No Resolution
A review of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism at the beginning of the end.
By Jenna Brager
Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Or, at least she wholly understands your impending failure to keep them. So go ahead, smoke another cigarette. Smoke whatever you can find. Down a few more 100 calorie snack packs. Eat a whole goddamn box of 100 calorie snack packs. Fuck 100 calorie snack packs, find some actual cookies and eat all of them. Eat whatever you can find. Don’t give up caffeine. Don’t work harder. Slack off. Don’t get a promotion. Keep drinking. Drink more. Ignore your new gym membership. Pick up new bad habits. Hone your bad habits into an art form. Master the art of sustaining your bad habits, because your bad habits are what sustain you.
After all, bad habits are lifesavers we cling to in the face of the fraying and always already toxic “good life fantasies” we wallow in, in the face of becoming totally unmoored. Are you really that guilty about your guilty pleasures? What exactly were you hoping for, anyway? In her new book Cruel Optimism, University of Chicago English Professor Lauren Berlant describes the titular phrase as “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” We cling to the fantasy that, “this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.” This time she’ll really love you. This time you’ll lose the weight. This time you’ll make enough money. This time the candidate’s promises will last after election night. This time the mission will really be accomplished. This time, you will be happy. Except, you know, you won’t. At least not for long.
Happy fucking New Year.
my bold. cruel optimism was totally a 2011 relevant phrase and the tool of neo-liberal deniers everywhere. therefore: want.
(via Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women | Brain Pickings)
In the 1940s and ’50s, there were few places where muscular women congregated; one of the most important was in the circus. Aerialists, trapeze artists, and acrobats all developed impressive musculature by practicing their arts. There was a cadre of men who pursued these women and captured their flexing biceps on film. The pictures do not show much creativity or talent, but they document female muscularity at a time when such images were very rare. There is a rustic charm to these photographs, taken in off-hours in fort of circus wagons or company busses. Unfortunately, few paying customers wanted to see girls posing like this.
Exploring gender identity and cultural disposition through rare archival images from 1800-1980. Having competed in amateur (a.k.a. drug-free) bodybuilding in my college years and to this day remaining the dedicated maintainer of a six-pack, I’m tremendously fascinated by the intersection of femininity and muscularity. So I was thrilled to come across Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women — a fascinating collection of rare archival images by David L. Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky 30 years in the making, chronicling nearly 200 years of sociocultural narrative on the strong female physique. ….
There is something profoundly upsetting about a proud, confident, unrepentantly muscular woman. She risks being seen by her viewers as dangerous, alluring, odd, beautiful or, at worst, a sort of raree show. She is, in fact, a smorgasbord of mixed messages. This inability to come to grips with a strong, heavily muscled woman accounts for much of the confusion and downright hostility that often greets her.” ~ David L. Chapman
… Curiously, the period between 1900 and 1914 was a golden age for images of muscular women, but these images become mysteriously difficult to find in popular media, until about the 1970s. Chapman speculates the advent of cinema and other popular entertainment displaced fairs, circuses, and vaudevilles, a prime venue for strongwomen, causing these foremothers to gradually disappear*.
via Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women | Brain Pickings)
*or the success of race, sex and class equality movements making the potency of strong women too threatening for conservative men and audiences?
We are simply IN LOVE with this label BUKI AKIB - everyone knows our Director Jacqueline Shaw is a MAD fan of the woven cloth in Africa - crafts and textiles - this brand epitomises “African Couture” (we copyright that term!!) ….look out for features on our blog!
FYI everyone who was into the African Fashion Guide book - now you can get it here!. More designers on their new tumblr + blog.
THINGS I AM CURRENTLY READING, PART 2
Oh Andrea Smith, why does every publishing project you touch mean another book I gotta get on import?
Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions by Elizabeth Andoh
(via powell’s books)
YUM
…..i suddenly forgot how to read. captain tightpants, please come and teach me. ill provide the cookies ^_^
fangirl trifecta.
Queer Visibility in the Rural US
Last night, I traveled an hour and a half to Stillwater to hear an INCREDIBLY AWESOME AND ROCK MY WORLD lecture entitled “There are no gay people here” : The Politics of Queer Visibility in Rural United States given by Mary L. Gray Author of this book:Gray spent about 2 years studying and researching LGBTQ youth in rural communities around the Appalachians. I must share with you some points of the lecture!
The mainstream has configured elements of what it means to be a “good gay” and to have a “good gay life.” This includes
- a critical mass of LGBTQ identifying people
- capital: money to to move legislation
- accessible “safe spaces” that are specifically for LGBTQ identifying people
Rural queer youth have little to no access to any of these things. Rural queers may ban together in temporary “safe spaces”, but they are not a “critical mass” and the spaces are not continually claimed by LGBTQ identifying people. The money they do have is not disposable and cannot be used for legislative action. Considering what the mainstream LGBT movements considers THE gay issues (mostly using capital for legislative action), rural queers may feel like they are not making a difference and are not relevant.
