreement gets worse, and starts to get interpreted as a personal attack. From then on, my every attempt to correct and clarify – usually with the intention to aim for agreement, since that's nearly always my aim in discussion (and maybe that's something problematic? I dunno) – can only make things worse...
(here and here are other examples, and too many threads on Barbelith, before I gave up posting there, to count...)
The thing that particularly gets me is that, in nearly all of these cases, I really don't want to “attack” or to offend the other person(s) involved – usually, my desire to clarify my views and to get them to, if not agree with them, then at least to see them as reasonable, is so strong because they are people who I like and admire and who have said things that I agree with and find true and inspiring. Unintentionally offending people who I admire is very upsetting for me, and it makes me feel a genuine, heartfelt desire to apologise, to tell them I don't want to make them angry or upset, and that that wasn't my intent.
However, I then get caught in a worse double-bind, because, apparently, it isn't legitimate to apologise to someone for offending them, rather than for what you said - which I also really don't understand. I have always passionately believed that retracting something you have said, if you still believe in it, because you caused offence to someone by saying it, is the height of hypocrisy (which is why it infuriates and disgusts me when politicians do it, as they seem to do all the time, particularly when what they said in the first place was something I agreed with, or that exposed the hypocrisy of other politicians). But I also genuinely feel ashamed and guilty for offending people I like when my intention was not to cause offence - but, then, it seems I am not allowed to attempt to make any kind of reparations for the offence, without retracting what I said - so I really don't know what to say or do when in this kind of situation, especially when it seems not to be the content of what I said, but the "style" of "how" I said it, that has caused the offence (since it is content that I pay attention to, and style, to me, is irrelevant).
In some of these cases, it seems that my writing style is the cause of the offence, as much if not more than the content of my views. This seems to be tied into some concept of "appropriateness" (which is a concept I always struggle with) - that some writing/speaking styles are appropriate for some topics, but not for others, and that this somehow depends on how "personal" the topics are -
which is a completely incomprehensible dividing line for me, as the dichotomy between the "personal" and the "political" (or sociological, or philosophical, or whatever) is one that has never meaningfully existed for me.
Also, it seems that the issues which I feel the most passion about are the issues which I'm most likely to get accused of being offensively “dispassionate” about, and the topics which I have the most personally invested in are the ones on which I'm most likely to be accused of “treating this as if it's just an interesting topic of conversation” - and I really can't work out why this is - although, I'm getting some sort of impression that, for maybe most people, emotional involvement in something and intellectual rigour about it are mutually exclusive (or perhaps that the application of someone else's attempts at intellectual rigour to something that is emotionally important for them is unwelcome) - whereas, for me, the more "personal", the more emotional and directly-relevant-to-me something is, the more I want and need intellectual rigour in thinking about it.
I get the strong feeling that, if I was having some of these conversations face-to-face, I wouldn't get regarded as taking such a “combative” attitude as I do on the internet. Tentatively, I wonder if that might be to do with the size of the “chunks” of conversation in those respective media – in a real-time conversation, people tend to speak in short sentences, with a much quicker back-and-forth rate, whereas on online discussion threads people tend to make longer statements at a time, trying to set out more of a comprehensive position in each one. I don't know if that has something to do with it. I'm fairly sure that, in my case, it can't be the commonly-cited presence or absence of non-verbal in addition to verbal communication, because I basically don't do non-verbal communication in any circumstance, and tend to find online interchanges easier to accurately state my views in as a result of that.
(I also think that I probably come across as more "sure of myself" on the internet than I do in face-to-face conversations, more definitive and authoritative in my views, which might contribute to it. I always thought that was a good thing, but... maybe not...)
This post isn't just to ask “where am I going wrong?” - it's to express my genuine bewilderment at what happens to me in these sorts of interchanges. I am really, utterly clueless as to what I am doing here that seems, repeatedly, to be so offensive – and yet, saying so seems to merely compound the offence. Frankly, this sort of thing makes me want to give up communicating with people altogether (although, of course, I know that that's not what I really want, it's just how hopeless and despairing it makes me feel – that literally whatever I say in an attempt to clear up an accidental offence I've caused to someone by stating my views will inevitably make it worse, but so will saying nothing).
And this, which I sought out in order to try to make some sense of this and see where I am going wrong, actually makes me feel worse, because, according to those rules, with my communication impairments I will *never* be capable of "civil discourse". And I'm not quite sure whether the things that Ballastexistenz talks about in this post (and the other posts that she links to in it) are the reasons why I get this, because that would seem to absolve me of "guilt" for what happens in these kinds of interactions, and I keenly feel that guilt (whether it's rational to or not).
Have any other autistic people encountered this? If so, what tactics have you found to be helpful in dealing with it? I'm really, really not sure if this is an autistic thing, or if tentatively seeing it as an autistic thing is just making excuses for being an asshole (even though I don't want, and am not trying, to be an asshole).
Any responses whatsoever are welcome. I'm not trying to be disingenuous or feign ignorance of anything here. I genuinely am ignorant of whatever social values I'm transgressing. And i know this is going to come across to people as whiny, self-obsessed, passive-agressive and all kinds of other things that i don't intend to be, but always seem to get accused of being (to the extent that i have to conclude that the accusations are accurate, because if everyone other than me thinks that i am something, then the only logical conclusion i can come to is that everyone else is right and i am wrong). But i want to not be those things... which is why i'm, rather pathetically and probably hopelessly, asking for advice...
Saturday, June 28, 2008
100 Book Meme (attempt at overcoming writer's block)
So, Dave Hingsburger did this one a while back, and queerpup over at Livejournal has just done it. I thought i might as well do it, as none of the many "proper" blog posts i'm working on seem to be getting anywhere at the moment, and i feel like i should post *something*...
EDIT: Just looked again, and they're actually not the same list. This is the list that queerpup posted. Doh.
the rules are:
According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (i *think*... had to do an Austen book for GCSE English, and i think it was this one. It was utter shite, anyway. Don't even get me started on the speculation that she was "one of our lot"...)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (OK, i idly flicked through *one* of them once. It wasn't very good.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (MUCH better than Austen. Need to re-read more critically, tho.)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (er... not sure which one to put this as. I own the Complete Works, but haven't by any means read it all. I probably intend to read all the tragedies, at some point, but care a lot less about the comedies.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I really didn't get why so many people liked and/or identified with this book. Really didn't relate to me, and i read it at the age when it's supposed to be most "relevant"...)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (this was an utter waste of paper, IMO)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (er... isn't this part of #33???)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (i think... tho i might have blurred the movie with other books i read when i was a little kid. For some reason i remember a series, rather than just one book.)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (another one we did for GCSE English. LOTF, 1984, Macbeth, and... Austen. No wonder i'm odd...)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (i think i might have started this, but i certainly didn't finish it)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (altho i was about 14, and found it incredibly confusing and didn't "get it", so maybe i should try it again)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville * (read this at about 10... probably need to read again from an "adult" perspective)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (and it fucking sucked... tho it might be worth re-examining the disability politics of it)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (only Dickens i've read, actually... well, i think i tried one of the full-length novels and couldn't get any further than the first chapter, but i can't remember which one. Dickens defines Unnecessarily Complicated Writing Style, as far as i'm concerned. I think he was paid by the word.)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White (again, if it's the book from my childhood that i think it was)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (as #87. Was it the one with "The Land Of Do-As-You-Please", that was referenced in V for Vendetta?)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (and i have to say... WTF was that meant to be about???)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams * (god, i was scarily obsessed with this when i was a kid for... several years, actually. Even tried to write a sequel...)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (er... isn't this part of #14???)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl * (Dahl was awesome... even if maybe a bit dodgy now. Why isn't Matilda in this list?)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
now for the rambly commentary stylee bit...
