tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56607498434567902152024-03-05T04:29:27.426+00:00Friendly local class feministVaguely informed musings on the worlds of women.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-19687337370644359852017-08-11T08:12:00.003+01:002017-08-11T08:12:25.338+01:00An Open Letter to Tea Circle about THAT Article<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p>Dear Tea Circle Oxford</o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I am writing in response to your article “<a href="https://teacircleoxford.com/2017/08/09/the-myth-myanmar-can-afford-to-ditch/">The Myth Myanmar can Afford to Ditch</a>”. This is not intended to be a direct rebuttal to the
argument put forth by Brandon Aung Moe, as I understand there are plenty of
those in the works, including one forthcoming for Tea Circle itself – rather I
want to ask why a platform hosted by an Oxford University programme would
publish such a piece in the first place.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Based on your affiliation and the academic credentials of
your editorial team, I assume you have the critical thinking and analysis
skills necessary to realise that this piece is garbage<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>,
even under the guise of an “opinion”. The author himself calls into
question his credentials early on, but like so many men before him, this does
not appear to have bestowed the necessary self-awareness or humility to conduct
basic research into the factual relevance of his opinion on before plunging in.
The piece shows minimal understanding of the meaning of the word “empowerment”,
central to the argument, and makes unfounded blanket generalisations about a
diverse country from a position of male and (apparently) Burmese ethnic
privilege. Most disturbing is the inflammatory turn taken in the middle, where
Brandon Aung Moe decides to label feminist activism which targets
representation of women in male-dominated areas as “a virus”. In a country
where open political discourse is fragile and contentious, suggesting that
women who fight for representation in areas like politics and media are
suffering from, or a symptom of, a deadly sickness, is a rhetorical turn which
skirts dangerously close to hate speech.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Assuming your editorial staff are familiar with the qualities
of a well-researched, intelligent article, this limits the likely explanations
for your publishing a piece which is neither. Perhaps you believe that this
opinion piece is justified under the terms you set out on your website of “offer[ing
a] unique perspective”, in which case I regret to be the one to inform you that
unexamined male privilege is extremely common, and Brandon Aung Moe is far from
the first man to use this many words to describe his own. You may also be
justifying the publication of this piece under the umbrella of platforming
Myanmar voices, but suggesting that one has to throw basic integrity to the
wind in order to include Myanmar people – even those without traditional
academic backgrounds – in a debate is frankly offensive to the millions of
intelligent, thoughtful people in this country who are capable writing of interesting
and well-supported arguments. I also can’t discount the theory that you were
aiming to provoke a strong negative reaction and in doing so “spark a debate”
on gender in Myanmar, either for lofty academic purposes or to draw attention
to your site (or both). Starting on the controversial side, pushing back
against feminism, I guess gives you a better claim to cutting edge independent
thinking, as well as giving you the convenient opportunity to suggest that
anyone who passionately disagrees with your argument or its quality is just
“offended” and needs to calm down and get into the proper spirit of rational
debate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s the sorry truth, though: it’s a waste of everyone’s
time to engage with the ideas as presented in this garbage article. By offering
your prestigious platform to a man with no qualifications on gender theory or
social science beyond “being from Myanmar and having a mother”, you disrespect
the entire pool of talented, knowledgeable writers from Myanmar who <i>do</i>
have the skills to write intelligently and sensitively from a range of
positions on this subject. And you insult the intelligence of everyone with a
passing knowledge of these topics by presuming that the debate we should be
having is the one in which activists need to fight, over and over again, for
the most basic recognition and acceptance of their work. Inevitably, this takes
time away from the work itself – which, as has been well documented and is
inevitably about to be demonstrated to you in exquisite detail, is real and
pressing, and has the potential to save and transform the lives of millions<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If this utterly basic debate is truly the one you believe is
most worth having – rather than, say, platforming a conversation with actual
ground-breaking potential on the state of structural gender inequalities in
Myanmar and the challenges inherent in tackling them – then you could at least
have done your readers the courtesy of publishing an intelligent piece on the
subject<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>.
You have instead chosen to contribute to the rich patriarchal tradition of reducing
the debate on inequality and diversity to its absolute lowest form, erasing the
contributions of anyone in Myanmar who might have wanted to go beyond “Gender
Awareness Kindergarten” and setting us back at square one, in which women must
once again carve out the basic space to articulate the inequalities and
barriers they face, against rhetorical opponents who are enabled in using
fallacious, puerile and inconsistent arguments to slow them down. It’s exhausting
at best, destructive and idiotic at worst.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I understand that you have your own response piece to this
article in the works, but I am not particularly excited to read it, or anything
else published on your platform, for as long as this piece remains an
indication of what you consider acceptable quality for your site. You can
clearly do better, and your failure to do so in this context is insulting and
damaging to this debate, and to your own integrity as a source of analysis on
Myanmar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yours in solidarity,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adrienne</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
have a personal stake in this assumption, as my own undergraduate degree is
from Oxford, and I like to think that’s worth writing on my CV.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Of women
<i>and</i> men, of course.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/adrie/Desktop/Tea%20Circle%20Letter.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myanmar Text"; mso-bidi-language: MY; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Admittedly, from my perspective, a well-argued anti-feminist work would be just
as infuriating, but I accept that in theory it’s not an oxymoron.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-71892022324598694432017-02-10T09:36:00.000+00:002017-02-10T09:39:08.592+00:006 Books on a Friday: Tempest BHM Challenge edition<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="29gqj" data-offset-key="29vkv-0-0">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">2016 was the year I fell back in love with reading - especially science fiction and fantasy books - in a biiiig way (like, 200+</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> things logged on Goodreads big), but I didn't do a lot of talking about that reading because I didn't really do any writing that wasn't strictly necessary for work, or a Star Wars prequels rewrite (more on that someday). 2017 is the year I promised myself I'd change that, but here we are already almost halfway through February. Whoops!</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">No time like the present to begin. I was inspired by K. Tempest Bradford (of the <a href="http://tempest.fluidartist.com/non-fiction/the-challenge/">Tempest Challenge</a>, in which one stops reading all white male authors for a year), who at the beginning of the month <a href="http://tempest.fluidartist.com/tempest-challenge-black-history-month-edition/">released a related challenge</a> to, every day in February 2017, "read something by a Black person that isn’t only about pre-Civil War American slavery, the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Era."
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have not been tremendously successful with this in the first ten days - I did kick off the month with The Shadowed Sun, which rounded off my N.K. Jemison novel backlist, but then I read <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24611565-twelve-kings-in-sharakhai?ac=1&from_search=true">this white dude</a> (slow but recommended) and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70587.Falcon?ac=1&from_search=true">this white lady</a> (disappointing). But there's no reason not to start now! I therefore present a 6-book list of things I will totally read before the month is out.</span></span></span></span></div>
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(Why 6? Because 6 is the number of books displayed on each page in my Kindle library, and is therefore the perfect number of things to put in a read-now collection that you can see all at once and choose from without being overwhelmed).</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYnfGzczSJCkrrwIi2qsXSd-Ock3wEkI1xa9b0yjg1O4YwBIxYIr4av8R3TPoYyXoEacOrWFxTmyEZQl0OsEGgxaeVQl1jSHwBpgthEk84JwGY0qjGlVdyUhqJSLM7c2EzJfrw9mV3tGs/s1600/lord.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYnfGzczSJCkrrwIi2qsXSd-Ock3wEkI1xa9b0yjg1O4YwBIxYIr4av8R3TPoYyXoEacOrWFxTmyEZQl0OsEGgxaeVQl1jSHwBpgthEk84JwGY0qjGlVdyUhqJSLM7c2EzJfrw9mV3tGs/s200/lord.jpg" width="130" /></a>1. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57504.Brown_Girl_in_the_Ring?" style="text-align: center;">Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson</a><span style="text-align: center;">. Magic-influenced urban dystopia about an inner-city Toronto abandoned by the rich and the people who live there - and what happens when the rich decide they need them again. This has been languishing in the Samples collection of my Kindle for almost as long as I learned I could download samples of books I wanted to hold off on buying. I think it's because of the combination of urban fantasy and sci fi dystopia, which are both genres I don't usually seek out. However, I do think Hopkinson (a Jamaican-born Caribbean writer) is a huge gap in my reading right now and I'm looking forward to finally getting to experience her stuff.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="d1i8b-0-0">2. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15743440-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds">The Best of all Possible Worlds by Karen Lord</a>. Why are all the covers for this book so terrible? Especially the sample on my kindle, which has flowers and a hummingbird, by which I mean no disrespect to flowers and hummingbirds or the covers that include them, but it doesn't exactly scream "aliens and culture clashes and ancient mysteries!" to me, and I'm quite particular about having at least one of those things in my reading most of the time. Ah, but such trivialities won't matter soon. Lord is a Barbadian writer with a few other interesting-looking books to date, but again new to me, and I've got high hopes for this one.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiiFnHrPXAuwupR_GlyH43atJNwf7RCu8crhApRcyVrzNZU0aDd3iUIEsJEFm_d-GLX-KRhYQ1tG7T0I7W6rrNvxbFfTX34Jlyy6n1irtg1AQbmvN8ZixgSdLausseETkSQhQ5nEDLIm4/s1600/angelou.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiiFnHrPXAuwupR_GlyH43atJNwf7RCu8crhApRcyVrzNZU0aDd3iUIEsJEFm_d-GLX-KRhYQ1tG7T0I7W6rrNvxbFfTX34Jlyy6n1irtg1AQbmvN8ZixgSdLausseETkSQhQ5nEDLIm4/s1600/angelou.jpg" /></a><span data-offset-key="1m7f3-0-0">3. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/130200.Gather_Together_in_My_Name?ac=1&from_search=true">Gather Together in My Name</a> by Maya Angelou. I love the Virago covers of Angelou's books almost as much as I love what's been inside the couple I've read so far, which makes the fact that I've not read very many even more embarrassing. The sooner I read this one, the sooner I can justify buying more pretty-covered books!</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="aclfh-0-0">4. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19837638-parable-of-the-sower">The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler</a>. Maybe I should read Imago, which is the third book in the Lilith's Brood trilogy, before this, but really I have a very strong sense that this is required reading in the reality we currently inhabit. Faith and struggle in a divided, declining world. Apparently it specifically references the 2016 US elections as the moment humanity begins to fall apart, which given Butler died in 2006 and wrote this book in the early 90s is... impressive.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_vri3Y8QKv0Fph-N_5Dp-VdMnnN58y2aV9sZsdEtq4BV7FDFVNVmdBwzChH-AoMj3pl7jxCDhyphenhyphenfqPTUFSJaSq7s11pyjF6psrH7yy5UJNlo9n0V0ANMHAEp6qabxxUXrIMw1mUQ1UmCY/s1600/acacia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_vri3Y8QKv0Fph-N_5Dp-VdMnnN58y2aV9sZsdEtq4BV7FDFVNVmdBwzChH-AoMj3pl7jxCDhyphenhyphenfqPTUFSJaSq7s11pyjF6psrH7yy5UJNlo9n0V0ANMHAEp6qabxxUXrIMw1mUQ1UmCY/s1600/acacia.jpg" /></a><span data-offset-key="ak43h-0-0">5. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1199688.Babel_17">Babel-17 by Samuel Delany</a>. Delany is, of course, the logical choice if I'm going to add a dude to this list. I'm going for this book particularly because Arrival is making me want some more "linguists save the universe" stories, and it's also way shorter than Dhalgren, which is the other one of his I probably ought to read (but will need a holiday to do so.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="d51dt-0-0">6. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/565335.Acacia?ac=1&from_search=true">Acacia by David Anthony Durham</a>. Alright, one more man (and urgh another USian, sorry). I only found out about this series recently (through the Tempest Reading Challenge youtube series!) but it sounds super intriguing: taking on the epic fantasy doorstopper genre in a subversive morally ambiguous way. And who doesn't have time for more fantasy doorstoppers in their lives? (Also, as both this and Delany prove, the best way to get me to read books by men is to find ones with women on the cover. Ayep).</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="d51dt-0-0">And a bonus audiobook: I've been listening to a lot of novella-length things recently, as getting through a full novel, and the next thing in the collection I'm working through is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26883558-the-ballad-of-black-tom">the Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle</a>. Yet another USian! But what can you do (read Lovecraft homages without ever reading Lovecraft, that's what).</span></div>
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I'll be back to tell you all how these things went - if I've inspired you to consider your own near-future reading list, I'd love to hear what you're planning! Reading lists can never be long enough.</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-79998203616051715552014-08-09T17:47:00.001+01:002014-08-09T17:47:19.292+01:00She returns!<div class="MsoNormal">
So I’ve been doing a few things since my last update,
including but not limited to:</div>
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<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Enjoying the return to form in the new Legend of
Korra show, which has </span><i style="text-indent: -18pt;">finally</i><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"> hit its stride on characterisation and
dynamics between characters, and set up an interesting and morally ambiguous
storyline where we actually can get wholeheartedly behind the protagonist for
once. Also every location has been amazing, early-20</span><sup style="text-indent: -18pt;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">-century-sci-fi-aesthetic
metal flower cities are the greatest thing ever I will fight you.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Buying rattan furniture, and other furniture,
and a washing machine, and then putting the furnitures and appliances into an
awesome new flat. For a while I was living in a different flat that already had
someone else’s furniture in, but that someone else turned out to be The Worst.
