My life in books

“The Secret Life of Bots,” Suzanne Palmer; Clarkesworld, September 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_09_17/

Palmer’s suspenseful yet very funny novellette takes place on a nearly derelict space ship on a suicide mission to stop an enemy worldkiller from reaching Earth. So much of the ship is falling apart, all the available standard bots are working nonstop to keep the ship going just long enough to deliver its payload. When there are reports of an infestation, the Ship AI pulls an outdated bot with dangerous instabilities out of storage to deal with the problems. It turns out, the dangerous instability is creative thinking, and the ship needs some of that badly if it’s going to fulfil its mission.

“Cake Baby,” Charlie Jane Anders; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cake-baby-kango-sharon-adventure/

“Cake Baby” may not be the funniest science fiction romp I’ve ever read, but it comes awfully close. Sharon and Kango are two surreal characters with a real talent for fucking things up royally, which is why they may not be the best pair of interstellar adventurers to hire for your dirty work. But they manage to survive, thanks to their far more practical crewmate, ex-cultist stowaway Jara, and their ship’s computer Noreen. Very funny stuff. Really. Read it.


“The Dark Birds,” Ursula Vernon; Apex Magazine, January 9, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/the-dark-birds/

Vernon often tells dark tales. This is one of them. In the forest lives a family. There’s a Father, of curse. And there is always a Mother, a Ruth , a Susan, and a Baby. When Mother has a new daughter, Ruth disappears, Susan becomes Ruth, Baby becomes Susan. That’s how it always is. Until it isn’t.


“The Fall of the Mundaneum,” Rebecca Campbell; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 28, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-fall-of-the-mundaneum/

In 1914, in a building in Belgium that houses a vast collection of books and artefacts, a man is waiting for the German army to arrive. He imagines that this great building, an establishment of knowledge and history, will be handed over honourably, to those who, while conquerors, will respect its importance. Right up to the end, he answers letters sent in by those seeking answers from the great collection, cataloguing the strange contents of a valise sent from his colleagues in Köhn, with a hasty message he understands only too late.


“Queen of Dirt,” Nisi Shawl; Apex Magazine, February 7, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/queen-of-dirt/

A young martial arts instruction with the gift of seeing things most people don’t must find a way to save herself from a hive of otherworldly things seeking a new queen, and her students from the potentially dangerous consequences of contact.


“Remnant,” Jordan L. Hawk and K. J. Charles; Smashwords
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/404000

Historical m/m romance, of the explicit sort, about two pairs of occult detectives. Apparently each of the authors is known for writing a series based on one of the pairs in this story, which is well-written, and lots of fun, both in terms of adventure and eroticism. The setting is London. A long dead Egyptian spirit is killing people, and ghost hunter Simon Feximal, with his companion Robert Caldwell, is investigating. Arriving from America just in time to lend assistance is American philologist Percival Endicott Whyborne and his companion, Griffin Flaherty. A nice blend of mystery, adventure and erotica.


“These Deathless Bones,” Cassandra Khaw; Tor.com, July 26, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/26/these-deathless-bones/

Khaw has excellently inverted the trope of the evil stepmother here, with a story of a queen married to provide a new mother for a prince whose own mother has died. But in this dark fantasy, the queen is a just avenger, and the young prince a cruel budding psychopath whose years of torturing small animals and throwing tantrums to punish the servants have led step by step to the unforgivable.

Samuel R. Delany is as well-known and respected for his literary and social/queer criticism as he is for his writing of fiction in multiple, often paraliterary, genres, from science fiction to queer erotica. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, a collection of critical essays on race, sexuality, science fiction, and the art of writing, plus a number of interviews on a variety of topics, that demonstrates the breadth and depth of his thinking and his academic work in these areas, and offers the reader a sustained experience both instructive and challenging.

The book is divided into three sections - Part One: Some Queer Thoughts, Part Two: The Politics of the Paraliterary, and Part Three: Some Writing/Some Writers. These categories, while suggestive of the overarching themes of each section, should not be taken as exclusive. In the first section, for instance, Delany has gathered essays and interviews that talk about queerness, but also queerness in relation to art, to his own writing in various paraliterary genres (science fiction, pornography), in other writers. In the second, he examines theory and criticism of science fiction, comics, and other paraliterary genres, but does so from the persoective of a queer academic, critic and author. The third section looks at specific writers and works, both literary and paraliterary.

There’s a documentary about Delany, called The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. I’ve never seen it (though I’d love to if I can ever find a coy), but one thing I am certain of, is that polymath is one of the words that one can definitely use to describe him. It’s there in his writing, in the breadth and scope of his thinking, his references, his allusions, the often very disparate threads of knowledge that he draws together in presenting his arguments. To read Delany is to learn things you never would have imagined. To read this collection of essays and interviews is to have your perspectives on race and sexuality challenged, to have your understanding of the art and practice of writing and the genre of speculative fiction - and a few other paraliterary genres - broadened.

