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Reviews tagging 'Classism'
The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers by Mark Gevisser
1 review
stevia333k's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
1.25
Gevisser is an unreliable narrator. His interviewing & networking processes were infiltrated by TERFs either before or after he started. (Assuming he's not a TERF, which is actually not a given, I'm guessing based on the writing conventions of omission, brackets, and deadnaming, that he only caught on very late after like 5 years of work, and he did his best to salvage what he could. In that process, he ended up centering a cis white audience because he didn't do enough to center the people instead of the administrators.)
The author literally had an interpreter in India named Lavanya commit unprofessional conduct because she was a TERF, and for the discussion of the pink line there wasn't enough awareness of TERFs/White Feminism taken into account. So the haunting part is that it suggests that for him TERFism is the norm, and it shows with how Lavanya was the head of various things in India he had first made contact with.
I really wish he gave Ehrensaft more page space. Like I have my problems with her too, but still. He literally had 2 questions he wrote down only 1 answer, which: what is that deal? -- Like where I'm from omissions are usually used as censoring methods, whether of a murder, a sex scene, or bad words, so this came off as an omission of guilt on his part, as well as a doubling down (as least for this work).
I think what happened is that his TERF framework was called out, he got embarrassed, and hoped to comprensate by emphasizing his unreliablity as a narrator on the basis of being a foreigner or being white etc etc, as a substitution for dealing with the infiltration. And I say substitution due to the lack of acknowledgement of TERF/fascist collaboration, and how he omitted Ehrensaft's answer to his 2nd question. (like he alr ady acknowledged trans people like Liam in Ann Harbor & Pasha in Russia cutting off contact with him! He also didn't call out Lavanya's interruption as unprofessional & called her "a strong feminist"!)
Seriously info about "gender creative children" would've been needed in order to counteract the representation of cis detransitioners & get ideas about the pink line... Basically he fell into truscum & TERF spaces, and so he's an unreliable narrator.
That being said there's a lot of people represented here, so as long as you are able to call out that white supremacism & transphobia as you go, then voila, like it covers history of my generation, but I do worry about micro aggressions involved with the making of this book. Like he doesn't understand the difference between identity vs role, identity vs positionality in the last 2 chapters of the book.
On the one hand, we might be able to look up some of these people in other sources. Why I liked the book was that it compiled a bunch of 2010's lgbtqia2s+ news stories & followed up on them, along with his discussion of lgbtqia2s+ refugees. -- On the other hand, it feels like he failed them all. Gevisser didn't work thru his own gender issues (let alone have a decent intersectional critique at the beginning of the it gets better movement), and also went from the top down, instead of the bottom up in terms of interacting with institutions to get access to the people & their stories. It's unclear *how much* TERF infiltration affected the translations, or whether he had to be approved by them to even get into these spaces.
I'm going to list the names of the people he profiled so hopefully you can exit his colonial gaze to get a better sense of reliability.
The author literally had an interpreter in India named Lavanya commit unprofessional conduct because she was a TERF, and for the discussion of the pink line there wasn't enough awareness of TERFs/White Feminism taken into account. So the haunting part is that it suggests that for him TERFism is the norm, and it shows with how Lavanya was the head of various things in India he had first made contact with.
I really wish he gave Ehrensaft more page space. Like I have my problems with her too, but still. He literally had 2 questions he wrote down only 1 answer, which: what is that deal? -- Like where I'm from omissions are usually used as censoring methods, whether of a murder, a sex scene, or bad words, so this came off as an omission of guilt on his part, as well as a doubling down (as least for this work).
I think what happened is that his TERF framework was called out, he got embarrassed, and hoped to comprensate by emphasizing his unreliablity as a narrator on the basis of being a foreigner or being white etc etc, as a substitution for dealing with the infiltration. And I say substitution due to the lack of acknowledgement of TERF/fascist collaboration, and how he omitted Ehrensaft's answer to his 2nd question. (like he alr ady acknowledged trans people like Liam in Ann Harbor & Pasha in Russia cutting off contact with him! He also didn't call out Lavanya's interruption as unprofessional & called her "a strong feminist"!)
Seriously info about "gender creative children" would've been needed in order to counteract the representation of cis detransitioners & get ideas about the pink line... Basically he fell into truscum & TERF spaces, and so he's an unreliable narrator.
That being said there's a lot of people represented here, so as long as you are able to call out that white supremacism & transphobia as you go, then voila, like it covers history of my generation, but I do worry about micro aggressions involved with the making of this book. Like he doesn't understand the difference between identity vs role, identity vs positionality in the last 2 chapters of the book.
On the one hand, we might be able to look up some of these people in other sources. Why I liked the book was that it compiled a bunch of 2010's lgbtqia2s+ news stories & followed up on them, along with his discussion of lgbtqia2s+ refugees. -- On the other hand, it feels like he failed them all. Gevisser didn't work thru his own gender issues (let alone have a decent intersectional critique at the beginning of the it gets better movement), and also went from the top down, instead of the bottom up in terms of interacting with institutions to get access to the people & their stories. It's unclear *how much* TERF infiltration affected the translations, or whether he had to be approved by them to even get into these spaces.
I'm going to list the names of the people he profiled so hopefully you can exit his colonial gaze to get a better sense of reliability.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Racism, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Xenophobia, Classism, Hate crime, Alcohol, Deadnaming, Transphobia, Genocide, Rape, Religious bigotry, Sexual assault, Abandonment, Acephobia/Arophobia, Alcoholism, Homophobia, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Gaslighting, Lesbophobia, Medical content, Outing, and Sexual violence
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