Brain without a jar

Happy birthday to Lyudmila Pavlichenko (born July 12, 1916), Soviet sniper in World War II, with 309 confirmed kills.

Had to look up how fast trains go in 1900 (45-60 mph). Looked at canon maps and realized that Amestris was far, far smaller than I had realized. Decided fuck that and superimposed Amestris and surrounding countries on a map of Pangaea so that I could get the size I wanted. Started planning out mountain ranges and other geography that isn't mentioned in canon but probably exists.

I wanted to do a what if this was real thing. So okay the Air Loom was a vast machine that fired evil miasmas at people to drive them mad. One of the people controlling it was a doctor, so I needed a medical centre near Bedlam asylum. I found a pharmacy, which was quite a large medical centre serving the local community. And found the main doctor there's name because it's patronage and membership records were online

I looked up the doctor, and wildly, I found he'd written a book about miasma theory and illness. He wrote it based on poverty in the local area. So I found the book, read it. Worked out where he'd have gone, found the names of the local pubs. Great.

Now I needed the other big name in the imaginary mind control gang. King Billy. So I needed someone cake William with wealth who was a patron of the pharmacy. And I immediately found William Wilberforce MP was involved. A famous anti slavery MP.

Join us as we discuss one of the worst-written books we've had to cover: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. It is considered a landmark text of the so-called third wave of feminism, but is it all it's cracked up to be? Given that it kicked off queer theory, it certainly got a few things wrong. Join us as we walk through the good, the bad, and the paradigm-shifting aspects of Judith Butler's seminal work.

Our companion episode on Patreon is on Monique Wittig!

TERF or Transfeminist Avant la Lettre? That is the title of a paper on Monique Wittig that is almost certainly clickbait. We discuss a paper by Blase A. Provitola examining Monique Wittig's work and the appropriations of it by scholars, feminists, and activists with very different politics, asking important questions such as "why is everyone so bad at reading" and "how badly can Talia mispronounce French words".

We actually have a fairly extensive library of Patreon episodes by now. You can get early access to our next episode (on The Beauty Myth, out soon) as well as Patreon-exclusive episodes on:

The Genderbread Person,

Jack Halberstam discussing how toilets are bourgeois,

Kadji Amin's fairly controversial paper We Are All Non-Binary,

One year ago, trans women held an iconic topless protest outside the Scottish Parliament. I love it when trans women hold topless demonstrations. If they're arrested, the state must admit they're women. If they aren't, it exposes the obvious contradictions of defining trans women as legally male.

One year ago, trans women held an iconic topless protest outside the Scottish Parliament. I love it when trans women hold topless demonstrations. If they're arrested, the state must admit they're women. If they aren't, it exposes the obvious contradictions of defining trans women as legally male.