for essays and art (reference)

Mary Cassatt once stormed out of a Paris gallery, furious — not because her work was rejected, but because it was dismissed as “too feminine to matter.”

It was the 1870s, and Paris was the center of the art world — a place ruled entirely by men. Women weren’t allowed to attend life-drawing classes with nude models, weren’t taken seriously by galleries, and were told to stick to “domestic subjects.” Cassatt, a banker’s daughter from Pennsylvania, didn’t listen. She crossed an ocean, burned through her savings, and vowed to prove them wrong.

At the Paris Salon, critics sneered at her quiet portraits of mothers and children. “Women painting women,” one wrote, “is like birds painting the sky.” Cassatt didn’t respond with words — she responded with rebellion. When she met Edgar Degas, the notoriously arrogant Impressionist, he saw something few others did: rage wrapped in restraint. “There is someone in you,” he told her, “who sees.”

He invited her to join the Impressionist circle — the only American and one of the few women to ever do so. Suddenly, she was painting alongside Monet, Renoir, and Degas — men who captured the world outside. Cassatt captured the world inside — and in doing so, changed what art could say about women.

Her paintings weren’t sentimental. They were psychological, radical. She painted mothers not as saints, but as thinkers — complex, exhausted, human. Her brush turned tenderness into resistance. “I paint women who matter,” she said. “Because no one else will.”

The male critics called her subjects “trivial.” Cassatt knew better. In an era when women couldn’t vote or control their own finances, she painted them reading, teaching, and thinking — acts of quiet revolution. Every canvas was a manifesto disguised as intimacy.

But her defiance didn’t end with her art. When the French government refused to hang works by women in major exhibitions, Cassatt publicly withdrew her own paintings in protest — a scandal that nearly ended her career. “I would rather fail with integrity,” she said, “than succeed with obedience.”

Even her friendship with Degas was complicated — intellectually electric, emotionally brutal. He admired her talent, but never saw her as an equal. “He told me women can’t paint,” she once said. “So I painted until he stopped saying it.”

The hidden story of Mary Cassatt isn’t just about art — it’s about control.

She never married. Never had children. Never softened her edges to fit the mold expected of a “lady painter.” While other artists chased fame, she chased freedom — financial, emotional, creative. “I have touched some people,” she said later. “That is enough immortality for me.”

By the time she was old and nearly blind, her influence had already reshaped modern art. The women she painted — once dismissed as background figures — became central, thinking beings. Every brushstroke declared: the domestic is political.

Today, museums describe her as “the painter of mothers and children.”

But look closer, and you’ll see something else — a woman who used gentleness as rebellion, color as conviction, and beauty as an argument for equality.

She once said, “I have fought to make my own way — it was not easy, but I would have it no other way.”

Mary Cassatt didn’t just paint women at rest.

She painted the quiet revolution of being seen.

ok this is my drive of essential readings (I have both PDF and epubs where possible). I’ve made a suggested reading order. Change the viewing to ‘list view’ so that you can see the order easily. Start with the area that interests you. Best if you are able to form a reading group, but if not, listen to the podcasts mentioned below to substitute for discussion as you read.

For Marxism start with:

1) What is Marxism All About, this Dialectical Materialism Intro and this anticonquista article on Dialectical Materialism

2) Then read through this Marx & Engels folder in roughly the order as numbered

3) Some ways down the road, you can read through this folder for Lenin, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Stalin & Mao

4) You can also listen to RevLeftRadio, Red Menace, Proles of the Roundtable podcast or Guerrilla History to supplement as you read. E.g., you can search Red Menace podcast’s on Socialism: Utopian and Scientific after you read it. Rev left, Proles & Guerrilla History have well researched Marxist view of history, so e.g, listen to their episodes on Stalin or Cold War to knock out the bourgeois history we learned.

For Anarchism start with:

- this folder, it is already ordered by books that are introductory to anarchism. The only fiction book I have in the drive is here, The Dispossessed by Guin.

For Feminism:

1) Read at least Ch 2 of this article: Women and Super-Exploitation.

