Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
Hi!
Over the past few years, I have written quite a few essays - small and large - about sex, gender, and history. Most of them got their own individual threads, sometimes attracting significant attention, sometimes barely any; but in any case, individual threads have a tendency to slowly drown down the forum list. And so, it occurred to me that it may be helpful - for me and for others - to attempt to maintain an index thread for my works that I can pin to my signature and then update. And so, this is the thread!
As always, if you find any of this work valuable or interesting, please consider donating to my ko-fi! Writing those essays can take a lot of research and effort, so I greatly appreciate any support that helps me find motivation to set time aside from the academic publish-or-perish mill to write passion-projects on the side.
garg's essays:
Irreconcilable Differences. Justine, Tabby and the Notorious Judith Butler: this essay is an examination of Natalie Wynn/Contrapoint's video-essay The Aesthetic, using it as a launching point for an examination of one of the core concepts in contemporary critical humanities: gender performativity.
Two Essays on April Daniels' Dreadnought: this is a pair of thematically linked essays (Trans Superwoman at the Doctor's Office. April Daniels' Dreadnought and the Logic of Medical Transphobia and For the Trans Woman Who Has Everything. Relatable Want and the Trans Power Fantasy) about April Daniels' YA super-hero novel The Dreadnought and its successes and failures with trying to create a trans feminine superheroine that grapples with social transphobia as much as with more traditional super-villains.
Nerds, Catgirls, and Other Trans Potentialities: in this essay, I try to ask if we can think the stereotypical "basement-dwelling trans communist catgirl" in a way that tries to move beyond a liberal trans paradigm of "gender identity" as an inviolable truth of the self - and also what sort of trans thinking can be done from the catgirl's point of view?
Why Couldn't It Have Been Me? Trans Envy and Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing: here, I use Maya Deane's wonderful trans retelling of the Illiad in order to ask about trans envy - that ugly feeling that trans people sometimes feel towards each other - and what can be done with it without rejecting it as bad consciousness.
A Machine for Gender Fantasies of extreme BDSM and the making of the trans feminine: in this three-part essay, I examine the relationship of extreme BDSM fantasies of submission, #mindbreak, and enslavement to trans femininity, and attempt to provide a basic, radical feminist account of how such fantasies can operate as means of production of gender - and what the implications of that are.
I Don't Understand Lauren Berlant, and That's Okay! How to Read Theory: this short essay serves as a quick advice for people who - like me - struggle with reading the so-called "high theory" that so much of critical humanities is written it. It contains advice on how to tackle texts that seem impenetrably thick and impossible to approach.
A Rubber Veil: Latex and the Problem of Porn: [WIP] this two-part essay examines how latex fetishism challenges our understanding of what pornography is, and asks how we can think of sex without skin.
In addition to the essays posted on SV, I also have a few open-access publications in various academic journals. They are generally written with a different, more academic audience in mind, but nonetheless I will link them here if anyone is interested in seeing what my professional work looks like:
'Yr Beast': Gender Parrhesia and Punk Trans Womanhoods: this article is an overview of trans women's history in punk music and an attempt to understand the practice of gender expression through the concept of parrhesia, which Michel Foucault identifies as a specific mode of truth-telling within the Western cultural tradition.
Ballgags, ropes, and spatulas BDSM toys between specialty stores and everyday objects: this article, based on a chapter from my PhD dissertation, is an investigation into the use and circulation of sex-toys among Polish BDSM practitioners, and the importance of viewing human-toy relationships in kink in ways that move past simple critiques of consumerist sexuality.
"Lesbian with the attributes of a man": Is a trans history of male masochism possible?: as the title suggests, this article is a preliminary intervention into the field of trans history, attempting to argue that we need to pay more attention to the mostly-ignorned historical links between the history of trans-femininity and sadomasochism/BDSM, as well as speculating on what sort of historical work may be required to account for said links.
Over the past few years, I have written quite a few essays - small and large - about sex, gender, and history. Most of them got their own individual threads, sometimes attracting significant attention, sometimes barely any; but in any case, individual threads have a tendency to slowly drown down the forum list. And so, it occurred to me that it may be helpful - for me and for others - to attempt to maintain an index thread for my works that I can pin to my signature and then update. And so, this is the thread!
As always, if you find any of this work valuable or interesting, please consider donating to my ko-fi! Writing those essays can take a lot of research and effort, so I greatly appreciate any support that helps me find motivation to set time aside from the academic publish-or-perish mill to write passion-projects on the side.
garg's essays:
Irreconcilable Differences. Justine, Tabby and the Notorious Judith Butler: this essay is an examination of Natalie Wynn/Contrapoint's video-essay The Aesthetic, using it as a launching point for an examination of one of the core concepts in contemporary critical humanities: gender performativity.
Two Essays on April Daniels' Dreadnought: this is a pair of thematically linked essays (Trans Superwoman at the Doctor's Office. April Daniels' Dreadnought and the Logic of Medical Transphobia and For the Trans Woman Who Has Everything. Relatable Want and the Trans Power Fantasy) about April Daniels' YA super-hero novel The Dreadnought and its successes and failures with trying to create a trans feminine superheroine that grapples with social transphobia as much as with more traditional super-villains.
Nerds, Catgirls, and Other Trans Potentialities: in this essay, I try to ask if we can think the stereotypical "basement-dwelling trans communist catgirl" in a way that tries to move beyond a liberal trans paradigm of "gender identity" as an inviolable truth of the self - and also what sort of trans thinking can be done from the catgirl's point of view?
Why Couldn't It Have Been Me? Trans Envy and Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing: here, I use Maya Deane's wonderful trans retelling of the Illiad in order to ask about trans envy - that ugly feeling that trans people sometimes feel towards each other - and what can be done with it without rejecting it as bad consciousness.
A Machine for Gender Fantasies of extreme BDSM and the making of the trans feminine: in this three-part essay, I examine the relationship of extreme BDSM fantasies of submission, #mindbreak, and enslavement to trans femininity, and attempt to provide a basic, radical feminist account of how such fantasies can operate as means of production of gender - and what the implications of that are.
I Don't Understand Lauren Berlant, and That's Okay! How to Read Theory: this short essay serves as a quick advice for people who - like me - struggle with reading the so-called "high theory" that so much of critical humanities is written it. It contains advice on how to tackle texts that seem impenetrably thick and impossible to approach.
A Rubber Veil: Latex and the Problem of Porn: [WIP] this two-part essay examines how latex fetishism challenges our understanding of what pornography is, and asks how we can think of sex without skin.
In addition to the essays posted on SV, I also have a few open-access publications in various academic journals. They are generally written with a different, more academic audience in mind, but nonetheless I will link them here if anyone is interested in seeing what my professional work looks like:
'Yr Beast': Gender Parrhesia and Punk Trans Womanhoods: this article is an overview of trans women's history in punk music and an attempt to understand the practice of gender expression through the concept of parrhesia, which Michel Foucault identifies as a specific mode of truth-telling within the Western cultural tradition.
Ballgags, ropes, and spatulas BDSM toys between specialty stores and everyday objects: this article, based on a chapter from my PhD dissertation, is an investigation into the use and circulation of sex-toys among Polish BDSM practitioners, and the importance of viewing human-toy relationships in kink in ways that move past simple critiques of consumerist sexuality.
"Lesbian with the attributes of a man": Is a trans history of male masochism possible?: as the title suggests, this article is a preliminary intervention into the field of trans history, attempting to argue that we need to pay more attention to the mostly-ignorned historical links between the history of trans-femininity and sadomasochism/BDSM, as well as speculating on what sort of historical work may be required to account for said links.
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