Linky links

[halojedha]

• A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet: One of my favourite novels of the last few years. Humane, charming, warm, funny sci-fi with characters you really want to spend time with. Queers in space! Tea, gardening, polyamory, chats about trauma! Plus a rich and compelling world and convincingly page-turny plot. Do like. It's only £2.99 for Kindle at the moment if you haven't already read it.
• Somehow I found myself looking at this recipe for homemade toothpaste. I'm considering making it.
• Ten photos celebrating post-baby bodies. I needed these. I'm loving what my body can do at the moment, but it's taking active effort to overcome the shoot beauty fascist conditioning and appreciate the way it looks. These help.
• Banana peanut butter energy bites. Saving for later, I want to make these.
• How to win a PIP appeal. I'm shocked (and simultaneously not surprised) at the way the DWP are behaving at the moment, rejecting claims seemingly by default regardless of how impaired someone is. This advice document looks like it might be useful for people intending to appeal?
• Why are queer people so mean to each other? An article by a queer therapist about community building, trauma responses and call-out culture. Some great nuggets of wisdom. "Conflict happens, but we can survive it. People are often disappointing, and we are allowed to set boundaries on relationships — but if our boundaries are too rigid, then we will always be disappointed."
• Gender as colonial object. Essay on how colonial, binary, heteronormative gender norms were imposed on indigenous cultures, including in Nigeria, Persia and the Americas. I want to read more into each of those histories; I also appreciated this take: "It’s useful to connect the imposition of colonial gender systems to the need for reproductive labor under capitalist systems. In other words, the reification of two fixed gender categories, the framing of these categories along teleological reproductive timelines, the exclusion of women from public life, serve specific purposes within a capitalist system: the division of labor into productive and reproductive. If capitalism is a driver of colonization, and if colonization transforms gender systems, it’s worth investigating how capitalism and gender might relate. Oyěwùmí is keenly aware of this connection, exploring how the subordination of newly discovered women coincided with the expropriation of communal land and installation of slavery and wage labor in Yorubaland."