This seems like a very random list - all fiction, sure, but a roughly equal mixture between "classics" (however that term's defined - i've always wondered when and how the "canon" of what gets considered "classic" literature was put together, just how old something has to be to get into it, and how much potentially-awesome stuff that was written around the same time didn't get in... especially when crap like Austen gets in), contemporary-ish "mainstream" novels, children's literature, and a few slightly tokenistic examples of sci-fi/fantasy (the latter 2 categories overlapping a bit). Plus Shakespeare, which really sticks out to me because, IMO, stage plays and novels are completely different media (OK, there is the occasional work that blurs the lines a bit - Alan Garner's Red Shift comes to mind - but still, they're at least as different as, say, movies and comics, IMO), so having Shakespeare in a list otherwise entirely consisting of novels is... odd. I'd like to know what criteria were used to compile it.
Also, the "reading level" of these books seems to be all over the place - from the very easy to the extremely difficult (tho i know opinions differ - i know people who think Dickens is "entry-level" classic literature, and Hardy is much more "advanced", whereas i find the former almost impossible to read, and the latter much, much easier... i'd love to see some studies, if any exist, of neurodiversity and "accessibility"/understandability of different fictional writing styles...) - it kind of feels like many of the kids' books were thrown in to make "non-literary" people feel less bad about having read hardly any of the books in the list, which seems a bit patronising to me. If they are all supposed to be roughly similar in percentage of the adult population who have read them, it seems a pretty odd list too - there are some here i've never heard of, tho this could be showing my own blindness to certain sectors of "popular" culture (who gets to decide which culture is "popular", anyway?). Some omissions are surprising too (wot, no Toni Morrison?)...
The instruction to underline those books you "LOVED" was a bit vague for me, as i can never tell whether they mean "enjoyed" or "thought were meaningful/significant" in these things - many of the books that i think are most crucial to my understanding of the world are ones i'd hesitate to use the word "loved" or "enjoyed" about, just because of how fucking dark they are - so i've underlined the ones that i was inspired by or thought are important/necessary reading (not necessarily both, for all of them). Several that i "loved" when i read them, i might be a lot more critical of now - these, i've marked with a *...
Anyway, this list has reminded me that there's a lot of "relatively mainstream" literature that i like or have liked, which is kind of interesting (since i mostly like... odd stuff). It's also got me thinking about how the literature i have cared about has changed, in fact arguably very radically changed, over the years, and how important a cornerstone of my worldview and understanding-of-life literature is. This possibly needs to be the subject of a future post...
I'd like to know what other people think of what was and wasn't included in this list...
EDIT: Just looked again, and they're actually not the same list. This is the list that queerpup posted. Doh.
the rules are:
According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (i *think*... had to do an Austen book for GCSE English, and i think it was this one. It was utter shite, anyway. Don't even get me started on the speculation that she was "one of our lot"...)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (OK, i idly flicked through *one* of them once. It wasn't very good.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (MUCH better than Austen. Need to re-read more critically, tho.)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (er... not sure which one to put this as. I own the Complete Works, but haven't by any means read it all. I probably intend to read all the tragedies, at some point, but care a lot less about the comedies.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I really didn't get why so many people liked and/or identified with this book. Really didn't relate to me, and i read it at the age when it's supposed to be most "relevant"...)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (this was an utter waste of paper, IMO)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (er... isn't this part of #33???)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (i think... tho i might have blurred the movie with other books i read when i was a little kid. For some reason i remember a series, rather than just one book.)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (another one we did for GCSE English. LOTF, 1984, Macbeth, and... Austen. No wonder i'm odd...)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (i think i might have started this, but i certainly didn't finish it)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (altho i was about 14, and found it incredibly confusing and didn't "get it", so maybe i should try it again)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville * (read this at about 10... probably need to read again from an "adult" perspective)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (and it fucking sucked... tho it might be worth re-examining the disability politics of it)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (only Dickens i've read, actually... well, i think i tried one of the full-length novels and couldn't get any further than the first chapter, but i can't remember which one. Dickens defines Unnecessarily Complicated Writing Style, as far as i'm concerned. I think he was paid by the word.)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White (again, if it's the book from my childhood that i think it was)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (as #87. Was it the one with "The Land Of Do-As-You-Please", that was referenced in V for Vendetta?)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (and i have to say... WTF was that meant to be about???)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams * (god, i was scarily obsessed with this when i was a kid for... several years, actually. Even tried to write a sequel...)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (er... isn't this part of #14???)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl * (Dahl was awesome... even if maybe a bit dodgy now. Why isn't Matilda in this list?)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
now for the rambly commentary stylee bit...
This seems like a very random list - all fiction, sure, but a roughly equal mixture between "classics" (however that term's defined - i've always wondered when and how the "canon" of what gets considered "classic" literature was put together, just how old something has to be to get into it, and how much potentially-awesome stuff that was written around the same time didn't get in... especially when crap like Austen gets in), contemporary-ish "mainstream" novels, children's literature, and a few slightly tokenistic examples of sci-fi/fantasy (the latter 2 categories overlapping a bit). Plus Shakespeare, which really sticks out to me because, IMO, stage plays and novels are completely different media (OK, there is the occasional work that blurs the lines a bit - Alan Garner's Red Shift comes to mind - but still, they're at least as different as, say, movies and comics, IMO), so having Shakespeare in a list otherwise entirely consisting of novels is... odd. I'd like to know what criteria were used to compile it.
Also, the "reading level" of these books seems to be all over the place - from the very easy to the extremely difficult (tho i know opinions differ - i know people who think Dickens is "entry-level" classic literature, and Hardy is much more "advanced", whereas i find the former almost impossible to read, and the latter much, much easier... i'd love to see some studies, if any exist, of neurodiversity and "accessibility"/understandability of different fictional writing styles...) - it kind of feels like many of the kids' books were thrown in to make "non-literary" people feel less bad about having read hardly any of the books in the list, which seems a bit patronising to me. If they are all supposed to be roughly similar in percentage of the adult population who have read them, it seems a pretty odd list too - there are some here i've never heard of, tho this could be showing my own blindness to certain sectors of "popular" culture (who gets to decide which culture is "popular", anyway?). Some omissions are surprising too (wot, no Toni Morrison?)...
The instruction to underline those books you "LOVED" was a bit vague for me, as i can never tell whether they mean "enjoyed" or "thought were meaningful/significant" in these things - many of the books that i think are most crucial to my understanding of the world are ones i'd hesitate to use the word "loved" or "enjoyed" about, just because of how fucking dark they are - so i've underlined the ones that i was inspired by or thought are important/necessary reading (not necessarily both, for all of them). Several that i "loved" when i read them, i might be a lot more critical of now - these, i've marked with a *...
Anyway, this list has reminded me that there's a lot of "relatively mainstream" literature that i like or have liked, which is kind of interesting (since i mostly like... odd stuff). It's also got me thinking about how the literature i have cared about has changed, in fact arguably very radically changed, over the years, and how important a cornerstone of my worldview and understanding-of-life literature is. This possibly needs to be the subject of a future post...
I'd like to know what other people think of what was and wasn't included in this list...
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Guess who sent me a postcard...
SQUEE!!!
:) :) :)
Not being very verbal today (uncharacteristically for me). But, Elizabeth, if i haven't said it already (and i probably have), you are awesome...
As well as the painting, there is also a rather nice looking sticker of an Anime style, androgynous goth character in a top hat and what looks like an ink stamp of a heron on the other side (which i haven't scanned in, because, obviously, my "real world" address is on it). And impressively neat handwriting, in my opinion... apart from a capital G which looked a lot like a Y, and really confused me for a bit... but i think that may be one of those transatlantic language issues...
So, for Beth, another squirrel from the other day:
(this one caught my eye because it was a kind of reddish colour, although that doesn't actually come out too well in the photograph... nowhere near as red as a real red squirrel, of course, but noticeably redder, especially on its tail, than most of the other grey squirrels around)
and a crow, in fact the closest i have managed to get a photo of one from:
(note that it has a white spot just about visible on its breast - as i've noted before, a lot of crows around Birmingham seem to have some white on them. Also, i'm quite pleased with the pose on top of the pine (fir?) tree there.)
Hmmmm. Beth is probably going to think i have some strange association between her and wildlife photography in my head...
