bloodygranuaile

My yearlong read for 2022 was Capital: Volume 1 by the inestimable Karl Marx, because I figured that after five years of doing socialism it was high time I actually read it. I’d read some of the earliest chapters way back in the day when I first got involved, but was only able to make two or three book group meetings before I basically gave up going. This I think prepared me a little bit for the first few chapters on this read, since they are the densest and most difficult to follow, so it was nice to have this be the second attempt.

From a modern perspective, the experience of actually reading the book is very uneven. Some parts of it are perfectly easy to read, describing the conditions in various industries and the history of attempts to improve them. Others are harder to read because they involve more abstract theoretical stuff about value that takes some concentration to get one’s head around. And other parts of it are just tough to read because they are responses to other writings by various political economists and journalists and commentators whose opinions nobody still cares about. Marx spends plenty of time rebutting the ideas of people who are still considered influential, like Adam Smith and Richard Malthus, but apparently there were also a lot of two-bit chatterers participating in The Discourse in the 1860s and Marx was determined to rebut every last one of them.

That said, it was a very valuable and often entertaining read. Some of the incredible length is because Marx does try to repeat stuff until you get it, which I found helpful for remembering what everything means. I am still not sure I could give you an accurate off-the-cuff definition of “valorization of capital” but there are a lot of other little bits of Marxist discourse that make more sense now that I’ve seen them fitted into one big framework. I do feel sort of like I should go back and read it all again until more of it sticks (1,200 pages of content is a lot to remember) but more seriously I think if I do read it again, I should probably read it alongside one of those companion/explainer works.

The other thing I’m tempted to do is jump right into Volume 2 for next year’s read, but I think I will give myself a break and try to tackle one of the books that’s been sitting on my TBR shelf for years instead. Maybe I’ll read Volume 2 for 2024.

I was pleased to hear that the political book club had selected for its next book Naomi Klein’s No Logo, which has been sitting on my TBR shelf waiting to go join its friend This Changes Everything on my read shelf for a few years.

While I generally like Klein, I had a few apprehensions going into this. The book is more than 20 years old; would it be so dated as to be useless? Would it uncritically endorse trends in activism that have since become so played out they’re ineffective (or worse, counterproductive), like parodying stuff or adjusting your personal consumption habits?

In retrospect I probably should have given Klein more credit; she’s not stupid, even if a lot of other loud online voices on the “left” are. I had my critiques of this book (mostly to do with finger-wagging about property destruction at protests), and certainly some of it is a bit of a time capsule (how long has it been since MTV was culturally relevant?), but overall it is, unfortunately, still very educational reading. We are still living in in the world of brands and megabrands and their endless colonization of public space–even the internet, which was basically the frontier of anti-corporate activism when this book was written because anybody could set up a website or listserv, has devolved into like four social media sites and seven streaming services that are all chock-full of ads and can nuke whatever content they want whenever they want to.

The book is split up into four sections: “No Space,” about the aggressive intrusion of branding into every nook and cranny of our lives and the megabrands’ attempts to become art, culture, spirituality, education, and the public square; “No Choice,” about corporate consolidation and the effects of monopoly power; “No Jobs,” about offshoring, “McJobs,” union-busting, and the other labor issues in both the global North and South associated with the megabrand model; and “No Logo,” about anti-corporate activism. In each section Klein does a pretty good job of taking us through the various recursions, co-optations, ironies, and contradictions of both brand behavior and the various attempts to fight back against it.

Klein discusses some things about brand co-optation of social justice that I think should be required reading for anyone trying to do cultural activism, especially around issues of media and representation. I also appreciated very much that in the section of “culture jamming,” she discussed the critiques and pitfalls of it as well as its successes (although, since the book came out 20 years ago, it doesn’t include one of my main critiques of it, which is that these days everyone thinks they’re terribly clever and good at it and most of them aren’t). She also has some not particularly original but nonetheless very important things to say about dressing up modest demands in radical language; the efficacy of lawfare (high) versus making people feel guilty about buying clothes and food (low); the uses and limitations of boycotts and selective purchasing agreements; and the commodification of rebellion (“Extreme sports are not political movements and rock, despite its historic claims to the contrary, is not revolution”).

There’s some solid reporting on how evil Disney is that is, distressingly, even more important now than it was when it was written, as Disney has made great strides in the past 20 years in acquiring every single fucking piece of video media ever produced and wiping the insufficiently “family-friendly” ones off the face of the earth (RIP Nimona) while dicking queer audiences around with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, easily-editable-out-for-China “first gay characters” every six months or so to keep audiences so hyperfocused on representation issues that we’ll never get around to noticing that special effects, practical effects, costuming, set design, lighting, and sound mixing have all gone completely down the toilet in the movie industry over the past several years, making most movies fucking unwatchable regardless of how diverse the cast is. I’m not going to judge anyone for being entertained by entertaining things (I have been entertained by many Disney products over the years), but all the same: Fuck Disney, fuck Marvel, fuck Netflix, fuck Warner Brothers, fuck every streaming site, fuck every TV station, fuck every major movie studio that buys up smaller movie studios just to fuck them over, fuck big retailers like Wal-Mart that can pressure studios out of making stuff by refusing to carry it, fuck Amazon, and while we’re at it, fuck everything that’s going on in the book industry too.