2) Then read through the marxist feminism folder and radical feminism folder

Islamic Feminism:

1) If you are a non-Muslim radical feminist who is constantly talking about Islam, read Leila Ahmed. You should also read this if you are from a Muslim background.

2) If you struggle with your sexuality & being Muslim, read Kugle.

of course everyone on the show is attractive (some conventionally, some in their own ways), but none of them look nearly as hermetically sealed and plasticine as is the norm on other shows/movies these days. even Taika Waititi, arguably the most movie star looking of the bunch, is pushing 50, and while he’s definitely fit, he doesn’t look starved or dangerously dehydrated like a superhero actor.

these days when I see super fit actors in movies or tv, I feel sort of distant from them, like I’m on a hillside looking down at them in the uncanny valley. or I feel sad about how much they had to suffer to look like that.

I mean

But I have to state plainly, for my own representation, you do not have to qualify each person as either “femme” or “masc” or “feminine” or “masculine.” You don’t have to categorize people in that way. As in, it’s not a requirement to label each and every person with one label or another. These are cultural ideas of the ideal man, who is superior to woman, and the ideal woman, who is always inferior. They don’t describe anything innate in a person, and anything they do describe innate in a person is being misattributed as evidence of an innate and justifiable male supremacy, which we as feminists need to rally against. Men are not destined to oppress us because of something cosmic and justifiable or biological or designed.

I've always enjoy dressing 'femininely'. I like flowery dresses, and I love My Little Ponies. Does that make me oppressed? Is that forced on me by the specter of the patriarchy? No.

I used to wear my brother's hand-me-downs, I shopped from the boy's clothing section.... It's all arbitrary... but I like doing things that are beautiful.

Here's an essay that I find relevant:

I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm broadly in favor of open dialogue between people with different viewpoints for many reasons, but while I am not at all opposed to ideology on its face I do think it's fascinating how some people are fully unable to make room for basic animal life as part of their political understanding of human beings, and seeing those failures causes me to raise an eyebrow. For instance, there's a certain portion of well off liberals who see choosing to have children as a wild, foolish, even confusing decision, and there's a certain portion of feminists who are maintain that any desire to be attractive to the sex or sexes you're interested in is a manifestation of patriarchy. But we are very literally animals, which means things which are true of animals must be true of us. No matter what our expressed reasoning, for the most part, people have children because animals have the desire to procreate. Likewise, wishing to attract a mate is so powerful an animal drive that it has driven phenotypical evolution in both the males and females of species from birds to bugs, and caused males of many species to learn to adorn themselves for elaborate dances or other courting rituals. That's very clearly a long way away from doing a full face of makeup every single day for a retail job, but if an ideology is truly making you believe that it's baseline weird to care even a little about one's appearance or that it's baseline weird and unacceptable to wish to have children, it is probably separating you from your own humanity.

I have heard people say, "Femininity is forced upon us women, and therefore we should destroy it."

I think they're talking about things like.... pressure to wear makeup, high-heels, skimpy outfits... but what I hear is that I'm not supposed to like dresses, or pony dolls, or pink.... or whatever.

It's all associations, and I believe they are using one word as a shorthand for a particular concept.... when it has many meanings across the cultural landscape. Outsiders to the discussion can take it the wrong way. Then, people get pissed off because they feel like they're being told how to live their lives for political reasons.

To be honest, I agree with the rest of your post. I was just reminded of this argument that I have heard from other people... and I would like someone's thoughts on it.

I mean, whenever I've heard this argument, then... it seems like it then is advocated for the political party of women to then dress more in t-shirts and pants... or in what is more often understood as a 'masculine' style, for shorthand. It doesn't mean 'male'. I have never equated this sense of 'masculine clothing' with "male". I've always known women can dress like this. It's just clothing. Masculine just describes a style. That's how I see it.

I've also had people then try to say that it would be regressive, or 'badly political' for..... not equating men and masculinity as the same.

As if one is supposed to start all their feminist thoughts from the perspective of the partiarchy.

"No woman is born a free-willed woman. They are made so by us," is the sentiment I seem to pick up.... from some activists. I suppose it's understandable, if they, as individuals, have gone through some serious conditioning to make them believe that these things are innate...... but not everyone goes through that conditioning. There are different levels to the conditioning, too.