Anyway, that postcard made my day :)
(LOADS of stuff i've been reading and wanting to post about, particularly on the feminism/sexuality/queer theory side of things, but i seem to be stuck in "read everything, but can't write anything" mode ATM. Oh well, that generally lasts a few days to a week, so hopefully some more posts soon...)
:) :) :)
Not being very verbal today (uncharacteristically for me). But, Elizabeth, if i haven't said it already (and i probably have), you are awesome...
As well as the painting, there is also a rather nice looking sticker of an Anime style, androgynous goth character in a top hat and what looks like an ink stamp of a heron on the other side (which i haven't scanned in, because, obviously, my "real world" address is on it). And impressively neat handwriting, in my opinion... apart from a capital G which looked a lot like a Y, and really confused me for a bit... but i think that may be one of those transatlantic language issues...
So, for Beth, another squirrel from the other day:
(this one caught my eye because it was a kind of reddish colour, although that doesn't actually come out too well in the photograph... nowhere near as red as a real red squirrel, of course, but noticeably redder, especially on its tail, than most of the other grey squirrels around)
and a crow, in fact the closest i have managed to get a photo of one from:
(note that it has a white spot just about visible on its breast - as i've noted before, a lot of crows around Birmingham seem to have some white on them. Also, i'm quite pleased with the pose on top of the pine (fir?) tree there.)
Hmmmm. Beth is probably going to think i have some strange association between her and wildlife photography in my head...
Anyway, that postcard made my day :)
(LOADS of stuff i've been reading and wanting to post about, particularly on the feminism/sexuality/queer theory side of things, but i seem to be stuck in "read everything, but can't write anything" mode ATM. Oh well, that generally lasts a few days to a week, so hopefully some more posts soon...)
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Finally properly online again...
Apologies for the lack of posting over the last month or so (to anyone who actually reads this blog)...
I *thought* i would be doing a post like this approximately a month ago, but unfortunately, just after i had finally managed to get internet set up in my new flat (majorly stressing myself out and using up ridiculous amounts of phone credit in the process), major software fuckups happened and i had to reinstall Windows... for which i had to get my brother to send me a copy of Windows in the post... which got lost in the post and never arrived, so he had to send it again... and which, when it finally arrived, crashed mid-install due to unidentifiable hardware issues, which necessitated me taking my computer to his house so he could take it apart and work out what the problem was (it turned out to be a cable, of all things, connected to the floppy drive)... but now, my computer finally has a functioning operating system on it again...
(I'm seriously considering switching to Linux, as soon as i get a bit more computer literate...)
So, yeah. The many posts which it had been my intent to write in the last few weeks will, hopefully, start to appear within the next week - and sorry to anyone who i told that particular posts would get posted (particularly E, who i was talking to on the phone about how great it was to have internet again, ironically on the very day that my Windows was to fuck up)...
I'm also intending to make a few changes to this blog, altho i'm not exactly sure what yet. I've had a couple of people say to me that white-on-black isn't the most accessible colour scheme from a visual impairment point of view, so i'm going to look into what others might be preferable (if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know) - altho this was about the only one i could find, within Blogger's available options, that didn't look horrible to me, so there might be some experimentation involved... i'm thinking of doing a bit of rearranging of my links and blogroll, too, tho again, i'm not exactly sure how, and might end up returning to how it was originally...
I'm also probably going to start using my Livejournal account more, in particular for posts on more trivial/geeky stuff that doesn't feel to me like it "fits" here (squeeing about TV shows or webcomics, for example) and/or thoughts that are too "unformed" for me to feel like i can make a "proper" post out of them (the latter of which might end up being reworked into "better" posts for this blog).
I need to decide whether i want this blog to be primarily just for the disability/politics/gender identity/sexuality type stuff, or whether my posts on other stuff, such as wildlife and the environment (which i've planned a few of, but then not posted them here, because those posts i have done on that kind of stuff haven't attracted any comments, and i haven't felt very able to articulately tie the disparate subjects together, like my original intent for this blog was) can also go here, or whether they should be split off into another blog (i only wanted one, and now i already have 3, including the music reviews one)...
I'd also really like to find a way of getting more comments/discussion on this blog, but i'm really not sure how to do that...
Anyway. Hopefully, more content coming soon...
I *thought* i would be doing a post like this approximately a month ago, but unfortunately, just after i had finally managed to get internet set up in my new flat (majorly stressing myself out and using up ridiculous amounts of phone credit in the process), major software fuckups happened and i had to reinstall Windows... for which i had to get my brother to send me a copy of Windows in the post... which got lost in the post and never arrived, so he had to send it again... and which, when it finally arrived, crashed mid-install due to unidentifiable hardware issues, which necessitated me taking my computer to his house so he could take it apart and work out what the problem was (it turned out to be a cable, of all things, connected to the floppy drive)... but now, my computer finally has a functioning operating system on it again...
(I'm seriously considering switching to Linux, as soon as i get a bit more computer literate...)
So, yeah. The many posts which it had been my intent to write in the last few weeks will, hopefully, start to appear within the next week - and sorry to anyone who i told that particular posts would get posted (particularly E, who i was talking to on the phone about how great it was to have internet again, ironically on the very day that my Windows was to fuck up)...
I'm also intending to make a few changes to this blog, altho i'm not exactly sure what yet. I've had a couple of people say to me that white-on-black isn't the most accessible colour scheme from a visual impairment point of view, so i'm going to look into what others might be preferable (if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know) - altho this was about the only one i could find, within Blogger's available options, that didn't look horrible to me, so there might be some experimentation involved... i'm thinking of doing a bit of rearranging of my links and blogroll, too, tho again, i'm not exactly sure how, and might end up returning to how it was originally...
I'm also probably going to start using my Livejournal account more, in particular for posts on more trivial/geeky stuff that doesn't feel to me like it "fits" here (squeeing about TV shows or webcomics, for example) and/or thoughts that are too "unformed" for me to feel like i can make a "proper" post out of them (the latter of which might end up being reworked into "better" posts for this blog).
I need to decide whether i want this blog to be primarily just for the disability/politics/gender identity/sexuality type stuff, or whether my posts on other stuff, such as wildlife and the environment (which i've planned a few of, but then not posted them here, because those posts i have done on that kind of stuff haven't attracted any comments, and i haven't felt very able to articulately tie the disparate subjects together, like my original intent for this blog was) can also go here, or whether they should be split off into another blog (i only wanted one, and now i already have 3, including the music reviews one)...
I'd also really like to find a way of getting more comments/discussion on this blog, but i'm really not sure how to do that...
Anyway. Hopefully, more content coming soon...
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Most Excellent
So, last week i was honoured to be given the Rated E For Excellent award by Last Crazy Horn... and so, I have to pass it on to 10 other bloggers.
This is a somewhat difficult task, because Last Crazy Horn picked Miss Crip Chick, who i was going to pick, and one of the other bloggers she picked picked Sweet Perdition, who i was also going to pick, and then Sweet Perdition picked... most of the other bloggers i was going to pick, namely Abnormaldiversity, Ballastexistenz, Chewing The Fat, The Gimp Parade (who i'm a little worried about actually, as she hasn't posted since March 22nd, which is rare for her), Questioning Transphobia, and Asperger Square 8... so, those i have picked are picked from the set of blogs i read not including that list... listing is strictly alphabetical and does not indicate any sort of order of preference (as if that was even possible between diverse individuals) (also excluded are group blogs or strictly-news blogs, so sorry BBC Ouch and F.R.I.D.A.)...
Andrea's Buzzing About blogs on neurodiversity, education (from both the "educator" and "educatee" standpoints), and the fight against pseudoscience... as well as insects and other creepy creatures. She combines simultaneously impassioned and rational defence of difference with devastating deconstruction of curebies and other nonsense-peddling quacks and hysteria merchants... and she also makes absolutely hilarious Dadaist poetry out of bizarre Google search terms ;)
(She also gave me a blog award back in December, so it's nice to be able to reciprocate the honour)
Emi Koyama's Eminism is more of a website than a blog really, but does contain a blog (even if it isn't posted to often), and needs inclusion simply because of the awesome way that ze interconnects discourses on transsexual, transgender and intersex issues, disability issues, fat acceptance, postcolonial economics, and feminist sex education (among other things i've probably forgotten) into a complete, consistent and fully intersectional radical libertarian approach to embodiment. Cutting edge in every sense.
