As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women's spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our "deviancy from the norm"? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman--and especially, especially by trans wlw--has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.
🤲
if there's anything at all that's not cadence? like your next project... wink wink
Should I...? Idk... I'm mostly waiting until I've finished Cadence and I can disappear for a little while to write it đź‘€ All I can tell you rn is:
It's 2009 - Hogwarts has its very first muggle Muggle Studies teacher, the seventh years have started an underground Blackberry BBM ring, there's word going around of students' wands randomly turning faulty in the middle of lessons, rumours of someone harbouring a kelpie in the girls' fourth floor toilet, DADA classes are a total write-off thanks to being taught by a nineteen year-old grad student named Chad, pocket-dragons have become all the rage, and Teddy Lupin has just started his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry đź¤
I’ve posted about this a few times, but it bears repeating because lots of people don’t even think about AO3′s name.
It’s a reference to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, which is a feminist essay about how society stifles women’s artistic expression.
sex isn't sexy unless it's a little bit gross. have you forgotten that you are a divine ape? plastic smooth skin, plucked hair, painted faces, scripted reactions, scrubbed til only the smell of perfumed soap remains, proportions that are conflictingly cookiecutter yet unattainable, none of this is even a little bit interesting.
you can laugh at napoleon's "home in three days, don't bathe" letter to his wife, but there's more sexuality in that one line then there is in the entirety of the hypersexualized but painfully unsexy internet.
No, no, and NO.
AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”
Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.
masculine women save the earth....
“The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotes a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term.”
— Martin-Damon, K., “Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals”. Bisexual Politics. New York: Harrington Park Press. 1995
my dad–also a writer–came to visit, and i mentioned that the best thing to come out of the layoff is that i’m writing again. he asked what i was writing about, and i said what i always do: “oh, just fanfic,” which is code for “let’s not look at this too deeply because i’m basically just making action figures kiss in text form” and “this awkward follow-up question is exactly why i don’t call myself a writer in public.”
he said, “you have to stop doing that.”
“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.
but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.”Â
i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”
as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck.Â
“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”
so, my friends: what are you writing about?
I love looking at old zines, like nothing fucking compares. One my favs is "Shocking Pink", a feminist youth-led magazine published between 1979-1992. (Link to all the zines here.) In it they talk about sexism and access to abortion resources, queer and gender rights, lesbianism and LGBT+ bookshops and all-female bands, racism and historical movements, equality for girls/women in trades and youth-led movements in the midst of Thatcher's Britain. If I could tell anyone looking to research this period I would tell them to read the zines made by the people they want to write about <3
One of these things is not like the others