Lara Elena Donelly’s Amberlough is a secondary world spy novel, a mashup of cold war intelligence narratives and Weimar Republic society, sources which Donelly explicitly acknowledged by taking chapter epigrams from John Le Carré novels and the musical Cabaret. There’s no other fantasy or science fictional elements, just an imaginary world with pre-WWII technology and a complicated political history, not unlike Europe of our own timeline and space.

The novel’s main character, Cyril DePaul, is an agent in the Amberlough intelligence service. He’s been out of the field for a year, following a traumatic mission which resulted in serious injury; his nerves are still shot, but a mission has come up that he’s uniquely suited to.

Amberlough is one of four loosely federated states that make up the nation of Gedda. Up until recently, this has suited everyone fairly well. However, a new political power, the One State Party (colloquially referred to as the Ospies) is on the rise and threatens to take power in the upcoming elections in the state of Farborough. The OSP is quite clearly a fascist-trending political movement, and with Amberlough being a place of rather profound liberal tendencies (sexual freedom, some degree of racial integration, along with a fair amount of smuggling and corruption, all politely conducted with an eye to tradition and balance), the powers that be in Amberlough are concerned. They’ve found hints that the OSP is planning to interfere with the election, and DePaul’s mission is to pose as a wealthy potential moneyman while he tries to uncover exactly what their plans are.

The mission goes wrong, and DePaul finds himself in a deadly game, forced to become a double agent for the OSP. Survival also means giving up the man he loves, Aristide - a cabaret drag queen and underground smuggler and drug dealer, at least until he can find some way to get out of the trap he’s caught in, and take Aristide with him.

But nothing works out as hoped. Unable to be open with each other, DePaul and Aristide end up working at cross purposes, tangling even more of their respective colleagues and contacts in the web of deceptions, the most vulnerable of whom is Cordelia, a burlesque artist and sometime drug runner, who Aristide persuades to act as DePaul’s beard. And through it all, the OSP moves inexorably toward power in Amberlough.

It’s a good thing this is the first book in a trilogy, because if the story were over at the end of this volume, I would be a very unhappy person. As it stands, I’m a very impatient person, waiting for volume two.

Matt, the protagonist of Sam J. Miller’s YA novel The Art of Starving, is not having a good life. He’s an intelligent, gay high school student who endures daily bullying from the popular jocks. His family is poor, and Jewish. He has suicidal impulses, fantasises about running away, or maybe getting his mother’s mother’s gun and taking it to school, and he struggles with anorexia and body dysphoria, which of course boys supposedly do not get. His sister has run away, and Matt thinks it has something to do with Tariq, one of the boys who torments him. His mother, a single parent who is always exhausted from her work at the slaughterhouse, is in perpetual denial about her children’s problems.

Matt doesn’t acknowledge his anorexia. Instead, he justifies not eating by saying that it makes him more alert and aware of danger, heightens his abilities to defend himself. He practices the Art of Starving, and throughout the book, he formulates the rules that govern his art.

The first person narrative is centred around two main issues. The first is Matt’s perceptions of how his body and senses change when he eats, or doesn’t eat; his belief that starvation heightens awareness, and his war with his body over hunger. The second is his obsession with Tariq, to whom he is attracted, but who he believes has somehow injured his sister so that she had to run away; he doesn’t say it directly, but it’s clear he believes his sister was sexually assaulted by Tariq, and possibly also by Tariq’s bullying friends.

It’s a scorchingly funny, bitterly heartbreaking story. Matt’s pain and desire come alive on every page, couched in trenchant observations about life, wrapped up in the grief of an adolescent who just does not see where he fits in the world. It’s a great novel - but since I’m reading it as a book that’s been heavily recommended as a potential Hugo nominee, I have to ask myself, is it speculative fiction?

The only genre element in the novel is Matt’s belief that he has powers granted to him by the art of starving. Several things happen that may be external validations of his belief. Or they may be delusions. Matt has starved himself to the point where his brain doesn’t work properly, so he is not a reliable narrator.

So... a good novel, an important novel, one that really gives an insider view of what it’s like to be a queer person growing up in a damaged home, struggling with an eating disorder, feeling like an outsider. And yes, I’ve been there. Even to the point of tripping on the sense of power that not eating gives a person who perceives themselves as otherwise powerless. The euphoria of wilful starvation.

But not necessarily a science fiction or fantasy novel. That’s a decision you’ll have to make yourself.

