star-anise:

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork.  In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

I’m having a weird month and finding it increasingly hard to disentangle modern narratives about bodies, lifestyle, health, and diet from medieval Christian versions of the same. It’s all melting and turning to soup inside my brain.

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give me a lever and a place to stand

50 years ago: Dr. John Fryer, in perhaps the most courageous and definitely the most consequential act of his life, sat down in a hotel conference room, looking like a clown in a rubber mask and curly wig. Every part of him was covered. He was terrified.

“I am a homosexual,” he said. “I am a psychiatrist.”

The New York Times covered the anniversary of his speech today. I believe we all should honour him. His willingness to speak the truth when it could have ruined his life (again) changed the world.

Dr. Fryer only spoke up because he knew that time, at that place, could have made a difference. He knew the American Psychiatric Association had a dusty little committee that oversaw the list of diagnoses and disorders the profession used, and the new committee chairman was fiercely committed to science. He was willing to overturn old Freudian dogmas if the empirical evidence said that homosexuals were not actually the disordered, perverted fiends psychiatry thought they were.

There is so much wrong with the world. It is natural to feel frenzied with the desire to set all of it right, everywhere. It is also natural to feel overwhelmed and powerless, because almost none of us possess the power to make changes on a scale equal to what’s wrong.

Two years before Dr. Fryer’s speech, gay and lesbian protestors picketed the APA’s general meeting. They stormed into conference panels, demanding that the APA take homosexuality off their list of mental disorders. It was a miserable failure. These midcentury Freudian psychiatrists naturally considered themselves as a cut above the unenlightened mass of common society; this ✨destructive and antisocial✨behaviour just proved that gays and lesbians had something wrong with them. Even members of the GayPA, the unofficial association of homosexual psychiatrists, disapproved of their behaviour.

So one of the activists, Barbara Gittings, realized they needed to switch tactics. If psychiatrists would only listen to another psychiatrist, they needed an inside man. So she campaigned relentlessly among the GayPA, asking psychiatrist after psychiatrist to put their reputations, careers, and medical licenses on the line to speak up for them. Doctor after doctor turned her down. No wonder; at the time, “sodomy”, meaning almost any non-PIV sex, was still a crime in 42 states. Who would put themselves out there like that?

Hence Dr. Fryer’s disguise. Hence his subsequent retreat from public gay activism. The following year, he lost another job for being too obviously gay. He dedicated the rest of his career to geriatric psychiatry, focusing on the spiritual and emotional needs of the dying and the bereaved they left in their wake. He threw large and fabulous parties, but always felt himself to be on the fringes of the LGBT movement. Only at the end of his life did people begin to realize just how profound his weird, secretive, clown-suited moment had been in their history. It doesn’t seem to have brought him much peace or healing, after a lifetime of silence and oppression.

We’re taught all these triumphant narratives where someone is the hero of a movement; when they are tirelessly committed to a goal and get to celebrate its accomplishment. When there is something wrong in the world, we’re given images of being pivotal to its solution. There’s almost an element of self-punishment; if we are not constantly anguished about something, if we do not constantly push beyond our own limits, are we really trying?

And consequently as a society we ignore or downplay the work that gets shit done. Not a heroic narrative, but someone stepping up once during a life where they have very little spare time or energy for activism. Not a complete change, but the small push of one tiny decision that looks like it might be important. Not halting a war halfway across the world, but showing up to the boring committee meeting you get invited to every year, and speaking for ten minutes.

And then years of friends, of renting rooms to med students to stay financially afloat, of providing what comfort and kindness you can to people you can’t really help at all. It is hard sometimes to understand how much it matters to be humane and decent to the world around you, but it’s easier to imagine when you think about the world around you being humane and decent to you.

I’m not saying we should stop watching the news or stop caring about events we cannot control. I am saying that we need to feed our own capacities to be loving and courageous and thoughtful—to survive, and do more than survive—and then we need to see what opportunities to change things are within our grasp, and what we would need to feel able to take part.

It’s possible the decisions we can actually influence will in the end be meaningless. But then again, it’s possible they won’tbe.

betterbinderproject:

Hey, it’s @star-anise. I started this project but I’ve been struggling to keep it going ever since.