Some people's parents let their kids do what they want. The child may pick up the conditioning at school, but they always have a safe environment for home.

Some people's parents are cruel.

It's also about one's own individual will. You always have a choice in how you act.

Sometimes you may feel like you don't, but that is you tricking yourself. Trust me.

I think that I do understand, on a level... the problem that can arise if you equate a 'masculine' style of clothing with a 'masculine' attitude. Then again, masculine means different things in different people's eyes.

I enjoyed listening to this. I think her perspective is valuable.

"What I don't get about this is why "feminine" is equated with "oppressed" and "masculine" would be "the oppressor". I've always enjoy dressing 'femininely'. I like flowery dresses, and I love My Little Ponies. Does that make me oppressed? Is that forced on me by the specter of the patriarchy? No."

Feminine is equated with the oppressed because it is a constructed set of ideas, morals, and expectations placed on the oppressed class for the purpose of maintaining that oppression within the sex hierarchy. It is not about flowery dresses, though flowery dresses ultimately falls into this category. The flowery dress is not "inherently" feminine because it's a thing humans make, and it's also not "inherently" feminine because it's made to support large cultural structures and myths. The value we collectively prescribe the flowery dress, which is not one thing but many things, is cultural and socialized between us. That value is linked to myths about women. This cultural value is femininity, and the flowery dress is merely a tool to enforce and obscure it.

Women are not inherently feminine because femininity is not describing truths about women as a group. Any individual woman acting in a way that either confirms or denies our ideas about what women should be or even inherently are doesn't prove inherent femininity. You like flowery dresses, sure. That is due to personal taste in many benign ways, and those ways are likely not as intrinsic to you as you'd like to believe, but also developed base on your own socialized experiences and your own values. Even so, liking feminine dresses is supposed to confirm in your own mind that you must be feminine, because that's the desire of the culture at large. The culture relies on the sex hierarchy, which relies on you believing you are feminine. But you don't have to say "I like this therefore I'm feminine" as if it's a biological truth about yourself.

This is why, when someone critiques one of my political posts with "this isn't politically feasible, how would a bill like this pass? How will it square with Supreme Court rulings X, Y, and Z?" and so on, the only answer I can really give is "maybe it won't". Maybe it won't be implemented for another thousand years. Maybe the American political machine will be ancient history by the time it can be done. But that's fine—posting isn't about making the world better. Posting can't do that, at least not directly. Making the world better, if you're just a random guy, can only be achieved through direct action and volunteer work and labor organization and so on. Posting isn't gonna do anything one way or the other. Of course these are political claims, and I do discuss them here and there, but that's not the main content of my #society tag because that's not really what my political posting is for. The main point of my political posting is quite simple: I don't always know what a better world would look like, and I am trying to figure it out. If this better world is not achievable for 10^10 trillion years, or maybe even ever, that would make me sad but wouldn't invalidate any of my points.

A half-feral hero, a monster king, a bastard prince, and an open world. Bound by destiny, they save or slay one another, an endless cycle of death and rebirth. When the Moonlight Monster rises, the Starlight Hero is Astielle’s only hope. Unfortunately, she’s a little busy with her rock collection.

☽✷☀

Astielle is a free webnovel about the Starlight Hero (Minnow), her nemesis the Moonlight Monster (King Karzarul), and his nemesis the Sunlight Heir (Prince Leonas). It is an endless reincarnation cycle enemies-to-lovers speedrun and slow burn about trying to avoid the main quest by doing every possible sidequest instead. It's about trying to get your friend away from his shitty family and into your polycule instead. It is over 200k words, and almost 40k of them are a flashback to completely different characters thousands of years before the main story. A lot of readers tell me it is very funny, or that it made them cry. It was supposed to be PWP. It is a hot fucking mess in progress.

"You shouldn't let her eat rocks," Ari said.

"If she wants to eat a rock," Leonas said, "there is nothing on this or any other plane of existence that I can do to stop her from eating the fucking rock."

"I spit it back out," Minnow said. She was regretting ever telling him about the rock. "Can we move on, please? I would like to move on."

