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| 0374610320
| 9780374610326
| 0374610320
| 4.22
| 18,476
| Sep 12, 2023
| Sep 12, 2023
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liked it
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Wait, this book isn’t by Naomi Wolf? Why did I even bother … jk. Although, ironically, I haven’t read anything by Naomi Klein previously, and I’ve rea
Wait, this book isn’t by Naomi Wolf? Why did I even bother … jk. Although, ironically, I haven’t read anything by Naomi Klein previously, and I’ve read two books by Naomi Wolf (more on that in a bit). I don’t think I personally have conflated the two Naomis myself, but I’m sure that’s just the lack of opportunity. Doppelganger intrigued me because I wanted to hear about Klein’s deep dive into the world in which Wolf has immersed herself and what lessons that holds for the fragile state of our democracies. Though this book is built on premise of people mistaking the two Naomis to a ridiculous degree online, Klein makes it clear that this book isn’t so much about Wolf as it is about the crowd she hangs out with these days. Klein is interested in this “mirror world,” as she calls it, and how Wolf went from third-wave feminist darling to conspiracy-theory monger and general alt-right poster woman. So she listens to Steve Bannon’s podcast, plumbs the depth of Wolf’s Twitter, and generally examines the ways in which the alt right and adjacent movements use, manipulate, and take advantage of media (both traditional and social) to sway people to their cause. Because we are living in a unique tipping point in history. Mass literacy battles with mass media illiteracy. Even critical thinking doesn’t exempt one from falling prey to misinformation, of course. One of Klein’s key points is that Wolf is a smart person and a deep thinker—many prominent people in these movements are, and it would be a mistake to underestimate them or label anyone associated with them as less intelligent. Rather, Klein wants to figure out what makes the mirror world so enticing. Doppelganger is one of an emerging genre of pop culture political books looking at the effect of the internet age on politics and society. Some of Klein’s most important takeaways come from reflection on how the internet encourages us to become doppelgangers of ourselves (in how we perform ourselves online). As someone who “grew up” on the internet—on Neopets and Geocities and message boards and live chatrooms and whatnot—I feel this. To this day, I might spend more time on any given day talking to people behind my “tachyondecay” username and an avatar than my real name and face. On an individual basis that’s fine. But when you scale this up to a societal level, Klein points out, cracks appear that leave us vulnerable to the misinformation that fuels conspiracy and polarization. In this way, Klein scatters references to different forms of doppelganger throughout the book. She did a deep dive into doppelgangers in literature and film (she talks a lot about Philip Roth, shrug). I watched Dual because she mentions it here and it has Karen Gillan in it (it’s weird and not at all satisfying, IMO). Though there’s something amusing imagining Klein obsessively consuming all of these books and movies for research purposes, all in all I don’t know that she successfully connects her doppelganger discussion to her broader points about the mirror world. I understand that she’s trying to say Wolf is more a doppelganger of herself than she is of Klein, that Wolf’s trip through the looking glass has resulted in that kind of self-doppelganging. But it feels like a slightly contrived twist. As far as Wolf herself goes, well … I read The Beauty Myth when I was 22, young, naïve (though I am pleasantly surprised to find I didn’t go gaga over it and therefore can honestly say I had my own reservations). Then five years later I read Vagina and criticized it for much the same reasons Klein criticizes Wolf: mistaking anecdotal evidence for science, confirmation bias, etc. Both of these reviews are real trips to read now, given that I was writing them back when I thought I was a cisgender man (oops). But I stand by my work. I respect Klein taking the high road and refusing to dangle Wolf in front of us like a cautionary tale. Still … she is. Like Klein, I can’t speculate about the precise factors that galvanized Wolf’s slide towards authoritarian militancy and conspiracy theories—but I can watch it, judge it, and remind myself that we are all vulnerable here. That’s what Klein realizes as she canvasses for her husband in the Canadian federal election and visits with people who should be sympathetic to the NDP but are raving anti-vaxxers instead. Doppelganger offers up some cogent and prescient (in the sense that even for a relatively recent book, it feels like Klein anticipated some of what has happened since it was published) analysis of the cracks in our media world. It stumbles a bit as Klein dances around her various topics of doppelgangers, propaganda, etc., and as a result it feels a little longer and more repetitive than it needs to be. This is a book that I would recommend if, like me, you are a sucker for discussions of media literacy, awareness of conspiracy theories, and how we can strengthen our democracy. It has enough substance to be worth the read—yet having read it, I don’t feel like I particularly learned much I didn’t already know. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 09, 2024
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Jul 15, 2024
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Aug 06, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 125027141X
| 9781250271419
| 125027141X
| 4.10
| 18,000
| Sep 13, 2018
| Mar 08, 2022
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it was ok
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Women are some kind of magic, to quote amanda lovelace, so it’s no wonder the patriarchy thinks we’re witches. The metaphor (and, for parts of history
Women are some kind of magic, to quote amanda lovelace, so it’s no wonder the patriarchy thinks we’re witches. The metaphor (and, for parts of history, literal belief) of woman-as-witch is a potent one. In Defense of Witches seeks to connect contemporary feminist struggles with the legacy of the witch hunts and trials that ran through Europe and America. Mona Chollet, translated here by Sophie R. Lewis, looks at a number of themes, like beauty standards, or the decision whether or not to have kids. I’m not sure how much I learned from this book, but it has some good synthesis of second- and third-wave feminism and presents a more European perspective than I’m used to. The chapters are long: in addition to the introduction, there are only four: “A Life of One’s Own,” “Wanting Sterility,” “The Dizzy Heights,” and “Turning the World Upside Down.” Averaging fifty pages, each chapter packs quite the punch. Chollet begins by examining the desire for independence beyond the home. From there, she talks about the pressure to procreate, followed by the idea that women have an expiration date, that after a certain age we just can’t be successful or desired anymore. The book finishes on an optimistic note, referring to progress Chollet sees through movements like #MeToo, and a reminder that we can take control of our bodies without being essentialist about gender. If I am disappointed in In Defense of Witches, it’s only because I was expecting more … witches? Like I kind of thought this book was about witch hunts and trials. Chollet really only references these in passing, however. There are a few juicy quotes from primary sources and researchers’ materials. But mainly she’s using the idea of women as witches as a lens to examine the tension between feminist writings of the twentieth century and broader society’s pushback. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but the way the book’s title, subtitle, and design lean so heavily into it, I feel like I’m sensible for expecting there to be more of a connection. As it is, I really enjoyed how many French writers and thinkers Chollet mentions and quotes. My feminist reading (most of my reading, let’s be real) is in a bubble of American, British, and occasionally Canadian authors. I don’t recognize a lot of the names Chollet drops—and that’s a good thing. I commented to a close friend of mine who is French that I felt like I was getting a window into what it’s like to come up into feminism in France. On top of this, of course, Chollet’s view itself is informed by French culture and standards—as evidenced by the very casual way in which she discusses wanting to have a lot of lovers, lol, and takes shots at American culture for being far less tolerant of this attitude among women. Chollet’s attitudes and arguments are firmly rooted in segments of second-wave feminism; indeed, In Defense of Witches can in many ways be viewed as a love letter to Gloria Steinem, whom Chollet quotes and praises interminably. On one hand, I appreciate this because my view of second-wave feminism is a little jaded and has been coloured by its appropriation by TERFs. On the other hand, although Chollet’s analysis makes offhand noises towards inclusion of queer and trans identities, it stops short of a full-throated attempt to integrate trans and nonbinary people. So in this respect, I ran up against the limits of this book’s analysis fairly quickly: it pulls together some interesting ideas, but it also doesn’t bring up anything all that new or radical. Probably the most enduring theme here is rationality versus irrationality and the way the former is inevitably masculine-coded, the latter, feminine-coded. Chollet argues that irrationality and emotionality are not the same. Patriarchy’s attempts to restrict women’s power and influence are rooted, in part, she maintains, because male-dominated institutions feared the power, creativity, and efficiency of women’s emotions. Hence the attempts to paint us as “hysterical.” Chollet makes the case that emotionality, while not an essentialist quality and something that many men can possess as well, is key to a more compassionate and just future in our society—something with which I am sympathetic. If there has been any theme to my overall arc, it has been moving away from the highly rational, academic mindset I cultivated in high school towards a mindset that embraces the irrational when needed (is it any wonder I found my true gender along the way?). In Defense of Witches is an all right book, and for others, could very well be revelatory. For me it was a fine way to pass the time, and it exposed me to writers and ideas that I might not have otherwise heard on this side of the pond. However, it wasn’t quite the book I was looking for, and in some respects, it doesn’t go as far as I wanted it to. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0062666975
| 9780062666970
| 0062666975
| 4.24
| 6,194
| Jan 21, 2020
| Jan 07, 2020
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really liked it
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We have all heard the tired refrain “boys will be boys.” Challenging this adage has been one of the main undertakings of feminism in the past half-cen
We have all heard the tired refrain “boys will be boys.” Challenging this adage has been one of the main undertakings of feminism in the past half-century. Yet how successful have we been in dismantling rape culture and teaching consent? More broadly, what messages do boys and young men receive about sex and sexuality, and how is that influencing their behaviour as they navigate their first intimate relationships? In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein explores these touchy subjects by going to the source: interviewing young men in high school and college. This 2020 book is a follow-up to Orenstein’s 2011 Girls & Sex, which I haven’t read. I might go back and read it someday. I chose to read Boys & Sex because I feel like I have a strong grasp on how girls and women are told to deal with sex. Despite living the first thirty years of my life as a man (I realized I am trans in 2020), I don’t have any clear idea of what is expected of men when it comes to sex. Reading this book was a revelation in the sense that it confirmed this feeling: none of the experiences described in this book remotely resemble anything I thought, felt, or did during my adolescence or young adulthood. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to being trans and how much to attribute to being ace, yet here we are. What an affirming read in that sense. Orenstein covers a lot of broad themes chapter by chapter. Some of these include porn, hookup culture, queer men, race, consent, compulsory sexuality, toxic masculinity, and how to talk to our boys. She editorializes a lot, interjecting with her own opinions and estimations of her interview subjects. I think this is a good thing; it is a poor journalist who uncritically reports on what her sources say without offering context, correction, or in some cases, rebuttal. At the same time, Orenstein does her best to “get out of the way” of her subjects, seeking not to tell their stories for them but instead share their unique perspectives. She has a whole chapter on queer and trans men, noting in her introduction that she regrets Girls & Sex overlooks trans women. I found this chapter in particular super interesting. Although the experiences of trans women and trans men are often thought of as inverses, they are not symmetrical. So it wasn’t so much that I was like, “Oooh, this person is ‘going the other way’” as I was fascinated by the idea of a person who had the experience of compulsory sexuality from a young woman’s perspective before ultimately transitioning and looking at it as a man. In contrast, as I said above, I feel like I noped out of that from the start, so I’m tabula rasa in that regard. The same was true of the chapter on hookup culture. As Orenstein shares subjects’ stories of feeling the intense pressure to hook up and how many of them regret it as they have aged or are glad they’ve moved away from such behaviour, all I could think was, “That was not me.” Not in a superior kind of way, just a bemused, “Was this happening all around me in high school?” (It was!) and “Is this what I was ‘missing’ in university?” In this respect, Boys & Sex is enlightening for me because I never talked to my peers about this stuff back when we all thought I was a boy. Orenstein reminds us that boys and men are, contrary to stereotypes, incredibly thoughtful when it comes to these subjects. They’re just often discouraged from talking about it. The book finishes with an intense chapter around how to have difficult conversations. Orenstein shares the story of a young man who eventually realizes that he was the perpetrator of assault on a woman he hooked up with in college. At the time, he didn’t see it that way and saw himself as a “good man” who respected women and looked for consent—but as he started to understand how she remembered that night, he was ashamed. Orenstein shares how he and the woman have undergone a kind of restorative justice process. It’s a fascinating story because it speaks to something I think we often overlook. Lots of people say, “Men are trash,” and then the defenders of our young men say, “Hashtag not all men.” Which is true! But if that is where we stop, without doing anything about the men and boys inculcated into rape culture, then we aren’t changing anything. Orenstein points out that our current system is raising really flawed (and fucked up) boys and men, and they need compassion and grace as we deprogram the toxic parts of their masculinity. That doesn’t mean unconditional forgiveness or freedom from consequences—but it has to mean a more nuanced conversation. Boys & Sex is a valuable contribution to that social conversation. It’s thorough yet not too long. It does its best to be intersectional—I didn’t talk too much about it, but I really liked the chapter on race—I think the one lens I really noticed was missing was disability. Obviously, Orenstein’s is not the last word on this subject. This is one important contribution among many others that have come before or since. But if, like me, you feel particularly out of the loop when it comes to how boys and men in Canada and the US are raised to think about and act on their sexuality, this book will open your eyes. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 03, 2024
