“The original TERFs hailed from a specific strain of trans-hostile radical feminism—the kind espoused by certain feminist authors from the 1970s and ’80s, like Janice Raymond, whose 1979 book The Transsexual Empire notoriously called for “morally mandating [trans people] out of existence.” Their political battles were focused on things like condemning strap-ons as a symbol of male dominance or keeping trans women out of the lesbian folk festival MichFest. They were widely mocked, highly unpopular and, even at their peak in the 1980s, exercised almost no political power.
So how did TERFs become a global threat? The answer, according to researcher Ky Schevers, is that they’re not the same people. In the mid-2010s, a small group of activists with fascist sympathies—most of them hailing from the environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance (DGR)—infiltrated the older movement and dragged it to the right, over the objections of some members.
“I was hanging out with these transphobic radical feminists when the right-wing creep happened,” Schevers says. “I know that there’s a whole lot of them that actually feel completely fucked-over.””
in the wake of dracula daily and subsequent ongoing discussions of the antisemitism that drives the book, i thought i’d throw together a verybrief primer based on little strands of research i’ve done in the past around some of the history that scaffolds dracula.i’m not trying to scold people for participating in the more lighthearted end of this cultural moment – i love dracula,i’m also reading dracula daily and enjoying everyone’s little jokes about jonathan harker and his paprika and so on – but i amtrying to provide what i hope is a somewhat useful resource for deeper engagement with the text, a necessary critical skill if you want to have anything meaningful to say about it. i’m not really interested in coddling people’s feelings about antisemitism, and i think it’s in everyone’s best interests to provide a little bit of a framework for how we approach and think about and talk about what is a pretty unambiguously bigoted book.
for what it’s worth, i find the most productive way to approach this text, as with any text that emerges from a tradition of immense violence (ie. pretty much any work of english literature from the nineteenth century, all of which write from the heartlands of imperialist plunder and the formation of nationalist cultural norms) is as a historical document. there’s a difference in these discourses between a piece that’s made today, where we might ask whywe’ve allowed particular cultural conditions to facilitate the telling of narratives that are attempting to naturalise conditions of bigotry, and one created in 1897, where our relationship to that historical moment should be one of self-reflection and analysis with an eye to informing our understanding of present-day violences. my point is that a text which locates itself within the british antisemitism of the late nineteenth century is one which can enhance our understanding of that antisemitism and its present-day legacy.
i also want to clarify that i don’t intend to reduce the bigotry of draculatojustthe antisemitism – it is clearly shaped by broader strokes around racism and imperialist race science in particular, but the specific british-jewish cultural history within which it is grounded happens to be the one that i have a relatively coherent understanding of, and wanted to share. i don’t at all intend to frame this as a complete account – i’m more just putting what i have to hand out into the world for others to do with what they will and ultimately come to their own conclusions about the text and how best to engage with it.
i think it’s worthwhile to also touch briefly on the fact that draculais by no means alone in invoking antisemitism where vampires are concerned – what often gets missed in discourses around what vampires can represent (parasitic capitalism being an incrediblycommon discursive invocation, to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing that so-called marxists can’t make the very short leap) is that much of the vampire mythos is shaped by antisemitism. the draining of blood closely resembles a blood libel, ie. the smear that jews drink the blood of christian children; the state of being repelled by a crucifix should be self-explanatory; the construction of the vampire as a parasite leeching off of communal social formations forged within white imperialist societies closely reflects anxieties regarding the allegedly parasitic presence of jews both in eastern + central europe andnew immigrant communities in britain. the vampire is immortal as the jew is eternal – the ‘eternal jew’ is a nazi smear drawing from the antisemitic canard of the ‘wandering jew,’ which in turn dates back to the thirteenth century. the vampire threatens the national body and so does the jew. the rush to point to the vampire as an apt metaphor for the parasitism of capitalism too quickly falls into the mire of discourses that entwine capitalist violence with jewish populations (jews are all moneygrabbing leeches and so on), and redirects anger towards capitalism into antisemitism. whilst the history of the vampire as a folkloric figure is far richer than just ‘jews bad,’ it is undeniable that this cultural scaffolding exists,and informs draculaeven before stoker comes to personally intervene in discourses of antisemitism specific to the conditions from which he was writing.
this excellent paperondraculaand the gothic response to anxieties of imperialist decay – ie. fear of a ‘reverse colonialism’ – that did the rounds on this website a few days ago covers a lot of important and helpful ground for this text, and i would highly recommend giving it a read. what it misses, however, is that draculais rooted not only in these abstract notions of imperial decline and external threats to ‘britishness,’ but in the very definite, concrete historical moment in which new discourses of antisemitism were emerging in britain – and that is the history that i want to touch on now.
