April 30, 2005

Dangerous books

Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas, a blog posts, via Bitch | (S)HITLIST, about an interesting study by a grad student that suggests a correlation between reading too many romantic stories, and being passive and hence susceptible to violence in relationships. Senior academics at the student's institution are making no claims: "Susan's work is an interesting study which is sure to spark debate, but further research is required in this area." But in various guises, this is an idea that has had real legs. I am doing a reading course this summer with one of our graduate students about the novel of female education in the eighteenth century. Inappropriate reading is a recurrent theme: I'm thinking Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, in which the heroine's mind was turned by the reading of chivalric romances. An interesting preemptive defence against criticism: this is a moral novel, qualitatively different from those trashy novels. Eliza Haywood has a character, an older man, seduce a young girl by giving her ... yes, bad literature. And it works.

Bonus links:

Charlotte Ramsay Lennox
The Charlotte Lennox Page
Literary Encyclopedia: Lennox, Charlotte
The Life of Harriot Stuart by Charlotte Lennox

April 16, 2005

Andrea Dworkin remembered

Since my earlier roundup there have been a lot more posts about Dworkin and her legacy. Go to Rad Geek People's Daily for some marvellous posts, and a comprehensive list of links.

April 13, 2005

Andrea Dworkin, R.I.P.

Andrea Dworkin was part of the coming-of-age of many women of my generation. With her death, much else has also passed away.

Obituary in the NYTimes (registration required), The New York Sun, and a balanced retrospective with some good links in The Guardian.

Jenny Diski, "Oh, Andrea Dworkin: rev. of Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore, London Review of Books.

The Andrea Dworkin Website, including The Andrea Dworkin Lie Detector and links to Dworkin's writings.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Press Release About Canada"

Wikipedia – first with the news (via Kameron Hurley). More on CultureCat, feministing.com, Pen-Elayne on the Web (and here).

Bloggers take note — Ampersand, blackfeminism.org, Echidne, feministe, Jessica, Christine (some good links), Pinko Feminist Hellcat (excellent links), XX (more good links) — even those with reservations. There are lots of others. She was important.

Some notable posts:

Rad Geek, Andrea Dworkin media blackout lifts, a little, More by and about Andrea Dworkin, May she be at peace: Andrea Dworkin, and Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape.
Susie Bright, Andrea Dworkin Has Died.
Cleis, In electric memory of Andrea Dworkin.
Flea, Andrea Dworkin, on the "I didn't always agree with her" syndrome.
my name is Andrea. it means manhood or courage at Nyarlathotep's Miscellany (via Echidne)

Some quotable quotes:

"[A] Leon Trotsky of the sex war," according to Punch¹

"Dworkin is one of the few remaining specimens of pure countercultural Romanticism: fierce, melodramatic and utterly convinced that all truth can be found in her own roiling, untempered emotions."²

"She was a warrior."³

"[I]t's tempting to say that if Andrea Dworkin didn't exist, we would have had to invent her.
Which, come to think about it, is exactly what we have done."⁴

E.: It is so hard to write you. Why am I doing it this way, not intending ever to send this letter, still with one eye to publication, a grand concept for a book in some sense, and still with one eye, that poets conscience, to a future which becomes increasingly impossible to imagine. It seems the only way I can bear the passion behind the language, the memory, the desire, the only way not to be burnt up by what I feel. You come over me in waves of memory, especially when I sleep, and I wake up in sweat and trembling, not knowing where I am, not remembering the years that separate us.⁵

¹ Adam Bernstein, Washington Post (Tues. April 12, 2005): B06.

² Laura Miller, Rev. of Heartbreak, The New York Times Book Review (2002).

³ Lisa Jardine on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

⁴ Louise Armstrong, "The Trouble with Andrea."

⁵ Andrea Dworkin, First Love: a chapter from an unpublished novel.

(Thanks to Murray Littlejohn for some of this material).

