call for contributions

[sebastienne]

'BLOODY HELL, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME ABOUT THAT!'

Medieval trans women, the British judiciary killed Alan Turing, black people in Britain before 1945...

Histories that get silenced, leaving us feeling like some weird postmodern blip instead of full human beings. deathbyshinies' magnificent project intends to tell some of these stories, and she'd love you to write her 1,000-1,500 words about your favourite secret history.

I'm going to be writing about Alan Turing's prosecution for homosexuality, and about Oscar Wilde's bisexuality. Information on how to reclaim your hidden history can be found here. Please do consider signing up to what should be a deeply worthwhile project!

Life is good for me at the moment. I'm getting very, very into studying the sociology of the internet. So much so that I'm considering this, even though just last week I resolved to get myself a part-time job that would pay the bills in order to devote two days a week to working on volunteering, activism, and song-writing. There also appears to be A Boy, (is there an upper age limit on that term? Someone may have to give me another word..) which is new, and exciting, and scary, and yet somehow deeply comfortable.

Comments

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Not *really*, because I know that he wouldn't do that with The Weight Of Patriarchal Oppression behind it, but the term does still ring those kinds of alarm bells for me in a way that "boy" doesn't. Like girl is infantilising and removing of agency, but boy is quite neutral in that regard.

(A & S are a case in point - she calls him her boy and that totally works but I can't imagine him calling her his girl.)

[subservient-son.livejournal.com]

I completely see all that, it's just that couples tend to infantilise each other with nicknames a lot - baby, dear, darling, honey, and I think it's ok in that context, but not with people who you don't have that very close relationship. Obviously it depends upon how you as an individual respond to things.

My Dad has a habit of referring to women in their late 20s as girl (admittedly, he is double their age), which is rather dodgy, but then he mentioned an incident where my grandmother referred to a woman as a girl who was over 60! She is over 90, though. A lot of the time it's about context, I suppose.