Larry Arnold aka Laurentius Rex is, AFAIK, the only other autism or disability rights blogger who i've actually met in real, 3-dimensional space. If i live to his age, then i would be very, very satisfied if at his age i am anything like him.
No Designation hasn't been posted to much recently, but is one of the better blogs i've managed to find on queer and/or trans issues that manages to intelligently yet readably write about the distinctions and interactions between gender and sexuality, while arguing for the abolition of all forms of gender- and sexuality-based discrimination, both overt and subtle.
Charles Johnson aka Rad Geek is about the only US-based political blog i can stand to read, and also probably the best defender i know of of the true meaning of libertarianism. There are issues (particularly economic ones) that i disagree with him on, but 90% of the time he writes incredibly powerful and passionate commentary that expresses my views far better than i could. And he's one of the very few non-disabled blogger/activists i can think of who care about disability issues.
Elizabeth McClung's blog Screw Bronze! is one of the most raw, powerful and moving blogs out there, while getting wickedly dark humour out of even the most harrowing of situations... and she writes posts averaging over 100 words every day, even while on an awesome culture-packed trip to Japan. She has made me laugh, she has made me cry, and, generally, she fucking rocks.
Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy blogs on subjects as diverse as BDSM, disability rights and sex-positive feminism, and manages to tie them all together with a passion for freedom and autonomy that is both highly intelligent and very sexy. If only we lived on the same continent... :( I also have to give props to her blog for being on LiveJournal and still looking better than those of many WordPress users ;)
Joel Smith's site This Way Of Life, including the blog NTs Are Weird, is one of many great autism advocacy sites. One of the things he is best at is connecting autism advocacy to the wider disability rights movement, and demolishing hierarchies of "functioning level" or diagnostic label within the autistic community, He's also one of very few Americans who properly understand, and both believe in and practice, the social model of disability, and one of the best at explaining it.
The brilliantly named Autistic Bitch From Hell's blog Whose Planet Is It Anyway? is another passionate, no-bullshit autism advocacy blog. There are things i disagree with her on (such as her support for Barack Obama), but she destroys curebie-ism and other forms of bigotry, and exposes the hypocrisy of much of the so-called "autism awareness movement", with devastating effectiveness...
(This list took me far longer to put together than i thought possible...)
Anyway. You are all Most Excellent. Now go name some other excellent blogs that i haven't yet heard of...
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Another awesome call for papers...
This one via Miss Crip Chick:
“Feminism For Freaks”
At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.
Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.
We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:
* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity
Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.
Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com
*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.
“Feminism For Freaks”
At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.
Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.
We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:
* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity
Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.
Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com
*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Monsters and the Monstrous: Call for Papers 2008
Found via Cryptomundo:
6th Global Conference - Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil
Monday 22nd September - Thursday 25th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.
Perspectives are sought from those engaged in the fields of literature, media studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, health and theology. Ideas are welcomed from those involved in academic study, fictional explorations, and applied areas (e.g. youth work, criminology and medicine).
Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
- The “monster” through history
- Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
- Children, childhood, stories and monsters; monsters and parents
- Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)
- Making monsters; monstrous births
- Mutants and mutations
- Technologies of the monstrous
- Horror, fear and scare
- Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
- How critical to the definition of “monster” is death or the threat of death?
- Human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
- The monstrous and gender
- Revolution and monsters; the monstrous and politics; enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
- Iconography of the monstrous
- The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires
- The monster in literature
- The monstrous in popular culture: film, television, theatre, radio, print, internet. The monstrous and journalism
- Religious depictions of the monstrous; the monstrous and the supernatural
- Metaphors and the monstrous
- The monstrous and war, war reportage/propaganda
- Monsters, the monstrous and the internet; monstrous virtualities
- Monsters, gaming and on-line communities
Papers will be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. We also welcome proposals for pre-formed panels which specifically explore the themes of hybridity or themes of monstrous parents and families. In addition, papers which examine the theme of hope in relations to monsters (for joint sessions with the Hope project running at the same time) are wlecome.
Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 9th May 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th August 2008.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Project Co-Leader
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
mailto: iheartvampires@gmail.com
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
mailto: m6@inter-disciplinary.net
Stephen Morris
Project Co-Leader
Independent Scholar
New York, USA
mailto: smmorris58@yahoo.com
The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of programmes organised by ID.Net. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.
[end quote]
I think this whole conference sounds awesome, and with the potential to bring all kinds of things together. I have bolded the topics in the list that i think sound particularly exciting...
It would be utterly awesome if some Disability Studies people submitted papers for this. I know i'm not up to it at the moment (and not (yet) being within the hallowed halls of academia, probably wouldn't be eligible), but there have to be some people who would be well into this out there...
A few topics that i can think of offhand that could potentially fit into this from a disability studies perspective: changelings, freak shows in fiction and reality, representations of disabled people as monsters or villains in horror films (see this post at Sweet Perdition, discovered through the latest Disability Blog Carnival... another one i need to add to my blogroll), the Neanderthal hybrid theory of neurodiversity, the use of disabled actors to play monsters or non-human characters (eg in Doctor Who)... shit, there's fucking loads of stuff...
(I think i'm going to have to spam about a couple of dozen blogs with this...)
oh, and a couple of classic blog posts which i think are relevant to this:
Little Light: the seam of skin and scales
Boots (of Makezine): Monster Trans
Ballastexistenz: I'm the monster you met on the Internet
edit: archives of the previous 5 conferences in this project can be found here...
6th Global Conference - Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil
Monday 22nd September - Thursday 25th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.
Perspectives are sought from those engaged in the fields of literature, media studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, health and theology. Ideas are welcomed from those involved in academic study, fictional explorations, and applied areas (e.g. youth work, criminology and medicine).
Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
- The “monster” through history
- Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
- Children, childhood, stories and monsters; monsters and parents
- Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)
- Making monsters; monstrous births
- Mutants and mutations
- Technologies of the monstrous
- Horror, fear and scare
- Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
- How critical to the definition of “monster” is death or the threat of death?
- Human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
- The monstrous and gender
- Revolution and monsters; the monstrous and politics; enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
- Iconography of the monstrous
- The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires
- The monster in literature
- The monstrous in popular culture: film, television, theatre, radio, print, internet. The monstrous and journalism
- Religious depictions of the monstrous; the monstrous and the supernatural
- Metaphors and the monstrous
- The monstrous and war, war reportage/propaganda
- Monsters, the monstrous and the internet; monstrous virtualities
- Monsters, gaming and on-line communities
Papers will be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. We also welcome proposals for pre-formed panels which specifically explore the themes of hybridity or themes of monstrous parents and families. In addition, papers which examine the theme of hope in relations to monsters (for joint sessions with the Hope project running at the same time) are wlecome.
Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 9th May 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th August 2008.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Project Co-Leader
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
mailto: iheartvampires@gmail.com
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
mailto: m6@inter-disciplinary.net
Stephen Morris
Project Co-Leader
Independent Scholar
New York, USA
mailto: smmorris58@yahoo.com
The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of programmes organised by ID.Net. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.
[end quote]
I think this whole conference sounds awesome, and with the potential to bring all kinds of things together. I have bolded the topics in the list that i think sound particularly exciting...
It would be utterly awesome if some Disability Studies people submitted papers for this. I know i'm not up to it at the moment (and not (yet) being within the hallowed halls of academia, probably wouldn't be eligible), but there have to be some people who would be well into this out there...
A few topics that i can think of offhand that could potentially fit into this from a disability studies perspective: changelings, freak shows in fiction and reality, representations of disabled people as monsters or villains in horror films (see this post at Sweet Perdition, discovered through the latest Disability Blog Carnival... another one i need to add to my blogroll), the Neanderthal hybrid theory of neurodiversity, the use of disabled actors to play monsters or non-human characters (eg in Doctor Who)... shit, there's fucking loads of stuff...
