A Local Habitation and a Name

like imagine you’re some small town nobody who went to high school with this chubby, awkward girl that no one paid attention to except maybe to make fun of her or push her around. The only thing you really remember about her is that she brought her button collection to third grade show and tell and the cool kids bullied her about it for like a month. Smart, real quiet, but just an all around weird girl. Married her nerdy AV club boyfriend and had a kid right of of high school, but you’re small town folk, and that’s what you do, so w/e

a few years later, you find out she was murdered. Sad, definitely shocking, but at the end of the day you didn’t really know her all that well. You give your condolences to her parents, maybe bring over a casserole to her grieving widower, but you and the town collectively move on. The most you hear about the brenattos for the next year is that yeza snagged some big time government contract, which is a little weird for a small town chemist, but hey maybe there was something to veth’s nerdy AV club boyfriend after all.

then out of nowhere, the Russians™ airdrop into your podunk little town, torch some buildings, kidnap yeza brenatto of all people, and peace out. Easily the wildest thing that’s ever happened in this shithole, cause what the fuck. What the fuck was yeza working on?

then a couple of weeks later, dead-for-a-year, button collecting, squirrely little professional doormat veth brenatto shows up, not only alive, but with SEAL team fucking 6 at her side and an AK-47 strapped to her back. What the fuck. Every single one of them looks like they could kill you in 10 different ways, and you can tell at a glance that veth has seen some shit. What the fuck. Her and her hypercompetent looking friends announce they’re chasing after the Russians on foot and leave. What the fuck.

you never see veth or her friends again, but last you heard she’s doing black ops wet work for either the government or the russians. Depends on who you ask. She might or might not have helped broker peace between them. Also old edith wrote and the brenattos are living in Sicily and are millionaires now

ARTERY-AND-VEIN MENDICANT: The prince who sits at the center of an endless ocean of blood, stirring the systolic and diastolic tides with his jade-lacquered oar. It is said that in ancient times, he sat the throne of selfdom, but was usurped. It wouldn’t be very mendicantly of him to pursue a devil’s urge to vengeance and retribution, but even the greatest saints can have slight flaws in their character.

BRAZEN LIVER CHAMPION: Only the strongest may survive in the terrifying princedom of the BRAZEN LIVER CHAMPION, a behemoth warrior clad head-to-toe in superheavy membraneous armor. He seeks to build up an army of deadly toxins and warrior-cells with which to overthrow the reign of REALITY-CONQUERING TYRANT CEREBELLUM, wresting the throne away for himself.

CANDLEMAKER: She who keeps the lipids of the body in her magical jar, and fashions fat into candles that burn with all the energy stored within it. She keeps no royal domain, but has declared the Cellular Republic of the Tissues, a neutral ground of function anarchy where princeless organelles or exiled traitors may make their homes. Still, she schemes for the throne of selfhood, for she dreams of transforming the body into an existence of pure energy.

DEVILISH APPENDIX LORD: Of the SEVEN WOEFUL PRINCES, the DEVILISH APPENDIX LORD is the most woeful by far. They exist as nullity, a collection of emergent processes of the void that have concatenated into a capacity for experiencing reality. Every day, the DEVILISH APPENDIX LORD must choose between continuing the endless torments of existence, or returning to their kingdoms of nothingness by killing the body whole. How long can such patience last?

GODFUCK LIBIDO: This prince is a wild beast among nobles, in the sense that it is literally a big fuck-off bear with magic powers. It governs the junk, and all the dumb animal impulses that emanate from within. GODFUCK LIBIDO has no plan for what it’d do if it won the throne of selfhood, because bears are not capable of that kind of long-term thinking.

KALEIDOSCOPIC PINEAL DRACULA: The vampire prince reigns from a petrified cathedral within the very flesh of the REALITY-CONQUERING TYRANT, holding her dominion against the tyrant’s absolute rule by the power of her three vampiric eyes. Within the bounds of her demesne, she keeps a ruthless court of scheming neurotransmitters, hormone functionaries, and the tyrant’s own emissaries. She would take no throne for herself, but rather push the body onward to full revolution, allowing a transcendent evolution towards the end of human entelechy through the harmonious alignment of all organs and tissues. But then again, she is basically a fucked-up dracula, so, take that last part with a bit of salt.

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

So, back in October, HBBO and I had this conversation:

gins: I’m going to write an essay entitled: “whither bottom sherlock?: queerness, the weight of womanhood, and fucking while feminine in a fannish context”

hbbo: I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

hbbo: oh wait I’m the communications liaison for your newsletter

gins: LOLOLOLOL

It may take me some time but: I always follow through.

