Boosts: Bunnies; Cyborgs & Tryborgs; We Are Not Our Paychecks

[jesse_the_k]

Great reading today from three places.

On DW:

seperis makes me laugh really hard about living with bunnies

Bunnies can eat through anything. Even zip ties. Even dozens of zip ties. Even all the zip ties. That is how I ended up with baby bunnies in the first place. They can also jump under duress three feet at a run and two feet just because they're assholes. (One of my tiny psychopaths can do three and a half feet, catch himself halfway over the top of the play area, and shimmy over.) Rabbits also like access to small, comforting, dark spaces to hide and cuddle (each other, not me).

https://seperis.dreamwidth.org/1041231.html
further background on bunny ownership: https://web.archive.org/http://seperis.tumblr.com/post/166559117285/the-bunny-files

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On Granta:

Jillian Weise is a poet, performance artist, prosthetic-wearing ass-kicker. She delivers the Donna Haraway smackdown I've been waiting 20 years for:

When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. The manifesto, published in 1985, promised a cyberfeminist resistance. The resistance would be networked and coded by women and for women to change the course of history and derange sexism beyond recognition. Technology would un-gender us. Instead, it has been so effective at erasing disabled women1 that even now, in conversation with many feminists, I am no longer surprised that disability does not figure into their notions of bodies and embodiment. Haraway’s manifesto lays claim to cyborgs (‘we are all cyborgs’) and defines the cyborg unilaterally through metaphor. To Haraway, the cyborg is a matter of fiction, a struggle over life and death, a modern war orgy, a map, a condensed image, a creature without gender. The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.

[... snip ...]

I call them tryborgs. They have tried to be cyborgs, but they are stuck on the attempt, like a record skipping, forever trying to borg, and forever consigned to their regular un-tech bodies. They are fake cyborgs. They can be recognized because, while they preach cyborg nature, they do not actually depend on machines to breathe, stay alive, talk, walk, hear or hold a magazine. They are terribly clumsy in their understanding of cyborgs because they lack experiential knowledge. And yet the tryborgs – for reasons that I do not understand – are protective of cyborg identity. I often find my bio re-written by a tryborg: ‘She claims to be a cyborg’ or ‘she calls herself a cyborg’. Imagine if they said this about my other identities: ‘She claims to be a woman. She calls herself white.’

https://granta.com/common-cyborg/

I first encountered Jillian in her Tipsy Tullivan persona, as she excoriated AWP for their hostility to disabled writers:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucwfcyz-fipjq0u6v-fevomq/featured

To my delight, she was on one AWP 2016 panel, celebrating the 40th anniversary of her publisher BOA, reading several poems and a call to action/drinks. CAFE LOOP is available at Wordgathering

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On Captain Awkward
I subscribe to the DW captainawkward_feed

Cap addresses “Tips for staying positive when your body hates you.” from a PhD student dealing with sudden liver cancer. Cap wisely turns to the wisdom of disabled people, and offers lots of excellent suggestions.

What if I told you that you don’t have to feel positive or stay positive or be positive. Stay alive. Positive can wait.

[... snip ...]

Fight the idea that being sick is something you’re inflicting on others. You say: “I feel like I’m a drain on everyone around me and I can’t even contribute academically anymore.” This ableist framing is hurting you and other people.

Your worth is not based on how much money you earn, it is not based on how much research or scholarship you do.

http://captainawkward.com/?p=46182