"Racebent" characters have long been making appearances on sites like Tumblr, but they’ve been picking up heat recently. One of the most popular and frequent, at least on my dash? Hermione Granger as a woman of color, most often black.
For the first time, I was seeing Hermione’s subtext brought out into text.
I'm mostly too old and not-with-it to know what the kids are doing on Tumblr, so I haven't seen this before. But I love it, hard. If I'd been an actual 14 year old when reading the Harry Potter books, I'd have cosplayed the shit out of Hermione Granger.
Lucida Grimbrow, Ravenclaw alumna. She's a teacher of wizarding ethics and bookseller.
Um, this is fantastic. So, Brendon Ayanbadejo is a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. He has also been an open and vocal supporter of marriage equality for at least a few years now. Here's an opinion piece he wrote for HuffPo back in 2009. It's short -- go read it. That piece means it shouldn't have been surprising to anyone when Ayanbadejo recently raffled two tickets to a Ravens game as part of a marriage equality fundraiser. Well, surprising or not, Emmett C. Burns, Jr, Maryland State Delegate (D), didn't like it. In fact, he disliked it so much that he wrote this letter, asking the owner of the Ravens to censor Ayanbadejo. Here's HuffPo on that, and here is Ayanbadejo's response, as reported by the Baltimore Sun. I especially like this part of it:
“I just thought it was important because it’s an equality issue. I see the big picture,” Ayanbadejo said. “You know, there was a time when women didn’t have rights, black people didn’t have rights, and right now, gay rights is a big issue and it has been for a long time. And so we’re slowly chopping down the barriers to equality. We have some minority rights we have to get straight and some gay rights, then we’ll be on our way -- because ultimately, the goal is to be the best country that we can be and we’re always evolving. You just look back to where we came from, and we’ve come a long way, but we still have a ways to go.”
I also love (LOVE!) the 2 cents Chris Kluwe, Vikings punter, has thrown in, voicing his support for Ayanbadejo, the first amendment, and marriage equality. With jokes. Go read it, but put your late-afternoon coffee/Diet Coke (or happy hour cocktail, for my East Coasters) down before you do. Did I mention that I love it. Good work, boys. I might actually have to start cheering for you and your teams. You know, when it doesn't conflict with Saints loyalty and fantasy football.
My favorite quote about Bill Clinton's speech tonight came from Steve Schmidt, one of MSNBC's Republican commentators, who said:
It was extraordinary. It was a virtuoso political performance -- there's no other politician in America in the last generation that could hold the attention of a crowd, have them yelling and screaming, speaking for 3 quarters of an hour. I mean, I wish to God, as a Republican, we had someone on our side who had the ability to do that. We don't. It would be great if we did. Just a[n] amazing performance.
Loved it that Clinton brought jokes. Loved it even more that he did so while breaking down actual policy.
I have to thank a FB friend for posting a link to The Crunk Feminist Collective's insightful short piece on Melissa Harris-Perry losing her cool at Monica Mehta. A video of the moment in question is embedded in that article, and you can find the longer segment at the website for MHP's show.
I was watching that episode, and I was absolutely thrilled when the moment occurred, both because MHP was right, and because Mehta had been saying *horrible* things the entire time, and I had only been able to yell at my TV screen. But, I've avoided looking into coverage of the moment, because I couldn't voluntarily subject myself to the inevitable "Angry (Black) Woman" stereotype reinforcement that I presumed would follow, or having to explain, over and over, why responding to this through the lens of "irrational women" or "overly sensitive Black people and their bad tempers" is both inappropriate and either deeply misguided or intentionally distracting. As The Collective wrote:
One of the ways White supremacy and sexism works is through a putative disavowal of emotion as a legitimate form for expressing thought. Women and Black people are overly emotional, so the conventional wisdom goes. We have been taught to overcompensate for this stereotype by being overly composed, even when anger is warranted.
