Welcome to Litsy!

This was a reread; this book was published in 2012 and I read it originally in 13 or 14. It's actually better than I remember it; Hanne Blank perfectly writes nonfiction with the gravity of academia but none of the obtuseness. The explanation of doxa in the first chapter may be the best intro to it I've read. Minor criticism: the lingering on 18 and 19th century marriage formats got a bit long + 1 detail. Overall fantastic and required reading.

Like this so far, Blank is a good author, but I have a degree in gender studies and all of this just reminds me of the uselessness of it all. Biologists and historians and anthropologists and sociologists can be experts on human gender and sexuality until the cows come home, but it doesn't MATTER because the horrid little regressives stick their fingers in their ears and go "nu-uh, we want sexual slavery back instead! "

Oh boy. It ends in a "meh" despite the subject being extremely interesting, mostly b/c the intro and chapter 1 weren't quite on topic; Frantzen is in literature, not history, so for him the narrative is important enough to spend a chapter on 19th c opera. That said, the bits about Anglo-Saxon England and how later texts reflected it? Awesome.
Photo from Friday; today was so rainy I had to finish the book at the gym after the coffee shop closed.

"unlike me, an intellectual, those stupid basic Kushner fans don't notice the true depth of Angels."

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but nothing in Frantzen's style of writing so far, 95% through the book, leads me to any other way of interpreting that quote.

Why why why was a typeface where the eth, the wynn, and the thorn are all so ugly and mismatched chosen for a book full of quotes in Old English?

I love how Frantzen goes from "Foucault missed a lot in The History of Sexuality when it comes to the medieval era" (true) to "so all of queer theory is stupid and invalid and also they probably said something mean to me". I don't even care. I usually like academic pettiness, but this has been going on for 21 pages! I'm not out of the fucking intro yet. Do your own work instead of bitching at everyone else. Jesus fuck.

It's probably not a good sign when I'm irritated with the author before even leaving the introduction.
More soon.

Straight men, are you okay? Straight white men, are you specifically okay? This entire book is an ode to the idea that it‘s about damned time we abandon our insistence on a binary view of life, love, sexuality, attraction, and gender.
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