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fiction_theory: There is some discussion of sexual assault in the essay - but I feel it is worth it.
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bitchyhaddayr: For the record:
1. When an old folks home has a tag sale, they do NOT have a dozen state-of-the-art rigid lightweight wheelchairs in funky colors to get rid of for nothing. The hardware they had in there, even massively used, would have paid for dozens upon dozens upon quadrillions of bus rides. Old people get piece-of-shit rundown folding chairs that are nearly impossible to push on your own.
2. When your sister has Downs? You don't hold her hand as you read her stories in precious, pwecious tears at her pathetic wretched handicapableness. You've known she had Downs your whole life. You're over feeling sorry for her, assuming you ever did, since you're her LITTLE SISTER.
3. When you are in a wheelchair and you find out that your love interest has been FAKING HER STUTTER? You are not angry because she's now "normal" and you are "stuck in this chair for the rest of your life." You are angry because she's been playing at what you actually experience. You are angry because half of the world treats you already as if you're faking it, and she really WAS faking it.
4. Noble and adorable cripples do not clasp their hands and give an "aw, shucks" look when their AB comrades in wheelchairs say: "This is for YOU," and point at them cheesily.
5. Schools that are not fully wheelchair accessible are BREAKING THE LAW. You do not have to give up your bus to pay for handicapped ramps. People do not have to write their own checks. Ramps are not provided out of the goodness of people's hearts. IT. IS. THE. MOTHERFUCKING. LAW.
6. And no one is worried about getting sued if they don't hire disabled people. Disablism in hiring practices is rampant and accepted. Threatening someone with the ACLU is a way to get yourself laughed out of the place, not immediately hired in a horrible economic climate.
balgarIt's quite odd to assume that certain cultural products are beneath analysis. Operas, symphonies, novels in the "literature" section, and subtitled movies more than two hours long do not convey more information or perspective than thirty second commercials, top 40 singles, network television shows, or comic books. I'd say that mass-marketed, "low culture" works are less idiosyncratic in their perspective and are therefore more useful in terms of understanding the society of which they are a product.
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tiredrandomsome1 on this--I don't think I could put it better if I tried--from here.Also, it appears the publisher Harlequin has shot themselves in the nuts. They added on a new vanity publishing wing--a wing towards which authors who are rejected from their commercial branches will be funneled. Reactions seem to vary from "But self-publishing isn't bad!" (which completely ignores how this isn't self-publishing, it's vanity publishing, and yes it fucking is) to the hardcore, as the RWA (Romance Writers of America) has (have?) revoked Harlequin's recognized publisher status.
I'll be the first person to mock the romance novel section, sure--but that's still one hell of a shitty thing to do to potential authors: lure them in with an established name, reject their novel, then flip them over and shake them for whatever money may come out while telling them that this is really the best way for their career to start.
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disappointedThat, on the other hand, Lake’s savagely pollarded heroine never seems to shut her mouth should come as no surprise either, I guess: because it is clearly not part of Lake’s belief system, or of his writerly strategy over the long consolatory pages of Green, to treat the savageries of immurement Green suffers as a child as ultimately deforming. Wolfe, whose example has clearly shaped Green, may be the only contemporary author of American fantastic literature consistently to treat damage as damaging; Lake adheres to a sunnier version of the costs of being born in prison: that spunk will unlock the barred door.
[...]
It is here we come to something of a sticking point, which is rage. The young peasant girl Green (she refuses to use the name her owner gives her), who has spent most of her life in a deep Skinner Box being shaped, refuses to accept her destiny. After all her travails, she tells us, “I was still me“, and my heart sank. The person we have thought she was—the aleph self gaining some dark noumenousness from her immurement in the heart of the Wolfean world she had been selected for as an infant—turns out to be a cloak that only half conceals a moderately sophisticated Liberal Humanist teenager from California with anger issues. Made berserk by the thought that she—a simple illiterate peasant lass from a subsistance rice paddy—has been bought and educated by immortals whose nature and purpose on the plate of the world we have not yet learned, Green kills one of her teaching Mistresses, scars her face so she cannot become a concubine, and escapes with Dancing Mistress into the City.
Specifically, there are two ways in which we can interpret Green’s sadomasochistic lesbianism. We can see it as the sort of empowering lesbianism practiced by apparently kick-ass fantasy heroines or we can see it as yet further evidence that Green has been completely broken by her time of enslavement. Either reading is discomforting, the former because it strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of homosexuality to view it as more legitimising than heterosexuality, and the latter because it implies a direct causal relationship between abuse and ‘aberrant’ sexual behaviour. In both cases, Green’s sexual preferences are reduced to something illustrative rather authentic. The upshot is that there is no sense of emotional reality to her attractions beyond shared orientation and the possibility, perhaps, that the author finds the idea of two girls getting it on a bit hot. Or one girl and a catgirl. I’m not joking.
[...]
I think I would have had less of a problem with Green had I been able to shake the suspicion I was meant to think she was awesome. She does kick-ass fantasy heroine things like kill people, sleep around, win fights and be Chosen By The Gods (yes, she’s that too) and her only flaws are the sort of flaws it is acceptable for a strong woman to have—i.e. she is a little bit impulsive, a little bit ruthless and just too gosh darn stubborn sometimes. Because of this, and her general disinclination to give a damn about anyone else, she never felt like a real person to me.
