Court overturns Prop. 8
This afternoon, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California overturned Prop. 8 on due process and equal protection grounds (PDF of the decision). At last, thank goodness, we have a step forward–but really, it’s a step that brings us right back to where we were in May 2008, when the state supreme court overturned the previous ballot initative-passed ban on same-sex marriage. It’s not so much an unequivocal step forward as it is a halt to the backsliding and the Court hauling the state out of the pit half of the population hurled it into. Still, to the couples who married in the brief summer of 2008, to the couples who wanted to get married after that cold night when Prop. 8 passed, and to everyone who cares about civil rights and equality for all, this ruling is wonderful. It’s a sign that the court can protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority and that even when bigotry holds sway, we can win. Eventually, we will win.
Back when CA Supreme Court was ruling on the procedural legality of Prop. 8, I wrote,
This decision will be a ruling once more on our humanity, on our dignity and our worth as equal human beings. Yes, the ruling is about marriage rights, but it’s apparent from looking at the ads and rhetoric of the anti-marriage equality side that the issue at hand is much broader. Are GLBTQI people indeed people, or are we monsters? By virtue of our nature, do we deserve to be shoved into the closet and hidden away so that we don’t corrupt the minds of (assumed to be straight) little children with our existence? Are our lives political footballs to be punted around for points until the election’s over and we’re told to just wait a little longer, our expectations are unreasonable and our demands unimportant? …I love this city and I love this state, but if the government decides once again that I do not have the rights to equality that are inherent to me by virtue of my humanity, if it decides once again to codify my second-class status into law, not content to leave it unspoken, assumed, and societally enforced, what place will there be for me here? [May 2009]
The court has ruled, and it stripped all the “concern for the children” and “sanctity of marriage” horseshit away from Prop. 8 and exposed its truth, that it was a bigoted attempt to legally classify queer people as inferior to straight people. In the conclusion to his ruling, Judge Walker wrote,
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that oppositesex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
This decision was a ruling on our humanity, on our dignity and our worth as equal human beings, and it affirmed that we are indeed people, who have the right to live and love in public. For once, we weren’t told that we had to wait a little longer–the importance of our demands was acknowledged and they were treated as a serious question of law.
I honestly didn’t think this day would come until the Supreme Court took up the case–and I wasn’t confident that they’d rule in support of equality. The composition of the Court is too close. I was still going to try, of course, and was briefly involved in an effort to put a repeal of Prop. 8 on the ballot for 2010, and would have supported it in 2012. This decision, though, circumvents all of the time, money, and labor that another ballot initiative would have required, and it’s an affirmation that the court system can work as it ought to. Thank god.
There’s a rally this evening at Castro, and a march from there to City Hall. I recall the last time I marched down Market Street for GLBTQI rights, a few nights after the 2008 election. What a relief and what a joy it’ll be to march in celebration tonight.
Politics of reproduction
Talking about having kids or not having kids often leads people to expose their asses. When I say that I don’t want to have kids, sometimes middle/upper-class/smart/liberal people tell me that I have a duty to have kids or else the uneducated/prejudiced/unintelligent/conservative/poor masses will outbreed us all!
On the other hand, I occasionally see news article about how there are too many Asians at X Bastion of White Privilege. In other words, I shouldn’t have kids because they’ll outperform white kids and steal the university seats and jobs that they are entitled to.
Here’s a cluebus: kids are not footsoldiers in a demographic war, no matter what side you’re on. To suggest that they are shows deep prejudices about the “right sort of people” that you ought to reexamine. See also: eugenics. Furthermore, it should not be stated or implied that the most important contribution that women can make for the advancement of society is give birth to and raise children. It is insulting and sexist and devalues the contributions that women themselves can make to society.*
I don’t want to have kids, therefore, you shouldn’t want me to have kids, either. What I do want is a stronger social safety net; affordable contraception and health care; better public education; and gender equality so that men can’t coerce women into pregnancy (more info on reproductive coercion); women faced with unwanted pregnancies have genuinely feasible options available to them; and kids can get good educations regardless of their class.