As a disabled person, a queer person, and a freelance cultural studies scholar, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer is exactly the sort of book you’d expect to find me reading sooner or later. There are many reasons to consider the relationship between crip theory and queer theory, and how they relate to other bodies of theory - feminist studies, race theory among them. Disability and alternative sexualities are situated in the body, they share a history of being pathologised, and seen as states requiring medicalisation, rehabilitation, and isolation. They carry high risks of stigmatisation. They challenge and subvert narratives of normality in a way that gender and race do not. As McRuer notes, “Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”

The book is structured as a series of essays examining various aspects of disability theory, or “crip theory” with particular attention to how they intersect with queer conceptualisations and experiences. The first chapter focuses on ways of “coming out” and becoming identified as disabled. McRuer points out that self-identification as disabled is something that occurs in opposition to a compulsory ablebodiedness inherent in society, much as coming out as queer occurs in opposition to compulsory heterosexuality.

“In many ways, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness I analyzed in the introduction militates against crip identifications and practices, even as it inevitably generates them. Certainly, disabled activists, artists, and others who have come out crip have done so in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression. Stigmatized in and by a culture that will not or cannot accommodate their presence, crip performers (in several senses of the word and in many different performance venues, from the stage to the street to the conference hall) have proudly and collectively shaped stigmaphilic alternatives in, through, and around that abjection. At the same time, if the constraints of compulsory able-bodiedness push some politicized activists and artists with disabilities to come out crip, those constraints simultaneously keep many other disabled and nondisabled people from doing so.”

The next section of McRuer’s book is titled “Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity” and is centered around the case of Sharon Kowalski and the disability-informed strategies utilised by proponents of same-sex marriage. He argues in particular that “...intracommunity debates over gay marriage and other “normalizing” issues are centrally about disability and disability oppression.”

“...the lesbian and gay emphasis on normalizing issues such as marriage deploys a fundamentally “stigmaphobic” strategy, “where conformity is ensured through fear of stigma” (Trouble with Normal 43). The stigmaphobic strategy is most troubling, for Warner and other queers, because it proscribes larger discussions of social justice and queer cultural generativity. To cite just one crucial example: most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry (a critique that was fairly basic to earlier gay liberationist and feminist writing).”

He further discusses ways in which the heterosexual nuclear family, constructed under capitalism as a means of reproduction of (able-bodied) workers, is inimical to disabled domesticity. As a site of (re)production, the disabled are increasingly moved out of the home and into institutions.

As a personal sidenote on this point, when I arrive at a hospital to receive medical care, I am generally assumed to be a transfer patient from a longterm care facility. The idea that I live at home in my condition is not considered. One side effect of this is that ambulance services, which are normally required only in emergency situations by able-bodied people, but which are necessary for me to travel anywhere, are covered by various forms of government or private insurance for disabled people being transferred from institution to institution, but not for me if I travel from home to a medical facility for non-emergency care, a “loophole” which has increasingly placed me in debt. Disability and domesticity are viewed are mutually incompatible and no provision is made for those who insist that it is not.

In the third section of his book, “Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation,” McRuer starts by discussing the idea of rehabilitation as reflected in the situation of Sharon Kowalski. Where Thompson and Kowalski perceived the possibility of a rehabilitation that involved a return to the home for care, and encompassed the idea of home as a queer and crip space, Kowalski’s parents could only understand rehabilitation as a return to the compulsory state of heterosexual ablebodiedness: “for them, able-bodied/heterosexual normalcy began at home, and if Sharon could not return to such a state of normalcy, then she would have to remain incarcerated in nursing homes.” With this as a starting point, McRuer goes on to “... address disability studies critiques of ideologies of rehabilitation more directly, through consideration of a few texts produced in the normalizing decade after Sharon Kowalski did, in fact, return home to live with Thompson and Patty Bresser.”

The first of these texts is a documentary, The Transformation, which chronicles the intervention of a fundamentalist Christian mission in a community of Black and Latinx transfolk; the film follows the recruitment of Sara, a trans woman, into the ministry and her transformation into Ricardo, showing “...[the] journey from the transgender streets of New York to a housed, married, and Fundamentalist Christian life in Dallas.” The second text is the journals and short stories of black writer Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited and published by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick three years after Fisher’s death from complications of AIDS. McRuer also discusses Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.

McRuer presents mainstream concepts of rehabilitation as focused on repairing and removing alterity and recreating homogeneity. It implies that “...the rehabilitative contract (“everyone agrees”), then, essentially stipulates that, in return for integration, no complaints will be made, no suggestions for how the world, and not the disabled body or mind, might be molded differently. No complaints will be made even if the contract in effect relegates disabled people to the margins.”

Rehabilitation becomes a process of normalisation, of demanding that the queer, disabled, damaged, different, degraded self be made normal, or be excluded, institutionalised, outcast. Narratives that bring the subject home, render them as able, acceptable, capable, while remaining a queer and disabled person still are seen as resistant, non-compliant.