(I think i'm going to have to spam about a couple of dozen blogs with this...)
oh, and a couple of classic blog posts which i think are relevant to this:
Little Light: the seam of skin and scales
Boots (of Makezine): Monster Trans
Ballastexistenz: I'm the monster you met on the Internet
edit: archives of the previous 5 conferences in this project can be found here...
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Wanted: representations of disability in 20th century British literature
A friend of mine and fellow disabled activist told me today that she was thinking of doing a PhD on representations of disability in 20th century British literature (she is currently doing an MA in 20th century British history). As a starting point she is interested in representations of people who came back disabled from World War I and II, but also in anything since then, and particularly in how literary representations of disability changed in response to changing social and political conceptualisations of disability.
She's particularly interested in physical impairments rather than mental, and not necessarily just in fiction but also in stuff like autobiographies, poetry, etc. Also while it's primarily British and 20th century stuff she's interested in, stuff that's older or not British might still be of interest (and i'd also be interested in it for myself!)
I thought that, out of the probably thousands of books i've read, i would be able to think of at least a few representations of disability, but, oddly, i'm really struggling to find any that are British - quite a few American (particularly African-American) novels i've read have physically impaired minor characters (minor characters just as much of interest as main characters), but, going through my bookshelf of novels, the only British one i can come up with is Samad Miah Iqbal from Zadie Smith's White Teeth, who has a paralysed arm from fighting in WWII (and that was published in 2000, tho as it was probably written, and certainly set, in the 20th century, i guess it probably counts)... all the rest are US (although there probably are some i'm not remembering in some of the many Indian and Latin American magical realist novels i read in the phase i went through of that... still not British, tho)...
As for autobiographies, i know that UK disabled visual artist Alison Lapper has written one, tho i haven't read it, and i've already mentioned to her Ruben Gallego's White On Black, which, tho it's Russian, i think would fit in as a disabled author's 20th century memoir as literature...
Can anyone think of any more? I know there are a few literature lovers on my blogroll...
edit: I posted a thread here, and got a few replies, none of which i'd previously heard of... tho i now think i might have seen the name "Precious Bane" mentioned somewhere, or at least it has a familiar ring to it...
also, anyone got any idea why mental impairments seem to be a much more popular topic for being a main theme of novels than physical ones?
She's particularly interested in physical impairments rather than mental, and not necessarily just in fiction but also in stuff like autobiographies, poetry, etc. Also while it's primarily British and 20th century stuff she's interested in, stuff that's older or not British might still be of interest (and i'd also be interested in it for myself!)
I thought that, out of the probably thousands of books i've read, i would be able to think of at least a few representations of disability, but, oddly, i'm really struggling to find any that are British - quite a few American (particularly African-American) novels i've read have physically impaired minor characters (minor characters just as much of interest as main characters), but, going through my bookshelf of novels, the only British one i can come up with is Samad Miah Iqbal from Zadie Smith's White Teeth, who has a paralysed arm from fighting in WWII (and that was published in 2000, tho as it was probably written, and certainly set, in the 20th century, i guess it probably counts)... all the rest are US (although there probably are some i'm not remembering in some of the many Indian and Latin American magical realist novels i read in the phase i went through of that... still not British, tho)...
As for autobiographies, i know that UK disabled visual artist Alison Lapper has written one, tho i haven't read it, and i've already mentioned to her Ruben Gallego's White On Black, which, tho it's Russian, i think would fit in as a disabled author's 20th century memoir as literature...
Can anyone think of any more? I know there are a few literature lovers on my blogroll...
edit: I posted a thread here, and got a few replies, none of which i'd previously heard of... tho i now think i might have seen the name "Precious Bane" mentioned somewhere, or at least it has a familiar ring to it...
also, anyone got any idea why mental impairments seem to be a much more popular topic for being a main theme of novels than physical ones?
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Stuff I have found recently
Haven't been feeling up to writing again recently. I have a huge list of posts i'm meaning to write (or maybe topics i'm meaning to write posts on), quite a few of which are ones i've said i would write to other people, which i really do intend to write soon (for a given value of "soon"), but it's going to have to be when i've got a more coherent head on.
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
Monday, January 28, 2008
Extreme mood swings, inability to write, and other headfuckery
So i haven't been posting much lately, despite the fact that there have been a shitload of things i've wanted to post about (actually, that seems to be true of a lot of bloggers at the moment... January weather?). Partly, this has been because of the fairly extreme mood swings i've been having, accompanied by a general, all-pervasive feeling of pointlessness, partly because of something which Danechi of Stimming With Rainbows of Every Design described absolutely perfectly in a recent post:
I spend a lot of time intending to write. I think of a topic that piques my interest, and I plan that when I have time, I'll blog on that topic.
But when I actually go off to write on that pre-determined topic, I freeze up. The best way I can describe it is that when I first think of the topic, the word pathways open up and I can follow them down and make a coherent post. Of course, I'm either not at the computer then or I'm trying to get something else done, so that doesn't happen. Then five or more hours later when I'm finally attempting to write it up, I'm on a whole other island and maybe there are other paths and maybe there aren't, but regardless, I'd have to do a lot of leaping across impossible gaps to get to the island with the first path. After a few days, I *might* reach it again (certain islands are frequented more often than others), but there's no guarantee.
In a way it's kind of reassuring to know that someone else experiences writer's block in the same sort of way that i do, and that it is (possibly) an autistic thing, rather than something unique to me... doesn't make it less frustrating, but somehow makes it more "acceptable"...
...altho, i'm having massive trouble seeing anything about me as "acceptable" at the moment - i've spent probably most of the last few days feeling like i am utterly worthless to the world, a burden on and shameful to everyone i know, and only capable, no matter how i try, of taking from the world and never of putting anything useful into it. Like i'm a complete parasite, a mockery of humanity, an infinitely hypocritical monster with no possible claim to absolutely any of my/its decisions or actions being justified in any way - in fact, the pure fact that something is being done by me, rather than by someone else, makes the action inherently unjustifiable, even if it is something that i would have no ethical problem at all being done by others. In fact, the other day i spent several hours so overwhelmed by such thoughts that i was literally lying on the floor, unable to summon up the motivation to move, even to eat (let alone cook), because "wasting" food to keep me alive felt utterly unjustifiable.
This is one end of the mood swing, and then the other is the fantasy - and even while feeling it, i think "how dare someone like me even fantasise about stuff like that?" - of being part of a community, connected to all sorts of radical ideas and movements and connecting them all together, being loved and appreciated by the people i love, being part of intellectual discussion which goes into such radical uncharted territory that it extends the frontiers of human thought and knowledge, being almost exhausted by all the utterly awesome things that my mind - maybe my mind alone - can connect together - then lapsing back into despair because i will never, ever get my head together enough to truly connect it all...
And on top of all that, there's the sexual frustration, the social frustration (combined with feeling like, as the completely ethically unacceptable, selfish, hypocritical, take-and-never-give person i feel like i am, i don't even deserve a social life, and in fact deserve to be laughed at even for wanting one), the cold of winter which i neither can nor deserve to escape from, and a totally irrational but sometimes totally overwhelming desire to be held. :(
And then the feeling that, well, i have no right to feel this needy or this despairing, when people like Amanda and Elizabeth (and shitloads of others, just the first 2 examples that came to mind) have real shit that they have gone or are going through, to which nothing i will ever go through in my life, as someone with all kinds of unearned privilege (white, male, (at least superficially) straight, no significant physical impairment, good education, etc) could possibly compare.
I think i am someone with negative natural authority. As in, someone with natural authority has the ability to make others see what they say as true and reasonable, and to follow their suggestions for how to do things, without any sort of coercion, just because they are able to present them as sensible, self-evident and rational. I am the exact opposite - anything i say, even if it is exactly the same in substance as what someone else might say, is, by definition, unreasonable, and any suggestion i make, regardless of what it is, is a completely ill-thought-out, laughable, unworkable suggestion, which no one in their right mind would follow.
- so, of course, it's fucking difficult for me to feel like it's worth me writing anything in this blog, if anything i write is automatically unreliable, distorted, misrepresenting the truth, so far out there that no one could possibly believe it, etc etc, just because it's me who wrote it... and no one's ever going to read this anyway...
