This was a fascinating read about the intersections of gender and identity. It reads like a dystopian science fiction story come to life. I read it while out on my walk today, and couldn’t put it down.
But anonymity isn’t always welcome on the internet, where an anonymous identity can be weaponized for the worst. That gap — between the good-faith anonymity assumed in trans spaces and the bad-faith anonymity increasingly assumed online — was the one Fall wandered into.
On one hand, you have a community that allows for the past to be a blank slate, and then in the other you have bad actors who use that blank slate as cover. The person they were looking for didn’t seem like she existed, but that’s because she was in the process of being created. It used to be anonymity was accepted because it was hard to prove identity beyond an IP address. Now identity is so accepted that the lack of it is suspect.
The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader.
This part blew my mind, and was such a breath of fresh air on terms of thinking about problematic art, or problematic artists. I haven’t heard a lot of thought about how to think about it, or a good way to separate the person and their actions from the art. Ironically, in this situation, it’s all intertwined.
How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story – Vox