New furniture and new place, on the other hand, is great!</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Going dancing at clubs in flip flops and then
having women in heels step on my feet, then wondering if the strange hard lump
on the top of my foot that this incident created is literally going to be there
for the rest of my life.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Symbol; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Playing Bastion. Playing Transistor. Thinking
about super beautiful apocalyptic indie games for a while. Then downloading
DOSBox so I can play a super old shareware Capture the Flag game forever. (A
lot of FTL and King of Dragon Pass have also happened.)</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Listening to Development Drums, a podcast which
I discovered through a recommendation that read “why would anyone pay for a
development degree when they could just listen to this podcast instead?” After
listening to 4 episodes I am sympathetic to this statement – though luckily I
never paid for a development degree, so that is something.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Haircut!</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Walking a lot and eating much less processed sugary
crap and consequently losing over twelve kilograms. Now I have very few items
of clothing that fit me properly, whoops! But hurrah for healthy life choices
regardless of their incidental consequences.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Supporting losing teams in the World Cup, then
failing to follow the Commonwealth Games.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Oh yeah and also moving to Myanmar to intern for
the EU delegation. Possibly should have put that one first.</span></li>
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As you may have noticed, one of the things I have not been
doing is writing. Or rather, I have been writing, but the writing has been
thousands of words of political analysis which is sent away to highly important
people (probably) with someone else’s name at the bottom. I have not been
writing for me, or for you: an unforeseen and disappointing consequence of a
job which has otherwise been one of the best things I have ever done in my
life.*<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since March, I have learned many important things. Some of
these things have been about this country, which is beautiful and overwhelming
and difficult and vastly different to engage with compared to the inscrutable
and ridiculous happenings of China.** I have had the opportunity to learn about
many fascinating political processes and events, and talk to some equally
fascinating people about said political processes and events. On a no less
extraordinary note, I have discovered many things about what happens when it
rains literally every day for three months and counting. Did you know that
unopened packets of spaghetti can develop black mould inside and disintegrate
within weeks? I did not know this, but now that I do it will probably influence
my pasta buying decisions for the rest of my life. Other things that happen in endless
rain include flooded roads, constant grime, wooden doors which <i>inexplicably</i>
no longer want to close, having one’s covered balcony turn into a refuge for
half the neighbourhood’s pigeon population, and a growing sense of emotional
discontent and misery. Luckily, the rains cannot last forever… I hope.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Besides, the ins and outs of monsoon weather (and also
political transition and conflict resolution, let’s not forget those), I’ve
also been learning a few more things about myself – silly, trivial things about
priorities and relationships and affirming my own self-worth and discovering what
I want to do with the rest of my life, stuff like that. I will never regret the
time I spent in China, or the things I got up to while I was there, but at the
same time I’m aware that in many ways those were years of stasis – I studied
some fascinating stuff and made some lifelong friends, but I didn’t really grow
in the same way that I have here. This new growth is exciting and terrifying, and
it’s also made me a little unsure of where the “new” me (oh dear, how
pretentious) stands in relation to my old stances and interests. I’m no longer
the “gender expert” in a classroom full of interested peers, nor am I in the UK
trying to figure out where I fit into the domestic feminist movement. I’m in Myanmar,
as feminist as ever but focusing on a very different set of issues in my
regular work. Where does that leave AAF? <o:p></o:p></div>
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The short answer is, I don’t
know. But I’m also aware that if I don’t reclaim my space for personal writing
soon, it will only become harder in future. So I am coming back, and I am writing
weekly again (although I know I have said this before and it has not happened,
so we’ll see), but I am making absolutely no guarantees about subject matter
for a little while. I still have tons of thoughts on media and British politics
and China and gender in development, but these are also competing for space
with a lot of new thoughts on life and politics in Myanmar and on the
complexities of being a 25-year-old intern finding out what her career might
have in store. I have no idea what is to come of this, but there is only one
way to find out. Adrienne’s blog is back!<o:p></o:p></div>
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*I was also not writing for a little while before then,
because being unemployed for many months with no end in sight was not very good
for my mental wellbeing or upkeep of hobbies. Let’s not dwell on that too much
though.<o:p></o:p></div>
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**This is not to say that things here are never strange or
inscrutable, but in terms of second-guessing motives for political decisions,
trying to figure out what is going on in the minds of the Chinese government is
a very special kind of futile. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-88885068290138306452013-12-12T19:57:00.000+00:002013-12-12T19:57:23.920+00:00Reasons I liked Frozen even though that one thing happenedThe end of 2013 is upon us, and with it a greater than zero number of movies that I actually want to see in cinemas. Having missed most of the worthwhile films of the past two years (apart from Pitch Perfect, which obviously was <i>the</i> must-watch film of 2012 and which I will hold in the deepest place in my heart forever), it's been nice to be in range of an english language cinema with films I really want to see, <i>and</i> have a schedule flexible enough that I can go for early afternoon adventures any day I choose. In the last couple of weeks I have seen Catching Fire and Frozen, and hopefully I will even get to see the Hobbit in 3D glory when it comes out... which is tomorrow, how did that happen? Where is the year? Oh well.<br />
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The Hunger Games movies and Frozen have both quite rightly taken criticism for being films which, despite ostensibly subverting trends and putting feminist themes into the mainstream, made some indefensible decisions in production which put people's backs up for the finished product. The decision to <a href="http://www.racebending.com/v4/blog/rue-wont-be-whitewashed-in-the-hunger-games/">whitewash </a>Katniss Everdeen and District 12 from their initially described "olive" skin is one which no amount of sublime acting from Jennifer Lawrence can ever make up for - yes, Jennifer, you are magnificent, I want you to make well-acted movies opposite slightly-shorter leads all the time and then back them up with your brilliant interviews, I just don't want you to play POC characters ever again please. And Frozen, which claims its origins in Hans Christian Andersen's <i><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/972/">The Snow Queen</a></i>, was called out for also being unnecessarily full of white people, as well as changing the original's majority female cast into a set of predictable male supporting characters. It's not a great start.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Snow_Queen_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="293" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Snow_Queen_01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In all its incarnations, though, the Snow Queen is a love story between people and reindeer.</td></tr>
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However, in their own right, both Catching Fire and Frozen turned out to be fantastic movies. Catching Fire, indeed, is plotwise pretty much the perfect film adaptation, although part of this does ride on the white-knuckle speed of the first movie in introducing most of the necessary characters and plots (and the first movie correspondingly suffers). Every character in that movie down to the most minor part is absolutely spot on, and the adaptation itself is thoughtful and clever, including some really nuanced aspects of the book that in creative ways. This doesn't make it any less disgusting that they whitewashed the film, and I can fully understand why some people don't enjoy the films purely on that basis, but hating one aspect of a production does not automatically reflect on everything else that happens, although it may undermine it.<br />
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So onto Frozen. The brilliant feminist fangirl blog over on Tumblr has been vocal for months about the <a href="http://thefeministfangirl.tumblr.com/tagged/Frozen/chrono">problems with Frozen compared to its source material</a>. Although the film itself is as far from the source material as it can possibly get without being a totally separate story, it's pretty obvious that at some point in the production process, somebody read a story that is full of old women and robber women and women with eyebrows down to their knees and women writing coded messages on fish, and said "you know what, this needs instead? Insidious masculine political authority, a Swedish stereotype and some male-voiced animal sidekicks. Oh and my goodness noooo body hair, disgusting." I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I don't think they ever had a meeting about "oh let's just make everyone white except some random people in the ballroom scene" (were Tiana and Naveen there? Flynn and Rapunzel definitely put in an appearance). Point is, the powers that be that made this movie clearly seem to have started off at the same gross place that it would just be wonderful if our pop culture could avoid. God forbid we ever have a Disney movie where the majority of characters are <i>female</i>! Especially since we got this unfortunate gem from the film's head of animation:<br />
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<span style="color: #4f4f4f;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very — you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna (Kristen Bell) being angry."</span></span></blockquote>
You heard the man, it is <i>very hard</i> to have more than one female character when they all have to look the same! I have seen this quote read as frustration by the animator at having creative limitations imposed by higher-ups, who need saucer-eyed snub-nosed pretty girls to go on lunchboxes at the Disney Store, but it could go either way. Some other enterprising fans coupled this with early leaked pictures which used Anna and Elsa's colours on Rapunzel's character model, to prove that Disney was in fact animating the same face over and over again. While this would be pretty awful if true... it's not.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://skunkandburningtires.com/wp-content/uploads/tumblr_mufen7pHoy1rkiwnzo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://skunkandburningtires.com/wp-content/uploads/tumblr_mufen7pHoy1rkiwnzo1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm not saying I don't want them MORE different, but credit where credit's due guys.</td></tr>
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Of course, the crime of having a quite similar character model was nothing compared to the issues of <i>enormous </i>magnitude which later picked up on. Perhaps unhappy about having to boycott a possibly good film over appalling production decisions, there seems to have been a significant drive to find every single thing that is wrong with the film and use it to prove how unremittingly awful it must be. For example, introducing a talking snowman as a cute character for kids? AWFUL. Inventing a program to create unique snowflakes but not inventing a program (?) to create unique woman faces? RIDICULOUS. But the worst crime, the biggest flaw in this film, the achilles heel which should bring the entire thing crashing down, is a moment in Elsa's song "Let It Go", which is also the best song in the movie and not really a spoiler if you know anything about plot structures and you should watch it:<br />
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Did you think that was fun, well-sung and visually interesting? Well you are wrong, because in this split second her hair goes through her arm:<br />
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That's right, folks. The film is <i>ruined</i>. There are other instances of animation not being exactly like physical reality as well, and they completely negate the idea that this could possibly be a film worth watching. This is so much worse than the lack of diversity or other female characters guys. Her <i>hair</i> went through her <i>arm.</i>*<br />
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What this movie is actually about, if you can tear your eyes away from that gif for a moment, is two sisters who love each other but through the actions of their equally loving but sadly misguided parents, have a really strained relationship. Elsa, the older one, has magic ice powers and is constantly trying to protect her sister and those around her from being hurt, having to repress her own feelings in the process. Anna, the younger, is playful and silly and has no idea why her sister won't spend time with her any more. Parents die, Anna falls in love in about 5 seconds flat at her sister's coronation, and then shit goes down and she ends up letting her super-new fiancee take charge while she goes off to find her sister with the help of Kristoff the reindeer-loving ice merchant. Hijinks and subversions ensue! The overriding message of the film is about the importance of accepting and loving people for who they are, even when they have flaws or are a reindeer. Although there are some heteroromantic bonds forged - including <i>enthusiastic consent in the final kissing scene how awesome is that</i> - the end of the movie makes it pretty clear that the two great loves here are between sister and sister, and man and reindeer.<br />
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If big corporations like Disney are going to take steps to make their films more progressive, Frozen is pretty acceptable in its end product. It's not raging radical tear-down-patriarchy good, but I don't think I cringed at a single scene, and it's a better film than Brave. This doesn't mean we should not criticise or even boycott for the enormous mistakes the production <i>did</i> make, because one day I want an animated film where women are just casually the majority of supporting characters, or voice the creature companions (has there <i>ever</i> been a female creature companion in a Disney film? I can't think of one), or fall in romantic love with each other, and the only way those films will happen is if people early in the process don't stop them. On the flipside, this means accepting that the mistakes made in production <i>might not stop films from being good films. </i>Frozen is a great film, even though Olaf the snowman is designed for children, even though the women are the same body type as Rapunzel and each other, even though <i>yes her hair clips for a millisecond please guys come on</i>. That does not mean that everyone will personally like it, and it does not invalidate the critique on how it was made and how it could have been better. But given how much scrutiny patriarchal media places on any female-led media and how much we already have to fight (just look at the superhero genre! Ever think we will see a Wonder Woman film if her appearance in Batman vs. Superman isn't FLAWLESSLY received?) I think it's high time we separated good, feminist critiques of films from "things we make up to make ourselves feel better about missing out on a good film."<br />
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APPENDIX A: Other miscellaneous things I liked about Frozen.<br />
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- I'm not actually that interested in fairy tales in general but I really like that this is a youngest sister story! It both confirms and subverts the trope by having the older sister be magical, but giving the younger one the "adventure". Good stuff.<br />
- Enthusiastic consent in the end!<br />
- The lack of villainous characters. It's not quite Studio Ghibli, but... well, I won't spoil it.<br />
- The finale is not <i>quite</i> as good to its heroine as Enchanted was to Giselle, but it's close.<br />
- There's a really interesting range of background women animated in the ball sequence. I would have liked to see them more prominently in later crowd scenes, which rely too much on militaristic men.<br />
- <i>Enthusiastic consent</i>, seriously that was the best romance confirmation since Shang's "You fight good" in Mulan.<br />
- Kristoff gets a much better deal of the whole "accompany the sheltered offbeat girl to do a task!" deal than his predecessor Flynn. He gets to remain the same crotchety nerd from start to finish, whereas Flynn had to go through that tiresome moral awakening. THIS WAY IS BETTER.<br />
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And a miscellaneous thing I really, really didn't: It'll be hard to time, but <b>if you go to see this film try to go late enough to avoid the Mickey Mouse short they put at the start</b>. Apparently Disney can draw Mickey and co. in 3D colour now, but they couldn't think up a story to demonstrate this that didn't involve sexual harassment, a damsel in distress and mocking sexuality in unattractive women. 2013, folks!<br />
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*According to the animators, it was on purpose and everything!Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-16788044921927035712013-11-26T18:07:00.003+00:002013-11-26T22:39:12.431+00:00Rebranding and guilt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/25/feminism-make-space-for-half-arsed">Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett</a> of <strike>4 Privet Drive</strike> Vagenda Magazine is proud to say she's perfectly normal, thank you very much. She likes normal stuff, like the Mail Online, diets, twerking in the kitchen and updating her <a href="http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk/">popular feminist website</a>. But trouble looms on the horizon! Other women - feminists no less! - appear to have suggested that a life that is not constantly 110% dedicated to the Advancement of Women People, every second of the day, might not be the life of a feminist at all. This is a problem for Cosslett, who describes herself as a "half-arsed, accidental feminist" and who therefore cannot conform to the impossible standards of full-arsed, on-purpose feminists. The conclusion is that feminism must be rebranded to accommodate the myriad of women who, metaphorically or literally, are missing 50% of their bums.<br />
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The "rebranding" of feminism is a concept that's been doing the rounds for a few months now, and it's fair to say that its a <i>bit</i> divisive. It kicked off with Elle Magazine's decision to team three feminist groups with three ad agencies in order to make some pictures that the average Tumblr user could probably have done in half the time and none of the budget:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The shapes! The colours! The mention of gender pay gaps! I have no doubt that this will be a game changer, thanks Mother.</td></tr>
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The Vagenda was one of the organisations which participated in the "rebranding" exercise, resulting in an advert which looks pretty much like the one above but with more words and using white instead of yellow. They also started an "Iamawomanand" campaign - which needs to be said really fast, as one word, for the full effect - which might <i>look</i> similar to the <a href="http://whoneedsfeminism.tumblr.com/">"I need feminism because..."</a> placard campaigns that have been running since well before this reblanding (that was a typo but you know what, let's run with it) but it <i>isn't</i> the same thing because this was an "Iamawomanand" campaign.</div>
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Anyway, those things happened, almost two months ago now, and everybody cared for about five minutes about the campaigns themselves before they disappeared into internet history, probably to be reinvented again as completely new and exciting ideas in a few months time. As far as I'm concerned, nothing about Elle's campaign or the people involved in it was wrong except for the word "rebranding", which turned out to be a pointless word anyway because the end product was about as generic and already-been-done as it comes. Taking the f-word out of pro-women messages and putting them in a mainstream magazine doesn't change the fact that <i>this has all been done before</i>.</div>
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And, hey, you know who has done all of this before? Feminists. And probably not full-arsed, on-purpose feminists either. Because when Cosslett starts comparing her part-time feminism to people who allegedly give all of their internal organs to the Matriarchal Conspiracy when they join the movement, she is in fact comparing herself to people who do not exist. No teenage girl wakes up one day and goes "You know what, I'm a feminist now, I will devote my life solely to the sisterhood and do nothing except smash patriarchy for the rest of my natural life". We all have to divide our time between smashing patriarchy and living in the actual world. </div>
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It is a necessary difficulty of feminism - a necessary difficulty of being a person! - that living in the actual world involves a certain amount of Getting It Wrong. We are tuned into a struggle for equality in a world full of systemic oppression, which is designed so that many of our choices reinforce that inequality no matter what we do. And it's a normal human reaction to feel guilty about those choices, even if there's nothing we can do about them. Feminism can't exonerate even the most full-arsed activist from sometimes screwing up and feeling bad about it. All we can do is try to balance minimal damage with maximum activism whilst making sure to take care of ourselves and the people around us.</div>
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This is not a defence of feminism's status quo, which <i>does</i> have problems with inclusivity both because of patriarchal misrepresentation and more importantly because it still lets down women on the margins, who are then told that their infighting is part of the reason the movement needs "rebranding" in the first place. But these glaring problems are unlikely to be solved by advertising agencies and Elle magazine, and working towards solving it is not going to make the Rihannon Lucy Cossletts of the world feel any better about reading the Mail Online sometimes. We are all going to have to bite the bullet and accept that, metaphorically, perhaps we are <i>all</i> a little lacking in the arse department.</div>
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NOTE: I just had a culturally impaired friend question my decision to "dox" Cosslett, so for anybody else out there who doesn't recognise the opening line from Harry Potter on sight: 4 Privet Drive is not the address of anybody in this article, it's the address of Vernon and Petunia Dursley, that is the joke, I swear upon my honour that never ever ever will I threaten the privacy of another person on this blog unless they are a fictional character from a popular wizarding franchise. This is a nice blog with standards, innit.</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-74895419664508194782013-09-06T22:47:00.002+01:002013-09-06T22:47:49.711+01:00Why femen should probably just stop. now.<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Did I say update last Sunday? I did. Back to the old habits so soon!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">This will be up on Femusings tomorrow but here's a sneaky preview for blog readers. I love you guys! I mean, go to Femusings too. But also keep coming here.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Boobies in this post!</span></div>
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<a href="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1162007/thumbs/r-FEMEN-TUNISIA-PROTEST-large570.jpg?6" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1162007/thumbs/r-FEMEN-TUNISIA-PROTEST-large570.jpg?6" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">It’s always quite inconvenient when feminist
things get ruined by manipulative men. Just ask anybody involved with the
dismal Hugo Schwyzer, who set himself up as a paragon of reformed male feminism
only to have a lengthy meltdown involving twitter marathons, manipulative
semi-apologies, a (hopefully!) career-ending confession about sleeping with
students and perhaps the most obtuse Jezebel article ever written. Of course,
plenty of people were already well aware of how sleazy Schwyzer has always been,
