“The punishment of imprisonment, even though it simultaneously relied on and negatively constituted individual rights and liberties, the penitentiary was expelled beyond the margins of democracy. In a very real sense, it [imprisonment] was the negation of democracy that liberal democracy required evidence of its existence. It was and remains the constitutive negation of liberal democracy. Carceral punishment, that is to say punishment that consists in the deprivation of rights and liberties, only makes sense within a society that respects individual rights and liberties. So the liberal democratic subject knows she is free precisely because she is not in prison. This constituative negation precisely demonstrates the meaning of freedom. And in this sense it’s structurally similar to slavery. I know I am free because I am not a slave. I know I am free because I am not a prisoner.”
For an alternative to the categories of sex and
gender, Moi proposes to return to the framework of existential
phenomenology on which Simone de Beauvoir relies.4
The central category for this theoretical approach is (p.16) that of
the lived body.
A reconstituted concept of the lived body, Moi argues, would offer
feminists an idea that can serve the function we have wanted from the
sex-gender categorization, without bringing its problems.
The lived body is a unified idea of a
physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural
context; it is body-in-situation. For existentialist theory,
situation denotes the produce of facticity and freedom.
The person always faces the material facts of her body and its
relation to a given environment. Her bodily organs have certain
feeling capacities and function in determinate ways; her size, age,
health, and training make her capable of strength and movement in
relation to her environment in specific ways. Her skin has a
particular color, her face determinate features, her hair particular
color and texture, all with their own aesthetic properties. Her
specific body lives in a specific context—crowded by other people,
anchored to the earth by gravity, surrounded by buildings and streets
with a unique history, hearing particular languages, having food and
shelter available, or not, as a result of culturally specific social
processes that make specific requirements on her to access them. All
these concrete material relations of a person’s bodily existence and
her physical and social environment constitute her facticity.
The person, however, is an actor; she
has an ontological freedom to construct herself in relation to this
facticity. The human actor has specific projects, things she aims to
accomplish, ways she aims to express herself, make her mark on the
world, transform her surroundings and relationships. Often these are
projects she engages in jointly with others. Situation, then,
is the way that the facts of embodiment, social and physical
environment, appear in light of the projects a person has. She finds
that her movements are awkward in relation to her desire to dance.
She sees the huge city with its thousand-year history as an
opportunity for learning about her ancestors. “To claim that the
body is a situation is to acknowledge that the meaning of a woman’s
body is bound up with the way she uses her freedom” (Moi, “Woman,”
65).
How does Moi propose that the idea of the lived body might replace
that of gender, and the distinction between sex and gender? Like the
category of sex, that of the lived body can refer to the specific
physical facts of bodies, including sexual and reproductive
differentiation. “Woman” and “man” name the physical
facticity of certain bodies, some with penises, others with
clitorises and breasts, each with differing experiences of desire and
sexual feeling. A category of lived body, moreover, need not make
sexual difference dimorphous; some bodies have (p.17) physical traits
like those of men in certain respects, those of women in others.
People experience their desires and feeling in diverse ways that do
not neatly correlate with sexual dimorphism or heterosexual norms. As
a lived body, moreover, perceptual capacities and motility are not
distinct from association with sexual specificity; nor is size, bone
structure or skin color. Most important for the proposal Moi makes,
the concept of the lived body, unlike the concept of sex, is not
biologistic. It does not refer to an objectivist scientific account
that generalizes laws of physiology and function. A scientific
approach to bodies proceeds at a significantly higher level of
abstraction than does a description of bodies as lived. The idea of
the lived body thus can bring the physical facts of different bodies
into theory without the reductionist and dichotomous implications of
the category of “sex.”
The idea of the lived body, moreover,
refuses the distinction between nature and culture that grounds a
distinction between sex and gender. The body as lived is always
enculturated: by the phonemes a body learns to pronounce at a very
early age, by the clothes the person wears that mark her nation, her
age, her occupational status, and in what is culturally expected or
required of women. The body is enculturated by habits of comportment
distinctive to interactional settings of business or pleasure; often
they are specific to locale or group. Contexts of discourse and
interaction position persons in systems of evaluation and
expectations which often implicate their embodied being; the person
experiences herself as looked at in certain ways, described in her
physical being in certain ways, she experiences the bodily reactions
of others to her, and she reacts to them. The diverse phenomena that
have come under the rubric of “gender” in feminist theory can be
redescribed in the idea of lived body as some among many forms of
bodily habitus and interactions with others that we enact and
experience. In such redescription we find that Butler is right in at
least this respect: it is a mystification to attribute the ways of
being associated with the category “gender” to some inner core of
identity of a subject, whether understood as “natural” or
acquired.