*ETA: This statement is not about mai’a's post “ain’t i a mama” at Feministe; I made this post a few hours before I read that one.
Adventures in Public Transit Fail
5/20
2 broken escalators (Embarcadero, Powell stations)
2 non-functional Translink Add Value machines (wouldn’t accept credit or debit cards – Embarcadero)
1 out of service change machine (Powell)
5/22
2 out of service Translink card readers (bus)
45 fucking minutes to get from the Mission to Russian Hill, courtesy of the Black & White Ball blocking Van Ness between Hayes and McAllister.
Anti-Oppression 101 Reading Recs?
The +1 has an internship at a research program that focuses on labor and gender issues, and wants to familiarize himself with the ideas, terminology, and basic works of the field. I was so excited when he said, “What feminist books would you recommend? I want to read them this summer,” you have no idea. He’s committed to social justice, he acts on his ideals, and he wants to educate himself–he’s a perfect ally, and he cares so much. He’s marvelous, and I love him for it.
*ahem* Got distracted there for a minute from the point of the post, which was to ask y’all what books you’d recommend for 101-style anti-oppression reading. We’ve got a book club of two, essentially, and we’re starting with Backlash and then Whipping Girl, and I’d also like to read some bell hooks this summer. I’m looking for books on feminism, queer theory, trans rights, anti-racism, classism, and disability activism. Ideally, they would be intersectional, or at least operate that way when read in conjunction with one another. What do you suggest?
Letters: ENDA
Via acrimonyastraea, gudbuytjane: “Barney Frank, get out of my pants.”
In response, I wrote an email to my representative; I urge you to write to yours (find them here), as well as to Pelosi in her capacity as Speaker of the House (contact link).
Dear Rep. Pelosi,
I am emailing you to urge you to support a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that will fully protect the rights of transgendered individuals. Transgendered people are vulnerable to discrimination, harassment, and outright violence in our society for no reason other than their gender identity, and it is up to our government to take a stand in defense of their civil rights by passing an ENDA that includes their rights as well as the rights of GLBQI people. I was appalled by Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) transphobic comments about trans people, which were reported in RollCall on Monday:
“He said concessions were made in the drafting of the language to address moderates’ concerns. For instance, Frank said, transgender people with “one set of genitals” would not be able to go to a bathroom for people with another set of genitals.
And, Frank said, they also would have to have a “consistent gender presentation” in order to be able to sue for discrimination.
“They can’t sit there with a full beard and a dress,” Frank said.”
Those remarks call upon damaging and fearmongering stereotypes of transgendered people. Instead, I urge you to support a fully inclusive ENDA.
Sincerely,
[PD]
Tortbunnies
Webcomic about rape statutes, which might bitterly amuse some of y’all.
Search Queries #2
I love the data features in WordPress, which tell me how many views this blog has received, which posts people are looking at, which sites they’re coming from, and which links they’re clicking on. My favorite feature, though, has to be the search terms tracker, which shows the search queries that land people at my blog. Occasionally, they are horrifying. Occasionally, they are mystifying. Occasionally, it’s an obvious case of mistaken identity, as when people land here looking for a pizza diavola recipe. Occasionally, they are effing hilarious, because I can visualize the readers angrily punching in their search queries, looking for results that will affirm their anti-feminist beliefs, clicking through to this blog, and reading confusedly before they realize that these are not the droids they’re looking for.
Some examples of the last category: dating a feminist is impossible
Oh, I’m sorry that you find it difficult to date someone who believes that people of all gender identities are equal. Wait, no, I’m not–I’m sorry for your +1, who is most certainly better off without you.
feminists ruin marr[iage]
What are you, a Quiverfull proponent? Try this on for size.
When You Say Exercise and Diet
[Trigger warning: discussion of fat-shaming and eating disorders.]
When it comes to obesity and fatness, many people will say that fat people should just eat healthy and start exercising, and then they’ll slim down to acceptable proportions. This concern-trolling suggestion relies on a number of faulty assumptions:
- That the fat person isn’t already eating healthily and exercising, and their current appearance reflects those behaviors.
