Miscellania #1 (de-cluttering delicious)

[linkspam_mod]

[This post contains links to discussions of: lbgt issues, cultural appropriation, gender, and race. Since they do not make up a themed dialogue/discussion, they are posted chronologically, from earlier to later.]


27 DEC 09
rubyfruit: Also I Am Still A Horrible Person (And That's Okay)

This is pretty much how I feel about -Ism Posts on meta communities. My two main issues with such posts are as follows: 1. The assumption that (a)I belong to a hive mind because I belong to a minority group or (b) there is a hive mind and all women/POCs/LGBT people/(insert minority here) all think the same way about the same topics when this isn't the case in the least (the multiple branches of feminist thought alone is proof that not all women think alike). 2. The assumption that it is my obligation as a member of a minority group to "educate" people within fandom, even when there are plenty of people willing to do so.

28 DEC 09
fjm: [Warning for Comments: Sexism] Open letter to fans, authors and critics of the male sex.

So: the next time you are asked to be on a panel, or part of a discussion, or an anthology, and not a single woman is included, I suggest that it is not enough to shrug and say "well, I didn't issue the invitations". Question it. If the answer is "there wasn't room" consider making a sacrifice. Furthermore, if you are asked to talk about the state of the field, it is also your responsibility to think before you go ahead and give a list of "the best" science fiction writers with not a single woman on the list [and if you seriously think there isn't a single woman on that list you aren't doing the right reading]. I am really tired of hearing men discuss the field as if there are no women writers. There have always been women sf writers (see the research of myself, Merrick, Larbalastier and Davin). There is not a single decade of sf in the twentieth century in which there were no women writers.

mevennen: [Warning: Sexism] My struggle

I have had one heartfelt email (sorry to do the 'lurkers support me in email' thing', but...) noting that, at the time of writing, relatively few people had addressed the point I made in the thread, which is not that professional female SF writers feel unsupported by the men, but that, a lot of the time, they feel unsupported by the women and that's actually more damaging. Invisibility, much?

02 JAN 10
dark_administrator @ dark_agenda: Post-reveal discussion

So now that authors are revealed, how did your participation in the Dark Agenda Challenge go? What thoughts do you have about it? How did it change your yuletide experience?

04 JAN 10
Charlie Stross @ Charlie's Diary:[Warning for Comments: Racism and Sexism] 2009 Hugo nominations

If you're eligible to nominate for the Hugos? Please do so. We need breadth; in some of the minor categories only a few dozen nominations can put a work on the shortlist. If the Hugos don't receive a lot of nominations, they're prone to capture by a few favourites with a narrow clique of supporters. (Ahem.) If you're male? Please try to find the time to read and consider nominating works by women, people of colour, non-anglophone authors, and other groups you may be unconsciously avoiding. Seriously. There's good stuff in our field being written by people who aren't white anglophone males, and they don't get the visibility and recognition they deserve in the Hugo awards. This is a shame and reflects badly on the collective taste of convention-going SF fandom. It's up to us to fix it.

05 JAN 10
pyrefly @ tanzaku: Integrating Tanabata with the Dark Agenda Challenge

So I've been thinking a lot about the Dark Agenda Challenge (see dark_agenda for more details) and the various conversations around fandom in the past year about Race Fail and chromatic sources/characters. This post discusses some of the problematic things that have come up with writing fic for Asian sources specifically, which are issues that are likely to come up in our exchange as well. Now, I don't particularly want to add additional requirements to our exchange, like, "Your fic has to have an accurate portrayal of the chromatic source and characters," as that could get problematic for many reasons.

06 JAN 10
bossymarmalade: Untitled [Mod Note: post about resource gathering for multiple privileges]

I am going to be doing part of a "cross-cultural awareness" workshop at my place of employ in a couple of weeks. My office primarily works with developmentally-delayed infants and since these services are free, most of our clients are in the recent immigrant, PoC, female, poor, or otherwise marginalized groups. Most of my co-workers are the very picture of nice (white or model minority) liberals. So I can't give them anything *too* academic or heavy-theory to start off with. What I'm looking for are easily-accessible vignettes... focusing on ableism and differences, classism, other privileges. I'm trying to come at it from an angle of "privileges and how to address your own" rather than "diversity means not telling other people to their faces how weird their cultures are".

12 JAN 10
aquaeri: The meaning of barefoot

And while the point of the essay doesn't really depend at all on the "barefoot" thing, it became obvious to me while reading: in US culture, being barefoot is symbolic of fragility, poverty, and abjectness. And being barefoot in Australia doesn't mean that at all. I'm an Aussie who spends a fair amount of time barefoot, and I know lots of other (adult) Aussies who do, up to and including full university professors. I don't know if being barefoot has any particular symbolic significance in Australia, but if it does, that meaning is closer to freedom and defiance of formality.

nacbrie: OTW and AO3 - thinky thoughts

But I will ask everybody to remember that this - this wonderful, beautiful, fucked up, schism-riddled, porn-filled, violently stubborn, loving, squeeful amazing mess that is fandom - is a community venture. As such, it can only be as good as the understanding between the various players. Nobody is requiring youse to agree, but can everybody please work at trying to understand where others are coming from? That violently expressing negative opinions can have a real affect on the actions available to others? That you cannot control how somebody will react to your work, so it is best to learn coping mechanisms?

13 JAN 10
thedeadparrot: stuff where i talk about stuff

Incidentally related to (2), I really wish it wasn't everyone's first instinct to hearing about my (and others') anger and pain and upset over ism-issues in canon X to tell me in my own space (a) how they are capable of utilizing their privilege to ignore the problems in X or (b) how much they love X despite the ism-issues I have just raised.

14 JAN 10
deelaundry: [Warning for Comments: Straight Privilege] An Early AM Question

I know some people on my f-list thought the male nurse House spoke to in episode 6-8 (the Thanksgiving ep) was gay. If you thought this, what specifically made you think it?

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Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hi!

Not related to sff necessarily, but related to racism, ablism, and feminism: Prof. Susurro's angry essay about (some white) social service feminists: http://likeawhisper.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/want-ad-for-feminist-revolution-pt-i/.

[linkspam_mod]

Thank you for the link.