In
a recent essay Linda Nicholson similarly proposes that feminist and
queer theory focus on the sociohistorical differentiation of bodies
as lived, rather than maintain a distinction between biological sex
and embodiment and gender as historically variable. To the extent
that this distinction between sex and gender remains, feminist theory
continues a “biological foundationalism,” as distinct from
biological reductionism. The study of sexuality, reproduction, and
the roles assigned to men and women should consist in reading bodies
themselves and not presume a nature/culture distinction that
considers gender as “merely cultural.”5
(p.18) The idea of the lived body thus does the
work the category “gender” has done, but better and more. It does
this work better because the category of the lived body allows
description of the habits and interactions of men with women, women
with women, and men with men in ways that can attend to the plural
possibilities of comportment, without necessary reduction to the
normative heterosexual binary of “masculine” and “feminine.”
It does more because it helps avoid a problem generated by use of
ascriptive general categories such as “gender,” “race,”
“nationality,” “sexual orientation,” to describe the
constructed identities of individuals, namely the additive character
that identities appear to have under this description. If we
conceptualize individual identities as constituted by the diverse
group identities—gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and so
on—there seems to be a mystery about both how persons are
individualized, and how these different group identities combine in
the person. With the idea of the lived body there is no such puzzle.
Each person is a distinctive body, with specific features,
capacities, and desires that are similar to and different from those
of others in determinate respects. She is born in a particular place
and time, is raised in a particular family setting, and all these
have specific sociocultural histories that stand in relation to the
history of others in particular ways. What we call categories of
gender, race, ethnicity, etc., are shorthand for a set of structures
that position persons, a point to which I will return. They are not
properly theorized as general group identities that add together to
constitute individual identities. The individual person lives out her
unique body in a sociohistorical context of the behavior and
expectations of others, but she does not have to worry about
constituting her identity from a set of generalized “pop-beads”
strung together.6
By means of a category of the lived
body, then, “one can arrive at a highly historicized and concrete
understanding of bodies and subjectivity without relying on the
sex-gender distinction that Butler takes as axiomatic” (Moi,
“Woman,” 46). The idea of the lived body recognizes that a
person’s subjectivity is conditioned by sociocultural facts and the
behavior and expectations of others in ways that she has not chosen.
At the same time, the theory of the lived body says that each person
takes up and acts in relation to these unchosen facts in her own way.
To consider the body as a
situation … is to consider both the fact of being a specific kind
of body and the meaning that concrete body has for the situated
individual. This is not the equivalent of either sex or gender. The
same is true for “lived experience” which encompasses our
experience of all kinds of situations (race, class, nationality,
etc.) and is a far more wide-ranging concept than the highly
psychologizing concept of gender identity. (Moi, “Woman,” 81)
One of my favourite aspects of English vocabulary is the existence of Old English, French, and Latin triplets, where the same idea can be expressed with three different words (hence triplets), where the most colloquial originates from Old English, a slightly more literary version from French, and the most literary version from Latin.
Some examples:
kingly / royal / regal
ask / question / interrogate
rise / mount / ascend
holy / sacred / consecrated
foe / enemy / opponent
start / commence / initiate
Additionally, we can consider the triplets where the final word (the most literary word) arrived in English via Greek:
I have degrees in costume design and textiles so I got mending through advanced mending as part of my higher education, but there were both aesthetics and techniques that I found fresh in Katrina Rodabaugh’s MENDING MATTERS. Make slow fashion one of your things in 2019.
Whether you are brand-new or an old-hand at mending, this book has simple instructions for practical fixes that make clothing more interesting and will help you get more mileage out of your most-favorite shirts and pants. Great guides for patching differently depending on what part of the garment you are trying to fix and whether you want a visible repair or an invisible one. It’s all drawn from the Japanese technique known as sashiko, get down the basics and then adapt and apply in all the little ways that work for you.
I have some beloved jeans where I have completely burned through the upper inner thighs and they are about to get some mending love….