March 24, 2005

Life Mask by Emma Donoghue

Here is one description:

The bestselling author of Slammerkin turns her attention to the Beau Monde of late eighteenth-century England, turning the private drama of three celebrated Londoners into a robust, full-bodied portrait of a world, and lives, on the brink of revolution. The Honourable Mrs. Damer is a young widow of eccentric tastes, the only female sculptor of her time. The Earl of Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, is the richest man in the House of Lords-and the ugliest. Miss Eliza Farren, born a nobody, now reigns as Queen of Comedy at Drury Lane Theatre.

In a time of looming war and terrorism, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Their marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones.

A colleague lent me this novel, saying that she had enjoyed it. As she is a discriminating reader I looked forward to reading it, but when I did I was horrified to find that I was not enjoying it. The characters were flat, it was over-researched in a superficial way, and it seemed nothing more than an up-market lesbian bodice-ripper.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But since it had been lent to me by the aforementioned colleague, I did not follow my impulse to put it aside; instead, I persevered, complaining loudly to Joe all the while. And I'm glad I kept at it, because it grew into an interesting novel. I still think it wears its historical detail heavily — there are countless instances where we are told something for no apparent reason other than, it would seem, Donoghue had come across some titbit about late 18th-century waste management or powdered wigs or the Prince of Wales and could not forebear from sharing; instances that are all the more irritating because her primary method of offering such information is to have one character or another reflect, in a self-conscious and unnatural way, on waste management, etc.& — but even though the novel is guilty many times over of this, one of the most annoying faux pas possible in a historical novel, it still manages to evoke a sense of time and place almost in spite of itself.

And an interesting evolution occurs with the characters. Initially one-dimensional, the three main characters take on a sort of evocative opacity that is much more interesting. Eliza Farren, a "virtuous actress" in the style of her better-known contemporary, Sarah Siddons, seems designed to fulfill the role of object of desire and not much else. Her insistence on maintaining her reputation — a potentially rich, and vexed, topic — is largely unexamined. However, by the end of the text this no longer seems like a fault; Donoghue addresses the issue with an almost oblique suggestiveness that surprises. Well, at least, it surprised me as I had decided, somewhat prematurely, that Donoghue was heavy-handed. The other two main characters are likewise developed in subtle and interesting ways. Derby, with whom one might sympathize for his long, frustrating courtship of Farren, has a brutal streak. The scenes in which Damer is targeted for being a "Tommy" are harrowing, and her growing self-realisation is nicely done.

Donoghue is not a stylist, but this novel has other strengths that only increase as it progresses. And it is interesting on the politics of the period, and on English responses to revolution in France. Which is more or less what my colleague told me when she lent it to me, now that I think of it.

"Derby & Joan or the platonic lovers, a farce" by Robert Dighton, 1795

Bonus links:

"A Sapphick Epistle, from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most beautiful Mrs D****" (1778). Reproduced by Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook.

An interview with Emma Donoghue.

Life Masks is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Fiction for 2004 (winners to be announced June 2, 2005).

Anne Damer links.

"Anne Damer and Mary Berry in the Library at Little Strawberry Hill" (drawing).

March 23, 2005

Gender and publishing

News flash: some people are still dismissive of women writers. L. Robinson alerted me to the Guardian Unlimited story, "Women writers: dull, depressed and domestic."

Julia M. Klein's review of The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton asks where are the women journalists? (via Jessa Crispin).

"Literary Awards for Women Only: Orange Outdated?" (via Bookninja). Be sure to read George's take. And Hurree posted the longlist a few days back.

And yet another example of the second-class status of women writers.

March 18, 2005

Sherrie Wolff,

a prominent Democrat from Colorado, has been on campus for the past two days. She gave a lively talk yesterday about women and development, and was on a panel today on women and democratization with our local MPP and outgoing leader of the provincial NDP, Elizabeth Weir. Elizabeth met Sherrie on a project they worked on together, in Cambodia. A group of us went out to dinner last night to D'Amico's, a local eatery. A stimulating evening.

These two events were the highlights of our International Women's Week celebrations. One final event on Monday: the students from my Writing by Women class are performing an early Suffrage play, a comedy called "How the Vote was Won." Very funny, and the students are great in it. We've staged it but we're only doing a read-through, not a full production. Less pressure, more fun.

