fuck it we ball

hello all! i made a fully formatted PDF of Sansûkh by @determamfidd​ for all to read - it’s free to download on my ko-fi

link to the Sansûkh Reading Companion

link to the Sansûkh Appendices

In case it's not clear to anyone, I'm using 'downstream' as a metaphor for 'occurring solely as a result of' or 'following the pattern of'. In this case, that would mean that patriarchy & misogyny are initially created in reference to, say, a class of people who are presumed capable of giving birth; transmisogyny would then target transfeminized people as a result of some combination of their [purported] resemblance to this class (roughly cis women), and their differences from this class. According to this reading, trans women encounter misogyny because of their similarity to cis women, and transphobia due to their differences from cis women. We could understand transmisogyny as being an equation of misogyny + transphobia.

I think we can see this isn't the case from a study of the historical processes that created the modern 'colonial gender binary' (following María Lugones). English, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc. colonizers in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania positioned Indigenous peoples as inadequately sexually dimorphic and inadequately disparate in gendered behaviour (through travel writing, legal systems, military violence, 'ethnographic' or 'anthropological' and medical practices including measurements of African people's genitals, economic intervention including paying only certain "genders" for certain kinds of work, etc.). The strategy here is both ideologically to justify colonial government, and to divide and conquer by disrupting Indigenous forms of government and social organisation (also per María Lugones iirc).

We recognise that the creation of sex is part of the same process as the creation of "gender": that is, the construction of binary "sex" where gamete production, chromosome type, hormone cycles, 'secondary sexual characteristics', and genitals all line up, is the biomedical justification for the construction of binary "gender," where moral qualities and social / economic roles fall into place along those same lines—rather than sex being "prior to" gender.

In the same way, a growing body of scholarship recognises "gender" (here read: "the modern colonial gender binary") and "race" as produced concomitantly. Indigenous societies are morally inferior, because Indigenous genders are not created and policed along the same lines as European ones, because Indigenous bodies are in-between and sexually indeterminate, because Indigenous peoples are racially inferior, because their societies are morally inferior, as evidenced by their genders being different... and so on and so forth. The idea that moral behaviours are heritable, that they create physical and thus racial difference over generational time, is the mechanism by which Europeans' (and some Europeans' more than others!) racial superiority is supposedly built.

On the flip side, Europeans are morally superior, and their civilisations more advanced (literally, more 'forward' in time than the atavistic Indigenous people's, closer to the apotheosis of human achievement), both as a result of and as evidenced by the fact that white "women" are supposedly cleanly differentiable from white "men" in body, in dress, in behaviour, in sexuality, etc. So policing the boundaries of "womanhood" or "femininity" is policing a gendered boundary, yes—but by the same token, it is policing a racial one (following Kyla Schuller).

So an idea that racial and moral inferiority is both caused and evidenced by a failure to neatly align "physical sex" with "social role", and an abjection of specific Indigenous social, sexual and economic roles (n.b. the point here is not that Indigenous gender systems are perforce perfect utopias or whatever), give us transfeminization and transmisogyny—but the same process also gives us the ideal of white, bourgeois, cisgender, heterosexual womanhood.

Things that we might take to be quintessential instantiations of misogyny—forced birthing or valuation primarily for one's 'utility' in giving birth, reproductive labour (which btw means 'all the work, including domestic work, required to produce the conditions necessary for the proletariat to persist', not 'reproduction' as in 'birth-giving'), division into a protected class that is spared the worst sorts of patriarchal violence in exchange for morally 'advancing the race', and an abjected class (some trans women, some sex workers) who are not under the same protective control—

—all of these things have race, imperialism, and transmisogyny already baked in.

See also:

/tagged/gender and colonialism

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

OP also invented armsocks.

The freaks who follow me understand my vision

The freaks who follow me understand my vision