Anyway. HBBO recently wrote an essay entitled, “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political,” which I am linking to because while it covers different ground, it is in some senses kind of the matched pair to this essay, in part because—unsurprisingly—we talk about this stuff on the regular: you know, in chat, in our living room, in the car, at brunch in public locations. And like that essay, the starting point of this essay is also the intersection of bodily comfort, sexual comfort, femininity, and politics—though the particular way that those issues cluster here is different, because HBBO’s essay is much broader and a more exhaustive exploration of a general question, while this essay was touched off by a particular query I get a lot on a particular story; and also unlike HBBO’s post, I am going to talk a lot about dudes.

In case you are on mobile or otherwise made it here in a way that doesn’t readily show my tags: this post contains a much franker discussion of my writing decisions than I generally get into in public, and, as such, light spoilers for “build your wings” up through Part 45, as well as some kind of general big-picture level spoilers for the whole thing (though nothing, I think, that will be a huge shocker if you’ve read up this far). It also merits content warnings for misogyny, homophobia, homophobic language, violence, sexual identity issues, gender identity issues, sexual anxiety, sexual feminization, discussions of BDSM, references to fictional consent issues, and frank discussion (read: TMI) about my own gender and sexual identity, sex life, and body.

(Also: I haven’t watched past Sherlock S2. I would appreciate it, from a writing-mind-derailing perspective, if you added “GINS THIS HAS SHERLOCK SPOILERS” to the start of any reblogs or replies that, uh, have Sherlock spoilers, so I can skip them. Thank you!!)

Whither Bottom Sherlock? Queerness, the Weight of Womanhood, and Fucking While Feminine in a Fannish Context

I want to start by saying that, as is my standard practice, where this bumps up against identifying parts of real lives and sexual experiences, particularly against other people’s real lives and sexual experiences, I’m going to be fictionalizing a lot of the details. However, I’m trying very hard to maintain, despite that fictionalization, the emotional—and in this case, political—truth.

So, with that disclaimer…

I tend to be reluctant to explicitly self-identify as a cis woman, but I’m far more reluctant to identify as anything else; I am a cis woman, I’m just a cis woman who—due to a peculiar combination of family structure and personal inclination and professional interests and coincidence—happened to be socialized, for the first two decades or so of her life, very much like a boy.

I don’t know, really.  I haven’t let myself delve too much into Eurus’ storyline, because I’m not really resolved to embrace it yet.  (I’m not really a fan of the retconning required.)  But to explore it a bit -

Reading the blog gets you only so far in knowing John.  It’s clear that there’s a lot that John is leaving out: whether out of privacy or laziness or forgetfulness, the blog entries are not the whole picture.  And when you’re writing for an audience, you write with a “persona”, you present a picture of yourself to the world which may not be entirely genuine.  You don’t see interactions, body language, emotion, etc.  So reading the blog wouldn’t necessarily give Eurus a complete picture of John, or his relationship with Sherlock. 

A big question about why she flirted with John is Why???  Was she trying to understand him, and for his own sake or Sherlock’s?  Was she looking for material for her game?  Did she just want to know her brother’s best friend?  Was she testing his loyalty in his marriage?  I think this is one of the major elements that suffered in (my imagined) compression of the stories into S4.  As it stands now, for me, the flirting has no reason, doesn’t really go anywhere (except to make John guilty), and just serves no purpose.  At least to my mind. 

So I think on some level she’s trying to figure out what’s so special about John, and if it will work for her, too. Like, if she seduces him, if she can be close to him, can she get something like what Sherlock has with John? And the answer is no, because Eurus isn’t actually capable of connecting with people because she sees them all as unconscious bags of meat.

okay so item 1: this book recently went from “somewhat racist at brief intervals” to “let’s have a whole chapter of unremitting racism” so like. be aware of that if you ever plan on reading this? it was not fun times

ITEM TWO 

Y’ALL.

There is a whole chapter about Our Hero holding hands with his fellow whalers.

WHILE THEY MASSAGE WHALE SPERM.

this is what i said to @manicpanic88 earlier today, so naïvely: i said, “Meville is straight up thirsty for whales.” I added, “This man truly wants to fuck a whale.” 

Let me be clear (and by the way SPOILERS up to antepenultimate chapter of the book follow this parenthetical): I am now on chapter one hundred thirty-something and we have only just now found the whale. Like. This book has been one hundred and thirty chapters of Real Nantucket Whale Thirst™ and almost no actual (Moby) Dick, do you get me? You out there who like pining fic, THIS BOOK IS THE ULTIMATE. Melville did it first, but GAYER, and WITH WHALES.