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Jun 09, 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0807006475
| 9780807006474
| 0807006475
| 4.33
| 10,396
| Jan 10, 2023
| Jan 10, 2023
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really liked it
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Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose
Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon debunks twenty prevalent anti-fatness myths. Anti-fat bias is consistently the only form of discrimination that has increased over the past decades (other types have decreased or stayed roughly the same), and sometimes it is so pervasive that we don’t even realize we are engaging in it. Gordon, a white fat woman and cohost of the podcast Maintenance Phase, organizes her myth-busting into four parts: “Being Fat Is a Choice,” “But What About Your Health?,” “Fat Acceptance Glorifies Obesity,” and “Fat People Should….” She makes it clear that this book is an introductory guide aimed at thin readers like myself and designed to get us thinking about our implicit biases and the systemic biases of society. Most chapters include calls to action at the end: concrete steps someone can take to challenge the discrimination described in that chapter. Some of these myths I had already heard debunked, many from a longread written by Michael Hobbes, Gordon’s podcast cohost, in The Huffington Post called “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.”. I already knew that being fat is not a choice, that exercise is not usually an effective way to lose weight, that there are many factors—some genetic or epigenetic—that contribute to weight gain. I knew the BMI is racist and anti-fat bullshit. Nevertheless, it was good to refresh myself and to hear about more of the science (or questionable science, in the case of studies that supposedly validate anti-fatness). I’ve long wondered how to take action against anti-fatness with what power I have as a thin person and an educator. Once upon a time, a student of mine chose to write a research essay all about the obesity epidemic. She tried to argue that fat acceptance is unhealthy. I remember being so uncomfortable reading it, but I also wasn’t sure how to challenge the student effectively. How do I speak up on an issue with which I have so little experience? Then again, I challenge students who inadvertently share racist myths all the time—why should this be different? So reading “You Just Need to Lose Weight” is important to me professionally as well as personally. On a personal note, there are connections I made while reading between Gordon’s discussion of body acceptance and my own journey in my thirties with transition. Even as my dysphoria decreases, I find myself surprisingly vulnerable to the anti-fat messages our society targets all women with. I find myself far more concerned about, obsessing over, my weight and my body shape than I did pre-transition. I won’t equate this to the struggles of fat people (especially fat trans women), for that would put me into Myth Nineteen territory—but I wanted to share for a moment the connections I was making to my own experiences. What I took from this was how, like any liberation in our society, challenging anti-fatness “lifts all boats.” It helps thin people as well as fat people—and I am not saying that’s why we should do it; obviously we should challenge anti-fatness simply because it’s the right thing to do. But I think it is important to note that anti-fatness shares its roots with anti-transness, anti-Blackness, etc.: white supremacist and patriarchal desires to control people’s bodies, particularly the bodies of people who aren’t white men. For that reason, I’m pleased that Gordon’s thesis trends more towards the systemic rather than the individual. Her points at the end of each chapter are individual actions (because that’s all we can do as individual readers). Yet her aims are social and systemic. This isn’t just about being “nicer” to fat people or more tolerant. This is about moving the fucking needle, about dismantling the systems that make it hard and expensive for fat people to fly or find clothing, the medical biases that prevent fat people from receiving dignified care. This slim volume packs more of a punch than you would expect, and I highly recommend every thin person reads it. I love how careful and inclusive it is when talking about gender, race, and disability. I love how focused and organized it is. I love how Gordon doesn’t coddle the reader, challenging us while simultaneously—I hope—motivating us to do better. This is a book that should make a difference. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 27, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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Paperback
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| 052551144X
| 9780525511441
| 052551144X
| 4.17
| 354
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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liked it
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Amid the calumnious pushback in the United States against so-called “critical race theory” (it’s not) in schools remains the single truth: you don’t l
Amid the calumnious pushback in the United States against so-called “critical race theory” (it’s not) in schools remains the single truth: you don’t learn the true history of the US in school. The same goes for Canada, where we learn about the enslavement of African people in the US, but we don’t learn about slavery in Canada or our own history of anti-Black racism following abolition. So I do my best to read and learn, especially from Black women. In You Get What You Pay For, Morgan Parker engages with the legacy of slavery and nearly four centuries of anti-Blackness on this continent. Her tone is brutally forthright, holding nothing back as she looks at how the shape of American society has influenced her life. In an era that has too long billed itself post-racial or colour-blind, Parker insists that, yes, you need to see her race in order to see the arc of her life so far. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Penguin Random House in exchange for a review. This is an essay collection loosely masquerading as memoir and following a rough chronology of Parker’s life. She returns to a few regular motifs throughout: her next therapist, the slave ship as a metaphor for living under white supremacy in the US, the impossibility of survival for so many Black people as a result of police brutality. Many of the essays engage with seminal moments of the American zeitgeist in the past couple decades: the ascension of Serena and Venus Williams, Ye’s infamous remark about George W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the trial of Bill Cosby. Parker acknowledges the complexity of her subject while writing with an appealing simplicity. Some of her discussions of her therapists reminded me of It’s Always Been Ours , by Jessica Wilson. Both books were illuminating. We white women often fail to consider race as a factor in our professional interactions, whether it’s therapy, treatment for eating disorders, or in my case, teaching. Which is not to say that race is the only factor in finding a good fit with a professional. But as Parker makes clear in this book, it wasn’t until she found a Black female therapist that she was finally able to connect in a way that was authentic and useful for her. Her white therapists prior lacked the experience and ancestors required to see all of Parker. That’s what we are talking about here. Seeing. Seeing the weight of intergenerational trauma. Seeing resilience not as a buzzword (“oh, you are so strong”) but as a rebellion against being put into a box. Seeing and understanding that racism isn’t simply, “Oh, people are mean to you because of your skin colour?”—racism is a kaleoidoscope of Rubik’s cubes of dominoes that fall every single day. It’s a behemoth, visible and invisible at the same time. You Get What You Pay For is dolorous at times. It lacks the rah-rah inspirational tone that we have come to demand from racialized writers. This is my first time reading anything by Parker that I can recall, so my point of comparison is to Roxane Gay, who is likewise unapologetic in her take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards her opinions. This is something we unthinkingly praise in white writers but often see as too adversarial or cynical in Black writers. While Parker has obviously met with a fair amount of success, she opens up and discusses how that hasn’t always translated into better mental health. This reminds me of Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey’s Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”. Before I read that article, I probably would have labelled Parker’s description of her experiences as imposter syndrome. Now I know better. Now I know that the driving force is systemic, misogynoir. At the same time, I think it’s important to emphasize that this collection is not hopeless. It’s just honest. You won’t exit it with a warm, fuzzy feeling, and you aren’t meant to. Now, that might not be what you want on your reading schedule right now—and I don’t blame you; I won’t pretend that I revelled in reading this. At the same time, I did fly through it, for as bleak as this book feels sometimes, Parker’s writing is also compelling. Intergenerational trauma is no joke. White supremacy is alive and well in the US, as well as here in Canada. You Get What You Pay For brings a powerful voice to the conversation. Above all else, Parker insists that survival is not enough. She wants her life to be hers, as she should. Freedom on paper is not freedom in reality. Not yet. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 12, 2024
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Mar 14, 2024
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Mar 29, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1942254199
| 9781942254195
| 1942254199
| 4.47
| 98
| unknown
| May 20, 2023
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liked it
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When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It
When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It shouldn’t be surprising I have spent a great deal of time in recent years thinking about this, yet I don’t know that I am any closer to an answer. So I was very intrigued by Gender Without Identity, by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. This discussion of gender formation from a psychoanalytical perspective, along with thoughts on practical application to the field of analysis, seeks to challenge a lot of ideas about what’s “normal” for gender. I received a review copy. I went into this book hoping to be challenged. It has been almost four years now since I transitioned. Much of that time has been spent rebuilding my identity around my new understanding of my gender. It isn’t easy. I know, and am confirmed in this knowledge with each passing day, that I am much, much happier living as a woman in this world (despite all the challenges attendant in our misogynistic, patriarchal, transphobic society). Transition has not only been a joyful experience for me; it has provided me with perspective and courage to grow in ways beyond or in addition to gender. At the same time, four years in, I’m not sure I have any better grasp on what gender actually means to me. Am I a woman because the label of “woman” enables me to feel more comfortable expressing myself in the ways I want to express myself? Am I a woman because there is, deep down within me, something intrinsically and ineffably feminine? I just don’t know. Gender Without Identity takes the perhaps unsettling position that this uncertainty is irrelevant, because gender itself is process rather than permanence. Key to this book is Saketopoulou and Pellegrini approach to gender, which rejects what they call “core gender identity” in favour of
