This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Things have been hard lately, I can tell that I'm making progress but it doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm trying to remember to take a step back, look at everything I've done, and be proud of that. But it is hard, the summer is passing rapidly and I feel so pressured to get things done more quickly with very little assistance. Need to keep focusing on the big picture, and even just the progress that I can make over the course of a few days when things are working. There are plenty of figure edits and writing progress being made without me having to fret about it not being finalized.

"Love Expanded: How Asexuals and Aromantics are Redefining Love, Life, and Family" by Wren Burke

 Here's yet another book on asexuality and aromanticism that I got my hands on! This was a lovely surprise as these tend to come out in October when Ace Week is. I found this on Twitter also, so I was able to get it right as it came out (important for reasons that will come later). Overall, I don't think I necessarily learned new things, but it struck me that this book is an excellent model of how to blend the ace 101 information along with what to do and what changes to make with this information. 

The book has ten chapters covering everything from what love means to a-spec individuals to gender to family structure and ending with legislation. The author covers plenty of material that I'm already familiar with such as Ace by Angela Chen or Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown but also pulls from anecdotes, a survey of 1,900 aces they designed for the book, and interviews with ace researchers. I was really pleased to see that aromanticism was an integral part of the book, with Single at Heart by Bella DePaulo getting its turn in the spotlight. And in general, the book is very inclusive and just feels very queer. It isn't breaking up identities to only focus on one but discusses elements of queerness and what that can look like in other cultures.

Helpfully, the book does not assume that you know much about asexuality and aromanticism, but it does not pander to folks that are new to the community. I find that if authors are writing more 101-type things that there are constant caveats about what they mean. This has its nuances, but I also felt that Burke just had a great handle on the material and was writing about what they were interested in. I also just feel that if you're picking up the book, you know what asexuality is and are likely asexual. But maybe I'm wrong (hoping that I'm a little wrong anyways). 

The ending though talks about what we need to do to make things better. And it starts with changing legislation and writing to MPs. Burke is British, I was honestly surprised how much US law was in the book, so I wasn't shocked by that. I do wonder though how quickly this book will go out of date as a result. Seriously, the most recent reference to the Ace Community Survey that I could find was 2019, it's been going on annually since then. How quickly will those legislative references go out of date? Or even more tragically, how many won't?

All in all, I thought this was a great addition to the canon of works on asexuality and aromanticism. I think it definitely has its niche as an intro text or something for someone who knows about asexuality but wants to start digging in deeper. I hope that it's a model for more works situating asexuality less as its own thing and more as fundamentally queer. And I dearly hope that there's more positive changes in legislation coming for us.

This Is Beautiful: No Meetings

 As my studies start to begin to wrap up (lol) I have finally achieved success with eliminating all meetings that I used to have to go to. A big part of that is that I'm no longer doing a bunch of orgs and those meetings are all gone now, but it's also part of me just not paying attention to anything that I don't want to do before I go. Plus it's the summer, so things are more relaxed regardless. It is really nice and makes me realize that I used to go to wayyyy too many meetings. Why was I doing all that?

“The Sublime Object of Ideology” by Slavoj Zizek

Alright well here’s another philosophy book that I certainly won’t do justice to. I grabbed this from Verso Books as I hadn’t read any Zizek and I was both pleasantly surprised by how much I got out of this while also sure that I didn’t fully understand it. The main issue is that this book is largely about Lacan, who is a philosopher that I haven’t actually read anything by, so I’m forced to take Zizek’s word for what different passages mean. But Zizek is blessed with being a relatively clear writer, he makes plenty of references to movies and pop culture so it’s very easy to follow along and get the gist of what he’s saying.

The first part of the book has to do with “the symptom” which I believe is a specific phrase to describe life under capitalism here. He discusses how it was actually first described by Marx, that there’s this contradiction between being free to sell your labor, and then once you do that, you are no longer free. This dissonance leads to the symptom, of seeing these contradictions and yet being trapped. I think Zizek coined the phrase “enjoy your symptom” and while that isn’t directly in this text I could see that coming up in a lecture or elsewhere. I’m not sure I grasp the full significance of the symptom as that seems to be his answer to everything (there’s a passage along the lines of “what existed before anything the symptom” of course) but there is an intuitive sense to it. I liken it to the idea of the absurd, that nothing really matters, there’s just this inherent sense that there’s a contradiction here we are ignoring the same way we don’t talk about the meaning of life constantly. He expands on the symptom and talks about how it has symbolic meaning as well, that the symptom can expand and turn into a source of joy as it becomes our main sense of meaning in life.