Here is a man who does sashiko live on YouTube, and this is one of his more rare videos because he’s opted here to speak in English. As he sews, he talks about the process, what he uses, the history, and more.
does the mortifying ordeal of being known guy know that his paragraph from a six year old NYT opinion piece about emailing pictures of goats to coworkers has become God Tier Tumblr Gospel ? like does he KNOW though
But what I wish I could tell all those children of the internet, holed up in their rooms, isolated online, is that they can only imagine the worst of relationships: they think that what another person will learn about them is what they see in themselves — the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. They don’t know yet that the ways in which they’re secretly screwed up and repulsive are boringly ordinary. The issue isn’t that you’ll be despised for who you really are — that, as a friend and I used to say about girls we were dating, “she’ll realize.” It’s scarier than that: it’s that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that you’re not who you thought you were.
As an artist, you don’t get to decide why people love your work. […] I would describe my reaction to seeing my writing reanimated as meme as “nonplussed,” maybe “bemused.” It always does some slight violence to a writer’s intentions to yank a sentence out of its context and present it as if it were a complete, isolated thought, like a maxim or commandment. I am not in the business of pretending to be in possession of any wisdom, or of telling other people what to do: this is the realm of self-help and advice writers — in other words, of charlatans. Part of me worries it’s an indictment of my prose that it should lend itself so well to Tumblr memes, the digital equivalent of needlepoint samplers. […]
But the things people love about you aren’t necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which you’re often not even conscious: it’s certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes you’ve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them — the contempt of a con artist for his mark — plus now you’re condemned to keep up that act forever, lest she Realize.) My last girlfriend found my flaws, the things that annoy even me about me, amusing. When you break up with someone, you don’t just lose them, but a version of yourself. You don’t even get to know what your children will remember you for; it probably won’t be what you thought were the important moments. […]
As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we don’t become fully real except in other people’s eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.
these are about 2/3 of the readings for my intro to lit theory course, if you’ve ever wondered what one studies on such courses, the links lead to free pdfs
I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!
1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout.
2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.
3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms.
4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway.
5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs.
6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race.
7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past.
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose.
9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas.
10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.
oh i have some of these too! many are science-fiction or science-fantasy, because the woman in those genres are severely under-represented ! The first two authors are slightly older, but their works are so important in the development of the roles of women in scifi as a genre so!
23. “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and“Mountain Ways”by Ursula K. Le Guin — The first is a study of philosophical questions similar to the trolley problem, told in very loose form. The second is a science-fantasy story about two women navigating love and sexuality in their society’s polyamorous marriage rituals. But honestly you should read all of Le Guin’s short stories and novels, she’s amazing.
24. “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler — One of my all-time FAVORITE short stories, about a future where humans live alongside large insect-like aliens, and serve as hosts for their eggs and larval young. It’s gruesome, gory, unsettling, and honestly pretty horrific but it’s really wonderful–if you can handle horror in your stories I highly recommended it. Butler’s novels are also wonderful, please check them out if you can (not all of them are this unsettling)
25.“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan — A trans allegory in which future humans go through surgery to become invertebrate sea creatures (cephalopods and arthropods mostly) in order to better work in space. Wonderfully weird in so many ways.
26. “From the Lost Diary of Treefrog7” and “The Palm Tree Bandit” by Nnedi Okorafor — Lost Diary is a story about a woman and her husband exploring an alien jungle told through research log-style journal entries. Very much survival horror scifi. Palm Tree Bandit is told as a mother reciting a story to her daughter as she braids her hair, about her great-grandmother who started a kind of small revolution for women in Nigeria. Nnedi’s novels and other short stories, as well as her works within the comics industry, are all fantastic, so look into her more if you can!!!
We now interrupt our regularly scheduled content to bring you a critical essay on the design world. I promise you that this will also be funny.
This morning, the design website Dezeen tweeted a link to one of its articles, depicting a plexiglass coronavirus shield that could be suspended above dining areas, with the caption “Reader comment: ‘Dezeen, please stop promoting this stupidity.’”
This, of course, filled many design people, including myself, with a kind of malicious glee. The tweet seemed to show that the website’s editorial (or at least social media) staff retained within themselves a scintilla of self-awareness regarding the spread a new kind of virus in its own right: cheap mockups of COVID-related design “solutions” filling the endlessly scrollable feeds of PR-beholden design websites such as Dezeen, ArchDaily, and designboom. I call this phenomenon: Coronagrifting.
