sashene

The BruJay Discord Server presents: The Covergirls Challenge for our sixth (!!!) annual celebration of April 27, the special day that irreparably changed the trajectory of both Jason and Bruce's life!

In memory of this special milestone, our server members have created fanworks as inspired by these six cover arts chosen by the server. Thank you to all of our participants, server members, and of course, you for joining us in the celebration!

Collected works can include: BruJay, JayBru, and gen Bruce & Jason. Any rating is permitted, and no restriction on content details. Please read through tags and summary for each work at your own discretion. And be sure to leave a kudo and a comment to show your appreciation!

And there's always something that I find both very mysterious and very typical for DC in it.

So Damian has a little story in the issue which makes sense because he's a quarter Chinese (edit: and West Asian, being Arab with ties to the Peninsula).

(Okay and I just did a double take and was like "what this was written by Aziz Ansari? This was after the accusation too DC why would you-- but then actually read it and it's Aniz Ansari...who is Aziz Ansari's younger brother. Turns out. No controversy attached to him specifically, he doesn't even have a wikipedia page).

It's a kind of three page little nothing story, shorter than almost everyone else's which is surprising for such a prominent character, right? But then the real mysterious part...

There's a little profile for every Asian hero that shows up in the issue. EXCEPT Damian. He's the only one who got left out as far as I can tell.

(sidenote: Looking at Atom's profile specifically and remembering the time I asked why DC was killing off so many characters of color, specifically citing Ryan Choi, at HeroesCon and Ian Sattler responded that it wasn't a big deal and DC was plenty diverse because they even have green and purple skinned characters. But 15-ish years pass and we're proudly spotlighting him as an Asian hero and hoping nobody remembers that. What a journey we've been on, Ryan.)

Why is Damian left out? At the time, this coupled with the shortness of the story made me think they forgot he was a quarter Chinese until the last minute, then realized "oh shit" and threw something together and that's why they forgot to include it.

But now, I'm considering that it really could be that they just don't want to have to put down what Damian's race is in a comic.

Like they really don't want to. As if they're afraid that putting it down officially would bring them under scrutiny of how they tend to present Damian. Like even just putting down what his mixed race heritage is, what he is on the Al Ghul side, scares them for some reason. So they're just putting him in there to cover their asses and hoping you don't notice he didn't get a profile, kthnx.

Like it doesn't make sense it was just an oversight when he was even mentioned in the solicit

Grab your favorite boba and pull a chair up to the dim sum table as we celebrate Asian Heritage Month with all your favorite Asian DC characters, old and new! Join [..] Damian Wayne and the al Ghul clan, New Super-Man, and more as we present new tales of these characters from their thrilling history!

And yeah there is an illustration of Talia and Ra's (w/ Bruce) in this and Talia isn't profiled either.

And like, it wasn't written by someone white , so I don't have the right to come down too hard (though editiorial is always a thing to consider) but the cherry on top is how in his story Damian specifically says traits he gets from his relatives with Asian heritage are bad things like "cruelty and ruthlessness' etc and the traits he gets from the white side of his heritage are positive things like "compassion"...

(and no, I do not know why sisters in plural and Babs is being referred to as his adopted sister??? she's not like she's legally AND spiritually not. it's the Asian issue and they couldn't be accurate and put Cass there? Thing is, I think her adoption hadn't officially been reinstated for DC yet. so basically, rather than have Cass officially rejoin the family in the 'aren't Asian Heroes great' issue, they pretended a white girl had been adopted instead of her).

Celebrating Asian heroes everyone!!!!

