Walemife

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from Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac:

In the UK, the 1970s and 1980s sex workers’ rights movement was deeply entwined with the ‘wages for housework’ campaign. Marxist feminists named the value of women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour and demanded a radical reorganisation of society to value women’s work. Around that time, the feminist group Wages Due Lesbians linked domestic work, sex work, and the work of heterosexuality in a solidarity statement against a 1977 vice crackdown: ‘Wherever women succeed in winning some of the wages due us, it is a strength to all of us and proof that women’s services cannot be taken for granted’.

from Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Grant:

“Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together. As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its Feminine Mystique era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (149 pages)

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx (58 pages)

Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones (112 pages)

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken (128 pages)

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (105 pages)

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (128 pages)

Cain by José Saramago (159 pages)

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (160 pages)

Rien ne va plus by Margarita Karapanou (192 pages)

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (169 pages)

Bluets by Maggie Nelson (99 pages)

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel (160 pages)

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (145 pages)

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt (142 pages)

The White Book by Han Kang (157 pages)

Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities [...] But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

Has everyone just believed this whole time that I bring it up for optics?

Everyone nods, "of course he mentions Indigenous people," because they believe it would simply look bad for me if I didn't.

In fact Indigenous knowledge is a constant topic of conversation and point of reference when I discuss my work as a scientist who uses Western science because my work is useless without it.

I work with endangered species which are endangered solely due to continual colonial violence against people and the land. I can follow the Western scientific method all I want and publish 100 papers on how to fix salmon populations—and get nowhere without Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

Indigenous knowledge is not an afterthought to reference as back up to Western science. Believe it or not, we can and should lead any number of scientific projects with Indigenous knowledge.

one of my favorite books to recommend people "plants have so much to give us all we have to do is ask" by mary sisiip geniusz talked about this, how her job as a knowledge holder was not just to transmit the knowledge her mentor taught her, she was also expected to test and verify the knowledge for herself and continue to build upon it

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

Light at an old Japanese house