I’ll go into detail about what I mean by this, but first, I would like to presenet some (highly condensed) history.
From Paper Architecture to PR-chitecture
Back in the headier days of architecture in the 1960s and 70s, a number of architectural avant gardes (such as Superstudio and Archizoom in Italy and Archigram in the UK) ceased producing, well, buildings, in favor of what critics came to regard as “paper architecture.” This “paper architecture” included everything from sprawling diagrams of megastructures, including cities that “walked” or “never stopped” - to playfully erotic collages involving Chicago’s Marina City. Occasionally, these theoretical and aesthetic explorations were accompanied by real-world productions of “anti-design” furniture that may or may not have involved foam fingers.
Paper architecture, of course, still exists, but its original radical, critical, playful, (and, yes, even erotic) elements were shed when the last of the ultra-modernists were swallowed up by the emerging aesthetic hegemony of Postmodernism (which was much less invested in theoretical and aesthetic futurism) in the early 1980s. What remained were merely images, the production and consumption of which has only increased as the design world shifted away from print and towards the rapidly produced, easily digestible content of the internet and social media.
Architect Bjarke Ingels’s “Oceanix” - a mockup of an ecomodernist, luxury city designed in response to rising sea levels from climate change. The city will never be built, and its critical interrogation amounts only to “city with solar panels that floats bc climate change is Serious” - but it did get Ingels and his firm, BIG, a TED talk and circulation on all of the hottest blogs and websites. Meanwhile, Ingels has been in business talks with the right-wing climate change denialist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. (Image via designboom)
Design websites are increasingly dominated by text and mockups from the desks of a firm’s public relations departments, facilitating a transition from the paper-architecture-imaginary to what I have begun calling “PR-chitecture.” In short, PR-chitecture is architecture and design content that has been dreamed up from scratch to look good on instagram feeds or, more simply, for clicks. It is only within this substance-less, critically lapsed media landscape that Coronagrifting can prosper.
Coronagrifting: An Evolution
As of this writing, the two greatest offenders of Coronagrifting are Dezeen, which has devoted an entire section of its website to the virus (itself offering twelve pages of content since February alone) and designboom, whose coronavirus tag contains no fewer than 159 articles.
One of the easiest (and, therefore, one of the earliest) Coronagrifts involves “new innovative, health-centric designs tackling problems at the intersection of wearables and personal mobility,” which is PR-chitecture speak for “body shields and masks.”
Wearables and Post-ables
The first example came from Chinese architect Sun Dayong, back at the end of February 2020, when the virus was still isolated in China. Dayong submitted to Dezeen a prototype of a full mask and body-shield that “would protect a wearer during a coronavirus outbreak by using UV light to sterilise itself.” The project was titled “Be a Bat Man.” No, I am not making this up.
Screenshot of Dayong’s “Be a Batman” as seen on the Dezeen website.
Soon after, every artist, architect, designer, and sharp-eyed PR rep at firms and companies only tangentially related to design realized that, with the small investment of a Photoshop mockup and some B-minus marketing text, they too could end up on the front page of these websites boasting a large social media following and an air of legitimacy in the field.
While the mask Coronagrift continues to this day, the Coronagrifting phenomenon had, by early March, moved to other domains of design.
Consider the barrage of asinine PR fluff that is the “Public Service Announcement” and by Public Service Announcement, I mean “A Designer Has Done Something Cute to Capitalize on Information Meant to Save Lives.”
You may be asking, “What’s the harm in all this, really, if it projects a good message?” And the answer is that people are plenty well encouraged to stay home due to the rampant spread of a deadly virus at the urging of the world’s health authorities, and that these tone-deaf art world creeps are using such a crisis for shameless self promotion and the generation of clicks and income, while providing little to no material benefit to those at risk and on the frontlines.
The final iteration of Post-able and Wearable Coronagrifting genres are what I call “Passive Aggressive Social Distancing Initiatives” or PASDIs. Many of the first PASDIs were themselves PSAs and art grifts, my favorite of which being the designboom post titled “social distancing applied to iconic album covers like the beatle’s abbey road.” As you can see, we’re dealing with extremely deep stuff here.
