I think being on a TV show is amazing but also, people get kind of used to seeing you a certain way and so it becomes a challenge to break free from that in a way.
On your own from the age of fifteen. Reckless, aggressive and undisciplined.
April 14, 2016
In the musical of my life after I’m long gone, my wife Vanessa is going to be the one who steps forward as the hero. Vanessa is not particularly fond of musicals—she only likes good ones. She is not effusive in her praise, or boastful. But when I looked up from that Chernow book and said “I think this is a hip-hop musical,” she didn’t laugh, or roll her eyes. She just said, “That sounds cool.” And that was all I needed to get started. As I fell in love with the idea of a love triangle between Eliza, Alexander, and Angelica, she said, “Can you have Angelica rap? That would be cool.”
I am someone who is so averse to travel that I wrote a whole musical about not wanting to leave my block in Washington Heights.
It was Vanessa who booked us trips and time away from New York. “You don’t get any writing done here because life keeps popping up.” Thanks to her, Hamilton was written in Mexico, Spain, Nevis, Sagaponack, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic—long trips where Vanessa would take me there and then leave me alone to write while she explored. She is my first audience, and she’s a tough audience, so I know if I impress her I’ve cleared the highest possible bar. She’ll come home from work and say, “Your king tune was stuck in my head all day—that’s probably a good sign.” This started out as a note trying to explain how my wife really is the ‘best of wives and best of women,’ but I’m trying to get at something more important—this show simply doesn’t exist without Vanessa. It’s a love letter to her.
Lin-Manuel Miranda on the role of his wife, Vanessa Nadal, in the creation of Hamilton. From the annotated libretto in Hamilton: The Revolution (via darrenburr)
Incredible illustrator @thelatestkate has never been afraid to talk about difficult topics; in the past, she’s shared her personal experiences with depression and leaving her religion, and her courage and candidness are always inspirational to us.
Today, she deals with another serious issue: how to cope if your parents are bullies. Bullying may seem like something that just happens in high school hallways, but it can happen at home, too—and if it’s happening to you, please know that the SparkLife community is always here for you, and that there are places you can turn to for help.
GATHER ‘ROUND CHILDREN AND LET ME TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT THIS GLORIOUS BOOK.
I HAVE OWNED THIS BOOK FOR A WHILE BUT NOW I’M SHARING IT WITH TUMBLR BECAUSE WE’RE ALL DRAGON-LOVING-FUCKS.
IN THIS BOOK
IN THIS MOTHERFUCKIN MASTER PIECE OF A BOOK
THE GIRL SEEKS OUT THE DRAGON BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO ESCAPE HER BORING LIFE AS A PRINCESS.
I DON’T THINK YOU GUYS HEARD ME.
THE GIRL WANTS TO BE WITH THE DRAGON.
AND THIS AINT EVEN IN A ROMANTIC WAY. SHE JUST RESPECTS THE DRAGON SO FUCKING MUCH.
THERE IS EVEN A PART WHERE SHE REPEATEDLY TELLS A PRINCE TO STOP TRYING TO SAVE HER BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO BE THERE AND THE PRINCE JUST ISN’T GETTING IT BECAUSE HE’S NEVER HEARD OF A PRINCESS WANTING TO BE AMONG DRAGONS BEFORE.
LIKE I CAN’T EVEN RIGHT NOW JUST READ THE DAMN THING.
THIS IS THE MOST READ BOOK I OWN AND I READ A LOT OF BOOKS AND HAVE MANY FAVORITES SO Y'ALL KNOW THIS BOOK MUST BE GOOD.
i have read it a total of 39749823792837493 times.
Every once in a while a post comes around that reminds me of how important these books were to wee me, and I have to reblog it so that other people can find this very important series.
What I absolutely love about this book is how the princess learns all these random things when she’s bored being a princess and then she uses every one of those skills while she works for the dragon. Her skill at making dessert got her the job.
She reads latin - great for organising old texts!
She fences - well, sometimes the princes won’t go away anyway
She cooks - even dragons hold banquets, ya know.
And then. And then. at the end she becomes a queen and all those skills she wasn’t supposed to learn help her be a good queen.
Bonus: the dragon she goes to live with, Kazul, is also female. Through various events in the book, Kazul eventually becomes King of the Dragons (yes, you read that right–in dragon culture, the titles of King and Queen are not tied to gender.
I cannot TELL YOU how much little Stele wanted to run away and become a dragon’s princess.
Jesus christ this was my favorite book like, EVER. The idea of being able to just do what you want?! Loved it. And that was so rare, and I read so much growing up, to boot, but so frequently it was just ‘stuff happens to girl!’ not ‘this is a girl, this is who she is, this is how she lives her life, isn’t it awesome?’