I don't think people should be in the habit of shouting each other down on a regular basis -- it's a terrible way to run a discourse. But sometimes you shout because someone has refused to actually participate when you tried to have discourse. Sometimes, you shout because you've been pushed too far to allow propriety to be used in service of misinformation, narrow-minded selfishness, condescension, and a thoroughgoing lack of empathy. Sometimes, asked to hold one more offense, your cup runs over.
So, thanks, A., for posting a link to something I could read without getting enraged. With election season now in full gear, I'll have plenty or reasons to rage, and should probably save what little eloquence I have for that.
I think this was, officially, the most interesting thing I saw on Facebook today: Leland Bobbé's "Half Drag" photographs. On his blog, Bobbé writes of "Half Drag" that his intention is "to capture both the male and the alter-ego female side of these subjects in one image."(L. Bobbé. "Support Half-Drag." lelandbobbe.com/blog. Web. 8 August 2012)
Photo by Leland Bobbé (http://lelandbobbe.com/#/18/30)
These are really fascinating to me. In addition to how interesting the comparisons are, I found that I usually couldn't "see" the feminine side properly with the masculine side showing -- I had to cover the right to see how the left really looked. I didn't feel like the opposite was true, though. I wonder why that is.
Photo by Leland Bobbé (http://lelandbobbe.com/#/18/6)
I also found that some of the subjects actually looked *more* masculine on the drag side of the photo. Again, I wonder why that is.
Today, I'm spreading the word about a film project that I'm very excited about:
WONDER WOMEN! is a documentary film that examines the relationship between popular representations of (super)powerful women and society's anxieties about the power of everyday women. The film features interviews with an array of Wonder Women, from Gloria Steinem to Lynda Carter. Yours truly even sat down with the director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, to talk about Buffy's place in the ranks of Wonder Women!
The film will be making its world premier in March, at the South by Southwest Festival. But before then, Kristy and her filmmaking partners need support to cover the costs of preparing the final festival print. Please check out the WONDER WOMEN! Kickstarter page, and consider supporting the fundraising drive with a donation of $1 or more. There's just about 2 weeks left to make the funding goal, and they're very close -- every dollar counts!
I hadn't heard about this encounter before now, but I love it! As someone who already believes that the stories we tell are important, that TV and films both shape and reflect us (sometimes in ways we don't acknowledge or even understand), and that speculative fiction can be a particularly powerful way for us to imagine human possibility, I find the idea of MLK telling Nichols to stay with Star Trek for the greater good quite moving. And it puts me in mind of another SFF character that broke racial barriers, at least for this viewer:
NYPD Detective Elisa Maza
Elisa Maza was one of many awesome things about Gargoyles, the utterly fantastic animated series that ran as part of the Disney Afternoon from 1994-1996. One episode of the show, entitled "The Journey," aired on ABC in Disney's One Saturday Morning programming.
Other sources will tell you that the ABC episode I speak of was actually the first of 13, the beginning of a spin-off called something ridiculous, like "Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles." This is patently untrue, as the monstrosity that aired on ABC was not at all the same show, and should, for the most part, be forgotten. Or disavowed. Or stabbed until killed. Dead. It may help you to know at this point that, in my mind, Heroes will be easy to marathon when I finally get around to it, because it only ran for one season. I also maintain that The Matrix was an excellent movie and had no sequels.
But I digress.
Elisa Maza was notable to me because she was a serious badass -- a lady cop with a great old car, a killer roundhouse, and serious attitude, she flew with the Gargoyles, taking on baddies from mobsters to mythical creatures to an uber-rich supervillain diabolical enough to have his own TV Trope. She also had Fantastic Disney Hair.
As if all of that wasn't enough to make her my favorite, here's a picture of her family:
HOLY CHARACTERS OF COLOR, BATMAN!