March 17, 2005

Poetry coffeehouse

this evening, part of IWW@UNBSJ. It was organized by two of our fabulous local poets, Heather Craig and Susie Bowers, who both read, along with Anne Compton, Robert Moore, and several others. The idea was to read poems by women who had been influencial, ones own poems, or both. Bob read three poems about Helen of Troy, including "Helen" by H.D. and Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," then read his own poem about Helen, and another about Penelope, both from So Rarely in Our Skins. Anne read a wonderful poem, part of a group project with which she is involved: several poets were turned loose in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and asked to choose a piece of art and then write about it. Anne chose "Victoria Kynaston" by Allan Ramsay (1749), above, and wrote a lovely poem from the perspective of the sitter. It reminded me of Browning's "My Last Duchess" in some ways — the portrait of a woman, the emphasis on her as object — but with the corrective of being from the woman's point of view.

(Now that I think of it, the two poems would be powerful, taught together.)

March 15, 2005

How the Vote was Won

An early-twentieth-century suffragist comedy in one-act by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John.

Local readers: come to a read-through by the students of ENGL3622: Writing by Women II, on Monday March 21 at 2pm in the Whitebone Lounge at UNBSJ. All welcome; free admission.

Part of International Women's Week @ UNBSJ.

Download the poster (11"×8.5" PDF).

March 08, 2005

IWD 2005

From A History of International Women's Day in words and images by Joyce Stevens

Happy International Women's Day, sistern and brethren.

Local readers: don't forget International Women's Week @ UNBSJ.

Loads of vaggin' good links:

Sharon at the beautiful Watermark offers a comprehensive IWD link roundup.

Sharon across the pond has a series of wonderful links, historical and literary.

Natalie posts some links and ponders her blogroll.

feminist blogs, a collection of, well, feminist blogs, has many, many entries today.

The goddess calls on us to work towards making our towns nuclear non-proliferation zones.

Jessica at feministing sends greetings then offers two good reasons against post-feminism.

Tiffany at blackfeminism.org offers some links.

Gina at misbehaving has some global links.

Cleis provides some welcome context.

P.Z. Myers tells you what.

Kameron Hurley posts on Fat Actress and polyamory.

Trish Wilson, at XX, offers two thoughtful posts, one on abusive relationships and the other on so-called "Friendly Parent Provisions." And on her own site she posts on the rarity of women film directors.

Take the superhard IWD quiz (link from Rox Populi).

Flea asks, "what would your professional name be if you were a stripper?" Me? Fluffy Highway 53. Shake it.

And what am I doing to celebrate? I've been building up the appropriate section of my blogroll.

And then there is the classic "Thank a Feminist," turning up just everywhere:

If you're female and...

...you can vote, thank a feminist.
...you get paid as much as men doing the same job, thank a feminist.
...you went to college instead of being expected to quit after high school so your brothers could go because "You'll just get married anyway", thank a feminist.
...you can apply for any job, not just "women's work", thank a feminist.
...you can get or give birth control information without going to jail, thank a feminist.
...your doctor, lawyer, pastor judge or legislator is a woman, thank a feminist.
...you play an organized sport, thank a feminist.
...you can wear slacks without being excommunicated from your church or run out of town, thank a feminist.
...your boss isn't allowed to pressure you to sleep with him, thank a feminist.
...you get raped and the trial isn't about your hemline or your previous boyfriends, thank a feminist.
...you start a small business and can get a loan using only your name and credit history, thank a feminist.
...you are on trial and are allowed to testify in your own defense, thank a feminist.
...you have the right to your own salary even if you are married or have a male relative, thank a feminist.
...you get custody of your children following divorce or separation, thank a feminist.
...you get a voice in the raising and care of your children instead of them being completely controlled by the husband/father, thank a feminist.
...your husband beats you and it is illegal and the police stop him instead of lecturing you on better wifely behavior, thank a feminist.
...you are granted a degree after attending college instead of a certificate of completion, thank a feminist.
...you can breastfeed your baby discreetly in a public place and not be arrested, thank a feminist.
...you marry and your civil human rights do not disappear into your husband's rights, thank a feminist.
...you have the right to refuse sex with a diseased husband [or just "husband"], thank a feminist.
...you have the right to keep your medical records confidential from the men in your family, thank a feminist.
...you have the right to read the books you want, thank a feminist.
...you can testify in court about crimes or wrongs your husband has committed, thank a feminist.
...you can choose to be a mother or not a mother in you own time not at the dictates of a husband or rapist, thank a feminist.
...you can look forward to a lifespan of 80 years instead of dying in your 20s from unlimited childbirth, thank a feminist.
...you can see yourself as a full, adult human being instead of a minor who needs to be controlled by a man, thank a feminist.
— Author unknown

Thank you.