not a difficult conclusion to come to given that his main man-feminist tactic was
to tell sob stories about awful things he used to do but now virtuously
refrains from. The discovery that the virtuous refraining was in fact
compulsive lying therefore came more as a depressing confirmation rather than a
stunning revelation. A manipulative man ruining a thing? Not really so
surprising to most of us, unfortunately.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">So it goes with Femen, who this week are
sending their activists into damage control mode with a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-man-who-made-femen-new-film-outs-victor-svyatski-as-the-mastermind-behind-the-protest-group-and-its-breastbaring-stunts-8797042.html">new
documentary</a>, “Ukraine is not a brothel”, which reveals that the entire
movement was masterminded by their “advisor” Victor Svyatski. On camera, Svyatski
claims that “on some deep unconscious level” he probably started the group to
meet girls, which is pretentious manipulative man speak for “I am very clever
and self-aware and am going to tell you nasty truths in a really clever way so
the intelligence and honesty will cancel out my utter moral bankruptcy”. He
also makes a long statement about how his presence was necessary because on
their own the women of Femen are weak and directionless and need a strong male
hand. Clearly these are not the words of a man who expects to endear himself to
a wider audience, so it’s probably not surprising that “leading member” Inna Shevchenko
has <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/talking-to-femen-about-their-shadowy-leader">come
out</a> to say that Svyatski has been out of Femen for a year, they all knew
how awful he was most of the time, and anyway they came up with topless
protests on their own and didn’t need him. Except they sort of did. But they don’t
any more! All is well and feminine in the land of Femen.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The damage has been done, however. In March,
Tunisian Amina Sboui’s topless protest and subsequent arrest provoked a range
of Islamophobic responses from Femen members in various cities: prompting Sboui
herself to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/amina-tyler">publically
leave Femen</a> at the end of August, suggesting that a more specific anarchist
movement might be more her thing. She and others have pointed out the lack of
transparency in the group’s finances, with most members apparently completely
unaware of how the group funds itself. And it’s long been an open secret that
the group selects its members based on their conventional attractiveness. Scouring
both press photographs and the pictures the group takes of themselves reveals
very few muffin tops or stretch marks, and racial diversity is limited to a couple
of shots of light-skinned black women. Sometimes these perfect-bodied women paint
“breast feeding army” onto themselves, to demonstrate how great breasts are
even though most mothers could tell you that post-natal perfect bodies look a
bit different to the pornographic ideal.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/femen%20arrest%20banner%20392042389042398.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="230" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/femen%20arrest%20banner%20392042389042398.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Could I find this scene recreated in any number of demeaning videos on RedTube? Absolutely.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Because the thing about Femen, really, is
that they are trying to “smash the patriarchy” by upholding the pornographic
ideal of women. While writing this article, I spent a very long time refreshing
the Femen website to check out the different banners they have. My favourite is
a beautifully-dishevelled slim naked women glaring sensually at the camera with
white semen-like liquid oozing out of her mouth. This is made feminist by the
fact she is flipping the audience off and “Fickt die Sexindustrie” (fuck the
sex industry) is written over the top of the picture. The “X” in sex is a
swastika, for that extra edgy touch! When they’re not taking these sorts of subversive
selfies, Femen are out on street protests which are designed to attract media
attention by setting up one of two kinds of shots: either straight-up male gaze
objectification shots of hot naked bodies, or images of nearly-naked women
being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men. Now, where else have I
seen nearly-naked women being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men
this summer? Oh, that’s right, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. That feminist
classic.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Nudity and objectification are regularly used
as tools to degrade women, and that makes a movement to reclaim the female body
an incredibly important part of the feminist movement. It also makes it a very
difficult thing to get right. The difference between pictures of nude activists
in newspapers about men with their clothes on, and pictures of nude glamour
models in newspapers about men with their clothes on, is a quite nuanced set of
concepts about intent and power and ownership that make it enormously important
that the work of groups like Femen is done right. If, as the latest allegations
suggest, this work is being done as a result of male desire to manipulate women
into being naked, this all becomes a lot less nuanced and a lot more
straightforwardly awful. That there are women like Sevchenko who do appear to
passionately believe in their organisation’s goals is a step in the right
direction, but if Femen aren’t constantly considering how topless protests fit
in to a wider feminist dialogue involving more than just hardy nubile white
girls, and particularly into the massive grey area that is female nudity and
pornography, then they are failing in their job as anti-patriarchy
provocateurs. And if they have been producing male gaze pornography and images
of women being dominated on the directive of a man who believes that his own
presence is necessary to make the movement happen at all, then the group’s use
of nudity becomes effectively indistinguishable from any other male-mandated
use of women’s bodies. Femen’s message turns from women smashing patriarchy to
patriarchy having a bigoted, self absorbed conversation with itself, using
women’s bodies as notepaper.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">When Robin Thicke turned around and said Blurred
Lines was a feminist manifesto, nobody gave him the time of day- rightfully so,
both because he was already on record saying “<a href="http://icydk.com/2013/07/02/robin-thicke-what-a-pleasure-it-is-to-degrade-a-woman/">what
a pleasure it is to degrade a woman”</a> and because you can’t just add
feminist meaning to any random act that involves women. When people who are in
favour of Page 3 suggest it’s a tool of empowerment because Censorship Is Wrong,
we laugh at them or facepalm, or maybe both if we are feeling particularly
co-ordinated on that day, because that is missing the fundamental point about
what the intention of Page 3 is. If the Stunning Revelations about Victor
Svyatski came at the end of a stunningly successful year for Femen, in which
they challenged pornographic ideals and promoted an inclusive movement and
designed strong, clever protests which made for rallying symbols and furthered
the feminist cause, the information in “Ukraine is not a brothel” would be
shocking and sad but also not insurmountable. But, as with Hugo Schwyzer, the
fact that Femen are not who they say they are is frankly old news. Pessimists
win, the world gets a little sadder, but it’s time to close the door on this
particular group. The movement to reclaim the female body is going to need some
new and better champions.</span></div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-18296097506271937702013-08-22T21:04:00.000+01:002013-08-22T21:04:07.041+01:00Bitesize For Glory<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Here we go!</span></h4>
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Secretly confirming the myth that all girls want to be princesses</h4>
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Because if even rampant feminists like royal fantasies once in a while, then surely that makes it universal to all womankind. Or maybe I just like Princeless because she has the same name as me.</div>
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I've still been busy in the comic world since my last post about it, and one of the things I discovered was this amazing comic, which turns the "princess locked in a tower" trope into a systematic thing and then has one particular princess and her guard dragon escape together, so the princess can disguise herself as a knight and go off to rescue her other six sisters, who are <i>also</i> all locked up around the kingdom. She teams up with a half-dwarf blacksmith who is similarly cool. Oh, and the princess is called Adrienne! Did you notice that? That's really cool.</div>
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The comic is occasionally a <i>little</i> self-conscious about trope busting - notably, there's a scene about bikini armour which is really quite forced (haha! the female smith character never even considered that women could wear full protective armour! haha... wait, what?) and book two sets up a "big mystery" which is pretty obvious within ten pages, although it seems like it's meant to be a long-running thing. But hey, it's all-ages, and it's incredibly good at lampooning misogynistic characters as well as expanding racial diversity beyond the "white people and mythical creatures" dichotomy that fantasy usually relies on. Also there is a great scene about hair management, which is always a winner for me.</div>
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You can check out Princeless some more at its tumblr, <a href="http://princelesscomic.tumblr.com/">here</a>, which includes download links if you go far enough. Princess Adrienne! How cool is that.</div>
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Pronouns for trans people</h4>
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Should be the pronouns the individual requests. If a person says they are a woman, it's common knowledge to even novice english speakers that the correct pronouns are "she", "her" and "her[s]". This does not involve difficult mind-blowing questions about the nature of gender, because pronouns for men and for women are deeply ingrained into our language and it is very simple not-even-trans-101 to learn that trans women are women.</div>
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Now you know this, you can go and despair at the <i>absurd</i> number of news websites who are wrong in their coverage of Chelsea Manning.</div>
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<h4>
Miss Tibet</h4>
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I follow the Tibetan human rights activist Woeser on Twitter, ostensibly to practice my Chinese although really it's for when she puts up interesting stuff like this. I have mixed feelings about this sort of portrayal of Tibet and <i>very</i> mixed feelings about beauty pageants, especially those designed by men for women. Some of the video editing is also unintentionally hilarious, which is unfortunate. But it's still worth watching with a critical eye. And at least the organiser personally asked the Dalai Lama what he thinks of beauty pageants, so that's definitely a great opinion to have. Right?</div>
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Medieval poison rings were totally a thing that existed</h4>
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Hey, you know what, let's play up the poisonous devious women stereotype briefly to point out <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/medieval-poison-ring-bulgaria-14th-century_n_3792771.html?utm_hp_ref=world">how cool this is</a>! Evidence would suggest it was used in Bulgaria by men, to kill other men, making it disappointingly like the vast majority of other weapons in human history. Still. Poison ring!</div>
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<h4>
Doctor Jude Roberts, Porn User</h4>
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You might have recently seen an image doing the rounds of a BBC Newsnight program in which a woman discussing pornography got effectively stripped of her doctorate by some hapless caption people. She wrote about the experience (and more on her stance on porn) for Femusings, and<a href="http://femusings.org/on-pornography-sex-and-being-dr-jude-roberts/"> it's an excellent read.</a></div>
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And... that's a wrap!</h4>
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Yes, dear reader: 30 days, 30 blogs. 29 on here, <a href="http://femusings.org/around-the-world-in-7-femusings/">one exclusively on Femusings</a>. I came, I saw, I wrote a lot of things even when I really didn't want to write anything at all (the tooth thing is still a thing, although the antibiotics are finally starting to work their magic thank goodness). Hopefully many of these things were enlightening for you! Most of them make me pretty happy.</div>
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What's next? Well, there will not be one blog every day again for quite some time. There will probably be no blogs at all here for at least a week whilst I read, recharge, enjoy the bank holiday weekend and hopefully kick this infection once and for all. BUT there will be a second "around the world" piece for Femusings over the weekend, and Stuff I like Sunday will return as a regular fixture from Sunday September 1. Depending on how busy I get and how prolific I remain without being under pressure, bitesize blogging may also become a regular fixture. I quite enjoy it!</div>
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In the long term, this blog is going to remain the major home for all of my discussion of media and culture, and for image- and link-heavy things that I want to do that belong on personal blogs like this. My news and current affairs pieces will be over on Femusings, and I'm not sure yet how much longer I will keep cross posting for - but they'll still exist, they just won't be on this particular website any more!</div>
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Thanks very much for reading (no matter how much or how little you actually read) and watch this space- I'll be back <i>very</i> soon.</div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-59252290898903251552013-08-21T21:34:00.004+01:002013-08-21T21:34:49.803+01:00Men and Laurie Penny and PAIN OW PAIN (30 days of blogging day 29)<div>
Hello world! I'm still on barely-acceptable amounts of pain medication, as well as several days of antibiotics, copious amounts of corsodyl and worst of all a period of enforced sobriety right at the moment when my parents restocked the beer fridge with delicious raspberry cider. I've actually started a couple of proper articles, got a paragraph through them, and then had my face start paining so hard I actually just want to take a pair of scissors to the inside of my mouth and see if stabbing it might make it hurt less. At this point I'm going with "maybe"!</div>
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I am so extraordinarily impressed by anyone who does pain management on a regular basis. I know usually people have more resources than just paracetamol and ibuprofen but still ‒ I consider myself a relatively hardy person and having this for just three days has already left me so behind and up in the air on all the things I have to do. Anybody who copes with something like this for longer- you're incredible. Coping with your body pulling this on you is incredible, doing anything on top of it is superhuman. Wow, you.</div>
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Anyway, this was going to be a lead-in to a bitesize article, but I actually ended up writing something reasonably long about one single topic so I'm seamlessly integrating now. Here is my seamless integration, isn't it great? Oh boy my mouth hurts. It's about half an hour until I can have another painkiller.</div>
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So Laurie Penny's <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/laurie-penny/men-sexism">article about men</a> has been doing the rounds on my Facebook, and it's got me thinking about <i>dudes </i>again. I know, lame right? If you haven't read that article, go and do so, because it's a thought-provoking read both for its content (which I pretty much agree with) and for its tactics. The discourse has been concentrating so much on the minds of men who <i>do</i> seem to hate women recently, it seems like a good time to point out that most individual men don't hate women (although the ones that tell you they're good to women because they have sisters are <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/08/15/even_little_kids_have_a_wage_gap/">probably lying</a>). But it's also important to figure out how to reconcile the fact that, yes, most men are good people who want equality with the fact that no, we don't actually have equality and few people even realise what it would look like and derailing the few strands of discussion we have going really doesn't help anyone.<div>
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So enter Laurie Penny, to point out that there's a difference between woman hating individuals and a woman hating culture, and we accept that most men are not the former but all belong to the latter, whether they like it or not, and it's quite right to be angry about that but not right to direct this anger at women. So far so good, although more so than with any other feminist article, for the love of god do not read the comments here. Based on what I've seen around though, this article doesn't have <i>quite</i> the universally enlightening effect that you might have hoped.</div>
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What has been missing from the discussions I've seen so far (and hey, I have a paragraph, but OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE PLEASE STOP HURTING AHH WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE YOU STOP I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CLOSE THIS WINDOW JUST ARGH NO OW OW OW you get the point) is an understanding of the difference between discrimination and sexism, and about how we can talk about the inequalities <i>men </i>see in a way that helps the general equality debate. Because, yes, a lot of the time those discussions are about how men are seen when caring for children, or worrying about being seen to be a bad person when you don't feel like you've done any of the things you're being accused of, or why nobody seems to care that there are women-only sports in the olympics but not men-only ones, isn't that sexism too? Sometimes this sort of stuff is derailing can't-win nonsense from uninteresting weirdos, but more often it's meant genuinely, and it's unfortunate that the existence of the former can make us a lot less amenable to dealing with the latter.</div>
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Discrimination and sexism are two different things, because sexism requires a power structure. This does rely on a bit more of an academic definition of sexism than is often understood, but at heart it's a simple point and it's one that bears repeating again and again and again when we talk about men in feminism. Men <i>do </i>deal with discrimination for being men, sometimes - and sometimes, the big example being with fathers, it's in very big, obvious areas of their lives! But these discriminatory experiences don't actually harm the overall superiority of men in society, and here's the important bit: they're usually because men are trying to do something feminine, and getting ridiculed for it. They face discrimination because being coded feminine is considered inherently negative for men, and therefore doing one of the <i>relatively few </i>femimine coded activities is dubious at best, taboo at worst.</div>
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Penny's article is a powerful argument for the difference between cultures and individuals which is important in underpinning why feminist discourse needs to discuss generalisations about systemic sexism without having every decent man have to individually note they are an exception. Next up I hope is the powerful argument about why if men want to tackle this inequality (as most do, because as much as we are driven to despair by them sometimes, <i>most men do believe in equality and want it to be true in the world they live in</i>) the way to start tearing down barriers for both women and men is to confront why we devalue femininity so much.</div>
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It's the old "sexism hurts men too!" chestnut in a different form, I know. I'm not saying we hand over space to endless postulating about why men are portrayed as stupid in adverts or what would happen if the draft came back. But if talking about feminine-coded activities is the gateway drug to getting men to confront the systemic sexism which makes those activities "wrong" for men, then fine, I'll have that conversation as many times as I can stomach.</div>
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This is not the powerful argument article. Not yet. Maybe later. Time for mouthwash.</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-23359891093623989112013-08-20T21:48:00.003+01:002013-08-20T21:48:45.873+01:00Is this the end for our intrepid heroine?It's day twenty eight! That's four full weeks of blogging, possibly more than anybody else in the entire universe has ever done before. If there were gold medals for blogs, I would be tearing down this analogy's equivalent to a track right now, the end in sight, knowing I was about to win the big prize and everything was going to be OK. And yet! In the final lap, disaster! Sprained ankle! Broken leg (although that didn't stop that olympic relay runner)! Or in this specific case, extreme chronic pain from a wisdom tooth that's been completely fine for about three years and has suddenly decided it hates the world!<br />
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(This is totally me pandering to the people who get to this blog by Googling 'dentist Drilling in "my mouth" '. Ok the one person. Look, I'm a useful blog for all your dental needs, one person! Come back soon!)<br />
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Anyway, I am literally sitting here chewing a garlic clove.Which genuinely works by the way, although it works best in combination with constant barely-within-instructed-dose cocktails of ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel, but no, I can testify that on its own, the ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel does not stop the constant shooting pains from throat to ear, but putting raw garlic in your mouth at least makes you question what hurts most. This is the most distractingly, unpleasantly painful thing to happen to me since I got a cough for half a year and strained my intercostal muscles (not recommended). There are lots of pains that I can just power through but this is really not turning out to be one of them.<br />
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I'm pulling up. I'm staggering on. The commentators are confused and possibly holding back the tears as the culmination of my journey moves from triumph to heartbreak.<br />
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Or something like that. I don't even know, I think these barely-within-instructed-dose drugs are doing things to my head that aren't just (aren't even) "taking away pain". <a href="http://femusings.org/on-pornography-sex-and-being-dr-jude-roberts/">Go and read this thing by Dr. Jude Roberts, Porn User</a> while I find some more effective garden herbs to chew. See you tomorrow.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-87679234471189041362013-08-19T22:45:00.000+01:002013-08-19T22:45:26.622+01:00You've probably never heard of her.As we come into the final week of Blog Every Day, I've had some more time to reflect on the impact it's had on the past few weeks. There's been some really great effects, like making 26-and-counting new pieces of writing in one form or another. There's also been some things that haven't changed, like my conviction that I don't ever have any good ideas for writing ‒ objectively, I'm genuinely not a prolific question-generator but an "oh, there's one idea, looks good enough, let's go with it" type of person", but evidence would suggest I do come up with <i>some</i> interesting things to talk about ‒ and some things that have actually been pretty rubbish. Foremost among the rubbish things has been the imbalance between the new data collections and <i>potential </i>information I'm taking in, and the amount of time I have to actually sit down with some of the stuff I've collected and really get to grips with it. I miss reading things that aren't on seven columns of Twitter! <div>
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There's a similar trade-off with living at home. On the one hand, I have already gushed about how amazing my living space currently is, especially compared to the cupboard dorm I was living in in China. On the other hand, I have to get up reasonably early each morning to make sure my dog doesn't eat the post. It's all one big, exciting trade-off. The most exciting thing about being at home, of course, is having a telly that gets english channels and the most exciting thing on that telly is the wonderful afternoon quiz show Pointless.</div>