Some of the mood swing aspects of all this might be because of some of the supplements i've been taking (St John's Wort and Korean Ginseng) - while i'm never convinced that any of them are more than placebos, i've taken them in previous winters and thought they might have had some positive effect, so i picked some up when i saw them cheaply in a local supermarket, and finished the bottles (one a day) last week, so i dunno, maybe some of the extreme depression/fatigue/cognitive twistedness might be due to coming off them... so, i've bought some more and taken some today. I don't like to attribute chemical causes to thoughts that seem to derive completely logically from the circumstances of my life, though - i can't help feeling that treating symptoms with chemicals/supplements/whatever is simply cheating myself when what i need to solve my problems is to turn my life around - but right now there doesn't seem to be any acceptable way to do that...
(well, there is the one thing i've attached a little nugget of hope to, which is the meeting i have booked with Colin Barnes at the Centre for Disability Studies in Leeds, on Friday 8th Feb... but i have absolutely no money, and i just looked up train ticket prices, and the cheapest return from Birmingham to Leeds is fucking £45 - which is twice what i thought it would be, considering that a return from Birmingham to London, an only slightly shorter journey, is £15... and when i told one friend she offered to pay for the ticket, but i feel guilt about that...)
This post really hasn't come out how i wanted it to; i'm not sure if it's coherent at all, but i think i'll post it anyway. If anyone who knows me in real life is reading this (probably unlikely, i know, but still), i'd appreciate (even if i don't feel like i deserve) them to call or email me, because i was lifted out of this depression for at least a few hours yesterday just by the sound of a friendly voice, but there are only about 3 friends who i know i can call just because i want to hear from them, and only so often i can call them. Apologies for the serious doublethink headfuck. Maybe i'll get it together enough to be able to write something meaningful tomorrow...
I spend a lot of time intending to write. I think of a topic that piques my interest, and I plan that when I have time, I'll blog on that topic.
But when I actually go off to write on that pre-determined topic, I freeze up. The best way I can describe it is that when I first think of the topic, the word pathways open up and I can follow them down and make a coherent post. Of course, I'm either not at the computer then or I'm trying to get something else done, so that doesn't happen. Then five or more hours later when I'm finally attempting to write it up, I'm on a whole other island and maybe there are other paths and maybe there aren't, but regardless, I'd have to do a lot of leaping across impossible gaps to get to the island with the first path. After a few days, I *might* reach it again (certain islands are frequented more often than others), but there's no guarantee.
In a way it's kind of reassuring to know that someone else experiences writer's block in the same sort of way that i do, and that it is (possibly) an autistic thing, rather than something unique to me... doesn't make it less frustrating, but somehow makes it more "acceptable"...
...altho, i'm having massive trouble seeing anything about me as "acceptable" at the moment - i've spent probably most of the last few days feeling like i am utterly worthless to the world, a burden on and shameful to everyone i know, and only capable, no matter how i try, of taking from the world and never of putting anything useful into it. Like i'm a complete parasite, a mockery of humanity, an infinitely hypocritical monster with no possible claim to absolutely any of my/its decisions or actions being justified in any way - in fact, the pure fact that something is being done by me, rather than by someone else, makes the action inherently unjustifiable, even if it is something that i would have no ethical problem at all being done by others. In fact, the other day i spent several hours so overwhelmed by such thoughts that i was literally lying on the floor, unable to summon up the motivation to move, even to eat (let alone cook), because "wasting" food to keep me alive felt utterly unjustifiable.
This is one end of the mood swing, and then the other is the fantasy - and even while feeling it, i think "how dare someone like me even fantasise about stuff like that?" - of being part of a community, connected to all sorts of radical ideas and movements and connecting them all together, being loved and appreciated by the people i love, being part of intellectual discussion which goes into such radical uncharted territory that it extends the frontiers of human thought and knowledge, being almost exhausted by all the utterly awesome things that my mind - maybe my mind alone - can connect together - then lapsing back into despair because i will never, ever get my head together enough to truly connect it all...
And on top of all that, there's the sexual frustration, the social frustration (combined with feeling like, as the completely ethically unacceptable, selfish, hypocritical, take-and-never-give person i feel like i am, i don't even deserve a social life, and in fact deserve to be laughed at even for wanting one), the cold of winter which i neither can nor deserve to escape from, and a totally irrational but sometimes totally overwhelming desire to be held. :(
And then the feeling that, well, i have no right to feel this needy or this despairing, when people like Amanda and Elizabeth (and shitloads of others, just the first 2 examples that came to mind) have real shit that they have gone or are going through, to which nothing i will ever go through in my life, as someone with all kinds of unearned privilege (white, male, (at least superficially) straight, no significant physical impairment, good education, etc) could possibly compare.
I think i am someone with negative natural authority. As in, someone with natural authority has the ability to make others see what they say as true and reasonable, and to follow their suggestions for how to do things, without any sort of coercion, just because they are able to present them as sensible, self-evident and rational. I am the exact opposite - anything i say, even if it is exactly the same in substance as what someone else might say, is, by definition, unreasonable, and any suggestion i make, regardless of what it is, is a completely ill-thought-out, laughable, unworkable suggestion, which no one in their right mind would follow.
- so, of course, it's fucking difficult for me to feel like it's worth me writing anything in this blog, if anything i write is automatically unreliable, distorted, misrepresenting the truth, so far out there that no one could possibly believe it, etc etc, just because it's me who wrote it... and no one's ever going to read this anyway...
Some of the mood swing aspects of all this might be because of some of the supplements i've been taking (St John's Wort and Korean Ginseng) - while i'm never convinced that any of them are more than placebos, i've taken them in previous winters and thought they might have had some positive effect, so i picked some up when i saw them cheaply in a local supermarket, and finished the bottles (one a day) last week, so i dunno, maybe some of the extreme depression/fatigue/cognitive twistedness might be due to coming off them... so, i've bought some more and taken some today. I don't like to attribute chemical causes to thoughts that seem to derive completely logically from the circumstances of my life, though - i can't help feeling that treating symptoms with chemicals/supplements/whatever is simply cheating myself when what i need to solve my problems is to turn my life around - but right now there doesn't seem to be any acceptable way to do that...
(well, there is the one thing i've attached a little nugget of hope to, which is the meeting i have booked with Colin Barnes at the Centre for Disability Studies in Leeds, on Friday 8th Feb... but i have absolutely no money, and i just looked up train ticket prices, and the cheapest return from Birmingham to Leeds is fucking £45 - which is twice what i thought it would be, considering that a return from Birmingham to London, an only slightly shorter journey, is £15... and when i told one friend she offered to pay for the ticket, but i feel guilt about that...)
This post really hasn't come out how i wanted it to; i'm not sure if it's coherent at all, but i think i'll post it anyway. If anyone who knows me in real life is reading this (probably unlikely, i know, but still), i'd appreciate (even if i don't feel like i deserve) them to call or email me, because i was lifted out of this depression for at least a few hours yesterday just by the sound of a friendly voice, but there are only about 3 friends who i know i can call just because i want to hear from them, and only so often i can call them. Apologies for the serious doublethink headfuck. Maybe i'll get it together enough to be able to write something meaningful tomorrow...
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Master's House
Everyone needs to read this, because it is MADE OF AWESOME.
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Really good discussion on autism and disability as identity
I'm not going to say loads about this, i'm just posting here with the intention to spread it, in case there's anyone who reads this blog who doesn't read the blogs it's already on (which, to be fair, is probably quite unlikely... but you never know)...
Joel at NTs are Weird wrote this post called "Welcome to the Disability Community", on how many within the autistic self-advocacy community don't fully understand the social model of disability, and thus, in his (and my) opinion erroneously, don't identify as "disabled", seeing that as a negative label when in fact being part of a wider disability community can only benefit the autism acceptance movement.
(This is an attitude i see too often at places like Wrong Planet, and one of the main reasons why i don't post there much any more. I'm possibly going to post a link to these posts there tho, and see what kind of debate it engenders...)
