Preamble: Renee Nicole Good was murdered after I finished this essay
On the 7th of January, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was repeatedly shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Good and her wife had been acting as legal observers in response to ICE activities in Minneapolis, and Good’s extrajudicial killing at the hands of an unaccountable white supremacist force is hard to not see as retaliation for daring to place any limits on their rampage.
Good was called a “fucking bitch” after she was shot. ICE agents prevented medics from assisting her, and bystanders trying to reach her were told that ICE had their own medics to help—a lie. The reactionary media machine was quick to frame her death in terms that signalled Good was an acceptable target, an undesirable whose culling is to be celebrated and not mourned. Jesse Watters on Fox News mentioned that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and a “lesbian partner”. Fake mugshots and doctored images listing non-existent crimes circulated on X, and when they were easily revealed as shams, right-wing social media accounts resorted to the old, reliable tactic: pointing out that Good was a woman.
“I feel like I have been condescended to by a woman who looks exactly like this thousands of times”, reads a widely-shared post on X attached to an image of Renee Nichole Good… smiling.
Just smiling.
Good’s vilification by reactionary extremists in the wake of her death is telling. She was white and blond and a mother, but her queerness (and perceived proximity to transness, through “pronouns”) was used to cast her as an enemy to the white Nation, to degender and mark her. At the same time the US President, in a statement justifying her execution, referred to her wife as her “friend”, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of their partnership. In the days since, other protestors detained by ICE have spoken of being taunted by agents who called Good a “lesbian bitch” whom they “had” to kill—for her insolence, her defiance, her refusal to perform the role expected of white women under a rampantly Nationalist regime.
She hadn’t known what was good for her, you see. She practically forced their hand.
Look what she made them do.
The following essay was written before these events transpired. It is not about Nationalism—not explicitly, though it does allude to the violence of Nation-building in parts. But it is an essay about lesbianism and lesbians and lesbian feminism, and the quiet, simmering hatred of those women who choose to love and be with women. A hatred that pervades politics both misogynist and feminist, both heterosexual and queer. It is an essay reflecting on the recent history of feminist movements and the quest for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism that will, at long last, prove inoffensive and appealing enough to men’s sensibilities. It is an essay about how, despite men demonstrating their investment in violent patriarchal politics, despite men proving time and again that they would rather tear up the social contract and uphold authoritarianism than countenance a world where women are free to exist independent of men, it is easier for us to hate and resent and abhor the women who point this out than the men themselves.
I present it to you with all the despair and grief and rage in my heart, and invite you to reflect on a world where men’s feelings matter more than women’s lives.
There's too much good stuff for me to copy/paste here but I thought I'd highlight these parts, which appear throughout the piece:
"I don’t actually like having to use the suffering of my people as a rhetorical sledgehammer. The pain and injustice my sisters experience weighs heavily on me, and even trying to write about it left me in profound distress for days. But the way whiteness is invoked in feminist discourses to imply that racialized and colonised and third-world women would never have cause to begrudge men or be critical of heterosexuality is frankly unacceptable. It belies how abstracted these conversations have become from the impact of misogyny on the majority of women worldwide, even as their names are invoked in pleas to be nicer to men.
...Simply put, the endless relitigation of how we owe it to men not to speak plainly about their exploitation and abuse of us—a conversation that largely occurs between anglophonic women in certain socioeconomic spheres who have the ability to choose who to partner with to a degree that is mostly denied to women worldwide—pisses me off. If you are lucky enough to be able to determine what your relationship to men is, I would suggest you have a responsibility to do more than muse about whether it’s unfair of you to say any harsh words about the guys happily mainstreaming incel ideology and birthrate panics into the modern political landscape.
Because that’s the part we keep stubbornly ignoring in these discussions: that today, men everywhere want more patriarchy. A lot of feminists seem to be laboring under a collective amnesia of what the feminism that led us to this political moment was actually all about. We had nearly forty years of 'patriarchy hurts men too' and sex positivity and making the case for anti-patriarchal politics to men. It did not result in the downfall of patriarchy, or a mass defection of men to the feminist cause. Instead, today we have Andrew Tate and fundamentalist Christian theocracy in mainstream US politics and Mark Zuckerberg going on podcasts to talk about how women in already male-dominated tech workplaces bring too much ‘female energy'.
....Truthfully, straight feminists and straight non-feminists (and even queer men and the queer feminists still trying to apologize for Dworkin’s existence) all desperately want there to be some magic fucking key that will unlock an arcane, secret reserve of empathy that men have, for all of recorded history, failed to access, squirreled away in their heart of hearts. We don’t want to confront the inevitable conclusion, to endure the psychic agony that comes with finally comprehending one’s destiny as designated resource for the ones with actual agency, most of whom simply find it more beneficial to dehumanize you than try to understand.
Imperialism is about borders and Others, but patriarchy is intimate in a way nothing else is. It freely invades our very homes, our bedrooms, our most private fantasies and even the bloody positions we like to do it in. ‘The personal is political’ wasn’t a paradigm shift, but the acknowledgement of a generational curse, an utterance of forbidden knowledge that has driven feminists mad since before we could name it. You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.
And fucking hell we desperately, desperately need to.
…I’d like to posit that hooks’ empirically dubious statements in Feminism is For Everybody are less about what conservative media actually promoted and more about this persistent heterofeminist anxiety of being dismissed and lumped in with those cringey man-hating dykes who make us all look bad. It is an anxiety that ignores how much epistemic injustice feminism has always been and will always be subject to, how little awareness of any kind of feminism there is in the mainstream, and how even the mildest feminist critique can and will be summarily dismissed by antifeminists because antifeminists are not beholden to what is true. The dismissal of feminism as too loud, too radical, and too misandrist happened during suffrage just as it happened during the second wave and the third wave and still happens today, despite how thoroughly lesbian feminists of all stripes have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
So let me conduct an autopsy on the grand, decades-long, misguided heterofeminist experiment instead of further jabbing at everyone’s guilty consciences about how they treat those angry, ugly, unfeminine, man-hating dykes. It’s over, girl. You gave him everything he wanted, and his response was to demand even more, to find religion and talk about how nice it would be to have a tradwife who can’t vote or divorce him. Feminism cannot make straight men any promises that are more appealing than the depths of domination and depravity patriarchy has on offer, and the protracted, tortured, overdue reckoning with the fact that men demonstrate sex-class solidarity and will protect their collective sex-class interests—even if it means giving more powerful men more power over them—is what’s making women everywhere have a crisis of faith in feminism."
listening to an album you used to love but overplayed for yourself after a really long time after the overplayedness has worn off and it sounds like it's supposed to again is the closest to being in heaven you can get during your mortal life i think
male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'
death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'
I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts
death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.
male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.
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