The fourth essay in McRuer’s examination of crip theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate Universality and Alternative Corporealities,” is an exploration of composition, corporations, and corporeality:

“Chapters 2 and 3 focused on highly charged institutional and institutionalized sites where cultural signs of queerness and disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to shore up dominant forms of domesticity and rehabilitation, respectively. In this chapter, I turn to another institutional site, the contemporary university, where anxieties about disability and queerness are likewise legible. In particular, I extend the critical dialogue on composition and the contemporary university by arguing for alternative, and multiple, corporealities. I contend that recentering our attention on the composing bodies in our classrooms can inaugurate and work to sustain a process of “de-composition”—that is, a process that provides an ongoing critique of both the corporate models into which we, as students and teachers of composition, are interpellated and the concomitant disciplinary compulsion to produce only dis- embodied, efficient writers. Most important, I make the somewhat polemical claim that bringing back in composing bodies means, inevitably, placing queer theory and disability studies at the center of composition theory.”

As McRuer notes, one consequence of compulsory heterosexuality and ablebodiedness is that social and cultural institutions are constantly engaged in a process of composing straight, able bodies capable of production and reproduction within the corporate, capitalist system.The teaching of language usage, of composition, is a part of that process, of creating bodies fit to serve corporate needs through their uniform skills of composition and communication.

The fifth section, “Crip Eye fir the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies” begins with a discussion of the politics of how society sees - and represents for others to see - the disabled. Taking the media text Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a point of departure, McRuer examines the ways in which representations of disability rooted in a model of progress and normalisation fail to serve the disabled but instead support the narrative of compulsory ablebodiedness: “In other words, some things don’t keep getting better; visual rhetorics of disability do not necessarily improve over time, nor do they posit (or construct, instruct, or assure) a disabled viewer.” McRuer offers a counterpoint in the masochistic performance art of Bob Flanagan, who incorporates both bdsm and his cystic fibrosis into his work, to the point if titling one performance piece “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” - suggesting “In a moment of danger and noncompliance, however, “some future person” or collectivity might detect in that sick message the seemingly incomprehensible way to survive, and survive well, at the margins of time, space, and representation (they might, in fact, detect that surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick).”

Taken as a whole, McRuer’s book interrogates and challenges assumptions, constructions and representations of disability, showing how disability queers the master cultural narrative if productive, corporatised, consumerist normality. It raises questions, and dies not always offer answers, only new ways of considering the disability identity and its relation to the social structures that surround it. It’s not an easy book, but it is a mist thought-provoking one.

Gregory Woods’ Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World is an interesting look at some of the queer people and communities who have undeniably influenced modern cultural development, from Oscar Wilde to Yukio Mishima, and how these artists and communities have been viewed.

Woods begins by defining his idea of the Homintern (a play on the international Communist organisation, Comintern, which advocated world communism): “The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network, it is either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states. You decide.”

However, Woods makes it clear that he is not speaking of some actual secret organisation or conspiracy to make the world more queer, but rather a loose conceptualisation of the international community of queer cultural workers, the artists, writers, musicians, critics, aesthetes, sponsors and patrons who held salons and operated clubs and galleries and publishing houses and other businesses and establishments where culture makers could gather, disseminate their works and perspectives, pass on their world views to future generations, straight and queer. But at the same time, he reminds us that the “homosexual” has frequently been seen as a fifth columnist, as a security risk, as a traitor more inclined to identify with “his” own kind across international birders than with his country if birth.

“There was no such thing as the ‘Homintern’. It was a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view; but, despite its lack of substance, it still occupied a solid and prominent site near the centre of modern life. ... The coining of the expression ‘Homintern’ is often attributed to Cyril Connolly, less often to Maurice Bowra, and sometimes to W.H. Auden; but Anthony Powell thought its source was Jocelyn Brooke, and Harold Norse claimed it for himself. Most plausibly, it was the felicitous invention of many minds, unknown to each other, at more or less the same time. Anyone who pronounced the relatively new word ‘homosexual’ with a short first ‘o’ – and that is likely to have included anyone with a classical education – could have made the camp pun. ‘Homintern’ was the name Connolly, Auden and others jokingly gave the sprawling, informal network of friendships that Cold War conspiracy theorists would later come to think of as ‘the international homosexual conspiracy’. In fact, the Homosexual International was sometimes only superficially international and sometimes only half-heartedly homosexual: it was also a matter of surfaces, fashions and styles. The term tended to be applied to networks only of men, in part because those who thought of such a potential conspiracy as a threat tended not to think of women, let alone lesbian women, as having sufficient influence to be worth worrying about.”

Woods also reminds us of the at-times commonly held belief that “homosexual cliques” controlled access to the cultural world, offering preferential access to artists who were gay themselves, or incorporated gay aesthetics into their work. The Homintern may not exist, but it has been, and still is, believed to exist (think of the religious right’s harping on a mythical ‘gay agenda’), and thus affects the ways in which queer people, communities and culture are seen and treated.

