reibureibu's reviews
75 reviews

Trans Girl Suicide Museum by Hannah Baer

funny hopeful informative lighthearted reflective fast-paced

5.0

So disillusioned am I with white trans women that I see the rare non-delusional non-self-absorbed (or, at least, not so self-absorbed as to have that impede any actual justice work) and I immediately think she deserves pussy. Maybe she does.

I have gripes with certain takes expressed in here, but Hannah Baer is a white trans woman who probably deserves pussy. Her perspective on transness is, to be expected from one who is white and comes from money, somewhat circumscribed by her background and I feel (at time of publication) she lacks awareness of how something like race affects, intersects, assembles, entwines with gendersexuality. I noticed this most in her sections on non-binary identity (not always a transness) and higher education, where she seems to inscribe non-binariness to an SJW caricature in the former and frequently lambasts herself as overeducated and higher education as lambastable in the latter.

People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships to these things. People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships with many things. I'm not going to get into the weeds of it here, but it is itself a sign of lambastable higher education when a higher-educated white person indiscriminately lambasts higher education—something I'm sure Baer herself would agree. Theory, academia, higher education in general, these are things that can and do allow for poc without the language to describe their experiences, their subjugations, their resistances, their complications, to do so. It's not an uncommon topic I hear from other poc; certainly it was the gateway for me. When highly educated white people blanket criticize their higher education, I can't help but think that they really have no idea what it's like to be non-white in white hegemony; which, yes, is kind of so obvious as to not need explained, but rarely is there any actual work done towards radical empathy.

Also, people who are not white are inherently trans'd (in non-/binary ways) by white hegemony. I don't really feel like educating on this because it's a lot of work to lay it out in a way those who don't already understand this can understand, but DM me or something if you really wanna know.

Anyways, I'm not accusing Baer of being a horrible hypocritical white racist, that is absurd. But I do think it's necessary to explicitly complicate seemingly-radical convictions especially when they come from the normative state citizen (in this case, the transnormative subject). Trans Girl Suicide Museum is one of my favorite things I've ever read, but I feel I must address the (obviously) unintentionally-imperialist maxim that resembles a liberatory transgression because white trans girls are going to read the shit that other white trans girls say and write (and *not* read things from trans girls of color) and take it as truth because they're funny and hot and internet-famous or something. I find it is especially the case with white trans women in particular, because in this specific configuration to shed male privilege often unconsciously works to reattain that lost privilege vis-a-vis leveraging their "new" trans + femme marginalization—effectually, wielding white power. If white femboys have a penchant to become outright nazis, white tgirls have one to become neoliberals (much more than they'd think).

Baer is pretty decent with this though. She checks her white privilege solidly enough to make sure she doesn't become *that* annoying white trans girl (I mean, she *is* very much an annoying white trans girl, but like, in a "you pass the vibe check" I-wanna-hang-out-with-her-and-trust-enough-that-she-won't-be-weird-about-race kinda way). I only take measures to scrutinize these two things because that is just what has to be done in order to not normalize white "agnosticism."

I am reminded of a great passage regarding sexism from Sara Ahmed:

We find that: once the pressure to modify the shape of disciplines is withdrawn they ‘spring back’ very quickly into that old shape. Feminists have to keep pushing otherwise things quickly reverse to how they were before. The history of the ‘spring back’ mechanism is impossible to separate from the history of feminist exhaustion. Which is to say: the very necessity of having to push for some things to be possible can be what makes them (eventually) impossible. Something might not come about not because we have been prevented from doing something (we might even have been officially encouraged to do something) but when the effort to make that thing come about is too much to sustain.

What I am implying here is that sexism might drop out of the feminist vocabulary not because of our success in transforming disciplines but because of the exhaustion of having to keep struggling to transform disciplines. It might be because of sexism that we do not attend to sexism. We lose the word; keep the thing.

Just as with sexism, racism (imperialism, neo-/colonialism, etc.) is the default that must actively, constantly, be pushed back against even if it is exhaustive work. Just as what Baer is doing against transmisogyny.

Fluids by May Leitz

dark emotional hopeful fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Awful. My reflection, not the book. Though that's awful in other ways. A fly.
Helped me understand parts of myself I hadn't realized I buried alive.

Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity by John Howe, Marc Augé

challenging informative medium-paced

3.5

My fault for not knowing going in that it would take an anthropological lens of "liminal spaces", and in that regard I found the text rather challenging (likely due to my unfamiliarity with the field) in spite of its brief length. I'd wager that anyone interested in this due to its subject matter will feel the same if not an anthropologist, but even so it's well worth pushing through because all the anthropology-specific technics Augé frontloads serve to make the back-half of the text dense and weighted (despite the 'liminality' of its topic) with analysis in a way that much of the popular literature of "liminal spaces" falls deeply short of. "Non-Places" is then perhaps the first truly edifying work on said topic I have come across, which is all the more impressive given it was first published in 1995; youtube video essays have a long way to go.

Splatter Capital by Mark Steven

dark informative reflective fast-paced

4.5

Accessibly-rigorous and rigorously-accessible political economic readings of gore flicks like Hellraiser and The Human Centipede; intermittent autotheory that adds so much personal historization to the highly abstract and metaphorical dialectics it bookends; assemblage-ing the high-/low-brow until it becomes irreducibly gallerte slop (babe wake up it's time for our corporately-mandated 15min lunch). And he's even catty.

So fucking cool. The kind of shit I wanna do.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.5

Me, wondering why all the friends I make are autistic.

...oh.

Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James

emotional hopeful informative sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

"Whoever wants to take our guns away wants to restore slavery."

(Verso graphic novel adaptation.)

At the Cafe: Conversations on Anarchism by Paul Nursey-Bray, Errico Malatesta

lighthearted reflective fast-paced

3.0

Me when I win made-up arguments in the shower.

The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir K. Puar

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

Unfolds innumerable potentialities. Innumerable futures. Paradigm-changing and -defining and -multiplying. There was/is a 'me' before and after Puar's work. Of course, there will be innumerable.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

reflective medium-paced

3.5

Fundamental disagreements aside (which tbh are largely certainly due to cultural-historical shifts), I have an enormous respect for Marcus Aurelius in that he clearly cares for his fellow man and has an ethical conscientiousness that pervades his very being. Even more admirable is that he clearly struggles in doing so, his writing herein a private undertaking to become that which he upholds, humbly. Here is someone I could dispute personal philosophy with for hours and walk away with few agreements but fewer scruples; I think finally I have an answer for those time machine queries.

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Outrageously funny. Let us cultivate our garden.