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‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias,’ wrote the Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, who saw nostalgia as a way of escaping the strictures of rationally ordered time. She contrasted two types. One, which is healthy, she called ‘reflective’ nostalgia: it looks at individual, often ironic stories from the past, tries to tease out the difference between the past and present to formulate the future. The other, harmful type she called ‘restorative’ nostalgia. This strives to rebuild lost homelands with ‘paranoiac determination’, thinks of itself as ‘truth and tradition’, obsesses over grand symbols and ‘relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding … Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.’
This Is Not Propaganda
Peter Pomerantsev
She didn’t like the idea that people who already had socially acceptable bodies would get the adventures, too.
Beneath the Sugar Sky
Seanan McGuire
Each time I went on stage and made a disparaging joke about my disability to put a non-disabled audience at ease, I played further into that mechanism. While me being onstage disrupted the status quo, I was diffusing that tension by reinforcing my otherness. Over time I grew uncomfortable, resenting the jokes I thought were necessary to be accepted by audiences.
Ophira Calof on Unravelling Ableism From Comedy
Ophira Calof
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