- That the fat person is fat by choice, and has never tried to become thin–in a society where the images of idealized physique are uniformly thin.
- That becoming thin is easy and simply a matter of willpower–that if you diet enough and exercise enough, you will become thin.
- That being fat is not acceptable.
I’ve made my share of these shitty assumptions in the past, and my god, how I wish I could take them back. In the past decade and a half, I have watched the women in my life–and it has only been women, but if you’re male and have experience with fatness, feel free to speak up in the comments–torment themselves over the way they looked. So when you say that fat people should “eat healthy” and “just exercise,” blithely assuming that that’ll make a fat person slim down into a thin person, these are the people I think of:
Katie, Veronica, and Carly, in the 8th and 9th grade. We had class together a couple periods before lunch, and they would discuss their diets and compare what they’d eaten that day. Or more accurately, they’d compare what they hadn’t eaten that day, detailing breakfasts that they’d skipped, recess snacks they’d passed over, and lunches they were only going to eat half of. These girls were 12-14 years old and their brains and bodies were still forming. They needed to eat, they needed fuel for their growth spurts and their brain development and their full days of classes and P.E., and they were already starving themselves. They were children, and they were already counting calories. Before they’d left puberty, they’d already internalized the message that they needed to be thin, and that fat was ugly.
I particularly recall one day, when Katie showed the other two girls a Snickers bar, which was going to be her lunch. You see, Snickers bars have the calories written on the packaging, so they make it easy to count calories. Katie had skipped breakfast and the Snickers bar was going to be the entirety of her lunch. The three girls did become thinner–but tell me again how that’s an indication of health, when their behavior was blatantly unhealthy.
A friend came over for a visit when she was home on break from college. She’d always been plump and curvy, and the first thing my mom said when she saw her was, “Boy, you look great! You’ve lost so much weight!”
The friend had lost weight. She’d lost weight because she had had anorexia, been running obsessively, and been doing large amounts of cocaine and struggling with PTSD because a man raped her. Tell me again how being thin means you’re eating healthily and exercising properly and it means you’re healthier than a heavier person.
A college friend of mine was very short and very curvy in a way that reads as fat. She was a varsity athlete who spent 15 hours a week in the gym for sports practice and weight lifting. She ate healthily, with lots of fruit, vegetables, and grains. She was in great physical condition, but because of her build, she still looked plump. Looking fat is not the same thing as being unhealthy, nor is it an indicator of someone’s exercise or eating habits.
One year, my friend began exercising obsessively while skipping meals, and found that this made her look thinner. Nevermind the health consequences of doing weight lifting while skipping meals; she was becoming thin, by god, and talked about how if she could just summon the self-discipline to ignore the hunger pangs of starvation, she could keep up this routine and become thin and beautiful. She had anorexia.
Evi was a beautiful, intelligent, and fat woman I met in Rome. She felt uncomfortable in two-piece bathing suits because of her body. That summer, we walked miles all over the city on a daily basis, and ate very healthily, with lots of organic fruits, vegetables, and balanced diets, with little soda or junk food. Despite the common assumption that fat people aren’t physically fit, Evi had no problem with trekking all over Rome, up and down hills in the blazing heat, standing in museums for hours–or at least no more than any of the thin people did. Evi was just as fat at the end of the summer as she’d been at the beginning, despite getting tons of exercise–and just as beautiful and smart.
My mom is incredibly physically fit: rarely sick, golfs every day, goes on eight-mile walks, hauls 50 lb. sacks of concrete, and hikes up mountains. By American standards, she is thin. By Korean standards, she is fat and heavy. By any standards, she is extremely healthy and in top physical form. I remember, nevertheless, how my aunt ridiculed my mom when she wasn’t around, joking about how my mom’s feet were too big to find shoes in a Korean department store, and how she was really, really big. My mom and I have the same build, with one exception: she’s thinner than I am. Thanks, aunt.