*ahem* Sorry, where were we?

Anyway, how to take on extremely large brands is always going to be difficult, because extremely large brands are… well, extremely large, and generally very deep-pocketed. But I think despite its age this book has some good strategic thinking on display that can help inform readers not only about what they’re dealing with, but what factors contribute to resistance being effective or ineffective. And for that, it’s still well worth reading, even if it does talk about MTV and Blockbuster a lot.

Currently, if you want to do something material to push back on at least one megabrand, Starbucks stores all over the U.S. are unionizing–you could go find the one nearest you and sign up for a picket shift or donate to the strike fund. And don’t cross any picket lines!

I’ve followed Natalie Ironside on Tumblr for a couple years now, because, idunno, I have no rhyme or reason for why I follow people on Tumblr. So I knew about The Last Girl Scout well before it was published. But I really only pushed it up my to-read list when real live people that I know not from the internet also started reading it and said it was very good.

And it is. It is extremely fun. It is about a bunch of militant communists and anarchists killing Nazis in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where there are zombies and vampires and stuff. And also talking about their feelings and arguing about Lenin. There’s lots of jokes and swearing and blowing stuff up. There are a lot of trans characters, including both our protagonists–Mags, a political commissar in the Ashland Confederated Republic, and Jules, an ex-Arditi with lots of unfortunate tattoos–and one of the major villains in the second half (Natasha Wenden, an Arditi military doctor, foil for Jules and a not particularly subtle example of why doing the oppressors’ dirty work for them to keep yourself safe will always have an expiration date).

As a self-published book it could have used another round of at least copy edits; as much as I would have loved to see a more polished version of this that had gone through the whole process of professional-level attention, I do not think that a book this explicitly Bolsheviksy would get bought by a mainstream publisher without a certain amount of ~toning it down~, and the total lack of toning it down is a big part of what made it so enjoyable. It’s satisfyingly indulgent for a somewhat niche audience of leftist queerdos whomst have actually spent time trying to do a left unity and fight fascists–the reds and the blacks bicker good-naturedly but always manage to work together without major mishap; the Nazis have superior numbers but are both stupid and overconfident, and have a tendency to defect. Some helpful vampires appear out of nowhere. An entire U.S. military base gets nuked. Jules gets a kickass motorcycle. Mags sings John Brown’s Body and everyone claps. Just good clean fun all around.

BDSA’s SocFem WG and AfroSoc are co-hosting a reading group on Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class, which I bought from the LPC a while ago. I figured this would then be a good time to move it from the unread nonfiction shelf to the read nonfiction shelf, even though the discussion is only on one chapter. It’s not a very long book, and I’m a completist.

Each of the 13 chapters has a tightly focused subject and the book as a whole reads like 13 essays rather than… well, rather than a book as a whole. This is fine–lots of great books are compilations of essays–but it wasn’t what I was expecting going into it. Angela Davis is a very good short-form political writer; she’s easy to read, and her essays are always information-dense and reasonably jargon-light.

The subject of the book is exactly what it says on the tin. Each essay chronicles a portion of the rocky histories of the various women’s, Black liberation, and labor movements, starting with white women’s role in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War and continuing up to the contemporary hot topics when the book was published in the early ‘80s. Special focus is given to the forging and deterioration of solidarity between different issues and demographics among and across movements, highlighting the gains that could be won when people supported one another and the weakness and fissures that develop in movements when they fall prey to supremacist thinking. Some of the history covered here I think has been mainstreamed a little since publication, but much of it is still rarely discussed outside of Angela Davis reading groups.

Some particularly thought-provoking subjects covered: The history of Margaret Sanger’s involvement in the socialist movement, before she quit the Socialist Party to chase eugenics money; the racial complications of the “wages for housework” movement; the history of abortion and infanticide among enslaved women and its implications for the reproductive rights movement; the legacy of the myth of the black rapist among white anti-rape feminists; everything about Ida B. Wells.

The chapter we’re discussing tonight, “Chapter 5: The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women,” is only seven pages long, but covers a range of subjects regarding Black women and labor, and should provoke a solid amount of discussion. I’m looking forward to it.

This is going to be a shorter review than this book probably deserves because it’s got quite a lot in it and I am awash in things I have to get done.