Middle-class rural queers are more likely to leave their rural areas for cities and larger towns because they have the capital to do so and also because of local pressure to “tone down” anything queer for the sake of the reputation of their privileged family. Working class and poor queers are the “most fabulous” in expressing their identities because they have nothing to lose! Still, local politics may have queer youth having to consider maintaining access to food, shelter, and jobs.
Many of the queer youth form coalitions with intersecting social justice issues (i.e. environmental, anti-racism, etc.) to be able to function and establish local recognition.
Gray recognizes that her studies are incomplete and will become out of date soon. This book is the first of its kind and more research needs to be done! …
Visit Mary Gray’s site at: www.queercountry.org
This sounds amazing. I wonder how much the ‘nothing to lose’ also means ‘nowhere to hide’ .
Related: identity politics and ‘really queer’ behaviours are commonly dismissed, even by queer advocates, as the realm of priviliged, politics-lite queers now.
But!
Such dismissals strike me as uninformed conservatism, for erasing the fact that it’s the least priviliged queers who still can’t access the gains from prior generations queer liberation. e.g. rural, ethnic minorities and gender minority people living in poverty etc.
Those queers have the most to risk and gain from brazen identity politics, as both a protective mechanism [be offensive, not defensive!] and a peer seeking visibility measure for people who are isolated or under seige.
It’s risky sure, but rural queers and/or queers in ethnic minorities sometimes just can’t control their privacy enough to control the risk either. Privacy is hard to ensure when your regular circumstance is being surrounded by people who aren’t really peers, but do notice your difference and demand to know your business.
In which case..ta da..being flamboyantly out is still very political, not priviliged nostalgia, because outness is now as ever about challenging stigma and isolation.
editor Sassafras Lowrey receives the first copies of Kicked Out (via pomofreakshow
Sassafras manages to be cute even while book spieling!
“It’s been a dream of mine since, since I was kicked out myself. I first conceptualized the book 2 days after I was kicked out. I was sitting in a library looking at all the books in the gay and lesbian section and there was nothing, I think, that talked about what I was going through. And I really made this promise to myself that if, if um, if I made it through it, that I was gonna write a book ..”
In the U.S., 40% of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ). Kicked Out published by Homofactus Press brings together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth and tells these forgotten stories of some of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. To learn more visit us online at http://www.KickedOutAnthology.com
ARTIST: Jerry McMillan TITLE: Ed Ruscha with six of his books on his head 1970. Jerry McMillan at Craig Krull Gallery
We see farmed animals so rarely today, it becomes easy to forget all of this. Earlier generations were more familiar than we are with both the personalities of farm animals and the violence done to them. They would have known that pigs are playful, smart and curious [we would say “like dogs”], and that they have complex social relationships [we would say “like primates”]. They would have known the look and behaviour of a caged pig, as well the infant like screech of a pig being castrated or slaughtered.
Having little exposure to animals makes it much easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment. The problem posed by meat has become an abstract one: there is no individual animal, no singular look of joy or suffering, no wagging tail and no scream. The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
Ethical shopping flatters us that our everyday buying is doing good’, argues Heartfield. Such ethical transactions represent a form of ‘status affirmation’. And as is the case with all forms of status affirmation, these green shopping habits are acts of social demarcation. Through adopting the identity of an ethical shopper, someone who cares and who reflects on what they purchase, green consumers are self-consciously marking themselves off from their moral, and incidentally their social, inferiors. Their denunciation of their fellow human beings who wear trashy throwaway cheap clothes and eat cheap food is a modern-day version of the paternalistic lectures made by Victorian do-gooders.
Ironically, green protest against consumerism doesn’t represent the rejection of consumption, but rather its moralisation. From a sociological perspective, green consumption can be seen as a new form of conspicuous consumption. This is consumption for effect. Consumption apparently must no longer be an impulsive act of buying – rather it has become a massively over-examined experience, and both a moral statement and an affirmation of status and identity. In the nineteenth century, theories of commodity fetishism noted the growing tendency for people to live through things – commodities appeared to acquire a life of their own through the working of the market. In the world of green consumerism, the fetish of commodities acquires an unprecedented significance. Things are assigned human and ethical significance. Thus we have the stigmatisation of certain foods as ‘evil’ and the rendering of other products as ‘ethical’.
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- from Frank Furedi’s discussion and analysis of Heartfield’s book “Green Capitalism.” (via joannecostello) adding to the reading list |
Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.
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Derrick Jensen: Endgame (via guerrillamamamedicine) I’m reading Endgame now, and having so many ‘yes’ moments. A lot of it’s what anyone who sees environmentalism as a baseline sustaining life issue would believe anyway; advocating whole social systems change not piecemeal ‘greenwashing’ consumer adjustments, advocating both large scale political change and everyday personal adaptations rather than sitting around waiting for a perfect, easy solution There’s some similarity to various First Nations philosophies, or permaculture and transition town theories, in terms of his views on resource ethics. Jensens strength in Endgame though, is that he hits the goal of good political writing for mainstream audiences so consistently: he translates huge, confronting political ideas into ‘YES!” moments that anyone could get and feel all motivated by. [I gush, because writing ‘green’ issues to appeal to non-climate-science nerds is a personal goal of mine. I do this stuff in a political volunteering role atm] |
