Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics; Sarah Waters, Fingersmith; Beyoncé, Lemonade; Jane Fonda in Five Acts; Kitty Tsui, “Asian Pacific Lesbian a.k.a Dead Girl, China Doll, Dragon Lady, or the Invisible Man”; Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts; Donna Zuckerberg, “Helen and her Eidolon”; Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Louise Bourgeois, She Lost It, 1947; Carmen Maria Machado.
hot take: the capitalist cultural construction of “humans are naturally greedy and self-centered” is just an attenuated version of the feudal christian construction of “humans are inherently sinful”; both are designed to make people internalize cultural problems and externalize morality.
wait, what was that? creepy men are saying rape culture is natural? white ethno-nationalists are saying humans naturally organize into ethnic identity groups hostile to those unlike them? abled people are saying that humans naturally ‘abandon the weak to die’? what could it all possibly mean?
To modern readers, the Freikorpsmen’s fantasy life will be familiar: a country in decline, a nationalistic call to purge it of disorder, a clear separation between men and women, rich and poor, your kind and the other.When the book was published in Germany, it became a cult classic and required reading in leftist circles. “Everyone — at universities, in left-wing undogmatic circles, in communal communities or groups of men — read the book at the time,” said one German writer. In 1987, the book was released in English and instantly, modern-day parallels were drawn. A New York Timesreviewer wrote that Theweleit had “captured a glimpse of our souls.”While other writers sought to understand the rise of Nazism by looking directly at Nazi violence, Theweleit, perhaps sensing that this direct path was too on the nose, used a different access point to the proto-fascist mind: their relationship to women.
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The Freikorps violence was not limited to women, but women are a potent symbol of their most primal fears: the dissolution of the self in another. Sex and the female body are, to them, nothing short of horrifying, so it is better that women be absent, separate, or dead.
When the Freikorpsmen’s wives appear in their writing, they are usually nameless and only mentioned in passing, even when they die. One Freikorspman’s writes only of his wife, “When I came home, I found my wife suffering from a severe nervous disorder. She died soon afterward.” Two pages later, he mentions honeymooning with his second wife. The white nurse is similarly unthreatening. She is sterile, sexless, and statuesque.
The “red women” however, are where the ugliness really lives. They represent everything that the order-obsessed Freikorpsmen fear: unwieldy sexuality, the chaos of revolution, the mingling of people regardless of class, creed, and color. “It’s a well-known fact that women are always at the head of these kinds of riots,” a Freikorps General’s speech read. “And if one of our leaders gives the order to shoot and a few old girls get blown up, the whole world starts screaming about blooodthirsty soldiers shooting down innocent women and children. As if women were always innocent.”
Throughout their writing, the Freikorpsmen are nearly drooling over the opportunities they have to murder these “red women” and stop the “filthy-red wave.” Theweleit quotes a scene from a fascist novel in which a Communist woman is confronted by Freikorpsman: “his sight is pointing straight into her mouth, into the center of that slobbering hole, so wide open with hysteria that he can even see the gums.” Once he shoots her point blank in the face, he is amazed. The shot “threw her onto her back, as if she had been blown over by some gigantic wind. Is that thing at his feet really her?”
The mineral component of bone is comprised mostly of the calcium phosphate mineral hydroxyapatite which is embedded in the organic component type I collagen. When bone is exposed to a mildly acid environment the mineral component leaches out leaving only the pliable organic component. Vinegar is safe to use and does not destroy the protein scaffolding that gives bone it’s characteristic shape. This is a human fibula tied in a knot.