The aces book club decided we were getting a little sick of reading YA and were trying to branch out, so this month we’re reading Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, a collection of essays and other short pieces by disabled writers. One of the essays is on disability and asexuality, a tricky intersection to navigate due to the ongoing desexualization of disabled people and pathologization of asexuality that often leaves disabled aces feeling like they can’t really do anything right and that they’re Playing Into Harmful Stereotypes just by existing.

While the essay that brought the anthology onto our radar is a small part of the book--it’s a large number of shorter pieces--I’m glad that we read it as I’m fairly under-read in disability justice; most of what I know has been picked up in bits and pieces over the course of organizing. While I sometimes found the reading experience to be a bit scattered--my brain is already a bit scattered lately, so changing subjects every three pages wasn’t my favorite thing--the wide range of disability experiences presented makes it a valuable introduction to the topic (assuming you don’t mind a bit of activist-speak from some of the writers who are pretty deep in organizing). So, overall: very good, glad I read it, probably not going to magically give me extra hours to devote to helping out AccessComm, but it definitely does help fill out my understanding of the issues a bit from like “here’s a list of accessibility-related Best Practices that I should remember.”

It’s not that often that I manage to get myself to read, like, real theory or academic writing of any kind without a book club to make me, but one of the recent exceptions was when I put in an order at Ohio State University Press for two of the volumes in their “Abnormativities” series: Ela Pyrzbylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality and Alyson K. Spurgas’ Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century. Spurgas’ book arrived first and despite knowing that my brain was completely squooshed from the national convention and I should do something nice and light for it instead, I couldn’t help but take a look at the introduction, and then I was compelled to read the entire thing.

Diagnosing Desire is broadly a critique of the supposedly objective, “apolitical” science in the fields of sex research and sex therapy and particularly of the DSM-5’s new replacement for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, the gender-specific “Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder.” It is also a qualitative study of a number of women who had been diagnosed--officially or via self-diagnosis--with low desire, some of whom had sought formal medical treatment, and others of whom had gone the self-care/self-improvement/alternative medicine routes. In addition to the study participants, Sturgas also interviews a number of professional sex therapists, researchers, workshop coaches, etc., in varying degrees of Calculated To Drive Me Personally Batty. (Celeste’s quotes in particular nearly gave me a nosebleed, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Spurgas starts by taking us through the history of sex research and particularly the history of feminist-identified sex research, which these days finds itself in an awkward position. Following the work of Masters & Johnson in the ‘60s and a lot of writing by a lot of irrepressibly horny sex-positive feminists, the old notion that women aren’t supposed to have sexual feelings of their own has been debunked, and the new notion that women are Just As Horny As Men, Actually, has come to the fore. Only women continue to have higher rates than men of both diagnosed sexual dysfunction and asexuality, which is a little distressing for the sorts of people who think we liberated women sexually by giving them, like, permission to be liberated, and by permission we of course mean that these are the new marching orders that everyone must follow or be deemed broken and subject to fixing.

Now, I am the sort of old-fashioned feminist that thinks that feminism is a left-wing political movement for the liberation of women as a class via the overthrow of patriarchy, and to me it seems reasonable, if not downright obvious, that there’s more to the collective sexual liberation of women as a class than merely declaring us Liberated, and if women are exhibiting higher rates of being Not That Horny After All then there is perhaps some kind of society-wide turnoff in effect, like the patriarchy continuing to exist, or men being terrible, or all these people chattering on about evolutionary psychology all the time, which is unsexy and crass. However, this is a rather niche and old-timey definition of feminism, and most of the self-identified feminist sex research going on now uses the newer definition: the tautological and fairly useless claim that one believes one’s own opinions about gender stuff to be correct.

It is this drive for an “apolitical” but somehow still feminist sex research--not the old downer kind of feminism that talks about patriarchy and the sociocultural traumas women face, just the new fun kind of feminism that talks about sex a lot and doesn’t upset anybody’s ideas about gender essentialism--that has landed the various fields of sex study in the shameful condition they are in now, pushing something Spurgas dubs the “feminized responsive desire framework.” This framework is a newfangled spin on the quite old and rather dubious conception of female sexuality as being predominantly reactive and receptive and not independently driven and it’ll wake up if you just, like, keep trying to put her in the mood, we’re sure--and not only that it will, but, now that this is the model, that it’s supposed to, and if it doesn’t then something has gone wrong. Gussied up with a load of evolutionary psychology--and evolutionary psychology does not appear to have gotten any more scientifically rigorous since the last time some unimaginative numbnuts tried to use it to argue me into bed--this model is now actively being taught to women who seek treatment for low desire, apparently sometimes in lieu of even the most basic inquiries into their relationship condition, like “do you think the people you’re trying to have sex with but are mysteriously lacking in desire for are attractive?” (One participant, after going through a pretty bad experience with a clinical treatment program for sexual dysfunction, was able to ‘cure’ her low desire by divorcing her shitty husband and becoming a lesbian.)