Astielle features:

Farming | Fishing | Cooking | Fast-travel | Monster-fucking | Murder | Extremely round pigs | Extremely small chickens | A mystery-solving teen | Traveling bards | Gratuitous face-fucking | The homeowner's association | Magical dreams | Zombies | Nihilism as a coping mechanism for undiagnosed depression | Politics | Using a sword as an all-purpose adventuring tool | Tax evasion | At least one monster gangbang | Spider's Gorge | Pirates | Unreliable narrators | Incorrect historical records | The looming specter of religious nationalism | Churros

the first is alice echols, 'cultural feminism: feminist capitalism and the anti-pornography movement', from 1983, about how the term 'radical feminism' came to be associated with one specific strand of earlier women's movements, and how that strand facilitated the absorption of women's movements by capitalism in the late 70s: [link]

the second is finn enke's 'collective memory and the transfeminist 1970s: towards a less plausible history', from 2018, about some other strands of earlier women's movements - trans, socialist, anti-imperialist, etc - and what might be learnt from the so-called 'second wave' in the light of that capitalist co-option of feminism and its contemporary forms: [link]

(feel free to ignore this I know this is asking for a lot also)

so let me preface this by saying that although this topic overlaps with my academic work, it's not my specific area of expertise, and this list is really just one random person's suggestions for some places to start looking. these category groupings are loose and sort of chaotic. i also am not uncritically endorsing anything on this list. for example: it includes the right-wing libertarian thomas szasz, on the grounds that his work still shows up in footnotes today, and i think if you want to learn about antipsych stuff you need to be aware of him and what he said. but my point is that this is not, like, a list of 100% correct opinions you should adopt; it's a collection of lots of different approaches and ideas, and you should always read critically.

also, i skewed heavily toward books rather than articles, and i didn't include clinical trials, papers, etc that many of these texts cite, because that list would be, like, the length of my dissertation bibliography and i was trying to lean more toward things that make an analytical/historical argument. but i do definitely encourage tracking down some of the papers etc that these books reference, and reading through them for yourself.

libgen and z lib are always my first go-tos for books, but there are certainly other options if those don't have something. i may also be able to procure you some pdfs if you message me. :)

general/introductory

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker

Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce Cohen

Creating Mental Illness by Alan V. Horwitz

Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull

Psychiatry and its Discontents by Andrew Scull

The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry by S. Nassir Ghaemi

Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (Anne Harrington)

older/foundational texts

On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System by Judi Chamberlin

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman

Psycho Politics by Peter Sedgwick

The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by R.D. Laing

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct by Thomas Szasz

on drugs (esp antidepressants)

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch

The Antidepressant Era by David Healy

The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment by Joanna Moncrieff

Pillaged: Psychiatric Medications and Suicide Risk by Ronald Maris

history and histories

Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France by Ian Dowbiggin

Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 by Daniel Pick

Knowledge and Power: Perspectives in the History of Psychiatry, ed. by Eric J. Engstrom, Matthias M. Weber, & Paul Hoff

Discovering the History of Psychiatry, ed. by Roy Porter

Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France by Jessie Hewitt

The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China by Emily Baum

What's Wrong With the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty by Mical Raz

A Critical History of Schizophrenia by Kieran McNally

Mental Health in the War on Terror: Culture, Science, and Statecraft by Neil Krishan Aggarwal

Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD by Matthew Smith

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder by David Healy

academic journals that publish relevant things (some open-access content here; otherwise you may need to get creative. lmk if you have no idea how to do that)

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Journal of the History of Psychology

Journal of the History of Psychiatry

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

a few more 'theory'-oriented texts

Anti-Oedipus/A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

misc stuff i personally think is cool and somewhat relevant

New Yorker, "The DSM and the Nature of Disease"

New Yorker, "Does Psychiatry Need Science?"