Over the years, I’ve watched my mom guilt trip herself over eating a cookie (“I’m going to have to run an extra hour at the gym!”) and get frustrated with herself for not being able to lose belly fat or drop weight, all while eating extremely healthily and spending an hour at the gym every day. She couldn’t lose weight, no matter how much she tried, and when she went to the doctor to see if she had a thyroid problem, he told her that there was nothing wrong with her, and she just needed to eat even less and work out even more. The message here is that if you buy into this game, (1) you can never be thin enough; (2) exercise and diet are not magic bullets.
My oldest friend is fat. She’s also gorgeous, stylish, extroverted, smart, and funny. But she’s fat, and because of that, she hates her body and thinks she’s disgusting and life would be better if she were only thinner. She hates her body and loathes herself–how tragic is that, when she’s a great person?
Pocochina is funny and whip smart, and struggled with anorexia and exercise bulimia for years. She starved herself: “I remember breaking a fast after five days of band camp with a bullion cube in boiling water – didn’t want to use two, that’d have been excessive – and being disappointed in myself when I added a couple of crackers.” But she still wore a size 13, which is considered fat, and when she started eating again, the doctor told her she needed to stop. Poco gave up junk food and fucking starved herself and worked out and was still fat.
Edit: Update from pocochina in the comments:
Can I just add to the above some non-disordered behavior which might illustrate the resilience of my body? I spent two summers doing drum corps – that is fourteen hours a day, 7 days a week, of serious cardio and resistance training, and it’s a traveling group sport, so food is limited for financial reasons and diet is planned for nutrition. I was…one size smaller than I am now? Maybe two? Treating exercise like it was two full time jobs. One full time job per dress size, maybe?
That body is awesome. It let me be one of the more physically and artistically consistent people there. This was a huge step in my recovery, because I’d bought all the bullshit about your body reflecting how hard-working and worthwhile you were. And I had to get in there myself to learn that it didn’t.
Why does anyone think that diet and exercise are magic bullets? Why does anyone assume that fat people just aren’t trying hard enough, that they have no self-control, that they don’t exercise and don’t eat healthily? Why doesn’t anyone think about the havoc that eating disorders and obsessive exercise can wreak on your body, your mind, your self-esteem, before spouting off about how “fat people just need to try harder, like I do”? Do they have no fat friends? Do they have no female friends who’ve ever struggled with their weight, body image, and self-esteem? I don’t think that my experience with my friends and family has been atypical, and I know at least three women who had anorexia, and Katie’s behavior probably qualifies, as well.
I think of girls and women who are thin, who are fat, and who are all beautiful and interesting and who deserve so much better than being told that their bodies aren’t good enough. They deserve so much better than being shamed into torturing themselves, starving themselves and making themselves lightheaded with hunger and exhaustion just so they’ll lose weight–and being told, if they succeed, that starvation is a good look for them, and if they don’t, that they’re still not thin enough and they must not have tried hard enough or wanted it enough.
I’ll close with some fragments out of old journal entries from the fall of 2006, when I thought I was disgustingly overweight and ugly. I was eating healthy and working out every day, and still. Wasn’t. Thin. Enough.
October 2006: Goal: Get down to 135 lbs., then 130. Become … silhouette-skinny. [I.e. so thin that clothes would hang loosely and I would disappear when turned sideways. It's an aesthetic I've always liked, but one that my bone structure will never fit.]
October 2006: Losing weight is good. However, I need a belt because my fabulous Monaco size 6 jeans are slipping off my hips. I feel overweight now. … My goal is for my Gap 4s to be loose … I’m not sure that’s possible without starving myself, though, as well as running miles and miles.
November 2006: Get your life organized, manage your time, go to the gym, stop eating takeout, lose weight. [takeout once a week--a horror indeed!]
Obsessing over my weight and viewing food and exercise as means to lose weight rather than as things to enjoy and means to be fit only served to amplify my misery. I used to think I was weak for lacking the will power to be anorexic; that is how poisonous the “if you’d just eat better and exercise more” mantra is. No one should ever have to wish for an eating disorder and think themselves weak because their body insists on getting enough food. The fat people you shame might already be physically fit and eating healthily, and the thin people you praise might be suffering from eating disorders. Size is not a good indication of eating or exercise practices, at any size.