in 1882, in the wake of the assassination of tsar alexander ii for which the jewish population of the russian empire were scapegoated, a set of highly repressive laws known as the ‘may laws’ were passed. in short, these laws heavily restricted jewish freedom of movement within the empire, almost entirely limiting jewish settlement to the pale of settlement (a portion of land in the westernmost part of the russian empire, encompassing modern-day belarus, lithuania, and moldova, and parts of poland + ukraine) and restricting property ownership + establishing strict administrative quotas across various sectors that severely limited jewish participation in russian society. this in turn brought about expulsions of portions of the jewish populations of moscow and st petersburg where these quotas were exceeded. crucially, these repressive laws were tightened over the next decade, which, alongside a series of brutal pogroms, caused mass emigration of the ashkenazi population from the russian empire. one significant epicentre for jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century was the east end of london. this was, of course, coterminous to the writing of dracula,in which an eastern european man imbued with a number of antisemitic smears attempts to inculcate himself within the population of london and imitate britishness with the eventual intent of sucking it dry – you see the very obvious lines being drawn here.
it goes without saying that the establishment of a new immigrant population in london would stoke the sort of reactionary sentiments that we can locate in dracula; however, we might look beyond just a loose historical correlation and consider the possible relationship between the whitechapel murders (colloquially known as the jack the ripper murders – whitechapel is located in the east end if you didn’t know) and stoker’s novel (published seven years after the last of the murders) amidst the adjacent discourses that said murders generated. in addition to the fascination with an ‘underside’ to victorian society in which sexual + social moralising was inverted and voyeurised by the moralist bourgeois class that these murders, targeting poor sex workers, amplified (think the kind of sensationalism we see with true crime culture today – very much the prototype of that), the projection of sensationalised sexual degeneracy and lechery onto the murders in turn invoked antisemitic discourses in which the east end’s jewish population became a nodal point of sorts where these spectral anxieties could be projected. a physical description of jack the ripper at one point included a dark beard and a foreign accent, with a sketch that added a hooked nose, and the famous goulston street graffito in 1888 which read ‘the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ has, though unproven, been treated as though it were written in connection with the whitechapel murders. john pizer, a jewish man, was at one point arrested for the murders (and later released), and police reports around this referred to emergent broader anti-jewish sentiment in whitechapel. the point is, there’s a case to be made for the whitechapel murders having amplified already-extant antisemitism in the east end, and a furthercase to be made for this specific blood libel adjacency to have shaped bram stoker’s novel. (to compare; this is, for example, the same discourse that scaffolds the joke in what we do in the shadows about laszlo being jack the ripper.) whilst we don’t knowthat stoker consciously, explicitly had jack the ripper in mind, 1) it is a theory that has been critically posited before, and 2) at the very least, the novel’s unambiguous antisemitism that locates itself most prominently within a blood libel would have been informed by discourses specific to london, of which this was a major one.
that dracula himself is something of an antisemitic caricature is, i would hope, obvious; and of course, the text is laced with the language of physiognomy and the fear that an immigrant might sufficiently imitate britishness to the point of being able to pass himself off as british wholesale. to take this further, we might, for example, think about how stoker depicts lucy westenras – a ‘blonde, demure’ white woman representative of the british imperialist fantasy of white womanhood becomes a vampire and feeds off of the same children that she (as a white woman) is socially conditioned to care for and reproduce, thus rendering the vampiric threat as one that targets white women and their reproductive roles within the imperial social formation. we might similarly point to the whitechapel murders and the simultaneous sensationalising of sex workers’ murders against the figure of the ‘good’ bourgeois white woman + the subsequent anxiety that the jewish population of the east end might represent a real, immediate threat to london’s womanhood.i don’t want to be overly didactic about this book, and i think that after a certain point this scaffolding is such that people can go away and do the work themselves – like, i’m not going to sit here drawing out point after painstaking point about how draculais peppered with the language of race science and imperialist anxiety at points x, and y, and z. my intention here was to provide a bit of specific background context for how & why this novel came about, from the relatively meagre well of information that i have to hand. my closing remarks might be that we could use all of this discourse as a launchpad for thinking about the points of convergence of subjugation within the vampire myth, and what that can tell us about how imperialism refortifies itself + against which values it does so – in dracula,in sheridan le fanu’s carmilla,in samuel taylor coleridge’s christabel,and in the broader corpus of myth to which all of these texts are responding, we can identify repeated convergent themes of othering the jew, the irish population (le fanu was anglo-irish and a popular reading of carmillais as representative of the colonisation of ireland), the homosexual (draculais incredibly homoerotic, and both carmillaandchristabelare fairly explicitly lesbian), the racialised + colonised populace, and the projection of lechery and sexual degeneracy onto all of these subjects in the ultimate interest of reifying white gentile imperialist sexual formations. the somewhat effete feminising of dracula comes against the masculinising of the imperial british man, for example; the ‘othered’ populace exists in threat & opposition to the imperial norm (and the feminised jewish man is a classicof antisemitism, eg. as far back as the medieval smear that jewish men menstruated). all of these figures clustered under the broad umbrella of the vampire are rendered as threats to reproductive white heterosexuality, and as such, to the reproduction of the imperial order, and to capital, and i’ve always found this to be the most elucidating angle from which i can engage with the text critically. i hope at the very least this is a helpful little conjunction of Thoughts that people can do something with?