New Yorker, "The Dictionary of Disorder"

Everybody by Olivia Laing

Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience, ed. by Dwight Fee

"The Functions of the Brain: Gall to Ferrier (1808–1886)" by Robert Young

"Neuroses of the Stomach: Eating, Gender, and Psychopathology in French Medicine, 1800–1870" by Elizabeth Williams

Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders by Nicole C. Nelson

From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History by Amy Koerber

Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Rutherford

misc resources

Factsheet on the 'chemical imbalance' myth

IsisCB (bibliography for history of science; searchable by topic, author, journal, and more)

Mad In America (webzine founded by Robert Whitaker; content varies widely by contributor so read critically as always)

Hearing Voices Network (support and community for those who hear voices)

cooking other peoples food: how chefs appropriate bay area ‘ethnic’ cuisine by luke tsai, east bay express

the stark racial divide in pay for restaurant workers by alastair bland, npr

the primal pleasure and brutal history of sugar by ruby tandoh, eater

ole missus vs mammy: who owns southern food? by michael twitty, vice

what happens when a brown chef cooks white food? by khushbu shah, gq

the rise (and stall) of the boba generation by jenny g. zhang, eater

yelp reviewers authenticity fetish is white supremacy in action by sara kay, ny eater

pathology of displacement: the intersection of food justice and culture by shane bernardo, whyhunger

the bon appetit test kitchens race problem by soleil ho, san francisco chronicle

the vegan race wars: how the mainstream ignores vegans of color by khushbu shah, thrillist

whose food is it, anyway? by ann hui, the globe and mail

Films That Feel Like Bad Dreams

The Nightmare Artist

Fear of Big Things Underwater

Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House

House of Leaves: The Horror Of Fiction

Monsters in the Closet: A History of LGBT Representation in Horror Cinema

The History of Insane Asylums and Horror Movies

The Saddest Horror Movie You’ve Never Seen

Fear of Forgetting

Slender Man: Misunderstanding Ten Years Of The Internet

The Real Reason The Thing (1982) is Better than The Thing (2011)

The Bizarre Clown Painting No One Fully Understands

The Little Book of Cosmic Horrors

The Disturbing Art of A.I.

Fear of Depths

Goya’s Witches

David Lynch: The Treachery of Language

The True History That Created Folk Horror

The Existential Horror of David Cronenberg’s Camera

the resurgence of the monstrous feminine

jordan peele’s us: black horror comes out of the shadows

hanif abdurraqib: on seabelts and sunsets

if i don’t dream, is there something wrong with me?

i love sally rooney’s novels, but they aren’t written for me

every age embraces the vampire it needs

night visions

i found silver and gold in my hair, rivers meeting on my wrists, stars and stones in my eyes

a beginner’s guide to becoming obsessed with jeanette winterson

shakespeare already wrote about what happens when women don’t have bodily autonomy

“grocery shopping with my mother.”

hysterical women helped me regain my voice

what if it doesn’t feel bright?

love is the most beautiful thing in the world

bettering myself

horror gave me power to embrace queerness in rural appalachia

in and out of time

culture club’s ‘karma chameleon’ foreshadows subversive strides toward social progress

if a tree falls in the forest

‘a note about self-care’

how open-hearted can you be and still survive?

jeanette winterson and mark o’connell on the future of humanity in a tech-dominated world

perihelion: a history of touch

how thelma re-defines the monstrous feminine in horror

anthony bourdain: the thrillist interview

deer on the side of an american highway

kate bush’s ‘running up that hill’ problem

embracing my bisexuality has set me free

“nope” perfectly encapsulates my disappointment with the biden administration

sayaka murata’s love letter to a convenience store

love, sex, and disabled women: we want to be sexy too

"but do they have SOULS???"

Does each twin have half a soul? Is there one full-souled twin and one soulless twin? Did you know that in a lab you can cut a freshly fertilized embryo in up to eight pieces and they will all develop completely? Would this produce seven extra lab-created soul or one lab-created Lord Voldemort split seven ways?

And then we move on to the opposite problem: what about naturally occurring human chimeras, a pair of fraternal twins that collide and merge into one organism with the DNA of both... after fertilization. Does a chimera have two souls? Two half-souls that don't match? Does one soul kill the other? Both sets of DNA survive, so what determines which soul lives and which dies? Does that make the surviving soul a murderer before it even develops a heartbeat, let alone awareness?