February 15, 2005

IWD2005

Spent much of the day working on a page listing the events we are planning to celebrate International Women's Day this year. Since March 8 falls on our winter break, our campus will celebrate the following week. In fact, we're taking the whole week. Anyone reading this who wants to plan an event or otherwise get involved, please let me know.

January 31, 2005

It's the most wonderful time

of the year.

Well, not really. But I'm short on time and material.

Here is My Creepy Valentine and Chocolate Voodoo Doll (via Fishbucket).

Apropos of the card, above, my women's writing class is planning a performance of Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John's How the Vote Was Won: A Play in One Act, a very funny piece suitable for a group (Literature of the Women's Suffrage Campaign in England). I will post more. Or not.

January 24, 2005

Representations

From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of early American imprints (via Bostonia). A lot of these items are reprints of, or are very like, texts printed in the U.K.

At the same site, another exhibit: Picturing Women explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative.

January 20, 2005

I love this guy.

I do. He's the thinking woman's Sean Connery.

SF

Farah Mendlesohn is doing a survey for a book on children and science fiction. She blogs at The Inter-Galactic Playground.

Benjamin Rosenbaum has released his amazing story, "Start the Clock," under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. What a fascinating idea (via BoingBoing). I hope he, or someone, traces any offshoots.

"I'll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy, or, Can We Really Imagine Life after Feminism?" by Lisa Yaszek. Part of this essay discusses sf as it relates to "postfeminism":

[F]for feminist authors, SF’s insistence on historical mutability and utopian possibility provides an ideal narrative vehicle through which to posit and explore the always necessary and political question, “what comes after patriarchy?”

(link from Mark Woods).

StarTrek R.I.P.? Not in our hearts (link from The Website at the End of the Universe).

January 16, 2005

Midwives

Natalie at Phiobiblon has a couple of posts about midwifery and illegitimacy in 18thc France (in the latter post she mentions the mind-boggling possibility that upwards of 40% of infants born in France in the period were illegitimate ended up in foundling hospitals).

Attaining Legitimacy: Eighteenth-Century Man-midwives and the Rhetoric of their Texts by Candice Dahl in Gateway: an academic journal on the web.

Sites and Margins of the Public Sphere, special number of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4 (Summer 1999), has a number of great articles available through Project Muse.

Sex, Gender and the Female Body, special number of Women's Writing 11.2 (2004). Articles not free yet but will be twelve months after publication.

Childbirth, midwifery, and science: The life and work of the French royal midwife Louise Bourgeois (1563 — 1636) by Bridgette Ann Majella Sheridan (Diss., Boston College, 2002).

Sharon's bibliography, Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Books/chapters and articles about midwifery history, a bibliography at Nursing and Midwifery History UK.

The History of Women and Science, Health, and Technology: a bibliographic guide to the professions and the disciplines: Midwifery.

Martha Ballard and a Man-Midwife: a time of transition in midwifery: an interactive exploration of the famouse illustration by Isaac Cruikshank. An an annotation from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (links from Caricatures of Nurses and Midwives through history).

Ask the Quack: post and get diagnosed. Be sure to check out the literary endorsements.

Update (17/1/05) In the comments, Sharon links to Elain Hobby's "Secrets of the Female Sex: Jane Sharp, the reproductive female body, and early modern midwifery manuals." Women's Writing 8.2 (2001): 201-212.

January 14, 2005

It's payday

(Click for larger image)

and I just ordered this. For half price, my fellow dix-huitiémistes! I got very excited when I read that it was edited by William Smellie, but it was not the William Smellie I was thinking of.

Though they were both Scottish.

