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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
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Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, #2)

Binti: Home deals with anger, grief, and confusion, heading towards catharsis but still feeling tense for much of the book. Binti intends to take one journey but finds herself on another. It feels on edge, waiting for something to happen.

This book is full of grief and anger, and it feels more like part two of one long book rather than a second book in a series. It can be partially understood separately from Binti, but Binti needs this sequel in order to feel complete. This has the processing and the aftercare that Binti sorely needed, and ends with a taste of the action yet to come in the third book (which I will read next).

This deals with several kinds of cultural prejudices, including a book-specific form of colorism, as well as xenophobia both with literal aliens and with various groups of humans.

It's hard to describe well because after finishing it I mostly feel tense. Even though a lot of things were processed and there was a very specific moment of catharsis, it was aftercare for one tragedy while re-contextualizing a lot of Binti's past in order to illuminate ongoing tensions and break the illusion that her existence before her travels was calm. Her journey had previously been framed in terms of running towards something, and now it appears that she also had some things to run from, whether she originally understood it that way or not.

On to book three...

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