agate

tamsin recently wrote about her “ethically questionable citation practices” that she intends to apply on her gemini capsule. i think she is rightly conscious of citation practices being central to knowledge construction and conventions of expression, and how gemtext (and gemini itself) allow us to think differently. she notes that her style — in actuality, methods — will evolve, so my terse comments are really limited to the version as it existed on 2024-04-09.

we hear a lot about the “politics of citation” and “citation as a feminist act” through references like those she includes in her page. these discourses, at least in terms of my own experience of them, are typically situated in academic-professional contexts. while i’d argue that both tamsin and i are embedded and intimately familiar with these contexts (😏) my assumption she’s not attempting to have her writing on gemini within the discourse register of these contexts.

my take is her approach seems as though it glosses over the intent of certain kinds of citational practices in a wider variety of registers, in a space, as it were, for the dolls. at least in my own writing regardless of genre, citation and reference serve at least three major functions: 1) attribution, 2) aesthetic, 3) aide memoire. the motivations of these forms of citation and reference are arguably more important than the specific convention used to express them

attribution is the most obvious - it operates in the mode of academic-professional discourse, and is typically leveraged to construct and connect knowledge, to wash one’s hands of plagiarism, and for these grander political ends. i probably find it the least interesting of the three.

aesthetic is a fun one. in my view, aesthetic “citations” can often be anything but typical citations outside the context of a critical edition. they’re often oblique references - from time to time, they can also co-exist as attribution (see, for instance, the work of chaun webster). i use it in some of my own writing, too (like pulling a line from an oscar wilde work into a larger poem). it seems like at least some of tamsin’s intended uses of epigraphs serve this function.

aides-memoire in some cases may also serve as attribution if i’m trying to remember the provenance of the idea. at the same time, there may be cases where i’m actively trying to track my own (timebound) disagreement with a particular idea or argument - and as such, a citation alone would typically be accompanied by some sort of note documenting this.

this was all fairly rambling, but my intention was to help get tamsin think about the ways that she wants citations to /do/ things. (yeah, of course i’m going to bring it back to austin, butler, and derrida by way of hypertext theory. see nakassis and harpold maybe that’s what should inform the style guide - how does she recall the kinds of flourishes she took when she attempts to do something different with citation(s) on her gemini capsule?

don’t stake too much in me don’t make me fall in love again we try this over you and falling over me into your bedroom stay for the afternoon and then go back to work and soon i’m coming home again coming home again

george clanton — “warmspot”

for all intents and purposes i am not what most people think of as an ideal trans woman. (sadly, this also includes a lot of other trans women.) my body is not small, but rather rugged and sturdy. i have a belly and tiny tits and a decent ass that gets increasingly peach-like over time. when i look at myself, though, i see myself as a beautiful creature. i think this started to happen alongside a significant decrease in dysphoria once i accepted that i might be a butch — the rara avis of gender presentation and identity. the butch i am is the person i longed to be, and i love this version of myself more and more.

i’d always looked up to butches when i was a younger, sexually confused inhabitant of the wrong body. this ranged from old school working class butches that i saw at my first gay bar that i’d go to with my high school ex, fancy academic butches (botanists! working artists! literature profs!) that i ran into throughout college and grad school, and the butchy campusdyke friends i ran with who really went out and made their own fashion sense rather than being hidebound (lol) by the motorcycle jacket-cum-501s look.

i guess it’s fairly similar to me that i made my own path. i guess i have my femme moments (says the girl who bought two dresses and a skirt last weekend), but i really gravitate to a soft butch. my butch is that of velvet and leather, of the scents of a barbershop, of boots and carabiners, of alpaca and teak. it’s not “gentleman butch,” as i am not a gentleman, nor trying to be one. for me, butchness is a form of service. it’s a butchness that smells of frankincense, cider, and soft cheese. it is the butchness of chivalry, albeit with better class politics: one of the old weapons from a more civilized age.

about four months ago i talked to my doctor about going on supplemental testosterone for “performance” reasons related to sexual function. (i also refer to this as “recreational T”, or “shits and giggles T”.) every few days, i slather a pump of 12.5 mg per pump gel to my inner thighs and hope and pray for the best. i’ll say that the experience has been marginally better, but it’s still unpredictable, even when supplemented by something banal like tadalafil (which, to my chagrin, my insurance considers 10 pills to be a 90 day supply).

given this unpredictability of my own sexual function, i logistically supplement my own body with a strap: a harness that looks and functions like a jockstrap, and a starry sapphire silicone dick. when i put it on last (before fucking a new lover), i caught a glance of myself in the mirror. in a moment like that i feel powerful, dramatic, and in control. i feel butch, but not masc. it becomes an extension of my beautiful, chunky body, “imperfect” in all the right places, a functional accessory much like my eyeglasses.

i catch more glances of myself as i ogle my changing body as i return from the gym. three months of weightlifting have led to amazing progress, and i move slowly, intentionally, as i struggle with the weight i take on. i watch videos of me deadlifting 200 lbs. and squatting 185 lbs. and i see a strong, powerful, beautiful butch woman. i look at my broad shoulders and back muscles and feel a longing for more definition — for more butchness as if the sweat that drains me carries it away from me. i look at my thighs, chiseled from three months of squats, and fall in love with myself again. i look at my face, and see the face of not only myself, but my mother. i look at my hands and i see calluses that will scrape across a femme’s thigh with the gentleness of a cherry blossom falling to the ground. as the meme goes, this is the ideal female body; you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

inspiration

• patrick califia, “butch desire”
• dorothy allison, “her body, mine, and his”
• britt h. young, “the total package”
• paul preciado, testo junkie
• funambulist magazine, “modes of subversion against the pharmacopornographic society”