Seated is a young and uncharacteristically pale-faced Elisa Maza. Standing, far left, is her dad, Peter Maza. On the far right is her mom, Diane Maza. The younger man is Elisa's brother, Derek, who later becomes an important character in his own right. In the middle is Beth Maza, the youngest of the family. We meet all save Beth in "Deadly Force," about halfway-ish through Season One, when shit gets so real that a worried Maza family gathers at Elisa's hospital bedside. At that first intro, it's clear that Diane Maza is African American, and that Peter Maza is not. I believe it's not until Season 2 that we're told he's of Hopi descent. I remember my response being something along the lines of, "Wait, so Elisa Maza's really, really not white? Sweet!"
It doesn't seem like it would be a big deal, a random cartoon character being multi-ethnic. But something about the way that it was handled, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, made her that much more exciting. Maybe it was the fact that I loved that show, that I thought that character had a lot of good things going. Or maybe it was the fact that, thinking back, I couldn't remember another black female character on a cartoon I'd loved since Shana (Jem, 1985-1988) and Diana (Dungeons and Dragons, 1983-1985).
Shana, far left. Her hair was truly outrageous.
Diana (aka The Acrobat). I never understood why she was wearing a fur bikini.
But I think it was more than that. For me, Elisa Maza was an animated descendant of Lt. Uhura - a female character of color making it look perfectly normal for brown women to kick ass and wield power. Instead of outer space, she traveled through time, around the world, and through the streets and skies of Manhattan, encountering new life and new civilizations of her own.
Of course, Elisa Maza traced her lineage back to the Enterprise in more explicit ways: Diane Maza, a native New Yorker whose ancestors hail from Nigeria, was voiced by none other than Lt. Uhura herself, Nichelle Nichols.
A friend of mine has a story out today, over at Strange Horizons! "Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas." Give it a read -- it's good. In the author's words, the story is about "seeing and being seen. Also, tamales."
Friday, October 21, 2011
The white man's tendency to indulge in narcissistic self analysis makes ethnographic research in europe very difficult. there is not one psychological or social phenomenon that has not been examined in scores of books. As soon as europeans have written up their theories, they start to believe in them. If you read these works of egocentric self justification, you risk being taken in by the elaborate style in which they are written, and by the seemingly logical arguments....If you want to keep a clear head, avoid all white self-interpretation and rely on your own common sense.
This morning, TNC links to Matt Yglesias' response to TNC's first column in the NY Times. Which happens to be about X-Men: First Class. I happen to agree with what I think is TNC's main point, that the film positions itself historically and, in the process, erases or ignores a major part of that history. In fact, as I wrote to a friend yesterday,
He's totally right, by the way. I was actually most annoyed by the way that it adopted the language of the civil rights movement (mutant and proud? really?!) and played up Xavier and Lehnsherr's MLK/Malcolm X resonances, but only in a way that could have been ignored/missed by people who don't already know about those resonances.
I was also unhappy with the fact that all of the brown mutants ended up on Magneto's side. I think Yglesias is correct in that Magneto is right -- homo sapiens sapiens cannot be trusted as naively as Xavier seems to. But, again, I have to side with TNC on this one. Magneto is right, but only up to a point. As TNC says in his response to Yglesias:
If Xavier's integrationist attitude is naive (and it is), I'd argue that Magneto's faith in violence and ethnic nationalism is equally so. For me, that really is the beauty of the film. I don't think it can be reduced to who is "right." As Magneto says, Xavier thinks all humans are like Moira. And as Xavier replies, Magneto thinks all humans are like Shaw.
I cannot support Magneto's intended (at the end of this film) or actual (in the earlier films) response to that, which is not a fight for equality (violent or otherwise), but a lifelong misson of world domination (very very violent), with disregard for the lives of both "normal" human beings and mutants. And seemingly having forgotten, ironically enough, that genocide and the mass mistreatment of groups on the basis that you consider them less than you are both BAD BAD THINGS.
*This has been your a.m. geek out. Now back to regularly scheduled nerding, as I finish the last of my grading for the quarter. Expect to see a bit more activity around here, now that the school year is loosening its death grip.
