“Myths are early science.”
“Myths are early science, the result of men’s first trying to explain what they saw around them. But there are so many so-called myths which explain nothing at all. These tales are pure entertainment, the sort of thing people would tell each other on a long winter’s evening.” – Edith Hamilton
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Che Gossett’s ‘Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign’
‘The zoo is a biopolitical apparatus, a carceral space undergirded by an anthropomorphic cultural imaginary. As Brain Massumi writes in What Can Animals Teach Us About Politics?, “The zoo is not simply a space of confinement…The horror of the visible stifling of the animals’ vitality is converted into fun.” Animals are anthropomorphized as having nuclear and domestic(ated) families and thus figured as a heteronormative spectacle. A powerful image of everyday resistance to animal incarceration that was in the news recently was where a panda feigned pregnancy to get access to more food and marginally less harmful carceral conditions – as a result a team of scientists had to reschedule their livestream of it after much laudatory heteronormalizing anthropomorphic zoo fan fare. Since its inception the zoo has also always (already) been a colonial and racial enterprise. The awful history of the anti-black racist and colonial exoticizing exhibitions of people of African descent alongside animals in zoos shows how for blackness the human/animal binary is not only collapsed but is in fact mutually reinforcing through the violence inherent in the racial-colonial grammar of animalization – how black people have been historically seen as beasts.’
[Via]
Follow Che Gossett:
November Roundup: Winter is Coming
This past month Gabbler Recommended things like this commentary on the disappointing Fantastic Beasts movie from J.K. Rowling.
B.L.A. had some deep thoughts like “I didn’t like The Fifth Element” and “J.K. Rowling is crying for help.”
In November we also discovered this lovely piece by Elizabeth King on automata. See some of her sculpture work here.
And Gabbler told Dr. Who to “suck it.”
Don’t know who we (G.B. Gabbler and B.L.A.) are? You should really know by now.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
