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Marsh's The beetle Bk 2 by Sydney Atherton (yikes) - Coggle Diagram
Marsh's
The beetle
Bk 2 by Sydney Atherton (yikes)
Britain's global colonial projects: from Gill-Peterson: In 1876 several District Superintendents in the police reported on the preferred method of officers for dealing with the hijras they saw in public while on patrol: “they would cut off their long hair, strip off their female attire and ornaments, and selling them, fit these people out with a set of men’s clothes.”2 Public humiliation and scapegoating was central to the project of eradication.
but also parts of cycles of positive and negative reinforcement
uh oh, this doesn't leave us
How does Atherton imagine his authority?
mad scientist? Obsessed with knowledge of weilding life and death? "I went to my laboratory to plan murder" (102) opening of chp 12 - certainly speaks to his moral character; but his language turns the violence into NATIONALIST moral rhetoric. LEGALISED MURDER?
the tone maybe makes him sound a little unhinged and furious? "it is not surpring that Marjorie could disdain me" (100)
Atherton focuses on clothes and comparison; AND THEN USING THIS AS EVIDENCE FOR ORIGIN; sets up comparisons because of regionalism (and ranks them); "like the originals and yet unlike" --tries to think through ethnicity but can't unthink colonial hierarchies
the dangers of using clinical tone and focus when analyzing the stranger's body; trying sooo hard to classify and tear the body up with his gaze
the use of a clinical gaze to own and dominate! (He needs to be IRB compliant cause loooooong history of racist violations of beneficience and respect of persons)
whereas Holt was dominated, this encounter with Atherton shows higher and mightier--Marsh validating masculinist and scientific power and strength;
the use of magic v. science is an Orientalizing tool for Western fantasies of dominance and progress
London v dog-hole; it's coalitional (racist) worldbuilding about gendered and racial dominance
the tone f this novel? What is it's...funny? Is it our terrible 2022 desensitization?
The beetle's changling body
maybe used as a way to dramatize power;
"my truly versatile oriental friend" and "egregiously mistaken on the subject of sex;" body is "by no means old or ill-shaped either" (152); hi, it's a new process of domination and ownership; this is about the large rprocess of knowledge production and paths to "Enlightenment"
"the subject of sex" - so putting a pin in the fact that natal sex is not the same as gender, this creature can shape shift so like....?
are we using irony to undercut Atherton's medical/sexual/colonial knowledge production? Exposes hypocriticalness;
or it reproduces colonial consumption
juxtaposed from Marjorie Lindon's sex life/marriage life
violent paternalism, mad dad about marriage and interrupting fantasies of privacy and selfhood; "it is her duty to represent me adequeatly; [...] my property is my own"