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A ridiculous number of these appear to be uploaded to Youtube, so if you like you can discover the magic for yourself, but basically the premise is this: four teams have to give answers to questions in different categories: either by naming something that fulfils a certain criteria (Matt Damon films, eponymous Beatrix Potter characters, nationalities that end in -ian) or by answering something from a set of themed questions. The catch is that these questions have all been asked to 100 hapless bystanders somewhere in the country before the show, and each answer has a score based on the number of bystanders who answered it right. The aim is to score as low as possible, which you do by giving answers that most of the 100 people didn't know. An answer that <i>none</i> of the 100 people knew is a Pointless answer, both because you got no points and because it is likely to be a very obscure piece of knowledge that you had no use for before coming onto a quiz show. It's great because sometimes they ask questions in categories where I can't possibly see how anybody could get <i>anything</i> wrong (like how could you not name every male Disney hero, who <i>doesn't</i> know what the Beast's real name is in this day and age, come on) and I feel very clever, and also because despite both being male, the presenters have some pretty awesome banter.</div>
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Therefore, in honour of my favourite daytime TV show, and of things I desperately want to read more about, let's play a Pointless inspired game! I am going to show you five pictures of different awesome women, and you are going to see which ones you can recognise. I haven't gone to the lengths of asking 100 people to tell me if they know them because if I had time to do that, I'd just read the damn books I want instead. But here goes:</div>
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Number 1: <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Cecilia_Helena_Payne_Gaposchkin_(1900-1979)_(2).jpg/358px-Cecilia_Helena_Payne_Gaposchkin_(1900-1979)_(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Cecilia_Helena_Payne_Gaposchkin_(1900-1979)_(2).jpg/358px-Cecilia_Helena_Payne_Gaposchkin_(1900-1979)_(2).jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I may be deliberately choosing pictures of women who look like they will take no shit from anyone. Which is... ironic.<br /></td></tr>
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Number 2:</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/9/4/53315694.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/9/4/53315694.jpg" width="273" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Occupation should be easy here at least...</td></tr>
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Number 3:<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://31.media.tumblr.com/16b851c7a3105bc687f79440824d27e6/tumblr_mmy1lvBg8Z1qkifsro1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="277" src="http://31.media.tumblr.com/16b851c7a3105bc687f79440824d27e6/tumblr_mmy1lvBg8Z1qkifsro1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Too easy again!</td></tr>
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Number 4:<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://documentarywriting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Nellie-Bly-around-1880_2-600x3991.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://documentarywriting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Nellie-Bly-around-1880_2-600x3991.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">... yeah.</td></tr>
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And finally, number 5:<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQD3USsTdaQQorLEus6PdkWvDGJDtk9mCEP6b1wKAUtdfnYEMNC" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQD3USsTdaQQorLEus6PdkWvDGJDtk9mCEP6b1wKAUtdfnYEMNC" width="321" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This one's technically the easiest but I've made it harder by choosing another "not taking your shit" picture.</td></tr>
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If we were playing the gameshow, this is the point where pairs of contestants would be looking at each other in horror, wondering why they are trapped with such an awful subject as "awesome women" (to be fair it is a <i>little</i> broad). If you don't guess right, you score<i> the maximum 100 points</i> which as we can all agree would be terrible for everyone involved, because TV quiz shows are very serious business. Anyway, think for a while about who you know out of those women, and how many other people you think </div>
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Alright. Thought enough? Let's go through the board, as they say. Up there are the top in Number 1 is Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, who casually formulated the theory that the majority of the universe was made of hydrogen and helium in her doctorate thesis. Second is Mae Jemison, epic physicist who was the first African-American woman astronaut and the first real astronaut to also appear in Star Trek. Third is Stephanie Kwolek, who is holding kevlar in that picture because guess what, she invented it. Fourth, Nellie Bly, or Elizabeth Jane Cochran as she was secretly known to non-readers, who faked insanity to undertake one of the first pieces of investigative journalism from a women's mental institution in 1887 (she was trying to avoid being forced to write the "culture" section). And last is the "easy" one, Ada Lovelace, who effectively invented computer programming about a century before computers actually came about. How did you do at home?</div>
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I'm being a little unfair, because scientists of both genders are rarely recognisable visually unless they're either a bit of a celebrity like Professor Brian Cox. But even without making you guess from photos, how many of those women did you actually know about before that paragraph? My guess is "not five". Cecelia Payne-Gaposckin is almost definitely a "pointless" answer, despite the fact that she figured out the composition of 75% of the universe in her PhD thesis. How many soldiers and police officers (and skiiers!) running (or skiing) around in their kevlar know that they owe this innovation in their safety (or skiing speed (or in the case of Scandinavia, both)) to a <i>mere woman</i>? And this is not even scratching the surface of the historical women I wanted to talk about here. Rosalind Franklin, whose work was integral to the understanding of DNA, is held up as the prime example of a woman who was screwed over and shoved aside by the men she was working with. Gertrude Bell, whose new biography is sitting on my Kindle <i>begging</i> to be read, spent decades in British colonial politics in the 19th century ‒ a very dodgy area to be celebrating, so don't think for a minute I am, but she spent that time fighting for independent Arab countries during the colonial period and eventually helped to install Hashemite dynasties in Iraq and Jordan, which was politically quite momentous*. Despite this, you're much more likely to have heard of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, and who discovered nuclear fission? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner">Not just Otto Hahn.</a></div>
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These women are all anything but pointless. They all did incredible things that change the ways we live in ways both big and small. But we completely overlook most of them when we look back at history, in favour of thinking that history is a men's game. Women have been adding to the stock of human knowledge, often against huge personal odds, for as long as human beings have been around, and we've been casually taking that knowledge and forgetting where it came from for just as long. And then people look back at the historical record and have the gall to suggest that because they don't "see" women, there must be something particular about men which just makes them naturally <i>better</i> at all these things. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking it's a particular problem of the current age that the best self-publicists win out over the most talented people in a lot of fields, but really this has been going on for quite some time. And it's much easier to self-publicise, or to get other people to like you, when they're not instead spending all their time suggesting you are worthless and out of place.</div>
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From Friday onwards, I get a bit of a break from extreme writing, and whilst I certainly won't be shutting up after that, I'm very much looking forward to having some time to actually read and reflect on some of the things I've collected about these women, and a million other topics, in the last month. Not just because I'm a rabid feminist who only thinks women are interesting (although that becomes more true every day, to be honest), or because I'm about to write a novel involving historic women scientists (FACT, so pass on any and all others that cross your mind if you are an expert on this topic because chances are I only know a fraction of what I should still!). Mostly, because these are not pointless people, and shouldn't be in any sense of the word.</div>
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*I should also point out that she was a member of the anti-suffrage league because too many women thought they belonged in the kitchen and bedroom! and shouldn't be in politics! So with that and the whole colonial figure thing I'm not actually suggesting she is any kind of feminist hero, just that she's a woman who did stuff in history that you don't know about. Which is the kind of person I am talking about here.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-35767092342334855902013-08-18T21:06:00.002+01:002013-08-18T21:06:56.078+01:00Stuff I like Sunday: Buffy the Vampire Slayer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Oh yeah, the big one. The holy grail. The show that went on in the late 1990s where a small blonde high school girl kicked evil in the arse repeatedly while dealing with serious high school things, and then grew up and dropped out of college and had to deal with even more serious <i>life</i> things, but still all the arses needed kicking all the time and that was no problem because hey, she's the Slayer! Nothing wrong or weird about that.<br />
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I could actually make this entire blog post just videos interspersed with overlong gushy sentences.<br />
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But no, let's do some writing! I first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1998, back when I was still a young thing who should probably not have been watching violent shows aimed at teenagers (although to put it in perspective, my brother's favourite films growing up were Starship Troopers and Predator...) I was completely hooked, downloaded all the episodes onto VHS when Fox Australia did their whole season marathons (Slayerfest!) and spent a lot of the next few years writing endless juvenile stories about myself as the slayer, except of demonic frogs rather than vampires.<br />
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There were a few things I thought were weird about the show when I was nine. I thought it was strange that even though Buffy and Angel were clearly meant to be together forever, he turned evil in Season 2, wouldn't really talk to her in Season 3 and then left altogether to do his own crazy Angel thing. What's with that? Similarly, I didn't really like Spike coming back without Drusilla in Season 4, especially as it ruined the symmetry- Spike and Drusilla are supposed to be one entity! One Big Bad! You can just imagine how I felt about the Troika in Season 6. On many levels. I also had friends at school who thought it was very unrealistic that Willow would give up places at top universities in order to go to UC Sunnydale, because obviously you go to the academic best university that you are given a place at with no consideration for other factors, right?<br />
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It did not seem at all weird to me at the time that this would be a female-fronted show where women characters in general are seen as far more powerful and in touch than the men around them. Likewise, it didn't seem weird ‒ once I'd accepted the idea that characters can have more than one romance in their lifetimes ‒ that Willow would fall in love with Tara and be a lesbian from that point onwards. To be fair it also didn't seem weird that Buffy's entire life was defined by antagonisms with male authority figures (yes, and her Mum, that's true) but hey. It wasn't perfect, but there's nothing else that's ever been like it.<br />
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Proof that Buffy was better than everything that came after, if you ever needed it:<br />
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I actually thought I had much more to say about Buffy - after all, it's one of the only shows I know of with its own dedicated journal, <a href="http://slayageonline.com/">Slayage</a> - but actually I'm going to leave this here, if only to avoid looking up more amazing videos. This was one of the very best shows for representation of women, and it ended ten years ago, and there's been nothing quite like it since. Why is that? Hmm.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-66248043213303046682013-08-16T22:43:00.002+01:002013-08-16T22:43:30.724+01:00How does one get from quantum mechanics to feminism?I ask you. In all seriousness.<br />
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Today, I did a lot of things. I played on my Iphone, because fictional high schools still don't run themselves and neither do fictional tower blocks or South American airlines. I hope that my audience understands that even though I didn't write "fictional" before that last one, I am not yet in charge of a real South American airline, but this is excellent practice because it has taken me from only knowing one north Brazilian city (Manaus, with a squiggly maybe?) to knowing at least four. My favourite is Belem, because it sounds like a Pokemon. In between this very important airline management, I did job search stuff, because I am legally obliged to do that and actually do secretly really want a job, as great as this all freeblogging all the time thing is. I also spent a really long time doing my first week of quantum mechanics for UC Berkeley.<br />
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I have brought up the quantum mechanics (and its precursor, Learning Linear Algebra for Fun) a couple of times, but it has been pretty much irrelevant most of the time. And it still is. Basically, upon arriving home, I decided that my life would probably sort itself out without me pushing it and therefore the best thing for me to do would be to just find things to do whilst the mystical universal forces work their magic. I also became briefly obsessed with Skills with the capital S, which any chronic self-undervaluer will know means "literally all the things that I can't do yet." Being a young person and a woman and also maintaining a constant conviction that the things life has taught you so far make you worthy of getting paid for your labour are three facts that are difficult to balance in this modern world. Luckily, it's summer, and challenges make me take on ridiculous projects rather than curling up into a ball and sleeping!<br />
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So, along with the birth of 30 days of blog, there was a concurrent line of thought: "how do I prove to <strike>myself/</strike> <strike>the world</strike> /<strike>every condescending scientist and mansplainer who has ever passed unwanted judgement on my life and abilities</strike> POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS (ugh) that I am truly an updated renaissance woman, capable of doing pretty much anything I set my mind to and also science is not so hard, look!" The answer was quantum physics on EdX. I enrolled, noticing that they wanted something called linear algebra as a prerequisite skill set. "no problem," I said, "of course I can do things with numbers in a line"! Then I actually looked at the diagnostic test and re-remembered that there are things called vectors which I have not seen since I was 18 years old, and also I only ever did one Maths A-level (foreigners: there are two) so all the linear algebra I had actually come across was "this is a vector, add it to another vector, also scalar multiplication, OK bye!"<br />
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Oh what a magical world of numbers ensued. Sort of. I got partway through the preparation and then got bored and distracted by things are less formula heavy and, in most cases, more edible. Then the course completely took me by surprise by starting last week. I had a single week to get up to speed on enough algebra and figure out everything there was to know about qubits.<br />
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Which I did. With two days to spare. 100% in homework one, YEAH. There were some hairy moments whilst my brain rediscovered the concept of radeons, and I'm still dreading the point when e comes in ‒ Euclid, who are you and why was the time I learned your constant's rules so long ago? ‒ but otherwise I am down with qubits <i>and</i> the double slit experiment and ready for whatever else quantum physics decides to throw at my strong sexy artist brain.<br />
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I'm still pretty sure none of this has anything to do with my original thoughts in taking the course though. Is any employer going to look at my CV, go "oh I see you passed a free online university course in quantum physics", and realise I am exactly the candidate they have been looking for all this time? Sort of unlikely ‒ although if this does sound like your organisation, and you work somewhere in either public policy or the non-profit sector, and you have a job... you know where I am. Seriously! In lieu of actual prospects, however, I'll have to rely on my innate love of learning and, more importantly, the sense of extreme satisfaction that comes from setting yourself an impossible challenge and then <i>winning</i>. Everything is important if it helps reinforce your ridiculous internalised ideas about success and worthiness!<br />
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What of our above question? What does any of this have to do with this blog's actual topic. Well, I googled "feminist quantum physics", and it is totally a thing that people are trying to make happen. Like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad">this lady!</a> I have no idea what to make of this theory and I have a reading list that is much too long and interesting to put her on it, but hey! Maybe one day, this whole linear algebra and quantum mechanics business will pave the way for my great feminist insight of the century. A girl can dream.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-33179242328805342192013-08-15T22:22:00.000+01:002013-08-15T22:22:14.470+01:00The third Thursday of AugustIt's that day of the year again! Yep, it's the day when 300,000 teenagers across the UK all open an envelope and then jump up and down in the air while photographers from every newspaper from the Times to the St. Neots Town Crier look on with glee. A-levels! There are some letters involved too, and often the small matter of your entire future, although it sounds like they've made clearing not quite as awful for everyone above ABB which is something. Gosh, hello non-English viewers, I promise I will start making sense again soon!<br />
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It's been a good few years since people first pointed out the obsession newspapers have with finding a particular type of student to go in their A level coverage. Young, hot, female, beautifully straightened and volumised hair (is volumising what kids do to hair these days? My hairstyling amounts to "wash, tie up, leave to dry, untie, CURLY BOUNCY HAIR!, dramatic mess, oh well". The newspaper hair is nicer), wearing some of that lovely low-cut "business casual" that sixth formers are into ‒ ideally with a twin, although hot groups of successful friends are also acceptable. Pose is most often elated leaping, although tears of joy and hugging girlfriends are also hot favourites. Boys are only allowed either as part of a twin set (provided they are sufficiently tall and fit) or if they have some kind of adversity story attached to them. Rules are relaxed for local newspapers which probably have less leeway to just go to every girls school in the country taking these photos. Because otherwise, you would think that A-levels are just the exam for girls school alumni who are conveniently off to a wedding reception in the afternoon and had to doll up specially.<br />
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I'm probably jealous, because I never got an excited leap, although I did get my picture in the <a href="http://www.huntspost.co.uk/news/latest-news/a_level_results_reaction_from_huntingdonshire_s_schools_1_2336189">Hunts Post</a> ‒ that link is their offering from this year though, not me. There's a picture of me right there in the corner, go look at that if you must! Anyway, my school had a record year of Oxbridge acceptances ‒ the record was 4, I did not go to <i>that</i> kind of school ‒ and three of the four of us who got in had to line up on a wall and wait around for the fourth, until it became clear that she was avoiding coming in when other people were around so we had to take the photo anyway while sitting on a wall and pretending we didn't mind having our time wasted. This was also while I was trying to work out why OCR had casually just not graded an entire exam, which hadn't affected my overall situation but was causing problems for friends who had also sat it, and which was also just not a nice things for them to do. Thanks for that OCR. Still waiting for my apology. The point of this whole silly story is that I was not a particularly attractive 18 year old, and the photo included the ridiculous good-at-everything sporty boy, so actually out there in the records for 2007 is a "weird looking girl partially hidden by conventionally attractive boy" photo which is highly subversive and proves that I was already destined for great things. This year I doubt we would have made it. Competition for hot exam photo girls is just too high.<br />
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The girls who are photographed to go into newspapers have done nothing wrong of course. They are great, and I admire everything about them, including their grades, their volumised hair, their excellent fashion sense at 18, what is not to love. Incidentally I am not including any pictures in this entry both because I am exceptionally lazy today and because I would be utterly horrified if I were an 18-year-old girl and I discovered my picture being used to prove some point on an angry shouty hairy twentysomething feminist blog, I would be <i>mortified </i>and I don't want to subject anyone else to that. But <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2394239/A-Level-exam-results-Record-number-students-accepted-university-courses.html">here</a> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/univer">are </a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/aug/15/a-level-results-fall-girls-top-marks">some </a><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/uk-news-in-pictures-8446454.html?action=gallery&ino=1&autoplay=true">links </a>if you need to go find the stories for yourself. You will note that there is a "gender gap" being reported on which you might think I'd want to talk about! But you'd be wrong because talking about a gender gap aggregated across all subjects for one year of results sounds like a very stupid thing to talk about. What was this paragraph going to be about. I forget.<br />
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We have known for years that this (and also the RISE! and now the FALL! of the GRADES! Like the sea and also it was much harder in my day, none of this A* nonsense) has been the favourite tactic of newspapers all over the country. They know we know. I am pretty sure that the Guardian has had a HILARIOUS self-aware feature at some point or another. But they keep doing it, for much the same reason as the Sun keeps printing women in small knickers every day and the Telegraph peppered their "hot weather" coverage with pictures of girls sunbathing topless in London parks. Because it <i>sells</i> and if they know and we know and it's all just in good fun and also look, they're so happy! Aren't we happy for them?<br />
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At a time when we should be most impressed with these young women for passing one of the first big milestones in their lives (well, GCSEs, but GCSEs are just illustrated with pictures of kids in school uniforms sitting at identical desks, because they are only 16, so less of a problem there), what newspapers are actually doing is reinforcing the fact that their only value is visual. The "beautiful girl gets A levels" picture is so cliched now that it doesn't actually add to our understanding of a story, and the fact that stories are revolving around this suspiciously underresearched gender gap actually <i>detracts </i>from the results of the individual girls by suggesting they're not representative. Yes, that hot girl did well, but <i>so did more boys</i>! What do you say to that, silly liberal female-intelligence theorists?<br />
