Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (79 of them)
ah i totally missed the literary clusterfucks thread (took me a while to find it because i was looking for it on ILB and not ILE).
so i found time to read the story, not because i much wanted to, but because if i'm going to talk about it i should have some minimal knowledge of it. it was sort of what i thought. a lot of paranoia and self-doubt in there, a lot of talk about war which i kind of skimmed over, since it's not a topic i find interesting or a topic i can much relate to.
i'm not opposed to anybody who wants to reclaim any word or phrase. i'm not saying they can't or shouldn't prioritize that. i think "queer" is a wonderful word, perhaps the first word that meant something to me (it would pop up in some of the older children's books i read but i knew somehow, cultural osmosis, that it meant more than that). i also don't think that reclamation is as simple or straightforward as lenny bruce made it sound.
i also agree with you about the therapeutic power of literature. i've written a lot of dark shit. writing that stuff, going there, has been a key part of my journey. i wouldn't dream of publishing any of it, though, because it's pretty awful, because i got a lot of bullshit in my head and i try to be respectful about where and how i put that bullshit on other people.
i don't know ms. fall, i don't know what drives her, but i have found it easy to underestimate how much hurt delving into that liminal shit can cause to other people.
i smile a lot, i laugh a lot, and i don't tend talk about dark shit. partly because i sound like a teenage goth girl when i do, partly because i have the tendency to ruminate, partly because it is fucking terrifying to think of what i might be capable of, under certain circumstances.
so i don't have a utopia for you. the closest to utopia is me, where i live now, and it's a shitty goddamn utopia, that's for sure. but i don't have any dystopias for you either. i don't know shit about the future, and i'm not sure anybody else does either; i'm just trying to survive, have the best present i can, and help give the people i care about the opportunities i have.
― revenge of the jawn (rushomancy), Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:29 (four years ago) link
i figured as such, but i wanted to cover my bases. :) i know the school of literature you're talking about - "hey why don't we write more stories about space elevators" or whatever - and i don't find those utopias entirely convincing. i don't subscribe to the philosophy that says our problems are going to be solved by technology, whether that's space elevators or gcs.
On consideration I'm not sure I agree with the hypothesis. I don't think "soldier" is a gender. I mean I know the joke is that it stands for "Assigned Cop At Birth" but it's just a pun, it doesn't speak to some deeper truth.
See, I'm always a woman, but I'm not always a woman first. Whatever else you are, if you're a cop, you're a cop first.
two months pass...
two weeks pass...