However, an even earlier and, in many ways more prescient and lucrative grift involves “social distancing wearables.” This can easily be summarized by the first example of this phenomenon, published March 19th, 2020 on designboom:
Never wasting a single moment to capitalize on collective despair, all manner of brands have seized on the social distancing wearable trend, which, again, can best be seen in the last example of the phenomenon, published May 22nd, 2020 on designboom:
We truly, truly live in Hell.
Which brings us, of course, to living.
“Architectural Interventions” for a “Post-COVID World”
As soon as it became clear around late March and early April that the coronavirus (and its implications) would be sticking around longer than a few months, the architectural solutions to the problem came pouring in. These, like the virus itself, started at the scale of the individual and have since grown to the scale of the city. (Whether or not they will soon encompass the entire world remains to be seen.)
There is something truly chilling about an architecture firm, in order to profit from attention seized by a global pandemic, logging on to their computers, opening photoshop, and drafting up some lazy, ineffectual, unsanitary mockup featuring figures in hazmat suits carrying a dying patient (macabrely set in an unfinished airport construction site) as a real, tangible solution to the problem of overcrowded hospitals; submitting it to their PR desk for copy, and sending it out to blogs and websites for clicks, knowing full well that the sole purpose of doing so consists of the hope that maybe someone with lots of money looking to commission health-related interiors will remember that one time there was a glossy airport hospital rendering on designboom and hire them.
Enough, already.
Frankly, after an endless barrage of cyberpunk mask designs, social distancing burger king crowns, foot-triggered crosswalk beg buttons that completely ignore accessibility concerns such as those of wheelchair users, cutesy “stay home uwu” projects from well-to-do art celebrities (who are certainly not suffering too greatly from the economic ramifications of this pandemic), I, like the reader featured in the Dezeen Tweet at the beginning of this post, have simply had enough of this bullshit.
What’s most astounding to me about all of this (but especially about #brand crap like the burger king crowns) is that it is taken completely seriously by design establishments that, despite being under the purview of PR firms, should frankly know better. I’m sure that Bjarke Ingels and Burger King aren’t nearly as affected by the pandemic as those who have lost money, jobs, stability, homes, and even their lives at the hands of COVID-19 and the criminally inept national and international response to it. On the other hand, I’m sure that architects and designers are hard up for cash at a time when nobody is building and buying anything, and, as a result, many see resulting to PR-chitecture as one of the only solutions to financial problems.
However, I’m also extremely sure that there are interventions that can be made at the social, political, and organizational level, such as campaigning for paid sick leave, organizing against layoffs and for decent severance or an expansion of public assistance, or generally fighting the rapidly accelerating encroachment of work into all aspects of everyday life – that would bring much more good and, dare I say, progress into the world than a cardboard desk captioned with the hashtag #StaytheF***Home.
Hence, I’ve spent most of my Saturday penning this article on my blog, McMansion Hell. I’ve chosen to run this here because I myself have lost work as a freelance writer, and the gutting of publications down to a handful of editors means that, were I to publish this story on another platform, it would have resulted in at least a few more weeks worth of inflatable, wearable, plexiglass-laden Coronagrifting, something my sanity simply can no longer withstand.
So please, Dezeen, designboom, others – I love that you keep daily tabs on what architects and designers are up to, a resource myself and other critics and design writers find invaluable – however, I am begging, begging you to start having some discretion with regards to the proposals submitted to you as “news” or “solutions” by brands and firms, and the cynical, ulterior motives behind them. If you’re looking for a guide on how to screen such content, please scroll up to the beginning of this page.
with everything that’s going on with bon apetit, i thought i’d just share some of my favorite recipe-based youtube channels run by people of color
just one cookbook - a super wide variety of japanese recipes. easy step-by-steps and all the recipes i’ve tried have been delicious
souped up recipes - chinese recipes - very informative videos and tasty food - i love her personality too
maangchi - who doesn’t love maangchi. delicious korean recipes and a fabulous personality
get curried - a huge variety of recipes from various regions of india
simply mama cooks - my fav for tejano food. i believe she’s a mexicana married into a korean family, and draws a lot from that
immaculate bites - mostly quick ‘tasty’ style video recipes focusing on southern us, african, and carribean foods. easy and delicious stuff!
stove top kisses - fun and delicious recipes and the videos are super fun to watch - mostly american food
j kenji lopez alt - author of the book ‘the food lab’ - he’s maybe my favorite recipe developer out there. all kinds of food and hes super knowledgeable
