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There is a shelf on the third floor of Central Library in downtown Portland. It contains all of the nonfiction books specifically about bring queer: books about raising your gay teenager, coming out in later life, how to support your partner who is transitioning, and about four books on bisexuality. I have never done anything in my life without reading a book about it first, so I picked out the most relevant of those four books, which was Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution.
It turns out that Bi has everything to do with why there are only four books on that shelf. Shiri Eisner has put together a book that discusses the particular political, economic, and social marginalization experienced by bisexual people—distinguished from the experience of gay, lesbian, and straight people (“monosexuals,” in her terminology). Eisner starts by describing how bisexual can be a radically inclusive term for all sorts of people that experience attraction to more than one gender, then goes through the myths, stereotypes, and stigmas attached to bisexual people. Next, Eisner examines how bisexual identity intersects with sexist and racist axes of oppression, then proposes this vision of a radical bisexuality that inherently destabilizes patriarchy and gender based oppression.
Whew!
There is a lot of material in this book, and because of the jargon-bordering-academic language it uses, the tedious and repetitious disclaimers of privilege, and activist-y eye rolls at global capitalism and the police state, I would say that it's more of a reference than a book to read front to back. I did appreciate the thoroughness of the work, and I have to admit to a certain bias against radical and activist thinking that sometimes provokes me into greater critical thinking and sometimes makes me churlishly dismissive.
Unfortunately, I was also turned off by some methodological loosey-goosey and an inconsistent analytical lens that made it seem like polemic. For example, a lot of Eisner's evidence for the argument that bisexuals experience worse health economic etc. outcomes is based on a single set of demographic data. That's certainly not Eisner's fault—she argues persuasively that bisexuals are an understudied group of people. But in another part of the book, she points out that because this data set is based on self-reported categories, it dramatically under-represents the group within bisexuals that would have the best outcomes due to other kinds of privilege, namely cis bisexual men.
Whatever gripes I might have with the rigor of some of her evidence, I also have to admit that despite coming in with a lot of skepticism, Eisner ended up convincing me that there is a unique stigma attached to bisexual people, and I came to understand why she considered bisexuals and their relationships as a battlefield of patriarchy and queer liberation.
And yet, I did end up walking away a little disappointed. I was still looking for some idea of what the specific bisexual experience of the world is. My gay identity was built not only from crushes and eyes averted and inconvenient erections and hot shame, but also from books and poetry and movies and narratives and testimony and role models. And a lot of that just isn't out there for bisexual men—or at least I might have to keep working to find it.
I rarely do this, but I abandoned this book just about 3/4 of the way through.
I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Atwood's dystopia is a broad caricature of a hyper-capitalist future filled with clichéd, George Saunders-esque portmanteau satires on corporate naming (CorpSeCorps, Pigoon). With a more generous scholar's eye I can see how that vision may have been prescient and counter-cultural when it was published in 2003 in the shadow of 9/11, but dystopia has been fleshed out and deconstructed in media in the years since, and now it reads as flat and thinly characterized.
Her imagination of a teen boyhood in which these adolescents have been so numbed to exploitation that child pornography, executions, and animal torture are treated as normal entertainment options among many seems heavily influenced by A Clockwork Orange and maybe this is my old age speaking—one of the great surprises of adulthood is learning that I basically have no interest in the hyper-violent media that would have lit me up in high school—but I think that Clockwork came out of a particular context and it's assumptions about how culture and morality interact should be looked at a little more critically than they are in Oryx and Crake.
One more critique:
I thought the whole storyline involving how the boys "met" Oryx was tasteless and irresponsible. There are many real life stories about men getting obsessed by girls they encounter in porn, and I think that there's a certain seriousness and gravity to those stories that demand good, rigorous storytelling if they are to be fictionalized.
“There's no evangelism like the zeal of a recent convert” is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. The convert is the rare person that knows what it is like to believe A and to be persuaded to believe B. It's lonely, because they feel an affinity, a one-sided kinship with the A's, and however much they also feel connected to B's they are outsiders. Therefore they must find new converts because only they will understand the journey they have completed.
Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is a memoir in which she looks back at her journey from being a founder of a startup at 19 to being a Marxist critic in her late 20's.
While she has some clearly expressed ideas and insights—I particularly loved the way that she drew a parallel between the structure of gig worker pay and the Amazon Web Services server credits that basically every developer uses—easily half of the book is skin-deep summaries of news events and startup culture ideas. The other half is a dull tick-tock of the saga of founding a startup and riding it into failure. It's just not that interesting, think: Abolish My Two Years Working at Kinko's.
If you misread the title, as I did, and inserted an unwritten How To at the beginning, please be aware that the sum total of the imagining a post-capitalism tech sector would fit in a not-very-long Medium post. It has one great idea about the possibilities of legislating code to be open-sourced after a certain period, the rest is banality.
I feel a little bad trashing this book because the sense of anger that Liu has at being hoodwinked and bribed into thinking that startup culture really was disrupting corporate evil and doing good doing well is alive. But kind of like the convert, in a world this upside down, if you have decided to maintain your belief that Silicon Valley is a force for good in 2020 (pub year), this book is not going to reach you, and if you have been there already, the naiveté of Liu's pre-conversion self is simply going to inflame your sense of injustice.
What a great yarn! Excellent storytelling, with the kind of mundane, closely observed details of prison camp life that only comes by living it. It’s not perfect—it never quite lands on a consistent tone and swings between suspense and comic. Attitudes towards Asia span racist to patronizing, and always imperialistic, but that seems accurate.