Your familiar friend for talking about posts is rolling out over the next few days, and it’s learned a ton since it’s been away. Now replies let you:
Reply multiple times to a post.
Reply to your own posts.
See all of a post’s replies in one place.
Decide who can and can’t reply to you. (It’s in your blog settings.)
All that adds up to being able to talk about a post, right inside of a post, even as it travels from Tumblr to Tumblr. So, starting with posts created today, you’ll see a new notes view to help you follow that conversation. Looook:
If you’ve been waiting for this, thanks for your patience. If you’re new to replies, come discover their unique flavor. Spicier than a like, sweeter than a reblog, served on a big family-style platter. All part of a balanced diet. Have fun replying, Tumblr.
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I was introduced to the concept of hermeneutical injustice a couple days ago and it’s been blowing my mind. I’ve been struggling for a while to reconcile consent and asexuality, specifically in the context where asexuality isn’t known. If asexuality isn’t an option, how can someone’s consent be truly free? Anagnori’s post on Asexuality and Consent Issues sums it up well:
Consent can only be freely given when all people involved are mentally, physically, socially and financially able to say “No.” An imbalance of power or of information limits the options that one of the partners can take, and it casts doubt on the voluntariness of the relationship. […] How many asexual people consent to sex that they would not have consented to if they grew up knowing that asexuality was a good, normal, and healthy way to be? How many people are pressured or manipulated into sex because they believe that they need to be fixed?
I’ve had countless conversations with other aces who feltpressured into sex before they discovered asexuality, not necessarily because their partner was standing over them saying, “You must have sex with me or the heavens will smite you with thunderbolts” (although that has happened to some people), but because they couldn’t think of a “good” reason why they shouldn’t want to have sex. They loved their partner. They had birth control. They hadn’t experienced trauma. What was stopping them? Why didn’t they want it?
This is a personal topic for me. I wouldn’t have consented to a lot of things in a previous relationship had I known that asexuality existed – had I known that asexuality is “a good, normal, and healthy way to be” – and there’s a lot of hurt in that for me. I was blamed and blamed myself for not being sexually attracted to my partner; after realizing that I’m asexual, I was able to stop blaming myself for not feeling sexual attraction. But then I became angry. I was angry at my ex for pushing sex. I was angry at the abysmal state of sex ed. I was angry at compulsory sexuality. And I was angry at myself. Why hadn’t I had the courage and confidence to say no?
I blamed my ex for a while – why did he push it when I said no so many times before? why did he enjoy it when I was clearly disinterested? – but that didn’t feel quite right. I said yes multiple times, and people can’t read minds. So then I was back to blaming myself. Perhaps if I truly felt so strongly that I didn’t want to have sex, I would have said no every time. But that doesn’t encapsulate the pressure and feeling of brokenness that I felt – the unspoken social norm that because I didn’t have a “good” reason to “deny” him, saying yes was a given. The problem is that I was left with no way to explain my hurt. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been a big deal: he said yes, I said yes, therefore everything was consensual. The problem is, had I known about asexuality, I would have said no. It felt like a wrong had occurred, even though there was no one to blame. And that is hermeneutical injustice.
Coined by Miranda Fricker in her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” twin_me’s introduction to epistemic justice explains it well:
Hermeneutical injustice is scary because of the word “hermeneutical.” What we need to know is that “hermeneutical” just means “having to do with interpreting things” – and in our case, “having to do with interpreting our experiences.” The foundational idea is fairly straightforward: having certain concepts helps us interpret our experiences. (Imagine trying to interpret the experience of anger or jealously or being “in the zone” without having a name or concept for it). But, how is this injustice? The answer to this question lies in the fact that a lot of experiences never become concepts that everyone learns. In fact, the concepts that everyone learns are often the concepts of people who are doing pretty well in society – not marginalized people. So, roughly, hermeneutical injustice happens when the reason that a relevant concept doesn’t become part of the collective consciousness is because the concept interprets an experience that is felt primarily by a marginalized group. Because [there] is no concept for the injustice the person is feeling, the person can’t express, understand, or know it.
Fricker discusses a few case studies, the central case being the story of a woman, Wendy Sanford, who had severe depression after the birth of her first child. She blamed herself for her depression, and her husband blamed her as well. A friend convinced her to go to a workshop on women’s medical and sexual health, where one of the small groups she was in started talking about postpartum depression. Suddenly, she was able to make sense of her experience. Just knowing that she was experiencing a real phenomenon that other people experience changed her life. Even though many people experienced postpartum depression, it wasn’t talked about, and it wasn’t in the collective consciousness.