Amanda at Ballastexistenz posted this inspired by Joel's post, and linking (in her original post and in the comment thread) to other autistic writers within a consciously pan-disability movement such as Cal Montgomery (Cal's and Amanda's writings are, IMO, pretty much equally tied as the best disability writing out there... whether the position both of them share as having both neurological and physical impairments has anything to do with that, i'm not sure, but i think both are incredibly good at pointing out not just the interesectionality but the essential unity of different impairments within a social construction of disability).
Amanda's post created (as her posts nearly always do) a discussion thread of extremely high quality comments; i commented, basically to agree with Joel and Amanda and to make a couple of points about language, but there's little i can say about the subject that Joel and/or Amanda haven't said already.
Of course, some autistic bloggers haven't agreed; ABFH posted her response here. I want to post a response to ABFH, but haven't quite worked out exactly how to tackle her points. (I usually agree with ABFH on nearly everything else, the only other major exception being her support for Barak Obama, but that's an issue for an entirely separate post.)
Anyway, this is just a pointer to those posts...
Joel at NTs are Weird wrote this post called "Welcome to the Disability Community", on how many within the autistic self-advocacy community don't fully understand the social model of disability, and thus, in his (and my) opinion erroneously, don't identify as "disabled", seeing that as a negative label when in fact being part of a wider disability community can only benefit the autism acceptance movement.
(This is an attitude i see too often at places like Wrong Planet, and one of the main reasons why i don't post there much any more. I'm possibly going to post a link to these posts there tho, and see what kind of debate it engenders...)
Amanda at Ballastexistenz posted this inspired by Joel's post, and linking (in her original post and in the comment thread) to other autistic writers within a consciously pan-disability movement such as Cal Montgomery (Cal's and Amanda's writings are, IMO, pretty much equally tied as the best disability writing out there... whether the position both of them share as having both neurological and physical impairments has anything to do with that, i'm not sure, but i think both are incredibly good at pointing out not just the interesectionality but the essential unity of different impairments within a social construction of disability).
Amanda's post created (as her posts nearly always do) a discussion thread of extremely high quality comments; i commented, basically to agree with Joel and Amanda and to make a couple of points about language, but there's little i can say about the subject that Joel and/or Amanda haven't said already.
Of course, some autistic bloggers haven't agreed; ABFH posted her response here. I want to post a response to ABFH, but haven't quite worked out exactly how to tackle her points. (I usually agree with ABFH on nearly everything else, the only other major exception being her support for Barak Obama, but that's an issue for an entirely separate post.)
Anyway, this is just a pointer to those posts...
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Shameless Conquering Lions
So Andrea tagged me for the Roar for Powerful Words award from the Shameless Lions Writing Circle...
I'm some sort of mixture of flattered and gobsmacked, because i really didn't think anyone would nominate me for a blogging award... anyway, according to Andrea, i need to pick 3 things i believe are "necessary to make writing good and powerful", and 5 people to pass the award on to...
For the 3 things that are necessary to make writing good and powerful, the first thing, IMO, is the ability to see links, parallels, metaphors or universal patterns that are shared by different things. This is something that, stereotypically, autistic people aren't supposed to have, and yet it's consistently the autistic bloggers and writers i know (and, on a wider level, disability bloggers/writers in general) that come up with the most powerful examples of it.
The second thing is something i'm finding it harder to define, but which i think basically boils down to being true to oneself; using one's own personal experience as a standpoint from which to find truth, and applying that truth in deeper and wider contexts - transcending, if you like, the barrier between private and public or personal and political. Representing oneself on one's own terms and without accepting the desires or attempts of others to "know better" about your reality, yet avoiding narcissism by refusing to limit the truths found therein to oneself, but extracting universal relevance from individual experience.
The third thing is something which i don't have anywhere near enough of, but really wish i had more of; the ability to put forward your own beliefs without fear of the controversy that might be engendered by them, or of their misinterpretation by others. There are a lot of things i have written on various message boards and communities that have been misrepresented or caused offence to people with differing viewpoints, and the resulting feelings of shame and feeling like people see me as some sort of bigot, hypocrite, or simply possessor of views that are just too far "beyond the pale" have caused me to give up trying to defend my views, and feel exiled from those communities. There are posts i have written for this blog, but then not posted because of fear that they would be so controversial and divisive that they would turn people i want as my allies against me. I have huge respect and admiration for people with the courage to put their real views out there, however "far out", without this kind of fear of "unacceptability" - who "come not as a lamb to the slaughter, but as a lion to conquer", to take a verse entirely out of context from my Christian days...
So, the 5 people who i am going to give this award to. I have, of course, picked people who didn't get the award from Andrea or from ABFH, who gave it to her, because the point of this is to pass it on...
First is Amanda Baggs of Ballastexistenz - the absolute no-debate choice, standing head and shoulders above anyone else i can think of. Her writing is, to me, some of the most moving, powerful, intelligent and insightful anywhere, let alone on the internet, and epitomises everything i mentioned above. Frankly, i'm amazed that she doesn't appear to have ever recieved this award before...
Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is another fantastic blogger, who is a great writer and, again, someone who, for highlighting the issues that she does, i'm really glad exists.
Elizabeth McClung of Screw Bronze! is another blogger i hugely admire for writing about incredibly dark realities in such a way as to be life-affirming without ever inviting pity or being sentimental, but cracking jokes and kicking ass. Also, this post by her is probably the best defence of blogging i've ever read...
Trinity is another blogger who effortlessly links together issues as disparate as disability rights, BDSM and sex-positive feminism, and is a great writer as well. Her primary blog is The Strangest Alchemy, but as i can't comment on that one because i'm not on LiveJournal, i've commented on her most recent post at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces, which she is a team member of, in the hope that it reaches her...
Ettina of Abnormaldiversity is another autistic blogger whose thoughts on diversity are extremely similar to my own, and who was among the people whose blogs made me decide to start blogging.
There are loads of other blogs i read that i consider to be the equal in quality of writing and in necessity of content to these; these were just basically the first 5 i thought of. I'm not really sure why nearly all my favourite bloggers currently appear to be Canadian women...
Anyway, just because i like lions (and wild members of the cat family in general), and the lion happens to play a significant role in the iconography and spirituality of a lot of the musical culture i'm into, i thought i'd add a few of my favourite lion images:
("I'm Not Ashamed" by Culture, "Jungle Lion" by Lee Perry and "Conquering Lion" by Yabby You were among the soundtrack to composing this post... which reminds me, i need to revive my music blog... and to blog about why i identify with the figure of Shiva Nataraja...)
I'm some sort of mixture of flattered and gobsmacked, because i really didn't think anyone would nominate me for a blogging award... anyway, according to Andrea, i need to pick 3 things i believe are "necessary to make writing good and powerful", and 5 people to pass the award on to...
For the 3 things that are necessary to make writing good and powerful, the first thing, IMO, is the ability to see links, parallels, metaphors or universal patterns that are shared by different things. This is something that, stereotypically, autistic people aren't supposed to have, and yet it's consistently the autistic bloggers and writers i know (and, on a wider level, disability bloggers/writers in general) that come up with the most powerful examples of it.
The second thing is something i'm finding it harder to define, but which i think basically boils down to being true to oneself; using one's own personal experience as a standpoint from which to find truth, and applying that truth in deeper and wider contexts - transcending, if you like, the barrier between private and public or personal and political. Representing oneself on one's own terms and without accepting the desires or attempts of others to "know better" about your reality, yet avoiding narcissism by refusing to limit the truths found therein to oneself, but extracting universal relevance from individual experience.
The third thing is something which i don't have anywhere near enough of, but really wish i had more of; the ability to put forward your own beliefs without fear of the controversy that might be engendered by them, or of their misinterpretation by others. There are a lot of things i have written on various message boards and communities that have been misrepresented or caused offence to people with differing viewpoints, and the resulting feelings of shame and feeling like people see me as some sort of bigot, hypocrite, or simply possessor of views that are just too far "beyond the pale" have caused me to give up trying to defend my views, and feel exiled from those communities. There are posts i have written for this blog, but then not posted because of fear that they would be so controversial and divisive that they would turn people i want as my allies against me. I have huge respect and admiration for people with the courage to put their real views out there, however "far out", without this kind of fear of "unacceptability" - who "come not as a lamb to the slaughter, but as a lion to conquer", to take a verse entirely out of context from my Christian days...
