> "Pleasure cannot, and does not, mitigate anger," says Sophie Mayer in her
> essay on the eroticism of Native American poetry. "The lived experience of
> genocide, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia find their voices too
> - ... pleasure becomes a protest against the dominant forces that would
> ignore or destroy it."
*transphobia*?
I personally think that *arachnophobia* is an insufficiently
recognised social menace, enforcing as it does an oppressive and
arbitrary distinction between so-called "species" and denigrating our
web-weaving cousins as a hideous alien menace, a bug-eyed,
furry-legged, bath-infesting Other.
Spiders are our friends!
...but only if they want to be, obviously, I mean I wouldn't want to
suggest that I wanted to co-opt them into some hegemonic
assimilationist project of erasing species difference under the
heading of a spurious universalism that would be only another mask for
anthropocentric domination. Or nuthin'.
Repeat after me: four legs good, eight legs *better*.
Dominic
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