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
please elaborate
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite orDauntless alongsideAquariusandRavenclaw andINTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinelywrong.
but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.
there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.
This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.
My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.
We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.
Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.
At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me.
I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.)
And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.
The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.
It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.
I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them.
So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster.
I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.
I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life.
Orphaned cat burglar Nyssa Glass intends to outwit her rotten fate.
“Adopted” by her incarcerated uncle’s gang of thieves, she breaks into homes and picks pockets to repay her family debt and one day buy her freedom from their dark enterprise. Mechanically adept and determined, Nyssa longs to attend Miss Pratchett’s School for Mechanically Minded Maids and make an honest life she can take pride in.
She wasn’t made to steal things. She was made to create and fix them.
However, before she can make her escape, the head of the gang taps her for a new assignment, one her conscience cannot bear. Nyssa is faced with a heartrending decision: sacrifice everything or become the very thing she’s desperate to escape.
Belly has been going to her mom’s friend’s (Susannah’s) beach cottage for summer, her whole life, with Conrad and Jerimiah- Susannah’s 2 sons- they are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer—they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one terrible and wonderful summer. Could this finally be the summer for love?
My Opinion…
This was one of my introduction books to YA romance, and I couldn’t have picked a better book! This book was so cute and fluffy and was filled with lots of twists. Jenny Han writes amazing books, and this is no exception. This book has such an adorable storyline and I think this is an amazing book. (Be prepared that belly is a bit stuck up in THIS BOOK, but in the other books she isn’t.) It was such a suspenseful and adorable read with many twists and turns. But overall, it is a spectacular book and you should 110% try the trilogy.
You will like it if…
You will love this book if you are in a reading slump and/or looking to try YA romance. Or if you just looking for an adorable, fluffy romance read!
“When I use the term “whiteness” I do not solely mean that white women are overrepresented as protagonists. I also include whiteness as a hegemonic force used to subjugate and oppress people of color. Although these white protagonists often act violently upon themselves, through various forms of self-harm, eating disorders or engaging in dangerous sexual acts, to regain control of their lives, they also externalize this violence onto those they can get away harming. Their primary targets are often people of color, mainly Black people.”
“These fictional depictions of the white disaffected woman have real-world parallels. In an episode of the Red Scare Podcast titled “Shia Labuse,” hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan mock FKA twigs, who opened up about the abuse she endured from Shia LaBeouf. Dasha, who diagnosed herself with “girl, interrupted syndrome” and is heavily associated with the waif aesthetic, calls twigs “attention-seeking” and “aggressive” in reference to the New York Times article where she exposed Shia. One can only assume she felt comfortable making these cruel remarks because Black women are not afforded the same vulnerability that white women are able to capitalize on.”
“Black women are not afforded the luxury of dissociation due to the continuous cycle of racial violence we are forced to confront.”
—summary:no one asks about that polaroid picture of a woman yoonoh keeps in the depths of his wallet.
lace, measurements, models—jung yoonoh has worked for the world of fashion for a little too long, but he’s as unknown as the person next door. with his inspiration dying down and his designs getting cheaper by the day, yoonoh has changed his ways. no longer is he the best lingerie designer in ‘silhouette’, the company he works for, neither is he the playboy he used to be and the dulcet-mouthed man that got his way through success.
bad luck has settled in his life, much like it has done on hers. the manager of a hotel that slipped his fingertips when one night she denied him all—the world, her hold, her smile, and just left him with a picture on his wallet.
only when he has to prepare one of the biggest fashion showcases of his life does he meet her again, and he realizes things could never be easy between them.
why is he, a man of fashion, infatuated with such a lovesick, monotone, blazer-sporting hotel manager? no one will ever know.
a runaway has captured him, and he’s not sure how to get his heart back.
maybe, he should start by forgetting that night.
