We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

trickortreatex fics are revealed! I got three delightful little treats. Two of them are sweet fluffy Dimension 20 fic, and the other one is ... not. All are recommended.

Advisor's Advice, Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers, 572 words: Between running their respective Courts Andhera and Binx have been busy! When they plan to meet at the next Bloom starting soon, Andhera seeks advice from Advisor.

Cheerful Contentment, Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers, 300 words: Binx works on a project and then has tea with Andhera.

Ritual, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, 300 words: Before the little creek was where Helen told her to stop.

ETA: Another one! Come to Me, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 200 words: The hour is late...

I liked doing the reading post in January and thinking about books is better than thinking about family things! so here's another one.

Recent: Not all that recent now, but I finished Imre at the beginning of the month and I did actually enjoy it very much. It's very Edwardian, both in style and attitude, but along with the Weird Ideas about ethnicity there's also a sincere attempt to refute misogyny in gay male culture. And idk, the romance is just sweet.

Also read Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer and loved that too! And this one actually has surprisingly little in the way of Period Typical Attitudes. People respect each other's boundaries (or, at least, the good ones do) and there's a very nice portrait of life in urban boarding houses in the late 19th century.

Read Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher, which I loved all the way through, but I finished it at a point when I had kind of a lot of pain and PMS, which means I have ended up with no ability to comment on it. I liked the ground wights. Oh, also halfway through I decided Wren should ditch her party and marry me. Possibly I have a Type.

Reread an early Cat Sebastian, which, well, it's nice to see how much she's improved.

Still reading and listening to a lot of RWRB fic. I don't think there's anything I want to specifically call out as good, but it's nice and non-demanding. At least as long as I stick to AUs or shove it into the wish-fulfillment area of my brain rather than the class-conscious part. Oh, and I relistened to the first chapter of Life of Crime the other evening, that was great.

Current: In the middle of the climax of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love - thank god for skip-the-line copies, I have been reading this very slowly over the last six weeks. Recommended if it sounds at all like your kind of thing. Hopefully I will finish it on my commute tomorrow.

Have started The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole, because sometimes reading about living in a dystopia is, what's the word, sympathetic.

Last year I read The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth and wondered why she doesn't have the same reputation as, at least, Ngaio Marsh or Josephine Tey. Now I'm reading The Coldstone and finding it somewhat less impressive. Possibly because of SAD and possibly because it doesn't have any characters I straight up like as much as I liked Jane Smith. But the bit I read today had some very fun sneaking around at night pretending to be a ghost. Also a bicycle. I should read more books with bicycles.

Also I got Poetic Designs by Stephen Adams (one of my university professors) from my brother (we should have two copies between us, but mine has disappeared in a box somewhere) and am rereading that for nice practical unemotional nonfiction and nostalgia.

Future: I am going to pick up a gay sci-fi regency romance that I found in the local library and hope it is as awesome as it could be. And either Sixpenny Octavo by Annick Trent or One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny, depending on whether I feel more like even more regency or even more medieval by then. And I have If You'll Have Me by eunnieboo on hold at the library.

At some point I'm going to go through my reading file and run the stats to see if I'm actually reading more queer fiction this year than usual. Probably not, honestly.

The threesentenceficathon is now closed for prompts, but remains open for fills forever. Here’s some more of mine, in all different fandoms; I will eventually post the last bunch of them once I’m sure there’s not going to be any more.

( The Old Guard )

( Our Flag Means Death )

( Snow White (Disney) )

( Marvel Comics )

( This Is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar & Gladstone) )

( Batman Comics )

( Goodbye Earl - The Chicks )

( Original D&D-ish fantasy )

So we are done! And man, this week just keeps on going, doesn't it. Maybe not for you, I hope yours has been better than mine.

Title: Growing Seasons
Rating: E
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov
Warnings/Enticements: Historical AU, Post-American Civil War, Farming, Domestic Chores, Blizzards, Slow Burn, Sharing a Bed, Angst, PTSD, Polyamory, Past MCD, Past Steve/Bucky, Background Dark Themes, Period Typical Attitudes, Explicit Sexual Content
Summary: “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this,” the stranger said, pulling his scarf down to reveal dark stubble and a surprisingly pretty mouth. “But the storm came up sudden, and I got no idea where the nearest town is. Could you point me in the right direction?”
“You won’t make it in this storm,” said Clint. “Stay until it blows over, it’s no trouble.”
Word Count: 20,294

On AO3

So for MFDE I wrote genderswap Clint/Nat mission fic.

And here is the thing I have been working on for forever:

Title: Growing Seasons
Rating: E
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov
Warnings/Enticements: Historical AU, Post-American Civil War, Farming, Domestic Chores, Blizzards, Slow Burn, Sharing a Bed, Angst, PTSD, Polyamory, Past MCD, Past Steve/Bucky, Background Dark Themes, Period Typical Attitudes, Future Explicit Sexual Content
Summary: “I’m sorry for imposing on you like this,” the stranger said, pulling his scarf down to reveal dark stubble and a surprisingly pretty mouth. “But the storm came up sudden, and I got no idea where the nearest town is. Could you point me in the right direction?”
“You won’t make it in this storm,” said Clint. “Stay until it blows over, it’s no trouble.”
Word Count: 2787 this chapter; 20k total

On AO3

Title: A Flame, Not an Ember
Rating: E
Universe: Marvel basically-cinematic
Character(s): James "Bucky" Barnes, Clint Barton
Summary: This would have been much easier in a bathhouse.
Warnings/Enticements: Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Kink Negotiation, Spanking, Masochism, No Power Play Whatsoever, Aftercare, Explicit Sexual Content
Word Count: 2483

On AO3

So I don't usually do Reading Wednesday but this week I want to geek out about Runaways.