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Women as decoration starts young, pervades everywhere and doesn't go away. Getting photogenic teens into your A level shoots isn't a sexist act on its own, but placed into a context where so few women don't write the news or appear in it on our own terms, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/15/women-newspapers-front-pages">where we are eye candy or victims</a> (and as the latter, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fwomen%2Fwomens-life%2F10218585%2FWhy-are-black-female-victims-seemingly-invisible.html&ei=QEQNUqnLO8io0AWCl4CABA&usg=AFQjCNHsDuKTf25K-6cWL4Mlc--4knCg2w&sig2=it0LMQGBntMXG7wHzgPsoA&bvm=bv.50768961,d.d2k">always white</a>), it's just one more microaggression in the endless torrent which newspapers in particular seem to throw at us every day. The assumption that women can be decoration is so pervasive that when the Irish Sun decided to drop topless models in favour of "clothed glamour" shots, this was celebrated as a victory instead of with scepticism and disdain. Oh, you've covered up the boobs on your blatant objectification page! Well clearly as a woman my only problem there was seeing boobs (I always put my bra on in the dark and never look down when wearing a low cut dress), so now you have completely fixed that. Excellent, carry on sirs.<br />
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Ah, A level girls, I'm sorry. I'm sorry your pictures in the paper are tainted with this nonsense, and that you can't enjoy being fit and jumping around without it being part of the systematic oppression of your gender. That really sucks for you. And now you're about to go to universities where lad culture is getting scarier, rape is not getting a whole lot better, and I don't fancy your chances of a job at the end unless something changes pretty dramatically in the next three years. The answer? Join WomCam, or your women's student union, or your feminist society. If there is not one, start one (message me about if you want, I'd totally help). Learn about yourself and become one with the movement and achieve a state of awesome sisterhood and then come join us! It'll be worth it. And when you do, you can let me know how you do that to your hair. I'm always so impressed.<br />
<br />Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-60742179715271146162013-08-14T19:51:00.003+01:002013-08-14T19:51:55.860+01:00Medical leave a.k.a. other places to go entertain yourself (30 days of blogging day 22)Oh my god. So today somebody stuck a drill in my mouth. Luckily, that somebody was a dentist, this is not a preamble to a story about some kind of horrible DIY accident, but it means that I am now feeling tragic and only imbibing sustenance through a straw (well, not quite, but chewing is difficult and cold ice cream is RIGHT out this evening *tragedy*). Also the new edition of Bitch Magazine came out and I spent all today doing homework for online university courses so... do I really have to blog today? Really? <i>really</i>? Let's call the whole thing off and come back tomorrow OK.<br />
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... no, alas, we've come too far for that. So this is still an entry, of more than one paragraph, because aching teeth and the persistent taste of blood are not a good enough reason to fail. Instead, here's the deal: I will try to make you go away by giving you links to all the things around the internet that are more interesting than being here listening to me whine about tooth pain.*<br />
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<b>Bitch Magazine got a new issue today!: </b>One of the best dead-tree-optimised feminist reads out there, Bitch is a "feminist response to pop culture". I'm a donor (a B-Hive member!) so I get all their exciting new stuff delivered in dead-tree-optimised PDF right to my inbox. The latest issue is "Grey" and there are some articles from it which are also up on the <a href="http://www.bitchmagazine.org/">website</a>.<br />
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<b>Improve your mind, academia style: </b>I'm currently signed up to what definitely qualifies as Too Many online university courses from both <a href="https://www.coursera.org/">Coursera</a> and <a href="https://courses.edx.org/">EdX</a> and I am enjoying all the things that have started (i.e. "The Modern and the Postmodern" and also a course on quantum mechanics which I am almost certainly going to fail). It's all free and though I am antisocial on both websites, you can also meet likeminded study people from all over the world if you choose :o<br />
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<b>If you only follow one China blog: </b>Make it <a href="http://offbeatchina.tumblr.com/">this one</a>. I am assuming that if you only want to follow one China blog, you can probably do without the heavy political or sociological stuff and can just skip to the fun, interesting pictures of slightly insane things that have happened in the world's biggest country. Off Beat China delivers in spades. One of the best bits of my Tumblr feed.<br />
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<b>I would prefer to be enraged over the infuriating state of men: </b>In that case, I recommend <a href="http://mansplained.tumblr.com/">Mansplaining</a> or <a href="http://fatuglyorslutty.com/">Fat, Ugly or Slutty</a> for some timeless examples of dudebro charm in action.<br />
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<b>Really stupid things you can do on your iPhone: </b>So I, er, started playing <a href="http://www.highschoolstory.com/">High School Story.</a> It's like a cliched teen drama mixed with what I sort of imagine the Smurfs is about having not watched the Smurfs. Everybody has different talents that they use to work together and achieve goals and there is no in school conflict or geeky kids getting beaten up except in inter-school rivalries (which are obviously fine). I am just up to the part of the game where you start endlessly hooking people up in random bisexual combinations. My favourite students are my ginger-and-pink haired asian runner girl, and my weirdly cheesy looking blonde student government boy who literally spends all his time standing in front of the same building canvassing everyone who walks by. Is this a good use of my time? No!<br />
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<b>Ninja Ropes? </b><a href="http://www.sarkscape.com/nrx2/">Ninja Ropes!</a><br />
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<b>The best browser game you'll ever play: </b>Is <a href="http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/">a dark room.</a> Keep stoking that fire!<br />
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And if all that fails, you could always go back to places you already know I like, like Femusings and Twitter, both of which are conveniently linked over to the right.<br />
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That's it. Still here? Go away. Tomorrow will be more. Ow my mouth hurts. Sadface.<br />
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*My dentist today was great tough. Really insistent that I shouldn't have to put up with any pain whatsoever whilst actually having bits of my tooth drilled out (super old filling, possibly the third repair, apparently the tooth itself doesn't... produce... minerals? So the fillings all come away horribly, blah blah how exciting my mouth is a warzone but at least they're all still there, even the wise ones, excellent). So none of this is her fault, it is the abstract fault of my mouth. Also I sort of prefer the pain and weird taste to the effects of the anaesthetic, which caused me to dribble all over myself on the way home.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-30730203484677036212013-08-13T17:12:00.001+01:002013-08-14T08:20:46.913+01:00Shouting back vs. shutting up: the lost art of listening(This post can also be read as an article on <a href="http://femusings.org/shouting-back-the-lost-art-of-listening/">Femusings</a>)<br />
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This morning, I joined the ranks of the superconnected, and purchased my first smartphone. To be exact, it is an IPhone 4S, my first <i>ever</i> Apple product, and it is forcing me to learn all sorts of new technology skills. I consider myself pretty computer savvy ‒ for example, I lost track of the number of classmates' theses I helped format because I actually understand the logistics of Microsoft Word's formatting codes and systems, which apparently is not a common skill ‒ but over the past few years I've sort of revelled in being utterly lost as soon as anybody hands me a fancy phone. What is this? Why did it just turn itself off? Why aren't these keys thumb sized, even though they expect me to type with my thumbs? Can it tell when I turn it sideways? Why do you have all these silly games? Why are the birds angry and what could it possibly have to do with me?<br />
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The decision to join the world of smartphones happened for two reasons, First, because I can't actually use a Tesco PAYG Motorola Razr from 2005 for the rest of my life, no matter how much I may want to. Second, because I am now at that stage of internet dependence where actually, the ability to access e-mails and twitter whilst not sitting behind my laptop has started to sound not just good but... a bit necessary. Avoiding a smartphone upgrade because you don't want to feel like that about your Twitter feed is sort of redundant when you already do.<br />
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And yeah, it is kind of about Twitter (I know, I know, I said no more writing about Twitter! But this is a important I promise). I've upgraded to Tweetdeck and now I've upgraded to Twitter everywhere, and now my entire purpose feels like it is based around building Brand Adrienne for the world to see. So far only 115 people have actually followed Brand Adrienne, and more than one is a personification of a library building which doesn't actually tweet any more, so even if I was not being utterly sarcastic about the concept of Brand Adrienne, it's not been too successful so far. But I keep trying to be interesting, partially because interacting with strangers on social media is actually a pretty difficult skill for me and I'd like to develop it, and partially because it sort of feels like I'm supposed to. Because I want to use Twitter, and that's what I should do on Twitter, right? Tweet, follow, follow back, grow those numbers. Platforms, reach, networking. Other. Words. Like those. Etcetera.<br />
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Except when people actually ask me in person why I've started spending so much time on that website, I never respond with "oh well I'm slowly making some arbitrary numbers bigger and it makes me feel like a more important person", even if that is a little bit true sometimes.* What I usually say is "ah, when I am on Twitter I read so much great stuff that I never read when I'm not following it!" This is true. If you set it up right, Twitter can be the most <i>amazing</i> news aggregator. Why check news websites individually when you can get the right 100 other people to check them for you? Not to mention getting access to blogs and other less well-known opinion sources that are generally much more interesting than any newspaper-approved comment section. When I read from Twitter, I feel like I have become a generally better-informed person than when I'm obsessing over academic texts or browsing the Guardian every morning.<br />
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Two put the above two paragraphs more simply, I can use Twitter for two purposes: I can speak, or I can listen. I am a little biased in that, strange as it may seem for somebody who writes thousands of words on a daily basis, I actually tend to be better at listening than speaking. This is because I am very quick to convince myself that I don't have anything useful to say about a given issue, and that if I do want to speak I should do it quietly, in my own space, to myself and not expect anybody to care. This is a state of mind that modern feminism is pretty vocal in opposing: like Sheryl Sandberg's comments about how <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Companies/vaIn9vN1RC5hD5tGrekLoK/The-words-have-it-all-problematic-for-women-Facebo">"bossy" girls should be celebrated</a>, like the Women's Room, like #shoutingback as a response to abuse. Women are silenced in patriarchy, and feminism fights patriarchy, so it's logical that a big part of the movement is about encouraging women to find a voice.<br />
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Except for some inexplicable reason, we expect it to be just that: "a" voice. One voice, singular. An assumption that if all the women of the world could speak, they would be talking about the same problems, and expect the same solutions. When the "mainstream" visible feminists have differences of opinion, it's treated like it's the end of the world, or a terrible reflection of the terrible state of our terrible movement. It's the same picture of baying crazed infighting women that the anti-suffragette movement used for decades to explain why women should not be within the political system. And when I see worries about "solidarity" in feminism ‒ why attack Caitlin Moran over Twitter Silence? Why get mad at online editors for letting a known abuser use their platforms when they were secretly being manipulated too? Why is #solidarityisforwhitewomen attacking me personally, I haven't done anything wrong! What about the movement? ‒ I see a lot of women who seem to refuse to accept that the "a voice" myth of feminism doesn't exist, and is silencing a lot of very important debates.<br />
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When I think about solidarity, three things come to mind. The most basic is "people I want to give support to"; I would add to that "not doing shitty things that hurt others just because they are convenient to me", because solidarity is a state and a process, not just one action that you do and then tick off your list for the day. You have to do a bit more than just tweet "poor you :( hugs xoxo" every time a feminist internet celebrity friend has a bad day. Even more than that, "not hurting others" means learning about more than just the bad days of your feminist internet celebrities‒ it means actively seeking knowledge about how women you don't even know are affected by your actions and behaviour, and, yes, your prejudices. It means knowing what a racist microaggression is so that you can combat them in your own behaviour, it means learning about how trans women and trans* people experience violence and discrimination and adding that to our knowledge bank about VAWG instead of making snide remarks about men in dresses. It means, in a word, accepting voices, not "a" voice. It means that the women out there who disagree vehemently with your feminist priorities and still dare to call themselves feminists<i> have just as much right to call themselves that as you do</i>, as long as their ideology is about achieving equality for women (and here I do mean all women, so <a href="http://everydaywhorephobia.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/swerfsterfs-the-westboro-baptist-church-of-feminism/">TERFs</a> are still not really feminists.) It's alarming how many feminists see themselves as receiving abuse from above <i>and</i> below, as if "shouting back" at women who are telling you your feminism is incomplete or offensive is as noble an act as "shouting back" at waves of misogynist abusers. If a woman tells you your feminism is offensive to her, you are a pretty rubbish feminist if you think that is something that can be dismissed offhand, no matter how wrong you think she is.<br />
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As somebody who struggles constantly with the legitimacy of her own voice, I'm grateful to feminism for giving me the message to speak out against sexism, and against systematic discrimination against me as a woman. But I do wish that feminism taught feminists ‒ particularly white feminists, although almost all of us have our privileges in some form or another ‒ how to listen as well as speaking up, and how to figure out the difference between listening and silencing. Saying "this woman has experiences of womanhood that are fundamentally shaped by her skin colour/sexuality/gender presentation/disability as well as just being a woman, and they are different to you, white straight able cis-feminist" is a call to listen, and actively seeking out and promoting these marginalised voices is <i>not</i> silencing, because the majority voice already has more than enough people repeating its message (an ironic thing to say for a white girl blogger with delusions of Twitter grandeur. But I'm young and stupid enough to believe I can find my niche <i>and</i> maintain my integrity about this, because it's a pretty basic belief for me).<br />
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I said I had three definitions of solidarity, but I've only given two so far. My third definition is a bit vaguer, and possibly stolen from that man who did the TED talk about Disney Princesses, but it is also the one that resonates with me the most. Solidarity, to me, is about my definition of who is on "my team" ‒ if I am A Feminist, who would I most like that label to associate me with? The answer is "pretty much everyone I follow on Twitter" ‒ not Big Twitter Celebrities, not dead white people with Must-Read books. When I identify as feminist, I have in the back of my mind the diverse range of women and men who, like me, probably spend far too much time staring at Tweetdeck or an Iphone sharing their view of the world for the benefit of others. Right now, I don't give back as much as I take, because I still have a lot to learn. Mostly? I listen.<br />
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*I've just outright said I'm still very much learning about this myself, so I don't know why anybody would want my advice on interacting, but in case you do, here is my super short guide to be cool and feel good on Twitter. 1) Don't post TOO much about arbitrary things in your day, because detractors of Twitter are correct in their assertion that nobody cares what you ate for lunch. They are wrong in that they assume that is all that is on Twitter. 2) Pass on interesting things you read, especially if they come from obscure places that people may have missed. 3) Don't be afraid to tell people if you think they are great or if you agree with things they say, because everybody likes to hear that and it will make you feel good to compliment others. BUT 4) Don't apply the Nice Guy principle (if I say enough vaguely nice things, I am entitled to lots of nice responses and recognition) to interactions with anybody, "famous" or otherwise. 5) Know when a thing is serious, when it is not serious and (most importantly) when the other person thinks it is serious but really it's not worth your time. In the third case, just stop talking. Also 6) is "don't abuse people" but really that should just be unwritten.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-12306761544652359382013-08-12T21:47:00.001+01:002013-08-13T14:14:03.858+01:00Bitesize Monday bite three: the bite where everything inexplicably starts to taste like socksSo I didn't quite expect Bitesize Monday to become this regular, but I just ate soo much homemade Mexican food (including a half hour crisis with guacamole because I am too stupid to check if the avocados are ripe whilst <i>in</i> the shop) that I cannot possibly think about writing several paragraphs on the same topic because digestion. So! Here are some things that have happened.<br />
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Femusings!</h3>
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Some more vintage Joy is up over at <a href="http://femusings.org/">femusings</a>, including a better-edited version of why Janet Yellen is awesome and America sucks for doubting her, and my piece in support of No More Page Three (the one with naughty pictures, tee hee hee!) You can of course read both of those here, but if you do, you'll miss out on all the other sweet stuff they have posted there by people who aren't me, including eight ways to cover up your next political sex scandal, a really good piece about how fat is perceived differently in men and women, and the beginnings of a super informative agony aunt column. You can also join us if you are feeling so inclined!<br />
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Copyediting</h3>
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I have been putting finishing touches on a thing I wrote that is going to Go In A Book! This is extremely exciting, but before I get to the stage of Thing In Book I have to go through the stage of Thing Has Been Copyedited. Which is fun in a whole different ways!</div>
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The edits aren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be, although there are more minor fact changes than I am happy with. Did I really get that much wrong first time around? Apparently so. I also had no idea that those luminous rainbow cheerio things are called "Froot Loops" and not "Fruit Loops", which now I think about it is so that you can have as many Os as possible to replace with luminous cheerios. I'm sort of proud of not knowing that until now, because it was one corner of my brain that was immune to branding for a little while at least. I also wrote at one point that India cancelled trees, because why wouldn't you?<br />
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#solidarityisforwhitewomen</h3>
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Again, if you don't know who Hugo Schwyzer is, I recommend that you keep it that way. If you do, and you've been keeping up with The Meltdown and Withdrawl of Hugo From The Internets forever, you'll know that there is some seriously divisive bullshit going on between the women who gave Schwyzer his platform for years, and the women, mostly WOC (<a href="http://twitter.com/redlightvoices">Flavia Dzodan</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/Blackamazon">@Blackamazon</a>, to name but two), who were actively calling him out and getting abuse for it. From him. For years. With the tacit consent of platform-giving women. Anybody who is not on the side of the people who were being abused by a man and ignored by the women who could have stopped it are Doing Feminism Wrong, just putting that out there.</div>
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Today, both Jill Filipovic of Feministe and whoever that woman is from Jezebel both offered the most mealy-mouthed "oh we're very sad he's not a nice man after all, but we totally didn't figure it out until now so *absolved*" non-apologies that there have ever been in the existence of language.<a href="http://jezebel.com/stages-of-grief-youve-been-dealing-with-a-disingenuou-1109782242"> The Jezebel one</a> is worth reading even if you don't know who Hugo is, because it is just the most perfect example of oblique, passive-aggressive, selfish, disingenuous journalism. The comments are split between "er, what is this even about, I have a life off the internet you know" and "we all knew, don't pretend you didn't know", because this is about a guy who made a living writing about <i>the attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend</i> on feminist websites, and also teaching feminism and LGBT studies to young people who he then also admitted to sleeping with and having sexual fantasies with (whoops, now you know about Hugo Schwyzer).</div>
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The Filipovice one is better because it has spawned a brilliant hashtag from <a href="http://twitter.com/Karnythia">Mikki Kendall</a> about the disturbing habit of white women (who are generally the ones in power in the feminist movement, because the feminist movement has some serious racism problems) to preach about solidarity and act on threats to each other (see: twitter silence) whilst ignoring or participating in threats to WOC in the movement. It is brilliant and everybody should go on Twitter and look it up, because you will learn many things. Like, how often do you hear people moaning about misogyny in hip-hop, but it rarely occurs to the same people to look at <a href="http://subjectivebeatles.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/top-five-most-violently-misogynistic.html">misogyny in classic rock</a>? One example among many many many. I'm not saying that misogyny in hip hop should not be critiqued, just that we should probably examine why we want to do it so often.</div>
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I don't write about race on this blog because as a white woman it is not my place to do so. It is, however, not just my place but my absolute responsibility to listen to women who have different experiences to mine, and to understand how my feminism is shaped by my privileges as well as my experiences of oppression. I'm sympathetic to people who go through the experience of discovering you trust a manipulative arsehole (whoops, what is this sentence). But 1) I don't think is what actually happened to the Apologetic Power Feminists and 2) the pain of that discovery does have to go hand in hand with confronting how you might have hurt other people. It's a whole cocktail of painful suck, but it's also a bit of a moral duty, especially in cases like this.</div>
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Whoops, soapbox over! And I promise I will try to stay away from Twitter stories for the rest of this week, even though that will be super hard because I just got TweetDeck and <i>it is a disaster for my life oh help help.</i></div>