They are quick to establish, however, that they are not seeking to invalidate how queer and trans people express the “story of their own origin” even if it includes “born this way” or other such core narratives. Rather, their approach to gender without identity is one of psychoanalytical praxis: it is most useful, they argue, for analysts to look at gender in this way, whether the subject they are working with identifies as cis or trans. Reading this made me think of Julia Serano and her theory of intrinsic inclination as outlined in Whipping Girl . Serano, a biologist, was unsatisfied with the idea that trans people’s identities are purely social construct yet also thought that locating transness within a purely biological cause was insufficient as well. At first glance, one might think this is incompatible with Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s conception of gender as experience rather than identity. I’m not so sure. I think that both interpretations have value. Certainly, I recognize now in hindsight that I have always had inclinations towards the feminine long before I understood that being transgender was an option for how to label myself. On the other hand, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s framework helps elucidate why so many trans people, myself included, only come to realize ourselves later in life. It isn’t just that I didn’t know that being trans was an option; additionally, I hadn’t yet reached a point where I was ready to improvise in that way. So I appreciate that this book did indeed challenge me to think carefully about what I even mean when I say “gender.” I also appreciate Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s unequivocal affirmation of the validity of trans and nonbinary identities:
I am not at all familiar with psychoanalysis and am perhaps wary of it (or maybe just wary of Freud, let’s be honest). My experiences with psychotherapy have been positive. Nevertheless, I know I am an outlier among trans people in that regard, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that psychoanalysis as a field needs to grow. Hopefully books like Gender Without Identity have the desired effect in that regard. For those of us outside the field, this book can still be useful (as my earlier musings demonstrate). However, be forewarned that the writing is clinical, full of jargon and vocabulary that, quite honestly, challenged even me. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are not writing for a general audience—which is fine, not a criticism of the book but definitely a caution for the general reader. I won’t pretend I understood fully everything that they discuss in the book. But I did enjoy this glimpse into how analysts and therapists approach these concepts, as well as the challenges of dragging the field kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. So from this position, I found Gender Without Identity to be what I expected: challenging, occasionally inscrutable, yet altogether quite clever and thought-provoking. While I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to just anyone, for someone who is curious about the intersections of psychology and gender, I think this is an important and powerful read. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 05, 2024
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Jan 14, 2024
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Jan 29, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0306827697
| 9780306827693
| 0306827697
| 4.49
| 213
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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really liked it
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Bodies are complicated. In addition to the indignity of merely having one, the way it constantly needs maintenance and has such a limited warranty, bo
Bodies are complicated. In addition to the indignity of merely having one, the way it constantly needs maintenance and has such a limited warranty, bodies are one of the primary ways we interact with our world. And our world is racist. It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies is Jessica Wilson’s attempt to sort through how anti-Black racism permeates diet culture and eating-disorder treatment when it comes to Black women. I found it super insightful and easy to read; Wilson is making a valuable contribution to what should be a much larger conversation. I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for a review. First, my positionality in the conversation on body image, body liberation, and most importantly, race and racism. I’m a white woman, and I am tall and thin. I have the economic purchasing power to ensure I can buy the Healthy foods and products we’re supposed to buy, and I have the privilege of looking such that when I choose to buy junk food, people don’t roll their eyes or mutter under their breath as I do so. My upbringing, education, and access to opportunities and healthcare—none of these things have been adversely impacted by racism; if anything, I am the beneficiary of white supremacy in our society. My identity as a transgender woman complicates this story of privilege. As Wilson herself notes in this book, queer bodies also get policed. I have a complicated relationship with my body and how I am read (or not read) as conforming to feminine beauty standards. But mine is a white queer body, not a Black queer body; I don’t intend to equate my struggles with body image to the struggles faced by Black women and people of marginalized gender experiences. As I hope I made clear in my introduction, I loved this book. However, I’m also not the best qualified to critique it—Wilson explicitly states in her introduction that this book is intended for Black women. So I just want to foreground the voices of some Black reviewers: Christina, Sarah, and Nariah on Goodreads. As I discuss my impressions of this book, keep in mind that my opinion and perspective aren’t as attuned to what Wilson is trying to accomplish as those of her target audience. When I started reading It’s Always Been Ours, I was expecting a book that discussed medical anti-Black racism and threw lots of facts about Black women’s bodies at me. I thought we would get a lot of history of anti-fatness and wellness culture. Indeed, these elements run through the book. However, Wilson more explicitly and emphatically grounds her narrative in discussions of white supremacy and the need to dismantle it. In other words, this book is actually very aligned with a lot of the antiracist reading I’ve been doing, a perfect addition to that shelf, if you will. Wilson is critical of any analysis of eating disorders and diet culture that acknowledges racism’s role in these issues as only one of many factors. She observes,
This hit me because I am absolutely guilty of minimizing racism in this way. Look, language is complicated. The terms we use to describe the struggle are always evolving. Sometimes—especially, I think, those of us who are more verbose—we trip ourselves up in our desire to be as expansive in our terms as we can be. When that happens, we actually end up erasing important differences (a good example of this is the tendency to lump together very disparate experiences under the umbrella label of “BIPOC”). So I appreciated Wilson’s adamant stance that we treat racism as baked in to diet culture. In other words, there should be no conversation about Black women’s bodies that does not explicitly centre the role of white supremacy in creating the standards for those bodies. This thesis might seem obvious. Yet Wilson shares many stories from her experience as an eating-disorder specialist that belies this. Most of her patients come to her seeking quick fixes, reassurance, granular plans to adjust their eating habits to help them feel better about their bodies. They resist doing the work she asks them to do to dig deeper. Similarly, her colleagues (particularly her white colleagues) resist her attempt to discuss diet culture and eating disorders in this way. In other words, there is a deep, structural desire to maintain the status quo. Although Wilson’s intimate narrative positions her as the brave rebel and maverick in this scenario, she undercuts self-aggrandizement by sharing examples of her own development along this axis. She critiques her performance in her first two years as a dietitian, recapitulating this at the end of the book by sharing how a longtime client of hers noted that, years ago, her advice would have been dramatically different. In this way, Wilson reminds us that no one comes to antiracism work already knowing all the answers. Doesn’t matter how you are racialized. We all internalize white supremacist ideals as we grow up, and it takes work to unlearn that (that is exactly what getting “woke” meant, after all, before the right decided to appropriate and distort the term). Wilson’s very personal and careful anecdotes of her experiences both as a practitioner and a Black woman are the heart of this book. To others in positions of power (and I count myself as one of these in my role as an educator), she is saying that every day is another opportunity for you to do better. To the Black women reading this book, she concludes on a note of celebrating Black joy. She wants Black women to know that their bodies—whatever their shape or size—are not a problem. On that note, however, I was also happy to read such a deep and incisive critique of the body positivity/fat liberation movements. I have heard a little bit about this here and there, particularly how it intersects with Instagram. Basically, there is a fine line between advocating for a positive view of one’s body, especially when one is fat, versus enforcing a kind of toxic positivity that can backfire. Wilson draws on the experiences of activists in this space. While none of what she has to say in these chapters strikes me as particularly new, it’s all a very useful summary of these issues. Again, I’m a very thin woman. I won’t pretend I don’t have body image issues or a complicated relationship with food. But I can generally find clothes that fit me, and people don’t look askance when I wolf down a cheeseburger. It’s Always Been Ours establishes how, for Black women of any size and shape, food is just another item on the list of mental gymnastics they complete each day. Hair too kinky? Eating too much or too little? Clothing too tight or too loose? When you add anti-Black racism on top of misogyny, you get misogynoir, as Moya Bailey coined, and it’s a hell of a thing. Speaking of new vocabulary, this book introduced me to the term food apartheid. This term complements and builds on the idea of a food desert (which I was already aware of); as Wilson explains, it clarifies that such areas are not naturally occurring but rather deliberately constructed as a result of racism. Neat! (The learning, not the racism.) It’s Always Been Ours is moving, well organized, funny, and helpful. This is a book about racism. Its language is more accessible than that of an academic press book, its stories more personal. But it is a book about how our society polices Black women and what Wilson thinks we should do about it (hint: resist). She challenges us to do better instead of simply going along with the narrative of the status quo because it is easier and lets us stay comfortable in the power we have. I’m glad I picked this one up! Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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Jul 26, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1479823961
| 9781479823963
| unknown
| 4.67
| 6
| unknown
| Nov 22, 2022
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really liked it
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Thunder Bay is not the most diverse place, demographically, in Canada, but that has been changing. For various reasons, more immigrants have been arri
Thunder Bay is not the most diverse place, demographically, in Canada, but that has been changing. For various reasons, more immigrants have been arriving here in recent years from a wider array of countries. This includes many Muslim immigrants, as well as people from MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) countries. Not only do these newcomers often face challenges with language, but my city can be a racist place. So I was intrigued by Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion because I hoped that I could learn more about the systemic anti-Muslim racism in our society. As is often the case, this book primarily talks about the United States yet the lessons are applicable to Canada as well. Evelyn Alsultany speaks from a potent combination of lived experience and scholarly knowledge. I received this book for free in exchange for a review. This is an exquisitely organized book. The introduction and epilogue are excellent end caps, wherein Alsultany lays out her thesis about how Muslim inclusion primarily works through a kind of neoliberal crisis diversity. Each of the five main chapters explores how this crisis diversity (dys)functions. Chapter 1 discusses stereotypes in entertainment; Chapter 2 is about the limits of increasing representation in industries like Hollywood or even politics. Chapter 3 introduces the idea of racial gaslighting, i.e., that how authorities and media downplay crimes against Muslim people (and other marginalized people) when classifying them as hate crimes is, Alsultany argues, important. Chapter 4 looks at examples of what we often call cancel culture: the purging of prominent individuals after they do or say something so racist that their sponsoring organizations have no choice but to distance themselves. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at the issues with diversity and inclusion on college campuses and similar places. Throughout, Alsultany establishes a firm line when it comes to not letting institutions off the hook. At the same time, I really appreciated her ability to empathize with people’s ignorance and prejudice. I am definitely biased, but I think she portrays other perspectives fairly and with nuance. This is particularly true whenever she discusses anti-Palestinian discrimination: she is unapologetic in her analysis of Israel as an apartheid state and condemnation of how Zionist groups weaponize and distort the definition of antisemitism; however, she also recognizes that Muslims and Jews both face a lot of discrimination. Indeed, a great deal of her discussion in Chapter 5 relates to how systems try to divide and conquer, pitting different minority groups against one another. I really appreciated the wealth of examples and analysis that Alsultany brings to each chapter. She looks at specific TV shows, such as All-American Muslim and Shahs of Sunset. She engages with specific scholarship, citing her own contributions to research (like the Obeidi-Alsultany Test) as well as those of scholars whose names I recognized and many I did not. This book is a great entry point into the wider literature around anti-Muslim racism (Alsultany explains in her introduction why she prefers this term to the more common Islamophobia, a distinction I found very interesting!). The nuance I mentioned earlier is also present in how Alsultany discusses improvements we have seen so far. Notably, her analysis of Shahs of Sunset points out that while the show is far from perfect, there are aspects of it that improve the portrayal of Muslims on screen. But she is adamant that there is no “quick fix” for diversity on or off the screen. I think this is an important takeaway—so often people are looking for the easiest, fastest solutions, but the problem here is neoliberalism and a deeply baked-in white supremacy that will take more than bandaid solutions to fix. Broken is a very considered and detailed exploration of an important topic of our day. If we are going to make our society a better place for everyone, we need to make it a better place for Muslims. I appreciated the solidarity Alsultany shows to trans people here, and I hope other non-Muslim trans people will return that solidarity—we are all in this together. Allow this book to arm you with the knowledge you need, regardless of your background or privilege, to change the systems that have failed for so long to include Muslim people in authentic and compassionate ways. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 20, 2023
