02. Waxing Quarter: Performance all the way down
(If you are surprised to see this newsletter, the first issue probably got classified as spam, but you can read it online. If you add this sending email address orion@buttondown.email to your address book, future issues will be much more likely to show up in your inbox. If you did see the first newsletter but meant to unsubscribe, you can also do that before the next quarter moon.)
Dear Old Friend,
It was so rewarding to get people's feedback to my first issue of this bimoonthly newsletter: the goal of “being in touch with people” certainly panned out. As always there's no expectation of a reply, but hearing back from friends near and far, newish and oldish, really made my week and encouraged me to send another one.
Second-guessing common sense
One of the big things I've been enjoying this week has been Performance All The Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference by Richard O. Prum. I'm only in the second chapter so far, but it has a strong introduction mapping out what it's going to do and why.
Prum, a multidisciplinary ornithologist, is guided by some of my favorite feminist scientists (Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Angela Willey — who I'll undoubtedly be writing more about in future dispatches of this newsletter). The book [paraphrased in the notes I am taking]:
focuses on how scientific concepts of sex, genome & body support the power of scientific communities in oppression of women & sexual minorities. [Prum’s] aim is to undo scientific justifications for binarist conceptions that have contributed scientific support to sexual oppression.
Prum both shows the richer analytic power that comes from letting go of unexamined axiomatic ”truths” like ”there are exactly two sexes, precisely differentiable, and science supports this,” and argues the importance of scientists staying engaged with the lived experiences of people in the modern world. So much of the popular understanding of key scientific topics like natural selection and is really, like, 8th-grade science from 30 years ago, and Prum reports from his recent work to show how deeply evolution is shaped by individual agency, beyond simplistic ”survival of the fittest,” ”selfish gene” notions.
From Prum's introduction, again in my notes’ paraphrase:
I never expected to arrive at many of the conclusion I have come to in writing this book. At the outset I had no reason to question the binary, no intellectual commitment to reconceiving the relationship between genes and the body. I got there by engaging with both scientific and cultural literature. As I applied gender theory to the material body, as I challenged my framework with more & different kinds of data, the idea grew ever more clarifying, powerful and productive.
This for me captures the exciting thing about bringing an open mind and a culturally-critical eye to world-shaping work of all kinds: the powerful, productive clarity that comes from reexamining established understandings of so-called “nature” without the constraints of received ideas that are held as axiomatic or common sense.
This piece in LA Review of Books by Banu Subramanian names some of its problems and is very worth reading —
It is as though someone took an advanced course in feminist and queer theory but entirely skipped Feminism or Queer Studies 101! For all its grand theory and terminology, the book is entirely devoid of politics or a theory of power
— but an important contribution of the book is that it is accessible to an 8th-grade understanding of biology, and takes a stand for the disciplinary permissibility of even examining its topics as mainstream science. Prum writes of the growing gap between the lived-experience, cultural reality of gender/sexual diversity, and the predominantly essentialist scientific frames. He warns of the scientifically and culturally dangerous alienation that people can feel from science that fails to reflect or even acknowledge their own experiences, and the cultural misuses that can thrive in the resulting gap. Of course Prum is not the only scientist working this beat: Marjorie Taylor Green's ”trust the science” nonsense in 2021 was a lovely opportunities for scientists to speak up about what modern science actually says about gender/sex.
Prum also shares a lot of cool bird facts while arguing for the importance of queer feminist science studies to science more broadly. I don't think the book is entirely devoid of politics, just a bit under-committed to the full political depth of the the work it draws from and the reality it is describing. I hope this helps it reach the people who need to hear it. But the choir also always needs preaching-to.
A regular part of this newsletter will be interesting links with brief commentary, such as:
- Workplace employee well-being programs not only don't help, they can make things worse for 46,000 workers in 233 organizations surveyed for this Oxford study.
- One of my niblings, 13, asked for a film camera for Christmas. Pentax is developing a new film camera, apparently the first new film camera this century, and it turns out to be hard:
No one has had to design a film transport mechanism for 30+ years. Older designers and experts have retired... Modern designers had not realised just how complicated it is.
But lord it has gotten expensive to develop film these days.
- As of January 1st, works from 1928 and sound recordings from 1923 have entered the public domain. This includes my childhood favorite Millions of Cats, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Also the big, final boss of US copyright duration: Disney’s Steamboat Willie.
- Paul Biggar can't sleep thinking about Gaza, and he was kicked off the board of the company he founded because he posted this heavily-cited cry of impotent frustration. These are the same kinds of thoughts that have been constantly looping in my awareness for the last three months. Of course Palestinians are having a harder time sleeping than California tech workers like me and Paul, and I am constantly aware that none of my Israeli friends are okay either. The occupation is traumatizing and dehumanizing for everyone it touches. It is not nice newsletter material and it is demonstrably risky to speak up, especially when I’m trying to get a job. It greatly behooves the job-seeker to present as anodyne a profile as possible. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give at least the bare-minimum acknowledgement here of the the ongoing genocide: this week's death toll of 24,000 Palestinians killed, more reporters killed in Gaza in three months than in any country in the entire year, and so much individual human loss. There's also the other ongoing genocide, and also the other other one which has been going on for years now with little mainstream attention. But there's only one that my own tax dollars are staunchly supporting today. Simply naming these facts is inadequate and ineffectual but here we are.
- Back on the Public Domain beat, this was an interesting article about the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photos taken to document the social condition of farms; specifically about the hundreds of thousands of photos ‘killed’ by having a whole punched through them, like the one above, which are now also in the public domain.
- I have always wanted to go to the New Bedford Whaling Museum's Moby Dick reading marathon and this guy went and wrote about it. I'm mad that they speak so ill of the Cetology chapter, which is certainly boring in the middle, but which is adorable academia-drag in the beginning and whose final paragraph is one of my favorite things ever written:
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Movies I have seen in the theater
American Fiction is great, you should see it.
The Book of Clarence is great, you should see it.
And since I got so many links in replies, a few that you sent me:
An account of a 1968 bike tour from Czechoslovakia across Europe and the Americas. Anne Helen Petersen on the transformational creative portal that women can enter in the 37–45 range (and here I was just reading Anne Helen on exclamation points and professional gender-and-tone tapdancing). Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed “how administrative states must count similar things, and that the counting can always lead to bad outcomes”. Lynda Barry's Syllabus for her ”writing workshop for nonwriters.”
That's all for this quarter moon. Next one: Friday, February 2nd at 15:20 Pacific. Groundhog day!
May all of our dreams of justice wax into fruition.
Love,
Orión