Thorns

Or: You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Post Is about You

About the original essay, and the point of all this

I came across the idea of reparative reading on Tumblr and was immediately taken with it. As described in this article:

A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader.

Unfortunately all the discussion I could find was either unhelpfully vague, or in the form of (very positive) reactions to the writings of the creator of the term, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Specifically, to her 2003 essay collection Touching Feeling and the essay "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You".

Just as I was deciding if I really wanted to pay $25 US for a book I probably wouldn't be able to understand, I came across the original version of the essay, created in 1997 as the introduction to a book of queer readings, and offered online for free by the publisher: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.

I found a online version of the 2003 version of the essay, from a brief skim it's basically identical, minus the parts about the book of essays it used to be an introduction to.

Anyway! I started reading and it was interesting but I started getting overwhelmed by all the unfamiliar terms and concepts, and so I'm going to try summarise it as I go like I did with confusing academic papers during my Phd. Which may or may or not end up helpful for anyone else but will hopefully at least help me!

I was going to do this as one post but then looked at how long it had gotten for just the first 7 pages of 35 and went AH. OK THEN. TIME FOR A MASTERLIST.
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I've seen an uptick lately in people using "gay" as a catchall for lgb or even lgbt. See for example this post (the gif is the Dean from Community dressed as the devil with a chainsaw saying "GAY MARRIAGE").

It irritates me, but every catchall term irritates someone, so I'm not sure if what I have is a genuine issue with the term or just a matter of personal taste. So I'm going to poke at it!
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I know this has been adressed many times by a lot of people, but I was pondering this question from someone who is hurt by some of the problematicness themselves, and the usual response didn't quite cover it.

My opinion in short:

There's lots of ways to "support" a work: watching/reading it, paying for it, promoting it, etc. Each should be considered separately.

And there are two questions when it comes to whether you or not you should "support" a work, for whatever definition of "support" is relevant:
1) What effect does it have on you?
2) What effect does it have on other people?

How you weigh the two answers is a matter of personal ethics, but they should both have weight. And it's very important not to weight what affects you more than what affects other people in anything claiming to be an objective analysis of the ethics of a situation.

Unfortunately people tend to conflate all the different forms of support, which I think is unhelpful.
( My opinion in looooooong )

I may have already posted some of these, sorry!

Objecting to Objectification A post that really annoyed me. It basically says that queer women shouldn't, say, check out another women's breasts without stopping and thinking seriously about her ~thoughts~ and ~feelings~. Personally I am totally fine with random strangers (regardless of gender!) thinking I'm hot without wondering about my inner life, as long as they treat me like a person should we actually interact.

I really dislike the way ALL sexualisation of women is demonised within certain progressive spaces (while other "sex positive" progressive spaces are more likely to celebrate the sexualisation of women by men), meaning that there is pretty much nowhere it is accepted and normalised for women to sexualise other women. I realise that some women want safe spaces where they don't feel sexualised, but there's a difference between "Please don't sexualise women in this space" and "sexualising women is bad".

A criticism of yarn bombing

Identity should always be part of the gameplay N K Jemisin talking about how oppression and privilege are dealt with in the Dragon Age world. I know some people prefer fantasy worlds with no sexism/racism etc, but personally I tend to enjoy ones which DO have some bigotry as long as it's handled well and in a way that allows for happy endings.

The Naked and the TED A criticism of various books to come out of TED and TED in general.

The missing stair, My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?, “I am the Lorax, and I speak for the creeps!” Posts on dealing with creepiness (and worse) in other people

Fallacy Watch: No True Klansman Redefining terms like "racism" to refer to attitudes so heinous that nobody actually believes them, thus allowing the speaker to avoid being labelled with the term.

self-care: a buncha links, or something Not all self care can be ~enlightened~ acts like doing activism or eating organic free trade vegetables, but it's still necessary.

Lincoln Against the Radicals "Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people."

DeviantArt did that very lj/facebooki-ish thing of saying "Check out this great new feature for removing some of your privacy sharing information with your friends! (if you don't like it go to your settings page)" so I was checking out my settings page(*) and saw:

deviantART no longer has "unspecified" as a gender option. If you choose to change your gender from "unspecified" you will be unable to change it back.

Hmmph!

(*)Where they hadn't changed it (birthday sharing) by default, so that's something

I've been thinking about how Dragon Age ties into archetypes and stereotypes and gender and STUFF and it all mooshed together in my brain to create a series of pictures and some meta. This is very rambly, I've been thinking about this for a while but I haven't had much chance to talk about it so have lots of miscellaneous tangents to untangle. For a more abstract take see Fanart meta: genderswap, crossdressing, and trans-ness.
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I was going to try and do an indepth thinky post about Dragon Age:Origins(*) but then I'd feel obliged to research it and I think I'd rather not learn so much about the setting that I can see all the cracks. So here's just lots of misc non-spoilery thoughts (I can't think about anything as solidly as I have this game and not poke it wrt bias etc).

On the whole I think it's pretty awesome as a game, but some aspects are problematic to a greater and lesser extent.
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This isn't a deep post. just an off topic tangent from this discussion.

So, ones I can think of off the top of my head (my brain has of course gone blank):

• Revolutionary Girl Utena
  
• Card Captor Sakura
  
• Sailor Moon? (I haven't seen it)
  
• Check the comments for many more!
  

It doesn't have to be the main characters, my point was that sometimes in anime (unlike mainstream western tv) you can think "Those two have such good chemistry, wouldn't it be great if they got together!" and they do.

EDIT: Obviously I'm not the best judge of this myself but the aim is stories one can enjoy as representations of queerness not unrealistic yaoi etc, and relatively mainstream anime that a typical sff geek might easily encounter and enjoy.

There's also lots where the subtext never quite becomes text but isn't actively contradicted either, like (as I recall) "Read or Die".

There's been a bunch of discussion about the portrayal of gay men in m/m slash and published m/m romance recently, and despite this being a fight that doesn't involve me and I shouldn't derail I keep finding myself wanting to rant about side issues, and eventually I decided I needed to get some stuff of my chest to avoid
derailing other people's conversations.

EDIT: This post is not about issues with the way slash or published m/m fiction portray gay men. I think those issues are real, and worth addressing, and I really don't mean to minimise this important question. I'm not talking about it because I'm not a gay man or a writer of m/m fiction, so it's not my question to answer. All the stuff in this post is side issues that have been coming up in the conversation around the question of representations of gay men in m/m, and I decided to needed to get them out of my head so I didn't derail the much more important conversations other people are having. In retrospect..probably should have been a locked post.

I hope I'm not being derailing or appropriative in this post, and am going to try to be open to criticism on that score. Not screening comments anymore because the conversation is moving too fast and noone is saying anything problematic (touch wood).
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