Woods begins his meditation on the interactions of gay aesthetics with the larger scope of modern culture with an examination of the influences of Oscar Wilde - his art, his role in the aesthetic movement, and his homosexuality, imprisonment and exile. Wilde’s work influenced a generation of continental writers, many of them also homosexual, but the tragic circumstances of his later life reinforced an association between aestheticism, decadence, and sexual deviance, and motivated a generation of straight writers to “butch up” as much as possible to avoid any suspicion that they might be “like Oscar Wilde.”

He also notes the effects of psychological and psychoanalytical exploration of sexuality, including deviant sexuality, centred around such German and Austrian thinkers as Freud and Kraft-Ebbing. Woods suggests that these effects were particularly pronounced in England: “The fact that the new sciences of sexology and psychoanalysis were of predominantly German and Austrian origins inspired in some British nationalists and jingoists the suspicion that sodomy itself was being promoted by a conspiracy of German-speaking perverts against the moral purity of the British Empire.”

From these beginnings - which in combination mark the end of an era where gay sexuality was kept hidden and as unremarked as possible, by all but the most daring of wilful outcasts, and the start of the modern era of sexual ferment and freedom when the love that once dared not speak its name became able to shout it proudly in the streets - Woods takes us on a tour of queer engagement with culture and public discourse, from the literary salons of Natalie Barney to the ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev, from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Weimar Republic’s Berlin club scene to the idyllic pleasures of sultry Capri, and on to the post-war “Sodom-on-Hudson,” Greenwich Village.

The book reads like a massive combination cultural tour guide and gossip sheet to all things queer, following a somewhat idiosyncratic itinerary through the 20th century, stopping frequently to exclaim “something interesting was said here” or “here is where these people were” - and then proceeding to tell you absolutely everything about it. As an organising conceit, the idea of the Homintern allows Woods to trace connections, networks, of acquaintance, of influence, of correspondence, of personal relationship, between people, places and even times, giving a sense of organicity to the idea of queer culture(s). It is a “who’s who” of queer artists and thinkers, and a celebration of their lives, scandals and achievements.

What is lacking, unfortunately, is an actual argument in support of the grand claim made in the book’s subtitle. There is much exploration of the minutiae of gay culture, but not much critical exploration of its themes and subjects, or indeed of its influence on mainstream culture. What critical analysis there is, is mostly about theories of homosexuality, and the ways in which changes in society influenced attitudes towards being gay.

What this book offers, essentially, is a vicarious journey through the lives of a number of well-known creative gay people, rarely rising above the level of reportage about their notable achievements, social habits and domestic arrangements. The depth of detail, and the research involved to produce such a tome, is impressive. However, the Homintern ultimately dissolves into a simple narrative of who worked with whom, who vacationed with whom, where they partied and with whom they slept while they did all that. I don’t know what I was expecting from a book so expansively titled, but what I got was little more than a crowded landscape of biographical notes about people linked by a common sexual orientation and shared occupation.

Sara Ahmed begins her book, Living a Feminist Life, with these words:

"What do you hear when you hear the word feminism ? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.

I write this book as a way of holding on to the promise of that word, to think what it means to live your life by claiming that word as your own: being a feminist, becoming a feminist, speaking as a feminist. Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls."

This is not unlike my own sense of what feminism has meant to me, throughout almost an entire lifetime of consciously identifying myself as a feminist. It is about living bravely and ethically, believing in the power we have within us to change the world and make it a better place for everyone to live in. It is about social and economic justice for every damned human being on the planet. It is about fighting sexism, racism, classism, homophobia and transphobia. It is about recognising intersectionality of experience and not centering the experiences of the privileged. It's about challenging capitalist greed, the bitter aftereffects of colonialism, the ongoing oppression of globalisation and economic imperialism. It's about respect and compassion and love. And yet, as Ahmed notes:

"When you become a feminist, you find out very quickly: what you aim to bring to an end some do not recognize as existing. This book follows this finding. So much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter. Just to talk about sexism and racism here and now is to refuse displacement; it is to refuse to wrap your speech around postfeminism or postrace, which would require you to use the past tense (back then) or an elsewhere (over there)."

Ahmed writes with such specificity about becoming a feminist, being a feminist, behaving in feminist ways, that every page is full of recognitions - “yes, that’s what it feels like,” “yes, that’s what always happens,” “yes, I’ve been there, said that, done that.” She talks about being the ‘feminist killjoy’ - the one who recognises the everyday manifestations of sexism and racism, who identifies them as problems, as wrong, as forms of violence, who has a name for these things, who feels angry about them, who speaks out, who takes action to resist the wrong, repudiate the violence, repair the harm. And about feminism as willfulness: “If to be a killjoy is to be the one who gets in the way of happiness, then living a feminist life requires being willing to get in the way. When we are willing to get in the way, we are willful.”