According to Robbie Burns,

SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;
The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;
His bristling beard just rising in its might,
’Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:
His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;
Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.

Bonus links on the first Smellie:

William Smellie, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (1754)
Of the Management of new-born Children, with the Diseases to which they are subject; A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1762)
Smellie lived for a time with William Hunter, author of Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata [The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774), and of whom I have written.
Collection of obstetrical and gynecological instruments in the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Obstetric Literature and the Changing Character of Childbirth.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Collection.

And the second:

Major Topics of the Encycopedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–1771)
Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular translated by William Smellie (8 volumes, 1781).
A Romantic Natural History Bibliography
Elegy on the death of Smellie's son (facsimile from the wonderful The Word on the Street).
"Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study."
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust. See particularly Links to printing historical resources. Also of interest: First Scottish Books.
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.

January 13, 2005

It's a baby if she says it is

Lauren at feministe posts a slew of links under the title "Thursday Feminist Reading Material." Was particularly moved by Ayelet Waldman's post about her own second-trimester abortion and the necessity of developing more nuance in pro-choice rhetoric. It ends, "Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion." I spent a decade as an activist in the pro-choice movement and have never wavered, but having fertility problems and then finally a healthy pregnancy of my own certainly broadened, and deepened, my beliefs. Though I suppose all those years doing posters, media bites and op-eds has paid off because I still seem to have managed to come up with a slogan. Not a very wise slogan, perhaps ...

January 12, 2005

Something old

The Scrap Album: Victorian Greeting Cards, Valentines, and Scraps (via Plep).

Check for the History Carnival tomorrow.

There is a thread at C18-L about monstrous births.

Watercolours of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) (featured at Giornale Nuovo).

Misteraitch has started a new weblog at which he is reproducing the essays of Isaac D’Israeli from his Curiosities of Literature, a wide-ranging work full of excellent advice, such as the following:

AMONG the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling.

He also warns,

THE literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastation of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books.

Though Misteraitch has rescued him from such a fate.

This is quite an inspiring project. I wonder if I have anything that is otherwise unavailable; one or two things, I think. Think how much we could add to the common pool if we all followed Misteraitch's lead.

January 11, 2005

Unwanted children

Most are probably aware of the ill-considered bill which, had it become law, would have required women to report stillbirths and presumably miscarriages to local authorities within twelve hours. Most are probably also aware that "after a firestorm of controversy spread across the World Wide Web over the weekend," John Cosgrove, the proposer of the bill, has withdrawn it.

Posting has been fast and furious: Democracy for Virginia has a series of comprehensive posts. See also

Pharyngula: "Virginia is for hateful loons"
iBeth: "Safe Havens": Terrible Idea
The Well-Timed Period: "Del. Cosgrove: Don't Relax Just Yet"
Bitch Ph.D (and here)
apostropher: "All your baby are belong to us."
Rosemary Hurford is spitting mad.
getupgrrl's vagina is angry. And how.
Dr. B: Pardon My French.... and The Power of the Blogosphere.
A rant from Echidne.
(Not) Mousewords: "First these women blog, and next thing you know, they'll be letting them vote."

Our sisters to the South just dodged a bullet. But while they are jubilant, I don't suppose anyone is forgetting that that particular gun is still cocked and loaded.

Oops, a double entendre. But I don't feel in the least amused, writing this.

Sharon has an excellent post, outlining the history of legislation against infanticide in England (she also links to two excellent bibliographies, btw).

This whole story — apart from the apparent power of blogging — is disheartening. My dissertation was about infanticide in Britain in the 18th- and 19th centuries, so I am familiar with the history Sharon outlines. And with the hysteria over the visions of "dead babies on rubbish heaps" that gripped England in the Victorian era. And the ludicrous, punitive, and ignorant responses of the authorities.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

December 30, 2004

Women, blogging

Clancy at Culture Cat has started a link portal to posts that address the question Freud would have asked, were he around to ask it today: what do women bloggers want? Or something like that. As Laura writes, "Please refer to it every time you have the urge to beat that dead horse again." Or to the page Shelley has set up at the IT Kitchen Wiki. Here are two posts of mine on the subject from last spring, one short and one longer.