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Jun 25, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0231556608
| 9780231556606
| B0BMWQ8DY4
| 3.33
| 9
| unknown
| Jun 06, 2023
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it was ok
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First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence
First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence of one here is notable. Anyway. Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet caught my eye because the history of computing, intertwined as it is with the history of mathematics and the history of feminism, interests me a lot. Ted Striphas discusses how we conceptualized both the word algorithm and the word culture prior to “algorithmic culture” emerging as a more recent phenomenon from the past few decades. This book is really not what I expected from the description, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad time. Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the eARC! Striphas takes a very intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to answering the question of, What was algorithmic culture like before we had the internet? These chapters span centuries, languages, and draw on everything from philosophy to computer science to linguistics and semiotics. It’s truly impressive how Striphas synthesizes writings and ideas from these various fields into his presentation. He references entire areas of study and scholars I had no idea existed (and I have degrees in math and education as well as minors in English and philosophy!). In particular, Striphas grounds his approach through his own expansion of Raymond Williams’s Keywords publication/theory. Look, I’m not going to pretend I have enough background to evaluate this approach. Readers more familiar with this angle of attack and Williams might be better poised to critique Striphas’ strategy. As it is, I liked the emphasis on looking at language as something constructed by and responsive to changes in our society—along with the potent reminder that even a concept like culture, whose meaning we might assume is to be taken for granted, shifts over time. So Striphas definitely exposed me to a lot of new (old) ideas, got me thinking, and that alone is something I appreciate in a nonfiction book like this! On the other hand, this means that Striphas often gets bogged down in the weeds of theory. So much so that I’m not sure each chapter actually accomplishes its mission of supporting his overall thesis. Striphas attempts to trace the history of the word algorithm, then culture, and finally algorithmic culture, but along the way he gets lost in discussing, say, the historical context of the Cold War, suspicion and oppression of gay people in civil service and academia, etc. I’m not dismissing that these could be relevant threads to his argument, but the amount of digression feels, if not boring, then distracting enough to divert me from the overall point he’s trying to make. As a mathematician, I really liked the chapter about the origins of algorithm, algebra, and al-Khwarizmi. I learned a lot I didn’t know. Striphas carefully questions the “official,” simplified narrative we often learn (if we are lucky) in our math classes. He makes it clear that he isn’t trying to downplay al-Khwarizmi’s role, or the wider role of Islamic mathematicians, when it comes to their influence on European mathematics. At the same time, he points out that a reductive approach—tracing algorithm back to al-Kwharizmi’s name, algebra back to a book he wrote (on a method that he probably did not originate)—actually does an injustice, flattening and erasing the complexities of that time period and al-Khwarizmi’s life. I really appreciate how Striphas clearly acknowledges the power dynamics at play, both in contemporary writings of each period along with modern views, the roles of racism and sexism, etc., influencing our perception of algorithmic culture. He references many luminary scholars whose names I’ve heard of (Ruha Benjamin) or work I’ve read (Safiya Umoja Noble). In this sense, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet continues the intertextual conversation, not just engaging with it but building it and then throwing the ball forward, into the future, hoping that someone will pick it up and engage with Striphas later down the line. This book is very specifically targeted towards an audience with more knowledge of this field than me. I think some people might pick it up (as I did) because of its title and description, expecting a more straightforward history (as I did) of computer science prior to the computer and the intersections with culture. But this is an academic book, not a pop history book, and it shows. If you’re willing to wade into deeper intellectual waters, then you will find parts of this book rewarding—challenging but rewarding. If you’re not wanting that workout right now, then you should skip this one. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 27, 2023
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Jun 2023
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Jun 11, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1839975229
| 9781839975226
| 1839975229
| 3.80
| 134
| 2023
| Mar 21, 2023
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liked it
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Another in the slate of ace-focused books released recently by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, who through NetGalley provided me with an eARC that I am f
Another in the slate of ace-focused books released recently by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, who through NetGalley provided me with an eARC that I am finally getting around to reviewing! Ace Notes: Tips and Tricks on Existing in an Allo World by Michele Kirichanskaya is a kind of how-to guide for being asexual in a world that privileges sexual attraction and desire. It’s not prescriptive (as Kirichanskaya notes, there is no one right way to be ace!) but it is very thoughtful. There are two stand-out features of this book: in-depth interviews with other ace-spec people and a very holistic consideration of how asexuality extends beyond the world of sex. All of the ace books I have read recently have, in one way or another, dispensed advice to their audience. This book takes it one step further in that it is meant to be an advice book. The chapter titles, such as “How to Identify an Asexual” or “Explaining the Different Types of Attraction,” reflect this. And whereas the other titles could, in theory, be useful for an allosexual reader, this book’s audience is definitely ace-spec people. This is a book for us, and it’s great. A great deal of what Kirichanskaya covers doesn’t apply to me personally, mostly because I have been out basically since I knew to use the words ace and asexual. That isn’t to discount the value in this book for baby aces but instead meant to highlight what I want to say next, which is that I still found, as an older person who is comfortable talking about her asexuality, a great deal of new perspectives on these pages. In particular, Kirichanskaya has a whole part of the book devoted to “Religion and Identity”—including chapters discussing asexuality and Judaism. As someone who is not Jewish, this is honestly not something that I had ever thought about! So much of the conversation around religion and asexuality in the West revolves around Christianity, and specifically the ideas of purity culture that have come out of Christianity. A lot of ace talk is about how to distinguish asexuality from celibacy, how to push back against purity culture, how to push back against the idea that we should want or have sex to be fruitful and multiply, etc. Reading chapters about asexuality and another one of the world’s major religious and ethnic identities was so cool and refreshing. It makes me think about how I need to seek out some perspectives from Muslim aces as well. Speaking of perspective, Kirichanskaya also interviews many prominent ace personalities. I hadn’t heard all of these names before but suspect many will be recognizable to people who pick up this book. The interviews are dispersed throughout the book based on where they best fit within the book’s larger organization. This is a really nice strategy that breaks up the flow of Kirichanskaya’s writing. Each interview allows Kirichanskaya to elucidate understandings of asexuality that she might not have been able to discuss as eloquently or authentically herself. One of the interviews was with Maia Kobabe, whose book Gender Queer sounds so good I might actually read it one day despite my deep aversion to graphic novels at the moment. Eir interview resonated with me because e and Kiranskaya talk about how transitioning can sometimes affect the labels one uses for one’s sexuality. People have asked me if coming out as trans means I’m not ace any more, something I addressed in a blog post a few years ago. I really like how Kobabe and Kirichanskaya discuss this idea (spoiler: the answer is not one-size-fits-all!). This book is well worth picking up if you are ace or thinking you might fall somewhere on the ace spectrum and want a volume that, rather than explaining asexuality to you, helps you think about what that will look like in your life. It asks you to consider what you want out of this label, what it means for how you relate to yourself and others, and what you want to do going forward. This focus on action rather than introspection is not for everyone, but it is a great complement to the other books this publisher has put out recently. I recommend. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 04, 2023
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Apr 06, 2023
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Apr 18, 2023
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Paperback
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| 039388144X
| 9780393881448
| 039388144X
| 4.03
| 650
| Feb 16, 2023
| Mar 21, 2023
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liked it
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One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become
One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced, in fact, that media literacy is the most essential skill English classes can cover. The deluge of disinformation and morass of misinformation out there is staggering. Throw in the challenges of deepfakes, and, well, it’s starting to get depressing, how difficult it is to evaluate the quality of information that comes across my feeds. For a long time, I’ve been using the Bad News Game in my classroom to help my adult learners understand how misinformation works. When I was approved via NetGalley to read an eARC of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, I didn’t know at the time that Sander van der Linden was one of the researchers behind the game! It’s neat to hear him talk more about how the game was designed and other findings about fake news. In the first part of the book, van der Linden discusses the current state of research into misinformation and how it affects us from a cognitive science point of view. Part 2 of the book look at the historical spread of misinformation, from ancient Rome to modern times, and introduces concepts like filter bubbles and echo chambers. Part 3 explains the concept that van der Linden and his team have been researching (building upon older research from the mid-twentieth century)—a psychological vaccine that inoculates us against misinformation. The Bad News Game is an example of such a vaccine in action. My main takeaways from this book (some of which I already knew but which van der Linden explained in more detail): our brains are susceptible to misinformation because of cognitive biases we evolved to deal with environments far different from the ones we find ourselves in today; merely debunking or fact-checking misinformation is seldom very effective; pre-bunking or inoculating people against misinformation can be very effective, but the duration of that efficacy can be variable. Some of what van der Linden says here might seem obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What makes Foolproof so valuable is the way that he grounds these perhaps obvious ideas in actual research stretching back decades. Reading this book reminded me of the incredible power of science: without this research, we would be in a much worse off place than we are today. This book gave me hope and made me more optimistic for our future. As grave a threat as misinformation plagues pose, there are solutions out there. Although van der Linden briefly touches on the role of artificial intelligence (such as deepfakes) in the book, he doesn’t mention generative AI like ChatGPT. This is likely because the book went to press just before ChatGPT and its competitors launched into the limelight. How’s that for timing? While a great deal of what van der Linden says about spotting misinformation applies to these tools as well, I still have questions. ChatGPT and other large language models open up the door to the possibility of generating so much garbage online that accurate information diminishes simply by volume alone. I’m curious if this new dimension to misinformation spread affects van der Linden’s recommendations or his team’s findings at all. Foolproof is a fascinating and edifying story of using science to push back against one of the most pressing issues in our modern society. Highly recommended for tech people, scholars, scientists, and anyone interested in how misinformation spreads and how we can fight it. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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ebook