Why Internet Comments Matter
[Warning: fat-shaming comments are the topic of the post]
Kate Harding recently wrote a fantastic article for Salon that started with Southwest’s shitty treatment of a fat celebrity and went on to discuss the fact that shaming, mocking, ridiculing, despising, concern trolling, and loathing fat people happens all the time to regular, non-celebrity fat people (“Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat“). In the article, she wrote how anti-fat policies on airlines almost kept her sister from being able to say goodbye to their dying mother:
Here’s the first thing I think of when this issue comes up, for instance: The weekend my mom was dying. Two of my siblings and I got to her bedside within hours of getting the call that she’d had a massive heart attack. Our other sister took two days to get there. She could fly coach, technically, with a seatbelt extender and the armrests digging into her sides. But she couldn’t afford two seats, especially on such short notice, and knew she might be forced to buy another if the airline decided she was too big to count as a single human being. She knew she might be bumped from the flight she’d paid for, and forced to wait around for one that was less full, for who knows how long, while our mother’s organs were shutting down in another country. And she knew that even if she was allowed to fly on the flight she’d booked, there was every chance she’d end up sitting next to someone who would spend the whole time sighing heavily and throwing her dirty looks — then probably spend the rest of her life telling the story of being next to that awful fat woman on a flight from Boston to Toronto, that disgusting creature who just booked a single seat without a thought to the people who would have to brush up against her monstrous bulk for a couple of hours, like she had to be somewhere so important it was worth inconveniencing strangers.
… my sister chose to drive a thousand miles as fast as she could, hoping she’d get there in time. While she was on the road, the doctors informed us that there was nothing else they could do, so the whole family’s focus shifted from wondering whether Mom would make it to wondering whether my sister would. … But that agonizing day of asking my mother to please hang on a little longer — while she was wracked with pain beyond the reach of morphine, moaning like a wounded animal when awake enough to communicate at all – is the first thing I always think of when the debate about whether fat people deserve affordable air travel comes up. You think of some lumbering beast who had the gall to “steal” an inch of your seat that one time. I think of a dying woman waiting for the last of her babies to say goodbye.
The main gist of the article is: people treat fat people like shit all the time, and this actively affects their quality of life. Awful, right?
Well. The article is making the rounds in Google Reader, and so I saw some comments on it today where the commenters had clearly skipped over all the portions about Kate’s dying mother and other fat people who have difficulties flying:
I think of the non-famous people who have been thrown off flights for making thin people uncomfortable — the brother and sister on their way home from their mom’s memorial service, the man who didn’t make it to a family funeral at all, the man living on disability who couldn’t afford a second seat to meet with doctors about a liver transplant — and all of the commenters at my blog who say, every time we talk about this, “I’m terrified to fly” or “I just don’t fly.” … because they’re fat. And they can’t afford two seats. … the risk of smaller-scale humiliations — sitting next to someone who complains about their size; absorbing flight attendants’ naked disdain; overhearing someone say “I hope I don’t have to sit next to her“; being told, as Smith’s seatmate on his later flight was, that they should really purchase two seats in the future to avoid making other people uncomfortable; plus the aforementioned dirty looks and heavy sighs — is often enough to keep them at home. It’s enough to make people say things like, … “If I start driving now, I think I’ll get there in time to say goodbye.”
Instead, their focus was on that fat celebrity that was kicked off of Southwest, and how they had no sympathy for him. I am uneasy about the ethics of reprinting comments posted in a Google Reader feed, which are semi-private, so here’s a summary:
- He’s rich, so he should be able to go to the gym, eat healthy, and pay doctors and nutritionists to help him lose weight. If he tries hard and can’t lose weight, he can afford weight loss surgery.
- He’s sedentary and eats lots of processed foods, so his fatness is entirely his fault and I have no sympathy for how he was treated.
- Won’t decreasing prejudice against fat people just encourage people to become fat?
- A person just shouldn’t let himself go like that.