So, over at the New York Times, someone named Ginia Bellafante wrote a "review" of Game of Thrones, in which she proclaims that "Game of Thrones is boy fiction" sexed up with "unhindered bed-jumping" "as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise." I put review in scare quotes because, as far as I'm concerned, if you start with the idea that no one with boobs could possibly want to watch this and follow up, as she does, with the thought that nothing in this genre could possibly have anything worthwhile to say to anyone, you haven't really done much to make me feel like you're trustworthy source of information on whether or not it's worth watching.
Now, as a) a woman who is b) alive and would c) watch if I had HBO, I was planning a response to the "boy fiction" bullshit (I'll be sure to include that in the title of my class next time), but Joanna Robinson over at Pajiba has already made such a fantastic one that I'm just going to link to hers and leave it at that. The comments are also pretty fantastic, as is often the case on Pajiba. Potentially spoilerific, but fantastic.
The dubious honor of Fug Madness "winner" went to Taylor Momsen. Here's the montage for this year's Fug Madness -- as always, a thing of beauty. Or fugly, as the case may be.
As I said on Facebook, old folks are killing this week. First Billy Crystal:
Fancy pants at the coffee shop. And by "fancy," I mean "dear God, no." (3/12)
I was going to mock this place for giving someone highlights with which I disagreed, but then I noticed this sign and decided not to. It put me in such a good mood that I bought cookies from girl scouts that morning. I almost smiled at a hipster that day, but recovered my senses in time. (3/12)
An excellent poem by Kay Ryan (3/13)
Morning got off to a terrible start, but I got a free latte with my breakfast while I waited an hour for the train, and there were pretty flowers on the table. (My garden was *totally* a bean that day.) [3/14]
When I was young, I loved Wonder Woman. I watched the TV show - I'm sure that what I remember watching must be the reruns, since it's original run was 1975-1979, which would have been a little early for me to watch and remember. I once convinced my mom to let me wear my Wonder Woman Underoos for Halloween. I know that someone once truth lassoed my little brother, but I"m sure I don't know anything about it. I admit with no shame that I was going to *be* Wonder Woman (or a cowgirl) when I grew up. But my first real, solid memory of Wonder Woman was a glow-in-the dark light switch cover that was on the wall in my childhood bedroom, and had been for as long as I could remember. I remember standing in front of it, making sure my arms were in the right position to start my power twirl. And I can remember further back, when I was even younger, imagining that she was protecting me when the lights were off—that the glow-in-the-dark-ness was a magic of some sort, warding off any number of unspecified "scary things." "All the world is waiting for you/and the magic that you do..."
When I got older, and certainly didn't think silly things like that anymore, I redecorated my room. I wanted to change it from the space I thought of as my mom's creation to one that was my own, so the baby pink on the walls changed to a more teenagery shade of...well, pink. But the little girly art—-an angel my mom had painted -- came down. My mother told me she'd put the angel there to watch over me when I was a baby; I gently reminded her that I wasn't a baby anymore, and put posters of an actor I've long-since forgotten on the wall where my gaurdian had been. My mom smiled and asked if I wanted her to help me take the screws out of Wonder Woman. She was sure the regular switch cover was around somewhere, and we could put it up after the paint was dry. "Why would I take Wonder Woman down?" I asked. "She looks good with the new pink." And so she stayed.
To be honest, I don't think I could imagine taking her down. And hadn't I always loved Wonder Woman? I don't think it occurred to me, at the time, that she must have been put there by one of the people old enough to watch and love Wonder Woman at the time that the show was happening. The people who'd bought me the Underoos, who'd actually been paying attention to the show while I was busy twirling with my eyes closed. Who'd put not one, but two protectors in my room. It's funny the things teenagers don't think of.
When I was 21, my brother and I sold our house in a somewhat hurried fashion. We did well for a 17 and 21 year old left with the responsibility of selling their childhood home in the middle of the school year, but a few things were bound to go wrong, and my forgetting to take that light switch cover off the wall was one of them. I've thought of it often over the years, and for some reason, it hasn't occurred to me until now that I could probably find one somewhere, and that it might even be for a price I was willing and able to pay.
Maybe she was waiting until I really needed her. It feels a little safer around here already.