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| 1839970022
| 9781839970023
| B0BCC6FLD8
| 3.65
| 697
| Feb 21, 2023
| Feb 21, 2023
|
it was amazing
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Despite loving podcasts, I have never listened to Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca’s podcast of the same name. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Sounds Fak
Despite loving podcasts, I have never listened to Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca’s podcast of the same name. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else because, hey, asexual and aromantic over here! It feels very fitting that I’m writing this review at the end of Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC. This book explores asexuality and aromanticism (which Costello and Kaszyca often refer to under the united umbrella of aspec, not to be confused with the asexual- or aromantic-specific terms ace-spec and aro-spec) by discussing how these identities relate to specific topics in our society. This is a slightly different and perhaps refreshing approach, finding a middle ground between books that take an “Asexuality 101” stance and more academic work like the fantastic Refusing Compulsory Sexuality . It’s definitely accessible, humorous, and empathetic. The chapters are divided very logically: “Society,” “Yourself,” “Friendship,” etc. Costello and Kaszyca share a lot of their own personal journey with their sexual and romantic identities. Costello is aroace, while Kaszyca is demisexual, so they each bring slightly different perspectives to being aspec, which I think is valuable. As the book progresses, they start to bring in quotations from a survey of other aspec people. This adds other voices as we hear from genderqueer aspec people, alloromantic asexuals, aromantic allosexuals, etc. The goal is very obviously to showcase the incredible diversity of the asexual and aromantic umbrellas within the wider tent that is being queer, and I love that. On that note: this is a masterclass in how to write in an inclusive, expansive way. Many writers, both queer writers themselves and those who write about us, often lament how “difficult” it is not to “offend” or inadvertently exclude people with their language. They point to artificially constructed examples of tortuous, often circuitous sentences supposedly designed to avoid such offence and exclusion. Kaszyca and Costello bypass such malarkey. They acknowledge that labels can be challenging, that terms change, that the split-attraction model isn’t for everyone, etc. Then they thread the needle to get to the point, which is that aro and ace identities are united by the fact that all of us on those spectra, to one extent or another, experience romantic or sexual attraction in a qualitatively different way from other people. That is the basic truth to which they speak in this book. The additional voices included throughout allow them to refine the message to speak to more specific experiences as needed. What I loved most about Sounds Fake But Okay is how it simultaneously resonated with so many of my own experiences while also showing me many different ones. I’m an aromantic, asexual woman—but I am also trans, and having transitioned in my thirties, I spent most of my formative youth under the impression I was a man. So while I heavily identify with Costello and the other female aroaces quoted herein, I didn’t quite share some of their experiences of compulsory sexuality and how that is linked to the madonna/whore paradox of our society. Likewise, in their chapter on gender, they discuss how the proportion of aspec people who are trans is higher than aspec people who are cis. Then we hear from a trans person who identified as ace when they responded to the survey but has since settled on the label of bisexual—because her experience of transition has changed how she experiences and understands attraction. Many people have asked me, as I have transitioned, whether I might not identify as ace anymore—so much so that I actually wrote a whole blog post about this for Ace Awareness Week—and while my answer was in the negative, I totally understand how it’s different for some people. Consequently, Kaszyca and Costello have managed to collate commentary that does a very good job of helping us understand the remarkable diversity of aspec experiences. I love it. I love how sensitively they unpack and critique the amatonormative nature of our society; while a lot of what they discussed in these parts of the book was not new to me, it is an essential part of this wider conversation. Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised to see other topics included, like a section near the end about kink and asexuality. In short, Sounds Fake But Okay is a careful, thoughtful work that seeks to go beyond its authors’ own experiences and ideas of being aspec. Though this book will be, I think, most fulfilling for aspec readers, I would recommend this to people who are not aspec as well. This book is probably the most concise exploration of the greatest number of topics related to being asexual or aromantic in our society. For any allosexual and alloromantic folx out there, reading this book would be a great way to educate yourself about some of the challenges that we aspec people have navigating a society that privileges romance above other relationships and pressures us to talk about and even engage in sex that we might not want. As its tongue-in-cheek title implies, Sounds Fake But Okay is about challenging our biases so that we can build a society that is more tolerant, affirming, and compassionate, regardless of the extent or ways in which one feels attracted to others. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2023
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Feb 22, 2023
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Mar 02, 2023
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 1839972629
| 9781839972621
| 1839972629
| 4.47
| 550
| Jan 21, 2023
| Jan 21, 2023
|
really liked it
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Even though I don’t have TikTok, some of the best content always escapes that platform to find its way to me. Such is the case with Cody Daigle-Orians
Even though I don’t have TikTok, some of the best content always escapes that platform to find its way to me. Such is the case with Cody Daigle-Orians, purveyor of Ace Dad Advice. I remember watching some of his videos and thinking exactly some of the sentiments he shares later in I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life, such as “it’s so nice to see an elder ace!” Lol, we’re so predictable. But it’s also true. Ace people aren’t visible enough. That’s changing, slowly, and it’s good to see someone like Daigle-Orians helping to make that happen. My thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC. Although there’s a fair amount of “asexual 101” in this book—and that’s fine—what I value most about this book is exactly what the subtitle promises: the advice. This is a book grounded in Daigle-Orians’ lived experience: that of someone who came out as gay, then came out again as ace after discovering what that was, then started talking about it online and realized he could contribute to the conversation. As he shares his story, he offers advice, yes, but also reassurance. Some of the advice is very quotable, such as when Daigle-Orians reminds us that “labels are tools not tests.” This is such an important idea to internalize, regardless of how one describes one’s identity. Daigle-Orians returns to this touchstone time and again, from an exploration of microlabels to a primer on the history and theory behind the label queer. Much of their journey is very relatable. They discovered the asexuality label on Tumblr. Some people dismiss asexuality as being “Tumblr real,” so I suppose this makes Daigle-Orians somewhat of a stereotype, but there’s a reason it’s a stereotype. Though Tumblr, like TikTok, has largely remained outside my purview, I love how it creates these spaces where queer people can talk, lurk, and just exist, often outside of a cishet gaze. The emotions that Daigle-Orians describes as they navigate the discovery of their aceness—relief, trepidation, excitement, etc.—are going to be familiar to aces even if they came to their sexuality in a very different way. While I came to mine younger than Daigle-Orians and single, I feel like we still have a lot in common. It was really cool to hear them talk about how they had never been to a pride event until recently, for that was true of me as well (and in many ways still is). Similarly, it’s so lovely to hear about his experiences as part of a polycule. I love seeing alternatives to our stereotypical ideas of what a family should be. The way that Daigle-Orians discusses his family, his challenges with dating while ace, the closeness he feels even to those members of his polycule with whom he isn’t in a sexual or romantic relationship—that’s neat. It’s wholesome, even. Some of the advice and perspective here might be hard to read the first time round. At one point, Daigle-Orians levels with us: being ace is not always easy. Boy is that ever true. I really appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat his experiences. Sometimes I swing between these two extremes of thinking “oh man, I’m so glad I’m asexual,” versus, “sometimes it feels like it would be easier if I were ace.” Daigle-Orians addresses the sentiment that some people don’t want to be ace empathetically but sincerely: you are who you are. You can deny that experience, compounding your unhappiness, or embrace going on a journey to discover what that experience means for you. Being ace isn’t the best thing ever, nor does it doom you to unhappiness. It’s just an identity like any other. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to spend some time listening to that elder ace’s perspective while you meditate on what being ace might mean for you. For allosexual readers: while this book cannot obviously capture everything about being ace, Daigle-Orians does their best to articulate one version of asexuality, acknowledging the limitations of this perspective by dint of being an older, white, male-presenting person. You’ll still get an interesting window into what it’s like being ace in a world that vacillates between denying we exist and telling us we’re broken. The overarching theme of I Am Ace is that your asexuality does not need to define you, but it can inform you. If you let it, your asexuality can help you feel more comfortable in who you are—whether you’re cis or trans, younger or older, etc. When we realize that our behaviour is not the same as our attraction, that neither of these are destiny, that we can question and change how we identify throughout our life and build, as a result, a happier life—that’s powerful. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 14, 2023
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Feb 14, 2023
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Feb 21, 2023
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| 1568589034
| 9781568589039
| 1568589034
| 4.10
| 3,400
| Mar 07, 2017
| Sep 04, 2018
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liked it
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This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa B
This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa Book Club, and I was intrigued. Well, actually, I wanted to know how to kill a city, should the need ever arise. That’s what P.E. Moskowitz covers in this aptly named book—though I get the feeling they are more interested in fighting against gentrification, and I suppose that’s a good thing. Part geographical rumination, part political manifesto, How to Kill a City is a tour through four major American cities and how gentrification has come for each of them. Moskowitz begins in New Orleans, examining how state and local officials used the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to enact policy that would encourage gentrification, development, and attract “the right sort” (read: white people) to the city. From there they take us to Detroit, which has been hollowed out by recession and foreclosure. Next up, San Francisco, where the tech bubble has priced millennials out of owning houses some of them grew up in. Finally, Moskowitz’s milieu of New York City, which has waged a decades-long campaign of gentrification across multiple boroughs. Along the way, Moskowitz explores what gentrification is, according to various sources, how it begins, and the forces that drive it. Their thesis is simple: gentrification is a local effect, but the cause is national and even global, so the solutions have to be a similar combination of these levels of community and government. Boots-on-the-ground activists are essential but if fighting by themselves are in for a losing battle. Rather, Moskowitz points out the need for policy change that recognizes how gentrification works and especially how it affects marginalized and vulnerable groups. I’ll demonstrate with one example from the book: real estate development. In many cities (I know this is true here in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver), housing prices are on the rise because developers or other wealthy owners buy up houses, condos, and apartments and then leave them vacant for most of the year. And the ones that are occupied are leased, often without rent control. As a result, people are being priced out of their homes in the cities, putting pressure on them to move to suburbs—and without robust public transit into the city from the suburbs, people often have trouble affording to even work in the city. As I read, I pondered how gentrification manifests in my own city of Thunder Bay. It’s a tough one, because I can tell it is operation, but I don’t think it’s as evident as it is in larger cities. Thunder Bay’s commercial districts tend to be dense and clustered, and while there are residential neighbourhoods that abut them, we have a lot less urban infill at the moment. We’ve always had a lot of chain and department stores, with local businesses eternally clinging to life as we lurch from one economic hardship to another. So it was challenging for me to apply Moskowitz’s teachings to my own city—something to think about, and perhaps watch out for. Then