So where are all these women? Try What She Said! or the Progressive Women Bloggers Ring, for starters: both fairly recent and the former, at least, formed specifically to address the interminable question.

And remember: sometimes a Power button is a lot more than just a Power button.

December 09, 2004

Weird new poll

According to a Radio 4 poll, reports the Guardian, Pride and Prejudice is the book that has "spoken to" women "on a personal level; it may have changed the way" women look at themselves, or simply made us "happy to be a woman." Don't worry: the story presents lots of criticism. Julie Burchill is reported to have said, "I can't see why Pride and Prejudice would make one feel proud to be a woman. If the question was, which book makes you proud to wear an empire line dress, then I could understand it." Touché.

Also rans: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Good to see so many people remember their English courses.

Burchill is also quoted as saying, "I think if people had been hooked up to lie detectors the winner would have been Jackie Collins."

December 01, 2004

Counting the hours

One ... more ... class.

Had our last prose narrative meeting this past Monday. A small, but very good group. We had discussions, rather than classes, and that was a pleasure.

Gender Studies finished today. Much larger, but also a good group. Quite a few of them clearly engaged with the course, and with each other, and I was glad to be able to offer them something to move on to (we are organizing for International Women's Day, starting next week;¹ there may be some action on campus climate issues as a result of recent — and some not-so-recent —anti-transgender harassment).

The intro. class will continue next term.

Marking-marking-marking for the next who-can-tell-how-long, but it all has to be tied-up before Dec. 14th when we leave for NYC for ten days or so.

¹ Mon. Dec. 6 at 1:30 in the Faculty/Staff lounge, if anyone is interested.

November 29, 2004

More groovy covers

Note the blurb: "He defied the 25th century with a woman who was NOT HIS WIFE—and a WIFE who was NOT A WOMAN." Though I'd bet it's not as promising as it sounds. Philip Jose Farmer was an interesting figure: a bone fide sf writer, but a big name in early sf erotica, too.

Images from Sleaze Science Fiction Covers, part of Vintage Paperbacks & Digests. What a blast from the past! I recognized several of the Frank Frazetta covers because my dad was a real Conan fan (link from Boing Boing).

November 28, 2004

Delany interview

wood s lot links to an brief interview with Samuel Delany by Stefen Styrsky for the Lambda Literary Foundation in which Delany discusses the intersection between his race, his sexuality, and his writing.

Tell it, Sister!

Sharon asks, "Is a working father good for the child?"

Pericat demonstrates le plus ce change....

17th Century British Porn to Be Auctioned

Jack Kolb on C18-L points towards the story:

The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the "quintessence of debauchery," is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month.

"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line."

"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.

"It is one of the most notorious publications in literature and makes most pornography written 300 years later seem tame."

The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.

The book, the only surviving copy, will be auctioned on December 16.

The conversation on the list has been fast and furious. Jim Chevalier offers some interesting links and quotes Richard Norton:

It should be noted that this play is not a defence of bisexuality or
libertinage in general, but of homosexuality in particular: clearly the author
and his audience had a concept of "the homosexual" in mind long before that
category was supposedly "invented" in the late nineteenth century.

Robert Dawson takes exception to the work being categorized as "The world's first known piece of printed pornography," and Rictor Norton links to Sotheby's cataloque description.

Here are the opening lines of the play:

Thus, in the Zenith of my last I reign,
I eat to swive, and swive to eat again;
Let other Monarchs, who their Scepters bear,
To Keep their subjects less in Awe than Fear,
Be Slaves to Crowns, my Nation shall be free,
My Prick only shall my Scepter be;
My Laws shall act more Pleasure then Command,
And with my Prick, I'll govern all the Land.

This sounds most promising. I echo Jim Chevalier's expressed hope that someone, somewhere, has scanned this text.

November 27, 2004

SF links

Noosphere, a French SF site. John Holbo gives the low-down. En Français, bien sur, mais il y'a beaucoups des images.

More from Holbo: a thoughtful post on education, sf, and learning to read from comic books. He links to Matt Cheney's post on teaching Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I learnt to read from comics. And my dad read them after I was through. He was so disappointed the day I spent my allowance on a romance instead of a superhero comic, that I never did it again. And today I am an sf-reading feminist with a doctorate in English. So it worked out well.

