Category: Gabbler Recommends
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘The Most-Watched Show in America Is a Moral Failure’ by SOPHIE GILBERT
“Baskin is interesting, too, because she’s a woman operating in a world characterized by gleeful misogyny. Exotic makes effigies of Baskin; he fills her mailbox with snakes (a strangely phallic gesture); he makes memes about her crotch, and videos in which he fantasizes about torturing her with a horse penis. He calls her a bitch so many times that the word loses all meaning. Jeff Lowe, one of Exotic’s business associates, who enters the series midway through, is a more limited character, but his treatment of women is still horrible enough to be noteworthy. (As his wife tells the camera about how she’s preparing for the upcoming birth of their child, Lowe remarks that she’ll immediately have to go back to the gym, and shows the directors glamour shots of the women he’s considering as nannies. Lowe, according to the show, also has a felony criminal record and a history of charges that include throttling his first wife.)”
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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk’ by KELSEY D. ATHERTON
The 2020s are, in a real, tangible sense, the conclusion of The Long 1980s. Writing in the 1980s, foundational cyberpunk authors were watching as leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursued a set of political reforms collectively known as neoliberalism. Prioritizing competition in the market above all else, these reforms were fundamentally a political project, aimed at shrinking the public sphere and undoing many of the commitments to social welfare that had been made in the wake of the chaos, upheaval, and deprivation of the first half of the 20th century. The neoliberal turn was a project of unmaking the state for individuals and communities and remaking it for capital.
Cyberpunk conjured a world at this end state of neoliberal reorganization. Islands in the Net features drone warfare launched against data havens at the behest of corporations. In Blade Runner, the profit considerations of multinational companies determine worker personhood. There is more than a little of the Tyrell Corporation’s prudent life expectancy design in how Amazon responds to worker protest over a lack of personal protective equipment. Today, cyberpunk’s anticipated neoliberal end state is nothing more fanciful than life as we know it.
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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: “If We Can Make Animals Smarter, Should We?” by Shayla Love
“In Dvorsky’s eyes, transhumanists are ultimately focused on the alleviation of suffering. The transhumanist philosopher David Pearce , for example , is known for what’s called the hedonistic imperative, which says that genetic engineering and other technologies should abolish suffering in all sentient life.
But is this just another bias that uplift reveals? That if only animals could be smarter, more aware, then they’d suffer less? Is this a fallacy that could be our own undoing, rather than an animal’s salvation— the overvaluing of intelligence?
“What about the kinds of suffering that humans experience as a direct result of our higher-order thinking?” Povinelli asked. “I’ve met a lot of transhumanists and many of them are very unhappy and they’re suffering more than a lot of people that don’t think about these things every day.””
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GODS IN OUR MACHINES BY G.B. GABBLER
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Googling Literary Lesbians: On Carson McCullers and the Erotics of Incompletion Sarah Heying Asks “The Sappho Question”‘
“In the study of lesbian history, the desire for proof is generally one the researcher doesn’t expect or even want to have satisfied. Queer research can feel like a secret club, where evidence is stored only within the blood that rushes from our bellies to our cheeks and is exchanged via intuition and rumor. When Shapland finds her proof, several years into researching McCullers, she’s overwhelmed by the verification of that which she’d known all along. Her girlfriend doesn’t share in her sense of shock. “‘Isn’t this what you were looking for?’” she asks. “‘Well,’” responds Shapland, “‘I didn’t think I’d actually find it.’”
…Which is to say, proof might be relevant, but it’s not the point. Often, the act of writing a biography is one on hand an attempt to uncover some previously unseen truth about a person, and on the other an effort to establish narrative or analytical meaning to the messiness of life. For Shapland, it’s more about finding a way to accept the mess in all its absences and utterances and to be honest with herself and her readers about what it is she wants from the archive. Ultimately, Shapland’s book aims to behold a woman she’ll never meet and to love her without laying claim.
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The act of piecing ourselves together through each other shows up again and again in lesbian literature. Sure, it can fringe on enmeshment when done possessively and without regard for one’s own motivations, and that’s a stereotype that makes for a handful of easy punchlines. But all jokes aside (cue joke about humorless lesbians), what so often gets overlooked is the great possibility in considering self-creation as a collaborative work of love in which we carry the bodies of others within our own….The woman that the narrator loves is dead, but not. The narrator is the woman that she loves, but not. When we continually re-make ourselves and each other through intimacy, we’re never done becoming.”
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