And so you ‘solve’ representation through the adequate presence of these characters. But I think this is an inherently individualistic and anti-liberatory way to approach representation, because it views minorities as individuals who can be cut from the social fabric of real life and transported into different fictional universes while leaving their identities fully intact. The presence of a disabled character does not also require the inclusion of structural ableism in the narrative, their individual presence is enough to represent disability. And so their presence in the narrative seems to emerge from nowhere - you don’t judge representation by looking at how the narrative represents and thinks about historical structures of race, gender, ability, you judge it by the amount of characters who contain those social markers. It means social identity exists primarily within the individual. There is no historical perspective given to characters, no acknowledgement of the fact that identity is dialectic and socially mediated. to paraphrase Gramsci, history impresses upon you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and I think when discussing representation, people judge the quality of representation by those traces - race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, etc - but ignores the inventory, the origins of those things, the social processes that produce race, produce gender, constantly and everyday. And so you get these characters that feel dislocated, alien to themselves and other people, because they express an identity that appears to have no origin point in the fictional world, no social backing. They are essentialised to what they “are” deep down inside. Characters are not made racial, not made gendered, not made disabled by the universe they exist in, they simply “are” those things.

And if narratives do tackle those histories, they tend to represent them primarily through misery. You know a character is gay because they get called slurs. You see a black character experience racism. You recognise a character is a woman by the fact that she is sexually assaulted. The history of their identities is represented as individual acts of violence or trauma, as if misogyny or racism are narrative objects themselves that occasionally collide with the characters to remind the audience that the authors take history very seriously. If an author is especially serious, they will get individual sensitivity readers to confirm or deny the authenticity of the social identity being expressed on the page; much less often you will hear of authors who rigorously consult, for example, books like Orientalism to ensure the structure of their work is not reproducing Western (and ultimately racist) conclusions about the world they are creating. Representational politics begins (and frequently ends) at the level of the individual. And so you get queer characters who endure homophobia or transphobia, but whose ultimate wish is to enter into a monogamous marriage and reproduce the social unit of the nuclear family, or the black character who finally finds community in a group of all white people that aren’t racist to their face. That’s not tackling history, that’s just allowing these character to be momentarily exempt from it. the historical norms and hegemonies present in the narrative are disconnected from the characters themselves. this is why you can have “good representation” in stories that are fundamentally racist or misogynistic or heteronormative (see: ofmd). If representation is only housed in your characters, if you view representation as a discrete trait that you can add more or less of, you are not thinking about the social identities that you are representing in a systemic way - you are, in effect, producing tokens.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

I think the larger takeaway from this is not that we have new evidence that contradicts old theories, but that these old theories were produced in a deeply colonial discipline that exactly mirrored modern power structures of patriarchy and white supremacy - it’s not just that these Man the Hunter anthropologists in the 1960s argued that human beings have always had extremely divided gender dynamics that position women as inferior to men (which naturalises patriarchy), but that these gendered divisions are evidence of civilisational advancement (which naturalises white supremacy). The other component of the argument being made by these 1960s anthropologists through this “man hunt, woman cook” framework is that any current or past societies that don’t follow this gendered division of labour mean they are 1) at odds with the supposedly universal character of gendered labour divisions (ie, “unnatural”), and 2) at a civilisational deficit relative to white European society, where the patriarchal division of labour is deeply enshrined. The author mentions the Ainu as an indigenous group that contradicts this Man the Hunter theory, but it’s actually perfectly in line with this theory - the Ainu do not present contradictory evidence to this theory, they are (in the eyes of these anthropologists) just an example of a group that is so backwards and civilisationally ‘primitive’ that they have not yet developed white, European gendered labour divisions as the base of their society. Like I think this article does a disservice to the severity of this Man the Hunter theory by only focusing on its misogynistic elements - this misogyny gives form and substance to its colonial argument, which is the idea that all civilisations follow a path from primitive to advanced, and the foundation of this development is a gendered division of labour. It naturalises this by pointing to the distant past, where humans were “living in nature,” where civilisation was at its most “raw” and unmediated by modernity, locating the origins of society within patriarchy - and then using this supposed universal origin point as the measuring stick by which to judge all other societies and civilisations in the world. I recommend Edward Said’s Orientalism, María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, and Aníbal Quijano’s Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality for more reading on this topic.