- He’s okay with being fat, so he’s setting a bad example for the children. And obesity is causing many problems in the health care system.
- Genetics might have something to do with it, but I can’t believe it accounts for everything, so I’m going to assume that personal choices are what makes them fat.
- Fat people can lose weight and keep it off.
- I have the means (time, money, energy) to keep myself looking good, and I take pride in that. So fat people’s choice to not do that is their choice, and they have to live with the consequences of that.
- I know some people are poor and uneducated about healthy eating, and so they deserve my sympathy, but these other fat people? Totally fat because they choose to be fat.
In other words, the commenters demonstrated a complete and utter lack of empathy; a lack of understanding of how class, race, and able-bodied-ness often intersect with fatness; a lack of understanding of recent studies (NYT) that show that genetics play a huge role in body weight; and broadly speaking, a great dollop of anti-fat prejudice. We went back and forth in the thread and it was enormously frustrating trying to talk about why, exactly, shaming fat people is wrong and why a lot of their assumptions are bunk. (For a more detailed discussion of the topic, see the FAQ at Shapely Prose.)
So, why does this matter? It’s just comments on the internet, right? People say things that are privileged, prejudiced, rude, cruel, stupid, or downright ignorant on the internet all the time. What’s the big deal? Close your browser and walk away. Disengage.
The comments matter because each one of them is from a person (or this case, two people, who left those comments over the course of a thread). They represent a real person somewhere out there who holds those thoughts and who interacts with fat people–or who doesn’t interact with fat people, because they despise the bad fatties who choose to be fat and pity the deserving fatties, the ones who’ve earned their compassion by being too poor to learn about nutrition and health.
The kicker is? I know these people. They are acquaintances and I’ve met them in person and gone to their house and broken bread with them. They’re not just random people on the internet, which underscores the point that no one is just a random person on the internet. All the comments on newspaper sites and blogs and public boards and forums are from real people with real thoughts, and that’s why it’s important to engage in dialogue with them. That is why internet comments matter and why I care about them and why I become, let’s face it, angry and frustrated while I choose keep engaging with them. It’s never “just” the internet.
This post has been brought to you by excessive frustration with today’s Fat Bingo comment thread.
Book Review 4: Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (white, gay, cisgendered, able-bodied, living) is a collection of humorous, autobiographical essays. Sahiya and I are going to a Sedaris talk later this year, so I read his book. The essays cover his adolescence and later years, and topics range from speech therapy to his dysfunctional relationships with his family to fixing up a house in France with his partner, Hugh. There’s an essay on performance art, in which Sedaris skewers his artistic ambitions and is upfront about admitting that his artistic inspiration was fueled primarily by drugs; when his dealer moves away, he ends his career as a performance artist. Anyone who has ever looked at an art installation with complete bewilderment, or sat through a tedious recital and spent the whole time daydreaming will see themselves reflected in this piece. The other essays that I liked had to do with moving to France and Sedaris’ culture shock and his difficulties with learning the language. In all, the essays reveal a self-deprecating, quirky personality (he collects grotesque taxidermy specimens). It’s worth reading for the laughs, but there’s nevertheless an overriding feeling of the melancholy that comes from mediocrity hanging throughout the book.
Book Review 3: Faro’s Daughter, Georgette Heyer
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Faro’s Daughter, by Georgette Heyer (white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, dead), is a Regency romance novel, although it’s so ridiculous and hilarious that it’s more like a parody of the genre. But Heyer established the genre in the first place! Hmm. At any rate, Faro’s Daughter is the usual Regency fare: an impoverished, good-hearted heroine! Mistaken identity! Aristocratic codes of behavior! Hapless first loves! Scathing insights into the conventions of romance novels! Etc.
The good: Deb Grantham, the aforementioned impoverished, good-hearted heroine, is intelligent, humorous, kind, and takes no crap from any man, be he a devoted young swain or a rude, insulting gentleman. Not only does she save a girl from an arranged marriage to a scoundrel and a certain future of marital rape, she also runs gambling tables in her aunt’s gaming house and holds her own in a battle of wits with the rude, insulting gentleman.
The bad: The book is surprisingly decent at avoiding gender stereotypes and showing that such assumptions are flawed. However, there’s an unpleasant scene at the end where Ravenscar, Deb’s antagonist, kisses her against her will, and in the end, she yields to him and enjoys it. Ugh. Also, it is Regency fare, which means it has class issues that are built into the framework of the story but never explored.
On the whole, Faro’s Daughter is an entertaining fluff read about a smart woman dealing with wit and élan with the variously infuriating men in her life: a hapless young swain; his cousin, who is determined to break them apart; and a self-absorbed, profligate brother.
Book Review 2: The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett (white, straight, cisgendered, disabled, living) is a Discworld Watch book. Murders in Ankh-Morpork; the disappearance of Sergeant Angua; the coronation of the new Low King of the dwarves; gender identity expression among dwarves; werewolf supremacists; a talking dog; and a missing loaf of sacred dwarf bread: all these are somehow linked together, as His Excellency the Ambassador, His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes finds out on a diplomatic mission to Überwald.
I loved this book! It’s that rarest of beasts, an ensemble novel with multiple plot threads that diverge and converge as needed without feeling contrived. Pratchett satirizes diplomacy, normative gender standards (it was accepted dwarf wisdom that all dwarves were assumed to be male, unless otherwise stated, and woe unto a dwarf who wanted to state otherwise…until Corporal Littlebottom came along!), cultural artifacts, and more.
I particularly liked Sergeant Angua’s prominent role in this book and how going home to Überwald forces her to deal with the complexities of her werewolf identity and her cross-species relationship with Carrot, her human lover. Angua’s struggle with both those issues has been mentioned in passing in previous Watch books, and it was good to see her finally have her say. In short, Angua isn’t human for part of the month and wolf for part of the month, she’s a werewolf all the time, and in The Fifth Elephant, Carrot sees her in the society of wolves and werewolves and comes to a better understanding of Angua and her personal history.
*Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s and has been an advocate for increased funding for Alzheimer’s research. While I don’t know if he self-identifies as disabled, I’m hesitant to go with the approach of treating being able-bodied as the norm.
Book Review 1: Cleaving, Julie Powell
Short reviews of the books I read in January. The authors’ identities with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, by Julie Powell (white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, living), is a first-person memoir about learning butchery and having an affair. I expected the book to be interesting purely on the basis of its subject matter (butchery! affairs! drama!), but I’ve since learned that no topic is inherently interesting, and this is especially true when the writing is lackluster, as is the case in Cleaving. Summary of the book in five sentences:
- Julie looooooooooves her lover, D.
- But he haaaaaaaates her. [Understandable, as she stalks him with frightening intensity.]
- Julie’s husband is sooooo sweet and she just doesn’t know why she can’t be happy with him boo hoo hoo.
- She’s so toooooooooooortured.
- Meat is cool!
Snarking aside, the writing is sloppy and alternately vapid and tortured. Powell writes at great length that she loves D, but after a few hundred pages, I still didn’t have any idea why she loved him. He was never fleshed out as a character, attractive or otherwise, and that shallowness is typical of the book as a whole, whether Powell is describing her feelings for D or her motivations for learning butchery. In the meantime, her long-suffering, saintly, perfect, sweet, beloved husband Eric suffers, like D, from a surfeit of adjectives while also failing to be a fully-realized character. He’s more like a sketch of a Good Spouse than a living, breathing character with thoughts, motivations, and actions. When Powell writes about butchery, the prose perks up and becomes genuinely engaging–but then she tries to use the butchery lessons as analogies for the status of her non-relationship with D, with about as much sophistication as a fifth grader doing writing exercises. While the raw material for a good book is here, Powell fails to shape it into anything interesting. There’s no plot or developmental arc, and for all the self-recrimination about her affair and her flaws as a person, Powell’s character doesn’t grow at all over the course of the book, making it, in the end, a waste of time.