The parallel between Wendy’s revelation about postpartum depression and an asexual person’s revelation about asexuality is clear, particularly when the asexual person is in a relationship with a non-ace person. Fricker writes, “the primary harm of hermeneutical injustice consists in a situated hermeneutical inequality: the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible.” In sexual situations, an asexual is left without hermeneutical resources to interpret their feelings. The collective hermeneutical lacuna around asexuality – or to go one step further, the lacuna around asexual feelings in general, i.e. lack of sexual attraction without a socially prescribed reason – harms the asexual person’s ability to consent. Learning about asexuality is therefore not only a hermeneutical breakthrough, but an overcoming of epistemic injustice.
Asexual invisibility is harmful in more ways than specific situations of sexual consent, too. Fricker asks, “Is hermeneutical injustice sometimes so damaging that it cramps the very development of self?” She gives an example using Edmund White’s autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story. As he describes his love for a friend, the collective hermeneutical resources classifying homosexuality as a “sickness” or an “adolescent stage to pass through” conflicts with his own feelings. His sense of self is being formed by collective understandings of homosexuality, which are more powerful than his singular personal experiences. “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”
Similarly, an asexual’s sense of self is formed by collective understandings of sexuality, leading to feelings of brokenness, abnormality, and isolation. When the collective hermeneutical resources construct sexuality as default, there is no way develop a healthy asexual selfhood. Moreover, asexuals are socially constituted as sexual where, particularly in intimate and physical relationships, it is against their interests to be seen as such. We see the harm in this played out again in issues of consent. The collective understandings of sexuality are more powerful than the singular personal experiences of asexuals, and an asexual person doesn’t have the courage and confidence backed by hermeneutical resources to say that their feelings and experiences are valid and must be respected by their partner.
When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world. […] hermeneutical injustice not only brings secondary practical disadvantages, it also brings secondary epistemic disadvantages [… that] stem most basically from the subject’s loss of epistemic confidence. The various ways in which loss of epistemic confidence might hinder one’s epistemic career are, to reiterate, that it can cause literal loss of knowledge, that it may prevent one from gaining new knowledge, and more generally, that it is likely to stop one gaining certain important epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage.
When I learned about asexuality, it was like the floodgates opened. Suddenly there was a term for my experiences and an entire community built around discussing them. Backed by this collective knowledge, I’m much more confident in my self, my boundaries, and my relationships. However, I was still left with pain and bitterness about my previous relationship; I didn’t have a model or framework in which to analyze a situation where lack of knowledge – for which no one was accountable – would’ve affected consent.
Now, we can talk about these consent situations as hermeneutical injustice. It encapsulates the visceral feeling that something wrong has occurred, yet no one involved in the situation is directly responsible. Fricker concludes, “hermeneutical injustice is not inflicted by any agent, but rather is caused by a feature of the collective hermeneutical resource – a one-off blind spot (in incidental cases), or (in systematic cases) a lacuna generated by a structural identity prejudice in the hermeneutical repertoire. Consequently, questions of culpability do not arise in the same way. None the less, they do arise, for the phenomenon should inspire us to ask what sorts of hearers we should try to be in a society in which there are likely to be speakers whose attempts to make communicative sense of their experiences are unjustly hindered.”
When people say that sexuality is a personal matter and no one should care what people do (or don’t do) in bed, it means that the collective hermeneutical lacuna around non-heterosexualities will never be filled. When people are confused on why some asexuals feel the need to “come out”, I can now explain hermeneutical injustice. As Anagnori concludes:
This is why asexual awareness is so important. We need everyone in the world to know that we exist, not only so that we can be respected, but so that millions of other asexual people can have the power to make informed, confident choices about their own sexuality. We need asexual people everywhere to know that they are not broken, abnormal or wrong for what they are feeling, and that they have the right to reject sex at any time, for any reason. When asexual people can confidently say “No,” then they will also be able to say “Yes” with more certainty and weight, and they will have the option of forming sexual relationships that respect their asexuality and bring them happiness.
In her article, Queenie goes on to state that the simple knowledge of the existence of asexuality might not be enough to counter compulsory sexuality, i.e. aces aren’t “suddenly free from pressure and expectations” after realizing they’re asexual. I completely agree. To analyze other consent situations, there’s Emily Nagoski’s model of consent (with addendums made by other people, as mentioned in the first paragraph of Queenie’s post). I’m also particularly fond of Lisa’s non-binary power model of consent. However, for the very specific case of an asexual person consenting to sex when either partner had no knowledge or understanding of asexuality, I believe that hermeneutical injustice is the best interpretation of the situation.
OSRIC
You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is–
HAMLET
GHOST
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
**HAMLET
**Murder!
GHOST
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
**HAMLET
**Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.
Ghost
I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:
‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
With the amount of “stop, drop, and roll” education I received growing up, I kinda thought catching on fire would be a more common problem as an adult.
I feel like if we’re going to have any misgivings about Oscar Isaac it should be because he once wrote and starred in a 7-page musical about a platypus
that is the absolute last reason I would have misgivings about anyone because that is awesome
