#election adjacent?: yesterday I told a couple people how my day job now feels like staffing the dying Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, and then thought about the bizarre role of the giant corrupt imperial bureaucracy in Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone. Which I love so much.
It's a bit like Jane Austen in that material underpinnings are acknowledged but offstage - but also, instead of just sitting around owning land and collecting interest on bonds, the Jia patriarchs periodically get saddled with a ton of administrative work. This is a great opportunity for graft but no life of leisure.
tl;dr Infrastructure disasters matter to Bao-yu because they keep Bao-yu's dad out of the house for months on end, making proper space for poetry contests with girls in the garden.
To tie it all together, I also haven't found any discussion anywhere of The Story of the Stone as a trans novel, which is bizarre to me and must mean a) I'm being too forward with my labels; b) East Asian studies/Redology is in a certain place; c) I'm still bad at searching JSTOR; d) any or all.
#litodons #queerlit #redology #infrastructuredisasterasheterosocialparadigm