I need help.

I’m sure there are ways for people to share information about boned binder experiments, to link examples or review things for sale. I put myself at the bottleneck of this blog when I’ve struggled to keep my own life together. I can’t run a community into the bargain.

So if the people interested in this idea find other ways to assemble and talk about it, I’ll do my best to support and aid you by signalboosting. If somebody wants to keep this blog up, let me know.

Once I get my sewing studio back together, I still have more ideas to get back to testing. I just have to be more realistic about what I can and can’t do.

If you don’t know this project, it’s based on an idea I had in 2018 when I learned about a health study that said an overwhelming majority of people who wore chest binders (even good ones like GC2B) experienced negative health effects like back pain or shortness of breath

I had an idea for a new design. I took what I knew about historical clothing techniques and applied it to modern knitwear and elastic, and came up with a model that someone who knows how to sew could make for about $20.

I got as far as documenting my process:

Transform a sports bra into a binder: The Tutorial

I had a lot of really big plans for things that I would do, like collecting survey data to see how my test model compared to commercial binders, providing technical support to sewists, and creating a community hub for people to talk about their ideas and compare results.

I am not good at doing that kind of work! I seriously overcommitted myself and as I fell behind on the work—because a lot of people have tried the idea out and taken it different places and then come back to tell or ask me about it—I got more ashamed of admitting I couldn’t.

So I would love to see what people are doing, hear how it’s going, and talk about improvements for the future. I just… need to stop putting myself in the way of that process, and find ways to follow the discussion without anyone requiring me to answer asks or email in a timely manner.

(As for my own contributions? Right now it’s a bit ambitious, but I hope I can get back to sewing more test models in 2022. There are ideas I want to try and issues I want to solve—for example, binders from this tutorial have tended to wear out and become de-elasticated fast, so I want to create models to keep that from happening. That’s the kind of work I cando.)

This isn’t stagnation; I’m fermenting.

I am so sad that bell hooks died this week. I read one of her books a few months ago, and she wrenched my soul open like a tin can. (This was a good thing.) I never met her, but the moment I heard of her death I thought: Oh no. I had so many things I wanted to ask her!

bell hooks was a feminist. She wanted a world where everyone was liberated from the harm that gender roles inflicted on us. Her perspective as a Black woman was essential to enriching radical feminism, making it more complex and nuanced. She wrote dozens of books, and was one of the heavy rollers bringing in the Third Wave of feminism.

Try her book Feminism is for Everybody. That’s all I ask. Look it up and give it a try.

If you hate feminism’s man-hating, you need bell hooks. She writes about men with an aching love, a shared humanity, a desire for healing and reconciliation. After all, she spent years teaching men about feminism, and didn’t do it to tell men how terrible they were. She saw how much the pressures of “being a man”, of worthiness defined by “getting girls”, used shame, power, and violence to create men who could be exploited by capitalism and the military. She knew that feminism cannot just cast men out in the cold to figure things out, cannot just resort to shame, power, and violence when men fail to instantly acclimate to the new feminist world.

If you’re getting into radical feminism, you need bell hooks. She’s the answer I point to when people say they love the incredible power of the tools radical feminism give them, so even if they don’t like it, they feel they have to accept the amount of vitriol and groupthink radical feminism seems to demand. Do you want to know how to use those tools of critique and political action, without having to agree or join in when members of your movement are hateful or aggressive to their “enemies”? You need bell hooks.

bell hooks lived face-to-face with the violent ugliness of male domination, from childhood to maturity. She lived as a radical feminist activist for decades and draws directly from those sources. But the valuable perspective she brings is the ugly parts of those trenches: The people the fight grinds up and spits out, and the people it leaves behind. She sees how furious concentration on an issue like the sexual assault of white women by strangers leaves the movement completely blind to other intersecting issues, like the mistreatment of Black men by the police. She sees the prostitutes damaged by radical feminist attempts to “liberate” them from the “exploitation” of sex work that don’t lead to healing or liberation, just poverty, ostracism, and shame. And she can envision a feminism that doesn’t leave anyone behind. She is a philosopher of love and healing.

She was an incredible voice in feminism. I have learned so much from her; she has enriched the world around us immeasurably.

May she rest in power.