Trigger warnings: Attempted rape scene: a man crawls into Powell’s tent, assaults her, and tries to rape her. Afterward, Powell refuses to call it rape, although it blatantly is, at one point saying, “I don’t want to use that word.” That made me very uncomfortable; while Powell is free to use whatever coping methods she likes and write about them however she likes, I was sad that she decided to publish one that reinforces the too-common tendency to avoid labeling rape as rape. Additionally, people who are triggered by descriptions of stalking should also be wary of Cleaving, because Powell stalks D obsessively and writes about it at length.
Verdict: Thumbs down. If you want to read a first-person memoir about learning butchery, try Bill Buford’s Heat, which is hilarious and informative. If, however, you enjoy listening to people whinge pathetically, self-centeredly, and at great length about their tortured love lives, Cleaving is the book for you!
Book Link
Via Troisroyaumes, More than 50 books by Queer People of Color. I’m amazed by how few of those authors I’ve heard of, and how few of those books I’ve read (one, to be precise, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred), despite considering myself a voracious reader. I’m looking forward to reading more books from that list, encountering new authors with a wide variety of perspectives, and doing my tiny bit to prove that there is a market for books by and about queer POC (Bloomsbury, I’m looking at you). First on the list: Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which my college roommate gave to me–and which has been sitting on my bookshelf since then!
Books Books Books
After last year’s RaceFail, I vowed to read more books by and about people of color, women, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. It would expose me to a broader range of authors writing from a wide variety of perspectives and it would do my tiny bit to show that there is an audience for these books and authors. And then I promptly bought Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, who is, to the best of my knowledge, a white, hetero, able-bodied, cisgendered man. On the other hand, I also read Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred
In the past, I’ve made a number of resolutions about books and failed to adhere to most of them. There’s the bibliophile’s classic, “I won’t buy any more books until I read all the ones I already have.” (ha! Has anyone ever successfully adhered to that, I wonder? Circumventing the letter of the resolution by using the library doesn’t count.) There’s the bibliophilic blogger’s, “I’ll blog about every book I read!” (ha!) Etc. Grand, long-term resolutions like that don’t work for me; what works for me are short-term goals and lists, such as, “I will read the copy of Silas Marner
- Finish Anna Karenina
. I started it last year after finding a cheap copy in a used bookstore the year before that, and after reading Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which incorporates allusions to AK as a running gag. I like it, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is that it’s physically a large book, which makes it inconvenient for carrying around.
- Finish Sherry Turkel’s (ed.) Evocative Objects
, which, like Anna Karenina, is on the heavy side for carrying around. It’s a collection of short essays about objects important to the authors.
- Read more Octavia E. Butler. Kindred was brilliant and unsettling and I wish I’d read it when I was younger.
- Finish Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution
, which I borrowed from Sahiya ages ago, started, and didn’t finish for no particular reason.
- Read one of the Greenland books that M lent me in 2008, which have been through two moves with me.
I plan to mix these books with recs via Tari’s reading blog at Troisroyaumes and Google Reader shares (because she shares/blogs a lot–yay bibliophiles!); LJ recs; and other miscellaneous rec sources. Here’s hoping that in the next few months, I will (a) finish some of the partly-read books I have; (b) read books by authors who are of color, female, LGBTQI, and/or disabled.
Happy New Year!
2009 thoughts: my second blogiversary at this site was in August, and my birthday was in the fall. Go me!
2010 thoughts: my goals for the new year:
- Learn to make a good chicken vindaloo.
- Use up the economy size bottle of shampoo that I’ve been lugging around since the summer of 2007, through four moves, before I move again this summer.
- Use up the farro, brown rice, wild rice, and barley in the pantry before I move again.
- Relax about cleaning. It’s not the end of the world if things are messy, and I suspect relaxing will make me happier.
- Knit up the stash of acrylic yarn I’ve been hauling around since college–possibly since before college.
- Resist the temptation to buy books. The library has lots of books, and books that are borrowed from the library don’t have to be packed up and moved or shipped when I move. In fact, the library positively discourages that sort of thing!
- Make ice cream once a month.
- Write enough stories to participate in Remix this year — I’m not sure how many stories I have that qualify that haven’t been remixed already.