again maybe, as Moskowitz themself reflects, maybe I am a gentrifier. I fit the economic demographic of being a white, middle-class, white-collar worker … but again, the neighbourhood is what I struggle with. I’m in a more expensive yet still heterogeneous area of town, heavily residential yet one where walking barely two blocks can put me among houses that are hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference in value to my own. Although How to Kill a City acknowledges outright the links between gentrification and racism, I would have liked to see more discussion of colonialism in this book. After all, the land American cities are built on is stolen from the Indigenous nations who predate European contact. The first European settlers were, in a sense, the original gentrifiers, and I think it’s worth examining how present-day settlers like myself benefit from our privilege even if we are not personally in the midst of a present moment of gentrification. Similarly, while not quite in the scope of the book, How to Kill a City got me thinking about gentrification in Europe. Moskowitz briefly mentions London, where gentrification as a term was coined. So it’s not a phenomenon unique to North America by any means. Yet I wonder how conditions in Europe—differences in population and transport density, differences in culture, as well as states with a heavier lean towards socialism—change the face of gentrification. Again, something to think about. That’s about where I come down on this book: it gives me a lot to think about. It’s firm and opinionated without being strident, yet it also admits different points of view—Moskowitz interviews developers and other gentrifiers who emphatically endorse what they are doing in these cities, and then Moskowitz presents the points of view of activists and those who oppose gentrification, with whom they clearly sympathize more. Still, I appreciate the attempt to explore this issue from different angles. Gentrification is ultimately about space, and space does not have to be limited to the physical. I’ve seen people discuss the gentrification of online spaces as well. So I like how this book has me thinking about our relationship with space, physical or not, and especially how I move through it as a white person. I’m thinking about relationality, how I relate to these spaces, to the people and objects within them, and how these things in turn relate back to me. How to Kill a City is a concrete and careful look at an important contemporary issue. While there is room for more breadth and depth than is on offer here, this book feels like a good starting point on a journey to unpacking one’s own role in gentrification and learning about how policy influences gentrification throughout North America. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 18, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
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Jan 29, 2023
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Paperback
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| 178775698X
| 9781787756984
| 178775698X
| 3.93
| 515
| Dec 21, 2022
| Dec 21, 2022
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liked it
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As I’ve noted in other reviews, perhaps most recently
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, being ace (asexual) in our society is no picnic. While I won’
As I’ve noted in other reviews, perhaps most recently
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, being ace (asexual) in our society is no picnic. While I won’t deny there are benefits to opting out of the compulsory sexuality of our society, the fact that we must, indeed, opt out is problematic. In particular, I think that many a-spec people have a hard time figuring out their labels—partly because asexuality encompasses a lot of overlapping identities, but also because, as a phenomenon, it remains either erased/ignored or misrepresented/misunderstood. With Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace, Eris Young seeks to change that. Thank you to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for a review! Young examines their understanding of their own asexuality (and how it intersects with other aspects of their identity, such as being transgender). Along the way, they cover some basic definitions (ever wondered what the difference is between being demisexual versus grey-asexual?) and include excerpts from interviews and surveys, both ones they conducted personally and others conducted through organizations like AVEN. The result is a book that is at times personal but overall attempts to affirm that there is no one right way to be asexual. This in and of itself is crucial, for one of our major struggles within and outside of queer spaces is being misunderstood. Sometimes it’s a conflation of asexuality with celibacy or prudery. Sometimes we do it ourselves in a rush to explain that “don’t worry, ace people still have sex/‘normal’ romantic feelings!” to make aces seem less Other. Whatever the case, asexuality is as vulnerable to gatekeeping and misunderstanding as any other umbrella identity within the larger queer tent. Let’s get the critiques out of the way first. Young’s writing style, and perhaps more importantly, their organizational style, doesn’t entirely work for me. The book kind of jumps around from topic to topic without a clear through line. This might just be a personal hang-up when it comes to non-fiction, but I actually like a narrative. I like chapters with framing stories and inciting incidents. This book is more of a collection of essays and ideas, and while that isn’t bad, it also hasn’t done more for me than inform me. That being said, I appreciate how this book tries to cover a lot of ground. Young’s voice is passionate, knowledgeable, but also humble. They make it clear that they are not trying to be the authority—or even an authority—on asexuality. This humility makes the book more approachable and accessible. Indeed, I think there are two good audiences for this book. First, young ace or a-spec-questioning people who want to learn more about asexuality without diving too far an academic rabbit hole. Ace Voices definitely checks that “overview/introductory text” box. The second audience, in contrast, would be allosexual/alloromantic people. See, even as publishing opens up its doors to more diverse books, I think we still face a problem of siloing. This is true for fiction—Black authors, for example, are regularly told their books don’t have “crossover appeal,” whereas apparently white authors’ books just appeal to everyone naturally? It’s true for non-fiction too. Memoirs and other books that foreground queer experiences become marketed to queer people—especially young queer people, as inspiration fodder. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. However, I want to challenge non-queer people to seek out books about queerness. I want to challenge allosexual or alloromantic people to learn more about asexuality and aromanticism—and this book would be a good place for you to start. I’m reminded of a similar book about trans people that I read in 2017. The author was cis, and you can imagine how bad it was at covering the subject as a result and accurately representing trans people’s voices (I am not even going to link to it in this review, it was so bad). Young’s authenticity in this space, the way they share their experience while also making room for experiences that are different, is so important. Overall, Ace Voices didn’t jump out at me as something spectacular. But it’s very solid, and it’s exciting to see books like this published, finally. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 22, 2022
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Dec 23, 2022
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Jan 08, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1683649257
| 9781683649250
| 1683649257
| 4.04
| 280
| unknown
| Dec 06, 2022
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really liked it
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This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity w
This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity when I read
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, and that made a lot of things click for me. So When Are You Having Kids?: The Definitive Guide for Those Who Aren't Sure If, When, or How They Want to Become Parents is a practical guide for addressing a very specific aspect of chrononormativity (which is the expectation that your life will unfold in a predictable, progressive, mostly linear path). Jordan Davidson’s look at the important decisions and facts around having kids is incisive, inclusive, and extremely comprehensive. This is the kind of book I think a lot of young adults need access to! I received an eARC from NetGalley and Sounds True Books in exchange for a review. I was drawn to So When Are You Having Kids? because of its promise to truly include gender and sexual diversity in its discussion of childbearing and childrearing. Davidson does her best to include as many different perspectives and experiences in the book. There are first-person testimonials from people of all shape, ability, and genders—yes, this is a book that boldly announces up front it will be gender-inclusive, and it follows through in its language and the people Davidson interviews. From cis men and women to non-binary folx, straight to gay to bi or pan or ace, from people who can get pregnant to those who can’t—this is a book that acknowledges that there is far more to a family than one man, one woman, and the hope that baby will make three. This is valuable to me. When I was a kid, of course, thanks to chrononormativity I just kind of assumed I would be a parent, likely of biological children, one day. Yet as I grew up, I learned a lot about myself. I’m asexual and aromantic. Neither of these identities precludes me from having children, of course, but it is one way in which I diverged from the heteronormative narrative. Then, a few years ago, I realized I’m trans. As Davidson explores in this book, trans people often face steep challenges when having kids—not just as a result of the rising tide of discrimination and stigma, but also because of gender dysphoria and financial pressures that make it harder to access gender-affirming care. So as I move through my thirties, my life looks a lot different from how teenage Kara imagined it. And I’m ok with that! I want to be the cool aunt who takes care of my friends’ kids so they can smash. I want to be the one who is available for a late-night phone chat because I’m not exhausted taking care of my own littles. I want to build a big, big chosen family around me full of people from all kinds of backgrounds—people with kids, people without kids—who take care of me and are taken care of by me in return. I don’t need biological children to do that. But boy, was this book ever a fascinating education about having children! See, I came for the inclusivity but I stayed for the science. Each chapter here was a revelation. Like, I think I have a reasonably good level of sexual education—certainly more than, alas, your average American, and probably more than most Canadian chicky boos too. But Davidson has done her research, oh my. First with the social science—stats upon studies of information about who’s doing it, at what age, or why we’re not doing it. A lot of this connects with things I’ve read in other books, like The Burnout Generation or treatises on climate change. Then with the biology: how ovulation, fertilization, and implantation actually happens. There’s also a lot of information on the expense of having a kid, a chapter that is very US-focused and reminds me of how important it is to stop Doug Ford from privatizing our Canadian healthcare system. If you have a question about having kids, the answer is probably in this book. There’s also a whole section dedicated to not having kids! I would have liked to see a little more time spent on reproductive rights and abortion rights—the book includes testimonials from some people who have had abortions, and Davidson does mention that women (we do not have much data for other genders who can become pregnant) who delay having children tend to be more successful and satisfied in other areas of their lives. However, given the political climate around abortion access in the US right now, I wish this book had been louder in pushing for a conversation around why protecting abortion access is important. Our society puts a lot of pressure on us—especially women—to have kids. (My bestie and I did a whole podcast episode about this.) As Davidson remarks early in the book, we are expected to justify a decision not to have children, yet we seldom, if ever, ask people why they have children. And whatever your stance on our evolutionary duty to pass on our genes, the fact remains that many people for a variety of reasons cannot have kids, cannot even be parents to adopted kids, no matter how much they might want to. On the flip side, many people who think they will never have kids end up becoming parents through one turn of events or another. This was what stuck with me the most from this book: the sheer unpredictability of life. The fact that we cannot have it all. As always, I come back to My Real Children , by Jo Walton, which follows one woman across two parallel lives. We can’t have kids and also not have kids, and as much as we try to steer our lives, nudge them along certain trajectories, external events will always shape those paths as well. Oh yeah, this book gave me the philosophical feels, big time. So When Are You Having Kids? is a fusion of fact and testimonial: each is powerful on its own, but the combination of the two makes this book extremely satisfying. As much as I learned a lot from the science, I also just enjoyed hearing all the varied stories from the voices that Davidson includes. This is a book I would recommend to anyone starting their journey into adulthood, anyone considering having kids—or not having them—and especially couples pondering if they want to become parents together. This is a book that will spark conversations, pose hard questions, offer advice on finding the answers to those questions, and help you become more prepared to navigate a world that insists it knows what you should want. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 05, 2022
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Dec 07, 2022
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Dec 14, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1982135484