A further aspect of Ahmed’s writing is her multi-layered examination of the words and images we use, and how their meanings and relationships can reveal unexpected truths. As in this passage:

“If feminists are willful women, then feminism is judged as a product of those who have too much will or too much of a will of their own. This judgment is a judgment of feminism as being wrong, but also an explanation of feminism in terms of motivation: the act of saying something is wrong is understood as being self-motivated, a way of getting what you want or will. Virginia Woolf wrote of a room of one’s own, a room we have to fight for. We can think of feminism as having to fight to acquire a will of one’s own.

Of course now when we hear the expression “a will of one’s own,” we might assume this claim as an assertion of the primacy of an individual. But own can be rebellious in a world that assumes some beings are property for others (being for others): to claim to be one’s own or to have a will of one’s own can be a refusal to be willing to labor or to provide services for others. Perhaps willing women means being willing to be for. When you are assumed to be for others, then not being for others is judged as being for yourself. Perhaps willfulness could be summarized thus: not being willing to be owned. When you are not willing to be owned, you are judged as willing on your own. This is why willfulness as a judgment falls on some and not others. It is only for some that ownness is rebellion; only some owns become wrongs.”

Ahmed devotes a significant portion of the text to discussing her experiences and observations on being a diversity worker in academia - an example of praxis of the feminist theory she expounds elsewhere in the text. But much of the thinking she shares about the work of enabling and supporting diversity, and the multiple barriers faced by such workers, is entirely applicable to the struggles of any activist to enable and support social and economic justice for any marginalised group.

Indeed, the final section of the book is about feminist activism of all kinds and the consequences of living a feminist life. Ahmed demonstrates the ways that the various concepts she identifies and explores - the feminist killjoy, the willful woman, the feminist snap among others - work in the real world of interactions between people with multiple intersections of privilege and oppression. Moreover, she stresses the importance of surviving as a feminist, and of ensuring that feminism survives. And she gives us much to think about while we try to survive and live our feminist lives.

“Feminism needs feminists to survive: my killjoy survival kit is assembled around this sentence. It is a feminist sentence. And the reverse too is very true: feminists need feminism to survive. Feminism needs those of us who live lives as feminists to survive; our life becomes a feminist survival. But feminism needs to survive; our life becomes a feminist survival in this other sense. Feminism needs us; feminism needs us not only to survive but to dedicate our lives to the survival of feminism. This book has been my expression of my willingness to make this dedication. Feminists need feminism to survive.”

I have recently been thinking a lot about AIDS, about the ways in which it has affected me and the people I know and care about. This has resulted in my picking up a small collections of books on various aspects of the AIDS epidemic, including Randy Shilts' classic, And the Band Played On, which I've read before but felt the need to revisit, especially after reading David France's How To Survive a Plague, which covers some of the same ground, but from a different perspective, and with a more concentrated focus on New York activists and issues.

Shilts' account, like that of France, is informed throughout by the brutal truth that no one in power, and very few in the American population, cared about what happened to a bunch of gay men except the men themselves, their friends, lovers, and - sometimes - their families, and a few dedicated scientists and doctors who saw these men as their patients, sometimes even as their community. If the disease had surfaced in almost other community, the history of AIDS in North America, and perhaps globally, might have been very different. But the first communities obviously affected were social pariahs - gay men, intravenous drug users, black immigrants from Haiti. People no one really gave a damn about. By the time it reached hemophiliacs, and other blood transfusion recipients, and a significant number of heterosexual people, it was too late to stop the tidal wave.

"The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America—it was allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health. This failure of the system leaves a legacy of unnecessary suffering that will haunt the Western world for decades to come."

Shilts is primarily telling the story of the efforts made by scientists involved in the fight against AIDD, and those who shared information with them, to track and research the disease in its early days, without anywhere near the necessary resources in people or funding. It's a refrain that echoes through the book, with researcher after researcher lamenting that they have no money to complete studies or analyse their data, to hire staff, to access equipment, to do any number of things that are essential to medical research on a mysterious new disease. There are frequent comparisons with the response to Legionnaire's disease and toxic shock syndrome where funds and resources were speedily made available to determine the cause of a disease which threatened fewer lives.

He also uncovers the ways in which politics - at the party level, the federal and state levels, the municipal level, and within the gay communities of cities such as New York and San Francisco interfered with the research process, limited the public health responses, kept the media and the public from understanding the true scope of the epidemic, and undermined attempts to stop it before it became unstoppable.

Shilts makes an important point about the disease - once researchers realised they were likely looking for a retrovirus, it was not that difficult a scientific task to find the virus responsible. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the search was made far more difficult than it needed to be. American researchers were delayed by funding issues and by a culture that downplayed the importance of working on a 'gay disease.' The political will to support the research did not exist. In France, researchers working under Luc Montagnier at the Louis Pasteur Institute actually found the infectious agent, now known as HIV, but which they initially called LAV, a full year before anyone in the US, but lack of resources made it difficult to perform the necessary research tasks to confirm their discovery, and grandstanding by the foremost American retrovirologist, Robert Gallo, undermined international respect for the French team. Gallo seemed to be always on the verge of being ready to announce that his lab had found the virus, which he insisted was related to previous retroviruses identified by his lab. The medical research establishment, kept brushing aside the French team's reports of having found the infectious agent, saying, in essence 'let's wait and see what Bob Gallo has.'