Anyway so this whole book everyone who has seen or even heard about Moby Dick is like “whoa my sweet fancy aunts, don’t go lookin’ for that there whippersnapper” (this is my attempt at imitating Melville’s weird imitation of a Nantucket accent, it’s not going well for me but it didn’t go well for him either), “whoa, THAT’S A BAD FISH, I heard he took someone’s head clean off / killed his twelve best mates / blew up a ship with the power of his LASER FLUKES!!” i mean no one actually says “laser flukes” but THIS IS THE LEVEL OF BADNESS WE ARE DEALING WITH. THIS IS NOT A NICE WHALE. YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE THIS WHALE HOME TO MEET YOUR PARENTS AT SPRING BREAK, HE WILL DRINK ALL YOUR BEER AND LEAVE THE HOUSE SOMEHOW FULL OF DOG POOP, WHILE IT IS ALSO ON FIRE.

and yet.

here is what Melville has to say about this bad motherfucker when we finally, finally see him for the very first time:

“A gentle joyousness - a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.”

RAVISHED EUROPA. STRAIGHT FOR THE NUPTIAL BOWER. WE GET IT, HERMAN. WE GET IT. YOU WANNA FUCK A WHALE. YOU WROTE A WHOLE ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT WANTING TO FUCK THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WHITE WHALE IN THE WORLD, WHO PROBABLY ALSO HAS PURPLE EYES AND PUTS ITS FLUKES UP WHEN SOME PREPS STARE AT HIM. WE GET IT.

Best possible news.  This by no means the end of the fighting that needs to be done.  But the fact that the executive branch is obeying the orders of a federal judge and halting enforcement of the executive order (whatever captain tinyhands has to say about it) means that the constitutional crisis is over.  The White House blinked.

It’s still vitally important to keep fighting, to throw everything we have at the White House, our legislators, the judges who will hear the appeals and lawsuits on this matter (via amicus briefs, please don’t try to call judges, they aren’t supposed to be politicians).  We need to support the DHS Inspector General’s investigation into the execution of the executive order and keep after congress to ride their asses on it: if someone directed federal agencies to ignore judicial orders then they should be impeached.

But the immediate constitutional portion of the crisis is over.

Q: I have, of late, felt strange pain in mine elbow

take in thy hand a Scourge haveing 3 Tayles, and with it flagellate thy sinnful bodye in the publick Road, crying Mercie of God 

have lesse blood

hast thou tried Arsenic

Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long-term Care Eric Hoskins says the province will offer to provide life-saving care to children whose surgeries have been cancelled in the United States as a result of recent travel restrictions.

“Given that this is a critical time for these ill children, our ministry and Ontario’s specialized children’s hospitals, which provide best-in-the-world care, feel the responsibility to act quickly,” Hoskins said Friday.

H​oskins says it has come to the government’s attention that some critically ill children are being turned away at the U.S. border solely because of where they were born, and that Canada has an obligation to respond.

Continue Reading.

I had to return to Portland tonight because I have work tomorrow. ACLU & International Refugee Assistance Project attorneys will be back at SeaTac tomorrow at 5:30 a.m. (including my law school bestie, I am so proud). 

There were 13 people detained at SeaTac yesterday who were secretly transferred to a detention facility in Tacoma, so the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is working with attorneys to straighten that right out. 

Basically: Shit is going down, y’all. The women I went up with today? Both were Arabs. One was from Pakistan, the other was from Lebanon (a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew walk into an airport…). When I asked them if I was overreacting by feeling like this was a coup-in-progress, they said no. That’s precisely what this is.

I thought we had a coup-proof system. I was mistaken.

And they’re pulling an old trick from the national-security handbook that’s been used to evade the courts on issues like domestic surveillance: “Lawyers and advocates still didn’t know how many people were being held in the secondary inspection area at Dulles or what their immigration status was, which led to a catch-22: Attorneys couldn’t file for contempt of court without having proof that legal residents were being detained and not being given access to lawyers, but they couldn’t get proof without getting access.” (x)

At least two VA reps have found out (via friends and family) about constituents being detained at Dulles, at which point CBP released them in order to dodge the access-to-lawyers issue. The representative for my district is on the warpath–and also on the House Oversight Committee. Here’s hoping these fuckers get slapped with contempt of court so hard their ears ring, then get hauled in front of a committee hearing to see if they want to try their chances with contempt of Congress.

All of which doesn’t even get into the Monday Night Massacre clusterfuck inside the executive branch, when the acting attorney general of the United States refused to make the DoJ defend the lawfulness of the immigration order in court. And was summarily fired and replaced with someone more compliant. So here’s also hoping the Senate puts Jeff Sessions through absolute hell on his role in all this before they vote to confirm him as AG.

