adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
I’m 32
couple more things:
Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.
As a 36 year old I’ll just say that I found Jr high/high school to be harder than any of my full time jobs I have held
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
I literally did not make a cent off of my last donation post and I’m freaking out. I really need to go to the grocery store and I really need to somehow pay rent in full. Neither of those can happen off of bf’s paycheck. We don’t live in an actual apartment, we live with bf’s friend’s parents.. so they can kick us out whenever they want if we don’t pay up our half of all of the bills. It’s either eat or live on the streets and it’s so unfair. I do not know what to do at this point. I guess if you’d like to help, I’ll put my stuff below. Thanks for reading.
Cashapp/venmo- bubblebath2005
PayPal- kaleiherbert@yahoo.com
More demonstration of the whole “communication can avoid trouble” point.
One of the things that prompted the little talk was the fact that he’s been going around with his phone out of battery a lot lately, and didn’t make any move to put it on charge when I reminded him this evening. That’s a recent change.
Without my directly mentioning that, he assured me that it had absolutely nothing to do with me personally. Which yeah, I had been concerned that he was sick of the frequent requests to pick up stuff that I couldn’t get out to buy, and that sort of thing.
Apparently not. Everything (including “the whole Internet”, in his words) has been too much, to the point of his at least half-deliberately avoiding it by not keeping his phone charged.
And spending basically all his time at home gaming and very little messing around online, now that I think of it.
I mean, I could tell that he was acting more stressed lately. But, I had no idea it was to that point, because he hasn’t been talking about it at all. Probably also not wanting to worry me, though he didn’t explicitly say that. It was obviously uncomfortable enough to talk about at all, though I’m glad he finally did say something about it. Understandable, the way things have been going, but not a good situation at all.
Like I said, we’re both pretty bad about that. And the fucked-up stoicism act is rarely helpful to anyone 😱
I’m still kind of shaky, but glad I went ahead and brought up something that had been bothering me for a while before Mr. C went to sleep.
On most levels, I know communication is good and can actually help avoid a bunch of problems. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, especially with enough ingrained training to keep your mouth shut to avoid conflict. Difficult subjects really don’t make it easier. Both of us can be pretty bad about that, and for similar reasons AFAICT.
I also have some extra (carefully instilled) scrupulosity issues around the idea of Causing Problems For Other People. Including by mentioning existing ones 😳
Anyway, he didn’t act like a jerk about any of it. He was listening, and obviously did care how I felt. (Not that I really expected otherwise, but yeah. PTSD.) And I’m feeling better about what was bothering me in the first place. Which was also heavily wrapped up in some of the same scrupulosity BS, since that is apparently just the way I roll 🙄
That is indeed kinda how respectful discussions in a relationship are supposed to work. But, even after this many years? I am still pleasantly surprised on some level when they do.
I’m glad this is circulating 😊 I’m looking to find the documentary (I think that’s the name in the upper left corner)
They = white people
They = Indian people
They live on the Andaman Islands in India. They are the first indigenous asian people. They came from Africa 70.000 years ago. They had lived in complete isolation for 50.000 years. Today, they are only 480 left of them, and they are in great danger. The Indian government assimilates them by force. The Jarawas are treated like animals in zoo by tourists and Indian scientists want to give them “bananas” to educate them.
The Jarawa campaigns goal is to gather 1,000,000 signatures.
What gets me is that initial pause. The bird knows this song. He knows when the drum comes in. Being able to anticipate musical rhythm is a form of intelligence very few species have, and this is the most remarkable example of it I’ve ever seen in a bird. The cockatoo knew to wait for the drums.
rhythmic awareness: a prerequisite of language evolution
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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