Cass Boe > Recent Status Updates

As a survivor of interfamilial ramcoa cult torture we have found this useful so far, but it definitely needs to be read slowly.

"Put simply, there is no such thing as 'the' body or even 'the' body image. Instead, whenever we are referring to an individual's body, that body is always responded to in a particularized fashion, that is, as a woman's body, a Latina's body, a mother's body...Thus, rather than view the body image as a cohesive, coherent phenomenon...I argue ...for a multiplicity of body images" (1-2)

"Nostalgia is a toxin for that expansive visioning that needs to happen. We need to be done with nostalgia" (239)

Wow. What an incredible book!

"In a free society beyond capitalism and beyond the family, we can finally know what it means to love and be loved" (246)

Wow this was a good fucking book.

"If chosen family becomes necessary for material survival, survival becomes bound up with status and the opinions of others. What happens to those who are not chosen?" (178)

WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT CHOSEN?!!!!

this book is so good and it was very silly of me to read half of it and then put it down for 3+ months

"Gender variation is a universal throughout human history; what has changed, during each period of economic development, were the means gender-variant people had to survive, and their place in the social order" (100)

"Family abolition is the expansion and generalization of relations of care and consensual interdependency. Family abolition is a commitment that no one should be without support, that everyone should have the freedom to find ways of loving and caring without coercion" (53).

"Family abolition, to be anything, must be both the radical refusal of state and fascist violence against care relations, and the remaking of care relations to challenge internal abuse" (46)

"A majority of Black American children experience at least one CPS investigation growing up. A quarter of a million US children--disproportionately poor, Black children--are taken from their households every year. A majority of the children removed are not based on claims of abuse, but rather neglect, defined primarily as the conditions of poverty" (38).

"The nation only became fully conceivable on the basis of an imagined community of stable families" (37)

So far this is a well-written accessible account of fatness in the U.S. Not really any new info to me, yet, but I look forward to getting to all of the interview data with children and their parents!!

"I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out... Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, "I don't have time for this" or "I don't have energy for this." But then I realized, "I don't have time ~because~ of this. I don't have energy ~because~ of this." This system had taken everything from me, from us...It had even taken ~me~ away from me" (140-141)

"The leap to communist relations...occurred without a mediating 'transition period.' Communization diverged sharply from many preexisting left models of anticapitalist transition. Self-identified communists and anarchists had varied visions of revolutionary social change... All such frameworks proved inadequate to understand the direct, antimarket, and antistate character of the insurrection" (13)

"there were groups who identified as communists...These groups and their rhetorical and theoretical framework largely played only a marginal role in the insurrections. Instead, the horror of crisis and the dynamics of struggle propelled mass political development, Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character" (10)

I've been thinking about this quote for months.

"I learned that most of the care given didn't take the form of professional expertise -it was human connection, the provision of empathy and attention within what otherwise feels like an uncaring and alienating world where the crisis is lodged in the body. ...I'm not proposing that we don't need expertise at all, but that we can take more collective nonexpert responsibility over our health than we do" (38)

This is sooo good so far!!

"While in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, American sociologist Erving Goffman discussed how all humans navigate social situations as a stage to perform appropriately in front of others and to avoid shame, it is fair to surmise that this so-called 'stage' is about quadruple the size for autistic people and surrounded by hot lava" (47)

"Instead, we should ask how environments, such as schools and workplaces, can be made more inclusive so that they no longer impose the obligation to mask" (10)

“It is then worthwhile to question why urban ethnographers, policy makers, and the public continue to place “risk behaviors” at the center of understanding and targeting poverty without fully acknowledging how populations are constructed as at-risk, whether avoiding risk behaviors will indeed break the cycle of marginalization, and what problematizing certain behaviors means for ‘at-risk populations’” 16

“community organizations and institutions that provide resources to marginalized youth can also constrain teens’ opportunities... they also adopt a culture of control, policing youth constantly …They regularly instill fear in the youth by implying that they could very easily become teen parents, gang members, or drug users…They justify the close policing of the teenagers as necessary to future success” (8)

Every social scientist and person who reads social science studies/articles/books should read this book! It's fantastic. Easy to read and well organized. I'm learning so much!