A further effect of Gallo's insistence that the infectious agent was related to the HTLV family of viruses he had discovered was that much of what little research there was in the US on fighting the disease focused on deepening the understanding of this particular family of retroviruses. It would later be acknowledged that HIV was not related to HTLV, and functioned rather differently in crucial ways. The HTLV research did nothing to further the fight against AIDS, but rather hampered it by using resources that could have been directed more effectively.

Politics and nationalism slowed recognition of the Pasteur team's achievement, setting research into development of effective anti-viral medication back at least a year. Lacking the vast resources of the American medical and pharmaceutical industry, French researchers did what they could, and were involved in testing potential anti-viral drugs well before the Americans, but it wasn't enough. The global co-operation necessary did not exist, and the Americans did not have the interest or the political will to lead the search: "Officials at the National Cancer Institute assured everyone that they were screening every possible drug for experimental trials in AIDS patients. What they didn’t reveal was that this federal screening program consisted of Dr. Sam Broder and two technicians; a federal hiring freeze prevented the NCI from augmenting this program."

Furthermore, without scientifically accepted evidence that there was an infectious agent which was being spread by sexual contact and blood exchange, the disease was allowed to spread unchecked for a more than a year following the isolation of the causative virus. The use of contaminated blood products and continued unsafe sex and drug-use behaviours among high-risk populations, without the proper warnings being made available, let alone blood testing and serious AIDS education programs, resulted in increasing levels of infection.

Given what is now known about the path taken by HIV, reducing the size of the epidemic in America through prompt action and adequate funding for research could have saved lives not only there, but in the countries where AIDS arrived as a result of sex tourism - Europe, Australia and much of Asia. As Shilts says in the book:

"Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late."

While I was rereading the book, I also rewatched the film that was made based on the book. It's interesting to note how the narrative was altered to make the film more accessible, and more marketable. The character of Dr. Don Francis, played by Matthew Modine in the film, is elevated from the position of just one of many researchers - albeit one who made some key connections early on about the possible nature of the new disease - to a more heroic and central role. The two women who played important roles in Shilts' account - Dr. Mary Guinan and Dr. Selma Dritz, were subtly diminished. Shilts describes Dr. Guinan as being in her early 40s, with a "harsh Brooklyn accent and straightforward demeanor [that] belied a maternal sensitivity that flavored her concern about the epidemic. Maybe that’s why she was such a good field investigator, colleagues thought. She came across as both strong enough to hear the blunt truth and empathetic enough to let you know she really cared." In the film, the character of Mary Guinan becomes a young and somewhat self-effacing woman, though the actor, Glenne Headly, does invest the character with a no-nonsense, hard to shock attitude toward her work. In the film, Dr. Selma Dritz is presented more as a convenient social worker who facilitates the actions of others than an epidemiologist in her own right researching the spread of AIDS - her status as a medical doctor is never referenced in the film, for example. It's Lily Tomlin's strong performance that makes the character memorable.

Obviously, much detail was cut from the book to provide a clean, straightforward narrative. Key lines from the book are often transplanted to different situations and circumstances, and spoken by different characters. The crucial message of the book, however, is made very clear in the film: that the Reagan administration contributed significantly to the scope of the global AIDS epidemic by ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health officials, and by refusing to properly fund the search for the cause of the disease.

One of the most controversial aspects of both book and film is the treatment of Quebecois Airline Steward Gaëtan Dugas. Shilts himself acknowledged that he sensationalised the role of Dugas - "Patient Zero" - in his book at the request of his publisher, but the film goes much further. Shilts notes that Dugas was only one of several people, indeed, only one of three airline stewards, identified in the cluster studies who travelled frequently both internationally and cross-country, and was not by any means the person reporting the most sexual encounters. The film focuses narrowly on Dugas, suggesting that he may even have brought the disease to North America, when in fact he was simply the nexus in one cluster of sexual contacts. Furthermore, his position as a nexus is quite likely due to the fact that he was in fact very co-operative, sharing with CDC researchers the names of many of his American contacts as well as providing samples for research on multiple occasions. In the film, his 'casual' attitude toward sexuality is exaggerated in order to emphasise the idea of gay sex as anonymous and without personal connection. In the film, his lovers don't even know his name; in the book, it is a former lover who provides the researcher with his phone number. Of course, genetic analysis of variants of HIV found in stored blood samples going back to 1970 has since proven that the disease was well established in the US long before Dugas arrived on the bath house scene. He was not the cause of the AIDS epidemic in the US, nor was he the vector by which the disease was spread from New York to the West Coast. He was simply one of thousands of very sexually active gay men who became an early victim of a disease that could have a latency period as long as ten years.

