I’ve Been Listening To “Blood Moon” By Saint Sister A Lot This Season And It Inspired This Piece

One of the oldest goddesses in the historical record is Inanna of Mesopotamia, who was referred to, among other honorifics, as “She who makes a woman into a man, she who makes a man into a woman.” The power to alter such fundamental categories was evidence of her divine power. Inanna was served by at least half a dozen different types of transgendered priests, and one of her festivals apparently included a public celebration in which men and women exchanged garments. The memory of a liminal third-gender status has been lost, not only in countries dominated by Christian ideology, but also in many circles dedicated to the modern revival of goddess worship. Images of the divine feminine tend to appear alone, in Dianic rites, surrounded only by other women, or the goddess is represented with a male consort, often one with horns and an erect phallus. But it is equally valid to see her as a fag hag and a tranny chaser, attended by men who have sex with other men and people who are, in modern terms, transgendered or intersexed.

— Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex by Patrick Califia

hello pauline, greetings from the other side✨ i have been struggling with reading non-fiction for a while, feels like my brain is rotting :( could you please help me out/ recommend things i can start with which are interesting and not that hard to comprehend. thank you so much for you help. love and light to you 🌟

I feel you, I’ve just started reading academic papers for uni again and I hadn’t realized how much I missed reading non-fiction! On this list there are some I’ve read, some I’ve started but haven’t finished and others I’m looking forward to read. I would say all the essay collections and memoirs (except maybe for that of Wojnarowicz) are pretty accessible, maybe the political writings are a bit harder to understand depending on the subject (and I guess level of specificity and/or radicalism as well)

Obligatory readings (so like, my favourites, essays/collections that have shaped who I am): - The Book of Delights by Ross Gay - All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks - The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing - Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver - Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley - The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Some very touching/harrowing memoirs: - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson - Little Weirds by Jenny Slate - The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - Bluets by Maggie Nelson - The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch - In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado - The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria* Marzano-Lesnevich (I think they no longer use that name but it’s the name under which it was published) - The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher - A House Of My Own: Stories From My Life by Sandra Cisneros - The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz

More political non-fiction: - The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and I Am Not Your N**** by James Baldwin - Women, Race & Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis - Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander - Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire - A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn - This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Others: - Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith - What Poetry Is All About by Greg Kuzma - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Crying Book by Heather Christle

monster theory 101

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a violent crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

It is important to note that while this essay is considered fundamental in the concept of monster theory and it’s study, Cohen’s work is built upon work like Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror: Essays on Abjection, and Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine. Additions to the field have been added since then; collected editions like the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters, Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters, as well as essays in journals, collected editions on other wider topics (like horror, fantasy, sociology in literature). But the field is still relatively small at this point. I’ll be putting together a sort of reading list at some point in a post about where you can really get a good overview of the area, but the central starting point for monster theory is decidedly Cohen’s essay (which is the introductory chapter to an entire book on the subject). 

Here are some diversified open-source syllabi and reading lists on race, gender, Kashmir, Palestine, caste, sexuality, colonialism and modernism, design and systems, feminism, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, data and tech, labour studies, African studies, disability studies, violence and it’s textures by some amazing educators and activists. Reblog, share and email decolonis.zing@gmail.com to include more in the list!

Decoloniszing Gender - khari jackson, Malcolm Shanks

Modernity and Coloniality - Ahmed Ansari

Design Thinking For Complex Systems- Ahmed Ansari

Feminist and Social Justice Studies- Dr. Alex Ketchum

Afrotectopia

Design + Anthropology - Shannon Mattern

“Shakespeare in the ‘Post'Colonies” -Amrita Dhar

At the Intersection of Critical Race and Disability Studies: A Bibliography - Amrita Dhar

Testimonials + local literature - Mountain Voices

Introduction to Critical Race Theory for 2017- Adrienne Keene

Mini Courses on Art and Culture - Asia Art Archive

Sound and Violence, Sound as Violence - Pedro Oliveira

Violence - Pedro Oliveira

Border thinking and Border as culture - Pedro Oliveira

Introduction to decolonial thinking and decolonising methodologies -Pedro Oliveira

The Kashmir Syllabus - Stand With Kashmir

Palestine Reading List - Danah Abdulla

A Bibliography of Caste Readings - Jyothi James

Decolonizing the Malabari Mind - Jyothi James

Labour and Tech Reading List - Alexandra Mateescu and Eve Zelickson

Diversifying your Design Syllabus: Recommended Readings by Women, Non-binary, and Culturally Diverse Authors - Hillary Carey

Between Scarcity and Excess: Capitalism, Population Control and the Climate Crisis - Luiza Prado

Decolonising Science Reading List - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Everyday Orientalism - Katherine Blouin, Usama Ali Gad, Rachel Mairs

some of the short stories from this eve that im thinking abt still... someone read them and tell me ur thoughts thank u

monsters never leave you - carlie st. george . i thought the fairytale elements were woven together nicely 😌 you get undead siblings, tree mothers, chosen family, forgiveness vs love etc! good stuff

call them children - wenmimareba klobah collins the monster narrative continues. their descriptions are delightful, especially in the crafting of the setting, and the ending... obsessed

my country is a ghost - eugenia triantafyllou the longing after loss that imbues this.. feel like it captures a loss of family connection when you’re not in your homeland very well imo

open house on haunted hill - john wiswell another house that loves you! adore the concept of this one, though it’s not horror vibes, more cozy and amusing! though the last line ‘if anything is as patient as a parent, it’s a haunting’ so much potential Thematically there for something more sinister... please may someone write it!

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca.1633-37, detail) Francesco Cairo

Source: Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion by Radcliffe G. Edmonds

FASCINATING stuff where this scholar on orphism argues that several texts on persephone explicitly (and the homeric hymn implicitly) claim that mortals pay the recompense (ποινη) for the grief (πενθος) that persephone underwent at her abduction. not hades, but mortals try to appease the goddess for her mistreatment, and in return they earn her favour and a blessed afterlife (or even next life). there's this irreconcilable problem here in that hades was culturally justified, but persephone as a goddess still warrants respect/pity/appeasement, and so mortals through rites and sacrifices console her.

the girl with a pomegranate (1875)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

AND IF we’re talking about Ovid’s take on the Persephone myth anyway, and the other story Ovid inserted, the comparison between the boy being turned into a lizard for laughing at Demeter and the Demophon myth are so different in every single aspect that I cannot fathom what the use of the second one is to the Persephone myth, only to Ovid’s overall themes. While Demophon is a temporary stand-in for Persephone and perhaps even a tool Demeter uses to one-up her brothers, and is a cultic display of her matronly side as a goddess, the lizard tale just…provides comedy? Characterizes her as petty or fickle? It really is the most derailing story line in this part of the text, as Demeter is searching before it and after it. It only provides the mandatory metamorphosis, but so does Cyane? And the fun part is that the episode reflects the Homeric hymn in that Demeter is received as a guest and receives a specific type of food tied to her role as goddess of the grain, but here it has absolutely no payoff, nor any ambiguity to make us guess at more. It just…is. 

Whimsical fans are not talked about enough