Critiques et Commentaires

I've identified as gay for a while, but these last years I realized I was probably closer to aroace, but hadn't found a satisfying confirmation online, so I was excited to read this book. I'm happy to announce that it lives up to its ambitious subtitle (What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex).

Ideas I particularly liked seeing explored or picked apart:

• How labels are useful to find meaning and shared experiences. (The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach. They are, like Lucid said, keys. Intellectual entryways to the ace world and other worlds. Offerings of language for as long as they bring value.)
• Compulsory sexuality: I LOVE it when authors analyze concepts that don't necessarily imply each other. Yes, you can want intimacy but not being that interested in sex (just as you can love to read and not want to grow A Collection™).
• Disorder vs. variation
• Queerplatonic relationships
• Amatonormativity (The assumption that “a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans.” Not simply normal, but preferable. Not only preferable either, but ideal and necessary—better than being polyamorous, better than having a strong web of family, better than having a close-knit group of friends. A good that we should universally work toward and are incomplete without.)
• Emily Nagoski's model of consent (yes to granularity!)
• Conflict between being ace and belonging to another minority, like how being ace and disabled can put someone at odds with both ace activism ("we are not sick!") and disability rights activism ("just because we're disabled doesn't mean we don't want a fulfilling sex life!")

I heard about this book via this post on Tumblr and immediately thought that YES, I would like to read more about how men have actually engaged with fiber crafts for a long time, especially since the blurb says:

It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework.

Well.

The book actually focuses on a period that goes from the Victorian era to the contemporary era, and when I say focus, I really mean FOCUS. The author describes at length the work of several English and American authors and artists, with probably more details that I was ready to read about.

On one hand some passages were really interesting and I appreciated how the author's point of view was informed by feminism. On the other hand, I realize that I would have been more interested by a well-written longform piece on the topic, but not a full book. There are also several mentions of contemporary needleworks that have been exhibited in museums, that questioned / interrogated our representations of this and that, and I would have preferred to read more about the actual effect they had on their audience or maybe just on the author (like in Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing for instance).

At the end, McBrinn advocates for a deeper study of this topic and for more publications about it, and I think that the book I thought Queering the Subversive Stitch was, the one that would cover a greater time span and explore all the continents, still remains to be written.

J'ai été attiré par le pitch : "Que deviennent les héros une fois le mal vaincu ?" qui n'est pas banal.

Après lecture des 3 premiers tomes cependant, je le trouve assez mensonger. L'action se déroule en réalité 80 ans après que le mal ait été vaincu et la situation n'a pas l'air très différente des récits de fantasy usuels. Il y a des nouveaux vilains à battre, et comme l'antagoniste de ce volume fait partie des "sept sages du chaos", je suppose que six autres vont lui succéder (puis leurs supérieurs après eux etc.) Il n'y a d'ailleurs ni surprise ni suspense dans la manière dont Frieren bat cette antagoniste, vu que tout nous est expliqué en détail juste avant et qu'elle utilise un gros lieu commun du shônen pour y arriver.

Visuellement, les arrière-plans sont très jolis et détaillés, mais les personnages sont assez lisses et peu expressifs. C'est normal pour l'héroïne car ça fait partie de sa personnalité, mais ça m'a davantage gêné pour les autres car ça rend la lecture un peu ennuyeuse. J'aurais bien aimé plus de dynamisme dans le découpage, dans les perspectives, pour contrebalancer le calme de l'héroïne.

It was amazing?

Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed by The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.

The muted color palette effectively captures the grayness of Patricia's life, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.

There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian writer in the 1950s, struggling to sell a novel with lesbian main characters that get a happy end at a time when putting your name on a comic book would be career suicide. And now in 2023 we get to read about it in a comic book crafted by two queer women, that features a problematic queer lead and won an Eisner award this year.