A review by ralowe
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman

1.0

god damn it i'd kill a whole cave of pepes for a black act up. the cdc: "In 2014, the estimated diagnosis rate for HIV cases in the United States was 13.8 per 100,000 population and 49.4 among blacks/African Americans."ќ i'm not sure where that's at now 2017. BLM is a black queer femme product granted the legitimacy of disdain from conservatives mostly due to it being a politic that keeps black flesh hidden. the terrifying impossilbe gary fisherisms, a thouand times the critique of the critique of the nation, illegible. a valid alibi, the online outraged liberal circulation of black documentary snuff, mike brown, eric garner, tamir rice and more. by "black flesh"ќ i refer to cathy cohen *boundaries of blackness*. ethical dreaming: beyond *time* magazine, what kind of black trans queer optics do i actually in my heart of hearts imagine? is it not merely beyond sarah schulman's grasp but my own? if the uninvited irruption of black queer trans flesh is beyond discourse then where? is schulman incapable of mitigating this bloody shitstorm? not sure to what extent i could be homies with schulman. i don't think she'd approve of me for some reason and then it'd be over. a really close colleague i used to work with"У okay mattilda"У deeply admired schulman for the unrelenting purity of her analysis and unwillingness to allow people their contradictions, and i have inherited that trait from her through her. and i believe that whenever it has been feasible"У excepting those occasions where it is absolutely necessary"У these tendencies have contributed manifestly to successful flourishing, generally as well as mine. not like that shit on tumblr where people tear each other to pieces. "tear each other to pieces"ќ"Уanother heuristic of mattilda's idiomatic inheritance: she'd use it to describe act up meetings in san francisco, how people treated each other, near the end i presume. it's a schulman construct i bet. sitting in a cafe in tech gentrified san francisco i can't help despairing at a recent black trans queer direct action project that came undone but not in so dramatic a fashion implied in "tear each other to pieces"ќ. i tried my best to be calm but firm for the most part in meetings. my emails are characterized otherwise. one of the most explosively disliked emails was written while i was in the midst of what i personally experienced as complete emotional detachment. i wonder if that was psychosis. but group-wise the differences were so stark that the few of us that together held precious distinct notions of reciprocity could no longer front on the fact that the group was impossible"У and by extension, us. well, not literally in a frank wilderson way "us"ќ, "чcause i'm still here, but you know what i mean. how immense and subtle, like the ground beneath your feet, were the forces we were working against. it was cosmic joke, meaning a joke on a cosmic scale, 42. these same forces write themselves as natural in schulman's democratic party aura, even as she knows and articulates that isomorphic naturalizing process enacted by straights against homos. i had low expectations for this book, and kind of wanted to get it out of the way so i can label myself current, but i'm actually worried about how much i did enjoy this book before now. enjoyed it as i floated through the marina waiting for a vegan bakery to open because i thought it described precisely the bland affluence we're fighting against, where i was walking through, choosing to walk through to eat, or something, but to what extent is sarah (i mean "schulman"ќ)'s and mine's the same fight? hers is overly and eloquently discursive on a broadway scale. but in an alternate schulmanhood or schulman dimension i'm tripping on the non-discursive way that black queer trans sociality moves through signals in the mall bathroom"_ because after all schulman(i keep wanting to type "sarah"ќ)'s critiques seemed to have went the right direction for the better part of the most part. sorta. but then i thought about it and gradually i lost my mind, hoodwinked again! schulman does little to disrupt the lowkey andrew sullivaning formaldehyding and periodizing of HIV/AIDS context she writes from within. the touching elegy of all her lost friends sincerely almost brought a tear to my eye in the marina, but then i remembered how much longer the names of the lost are in that sped-up cut of obit portraits in *tongues untied*, everything we don't know, a deadly miasm on the unfolding present statistically three years old; i feel size queeny and gross stat to stat, however millions more than you, but yeah. damn you, secular humanism! at one point she mocks this ineligibility of subaltern black queer trans deviant flesh to ever matter by noting that one elegized friend although a published author just couldn't write very well, awwe. that's fine, at least he's not a nigger.