So, the 5 people who i am going to give this award to. I have, of course, picked people who didn't get the award from Andrea or from ABFH, who gave it to her, because the point of this is to pass it on...
First is Amanda Baggs of Ballastexistenz - the absolute no-debate choice, standing head and shoulders above anyone else i can think of. Her writing is, to me, some of the most moving, powerful, intelligent and insightful anywhere, let alone on the internet, and epitomises everything i mentioned above. Frankly, i'm amazed that she doesn't appear to have ever recieved this award before...
Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is another fantastic blogger, who is a great writer and, again, someone who, for highlighting the issues that she does, i'm really glad exists.
Elizabeth McClung of Screw Bronze! is another blogger i hugely admire for writing about incredibly dark realities in such a way as to be life-affirming without ever inviting pity or being sentimental, but cracking jokes and kicking ass. Also, this post by her is probably the best defence of blogging i've ever read...
Trinity is another blogger who effortlessly links together issues as disparate as disability rights, BDSM and sex-positive feminism, and is a great writer as well. Her primary blog is The Strangest Alchemy, but as i can't comment on that one because i'm not on LiveJournal, i've commented on her most recent post at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces, which she is a team member of, in the hope that it reaches her...
Ettina of Abnormaldiversity is another autistic blogger whose thoughts on diversity are extremely similar to my own, and who was among the people whose blogs made me decide to start blogging.
There are loads of other blogs i read that i consider to be the equal in quality of writing and in necessity of content to these; these were just basically the first 5 i thought of. I'm not really sure why nearly all my favourite bloggers currently appear to be Canadian women...
Anyway, just because i like lions (and wild members of the cat family in general), and the lion happens to play a significant role in the iconography and spirituality of a lot of the musical culture i'm into, i thought i'd add a few of my favourite lion images:
("I'm Not Ashamed" by Culture, "Jungle Lion" by Lee Perry and "Conquering Lion" by Yabby You were among the soundtrack to composing this post... which reminds me, i need to revive my music blog... and to blog about why i identify with the figure of Shiva Nataraja...)
Friday, November 30, 2007
Really, really awesome speech by Eli Clare
BODY SHAME, BODY PRIDE: LESSONS FROM THE DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENT by Eli Clare
An absolutely awesome, incredibly powerful speech about the intersections of trans, queer and disability identities and politics, about which i can't really say anything it doesn't say itself, except GO READ IT...
A few highlights:
Late at night
as I trace the long curve of your body,
tremors touch skin, reach inside,
and I expect to be taunted, only to have you
rise beneath my hands, ask for more.
Let’s lean towards a place where we can name bodily difference, even through our ambivalence, grief, longing, in ways that don’t fan the flames of shame, a place where none of us expect to be taunted and we know ourselves to be sexy and desirable.
---
The ability to keep bodily matters private is a privilege that some of us will never have. Just ask a poor person on welfare, a fat person, a visibly disabled person, a pregnant woman. Ask a person of color whose ethnic heritage isn't seemingly apparent. Just ask a seriously ill person, a gender ambiguous person, a non-passing transman or transwoman. All these people experience public scrutiny, in one way or another, of their bodies.
---
...the disability rights movement values self-determination. Who gets to make which choices about our bodies—where we sleep, what we eat, who we socialize with? A popular disability rights slogan declares, “Nothing about us without us.” For peoples who have long histories of institutionalization in nursing homes, group homes, psych wards, state hospitals, and rehab centers, self-determination is a radical and liberating politics. We get to determine how and when to explain ourselves, bodies not reduced to medical histories but rather belonging fully to us, doctors playing only small, bit roles. By valuing self-determination, we invite many different kinds of bodies to the table. We reach toward liberation rather than privilege.
---
Personally I’d like to grind the idea of normality to dust. I don’t mean that everyone in my worldview ought to be queer; it’s just that the very idea of normal means comparing ourselves to some external, and largely mythical, standard. But being normal or being queer aren’t the only choices.
but, the entire thing is utterly essential reading...
Eli Clare is the author of the excellent book "Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation" (which i've probably already mentioned several times in this blog... and there are still several posts i mean to write based on bits from it), and several books of poetry. Ze seems to identify as a queer woman in "Exile and Pride", but as a trans man in more recent stuff (such as this interview at EnGender), rather like Pat Califia, so i'm not 100% sure of hir preferred pronouns... Eli, if you're reading this, let me know if you're "he" all the time or only in certain contexts and i'll refer to you in future accordingly :)
and ze commented on my blog... :o *fannish swooning*
(as an aside, it's interesting that i first came across Pat Califia's writings as a trans man, then later discovered some of hir earlier works in which ze identified as a lesbian, and even later discovered ze had a physical impairment... whereas, i first came across Eli Clare as a disabled queer woman writer (through AK Press), then only later discovered stuff ze wrote in which ze identified as a trans man... i wonder how many other writers have gone through this process of identity, and how much of what has been seen as "lesbian culture", as a result, could more accurately be described as trans man culture?)
anyway, yeah. trans/crip alliance stuff rocks. :)
An absolutely awesome, incredibly powerful speech about the intersections of trans, queer and disability identities and politics, about which i can't really say anything it doesn't say itself, except GO READ IT...
A few highlights:
Late at night
as I trace the long curve of your body,
tremors touch skin, reach inside,
and I expect to be taunted, only to have you
rise beneath my hands, ask for more.
Let’s lean towards a place where we can name bodily difference, even through our ambivalence, grief, longing, in ways that don’t fan the flames of shame, a place where none of us expect to be taunted and we know ourselves to be sexy and desirable.
---
The ability to keep bodily matters private is a privilege that some of us will never have. Just ask a poor person on welfare, a fat person, a visibly disabled person, a pregnant woman. Ask a person of color whose ethnic heritage isn't seemingly apparent. Just ask a seriously ill person, a gender ambiguous person, a non-passing transman or transwoman. All these people experience public scrutiny, in one way or another, of their bodies.
---
...the disability rights movement values self-determination. Who gets to make which choices about our bodies—where we sleep, what we eat, who we socialize with? A popular disability rights slogan declares, “Nothing about us without us.” For peoples who have long histories of institutionalization in nursing homes, group homes, psych wards, state hospitals, and rehab centers, self-determination is a radical and liberating politics. We get to determine how and when to explain ourselves, bodies not reduced to medical histories but rather belonging fully to us, doctors playing only small, bit roles. By valuing self-determination, we invite many different kinds of bodies to the table. We reach toward liberation rather than privilege.
---
Personally I’d like to grind the idea of normality to dust. I don’t mean that everyone in my worldview ought to be queer; it’s just that the very idea of normal means comparing ourselves to some external, and largely mythical, standard. But being normal or being queer aren’t the only choices.
but, the entire thing is utterly essential reading...
Eli Clare is the author of the excellent book "Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation" (which i've probably already mentioned several times in this blog... and there are still several posts i mean to write based on bits from it), and several books of poetry. Ze seems to identify as a queer woman in "Exile and Pride", but as a trans man in more recent stuff (such as this interview at EnGender), rather like Pat Califia, so i'm not 100% sure of hir preferred pronouns... Eli, if you're reading this, let me know if you're "he" all the time or only in certain contexts and i'll refer to you in future accordingly :)
and ze commented on my blog... :o *fannish swooning*
(as an aside, it's interesting that i first came across Pat Califia's writings as a trans man, then later discovered some of hir earlier works in which ze identified as a lesbian, and even later discovered ze had a physical impairment... whereas, i first came across Eli Clare as a disabled queer woman writer (through AK Press), then only later discovered stuff ze wrote in which ze identified as a trans man... i wonder how many other writers have gone through this process of identity, and how much of what has been seen as "lesbian culture", as a result, could more accurately be described as trans man culture?)
anyway, yeah. trans/crip alliance stuff rocks. :)