| 9781982135485
| 1982135484
| 3.75
| 8,226
| Nov 29, 2022
| Nov 29, 2022
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really liked it
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Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant. Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butt Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant. Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butts, and specifically women’s butts. Heather Radke—a curvy, queer white woman—wanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Frankly, I’m glad. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC in exchange for a review. Radke quickly rejects evolutionary psychological explanations for our obsession with butts. She thoroughly explains why evolutionary psychology, unlike evolutionary biology, is unreliable and pseudoscientific. While we have plenty of possible theories for the adaptive value of the butt, its role in sexual selection might forever be occluded by that pesky thing called culture. So Radke investigates how, in Western society at least, we started to care so much about what was behind us. She begins the story in South Africa and London, tracing the life as best she can of Sarah Baartman, a Khoe woman who became better known as the “Venus Hottentot.” Is it any surprise that our obsession with butts is wrapped up in Europe’s history of white supremacy? Of course not. For centuries now, white Europeans have sought to hypersexualize and dehumanize people of African descent. Therefore it is no coincidence that big butts became associated with Black people while the ideal—embodied, of course, by white people—was a flat, more demure behind. From this inauspicious beginning, Radke moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of our journey centres upon fashion: the bustle, changing hemlines, the flappers, etc. Some of it, too, is rooted in celebrity and media, from the starlets of the early twentieth century to the models and music videos of the nineties. Exercise fads and diets come and go. The one constant? Change. Sometimes big butts are in, sometimes out. The message, however, is the same: for women, your butt is a synecdoche. A sign of how well you meet your generation’s ideal of femininity. Radke echoes this in some of her personal anecdotes throughout the book. She would tag along, as a young girl, on her mother’s shopping mall trips. Changing room try-ons and the betrayals of clothes—or bodies. For, you see, that’s how Radke reports her mother framing the situation, language that she then inherited: my butt is too big. Never that the clothes are wrong, but rather her body is wrong. Whoa. So of course I thought about my body. All my life I have had thin privilege, have never had to contend with being called or understood to be fat. Most of my problems with clothes not fitting are a result of my height rather than waist, hips, or weight. As an asexual person, I didn’t really pay much attention to others’ bodies, and I never thought of myself as a sexual being—and because, for the first thirty years of my life, we all thought I was a man, most of the world seemed content to let that be the case. I thought my issues with my body came largely from how it was changing as my metabolism slowed. Then I realized no, it was because deep down I knew my body didn’t match with my idea of who I am, especially my gender. Transition, then, has done wonders for my confidence in my body. But the euphoria I feel from how my body changes—hair growing, skin softening, curves emerging—is also accompanied by the unease that many women feel in our society. I want curves because I want to feel more feminine, yes, but surely some of my desire for a curvy booty comes from internalized ideas of beauty from my coming-of-age in the first decade of the twenty-first century. So here I am in this liminal space of wanting to accept my body as it is yet also wanting to change it. Therefore, despite the butt holding very little fascination for me as a symbol of sexual attraction, I definitely understand the hold it has over us as a symbol of femininity, of my femininity. Reading Butts has helped me think about my body against the backdrop of our wider cultural and historical zeitgeist. This is a thoughtful, thorough treatment of a topic that many might dismiss as childish or prurient. Their loss. I might not be enamoured with butts, but I was enamoured with Butts. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2022
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 04, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0393882314
| 9780393882315
| 0393882314
| 4.01
| 308
| Oct 04, 2022
| Oct 04, 2022
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liked it
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Shout out to CBC Radio’s Spark for their episode on protecting our intimate data, which interviewed Danielle Keats Citron. That’s how I learned about
Shout out to CBC Radio’s Spark for their episode on protecting our intimate data, which interviewed Danielle Keats Citron. That’s how I learned about The Fight for Privacy just ahead of its release date and managed to snag an eARC courtesy of NetGalley and W.W. Norton Company. This book is primarily US-focused, which probably shouldn’t be surprising. That being said, Citron references South Korean examples quite a bit, along with a smattering of other countries, particularly Europe. That’s one of the big takeaways from this book: the fight for privacy is global, because the internet is global; however, American laws and regulations have an outsize effect. Many websites that host things like nonconsensual porn do so in the United States because of things like the Communications Decency Act’s protection from liability. Similarly, Citron explores how some corporations like Facebook and Google end up operating with one regime for their American customers and another for their European customers (who are protected under the GDPR by stricter privacy laws). Citron first establishes what constitutes intimate privacy and why American law is so woefully inadequate at protecting it. She outlines who is most vulnerable to violations of intimate privacy (three guesses—yep, marginalized people, especially women, and especially racialized women!). Finally, she sets forth specific and attainable solutions in both law and the corporate world. She is able to do this because she knows what she’s talking about—Citron has literally written the book on online abuse, along with this book, and co-founded initiatives dedicated to fighting back against intimate privacy violations. She speaks with the expertise of a law professor yet is able to explain everything to the reader in plain English—no mean feat! I’m not really one to advocate for incremental change—more and more, I feel like burning the whole system down and starting over, and when politicians instead seem to compromise their radical ideals in favour of working within a system or status quo, I am often disappointed. Nevertheless, Citron makes some really good arguments here for the value of incremental change within the existing legal and regulatory frameworks that corporations use to manage our personal data. In one chapter, she describes sitting down with Kamala Harris and her team back when Harris was the Attorney General of California. As Citron describes working with the now–Vice President, I suddenly understood how people like Harris can go into politics in the hopes of making a real difference. It’s almost enough to make me optimistic again! Anyway, my point is that The Fight for Privacy walks a fine line. Citron is pragmatic: you aren’t going to throw away your phone and go live off the grid, and that is literally the only way to avoid allowing companies to collect your personal data. Citron is also not radical: according to her, the solution is not to dismantle capitalism per se, not to replace these corporations with a different type of entity, but simply to offer them market-based and political incentives to be better. I’m skeptical of that approach, of course, but I can see where she’s coming from. This is not a revolutionary book, but it is a very practical one, and I think there is real need for that. At times, however, I found myself wondering who needs this book—its target audience wanders a little. I thought about my dad, who is a lawyer and might enjoy this book, though I wondered if it would be technical enough for him. As I mentioned earlier, it’s accessible enough for a layperson, but at times it does get bogged down in discussions of regulatory technicalities. On the other hand, people involved in regulating tech companies would probably want something a little more focused. In trying to be too many things, The Fight for Privacy ends up feeling scattered and unfocused. If I could change one thing, it would be to cut down on the exhaustive examples Citron offers up in chapter after chapter. A little more editing, a little less rock and roll. This book is also, I need to be frank, somewhat disheartening. To be fair, Citron does end on a note of hope by describing successes she has witnessed in recent years. Unfortunately, her exhaustive documentation of the not-so-successful situations left me feeling very discouraged as I read. It is so challenging to navigate our digital world, because so much of our interaction with corporations and governments and the corresponding exchange of data exists beyond our direct control. These issues came up in my English class a few weeks ago, and we talked about how hard it is to understand or have any concept of how companies are using our data. The issue feels, at times, insurmountable. But I will give The Fight for Privacy this: if it is not clear in its audience, it is certainly clear in its purpose. It is a manifesto, a clarion call for stronger privacy protections, data use transparency, and a civil right to privacy. Citron’s presentation is level-headed, thoughtful, measured—she has worked hard to come to the table with actual proposals, backed by her years of experience. I was disheartened by this book and buoyed at the same time! Do these feelings cancel each other out? I’m not sure. All I really know is that if, like me, you are concerned about how corporations and governments are using the increasingly complex web of data available to be harvested from each and every one of us … you would probably get something out of reading this book. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 22, 2022
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Sep 27, 2022
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Oct 04, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1623177103
| 9781623177102
| 1623177103
| 4.53
| 1,364
| Sep 13, 2022
| Sep 13, 2022
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it was amazing
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Sometimes being asexual (and in my case, aromantic) can feel very lonely, for reasons perhaps obvious but which I will elaborate on in a moment. In pa
Sometimes being asexual (and in my case, aromantic) can feel very lonely, for reasons perhaps obvious but which I will elaborate on in a moment. In particular, it feels like we are usually an afterthought when it comes to research about queer people and sexuality. I know that’s not entirely the case, though, and am always looking to broaden my knowledge about those who study and write about asexuality. So of course I leaped at the chance to read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown. Not only does it discuss the ways in which our society privileges allosexual people and pairings, but it also challenges some of my understandings as a white person, getting me to think about the intersections of racism and acephobia. The book comprises twelve chapters (plus a foreword, introduction, and afterword). Each chapter explores a different dimension of compulsory sexuality, which is a term Brown uses to build on top of the more well-known compulsory heterosexuality, which is the idea that social pressures encourage and reward heterosexual expressions of love and desire and punishes those who deviate from that norm. In uplifting voices on the asexual spectrum and research into asexuality, Brown wants to emphasize that beyond compulsory heterosexuality, there is a wider idea that sex itself is a requirement for full admittance into the human experience. Hence, compulsory sexuality: moving the gatekeeping goalposts so that queer people are OK as long as they’re having sex with someone, but if you don’t actually care all that much about sex … well, that is just a bridge too far! This privileging of sex as a determiner of identity has long bothered me, and I’m glad more people are calling it out. Your sexual orientation is whom you’re attracted to, not who you do, if you know what I mean. Yet even in queer spaces, the performance of sex and sexuality often become more important than the underlying attraction. Brown argues that this is inherently exclusionary of ace people:
This can be a touchy subject among queer rights activists, and understandably so. A great deal of the queerphobia lobbed our way these days comes in the form of accusations that we are predatory, as the recent co-opting of groomer by far-right activists demonstrates. I get why allosexual queer people are very invested in celebrating non-normative sex and sexuality in a healthy, sex-positive way. Yet I appreciate that Brown is unyielding on this point:
That is to say, the way our mainstream society oversexualizes/hypersexualizes queer people is an intentional form of controlling and minimizing our queerness as a political and personal identity. It is a radical act, therefore, to reposition our queerness along those axes—and in doing so, realigning allosexual queers and asexual queers. Brown’s unrelenting grounding of asexuality in the history and politics of queer liberation is refreshing. She makes it clear that we have always been here, always been a part of queer movements. It’s gratifying to see it all spelled out this way in black and white, for so often, asexual exclusion takes the form of asexual erasure. This is a book that is determined to make us feel seen. Then we have the way Brown discusses how compulsory sexuality overlaps and interlocks with anti-Black racism, especially misogynoir, along with fatphobia. She relates well-known stereotypes of Black people, such as the Jezebel, Mammy, Mandingo, etc., to compulsory sexuality, demonstrating how white supremacy has long set up a correlation between hypersexualization and race (at least in the eyes of white people). Hence, Black asexual people face additional challenges that white asexual people like myself don’t because they also carry the burden of numerous racist stereotypes. Something I really like about Brown’s presentation of these ideas is the way she works them into every chapter, truly ensuring that this important element receives thorough examination instead of, say, a token chapter like it might be given in another scholar’s work. Indeed, while I would have read this book even if it was solely about asexuality, the intersectional component is what truly got me excited. As a white person, it’s important to me that I understand not just the privilege I have in terms of how society treats me but also the ways in which our society has shaped my very thinking. Brown does not mince her words:
