Essays

Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves (2018)
by Fobazi Ettarh
"Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed."

Hot Allostatic Load (2015)
by Porpentine
"Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms."

Position of Guilt: Black Hot Allostatic Load (2024)
by Anonsee Storyweaver
"As of writing, I still don’t know what else I’ve been accused of. I can’t even accurately say if any of it is true or false because I still don’t know who I hurt or how I hurt them. Once again I believed them. I believed both this and the prior story until I was given enough evidence to prove that people were lying for their benefit and at my expense.[...] While the original focus of HAL ["Hot Allostatic Load"] is on transfemmes, and my stories focus on Black AMABs, I honestly feel like they come from the same roots within a white supremacist expectation to be able to quash other/further marginalized folks at a moment’s need; to offer them up as sacrifices, as scapegoats, in the same way but with different lenses."

We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs (2017)
by Lauren Michele Jackson
"“[T]o be looped in a GIF, to be put on display as ‘animated’ at the behest of audiences,” as Monica Torres describes for Real Life, is an act with racial history and meaning. These GIFs often enact fantasies of black women as “sassy” and extravagant, allowing nonblack users to harness and inhabit these images as an extension of themselves. GIFs with transcripts become an opportunity for those not fluent in black vernacular to safely use the language, such as in the many “hell to the no,” “girl, bye,” and “bitch, please” memes passed around. Ultimately, black people and black images are thus relied upon to perform a huge amount of emotional labor online on behalf of nonblack users. We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your “yaas” moments. The weight of reaction GIFing, period, rests on our shoulders."

[Header edited from Delicate Tension no. 85 by Wassily Kandinsky]
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