Shilts himself would later die from the disease that had spread so ferociously across the continent, and then the world. And the epidemic continues to spread, despite the development of drugs that reduce the viral load to almost undetectable levels in many people living with AIDS, and despite the educational programs on harm reduction.

In Canada, the incidence of AIDS is increasing, particularly among Indigenous peoples. Worldwide, incidence is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, and some countries in the Caribbean. People continue to be infected, and people continue to die. The human immunodeficiency virus, which is now believed to have begun its long journey around the world about a century ago, is now a part of our lives and will be so for a long time to come.

Ellen Klages' novella, Passing Strange, is a rich science fantasy that explores many transitions - passings - across diverse borders. The narrative begins with an account of the final days of Helen Young, an American woman of Japanese heritage who has spent much of her life passing in one way or another. When we met her, she is very old, dying of some unspecified condition. One of her last acts before her self-administered final passing is to sell an original drawing - the last drawing - of the highly collectible pulp artist known as Haskel.

The narrative then moves back in time to the early days of the second world war, to San Francisco's hidden gay world. Here again Helen is passing, in multiple ways. As a straight woman - she is married, to a gay Asian man - and as Chinese - her married name in ambiguous and as she herself notes, most white people can't tell Asians if different nationalities apart. She is also a lawyer, but 'passes' as an exotic dancer to make ends meet. And she models Asian characters, male and female, for Haskell's covers.

Haskell is, like Helen, a lesbian, and passing professionally as a man to sell their art. As the story progresses, she meets and falls in love with Emily, a young butch and drag king performer who sings at the local lesbian bar.

Klages writes with great detail and empathy about the lives of lesbians in pre-war San Francisco, the different experiences of those, usually femmes like Helen and Haskell, who can pass, and the butches and dykes who cannot pass and thus draw the most reaction from the straight world of police and gawking voyeuristic tourists. The fears of discovery and subsequent loss, the courage to go on in spite of all this.

There's another dimension of passing in the story, besides that of the boundaries of gender. There are also passages across the borders of science and magic, reality and illusion. We meet Franny, a witch of sorts, with the gift of translocation, of passing magically between geographically separated points by folding the maps she creates, and her partner Babs, a mathematics professor who is trying to develop a branch of topological math that can describe what Franny does. And Polly, a young relative of Franny's from England whose passion is science, which she uses to help develop acts for her magician-father. And eventually, we learn the story of Haskell's grandmother, who used magic to pass through danger by turning life into art, and then back into life.

The story of Emily and Haskell's romance is both sweet, and fraught with danger because of their transgressive sexuality, and ultimately they must make use of Haskell's family magic to escape when there is no other way, a strange and magical passage into another life.

Klages fills her narrative with borders, boundaries, crossings, passages and transformations, from the great passings of life and death to the small changes in colour and appearance brought about by different lighting. What remains the same, despite transformations, is loyalty, friendship, and love.

If there is any weakness to this story, it's that there's not enough. The principal characters are drawn with such clarity and depth that one wants to know so much more about all of them, their lives after this moment in time. I had an overwhelming feeling that each woman mentioned has a marvellous story waiting to be told, about how they came to be in this place and time, and where they went from there. And I want those stories.

Andrea Hairston's novel Will Do Magic for Small Change is a celebration of the power of storytelling, the connection between past, present and future, and magic - the everyday magic that comes from such acts as taking a step into the unknown, opening your heart or trusting your sense of yourself - and how these things can heal, can make something that was broken, scattered, whole again.

Hairston gives us two narratives interwoven by magic, imagination and love. The first, set in 1980s Chicago, centres on a young black girl, Cinnamon Jones, child of poverty, myth and art. Her father is in a coma, shot while trying to help two lesbians. Her brother has died of a drug overdose that may have been suicide. Her mother, a city bus driver, is increasingly unable to cope. But in her blood is the magic and mystery of her grandparents, a hoodoo woman and a medicine man. What pulls Cinnamon forward is a love of theatre, the friends she meets at an audition - Klaus and Marie - and the gift from her brother of a mysterious book that writes itself, the story of an alien wanderer come to earth.

The second narrative is the story of this Wanderer. Starting in the late 1890s, the alien is caught up in the flight of a Dahomey ahosi, or warrior woman, after her defection from the Dahomeyan women's army. The warrior, Kahinde, names the alien after her dead twin brother Taiwo, for whom she left the king's army. Joined by Kahinde's sister-in-law Samso and her infant daughter, they travel to the new world of America seeking a place where they can write new stories of their lives.

Intersections of past and present, love and fear, the deep truth of storytelling, theatre, art - the tale of the wanderer becomes the tale of Cinnamon's life and as it finds completion, the path to Cinnamon's future is woven together and unfolds before her.

A magical book, with layers of meaning I'll be contemplating for some time to come.