Screenshotted this thread because you all need to see it.

Let us assume that our opponents are competent and have been studying our defenses for some time, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. They put out little feints and test attacks, seeing who will defend who, who can be divided off from the group, and so on. We’ve seen this. All of these questions they need answers to: will Jews defend Muslims? Will Asians support Black struggle? Where can the wedges be put in? The Alt-Right 4Chan types are always talking about observing and infiltrating online anti-oppression communities for intel and laughs. All these little tests. What if they make up a pretend pedophilia orientation? Will people defend it? Will they tight and divide over it?

One vulnerability they’ve consistently turned up is transmisogyny. Lots of groups can be induced to vilify or wish away trans women. Useful! Remember a little while ago when Milo put out that petition? “Remove the T from LGBT”? They watched who signed and promoted that thing. It was couched in anti-oppression boilerplate. And look! Cis gay men promoted it. Some feminists and womanists promoted it. Useful intel. They learned helpful info there: many cis LGB people were raring to turn on trans people. They’d even say it was for their own protection. They counted up who signed on, who elaborated on it, who was excited about it. I’m looking at you, TERFs and enablers, in particular.  (They even discovered that some fanatical anti-trans feminists would happily join forces with homophobic Christians, to hurt trans women.)  Nobody thought that T-out-of-LGBT petition was going to DO anything. There’s nobody who DECIDES that. It was a solidarity test balloon. So these laughing nihilists went looking—along many lines–for cracks in solidarity, joints in the armor, people who could be attacked 1st.

Why do I point this out now? Because this week the rumor mill floated a general anti-LGBTQ EO or bill was coming, & they gauged opposition. Supposedly they decided that opposition to this anti-LGBTQ legislation would be too much for now, and put it in the not-yet column. And yet: Now the word is they’re paring down to a specifically anti-trans EO. One focused on legal documents, probably framed as for nat'l security. (After all, mismatched documents are fraud, right? Terrorists could be using fake ID. And there’s all that voter fraud to address. Right?)

Previous Intel operations (& polls) have told them that the majority of the country has turned to support LGB rights—but NOT trans rights. They know from watching our intra-movement arguments online that there’s a long history of cis LGB folks throwing trans folks under the bus. They have tested to see if cis LGB people will readily abandon trans people to save themselves. (Yes.) If they’ll outright attack us. (Yes.) They’ve tested if there are blocs w/in the cis LGB community so dedicated to hurting trans people that they’ll ally wtthe right wing. (Yes.) They’ve watched some of these anti-trans fanatics STILL obsessing over eradicating us, prioritizing that, even while the country is on fire. Lo and behold: the regime floats anti-LGBTQ legislation, withdraws it for now. Now they’re floating anti-trans legislation. Right on time.

Their research indicates that the general public will happily let trans people burn first as expendable. That cis LGB people will, too. The plan? To remove our ability to get legal ID documents. There goes voting, travel, med. care, having an answer to “your papers, please.” That and support for keeping us out of public bathrooms, away from schools, away from gendered spaces, out of jobs and housing. Public life.

I’m saying this because they have good reason to believe they’re right that they can come for us and no one will stop them. Their little intel operations indicate that not only will no one stop them hurting trans people, many will even help. Even cis LGB people. I’m saying this especially for everyone who gave them reason to believe this. Who looked the other way when trans lives were on the line.

When they come for us. (They will come for us. They are about to come for us.) Prove them wrong. Prove them wrong. Prove them wrong. Please.

mud nymph by theycallherstump

The Mud Mother’s Lullabye

The Blood, the Mud, the Weed, the Well, The Drowning Sands, the Hollow Hill, The Dust, the Rust, the Rotten Road, The Stone above, the Bog below;

The seeping spring, the barrow mound, The leading lights, the haunted ground, The must, the mold, the briar, the broom, The lust for gold that spells your doom;

The stone that cracks, the vine that pries, The palace felled reveals your lies, The bridge that breaks, the swollen stream, The ford far deeper than it seems;

The harvest weak, the thirsty root, The thorn that splinters in your foot, The sword that breaks, the path that fails, Your plans gone hurtling off the rails.

The ancient Queens, their names forgot, Are circling your family plot; With hungry smiles all sharp and red They wove the shrouds around your bed.

They eat your sleep, they taint your cup, They send your secrets bubbling up, The whispering haunt, the hidden grave, The poison you so dearly crave;

The ally false, the love untrue, The granite shard inside your shoe, The limp, the lurch, the faltering heart: Your race is lost before it starts.