Stephenie McGucken
LightNews LightNews
banner
stephenieeloise.bsky.social
Stephenie McGucken
@stephenieeloise.bsky.social
220 followers 160 following 1 posts
Professor in Atlanta. PhD. FSA Scot. Medievalist working on gender in Early Medieval art. Photographer. Unabashed Fangirl.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Stephenie McGucken
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Don't love the new relevance of my book's Conclusion, ngl
Musk sacrificed Twitter to render unto the people X, a platform that aims to foster the white-supremacist fantasy of a white Middle Ages in which the cis-hetero-patriarchy reigned supreme. At the same time, Twit-ter-or what it represents in the right-wing imagination, the unacceptable divergence from cis-heterosexual whiteness-is stuffed down a decidedly medieval memory hole. If first there was the (analogue) Age of Antiquity, devoid of social media, Twitter's time becomes the Middle Ages, that messy bit in between which must be overcome to show how truly modern we are. 63 Twitter's medieval, like the medieval evoked in Pulp Fiction, is "the space of the rejects-really, the abjects of this world."64 Musk's X becomes a teleo-logical inevitability and, indeed, a necessary step forward into right-wing "enlightenment." But the medieval, it seeps. The platform formerly known as Twitter has proven to be a particularly porous medium. Spencer-Hall, Medieval Twitter, p. 168-69 Somewhat paradoxically, the seronegative digital space produced by Musk's "medieval" campaign to root out the "woke-mind virus" can itself be characterized as a space of the medieval(ist) imaginary, an implicit conjur-ing of the weaponized Middle Ages of white-supremacist and fascist fanta-sy.40 This is the fundamentally modern invention of a medieval past in which "everyone [knew] their (gendered) place," in which "everyone who mattered was straight, cisgender, white, and Christian."41 This is, historically speaking, bullshit. Trans, genderqueer and queer people have always existed, present in the Middle Ages as today. 42 Europe in the Middle Ages was neither snow-white nor unilaterally Christian. 43 Get over it. Spencer-Hall, Medieval Twitter, p. 165
February 4, 2025 at 11:22 PM
Reposted by Stephenie McGucken
jessdkant.bsky.social
If you cannot call it what it is when all in a week: a government removes every mention of a group of people, destroys information about them en masse, bans their discussion in schools, restricts their ability to travel and starts seizing and refusing their official identification, when will you?
February 1, 2025 at 12:45 PM
stephenieeloise.bsky.social
If anyone needs me, I'll be here living out my best medievalist x art historian life for the next ten weeks.
January 6, 2025 at 3:13 PM