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Despite being made by a man (I think). Why <i>don't</i> women report abuse more regularly?</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-69707427947212673262013-08-11T21:19:00.001+01:002013-08-11T21:19:31.904+01:00Stuff I like Sunday: Tamora PierceSo unlike yesterday, I was not lying when I said that today I am going to talk about the best female fantasy author out there, and one of the most important fantasy authors ever. That someone is Tamora Pierce, who also conveniently wrote my childhood. To start you off, here is a video of Tamora Pierce being an awesome young adult fantasy author winning all the awards (as well she should:)<br />
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Pierce's books are mostly orderly fantasy quartets (there is a two-parter and a trilogy in there somewhere, I think...) set in two distinct fantasy lands: Tortall and Emelan. I'll focus on Tortall because there's more of it, although the Emelan books I've read are equally as good. Tortall begin with the story of Alanna, a kid with a dead mother and a distant father, who is about to be sent off to nun school to do noble lady-type stuff. Alanna doesn't want to do noble lady type stuff, and she conveniently has a brother who doesn't want to be sent off to knight school to do noble man type stuff, so she disguises herself as a boy and takes his place in knight training and he goes off to get trained in magic (which totally exists, because fantasy!) The first couple of books books deal with Alanna trying to cope with being a page and then a squire whilst disguising the fact that she's maturing into a super tiny woman and not a big burly knight-type, whilst also foiling the plans of Bad Guys and unsuccessfully fending off mutual attraction with her BFF Jonathan, who also happens to be crown prince. Spoiler alert, this is reasonably light-hearted young adult fiction, so she gets to be a knight and everybody discovers she's a woman but they mostly get over it. Also she has a magical cat that is probably actually a star constellation.<br />
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After Alanna the next quartet shifts to another character, a kid called Daine who can magically talk to all of the animals. This is weird in universe as well as in real life, so she gets to Discover Her Powers whilst also doing the whole growing up shebang, and also come to terms with having a childhood where her mother had to raise her alone despite prejudice against single mothers, and then gets murdered by bandits who Daine then kills along with a bunch of wolves she's been chatting to. Which is a bit traumatic. Also she prevents a war both against a neighbouring country and against a magic land of magic creatures, and is caretaker to a totally sweet dragon. After <i>that</i>, you get Keladry, who decides she also wants to be a knight and who doesn't actually have to disguise herself, but puts up with lots of prejudice from her peers and the people training them, and generally grows up to be enormous and almost unbeatable at jousting but still gets rubbish "feminine" assignments when she becomes a knight, but then it turns out they are the most important jobs and nobody else could handle them, she is just generally the best. Then there's Alanna's kid, who is a little bit annoying but ends up in the middle of a racial/colonial war and falls in love with a crow that gets to turn himself human. Basically it is all happening all the time!<br />
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I know fantasy tends to be quite a polarising genre, and reading young adult books as a grown-ass woman is also not desperately common, so a lot of people might be scratching their heads at the moment and wondering why on earth any of this is a worthwhile recommendation. The answer is this: these books are not only brilliant entertainment (rest assured, the stories happen a lot better than how I write them down here) but they also do what almost no books for young adult women do: they combine coming-of-age with wish fulfilment. We pick up with Alanna, Daine, Keladry and Aly (Alanna's kid) when they're all between around 10 and 13, and follow them through some of their most important years, both as they grow into awesome career women protecting the kingdom, and as they just generally grow into women. Alanna gets through some of the hardest parts of knight training more easily than all the bigger kids around her, only to be completely freaked out when her period comes (because dead mother, so nobody ever explained it). Daine copes with some really serious family issues and learns to respect how strong her mother was for bringing her up, whilst also coping with some really serious "oh god I can shapeshift now and I don't know how to hold on to my humanity" issues, which most teenage girls <i>don't</i> ever have to deal with. Unlike the first two, Kel has loving and supportive parents who remain loving and supportive (and teach her about periods), but she's grown up in a culture away from Tortall ‒ pseudo-Japan, to be specific ‒ and has to deal with being the only girl in a hostile environment, reconciling her adopted culture with her birth culture, and also with jousting with a lance twice as heavy as anybody else's because the awful boy gave her that one and she was too proud to ever give it back. They combine storylines that young women can relate to, and which humanise the troubles of young women for men who aren't used to putting themselves in the shoes of female protagonists, with plots that are pure fantasy in the best possible way. Kids can't actually be knights of a fantasy realm, but they can dream of being a girl just like them who <i>is</i>.<br />
<br />
All of Pierce's Tortall women take on a patriarchal culture <i>reasonably </i>analagous to discrimination in the modern world, come to terms with their differing strengths and weaknesses, and achieve superhuman things with them. What's more, where the characters do have romantic interests, said romances have nothing to do with their growth (the one possible exception, Daine, has a romantic plot which could interfere with her magic teaching, but this is at the point where spoiler spoiler spoiler so she'll probably be alright...). This is not Twilight, where Edward gets to show Bella a whole new world, protect her for three and a half books, and then finally give her her own superpowers so she can protect him for a change. Nor is it the Hunger Games, which I love dearly but which is a story of a woman being brutally crushed by a world she has no agency in, but it's OK because she gets the Nice Boy at the end. All the romances are, by and large, treated as teenage romances should be: a couple last, most don't, you don't always love just one person at one time, sometimes you aren't that interested in anybody at all, and it's usually not necessary to hook up with your best friend of the opposite gender just because you're friends. Alanna's story was originally meant to be a single book for adults, so it's probably not surprising that she has a fair bit of implied sex with more than one love interest (shock!), but none of the other characters are chaste virginal types pining constantly after The One or using love triangles to motivate all of their life choices. This is refreshing.<br />
<br />
I also like that Pierce's women don't live in a rosy genderblind world of Strong Female Characters. In fact, one of my favourite parts of Keladry's books are the Awful Teasing Boys, who continue to be awful and not accept her even after she's proven herself to the older, stuck-in-their-ways chauvinists around her. It's implied that a couple of them are just... unwell, in the same way as some women-fearing MRAs come across as unwell in the modern world. They get their comeuppance in different ways, but I love that the moral of the story isn't "kickass woman fixes everything around her!"; it's "kickass woman follows and achieves dreams and achieves love and respect from people worth achieving it from, and more would be nice, but sometimes you do just have to accept lost causes." Kel also ends up having to balance having "fun" with one of her fellow knights with sexist reactions to female promiscuity, where an older female character takes her aside and says "this is what happens, it's completely wrong, you can choose to fight it or you can modify your behaviour because of it, both will be difficult and it will suck but you should know this." It's not exactly the most inspiring message, and it may raise some feminist eyebrows that the character's choice is to be clandestine rather than organising fantasy slutwalks, because hey, she likes being a knight and she'd rather devote all her time to doing that and fighting sexist bullshit directly related to it. But, again, it drives home that these are women dealing with the practicalities of being women, however much they may suck. Not even the most dedicated feminist can fight every microaggression all the time.<br />
<br />
So anyway that is my Sunday recommendation to you. Relive your girlhood! Or appreciate it for the first time if you didn't have one, because if I was compelled to read Catcher in the Bloody Rye and Vernon God Little as "gender neutral" coming of age books, you should be able to read the Alanna Quartet on the same terms. Tamora Pierce technically doesn't have a british publisher at the moment, which is a travesty, but I have everything she's ever written as an ebook<strike> and I don't think I paid for them sorry about that I did also own all the paperbacks once I promise</strike> so they are, er, out there. If you know what I mean. Go forth! Read Tamora Pierce.Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-55577557341262667212013-08-10T23:55:00.003+01:002013-08-10T23:55:33.486+01:00A screwdriver of one's ownSo remember how I promised Deep Personal Feminist Reflection today? Well, my promises mean nothing and you should never believe anything I say. In all seriousness, I feel like a Deep Reflection post, unlike most of what I write, requires an actual correct mindset, and I am not in it today. This is partly because Hugo Schwyzer's uncomfortable public meltdown (look it up if you must, but if you don't know who he is honestly I'd just keep it that way) has has a pretty big impact on my feminist feels, and although it won't change my identity in the end, it doesn't feel right to try to be trying to affirm what that identity is <i>right</i> now. The other reason is because I spent all of today buying shelves, then putting up shelves, then putting things on shelves, and now I have a fully unpacked, tidy living space which is both completely magnificent and completely awesome. In-keeping with some of the greatest writing advice I ever had, from a fellow SOFA*-er, I have been leaving most blogs later and later because "if you only have an hour to write it in, it only takes an hour" (seriously, all aspiring writers take note, that is the kind of thinking that will get you ahead in this life); the flipside of this is that sometimes the day just gets too mentally exhausting for serious blogging at the end of them. This is one of those days.<br />
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As anybody who has ever done intensive long-term writing will know, writing constantly takes very little time to turn even the most pleasant, outgoing person into an aggressive, selfish, single-minded hermit. In theory, this amount of writing only takes up a couple of hours each day, but as I'm never quite sure which couple of hours and I like to keep them all potentially free in case the mood strikes me, I have become increasingly hostile to any sort of organised distraction that I don't feel fully in control of. My family have unfortunately had to deal with the brunt of me aggressively not wanting to do much, or spending an arbitrarily small amount of time doing something else and then having a meltdown about how those were the exact ninety minutes I <i>needed</i> for feminist writing, or getting very worked up about how every minute spent blogging is a minute less that I can spend writing elaborate lists of action for the Job Centre. Rest assured, Huntingdon Job Centre, I am doing my bit. You would be amazed at what job seeking activities double up as fun procrastination when you're trying to write this much.<br />
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The one exception to this, as blog posts have occasionally referenced, has been the slow but relentless overhaul of my room from "weird disorganised collections of nonsense" to an actual space that an actual grown adult/collector of nonsense might want to inhabit. Given that a lot of this has been things I can't do alone, like flatpack furniture, shelves, lifting heavy things up flights of stairs, and screwing things into walls, allowing this to be my one distraction (OK there was some Sypro the Dragon playing too, and the ice cream continues to be a thing, but shush) has rather exacerbated the aggressive selfishness, by making it so that my only desired socialisation with parents involves them assisting me in endless room improvement tasks which I do in a state of great agitation about where my blogging time will come from. Not from ice cream time, that's for sure!<br />
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Anyway, now the trials are over and ALMOST ALL of the nonsense collection is distributed in appropriate locations. This collection includes:<br />
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<ul>
<li>An exquisitely painted oar (still not mounted, making it one of the few continuing out of place things, but hey. It's an exquisitely painted oar! These things are hard to find place for)</li>
<li>An overgrown cactus</li>
<li>A giant scroll which says "horse" in Chinese</li>
<li>The Triwizard cup (which currently houses a Mudkip and three tampons, because... feminism?)</li>
<li>The TARDIS</li>
<li>Several Sonic Screwdrivers</li>
<li>A small mug with somebody else's star sign on it</li>
<li>A keyring intended for somebody called "Harrison"</li>
<li>A shell shaped a bit like a vagina</li>
<li>A marble tortoise that makes me sad every time I look at it because it reminds me of being abused into buying it in a shop in Vietnam (but which I can't throw away because I bought the damn thing and now I am going to damn well own it)</li>
<li>A cyberman head intended for growing cress in, and cress seeds.</li>
<li>A silver tankard full of plastic Daleks (a lot of this nonsense collection is Doctor Who related... fancy that)</li>
<li>Scarves. Oh god, scarves.</li>
<li>An original Game Boy and a special edition Pokemon Game Boy colour (with Kirby's Dream Land and Pokemon Blue in, respectively)</li>
<li>Some individually wrapped Hubei speciality fish packets</li>
<li>Zero accordions :(</li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHavHIlV0fjJtuYx3A71ZVmKDdFqscpU0CAl8HjUCLyBVzjIa1HPqR8IJUeQYE7GGzi9b6I37_cA5MoTsW-ph1TNVFCdZjrRwaRhc-NpmpAaFQqlOEUj1hpEL-5eHseTIbbbam9xvoDpY/s1600/SAM_1833.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHavHIlV0fjJtuYx3A71ZVmKDdFqscpU0CAl8HjUCLyBVzjIa1HPqR8IJUeQYE7GGzi9b6I37_cA5MoTsW-ph1TNVFCdZjrRwaRhc-NpmpAaFQqlOEUj1hpEL-5eHseTIbbbam9xvoDpY/s400/SAM_1833.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One electric piano though. Also that scroll says horse in Chinese. AND IS ALSO A PICTURE OF A HORSE. It is a very crazy and conceptually difficult thing to understand.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_vswipDpxGEXUnXBVBCcUidGjOO8jXrFadEre0ZBcWVtEpSMbaA8AXpRCMePhsTV_khvusUHbR2OuZeQRArlXj1oNxGl7YVNd8sP6DfLeQI3BcOl9t4OSIXqGlFdvqSE85HB1CBuToeE/s1600/SAM_1835.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_vswipDpxGEXUnXBVBCcUidGjOO8jXrFadEre0ZBcWVtEpSMbaA8AXpRCMePhsTV_khvusUHbR2OuZeQRArlXj1oNxGl7YVNd8sP6DfLeQI3BcOl9t4OSIXqGlFdvqSE85HB1CBuToeE/s400/SAM_1835.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Other side of the room, feat. oar that is pretty much only out of place object in the entire room. DAMN YOU, BLADES. Also everybody who has ever been to my room before will notice that it is no longer luminous turquoise and pink. This was a magical surprise that my parents pulled on me at the end of 2012! I approved of the magical surprise: those were terrible colours for a bedroom, shame on me for ever picking them.</td></tr>
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Some things I don't have because they have mysteriously gone Somewhere ‒ probably to the attic ‒ include my DVDs of Mulan and Mulan 2 (and all my other DVDs), and my Kylie Minogue-in-Doctor Who action figure. I have all the other companions though, currently lined up on a shelf and not in any sexual positions at all. This will not last.</div>
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I like most of my nonsensical stuff collection. Lots of it has memories either of people giving it to me (like the Triwizard cup and the zodiac mug), or of using it (the Gameboys) or is Doctor Who related and/or generally makes me feel awesome (SONIC SCREWDRIVERS AAAA). I also own a lot of redundant Real Person things, like an actual screwdriver whose existence deeply confuses my dad, who assumes that all tools in the house fall under his domain and tried to remove it from my room to go live in the garage with the fifty screwdrivers he already owns. Like everyone who moves out and then back in again, it's hard to reconcile some of the material symbols of my independence with being back at home again, and even harder to figure out exactly where on my lovely new shelves this screwdriver I will never actually need should go. In the end, as homage to the "father attempts to steal screwdriver, feminist victory won as I defend my womanly right to own my own useful tool" story (totally how it went down) I went for "pride of place", but who knows how long that will last.</div>
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<div>
Anyway, there is no real point to this entry except gushing, so... I'll gush a little more then stop. I don't know how much longer I will be staying under this roof, but it's <i>so</i> nice to finally have a space which represents the important material bits of the last six years as well as the most important things before that. Given that my future is so completely uncertain for the first time in my quarter-century existence, it's nice to have good reminders of my present and my past all around. Now... if only it had an accordion.</div>
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*Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness. It has an acronym now, and hey those initials conveniently spell out a word! Who knew?Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-89773120371219950692013-08-09T23:44:00.000+01:002013-08-09T23:44:57.149+01:00Words and picturesI feel like I have an odd, underformed relationship with my geek side. On the one hand, I adore a lot of what the subculture produces ‒ media which introduces entire alternate universes to play in, and often the explicit mechanisms to do so, alongside a general sense of awe and excitement regarding some of the most amazing parts of our own universe. I love video games, I love fantasy and sci-fi, I have already gushed about online roleplaying. I have even had brief experiences with tabletop gaming and card games which made me wish the communities surrounding them catered to me more. Despite this affinity, however, I feel like I've never devoted the correct amount of time to reading and watching to <i>really</i> be a geek, whatever that means. I've written before about feeling like a general culture failure because the things I like are usually too few, too specific and too far away from the "things you must watch/read/play or you are not a proper lover of media" list that people like to compile and then wave in your face. With "geek things", the problem is compounded by the way in which men attempt to protect the subculture, which has been well documented in the phenomenon of the "fake geek girl".<br />
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So, last week, for reasons which were part semi-geek identity crisis and part "I will do a thing that I can later write a blog about, how virtuous", I asked my friends at my local comic shop which comics they would recommend for an unrepentant feminist who wants to read Things About The Womens. I mentioned my friends on Tuesday but that was a very quiet blog post so let me do so again: a couple of years ago, against the backdrop of Recession and The Death Of Local Shops and Amazon Ruining Everything, a friend of mine from school and his little brother refurbished a gorgeous 16th century shop in the middle of Huntingdon, filled it with books, comics, tabletop games, action figures and imported sweets (and a Mass Effect art book which will one day be mine...), and have been quietly and successfully running <a href="http://www.nichecomics.co.uk/">Niche Comics</a> since the beginning of 2012. If you ever find yourself in Huntingdon for any reason, I guarantee that visiting them will be the highlight of your day, because they are amazing and because Huntingdon is... not. They are down the non-pedestrianised end of the High Street, near the Samuel Pepys pub, or whatever it has rebranded itself to these days. You should also follow them on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Niche.Comics?fref=ts">Facebook</a> even if you never intend to set food in Huntingdon.<br />
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My friend is also very well-informed both about comics and about women's representation, so it was no surprise when he came back with a fascinating list of things for me to try out. The most prominent feminist discussion around comic books tends to focus exclusively on female body shapes, and particularly the <a href="http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/">Strong Female Character</a> pose, here illustrated by the Hawkeye Initiative (which redraws female superhero poses done by Hawkeye, who is... some guy. I don't know. I'm not a real geek!) but what I ended up with was a very different impression. I'm not feeling desperately prose-y (perhaps because of all these comic books rotting my mental faculties?) so I'll bullet point what I've read so far.<br />
<ul>
<li>The New York Four, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly (the first one wrote it, the second drew it), is a quite Scott Pilgrim-esque book about four women college students at NYU. The main one is socially awkward, love texting (zeitgeist alert!) and is trying to develop a relationship with her estranged older sister. The other three are a Fiery Latina with Cleavage (and a secret heart of gold), an Asian-Canadian who starts stalking her professor after she gets a B in one of her classes, and someone from the West Coast who skates and Can't Understand Boys! Despite this all being a bit stereotypical, New York Four (and the sequel, New York Five) is actually pretty decent at giving its characters satisfyingly melodramatic but not entirely unrealistic lives. It didn't replace Scott Pilgrim in the section of my heart reserved for "fun youth life story comics" but I did enjoy it.</li>
<li>Local, also by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly. This is supposed to be their magnum opus or something and it's therefore bound in a super fancy hardcover book (which cost me the remainder of my Shakespeare tutoring money, oh the things I do for blog). It's supposed to be twelve stories that represent twelve years in the life of Some Woman who lives in twelve different US cities during this time. All the reviews on the back say it will be the most inspiring thing I ever read but I only read the first two and was... not that hooked. Maybe I just don't understand poignant woman stories.</li>
<li>Mara, by Brian Wood (that guy again!), Ming Doyle* and Jordie Bellaire. It's about a superstar volleyball player (not beach volleyball!) in a grim dystopian future. Yes, you heard. Bad things start to happen to her, made worse by the whole grim dystopia thing, and we get to read on as her whole existence falls apart. It's actually very good, although I hated two things: first, all of the comic covers use Super Arty Colours which hide the fact that Mara is a WOC (the first one makes her face literally white, although everything else has colour). Second, the comic itself uses a lot of in-universe news reports which constantly represent her using this picture:</li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCMl62nqIymZD0yXGxJkoeSXwYQTIKT8qEqj1lK_UEJtoM9j9EtS10NxWSfaYtuOm0tZ-wdHu8HjLZAdOICPcdxWNoJMo1rU6XObm1W-T4vAM39UV2UtE41MX8_DSt5Uut7jlvCuJjUY/s1600/tumblr_maa0htuGb71qhb9cho3_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCMl62nqIymZD0yXGxJkoeSXwYQTIKT8qEqj1lK_UEJtoM9j9EtS10NxWSfaYtuOm0tZ-wdHu8HjLZAdOICPcdxWNoJMo1rU6XObm1W-T4vAM39UV2UtE41MX8_DSt5Uut7jlvCuJjUY/s400/tumblr_maa0htuGb71qhb9cho3_1280.jpg" width="263" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Grim dystopian future where women (NOT BEACH) volleyball players are super famous, but still mostly famous for being pinups. Thanks...?</span></span></td></tr>
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<ul>
