Secret Histories

[alias_sqbr]

Having finished my Phd and had some time for my brain to bounce back, I've been filling my brain with lots of different things, including history. The thing is, I find most history books to be either too dry and technical for my not-so-arty brain, or very conventional and uninteresting: all about the lives of kings and other rich white men, and tending to uncritically regurgitate the traditional and nostalgic ideas people already have with just a few glosses of extra facts. I think the desire to try to fit morally grey people like bushrangers and colonists into neat little good guy/bad guy boxes is one of the reasons I find my own country's history so unbearably dull.

One solution to this is to seek out histories which are explicitly from a more non-conventional viewpoint. Tony Robinson is about the only tv historian I can think of who does this, mainly with the lower classes, ie with his Worst jobs in history.

Beneath the cut: a synopsis of what I've found so far, including "The Homosexual History of Australia", "Damned Whores and Gods Police: the history of women in australia" and "Understanding Deaf Culture".

The Celluloid Closet did a really good job for american cinema, so when I saw The Hidden History of Homosexual Australia on Quickflix I added it, and sure enough for a change I actually enjoyed learning australian history. It's not the best made documentary ever, and it both conflates and ignores issues of transgender and transexuality (ie when talking about "passing women", women who lived as men at the turn of the century, I don't think it even suggested the possibility that they say themselves as men: either they were straight women who just wanted male privileges, or they were lesbians), and the use of random movie clips for emphasis didn't always work, but I still enjoyed it. Looking for a link I found this page about aussie gay history which unlike the documentary mentions how aboriginal society treated it's own homosexual members before european settlement.

I enjoyed In our time: memoir of a revolution, about the history of american second wave feminism, so had high hopes for Damned Whores and Gods Police: the history of women in australia, but got bored. I might give it another go when I'm entirely better. Amusingly: Susan Brownmillar spent a page talking about how apart from Germaine Greer, aussie feminists were/are a bunch of hive-minded marxists too caught up in convention and conformity to buck the system and get anything done, which I found a bit grating. In her introduction, Anne Summers (who worked on Ms in America for some time) spends like five pages ranting about how american feminists are a bunch of celebrity obsessed narcissists, too blinded by idealism and self promoting factionalism to work with each other and government and get anything done :D

Finally, I came to the sudden realisation recently that one of the consequences of Amniat (In ACOS) having access to telepathy is that there's now a way for deaf people to make themselves heard, which means that to write the story properly I should figure out what that means for them and everyone else. Since I know NOTHING about deafness I had a look at the Perth library catalogue and got out the one adult book they had on the subject(*): Understanding Deaf Culture. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it since it's a history book chosen at random with no recommendations, but it's actually really interesting. It really is this whole unknown history I'd never heard much about, the way deaf schools changed deaf people's life irrevocably, forming these closed, heavily controlled environments which were a mix of wonderful togetherness and community building, and horrible abuse and segregation but lean large in people's minds either way. I'm reading a chapter about the first professional deaf theatre, where a hearing theatre director who just liked the look of sign language got a bunch of deaf actors together, and they went from doing straight forward amateur productions aimed just at the deaf to these beautiful professional productions with fine costumes, choreography, and integrated voice actors, which hearing audiences loved..and deaf ones couldn't understand, since everyone was moving too much and too fast.

And as well as these I've been listening to various podcasts from Berkley, which has been really interesting too, university level history etc has a much more nuanced and complex story to tell than your usual aimed-at-the-layman stuff, even at a first year level.

(*)This is Perth City library, there's more in the overall WA system! I also read the like 10 page children's picture book, which was disturbingly educational, thus illustrating how little I know on the subject.

Comments

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

There is a pretty readable Oliver Sachs book Seeing Voices about deaf culture.

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm, ok, I'll look out for that. One advantage this book has is that it's by Deaf authors, and tries to give an inside view, but a well educated outsider's view is valuable too.