Mary Rose Museum's Queer Lense

[1stWorldProblems]

I bloody love this musuem & it's one of the few to use tech to enhance its exhibits with the "ghosts" it projects on the hull (as opposed to unnecessary "interactive" displays that 50-somethings are cool and break after a few months but which kids have seen better done on their tablets but that's another thread). This came up on my timeline today - viewing a number of their objects through a queer lens - or going on about 21st century concerns that can only be linked to the said object by tying yourself in knots.

https://maryrose.org/blog/collections/the-collections-team/queering-the-mary-rose-s-collection/

SO tedious - the wreck and the objects found are fascinating without layering on 21st century superfluous info. It's not even interesting or original thoughts - just the usual guff.

Life in Britain Through the Fat Lens. Shopping Edition.

People shop and buy things like coffee, cat food and washing up liquid. Some fat people also buy coffee, cat food and washing up liquid - incredibly, the fact that they are fat bears absolutely no relevance to their need for caffeine in the morning, the cat will kick off if left to go hungry and they share a wish to avoid a slimy washing up bowl full of dirty plates and the last cat food fork by Friday. Some fat people like shopping and for some, they can think of a hundred other things they'd rather be doing than trailing round the Co-op after work and therefore stick most of it on an Amazon or Ocado order.

Mole has delivered again!I

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins Ooh a quiz! Is there snacks whilst we fill it in?

a slimy washing up bowl full of dirty plates and the last cat food fork by Friday.

@NeverDropYourMooncup can you please remove the cctv you appear to have installed in my kitchen.

Thank you.

@NeverDropYourMooncup I'm sorry but I'm not going to open my museum or do my blog if other people also claim to know what life through a fat lens is like. Don't you know I'm super special

@Boiledbeetle snacks are a given.

Ah, terribly sorry about that. I'll see to it directly.

Life in 21st Century Britain Through the Fat Lens - Cleaning Edition.

Some people like cleaning their houses. Some people don't and will try to get the other adult in the house to do it, rage clean on a Saturday morning when they can't find a mug for their coffee or say fuck this shit and book a cleaner.

Fat people can also hate cleaning up after a fully sentient adult and make grumbling noises about a mystical being known as Thefuckingcleaning Fairy doing it. Sometimes they will have a pet such as a cat, commonly known by a similarly mystical name, Thebastarding Cat, particularly when it is in the process of disembowelling a mouse or depositing a rather large furball onto the freshly vacuumed and only piece of carpeting in the entire bloody house.

We do not know whether Thefuckingcleaning Fairy and Thebastarding Cat differ in presentation from the mythic beings of HealthyBMI Culture, but there do appear to be some commonalities in how Fat People get really pissed off with thoughtless spouses and vomitous felines just before they leave for work in the morning and those of the majority.

😂😂😂

Philip Hensher on this nonsense on Unherd.

https://unherd.com/thepost/the-queering-of-the-mary-rose-insults-gay-history/

'Juvenile satraps.' Nice one, filed for future use. As are some of the comments on here.

Not come across Philip Hensher before this but his tweet and that comment say much of what I think of the Mary Rose blog post but with more eloquence!

when they can't find a mug for their coffee or say fuck this shit and book a cleaner.

Sometimes they will have a pet such as a cat, commonly known by a similarly mystical name, Thebastarding Cat, particularly when it is in the process of disembowelling a mouse or depositing a rather large furball onto the freshly vacuumed and only piece of carpeting in the entire bloody house.

seriously! Camera! Out! Now! You are not to be making your living off the back of my habits young woman!

IIRC, the Tudors had that naval recruitment campaign with posters showing a pointing Henry VIII saying, 'Join the Navy and Feel a Man!' But when people started shouting suggestive comments at the monarch as he was rowed across the Thames, that's when he decided to have Thomas Cromwell dramatically cancelled.

Life in 21st Century Britain though a fat person lens. Washing machine edition.

Fat people use washing machines to wash their clothes. Fat people need to wear clothes despite the fact that some people think they shouldn't be sold in shops. Or if they are sold they must certainly should not be modelled. They think Fat people should wear sacks and look like total crap. However, Fat people generally make the most of what they've got and try to dress in a way that suits their size. This means that they need the aforementioned washing machine.

I wonder if it could be argued that washing machines are less cost effective for fat people. This is because their larger clothes take up more space in washing machine so they can get less outfits per wash. This could also lead to more general wear and tear on the machine as it will be used more often. This is an unrecognised form of fatphobia and discrimination.

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins 😍😚😚

Sighs a happy sigh!

