As folk devils
Another item from the Journal of Lesbian Studies –
But don’t go thinking other women who are branded with the scarlet letters of TERF are innocent of wrongdoing. No no no no no no don’t think that for a second – that would be very wrong, in fact it would make you a TERF.
Does violence against trans people occur with depressing regularity? Is there a citation for that? (No, there is not.) Are trans people murdered at a grossly disproportionate rate? Is there a citation for that? (No, there is not.) Is there a “cultural panic” about “transness”? Well, that one depends on who is doing the labeling.
Anyway. It doesn’t get more “Do it to Julia” than this fetid little pile of dung.
OK, I know I’m picking nits, but having spent large chunks of my life in New England and New York state, this bugs me. Both “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Get Out” took place in New York, not New England.
New England comprises Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It ends at the New York border.
It’s a nit worth picking. Having grown up in New Jersey I know damn well New England and New York are NOT THE SAME. York is not the same as England (though it is in England), and Jersey is way the hell out in the
AtlanticChannel. So there.What’s worse is when I go to conferences and my name tag says NE on it, people think I’m from New England. Nebraska is some distance from New England, and has never been considered part of it. Just ignorance, I guess.
Not to mention that New York State started out its European phase as part of New Netherland (with NYC as New Amsterdam).
iknklast,
I got my masters at a small school in Vermont, and got my first email address when I was working at Virginia Tech. So when some of my former classmates got messages from me@vt.edu, they assumed I was back in Vermont.
Re “NE”, in their defense, “NE” is used a lot as an abbreviation for New England. and this is well known to people in the northeast. But really, Americans should know the state abbreviations. Nebraska used to be NB, but it hasn’t used that abbreviation for half a century.
Sackbut, it doesn’t help that Nebraska is possibly the least charismatic of all the states. I find most people have heard of it but know nothing about it. The state works hard to maintain that; the one thing they don’t want is flamboyance. Which makes it surprising Trump is so popular here, but I guess because he is not Nebraskan and not drawing attention to Nebraska, that’s okay.
I was once talking to a woman who told me of course I know about Nebraska! So I asked her to name something. The first thing that came to mind was Dorothy and Toto. The next thing she said was something from Iowa. Nothing she mentioned was in Nebraska, though they were all in states that touch Nebraska at some point. I’ll admit, I was probably pretty much like that before we moved here. Nebraska was a black box to me. If I knew more about it, I might have turned down the job (or never applied in the first place). But all I knew was that they had a football team, that Arbor Day started there, and Scott’s Bluff.
If you were referring to Jersey in the Channel Islands then it isn’t in the Atlantic. It is in the English Channel, just off the coast of France.
@iknklast,
Ashfall is pretty cool, and charismatic in an understated way.
The Sand Hills region of western Nebraska is a unique and beautiful place, IMO. Not too many people know about it though.
Willa Cather writes about it in The Song of the Lark. If people read Willa Cather, which they obviously ought to, they would know about the Sand Hills.
Well it is the home of Mutual of Omaha, which sponsored for years Wild Kingdom with the be-mustached host. It is also the home of the Prophet Billionaire, pbhn.
I definitely agree those things are great. Ashfall I’ve been to numerous times, and the sandhills. There is also Scott’s Bluff, Chimney rock, and the birthplace of Malcolm X. But…most people I talk to don’t know about any of those things. They also don’t know about Carhenge, or that supposedly the Antichrist is from Alliance, NE.
I know of Carhenge and a few of the other places you mentioned, but I would have been hard pressed to place them in Nebraska. The only thing I can reliably attribute to Nebraska are city names, the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, and the state abbreviation NE. And one particular trans otter.
I know of a person who was initially rejected from a US medical school because they had filled their quota of foreign students; he had to explain that New Mexico is in the US. I’ve read of people who thought there was no Virginia, only West Virginia (“yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia”). Americans don’t know their own country.