It gets worse, considerably worse, when she returns to her home. Suddenly Copper Downs goes from being not merely more affluent than her homeland but objectively better. Green states, quite clearly, that:
My captors had been right. Rather I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.
Now I know that this is partly Green giving in to despair, but nothing in the text challenges this conclusion. It’s rather an object lesson in the dangers of taking on too many genre stereotypes at once.
Had this been the story of a white man who was taken away from his pseudo-European farming village and conscripted into the armies of the Dark Lord of Evil then I would have been overjoyed to find him returning home to realise that his long lost homeland was a poverty stricken shithole and his father was a bastard who never cared about him. It would challenge the assumptions of a genre that frequently glamourises poverty, and it wouldn’t have any creepy overtones (unless you want to make a big thing about militarism).
Make the white man a south-Asian woman, however, and you start getting into difficulties, because now you’re not saying “being poor sucks” you’re saying “being foreign sucks”. Turn conscription into slavery and you’re not saying “you might be better off in the army than on a farm” you’re saying “you might be better off as a slave in Europe than as a free man in your own country.” Add in the courtesan angle and you’re saying “it is a good thing for south-Asian women to be sold as sex slaves to European men.”
I hope I don’t need to point out that this really isn’t okay.
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anxious tired frustratedAbstract: If you're going to argue about a text's metaphorical or allegorical representations of race, you may want to take a look at how it treats actual people of color before forming your conclusions about the subversion of racial stereotypes.
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cynicalrandomsome1 on IJ: Fanlore steals.Where is the outrage? Is it because these people are supposedly fans? Fanlib said they might copy parts of &/or a work to a different location and people flipped the fuck out. These people lift artwork without permission and run roughshod over the 'zinemakers, the people who helped really get this fannish boat sailing to begin with, and I only hear about it from a friend of Sockii's? How do any of us know that our fanworks, in any format, won't be lifted for their site/archive under the guise of some sort of historical importance?
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bleurghBall said the Vampire King of Mississippi is coming in season three. He provides a contrast to Sophie-Anne, the Vampire Queen of Louisiana (Evan Rachel Wood). “He’s older,” Ball said. “He’s much more mature. He’s much more methodical and grounded. She’s kind of crazy. To me, she’s kind of like Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan, where she has a very short attention span and she’s very, very egomaniacal and very self-obsessed and doesn’t really think about her actions, whereas the Vampire King is very much an adult. He has an agenda. He has things he wants to achieve. I think he’s much more formidable than she is.”
tiredFor a while now I’ve been thinking about how many readers seem to hate female characters more than they hate male. Or rather that the same behaviour from a male character is okay but someone inexcusable in a female.
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irate tired1. pertaining to a woman or girl: feminine beauty; feminine dress
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4. belonging to the female sex; female
anxiousWarehouse 13 also treats the idea of history being powerful, dangerous, and relevant today as a crazy, fantastical notion. "Who would think that? Doesn't everyone know that the past is something we tear down and lock away in the attic to make room for the new?" Well, it turns out that not everybody does think that way. Especially people, like indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and other victims of imperialism throughout the world, who had their language and/or history and/or culture and/or lives forcibly removed by colonizing powers. A power like, say, the United States government.
We of the Powhatan Nation disagree. The film distorts history beyond recognition. Our offers to assist Disney with cultural and historical accuracy were rejected. Our efforts urging him to reconsider his misguided mission were spurred.
"Pocahontas" was a nickname, meaning "the naughty one" or "spoiled child". Her real name was Matoaka. ....The truth of the matter is that the first time John Smith told the story about this rescue was 17 years after it happened, and it was but one of three reported by the pretentious Smith that he was saved from death by a prominent woman.
Yet in an account Smith wrote after his winter stay with Powhatan's people, he never mentioned such an incident. In fact, the starving adventurer reported he had been kept comfortable and treated in a friendly fashion as an honored guest of Powhatan and Powhatan's brothers. Most scholars think the "Pocahontas incident" would have been highly unlikely, especially since it was part of a longer account used as justification to wage war on Powhatan's Nation.
Euro-Americans must ask themselves why it has been so important to elevate Smith's fibbing to status as a national myth worthy of being recycled again by Disney. Disney even improves upon it by changing Pocahontas from a little girl into a young woman.
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scared"As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Gagan said.....The victim was found unconscious and "brutally assaulted" under a bench shortly before midnight Saturday, after police received a call from someone in the area who had overheard people at the assault scene "reminiscing about the incident."
...."This just gets worse and worse the more you dig into it," Gagan said. "It was like a horror movie after looking at the evidence. I can't believe not one person felt compelled to help her."
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nostalgic amused infuriated angryRoman Polanski raped a child. Not if, maybe, or possibly—he did it. He did it, he did it, he did it. And then, like the coward son of a bitch he is, he fled the authorities.
Now, most people would say, “Wow, that’s horrific and unspeakable, and he should be punished for his crime. Not just because he hurt a young girl, but because he might do it again.“
I really thought we'd moved past the days when we blamed women for the violence committed against them. I really did. I didn't think anyone in America today could stand up and blame a 13 year old girl for the actions of a 43 year old man who gave her alcohol and drugs before he got around to having sex with her -- because, damn, she kept saying no!
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