The next section is much more technical and I confess I was skimming a lot of it. Lacan has these diagrams that illustrate what language does when we refer to different objects of desire and how we get meaning from them. Zizek appears to be going through these and elaborating on them/explaining further, but I also just don’t really care too much about what the letter S means on a diagram from a guy I haven’t read. I did appreciate more though the discussion about what language does, since that’s common in philosophy. Are we referring to the universal? A particular? That sort of thing. From there he talks about the two deaths, that we die once physically and again when we realize we are dead. I thought this section was interesting, but I couldn’t follow the connection beyond that it was an extension of the discussion of desire. Once we stop desiring or realize that what we desire is impossible, that constitutes the second death.

The third and final section was the roughest for me because it continues into he weeds on the ideas of the subject introduced with the Lacanian desire diagrams. I did quite enjoy a part on how the object is a lack. He uses this example of a painting called “Lenin in Warsaw” of Lenin’s wife with another man where “Lenin in Warsaw” is the object specifically because he is not there. This idea that the object of desire or whatever is by necessity a lack that’s given meaning by the desire resonates a lot with me.

So there’s what I got out of that. Primarily that I should have read Lacan (and probably brushed up on my Hegel) first. But I honestly was impressed with how much I could follow, and I quite enjoyed Zizek’s jokes and references to pop culture along the way. It is so hard to keep up with philosophy once you’re out of classes, so I’m trying to not get too discouraged, but I honestly like revisiting it every once in a while just to see what I’m able to get out of the experience. And I can always reread something later and learn more!

This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Not like a super fleshed out post, but in the past week I had a thesis committee meeting and submitted an abstract to a conference. And it's nice to just look back and realize that I have gotten a lot done. I'm trying to not focus on how much I have left to do, and this was a nice reminder that I am making progress and I am going to graduate eventually!

"Genetics in the Madhouse" by Theodore M. Porter

 I was really lucky to get a free copy of this book through the Science, Technology, and Society group at my university, and I am so glad that I did! The book group does have a selection of multiple books most years, but it's not every year that I get something that is so directly related to my actual degree and my interests.

This book looks at the history of asylums and in particular how asylums documented patients and their madness. This forms some of the earliest examples of big data, and directly impacts the study of statistics and heredity. Researchers figured out pretty early on that insanity and mental illness were passed on in families, but their understanding of it and how to treat it varied wildly. The book focuses a lot on Great Britain, Europe, and the US but there are mentions of elsewhere in the world as well. The main thesis though is that eugenics was not simply a misunderstanding of Mendel, it started way before that, with these asylum researchers and the work that they were doing, and it has larger roots in big data itself.

I honestly found this whole history fascinating. As a genetics researcher, I have tried to make it a priority to learn about eugenics and the hooks that it has in our modern understanding of genetics and the way we teach it. (We do not typically get taught this in hard science classrooms, hence branching out to STS.) And I have to say that I am deeply swayed by this argument, I think it makes a lot of sense that eugenics came from the failure of asylums as forced sterilizations were so tied to ablism and still is!

My one critique of the book is that in presenting the history, it focuses just on that. There are very few, if any, elaborations on how these historical figures were wrong. Which maybe if that was included it would be a very different book with a different focus, as that's adding a lot of information, but I was curious going through what was more accurate than others. And part of that is beside the point, a big contention was how different hospitals were defining insanity and cure rates and things like that. But I so wanted to know what the modern arguments against these ideas were! I knew probably more than average as a genetics researcher, but I did wonder if the average layperson would be able to pinpoint what the fallacies were.

This is immediately going with my other books on eugenics and genetics history. I hope that others read it and that I can get some of my lab mates interested in it!

This Is Beautiful: Cooking

 A combination of a few factors have led to me cooking much more in my regular life. First, I have started protecting my weekends much more. I do a lot of meal prepping, so having time on Saturday or Sunday to actually do that is crucial. We also started getting a kind of farm share box that is local foods only, some prepared even, and you can opt in or out each week. So it's pretty flexible, but still gives me access to different foods I might not buy on my own.

And I'm really enjoying it. The challenge of how to use the different foods in a way that we will actually eat is pretty exciting in a way that makes my brain happy. Taking the time to really do this and make something good, plus we get so much food from this box that it's always a feast on Saturday or Sunday night. It's so satisfying!