reading [insert day of week here]
Feb. 1st, 2019 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sea_changedLet's just. . .pretend it's Wednesday, shall we.
Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan, by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci. Extremely good. I know little to nothing about the various historical contexts, but Takeuchi-Demirci is a clear writer on a fascinating subject, and manages to marry political history with women's history in a way that I don't see particularly often. She's also clear-eyed on the distressingly close connections between the early birth control movement and the eugenics/population control movement, and spends a lot of time teasing out those connections in both the U.S. and Japan (and among both white and Japanese people).
Crucible of Gold, by Naomi Novik. So much fun. It had all the joy of discovering a new dragon society that I felt was missing from Tongues of Serpents, plus political machinations, plus the return, however brief, of the Tswana dragons and Lethabo/Mrs. Erasmus. (I wanted so much more from that portion of the book, but I was so utterly delighted by the little glimpse of Lethabo we got, and how she's managing her new/old life.) I loved the Inca dragons and their feathers (!) and their totally different valuation system (which Temeraire immediately appropriates, which cracked me up). Overall the kind of delightful romp I expect from the series.
[Gay history sidenote: I always though of "invert" being a petty firmly twentieth-century phrasing, which the OED is backing me up on, listing its first use as meaning "gay" in 1897. I'm always a bit leery of trusting the OED for subculture-specific or slang terms, however, of which this is both, so if anyone happens to have any info on early nineteenth-century (or earlier) use of the word to mean a gay man/as a slang term for sodomite, I'd be fascinated.]
Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan, by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci. Extremely good. I know little to nothing about the various historical contexts, but Takeuchi-Demirci is a clear writer on a fascinating subject, and manages to marry political history with women's history in a way that I don't see particularly often. She's also clear-eyed on the distressingly close connections between the early birth control movement and the eugenics/population control movement, and spends a lot of time teasing out those connections in both the U.S. and Japan (and among both white and Japanese people).
Crucible of Gold, by Naomi Novik. So much fun. It had all the joy of discovering a new dragon society that I felt was missing from Tongues of Serpents, plus political machinations, plus the return, however brief, of the Tswana dragons and Lethabo/Mrs. Erasmus. (I wanted so much more from that portion of the book, but I was so utterly delighted by the little glimpse of Lethabo we got, and how she's managing her new/old life.) I loved the Inca dragons and their feathers (!) and their totally different valuation system (which Temeraire immediately appropriates, which cracked me up). Overall the kind of delightful romp I expect from the series.
[Gay history sidenote: I always though of "invert" being a petty firmly twentieth-century phrasing, which the OED is backing me up on, listing its first use as meaning "gay" in 1897. I'm always a bit leery of trusting the OED for subculture-specific or slang terms, however, of which this is both, so if anyone happens to have any info on early nineteenth-century (or earlier) use of the word to mean a gay man/as a slang term for sodomite, I'd be fascinated.]
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-02 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-02 02:04 am (UTC)(Really, I think the novel was just being anachronistic in having its early 19th-century characters use it, but I didn't want to just write it off reflexively, I suppose.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-02 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 01:15 am (UTC)Thanks for linking that Upchurch post, that's fascinating--I've certainly seen evidence (a la Bentham) and arguments (a la Randolph Trumbach) that homosexuality was considered by at least some to be innate/natural, and the idea of a gender "inversion" was certainly there (back to the idea of the molly), but it doesn't seem to have been expressed in the term "invert" itself, as far as I can discern.