Imogen > Recent Status Updates

I'm really compelled by the presentation of two different sides of racism from the perspective of those in a single Black woman's life. Her white boyfriend has issues with fetishizing women of color, and her employer has issues with putting women of color on pedestals while paying them too little, and when they come together it's a great insight into microaggressions.

Reid definitely has a talent for evocation without too many words. She is very deliberate in the actions and qualities she chooses to describe, which almost always enliven her characters. Not easy to pull off.

This is probably a result of my course reading, but this reads a bit like a case study--"Emira, a 25-year-old African American woman, works as a nanny for a wealthy white family. One day, while taking the young girl she nannies for to a local health food market, she is approached by a security guard, who tells her another customer is concerned that she is not the girl's caretaker. What went wrong in this encounter?"

Turn of the Screw vibes

I'm not very far in, but I'm thinking I might give up on this one. The writing style isn't for me, and there are gratuitous, poorly described sexual descriptions.

So...this entire book so far has been transphobic, fatphobic, and racist. Not really enjoying it.

I think I'm going to have to agree with the NYT Book Review on the "gratuitous depictions of abuse and torture" point

So many exceptionally good explanations and quotes in this.

Dolmage uses trigger warnings not only at the opening of the book but before each potentially triggering section--this affirms their purpose in many ways.

"institutions cannot be disconnected from the bodies within them"

From the very beginning, Dolmage not only talks the talk but walks the walk, practicing what he preaches. He has made this book available in an open-source HTML format compatible with most screen readers, he describes any pictures he uses in the text, and even uses "access" instead of "see" for his sources in the interest of clarity.

Madeline's take on mental illness (is it also Eugenides's?) is not great

I take it back, Sally Rooney, THESE are the worst sex scenes ever written

Gallagher perpetuates some harmful tropes around paralysis, even as a person with paralysis himself--that FDR was "confined" to his chair and a "prisoner" in the White House, for example.

Some smack-you-over-the-head callbacks to previous conversations

I don't think Jaydon's motives are strong enough to justify his actions.

A lot of the problems that the Black Spring residents deal with could be solved if someone just...put a tracking device on Katharine? Maybe they're afraid she would retaliate, but clearly someone managed to stitch her eyes and mouth closed, so there must be a way to do it, right?

Garland-Thomson discusses the origin of the "grotesque" trope in modern literature, and suggests (quite accurately, in my opinion) that it discourages authors and critics from politically conscious perspectives on disabled characters

Garland-Thomson charts the literary progression from a disabled rhetoric of sympathy in works like Uncle Tom's Cabin, to a rhetoric of dispair in industrialized novels like The Silent Partner, to a rhetoric of celebration in Black postmodern fiction like The Bluest Eye and Zami. She recognizes each rhetoric as a form of protest, but deftly points out the flaws in these representations.

I really respect detailed world-building, and that's exactly what Heuvelt has done here. The prose may not be the smoothest, but the premise is so well constructed that, despite its ridiculousness on the surface, you start to think it's plausible.

Con: The "millennial lingo" is not very convincing

Con: the diction is very slangy, to the narrative's detriment. Introducing characters by stating "___was his name and ___was his game" seems cheap.

Pro: the narrative unfolds artfully, establishing the main conflict bit by bit without sounding contrived.

Garland-Thomson introduces two essential terms to her examination of disabled cultural representation: "benevolent maternalism," or the impulse of female protagonists to care for and pity those with disabilities on the margins of the narrative, and "charismatic deviants," or disabled women whose very presence evokes complex issues, but who are never treated as truly human.

Garland-Thomson argues that the move from viewing physical differences as monstrous (pre-Enlightenment) to freakish (mid-1800s to mid-1900s) to pathological (1940s on) is no improvement, but rather a reframing of the same essential aspects