the feminist librarian reads

Hi, I have been following your blog for a while now and you are just cool and awesome and lovely and you blog is fantastic. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and I wish you the best of luck in the new year.

I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

Antifeminists didn’t just oppose the ERA, government-sponsored childcare, and family leave because they wanted women to stay home and raise kids. They were also worried about letting men evade their responsibility to provide for their families, giving government too much power over businesses’ operations, and turning childrearing over to socialistic institutions. Ultimately, the deeper argument of antifeminism was that capitalist individualism depended on a family structure in which women, rather than the government, took responsibility for human needs that couldn’t be satisfied in the market economy.

The press is not a pro-democracy trade, it is a pro-media trade. By and large, it doesn’t act as a guardian of civic norms and liberal institutions—except when press freedoms and access itself are at stake. Much like an advocacy group or lobbying firm will reserve value judgments for issues that directly touch upon the things they’re staked in, reporters and media organizations are far more concerned with things like transparency, the treatment of reporters, and first-in-line access to information of public interest, than they are with other forms of democratic accountability.

Of course most of those pundits are white people with at least a Bachelor's degree, and there's quite a bit of condescension built into these narratives. It's implied that these under-educated white folks are dumb enough to believe a toxic showman who outsources the production of all his tacky merch to China and Bangladesh – and personally recruited undocumented workers to build his high-rises on the cheap – is going to protect American workers against global competition. It's wrong to assume that people who didn't get a college degree are stupid.

It’s telling that professional academics, committed to ruthless empiricism and logic, are reduced to mystical, even spiritual platitudes when pressed to explain their opposition to grad-student unionism. They don’t have arguments so much as feelings. It’s just somehow wrong.

Our story effectively begins in 1932, when Democrats formed a majority coalition that included Northern liberals and Southern conservatives. The Great Depression had made economics the fundamental dividing line of conflict. And with Republican President Herbert Hoover getting the blame for the collapse, Democrats were on the winning side of the issue.

I have never seen a politician understand the danger of the Alt-Right. It made me sad that a fringe hate community has become so central to American politics that a presidential candidate has to make a speech about them. But it also filled me with genuine, raw hope for the first time since I became an activist. Finally, someone took the threat of the Alt-Right seriously. And it could only be Hillary, who has experienced their loathing for decades, long before Twitter even existed. She reminds me of myself, or of the woman I hope to become: resilient in the face of opposition, unbroken by decades of sexist attacks and restrictive stereotypes. Her candidacy is proof that the Alt-Right will ultimately fail. There is no amount of screaming and threatening that can halt progress.

Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

The Cursed Child is not fanfiction. TCC was not written within a network of uncompensated writers, sharing stories within a vast cultural conversation. TCC doesn’t do any of the things the best fanfiction does—it doesn’t push the characters forward, and it doesn’t dive any deeper, and it doesn’t feel like a critical response to any of the texts that came before it (Rowell’s Carry On performs far more work critiquing the Harry Potter books than this play). The Cursed Child is an official follow-on work: professional male writers came to JKR with an idea for a play and she approved all of it. Even if you think its sloppy, even if you think it’s a travesty, even if you don’t want to accept it as “canon,” you do not get to pin all of that on fanfiction.