Also finished in the last week:

Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move by Mary Soderstrom.
As a history of roads this was an interesting summary; however I hoped when I took it out of the library that it would be more of a history of immigration, which is really not what it was trying to do. And I still want that book, although it would be really really long.

Runaways: The Complete Collection, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan et al.

OMG this is amazing.

I have been reading Runaways since December--actually I picked up the first volume of Rainbow Rowell's new series first, which was great but also I am now spoiled for everything. So if that matters to you don't start there.

But the first series--it is actually making me really sad for my younger self that I didn't read it when it first came out because, um, that kid could have used it. But it is so great now. And it has Nico and I love Nico SO MUCH.

Nico Minoru is a sad bisexual Japanese* goth witch and she is trying so hard. And not exactly succeeding. And all I want is for her to be happy and she is really really bad at being happy. Like, even if her life was not exploding she would ... not be good at it. And I love her so much.

Here she is when her best friend comes back from space:


And then:


Always great when your space girlfriend comes back from space and you missed her so much and you're so happy and ... then it turns out she also brought her actual girlfriend. Who is ... not you. Because you fucked it up. Right. Awkward. (Also, this panel contains three queer women, two of whom are women of colour (though technically Xavin in the centre is genderfluid). Just casually. Talking about plot.)

Vaughan paces things brilliantly--in among the supervillain fights are little quiet moments of characters talking about religion, or mourning ... everything, or going shopping, or having nightmares about turning into their parents. And I love the story structures and the antagonists, and in this volume he does something that authors very rarely do when talking about the internet (especially in 2006) and remembers that people use the internet to make friends.

I watched the first episode of the Hulu series over Christmas and it was pretty cool, but I'm bad at getting motivation to watch TV shows even when I actually have easy access to them, so I haven't seen the rest of it.

Currently Reading:

Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden.
This is pretty textbooky but I wanted a general introduction so that's a good start. Also when I showed it to Pixies the first time she read the title as "Central USA" and now I'm thinking about the Mongol conquest of the central United States.


*I noticed reading Silk** last year that I had been really feeling the lack of Asian characters without even noticing it. This isn't about representation for me--I'm not Asian--but maybe representation of my environment: I grew up in north Toronto and therefore contexts full of white people feel fundamentally wrong to me. In my head there should be lots of Asian people around, because that's just what the world is supposed to look like--my high school was probably about 75% Asian--and the contrast between that and most Western media, or the actual small midwestern city I am living in right now, is very weird.

**Incidentally, I'm still annoyed that after 4+ years on Tumblr I found out about Silk--and Runaways, for that matter--by randomly browsing at the library. If Tumblr isn't going to tell me about awesome Asian spider-girls then why was I even on Tumblr?

Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.

Title: If There's Anything I Can Do
Rating: G
Universe: Marvel Comics
Character(s): Clint Barton, Kate Bishop
Summary: If there’s any topic Clint Barton is actually qualified to give advice on, it’s “Having a crush on a woman who can kill you with her pinky.” And maybe also “Being a bisexual disaster.”
Warnings/Enticements: Sexuality Crisis, Male-Female Friendship
Word Count: 616
Author's Note: Yes, I totally did edit it at the last minute when I realized I could make it exactly 616 words.

On AO3

Also I expanded a bit on Steve's date in the drabble last week.

So I’m reading Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 by Emma Donoghue. The first chapter is on hermaphrodites (that being the in-period technical term, sorry), and I suddenly realized a possible explanation for some of the reports that I have never seen mentioned in any scholarly account.

The idea is that a woman, usually living normally but perhaps having intimate relationships with other women, would suddenly be revealed to have abnormally large genitalia (which was occasionally capable of impregnation). The period explanation was, at first, that she was a hermaphrodite, or later that it was an overgrown clitoris (which might or might not differentiate her from a “true” hermaphrodite–lots of contemporary confusion on this point). Modern authors point out that we can’t know anything about the reality of these people, but also suggest that the reports were exaggerated by the authors. Some of them probably were. Some of these people probably had what would now be called intersex conditions.

Probably because these narratives focus on the hermaphrodites’ femininity or lack thereof, (edit: and also because of what is perceived as more threatening to ideologies and gender hierarchy) I have never seen anyone suggest that perhaps a “man” had decided to live as a woman, and if discovered gave the explanation that she had been born as a woman with abnormal genitalia (which would, incidentally, be far less likely to result in criminal charges than calling oneself a man). In this case the “overgrown clitoris” that gave contemporary medical writers so much trouble and which modern scholars dismiss would simply be a normal (or small, or hypospadias, or whatever) penis. Discussions of historical transfemininity, as far as I have seen, focus primarily on queer male drag cultures and prostitution. And there does seem to be a general assumption that (unlike AFAB people dressing as men) it is simply impossible that AMAB people dressing as women would be able to pass for very long, despite numerous examples.

Obviously, it is in fact impossible to know the precise anatomy or self-understanding of anyone who lived three hundred years ago, and I am not claiming that this is the full explanation for reports of hermaphrodites. But if anyone has seen relevant scholarship on transfemininity, please tell me.