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there will be blood
Tuesday, 27 November 2018 11:17 amI spent Sunday morning moderating an Honours paper for another university, which was entertaining, because it was a course on comics. Apparently any other institution in this country is more liberal than my Cherished Institution on the subject of what constitutes Literature Worthy Of Study. The bastards. Nice little course, except for the trifling problem that about 80% of the chosen texts were Alan Moore, Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, thus establishing comics as something exclusively written by white men. No women. No black authors. And an extremely dodgy tendency to examine works by Moore as "feminist" writing, which is an assumption rife with sufficient flaws actually to leave me speechless. The course somewhat foolishly illustrated its feminist theory section with Saga of the Swamp Thing #40, which is all full of equations between menstruation and werewolves and female anger, written in an essentially facile manner that purports to critique but really doesn't examine the terms of its own assumptions about biological essentialism and female abjection, and thus ends up perpetrating them. Bleah. I was sharply reminded how much and how profoundly I actually dislike Alan Moore.
On the upside, I slightly pinch-hitted the moderation, their originally assigned moderator did a disappear at the last minute, and I turned it around in three days, which led yesterday to the unexpected arrival of flowers and chocolate from the grateful course convenor. I feel appreciated. And have been consuming Lindt all day while cheerfully ignoring any ironic resonances with chocolate as a culturally accepted remedy for menstrual suffering.
It's all a bit entwined, in fact, because a routine gynae check-up yesterday has revealed that, yet again, my uterine lining is doing weirdnesses and needs to be examined and possibly restrained, so I'm in hospital yet again next week for a minor op. My uninterrupted streak of One Minor Op Per Year continues apace. Probably I shouldn't spark these things by reading Alan Moore versions of female biology. At least the bumps on my fingers aren't regenerating. Yet, she says darkly. I may yet mutate into actual Swamp Thing.
On the upside, I slightly pinch-hitted the moderation, their originally assigned moderator did a disappear at the last minute, and I turned it around in three days, which led yesterday to the unexpected arrival of flowers and chocolate from the grateful course convenor. I feel appreciated. And have been consuming Lindt all day while cheerfully ignoring any ironic resonances with chocolate as a culturally accepted remedy for menstrual suffering.
It's all a bit entwined, in fact, because a routine gynae check-up yesterday has revealed that, yet again, my uterine lining is doing weirdnesses and needs to be examined and possibly restrained, so I'm in hospital yet again next week for a minor op. My uninterrupted streak of One Minor Op Per Year continues apace. Probably I shouldn't spark these things by reading Alan Moore versions of female biology. At least the bumps on my fingers aren't regenerating. Yet, she says darkly. I may yet mutate into actual Swamp Thing.