*(Edited a little, because there are things we don't think of as grown ups either. Thanks, dad.)
Another week of grading means another slow week on the blog (yeah, what else is new). What am I doing to make it hurt less? Well, this is too good not to post:
I got this goodness from one of the deans, who got it from one of the student lists. It made us both a little teary. And then she said, "I'm writing music right now and I"m thinking I might reach out to this author, ask if I can collaborate with her on turning this into a song. Well, maybe not the heroine part." (It amused me to hear that the dean is writing music, in the way that it must amuse my students to hear that I love karaoke.) Anyway, this dean was like, "Well, maybe not the heroine part." And then we were both like, *shrug* "Maybe the heroine part, too!" *laugh* It was a funny moment.
A funny moment. I'd just had coffee with two professors, to talk to them about teaching, at a moment when I'm looking forward to teaching my own class for the very first time, which might also be the last. This alongside having an article and an invitation to give a paper (so, I'm validated as an academic?) to think about while simultaneously beginning to consider what my backup career path will be in case the fellowships (no jobs to apply for) simply do not materialize (oh, right - only maybe, if the fates allow). Note that I'm not even touching the weight/love life part. The gravitational pull of that one is too strong for this post.
I want to send it to my little sisters, who are not yet 20-something, though I know I cannot make those future versions of them understand what their present selves have not yet lived. Those things are their becoming.
I want to send it to that younger me, who once was 20-something (was she, really?), though I know she is no longer there, is already moving through time, faster than she can imagine, towards where she sits now - was sitting then, when she wrote this - having already become who she is today, on her way to who knows what next.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
So, there's this thing called WisCon. It's a convention on science fiction and fantasy that focuses on feminism, gender, race, and class. And people talk politics a lot. And there's an academic track. And sometimes they disinvite the guest of honor because she says something super racist online.
Sounds awesome, right?!
That's exactly what the friend who told me about thought I would think. Which is why he told me about it. But you know my broke ass really can't afford to spend money to run off to Wisconsin (heh heh - you see what they did there?) for a random geek/nerd/feminism extravaganza. As does he. So he *also* told me about this other awesome thing called Con Or Bust, an annual fundraising effort to help people of color attend WisCon (and, I think, other science fiction and fantasy conventions, though I've only heard about it in conjunction w/WisCon), in an effort to increasing racial diversity and goodness in the science fiction and fantasy loving/making communities. This effort was started in response to some serious fuckery that happened a couple of years ago (you can find a good summary of said fuckery here, but be warned SERIOUS FUCKERY, and a lot of it). Here's what you need to know for this conversation: as part of a much larger discussion on writing about The Other, it came up that, yes, Virginia, people of color do, in fact, read science fiction and fantasy. And we do, in fact, attend conventions. And we would, in fact, do so more often, if we had more resources. So someone said, "Well, why don't we raise some funds and help some more people of color come to our convention?" And so Con or Bust was born.
Well, guess what? I'm a person of color, and I would love to go to WisCon, so I have thrown my name in the Con or Bust 2011 hat, and they're agreed to share some of those funds with me. How does this affect you? Well, maybe not at all. But, if you'd like to know more about how I'll be getting sent to WisCon, you can follow that link to Con or Bust 2011 info, where you'll find links to info on how to offer things to be auctioned off, how to browse the things being auctioned and, if you decide to bid, how to do so, or how to just make a donation.
If you're a person of color who would also like to go to WisCon and you'd also like to request assistance, look here for information on how to do that.
Finally, here's what my friend (who is also awesome) had to say about Con or Bust:
Con or Bust is dedicated to getting fans of color to WisCon, and I have been astounded by the generosity of all involved, and by the awesome, awesome people who have been able to attend WisCon because of it. It's helping to increase the visibility and visible participation of people of color in the SF&F artistic, fandom, and critical communities, and has definitely helped make WisCon a convention that I love and look forward to attending.
Yeesh - no pressure, dude. Hope I don't mess up the track record of awesomeness :)