—title:runaway silhouette —pairing:jung yoonoh x reader —genre:lingerie designer!au ; hotel manager!au ; strangers to lovers to enemies!au ; slowburn!au ; slice of life!au —type:fluff ; angst ; humor ; drama ; suggestive —word count: 19,326 (i said slowburn and i meant it) —warnings: mentions of sex (the act is never on paper or narrative)
Jung Yoonoh is dressed to succeed.
With folded white sleeves and a black vest that becomes a second skin, he merges into the office like it belongs to him. It might, at some point in time; an associate after a few years and then, onto another business that was his own—vision, designs, everything. That’s the plan. His suitcase hangs, paces back and forth in the hook of his fist while all eyes cast on him while walking through the cubicles.
Today, Yoonoh is becoming the one in charge.
Silhouetteis the lingerie line everyone wants to have cladding their skin. Expensive, intricate and elegant. It’s one of those things people put on when they need to feel their best while also being comfortable. Garments that enamor the buyer and the people who see them. His home for the past two years, Yoonoh has broken his assto get to the manager position in the design department.
When settling his suitcase on his cubicle, he shares a smile with his neighbor. Johnny, part of the social media team, with his long-curled hair framing his rounded face. Fixing the collar of his shirt, Johnny interrupts him to say.
“Big day today, aye?”
Redemption, he likes to call this day. The payment for the parties he didn’t go to and the obnoxious nagging he stood from his boss, Mrs. Kang. This tall woman with atrocious so-last-season fluffed out coats in bright pink who screams at the mere sight of beige underwear. As she says, it’s tackyandsimple, the kind of clothing you’d want to wear when un-turning someone on.
Yoonoh can’t waituntil he can make decisions, organize collections, make bigger and better options for Silhouette to expand.
Fred Moten’s concept of undercommons has been incredibly useful in articulating the reading group as praxis but it feels like a wasted opportunity to see Moten deployed in the service of analyzing the activity of just one reading group because the really robust part of thinking that social formation in that way is its modularity, reading groups as immanent to the mobilization, not the totality of it and indeed as organelles that frequently lyse. The group in this ethnography is a preparatory group for a Trotskyist org in Lebanon, about as impersonal an institution as you can get on the Left - people are attracted, subordinated to the purpose of the group, and lashed to the productive labor of rebellion as directed by experts, and then become alienated from that labor. This is not to say the group itself cannot do anything useful - Chamas identifies both worldmaking and therapeutic benefits to participation in this social formation, that our demons may no longer be seen as supernatural even as they remain nearly insurmountable. The therapeutic benefit of such a space is something I’ve documented myself in every group like this I’ve been a part of - I always seem to come away with friends, some of whom have become so close as to offer to pay my rent for me if needed (something I absolutely dread having to do someday), and personal distresses, if any, are often aired as people trickle in and rarely do they end up distracting from the work the group came to do together.
The issue I have is that the subject of inspection is just a very poor example of this sort of thing. Reading groups are basically just networking on a shared interest, and when they disintegrate or split, the particulates scatter and reconvene elsewhere and in this way the entire nexus of this aspect of the undercommons is reproduced. In other words, splitting is not the end. It is a flexible, separable thing; a many-headed hydra; a mycelial network which attempts to funnel resources to where they’re most needed. And indeed, this last function was what allowed Moten to come to terms with his social position without guilt - his function was one of defection, of channeling resources afforded him by engagement with the institution to that institution’s antagonists. “Disorganized study” is “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you”, it is a way of “being together in brokenness”. This mode of thinking intends to flatten relations between thinkers and discard the presumed importance of expertise: “They were spaces for discussing readings but also for telling stories through which to cultivate what Hage, following from Bourdieu, calls a “specific radical illusio: not just a conception of the world but an investment in it.” Bourdieu, Hage tells us, “links illusio with a social libido because the way we invest ourselves in the social world is not only intellectual but also libidinal”. This imbrication of the libidinal I was hoping to see Chamas tackle given the deployment of a queer perspective, but this perspective is limited to the utopian promise animating this group (and the undercommons more generally) and ignores both the intensely generative energies that comprise sexual tension between collaborators as well as the more conflictual aspects of that tension. Something like a breakup between two members causing a group to entirely disintegrate is perhaps sad in the immediate, but as mentioned before, these particulates find new groups and again become nodes in the network. We needn’t all work in the immediate presence of awkwardness, but we can at least devour the same festering corpse.