<li>The first book of Strangers in Paradise, one of two things on the list by Terry Moore. I started off really sceptical about this, because it appeared to be about a Hilariously Angry Lady getting unwanted stalker attention from a Nice Guy despite telling him she's a lesbian, and pressuring her Heterosexual Female Friend into a relationship. It then goes through a load of what I can only call male fear-of-women fantasies about rejection and castration and people knowing you have a small penis, which did nothing to improve my mood. Also it has Hilariously Angry Lady crying in handcuffs on the front cover. But! The fact that it managed to win me over from this beginning is probably the best recommendation I can give to anything ever. It vacillates wildly between "cute slice of life" and "everybody is getting shot by the mob wtf" which shouldn't work but does, and while the Nice Guy overstayed his character's welcome, I completely loved almost everything after the initial castration/small willy story. Conveniently, this lines up with the moment when Heterosexual Female friend puts on thirty pounds and is drawn for the rest of the strip as a canonically gorgeous woman with a bit of a double chin and realistically distributed fat and a complicated relationship with her body type that doesn't boil down to any stereotype. Because not <i>everything</i> is Hawkeye pose, guys. It also lines up with the point where almost everyone important to the story is female ‒ mob boss, mob boss's dapper assistant, mob boss's giant silent muscled type, Angry Lady's dead mentor figure... statistically, the character gender ratio probably isn't far off 50:50, but women get all the good parts.</li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPX82okusWN9BOfhzF-7jsFQB9msAF1d9XMviUt6yUBs70ZYn2GwGbqrj-fyRArHFmKGFzqPdBOOjmIUPBxCOOyw0cfX7diatjNk8_GWYwcE20x5VqdQwz53vhRvxRbgJlCslASrIv1I/s1600/sippockv2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPX82okusWN9BOfhzF-7jsFQB9msAF1d9XMviUt6yUBs70ZYn2GwGbqrj-fyRArHFmKGFzqPdBOOjmIUPBxCOOyw0cfX7diatjNk8_GWYwcE20x5VqdQwz53vhRvxRbgJlCslASrIv1I/s400/sippockv2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This cover is only marginally less awful than the weeping handcuffs picture on the front of volume 1, but oh! Double chin, waist fat-fold and belly on woman who several other characters find gorgeous and irresistible, drawn even in the picture where we are supposed to think she is gorgeous and irresistible. I FORGIVE YOU FOR THE NICE GUY STORYLINE, MOORE (nah actually that's not actually how it works, but if it was, I would).</td></tr>
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<ul>
<li>Rachel Rising, which is what Terry Moore is doing now he's finished writing about Hilariously Angry Lady and company (there is also something in between, apparently). Again wins no points by beginning with a frightened, scantily clad young woman digging herself out of her own grave, but it hits all the good points of Strangers in Paradise but more cleanly. It mixes the exploration of relationships with some seriously crazy shit, the good character roles all go to women, and the women (and the men) are all easily distinguishable from each other through drawing alone. Whilst there's a lot of violence, including scenes of violence against women which always make me instinctively wary, it's interesting that the women victims are the ones who return and continue to have agency, whereas the men who die just... die. Often brutally. I think there's a whole complicated thesis in here on gendered victimhood which is way beyond the scope of this blog, but suffice to say it's... <i>interesting</i>.</li>
</ul>
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I also have one of the Love and Rockets books sitting here waiting to be read, but I didn't get to that one. Maybe it will have its own post later?</div>
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<div>
Anyway, those are things I read! All of them were good. If you listen to things I tell you to do, you should definitely read Strangers in Paradise. But most of you don't listen to things I tell you do to. So. What did I learn from my little comic book binge?</div>
<div>
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<div>
Well, there's no getting around it, these sure are a lot of stories about women by men. The only comic with significant female creative involvement is Mara, which has two women artists ‒ one to draw, one to colour. It's also interesting that it's the <i>same </i>men, although this might also be related to my friend's opinions on what I would be interested in as much as a comment on the state of the industry in general. I've got him to put some Alison Bechdel on order so I'll be rectifying my man overload soon!</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2WOYyiHrdduzH1UuCY6PHbQseQYfAF4-0_OPEzXd0uZsyJRBq-kxrlgu-bIWWkk9fOcmqjd8EdPH0t9ZqMz8PE8cEvAhBbqH9TZvp14MQJPsJvS-oulgsWnRnPh4cYmZu_RujtPzAZE/s1600/bechdel.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2WOYyiHrdduzH1UuCY6PHbQseQYfAF4-0_OPEzXd0uZsyJRBq-kxrlgu-bIWWkk9fOcmqjd8EdPH0t9ZqMz8PE8cEvAhBbqH9TZvp14MQJPsJvS-oulgsWnRnPh4cYmZu_RujtPzAZE/s1600/bechdel.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's Alison Bechdel of the Bechdel Test fame, whose comic which introduces the Bechdel Test (which only about 50% of modern movies pass, and it becomes much fewer if you have requirements for two <i>named</i> female characters). This picture is going to break my blog frames, watch me not care because it is important and awesome.</td></tr>
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In general, this was OK. There were a few gratuitous "camera" angles here and there, the worst being that picture above of Mara, but most of the time women looked like actual real life different types of women ‒ not everything is Hawkeye! Everyone in Ryan Kelly's art, male and female, has big pretty eyes and luscious pouty lips, so I put that down to style rather than female stereotyping (and they do make varied facial expressions with their big facial features so that's nice.) Everybody acts like you would expect a comic book version of a real life person to act, which is pretty much like real life except everybody talks in complete clauses and sometimes <b>bolds</b> their <b>important words.</b> </div>
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What it means to me, though, is that I'm much less likely to be sympathetic when women do start doing things that are, to me, Man-Fantasies and not actual woman things. New York Four has a bit of professor seduction by Fiery Sexy Latina, which is portrayed as her being predatory and him being weak, and the implications we are supposed to draw are 1) she is a Strong Confident Woman and 2) Strong Confident Women get what they want through preying on poor squashed men. Now I'm sure that this has happened in the history of the human race, but I'm equally sure that it happens far more in the minds of men who are afraid of women being inappropriately Strong and Sexy at them than it does in actual real life. Similarly with the castration "fantasy". I think this is why all these stories are, perhaps surprisingly, at their best when it's women talking to other women. Even with the best will in the world, it's apparently hard to escape unconscious worries of <i>what might strong women do to men</i>?</div>
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As you would expect (we've all seen Joss Whedon's Strong Female Character rant, right?), Terry Moore has been asked about the whole Writing About Women business more than once. His answer (in one of the relatively few interviews I read, I've no doubt there are many, many more) was not <i>quite</i> what I was hoping:<br />
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"Well, if you'll notice, when I write female characters, I don't have them doing anything that's actually very feminine. There's no scenes of women having lunch together or shopping or talking about guys.<br />
So what I'm actually doing is using female characters and putting them in situations that are typically male, just because I find that that incongruous setting is so much more intriguing.<br />
Put a man in a dangerous situation, and we automatically just assume he's either going to go commando or wimp. We've seen it so many times.<br />
But if you put a woman in there, you're just not quite sure what's going to happen... Usually women are portrayed as victims of male predators. In my story, the woman is usually fighting against her own genre. I just find that a little more interesting. Instead of lions attacking penguins, what if penguins attacked each other?" <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/9278-terry-moore-walking-dead-rachel-rising-return-of-katchoo.html">(Source)</a> </blockquote>
There's a sympathetic and an unsympathetic reading of this quote. The unsympathetic reading would be to pick up on the "women only have lunch and shop and talk about guys, and men do literally everything else, what the hell", and that's definitely what first sprang to mind. But I think he's talking about tropes, not men and women themselves. As the "typically male" scenes he puts his women in are things like "get involved in mob shootout", it's pretty clear he's not actually equating "typically male" with "things that real men actually do regularly" (unless he's a really dangerous dude...) but instead pointing out that, yeah, we expect male characters to be in those situations and to react in one of those two boring ways, but when you write an unexpected character into the scene, the audience has fewer expectations for what might happen next. Unfortunately I cannot put a generous spin on the lions and penguins thing, but it's absurd enough that maybe it can be quietly ignored. I hope he doesn't actually think of women as penguins <i>or</i> men as lions?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In this metaphor, both the alarm clock and the women are penguins. Or... something. Let's really just leave it.</td></tr>
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Stating that using women is great because it avoids stereotype is a risky business, because it risks denying that stereotypes of women can be problematic even when characters are written away from the most restrictive ones. I enjoyed learning about another little corner of geekdom, where men are creating stories of biologically accurate, well rounded human women doing awesome stuff. But while it's great that there are men who think these stories need telling, I'm not sure if I can fully get behind them as stories <i>about </i>women if using women is purely an act of subversion. Being a woman is not a subversive act, it's a fact about us as people, and that needs to be recognised by creators and, more fundamentally, by the gatekeepers of creative industries, because they're the ones who <i>really</i> make it so that the only comics my friend can recommend are men writing about women. Sort it out, geeks. And give me more comic recommendations whilst you're doing it, I may be addicted. <i>Whoops</i>.<br />
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<i>Day 17. Tomorrow is probably going to be Adrienne's feminist autobiography. Sunday will be me gushing about the most important women's fantasy author </i>ever, <i>no arguments allowed. Mark it in your diary! Seriously. Just write "ADRIENNE'S BLOG" across all the pages. Doesn't your life look so much fuller now?</i><br />
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*I hate to act as if this is at all relevant because it completely isn't, but I was super amused to discover that Ming Doyle is, or was, dating Neil Cicierega, who made Potter Puppet Pals and Lemon Demon music and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqO5lNS094M">this thing</a> that was super cool on the internet, like, ten years ago. That guy!)</div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-28742132571255876682013-08-08T13:34:00.001+01:002013-08-14T08:22:44.125+01:00Women and money: highbrow very serious non-fictional policy circles(This post can also be read as an article on <a href="http://femusings.org/women-and-money-and-janet-yellen/">Femusings</a>)<br />
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While I continue to think deeply about the political structure and founding myths of fictional desert city-states, and the British liberal commentariat slowly destroys itself over complex questions of whose opinions are the most profound and important, the USA is in the process of replacing one of the most important people in global political economy: the dude who runs the Fed.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">To increase the production values of this blog, I intend to increase the number of pictures I source from hilarious political conspiracy websites. <a href="http://www.poorwiseman.net/Operations/warrantops.html">This</a>, and the <a href="http://www.deesillustration.com/">source</a>, are both extraordinary.</td></tr>
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That's right: the international household name that is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_bernanke">Ben Bernanke</a> (nice beard) is stepping down as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, which is the US equivalent of the Bank of England or European Central Bank, which means that it prints money and does exchange rates and is regarded with constant scepticism from the segment of society who remains confused about why we don't still pay with everything using gold doubloons (inflation! Fiat money! What are these crazy ideas! Money was much less confusing when it was cowrie shells). Bernanke's most obvious successor is Janet Yellen, who is currently vice chair of the board of governors. Unfortunately, things are not straightforward, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/opinion/krugman-sex-money-and-gravitas.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130802&_r=0">for the simple fact that Janet is a woman</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yeah Janet, I'm wearing that face about it too.</td></tr>
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Having spent too long recently in the mire of "not-sexist-BUT" reactions to Twitter and freedom of speech and and all that business in this country, it's almost refreshing how <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/19/the-subtle-sexist-whispering-campaign-against-janet-yellen/">straightforwardly sexist</a> the backlash against Yellen is. Sure, there's some<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323968704578650450613878848.html"> political and economic reasons</a> people don't like her, which are boring because the US political process is so obsessed with legitimising right-wing libertarian weirdness which wouldn't fly anywhere else, and also with explaining their political differences using bird metaphors, meaning that everything boils down to comparing Yellen's "economic dove" policies to "economic hawks" or "economic ostriches" (I hope somebody somewhere invented those before I did) and really, who cares that much about those words. But mostly the argument seems to be a good old fashioned doubt of female capabilities.<br />
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What is the problem with women and money? Well, having a woman in charge would force everything to devolve into gender politics and "<a href="http://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-female-dollar/88357/">female dollars</a>", and also it is <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324809004578633922341613866.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop">impossible</a> to separate her brilliant credentials and work history from the fact that some people think giving the position to a woman would be a good break from hundreds of years of men. Also, she doesn't have <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/30/janet_yellen_gravitas_al_hunt_says_she_lacks_it.html">gravitas</a>, which I assume is code for "white men cannot help but imagine she is about to offer them delicious baked goods, because she's a little old lady". To be fair, I have spent almost a quarter of a century wondering if every man who looks vaguely like my grandfather is going to force me to play renaissance-era recorder duets, so I sympathise. It was very hard to survive both a politics degree <i>and</i> a development degree with Henry Purcell playing in my head every time tall white old men became relevant to the conversation. And it is naturally so much harder to take women seriously, so I can see where... nah enough pretending about that actually, what a load of nonsense. Not the bit about Purcell, that was legit (he was baroque, not renaissance though. WHERE IS THIS GOING).<br />
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It's incredible how economics sets itself up as so hostile to women ‒ and, I would argue, to most of us social scientists who want to spend our time thinking about people as people and not Trying to Look Like Physics. There's a brilliant section in Deirdre McCloskey's Economic Writing about how much academic economics is made impenetrable by economists deliberately writing to look "scientific", as if the only way to legitimately study "how do societies distribute stuff?" is to ensure that the distribution looks as natural and divorced from human agency as possible. If I were getting my own conspiracy theory on I would point out how this seems to help a lot of people accept why the answer to "how do societies distribute stuff" is so different from "how do we think stuff should be distributed in society", but although I will one day make good on the pun in calling myself a "class feminist", now is not the time. Although part of my undergraduate degree is in economics, I have never got on with a subject that aims to represent as much human experience as possible in equation form, whilst ignoring the fact that these equations are based on the same mythmaking and storytelling and collective beliefs as all other human experience. Even before I connected my general feminist leanings with my academic interests, making reductive science out of people honestly all seemed a bit... <i>masculine</i>. It's hard to get behind Objective Social Science when your life experiences all demonstrate how nonsensical the assumption is for the vast majority of people.</div>
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I don't want to suggest that Yellen, or any women in policy circles, are somehow betraying the feminist cause by being where they are, knowing what they do or even for having the priorities they do (the idea that Yellen will actually have "female dollar" policies and close economically-based gender gaps is laughable ‒ even if she wanted to, or if her role was about those things, she wouldn't have the power). I wouldn't get very far even as a rampaging negative armchair lefty without understanding the need for economics and for understanding how it impacts society. But the fact that "being generic" is considered an important characteristic for being able to understand and manipulate economic policy is sort of terrifying. It's the opposite of what we saw in Doctor Who casting last week, where cries for diversity were drowned out by "CAPALDI IS THE BEST MAN FOR THE JOB" (brilliant article on that <a href="http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2013/08/doctor-who-peter-capaldi-can-stay-but-steven-moffat-needs-to-go.html">here</a> by the way). This is a mantra which ignores the fact that rarely is there only <i>one</i> person who could do a given task, and the reason we only see one is usually because we are biased against the rest in some way. For Yellen, her opponents are arguing the other way around: sure, she <i>could</i> do the job, but can we <i>really</i> not find an equally qualified white man to do the same thing? If he's a "hawk", metaphorically or literally, so much the better. It's just too risky to let the liberals win, even on the agenda of "not everybody in charge of money ever has to be a man".</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Or like, a superhero hawk. With a superhero dove partner. I don't really know or want to know about what this comic is.</td></tr>
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It'll be interesting to see how the nomination process pans out, and whether Yellen actually does find her way to the top. Her main rival still appears to be Larry Summers, the man who once suggested that women weren't really smart enough to be university professors in large numbers (whilst running to be president of Harvard, no less!) which to my mind does not seem to be the kind of person we should hold up as "brilliant generic homo economicus". If she does get it, I've no doubt the right wing inflation-fearing conspiracy theorists will grumble on, and bring us some grade A sexist commentary for a while. But honestly, I'm hopeful that they'd then return to just criticising "OMGWTFBBQ YU NO GOLD??" and "socialist conspiracy with the Rothschilds" and "Obama wants to sell us all to China" and not so much "... but she's a woman?" I don't often argue that "gender blindness" is a good end goal for something, but in the case of "things that tinfoil hat folk want to criticise about successful political figures", I'm all for it.</div>
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<i>It's day 16 and that means "only" 14 more blogs to go. Tomorrow: comic books!</i></div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-49437214325103570872013-08-07T23:55:00.003+01:002013-08-08T10:58:40.998+01:00Women and money: histories and fantasies (30 days of blogging day 15)So, as most people who know me are aware, my last two years in China weren't my only two years in China. Back in 2007, when I was even younger and <i>much </i>stupider and not nearly as feminism-conscious as I am today, I spent a year teaching in far west China, in a <strike>province</strike> Autonomous Region called Xinjiang. I went to central asian style discos a lot, ate pilaf, did a fair amount of hiking, was a background extra in a Pepsi advert, rode camels, figured out the routes for almost every bus in the city, and survived a -40 degree winter with only my dreams to keep me warm. I also lived in an apartment which didn't have a reliable internet connection and therefore spent my large amounts of antisocial downtime either watching very cheap <strike>illegal</strike> DVDs or reading stacks of books that I had sent, traded with others or on rare occasions actually bought from the terrible English language selection in Urumqi's bookshops.<br />
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I remember some of these books quite well. Because it was usually my mother on the other end of the post process, I ended up reading a lot of things she had been recommending for years, like Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series (which are incredible by the way) and Mr Norrell and Jonathan Strange (also brilliant). When I was at the mercy of bookshops, I ended up reading a lot of horrendously dry "classics" like Doctor Zhivago and the Red and the Black and only narrowly avoided slogging through every Sherlock Holmes story ever. The low point was probably reading the simplified memoirs of a random CCTV 9 news anchor, who told "hilarious" stories about life in Beijing as a foreigner that were clearly aimed at Chinese audiences who wanted to reinforce how incapable foreigners are of ever adapting to Beijing.</div>
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One of the books that's stayed with me the most, however, is probably one of the most obscure: <a href="http://www.upf.edu/materials/huma/central/abast/goullart.pdf">Forgotten Kingdom</a> by Peter Goullart, which you can download in its entirety from that link. I picked it up during one of my periods of travelling, when I was in the southwest part of China in a town called Lijiang. These days, Lijiang is a bit of a tourist disaster, having seen its Old Town "restored" as an overly bright and twee maze of identikit tourist shops. Before this, however, Lijiang was the home of the Naxi, one of China's 55 official minorities and a really interesting example of a society where women dominated, at least within the economic sphere. Goullart spent a few years living in Lijiang just before the Second World War reached the mountains, and Forgotten Kingdom was his memoir and record of the culture he left behind.</div>
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The only way I have of explaining the Naxi is to paraphrase a book I haven't read in six years, and I have not checked how good a historian or anthropologist Goullart seems to be, so what follows may be my misremembering of a misrepresentation, but bear with me. The book's representation of Naxi culture (which is repeated by the Lonely Planet <i>and</i> Rough Guide, so what more reputable sources could you need...) states that although men hold official political offices, at some point in their culture the people of Lijiang had decided that women held a status so much lower than men, that it was unreasonable to expect men to do very much work at all, and that it would be better for lowly women to deal with all of the economics of household maintenance. Women were so unclean they were kept from sitting to eat at the same tables as men, and forbidden from being on the upper level of a house when men were downstairs (the only justification I can think of for this is period related, which if it's correct is a pretty hilarious example of male overreaction to menstruation. The unending fear that a woman might be upstairs and then <i>drip</i> on you. It must be very tricky being a man!) but they also had all the money, did all the trade, and eventually ended up leaving their kids behind with their relaxed men, because a woman's place is in the shop. </div>
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The society apparently ended up in a situation where men were officially on top, but in reality had to beg their wives for a fiver every time they wanted to go out with their mates because men were not supposed to have money of their own. Power relations were complicated! There was some more stuff in the book about rates of arranged marriage and teen suicides and I feel like if I go back to it now as a more critical, self-identified feminist, I'll find a lot of interesting gender representations and author impositions that 19-year-old me would have passed right by. </div>
