If you are found without them, you will have books thrust upon you!
For example: I’m currently reading through “Killing Hope”, which basically clears up any reservations I had about destroying the USA. I thought I knew how bad American Intervention was during the Cold War, but by god was I wrong. Its insane how fucking evil the USA is.
I’m also starting my foray through “Capital” and right now its just Marx bashing my head against the definition of a commodity.
I’m almost done with Washington bullets by Vijay prishad (audiobook). I recently acquired a copy of Red star over the third world (also by he). Idk what I’ll listen to next, maybe Cows save the planet by Judith Shwartz. I also have a copy of capital vol 1, but I’m scared to read it.
assuming you mean the last big meal of the day (some places call Lunch ‘dinner’) aka supper, anywhere between 1600h-1930h.
This one has kind of an interesting format. It’s sectioned off with numbered paragraphs, almost presented as stanzas in prose poetry. Very intrigued.
Section 1 is comparing walking through Manchester with walking through Lancaster. Manchester, as a crowded and diverse city, offers some form of camouflage for a trans femme. Queens are common in the Manchester bars, and the city is visibly diverse, so while being trans may not be comfortable, it is easier to blend in to the crowd.
In Lancaster, however, the vibe is quite different. By being less crowded, you stand out more.
“People will start a conversation by asking if you’re getting a sex change”
That’s a fucking ice breaker. what the heck. (Not really surprised though, marginalised people often get incredibly uncomfortable and invasive questions from strangers, who feel an entitlement to the details of your personal life. Ask someone with a visible disability how quickly someone they’ve never met starts asking personal medical questions. It’s fucking fast).
“What I am describing here is the way in which encounters with strangers affect a sense of being (un)gendered. A crowd can leave you feeling scrutinised and isolated, or casually adrift.”
As someone who hates crowds, I really get this. On the one hand, being in a crowd is so stressful. There are so many people, so many chances for a negative encounter, so much to be wary of while also being so much harder to be aware of everything around you. On the other hand, in a crowd, while there are more people to perceive you, you are actually less perceived.
To the other members of the crowd you are just another face in the crowd. This, I think, is the “ungendered” interaction they’re talking about. By being subsumed as a part of the whole, the lack of specific scrutiny you receive decouples you from the otherwise gendered interactions you face in a smaller group. When you pass by a man in the street, he looks at you as a woman. When you are one amongst a thousand, you are looked at as a part of the crowd.
“Our conditions are hardly of our own choosing. Navigating social worlds of alienation, enforced heterosexuality, and class division requires laborious care.”
"Delany [Times Square Red, Times Square Blue] uses the term contact to describe this mingling across classes and cultural contexts, which characterises city living"
“Contact brings those from divergent forms of life into close quarters, for better or worse. Contact encounters, as Delany outlines them, find their scene in the porn theatres, cruising grounds, and side streets where hustlers, science fiction authors, dock workers, priests, and scholars are likely to cross paths. These encounters are likely to disturb, lead to the forging of unlikely alliances, or even liberate.”
The intersection of queerness across class lines (labour, educational, racial, ethnic, disability, gender, etc), especially in the underground/anonymous encounters scenes, is a really interesting examination in the ways that solidarity can be formed even amongst unlikely allies in the face of wider systemic oppressions.
“[Lancaster is] not the kind of place we would expect queers, anarchists, anti-fascists, or Friends of Palestine to set to work in.”
I’ve never even been to Lancaster and even I had a pretty negative impression of living in Lancaster as a queer person. However, I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect them to “set to work” in Lancaster: queer people are carving out communities everywhere in the world, and as hopeless as it seems sometimes in the face of capitalist exploitation, so too, are anti-fascists.
Many thanks to our brave shitposters, may they succeed to wether the storm of fascism and liberalism of reddit. Especially like this subreddit. Good luck.
Remember you’re not lesser for not understanding it immediately, or being able to read it super fast. These books are a brain twister, and I myself have taken almost a few months to understand it. I still haven’t gone through the first edition! Move at your pace, and increase it if you feel you are ready.
Adding to what others of said, you need to heal yourself, a lot. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I suggest guided meditation. Here’s one for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTD6tUJpNJc