Matt Cheney points towards some speculative poets, and offers seasonal shopping tips. And be sure to read his post, "Artsy, Shallow Lesbian Erotica that's Not from the '50s!," about some sophisticationally-challenged responses to "Time's Swell" by Victoria Somogyi and Kathleen Chamberlain. An atmospheric story, written before the two authors had met in person.

Call for submissions: So Fey: Queer Faery Fiction (Haworth Press), featuring gay, lesbian, bi and trans-themed stories (via FutureTense).

And, since Buy Nothing Day is over, here are some links to kitschy toys, sf and otherwise, from web zen's cool holiday shopping guide.

November 16, 2004

Alix Olsen

Folk poet and so much more.

Visit her site.

Critics write: "Slam superstar Alix Olsen gives voice to the voiceless," and "She will make you laugh your head off and then cry your eyes out in the space of five minutes."

November 22, 2004
Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre, UNBSJ
Doors open 4:45pm
Show 5pm
Free Admission

Presented by the Faculty of Arts, the Gender Studies Programme, and the Women's Resource Centre

Update (19/11/04): Alix Olsen's Canadian dates have been cancelled; no word yet on rebooking. Too bad; it looked to be a good show.

October 27, 2004

Follow-ups

Via Boing Boing: Pitcairn men accused of rape convicted but not yet serving time (registration required).

If any former sf students are reading this, get out your wallets. RE/Search will publish JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future? (also via Boing Boing).

Map of Dante's Inferno (via Plep).

Real Women Project: bronze sculptures the same size as Barbie but a lot more expensive (via Plep).

October 01, 2004

Unhappy postscript

to my reading of Simon Winchester's Outposts:

Because of its isolation Winchester was unable to visit the Pitcairn islands, where 46 descendants of the mutineers from the notorious HMS Bounty make their home, though he did write about it in Outposts and elsewhere. When he wrote that the "romance of the Pitcairners' early story has never quite been matched by the realities of the islanders' insufferably dreary lives," he had no idea:

The tiny UK Pacific colony of Pitcairn has begun trying seven men on sex abuse charges which highlight a local culture of underage sex.

The seven, who make up half the local adult male population, face more than 50 charges of rape or indecent assault.

New Zealand prosecutors say there is an ingrained culture of using children for sex on Pitcairn, famous for its link to the Mutiny on the Bounty.

Local women have argued the practice is an island tradition and consensual (BBC).

Cyrus Farivar (link from Boing Boing) offers some additional links: to an ABC story, and to Paul Lareau's comphrehensive site on all things Pitcairn.

Update (13/10/04): Cyrus Farivar updated his link.

September 30, 2004

We are inexplicable

Two from Ed Champion:

Why do women, "particularly educated literary feminist women," find the "selfish and overbearing" (his words) Mr. Darcy so compelling?

Here is the rub — Austen leaves us to assume that her heroine's marriages are happy despite portraying very few idyllic marriages in the rest of her texts.

And, "Only Two Percent of Women Describe Themselves as Beautiful."

Furthermore, only five percent feel comfortable describing themselves as pretty and a mere nine percent feel comfortable describing themselves as attractive. Additionally, just 13 percent of women say they are very satisfied with their beauty; 12 percent say they are very satisfied with their physical attractiveness; 17 percent are very satisfied with their facial attractiveness; and only 13 percent are very satisfied with their body weight and shape.

I've put this article on the list of readings for my gender studies class..

September 24, 2004

When girls were girls

Natalie has two posts on early-modern gender: "Stays are quite low, with the bosom much exposed," about costume, and "The plasticity of gender," about an all-woman production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe. A nice companion piece to the production of Romeo and Juliet I read about last year, performed by four boys.

September 19, 2004

So we're at Phyllis and Peter's

for dinner, and Phyllis and I are in the kitchen while the menfolk are doing something or other in the garage and the three children, B¹ (5 yr. old girl), B² (2 yr. old girl), and the Jinker Boy, are in the next room. These three march in, led by B¹ in a tutu and nothing else, who proclaims that she helped the other two to dress up and that they are all going to dance. B² is wearing a hot-pink net confection with only a few rips, and the JB has on a pink leotard with attached tiny tutu, very tasteful and discrete.