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

My resistance to this framing is that people tend to use these cases as examples of a state doing bigotry ‘poorly’ - that the state, in its efforts to oppress and eliminate trans people, has become unwieldy, and as a result it lashes out at “the wrong people,” that it has become irrational and overcome with hatred. This framing positions the state’s discriminatory practices as coming from a place of brute passion, as outside its normal functionings. When in reality this is not a glitch in the system, or an unintended outcome, or the articulation of hatred gone too far; it is the logical expression of cissexualism. This couple’s child is being harmed by cissexualism, not transphobia. This may seem pedantic, but it is the same distinction made between patriarchy and misogyny. Patriarchy harms everyone, but it would be incoherent to say that everyone is targeted or harmed by misogyny. Transphobia is the output of cissexualism, much the same way misogyny is the output of patriarchy. 

So the point I’m trying to make is that instead of arguing that the state is overextending its transphobia to those who shouldn’t be affected by it, I think a more productive analysis is that it is becoming more militant in its cissexualism, and because cisgender people are constructed as (and benefit from being) cis under this system, they will feel the effects of this militancy in various (sometimes deleterious) ways.

And I likewise hate that the other dominant framework is “born this way/born in the wrong body” because of how it naturalises the very political and violent nature of sex assignment and its embeddedness within state census data, administrative architecture, the pathologisation of sex and desire (all of which are not natural or eternal), and so on. furthermore I deeply respect the position other trans people have when they say that they chose to be transgender - outside of conversations of individual validity, I think that is a politically useful and powerful way to position yourself. Even if we were to accept that being transgender is fully a choice, people would still do it, because being trans is not disgusting or shameful. I am not a sick individual, or a tragedy, or a danger to others, I am transgender and that is an incredibly meaningful and fulfilling part of my life. To frame this as a sexual perversion or life-long condition means reinforcing the idea that transgenderism is a shameful deformity (we have much in common with our disabled & intersex comrades in this regard), that the cissexual body is the exclusive site of beauty and authenticity.

And so this is where I find the idea of autonomy much more useful - while ‘choice’ is situated as a thing that individuals do, autonomy is power that is granted to you. I can’t meaningfully demand choice as a political goal, but I can demand autonomy. I don’t want choice, I want the autonomy to act on my desires, and the way that will happen is through the state provision of free hrt, surgery, name and gender marker changes, and so on. Autonomy feels like a much more productive articulation of “choice” because it necessitates that we think about who and what grants autonomy, for what purposes, in which contexts. Who gives a shit about choices! Transgenderism is not a social position an individual can have in society, it is produced through cissexualism, through state and medical sex assignment, through coercion and pathologisation and violence - all of which can be changed.

“thanks for taking this basic conversation about how women are still an oppressed minority group and crawling out of the woodwork to make sure the conversation becomes about how men are harmed by the patriarchy too”

1. Have as many large age gaps between characters as possible.

2. Family relationships should be prominent and preferably inappropriate.

3. Have at least one main character who is irredeemable.

Sukuna did not overpower Gojo’s technique. He asked a question that was never built to answer.

Yet, this does not diminish the brilliance of the technique. Gojo Satoru built his ultimate defence on what sounded like a simple division of space. It took four of the deepest ideas in modern mathematics, such as convergence, measure, metric geometry, and topology, to fully understand why it stood, and ultimately, why it could fall. That, in the end, is what mathematics does best. It does not just calculate, but it illuminates.

they are reinventing the "my yearning towards you alone cuts through space like a heartfelt wish" from the first principle ...

(side note: this is also why, when gege explained that gojo didn't see the slash coming because he was distracted after destroying mahoraga, thinking that sukuna no longer had any means to bypass Infinity, i believe it. it shows that gojo had truly given up on the idea that someone could have the patience and willpower to unravel the mystery of him, not knowing mr yearnatron3000 sukuna over there was built different and had been yapping about reaching him since chapter 116: