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Everything I Knew About Claudia Brown

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Sunday, September 8, 2013 I first heard of Claudia Brown when I was about 8 weeks pregnant and nauseated by the smell of oxygen. I had already had one extremely disappointing visit with an Ob-Gyn out in Waimea (grimy carpets, dead-eyed nurses, and a dismissive and distractingly attractive male gynecologist). I was taking my toddler for a walk along our little gravel road to see the horses (don’t breathe: horse-sweat, hay, grass, animal hair, poop) and feed them papayas (don’t breathe: too pungent, too fleshy, with an overripe kerosene off-gas). We ran into our neighbor and her leaping and spinning three year old, who was tanned to mahogany and naked except for a tutu.   The little girl pointed at her mom’s watermelon-sized belly. “HIS NAME IS POPCORN!” We chatted about birth and doctors and midwives, I told her how much I had loved the midwife-run birth center on the Big Island and how unimpressive my visit to the Ob-Gyn had been. She said, “Oh, you’ll love Claudia,” and dashed h
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So I did a crazy thing, and left my kids for 11 days and went to Scotland to the Dorothy Dunnett Centenary where I gave a paper and met up with my sister Katie because life is short and mortality is looming and we’re alive, briefly, gorgeously, so why not.  Wait, back up. So Katie has fucking cancer and she is okay for the moment but it’s fucking ocular melanoma and that fucking kills people fast once it metastasizes. And it hasn’t metastasized yet, but it will, that’s what it does. Fucking CANCER, she’s 38, Jesus FUCK-- Wait, back up further.  So my mom had cancer, breast cancer, that she found when she was 29 or 30, and she battled it off thru metastasis for years, and died at 41 when I was 17 and Katie was 12 and Liz was 10. And she got cancer that early because of a fucking BRCA mutation that Katie inherited, along with a bunch of other cousins in the Pratt family.  So, fuck cancer. Also, the world shifted and Katie is-- we can’t count on her being here next year, or next time, or
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Sex & Power, Gender &Transgression: LGBT+ Diversity in the 15th and 16th Centuries

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  Sex and Power, Gender and Transgression: Lessons for Today from LGBT+ Diversity in the 15th and 16th Centuries Rebecca Stevenson (As presented at the Dorothy Dunnett Society Centenary Conference in Edinburgh, with some added notes in smaller font) April 12, 2023 Good afternoon, my name is Rebecca Stevenson. It is a pleasure to be here, speaking about Sexuality, Gender, Power, and Queerness in the 15th and 16th century World.  Cut Sleeves and Bitten Peaches Is it possible to understand the inner worlds of people we’d call LGBT+ from 600 years ago? Or to understand how they defined themselves, how they accessed or lost social power? Or how social systems shaped the meaning of sexual and gender behavior? Stories and poetry are decoder rings for queer interiorities of the past. Writings from queer points of view allow for self-definition in context, and reveal eddies of social power and transgression. And stories illuminate the rainbow palate of diverse sexualities, identities, intimacie
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