@londonmummy1966
Am sorry to be a spoil-sport, but the newspapers misreported the findings of the paper (Going south of the river: A multidisciplinary analysis of ancestry, mobility and diet in a population from Roman Southwark, London [Journal of Archaeological Science, October 2016]) regarding “Chinese” skeletons in the Roman cemetery.
There’s a really good breakdown of Why We Don’t Know That in this Forbes Article - FWIW I agree it’s highly probable Sino-Roman trade relations would have brought some Chinese people to what is now England & Wales; but the proof is yet to transpire. Just thinking about how much more we know about Ivory Bangle Lady than when I was a child rams home the insane amounts of progress that’ve been made in the field.
Speaking of African [diaspora] Romans I always think the posting to Hadrian’s Wall must have been utterly desperate for the Aurelian Moors - don’t you?

I suppose one plus of the Ancient World is people don’t have to queer nit-combs for their LGBTQIA[2S]+ representation. The down side is routine misinterpretations; & of course splashing about the word “queer”. It is not the lack of a Latin translation that means were one able to interview an Ancient Roman about their sexuality “queer” wouldn’t come into it; yet the ahistorical usage persists 🤦‍♀️

Although Roman sexuality itself is a very interesting thing. All bound up in notions of the dignity (or indignity) of active and passive roles and dominance.

This seems a really strange thing to do. Can't a mirror or a nit comb just be a mirror or a nit comb?

And the amount of choice the men and boys in the passive role had, or usually, didn't have.

Bwahahajhaha! That's fucking priceless!

@NitroNine - thank you for that. I have to say that I would expect any Asians found in Romno British cemeteries to have come from India on the somewhat easier trade route through the Red Sea and Egypt. My understanding of the Silk road at the time was that the terrain was such that it made sense to have traders who knew the area do different legs. I looked into it a bit when I wanted to do a DPhil on the clothes Roman women wore and had thought about doing a chapter on the Roman attitudes to silk. Sadly my tutor was very dissmissive of this type of "wimmins herstory" and suggested looking at the distribution of provincially minted coins accross the empire instead so I fled to accountancy as the more interesting option. I now wish I'd stuck to my guns a bit more.

I can imagine a lot of the auxilia sent to Hadrian's Wall not enjoying the climate although Moors might have come from the Atlas area and been a bit more used to the cold (although maybe not not the rain and not at such low altitudes...).

A House through Time is full of d olusoga saying he/She MUST have felt this way.
Then I turn off. Because it's not history, it's you putting your preconceptions on a dead person

I had this problem with the book On Savage Shores which came out recently. The premise was interesting - instead of asking what was it like for European coloniser to discover the Americas, it asked what was it like for the indigenous Americans to suddenly "discover" Europe. But some sections relied so heavily on "they must have felt like this", "it must have seemed" etc that just pushed having empathy and understanding for other people too far into pure speculation from a modern perspective.

The Vindolanda Tablets included bitching about the weather - 'Caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum' (something like 'the sky is foul with frequent rain and fog') and asking their Mums to send them cloaks, pants and woolly socks.

Even worse is the problem I had with Joanne Paul’s book on the Dudleys, she doesn’t even say ‘must have’, she says did.
She is a tremendously talented historian with richly textured knowledge of her period which takes in all kinds of social and cultural material as well as the documents directly related to her subject. But I am constantly frustrated by not knowing whether things are documented or imaginative reconstruction. Do we know he felt like that because it was in a letter or are you assuming? Do you know that’s how the funeral looked based on a contemporary account or are you just basing it on what we know was generally done at funerals? If the latter it’s risky because you are writing about exceptional people in exceptional circumstances. If the former quote the source because it’s more immediate and vivid to hear it directly.
Don’t do it. If you want to write fiction write fiction. Otherwise make it clear what is speculation and what is evidenced or your book is useless to me. I won’t be buying her next unless she changes approach.

The Vindolanda Tablets included bitching about the weather - 'Caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum' (something like 'the sky is foul with frequent rain and fog') and asking their Mums to send them cloaks, pants and woolly socks

Agricola moaned to Tacitus about it as well - 'the climate is wretched, with frequent rains and mists.' Shove off back to Rome then, no one asked you to invade (said the Brittunculi - (nasty little Brits) - according to the Vindolanda tablets.)

I know. I am waiting to see the museum, gallery, theatre which marks and celebrates something that touches on my feelingz. I am not fussy, any of my not yet legally protected characteristics will do.

single parent ,

slight obesity

dodgy ticker

gardener

avid reader

difficult hair ( I totally missed out on that one re the Mary Rose it seems)

missing appendix

1950s teeth

I am pretty sure that each of my categories has the potential to reach the hearts of many brave souls, probably in more than one category too. My people, it’s time to come out from behind the sofa and show your true worth.

I bet if we all got together we too could fill Trafalgar Square, and probably spread out a bit too. I am not asking for a months worth of tacky celebration, or even a day ( I am also a woman and am truly grateful and celebrate that one day when half the worlds population is given recognition) a couple of hours would be enough for us to share our stories, and recognise that we have common ground. And it would be lovely if our contributions to the wider world could be acknowledged.