culture consumed (February, 2021)

[hermionesviolin]

books

• book club books
  • [feminist sff book club] Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 
  • [Medford LGBTQ+ Book Club] Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
  • [DRFD (work) bookclub] Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
• Fucking Trans Women #0 (an 80-page zine) by Mira Bellweather
• 7 board books (Nibling #2's second birthday is in early April)

video essays

• J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints because Thom had been talking about it.
  When I said I was gonna start watching it, they said:

  I will not be offended if you don’t like it. It’s just really working for me for some reason.
  
  Like, I low key love her presentation, and the systematic unpacking of bigotry is totally my kind of intellectual jam.
  
  It’s very much the perfect intersection of snarky and thoughtful for my current state of mind.

  I wasn't that into it, but there were some bits I really appreciated.
  
• I also appreciated that YouTube was pandering to me by offering me "Sex Work | Philosophy Tube" in the sidebar (Abigail Thorn, who does Philosophy Tube, had recently come out as a trans woman, though this video is from May 2019 and uses her old name).  I did in fact watch that -- though (unsurprisingly) I didn't learn a lot new from it.
  
• While I was watching that, Thom said:

  I’m watching the Philosophy Tube video on Queer Theory (because I’m me). I’m impossible to watch it now without realizing what’s going on, so I have no idea what I’d have thought then. But it screams “I am a Queer” pretty loudly in the first 10 minutes.

  So I watched that next (Queer ✨| Philosophy Tube [Oct 2019]), and it is a _delight_.
  Unsurprisingly, lots of folks had gone back to this video after her coming out one.  Comments included: "The galaxy brain required to be a woman playing a man playing a woman, is like Abigail-level acting. Only on philosophy tube."
• I watched her coming out video (Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story | Philosophy Tube ★) on a date night with Thom, because Reasons (#HoldYouWhileYouCry).
• comments about "mouthfeel" about girl dick in Abigail's "Queer ✨" video referenced Tiffany Tumbles | ContraPoints, so I watched that -- Natalie says in comments, of the video as a whole: "You wouldn’t be wrong if you said it’s about the politics of self-loathing, power dynamics within LGBTQ communities, how bigotry becomes internalized and how internalized bigotry becomes the alibi of external bigotry."  (For the "feminine penis" bit -- which was honestly my favorite bit -- start watching at about 8:42 and watch for about one minute.)

tv

• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Season 5