My initial response as someone who does identify on the asexual spectrum is to be defensive about “low desire” being a category of dysfunction at all, so it was very informative for me to read about the perspectives of women who did feel like losing their desire was an interruption of normal functioning. It’s clear that there are not (yet, anyway) any real cut-and-dried, easily identifiable answers about when we are pathologizing natural human variation vs. when we are naturalizing the effects of patriarchal oppression (and then, of course, pathologizing that in order to redirect efforts away from political solutions and toward individual women individually working to not Let Themselves be affected by, y’know, the structures of our entire society, through personal strength of character or sheer irrepressibility or whatever victim-blaming nonsense we’re spouting this week). An interesting aspect for me as a reader was that, while half the time I felt like I was reading about space aliens--as is usually the case when I read about sex--I also found myself relating quite a lot to many of these women’s stories about Things That Have Sucked, both subtly and less subtly, about being involved with cis men, in regards to my infrequent forays into heterosexual experimentation. It is nice to know that I am not insane for a) finding them to have sucked and b) experiencing the expectation that nothing could ever suck in a way that’s demotivating, that if something doesn’t work for you you should be endlessly motivated to Keep Exploring, as a demand for a pretty significant amount of work, which it is possible to then find tiring and like things are being demanded of you. I was familiar with the concept of compulsory sexuality before this but not so much with biopolitics, so I found the sections on sexual self-optimization and its ties to the more general neoliberal cooptation of self-care to be particularly fascinating.

There is also a lot about sexual carework, a thing I have simply never had any interest in doing, and how it is related to modern (white, middle-class, able-bodied) femininity, a thing I do not feel compelled to “succeed” at and do not particularly value (femininity is just gender conformity for women and, while my appearance is pretty gender-conforming, I don’t think anybody who’s ever met me could accuse me of valuing conformity). I found all this stuff particularly interesting because it highlighted to me the degree to which my asexuality/aromanticism really are, in part, tied up in my politics, in a way that much of the rest of the community doesn’t seem to share--from the execrable dedication of Angela Chen’s otherwise excellent Ace to the relentless “Aces can still…” discourse of mainstream journalism, there’s an often-showcased desire to be normal and a view of “normal” sexual and romantic relationships as satisfying and desirable that I just… don’t see! I see a sexual landscape that women are expected to navigate their way towards extracting enjoyment from, but from over here that landscape really just looks dreadful and I do not want to spend a lot of time learning to navigate it. I would possibly be more interested if it sucked less, although maybe not. So it was nice to read a book that really discussed in depth all the ways in which the terrain that women are developing and performing their sexuality on really is still quite rocky, and that a scientific consensus that depends on and simultaneously refuses to engage with the traumas and demands made of feminized populations results in regimes of “treatment” and “advice” that wind up producing sexual difference, thus exacerbating the problems they are in theory terribly concerned with solving, and, in fact, producing women’s sexuality as a problem to be managed and treated and brought in line with a complementarian vision of heterosexual fulfillment.

While this book certainly jammed a lot of very chewable content into my poor exhausted brainpan that I will be ruminating upon for quite a while, it ALSO reminded me of how much other stuff I need to read! I’m so under-read in so many areas! I will be going back through the works cited pages multiple times, I am sure, even if that does mean my eyeballs will be assaulted with the citation of Karl Marx’s Capital using the year the Penguin Classics edition was published and not, you know, the year it was published originally. (I am sure this is a house style thing and do not wish to blame the author for it but it really is my biggest criticism of the book; no reader should have to suffer through seeing the citation (Marx, 1990).)

Anyway, final verdict is that this book was REALLY fascinating and now I sort of regret not having a book club to discuss it with, so if anyone wants to borrow my copy so that I have someone to talk about it with, please let me know!

 For July, the politics book club decided to finally tackle a book we’ve been putting off for nearly four years now: James C. Scott’s giant brick of a study Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. And I’m glad we did (tackle it, I mean, not put it off for four years). 

 In my politics book club (now one of multiple politics book clubs, but whatever) we decided to read Julia Serano’s 2007 classic Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, even though books that came out when I was in college being “classics” now makes me feel old and creaky. I was not the one who suggested it, but I had recently picked up a copy because I’d started following Serano on Twitter, so it was a well-timed suggestion.

Several years ago now I bought a copy of Marxist Classics: Volume 1 with the intention of attending the Marxist Classics Reading Group, and, well, let’s just say I intend to attend a lot of reading groups, but I can only actually attend so many reading groups. I ended up reading the first piece, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and two-thirds of the second piece, Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and then the book sat on my shelf for three years.