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I am reminded of this for two reasons. First is the potential appointment of Janet Yellen to the Fed (<a href="http://blogs.perfil.com/lamuralla/">CREDIT TO STEPHAN </a>for ongoing commitment to the cause of sending Adrienne links), but we'll get to that tomorrow. The second is the time I spent in Oxford discussing alternate universe fantasy RPG worldbuilding with two of my most brilliant friends. I am the kind of person who knows other people who invent vastly complex, fully populated cities complete with their own crazy religion and crusading past (and plague, there's always a plague), then invite other people to come and invent power hungry (or in my case, stunningly ignorant but perpetually good-natured*) factions to interact in intricately plotted text adventures - and also sometimes real dungeons and dragons style stuff with dice and everything, I think? Anyway, said RPG and my place in it both take up a lot of my creative energies at the moment, and it's a nice low-maintenance way to keep in touch with my, er, fictional side</div>
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Being A Feminist always poses interesting questions when it comes to fantasy and science fiction. Most of the discussion around women in geekery tends to focus on the behaviour of audience and creators, and how the community handles its feminine side (A: badly...), but to me it's equally as interesting to consider how, when we are effectively given a blank slate to draw our worlds on, we imagine gender to come about in those worlds. I've already discussed this a bit in Mass Effect, and how disappointing it is that the creators chose Invisible Women and "embodies cosmic traits of Fundamental Female Traits and Life Cycle" as its two dominant gender tropes. But if we're not dismissing women or assuming they're just there to Be Women, what <i>should</i> they do? Do we invent a world where gender (and race and sexuality and and and...) Really Doesn't Matter, and everybody is just a big utopian rainbow of everything humanity has to offer? Or do we assume that all sexism in our society would be natural in all societies, and give women in fantasy/sci-fi the same problems to overcome as real women have to in the real world? Where are the interesting stories at?</div>
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The answer I went for when dealing with my friend's city (which itself has a complicated mix of gender representation, because he is awesome at thinking through this stuff just as much as I do, hurrah for feminist men because even though it's annoying when they sometimes take over our spaces and platforms, the world is just<i> </i>much better when they exist) was to dig out the mental marker I always start from in worldbuilding like this: take the Naxi as an example of how a (possibly!) fundamental "men are strong and women have periods and babies, so men are better" bias <i>can</i> lead to a society of strong, independent, powerful women. If men are strong but have no jobs at home, perhaps they all leave the city for long periods of time, and the entire property rights system slowly becomes the preserve of women alone? Perhaps at some point they built a big wall around everything and had a little Lysistrata style gender war about who is on top, and unlike Lysistrata the women weren't written by men into saying "oh we're weak and just want you really"? Throw in a slight "everybody in city X has one profession" bias because, hey, it's fantasy and motifs like that are fun and make dialogue easier, and boom! Female driven fantasy that, to me, is a bit more satisfying than having to revert to either "strong woman fights The Man and also The Man Is A Wizard" or "woman exists because everyone exists and is beautiful, woop woop!"</div>
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I spoke a bit on Monday about how much I like the idea of getting to know the underrepresented women of history, because the depth and range of women we know nothing about is both inspiring and disturbing. Perhaps my message for today is to expand that to the worlds of women in general (wow, that's in the subheading of my blog and everything. This is a thematic post!) 19-year-old me wholeheartedly recommends Forgotten Kingdom, and whilst 24-year-old me doesn't automatically do the same, my continuing love and nostalgia for that side of China (or at least, my perception of it) mean that I'd love for more people to know more about the Naxi, and about how narrow our version of "natural gender roles" is when we compare it to other ways of organising the world. Women can do everything, even money! Tomorrow, we cross the Atlantic to talk about how modern America is coping with this concept.</div>
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*I wonder if anybody else who plays Shareen reads this blog? I know we are all supposed to be hidden from each other to greater or lesser degrees and I'm sure now if you meet me, you'll know who I am, but honestly my faction's motivations are such that I can't see how this matters. Use this secret knowledge for your own nefarious ends if you must, secret people of the city!</div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-3494140472792487132013-08-06T22:41:00.001+01:002013-08-06T22:50:54.645+01:00Our hero goes to Oxford, then takes stock.I am so tired I almost got confused between the "new post" button and the "new blog" button and put this entry onto a whole new website all of its own. I slept for about three hours last night (and not even for any interesting reasons), have been on two three-hour bus journeys, fended off three drunk street harassers on my way up and down Abingdon road, ate an incredible refried bean and nacho bake, introduced the chocolate ripple teabread (this iteration was slightly more chocolatey and less rippley) to the world at large, and have generally been enjoying the wonderful world of my undergraduate days. Ah, Oxford, with your large buildings and delicious cafes and your new graduate centre of my college. What have you done to me, and how did it only take 30 hours?<br />
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I have several things to tell you about as a result of me being in Oxford, like the story of my grand feminist awakening and the musings I had about Naomi Wolf and Andrea Dworkin and the ownership of female bodies at 4.30 in the morning when sleep turned out to not be a thing I wanted to do. After that, (or maybe before, I'm all about the suspense) I am going to tell you all about the possibility of a woman running the federal reserve, share with you my feelings about the quality of representation of women in post-2005 Doctor Who, muse on now being a member of Association of Women in Development and the interesting stuff they send me, and share my thoughts on some comic recommendations from <a href="http://www.nichecomics.co.uk/">my fabulous shop-owning friends.</a> Unfortunately, these things are going to have to wait until I can type more than ten words without my brain literally (orig. "litarelly") shutting down (orig. "dovn") and refusing to spell (orig. "smell") even the most basif ("basic"?) of words.<br />
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It's been two weeks and fourteen posts. Tomorrow marks the halfway point, and I hope you're excited as I am for the second half of this endeavour. For now, I'm going to lovingly leave you with Vienna Teng's grandmother song, and have some long, exquisite sleep. That is my feminist recommendation for the day, all: sleep. Nothig quite like it. Nothing. Ugh.<br />
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<br />Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-57023022656309318082013-08-05T14:13:00.001+01:002013-08-05T14:39:43.016+01:00Another bitesize Monday (with added navel-gazing)So this is day 13 of 30 blogs 30 days and I don't feel ashamed to admit that, on top of everything else I have going on right now (which is a cocktail of jobseeking weirdness, ridiculous self-imposed academic targets and the continuing rearrangement of my room so that I can have a music corner,<i> y</i>es<i> a music corner</i> oh my god how exciting), I am well into mid-project stress on how to keep this up. So many people have given me some really excellent ideas but I am currently devoid of research time. What can be done?<br />
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The answer for today is "leave you all hanging and go to Oxford, ha ha ha ha ha". I think the answer for other days is to start serialising some more, like I did on Thursday/Friday last week (although that was two full-sized posts with a tenuous common thread)? Whatever happens, things are going to become much easier when furniture assembly becomes a less significant part of my life.</div>
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For today, let's do a rundown of a couple of generic things apropos of nothing:<br />
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I saw Hyrule Historia in the local bookshop and it made me 1) start my AJ-mas wishlist and 2) think of this awesome thing</h3>
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For those who are not Zelda fans, Hyrule Historia is the epic english-translated artbook of ALL THE ZELDA EXCITEMENT and ownership of a giant hardcover book about videogame timelines is pretty much the only thing I need to complete my collection of things-that-sound-absurd-when-you-put-it-that-way. Sadly, spending £25 on majestic nerdy coffee table books is an activity for a different life phase, so I must put it in the "ONE DAY" category and hope that that day is this year's Annual Present Time. We shall see!</div>
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Zelda isn't very feminist though (no video games are! alas) because apparently even more than American studios, Japanese video game makers are a bit perplexed about the idea of female protagonists or non-stereotypical gender representations <a href="http://www.zeldauniverse.net/zelda-news/aonuma-may-consider-princess-zelda-to-feature-in-her-own-game-if-people-have-strong-feelings-about-it/">being possibly a good thing</a>? That's why, even though I'm not an enormous Dresden Codak fan (how can you do a webcomic full time and still update it that slowly), I absolutely love his concept art for an actual <a href="http://dresdencodak.tumblr.com/post/47724463171/inspired-by-anita-sarkeesians-video-game-tropes">Zelda-driven Zelda.</a> If you haven't seen it, look at it, if you have seen it, look at it again and be reminded of it and how awesome it is.</div>
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Anyone with a freezer can make ice cream</h3>
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After Wednesday's cake baking experiments left me with a large burn in the shape of a Geth dreadnought on my wrist (not even exaggerating), I decided to abandon the idea of heating food in favour of making really cold things instead. To be specific, I have been making ice cream! It turns out that even without a fancy machine, this is very easy to do (total credit to an <a href="http://roachpatrol.tumblr.com/tagged/ice-cream">awesome artist's tumblr</a> for teaching me how). You need 3 cups combined of double cream and whole milk (more cream is better but also more expensive, I tend to use 1 1/2 cups cream and 1 1/2 cups milk), around 1/3 cup sugar, exciting things for flavour (suggestions: peppermint extract, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, fancy honeycomb pieces from the ridiculous Waitrose baking section, dried fruit, cocoa powder, Bailey's Irish Cream, sweet potato, beetroot, wasabi...) and a freezerproof bowl.</div>
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Put everything EXCEPT any "heavy" ingredients (like chocolate chips or fruit pieces) into the bowl, whisk like crazy for a bit, put in freezer. 30 minutes later, remove from freezer, stir with wooden spatula, return to freezer. 15 minutes later and then for every 15 minutes after that until FOREVER, stir again. You'll eventually get something which looks like mousse but super cold (same viscosity as soft serve ice cream, pretty much). When this happens, add any chocolate chips or whatever you want, then leave it in the freezer until you get an actual properly frozen thing.</div>
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Remove and eat! You'll have something that will be denser and icier than shop bought ice cream but will also have the expression of your personal flavour ideas in every bite. TOTALLY worth it. If you do this, let me know what exciting (or generic but amazing) combinations you come up with!</div>
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#inspiringwomen was, in the end, a better hashtag than #twittersilence</h3>
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Honestly, I'm not quite sure why "not being on Twitter for a day" needed a hashtag, it's not like anybody could actually use it seeing as how they weren't on twitter, so all that happened was it got filled up with criticism from people who <i>were</i> still on Twitter. But aside from serious questions about whether not doing a thing for 24 hours really constitutes a meaningful boycott, as somebody who did use twitter yesterday I have to say that I enjoyed the people filling it up with awesome stories about women much more than I enjoyed the people who weren't there.</div>
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One of the best timelines, that's now a storify for your post-#trolliday viewing pleasure, was <a href="http://storify.com/FernRiddell/12wmn12hrs?awesm=sfy.co_pBtj&utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co">Fern Riddell's 12 women, 12 hour</a>s. I don't know how I feel about her ending with Queen Victoria but other than that that it's fabulous history that includes a mixture of well-known and depressingly obscure 19th century figures. I think it's always worth going out of one's way to learn about awesome women from the past, because history has an enormous male bias that a lot of people assume is because men have just done more things worth remembering. Nope, it's because history has an enormous male bias<i>. </i>Damn you, history!</div>
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A man has become a welder</h3>
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In times of writer's block, when it feels like absolutely nothing in the world is worth writing about or that you are not qualified to write about anything, it's nice to know that journalists at the China Daily <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-08/02/content_16867798.htm">often have the same problem.</a></div>
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This actually turned out surprisingly long! Expect tomorrow's post late, Oxford is not going to visit itself.</div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-383732882177641552013-08-04T23:51:00.003+01:002013-08-04T23:51:52.686+01:00Stuff I like Sunday: Of Monsters and Men, MetricGosh is it that time of day already? I've spent almost all day putting together flatpack furniture and moving things around my room to make it look more like a twenty-something's bedroom and less like a closing down sale in a next-millennium antiques shop. I have still not figured out where my extensive collection of Doctor Who figures is going to live, but perhaps I should wait until I find out whether I will need room for expansion after today's announcement.<br />
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As anybody who knows me in real life has probably guessed, I definitely have some Things to Say about said announcement, but honestly today I am tired of that sort of nonsense. And Sunday is a day for unapologetic fangirling! So, combining the themes of "I spent all day putting up a flatpack wardrobe" and "things I really really like", here are gushing reviews of the two things I have been listening to a lot to get me through the day. Both are female-fronted! And in more than just a figureheady "we would like to sell albums to teenage girls, here is a song I wrote for a woman now sing it" way.<br />
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First is "Of Monsters and Men", who, like Kerry Katona, come all the way from Iceland!<br />
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Nah not the supermarket really, they're from the country Iceland, the one with the volcanoes and the population smaller than Luxembourg.</div>
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So I am unapologetically not a music journalist. In fact, having spent many of my high school years being a Girlfriend to a Boy in a Band, I have found myself with a mild allergy to the entire scene of Supercool Musical People. Needless to say being a Girlfriend and not a person in my own right did not really suit me, but being a person in your own right in Boy in a Band World involved more effort and talent and inherent coolness than I could muster. The combination of not liking things I am not automatically good at and accepted into, and the mildly traumatising nature of anything that happens at high school, means that knowing things about music all just feels a bit inherently depressing for some reason. But anyway, now I am a single accordion-playing feminist so perhaps it is time to move on! I'll start by reading the Wikipedia page of this band I like.<br /><div>
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Of Monsters and Men! Their lead singer is that epic woman on the right and she is called <span style="background-color: white; background-image: none; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanna_Brynd%C3%ADs_Hilmarsd%C3%B3ttir" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir">Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir</a> because people from Iceland have epic names with gendered surnames that I am not inherently enamoured about but because it's feminine and Viking I am wholeheartedly behind that name in general. She plays the guitar, and another one of them (the one called Raggi, probably but not definitely the one in the leather jacket, not looking it up because men, pah) plays the guitar and sings also so they can sing awesome duets like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I">Little Talks</a>. They are quite new and therefore only have one album, <a href="http://open.spotify.com/album/6uD3oJCWT1gtlSCg5lDiNF">My Head is an Animal</a> (that's a Spotify link Eff Why Eye) but it is brilliant slightly-but-not-overly twee folky guitar stuff. Also they have an accordion which is like plus a million points and the only way it could possibly be better is if Nanna Hilmarsdottir played the accordion. Unfortunately, their accordion player left the band to go to university instead, but they have a session playing accordion for when they go on </span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: none; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.1875px;"><strike>adventures </strike></span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: none; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;">tour.</span></div>
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The other thing I have been listening to ‒ and only a year late! ‒ is Synthetica, the 2012 album by Metric. I've loved Metric unintentionally ever since watching the Scott Pilgrim movie in 2010, where they provided "Black Sheep", the song the Clash at Demonhead perform at their gig. Good movie, great comics, <i>epic</i> song. </div>
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That's the Brie Larson version, which is not as good at the original, but has the added bonus of invoking Scott Pilgrim feels and we all need more Scott Pilgrim feels in our life. It took another six months for one of my friends from the Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness to introduce me to the band behind Evil Ex Number Three, in the form of <a href="http://open.spotify.com/album/53Zf2P5pfFDHcbvdQOMPuU">Fantasies</a>, Metric's 2009 album. This was a turning point in my life. Seriously, I'm not somebody to say something like this lightly, because telling people what to like even as a joke always rubs me up the wrong way, but here's the thing. If you are the kind of person who has an unofficial (or official!) list of songs that would be in the biopic of your life, and you <i>haven't</i> got a single song from Fantasies on said list? I'm not sure you're living your life right. I'm sorry, I know Differences In Musical Taste is a thing, and not everybody's life is an epic feminine indie drama, but... seriously. This album is<i> literally all our lives</i>, no exceptions.</div>
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If you're not sure which Fantasies song would be on your soundtrack, it's probably Gimme Sympathy:</div>
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(Also if you really don't want a thing from Fantasies, I will also accept "Monster Hospital" as an acceptable substitute. Video is a bit violent, you have been warned.)</div>
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The woman doing the singing (and the drumming, guitaring and synthing in the above video, and also actual keyboards and composing for the band) is Emily Haines, and she and her man-band are all Canadian and she's friends with Lou Reed which is basically an enormous stamp of approval right there.</div>
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Despite thinking this album is the best thing since "The Second Sex", new music comes to me slowly (a byproduct of actively wanting to be disconnected from any sort of Scene), so I... only just discovered there was a "new" album a couple of days ago. I do not have quite the same visceral attachment to <a href="http://open.spotify.com/album/6kCydCXVYWRebP594HP3XH">Synthetica </a>but it is pretty darn great. "Wanderlust" has Lou Reed doing vocals, which is strangely jarring but in the best possible way. I am already a very big fan of "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiQ1QpNSkA">Speed the Collapse</a>."</div>
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So that is my very very short roundup of women in bands! Women. Who knew they had things to sing about, and that they can even compel men to help them sing those songs by playing fun instruments in the background? And they can wear nice clothes and take fun photoshoots in nature, just like the men. Wish somebody had told me this when I was fourteen...</div>
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Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5660749843456790215.post-16479929578596393872013-08-03T19:28:00.001+01:002013-08-03T19:28:06.403+01:00All about menMen like these!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thanks <a href="http://www.harkavagrant.com/">Kate Beaton</a></td></tr>
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Nah, not really. Actually, the most amusing thing that happened to me today, man-wise, was watching Tony Wang's Twitter feed. Tony Wang, for those who aren't up to date on their high powered businessmen, is the boss of British twitter, and has been in a fair bit of trouble regarding the Twitter Thing. Incidentally, update on the Twitter Thing: still a thing, though less of a thing. The Daily Mail got involved and printed an EXPOSEE (with an accent gris on one of them Es) on some of the men involved, some of whom apparently have fiancees (with another accent) and wives (no accent) and everything! I'm not linking though because at the end of the day it's still the Daily Mail. Back to Tony: After deciding that Twitter will indeed have a new abuse policy, the guy decided to Tweet a fateful statement:</div>
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I personally apologize to the women who have experienced abuse on Twitter and for what they have gone through.<br />
— Tony Wang (@TonyW) <a href="https://twitter.com/TonyW/statuses/363602538022436864">August 3, 2013</a></blockquote>
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Thanks Tony! Decent PR move there, give your team a pat on the back. The amusing part of this is that if you go on Tony Wang's Twitter feed, the message in question is now buried under several hours' worth of Tweets apparently responding to what may be <i>every single man </i>on Twitter, whose responses are all tragically predictable: <i>what about the men? Where is my apology? How come this thing is not about me?</i><br />
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I have to be sympathetic here, because it must be extraordinarily hard to be obsessed with your own place in the world that you expect every single thing on <i>Twitter</i> of all places to be directly relevant to your life. The world of men is apparently populated with an inordinate number of clones of Zaphod Beeblebrox, getting constant reassurance that they are the most important thing in the universe at all times...<br />
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(Incidentally, when I went to look this clip up and listened to it again, I had totally forgotten that the Total Perspective Vortex was invented by a man, for a woman, because of how annoying it is when women suggest men should "get some perspective". Aaah! Et tu, Douglas?)</div>
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This is going to be a shorty so I'm not going to take this observation too much further (though oh my goodness, could I ever... maybe another time). I just think it's worth noting how absurd it is to react to a single instance of "this thing is not about me" with "why isn't this thing about me" ‒ and actually, (unlike gendered twitter abuse) this isn't just a problem for men, but for everybody who exists in a kyriarchal power structure. So, everyone then. There definitely are bits of feminism that are about men, and a few of them are even <a href="http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/08/male_feminists_important">good bits</a>! But many things are not, in the same way as many things are not about white people, or straight people, or able-bodied people. We would all do well not to get too shocked every time we discover this.</div>
Adri Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00515756221558315734noreply@blogger.com0