I’m being called out—and I appreciate it. I think this is one of the most pressing challenges that white queer activists face right now, i.e., acknowledging how we inadvertently work against the overall cause for liberation by refusing to acknowledge the presence of race and role of racism in our spaces. This book is a direct challenge to any claims on asexuality as a bulwark of whiteness and white supremacy. While we white asexuals might not be intentionally perpetuating those ideas, we have grown up with them and internalized them. So this book, in addition to validating us, will challenge us in the best possible ways. And Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is so validating! The older I get, the more that compulsory (hetero)sexuality bothers me. I used to think that I had escaped it, having grown out of the dating-heavy period of my twenties wherein all my peers seemed to be hooking up and then shacking up. I thought that once I reached the refuge of my thirties, I could start my inevitable evolution into the “cool spinster aunt,” the friend who would take your kids for a night when you wanted to fuck, the perpetual bachelorette sipping tea on her deck, ready when you called to vent about your partner. That was supposed to be my life! But I am realizing that compulsory sexuality will continue to stalk me through my decades, evolving as I evolve yet ever present. Nowadays it’s the gentle but hollow caress of loneliness as I watch more of my peers pair off and embark on a new phase of their lives that I have opted out of. (Brown introduced me to chrononormativity, coined by Elizabeth Freeman, to identify this idea that our lives should unfold along a particular trajectory as determined by social and cultural norms.) I have no desire to have a partner of any kind, to have children of my own; I enjoy living by myself—yet I live within a society that is constantly telling me such a state is unnatural, pitiable at best and deviant at worst. Please believe me, my allosexual readers, when I say that you don’t truly understand how much of our world is built upon this assumption that sex and sexual attraction are required and normative. You don’t. It isn’t just the idea that our society itself has become over-sexualized, the so-called “raunch culture” that other books I’ve read have tried to unpack. It goes so much deeper than that, intersecting, as Brown notes, with forces like white supremacy. For us asexuals, it’s a world that holds us at arm’s length, misunderstanding or mistrusting us. But maybe if you read this book, you can get a glimpse into my world. Truly the most fulfilling part of this book for me is Brown’s unapologetic tone. Early on she calls out how we asexual writers often attach disclaimers and qualifiers to our statements: oh, some ace people masturbate; some of us choose to get married or even have sex; some of us might even enjoy sex! Partly we do this because the asexual spectrum is incredibly diverse, ranging from people who experience zero sexual attraction, like myself, to people whose attraction fluctuates based on factors ranging from time to connection to someone. But we also do this because of internalized acephobia and this idea that we need to make ourselves more palatable to allosexual readers, reassure you that we are actually Just Like You! Brown recoils from this, as do I (though I freely admit I am guilty of acceding to the pressure to do this in my blog posts), and it endeared me to her writing immediately. Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is not just a succinct and edifying work of Black asexual scholarship: it’s an unyielding assertion of the belongingess of asexuality in our society and sociology. Not only does this book make me feel seen, but it makes me feel valued and recognizes my humanity. It centres me in a way that many queer conversations do not, even when they are inclusive of me. If you have any interest in a more scholarly read about sex and sexuality in our cultures, you need to read this. I received an eARC via NetGalley and North Atlantic Books, but I’ve already ordered a copy from my indie bookstore. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 05, 2022
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Sep 09, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1635577365
| 9781635577365
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Famously, I was told the internet is for porn. That can’t be true, of course, because as far as I am concerned, the internet is for writing book revie
Famously, I was told the internet is for porn. That can’t be true, of course, because as far as I am concerned, the internet is for writing book reviews! Anyway, The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession is yet another entry in a long line of books that looks at how people have lined up against one another to support or oppose the creation, distribution, and consumption of pornography. Some people on both sides call themselves feminists. Kelsy Burke looks at who the people are on these sides, and how we got here. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Bloomsbury USA for the eARC! I’ve read several books that touch on similar themes. Way back in 2018, I read the much older Female Chauvinist Pigs , which Burke cites here. More recently, I’ve read The Pornification of America and Why We Lost the Sex Wars , both through NetGalley as well. Why do I keep coming back to this topic? I think it has to do with a fascination with the limits of feminism. I identify as a feminist, but I also recognize that my views on feminism have been shaped by my privilege as a white, able-bodied person with a good education and job. A lot of my learning in recent years has focused on unlearning my white feminism in an attempt to look at things more intersectionally. Porn, and its influence on our culture, is at the centre of a lot of debates about what it means to be feminist. As usual, historically, it has been middle-class cis white women leading the charge, while sex workers are disproportionately poorer women and non-binary people of colour. Burke’s book intrigued me because, while didn’t go so far as to promise objectivity, it did say it would strive to include multiple perspectives on “the pornography wars” and to critique those perspectives. This was something I felt was sorely lacking in Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which despite professing feminist views and a neutrality towards porn, interviewed mostly people one would describe as anti-porn. In contrast, The Pornography Wars has data and stories gathered from across a vast spectrum, ranging from interviewees who are staunchly anti-porn on moral grounds to people who are staunchly pro-porn to people who are just confused, unsure, or who don’t like porn for their own reasons but aren’t opposed to its existence socially. Although I’m not going to get into it here, you can imagine, I hope, that my own relationship to porn, as a 32-year-old asexual transgender woman, is complicated. Indeed, Burke elucidates how most people’s relationship with porn is a complicated one, which is why this subject needs to be studied and discussed. Though I would largely describe myself as “pro-porn, sex-positive, pro-sex-worker,” I must admit that Burke’s work has me feeling more negative towards the porn industry than ever before. Now, I knew already about how problematic PornHub/MindGeek are. But as Burke peeled off the layers of corruption and dysfunction within the industry, I started to realize that the idea of “ethical porn” is problematic, to say the least. It’s great that one can pay for one’s porn, but that only solves a single problem and doesn’t address the underlying abuse of sex workers within the porn industry. A consumer must embark on more extensive research—has that talent ever been accused of sexual assault of a fellow talent?—to feel confident in the ethics of one’s pornography. Suddenly the idea of consuming porn ethically feels closer to the idea of consuming meat ethically—and while I haven’t gone vegetarian, I am all for dramatically reforming the meat industry. At the same time, Burke is careful not to repeat, and indeed she calls out, when critics of the porn industry cherry-pick the most sensational stories of abuse. As the subtitle of this book implies, part of her examination of the history of the pornography wars involves the battle to have pornography declared “obscene.” Burke is very careful to delineate between opponents of pornography who hold it as immoral versus those who see it as unhealthy (although there is often overlap). Her exploration of whether or not there is science to support the idea of porn addiction reminds us that science is a tool prone to being biased or misused. Plenty of evangelicals are seizing on science, albeit often junk science, to back up gender-essentialist ideas of brain function and sexuality. Though out of the scope of Burke’s thesis, these findings hint at the underlying problem in American society—a general dismantling of scientific literacy to the point where what counts as science and fact is now up for debate. As Burke points out, the pornography wars have become increasingly polarized and moralized. She wants to demonstrate that there is common ground between those who would describe themselves as anti-porn or pro-porn (or at least, porn-neutral). This might seem like an impossible task, but I think through the patient exploration of her topic from different angles, she succeeds. At the very least, The Pornography Wars shows that the history of smut, obscenity, and pornography in America is not as simple as many of the people on either side of this battlefield might claim. I really enjoyed learning about that history, and I think Burke did a great job of presenting different perspectives in a way that truly challenged my own existing views on pornography, both as a concept and as an industry. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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Jul 15, 2024
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Aug 06, 2024
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it was ok
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jul 25, 2024
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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Jun 09, 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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| 4.33
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really liked it
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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| 4.17
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Mar 14, 2024
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Mar 29, 2024
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| 4.47
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liked it
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Jan 14, 2024
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Jan 29, 2024
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| 4.49
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really liked it
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Jul 23, 2023
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Jul 26, 2023
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| 4.67
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really liked it
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Jun 25, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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| 3.33
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it was ok
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Jun 2023
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Jun 11, 2023
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Apr 06, 2023
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Apr 18, 2023
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| 4.03
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Mar 25, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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| 3.65
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it was amazing
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Feb 22, 2023
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Mar 02, 2023
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| 4.47
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really liked it
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Feb 14, 2023
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Feb 21, 2023
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| 4.10
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liked it
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Jan 19, 2023
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Jan 29, 2023
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| 3.93
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liked it
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Dec 23, 2022
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Jan 08, 2023
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Dec 07, 2022
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Dec 14, 2022
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 04, 2022
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Sep 27, 2022
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Oct 04, 2022
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| 4.53
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it was amazing
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Sep 09, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Jul 12, 2022
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Jul 22, 2022
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