"How wonderful you all look!" Phyllis and I enthuse. "Have fun dancing!"

Ten minutes later, they're back, again led by B¹, still topless.

B¹ (to me): Is it okay that [JB] is wearing a girl's costume?
Me: Sure, if he wants to.
B¹: So it's okay that he's wearing it?
Me: Sure. He can wear whatever he likes.

JB, hearing this exchange, dashes back into the living room, rips off the tutu, and rushes back into the kitchen wearing only his Spiderman pull-up and one sock.

Me: Aren't you dancing any more?
JB: Where's Daddy?
Me: He's outside with Peter.
JB: Wanna go wit Daddy and Peeder!
Me: Sweetie, you're not dressed and it's cold out.
JB: [louder] Wanna go wit Daddy and Peeder!!

I just know I am going to report this to my gender studies class.

September 02, 2004

Oy!

Well they say that any publicity is good publicity, but I have my doubts...

August 26, 2004

Pink and blue

The Jinker Boy has discovered the categories of "boy" and "girl," though he uses them with his own inflections:

Me: Is Phyllis a boy or a girl?
Jinker Boy: Gel.
Me: Is Lauren a boy or a girl?
JB: Barbie gel.
Me: What's a Barbie girl?
JB: Liddal gel.
Me: Is Daddy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.
Me: Is Mummy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.
Me: Mummy's a boy? Why?
JB: Because I love it.
Me: Because you love Mummy?
JB: Yis.
Me: But you love Phyllis and she's a girl.
JB: [pause] Yis.
Me: Is Mummy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.

July 25, 2004

Women on the go

Made a quick visit to the National Portrait Gallery yesterday (and did you know that there is also one in the U.S.? Most confusing for googlers) and saw Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers. Aphra Behn and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were featured, but I didn't buy the book because the exhibition was skewed towards the 19th and 20th centuries. While interesting, not my patch.

Had upscale Italian last night. That brings the tally of London meals to one Chinese, one Portuguese, one Thai, one Indian, and one Italian. Had English cooking elsewhere, mind — mainly at the conference, and with my relatives — though I did have an excellent Indian meal in Bury St. Edmunds.

This will probably be my last entry for a few days; am flying back to NYC this afternoon and will no doubt be prevented from having any keyboard time by the Jinker Boy. And quite rightly.

And, am about to eat my last pain chocolat and drink my last latte for awhile; back to low carbs. And not a moment too soon.

Yesterday's conversation with a just-woken Jinker Boy:

Me: Good morning, sweetie!
JB: Mummy.
Me: Did you have a nice sleep?
JB: [beat] Yiss.
Me: Mummy's coming home tomorrow!
JB: Why?

July 05, 2004

A sobering invention

"Gadget will stop spiked drink peril" (via Boing Boing).

Gilman

Some great links about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and nineteenth-century women writers in general at wood s lot.

Here is my student's site from the sf course last fall.

June 29, 2004

Vaginas dentata

Recent post at Cup of Chicha:Slowly approaching the technology needed for stepford whores. What is it with these hyper-realistic sex dolls? Whatever happened to the good old imagination? When I was a girl, we never had hyper-realistic sex dolls. We made do with two-dimensional photographs of David Cassidy stuck with peeling scotch-tape to the walls above our beds. Sometimes in black and white! And we were glad to have them, too.

But I digress. Was thinking about girl-robots (and don't you love that identity-theft commercial?) and trying to come up with a list. Robots, not creatures or undead or any other of the myriad non-human and therefore eminently killable forms that women can take in popular representations.

Metropolis (1927).¹
Barbarella (1968) (wasn't she sort of a robot? She looked like one.)
The Stepford Wives (1975), and redux (2004).
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
And, wow, Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980). With Julie Kavner and Sharon Gless!
Blade Runner (1982).
Cherry 2000 (1987).
Cyborg (1989).
Frankenhooker (1990). I know, technically not a robot...
Eve of Destruction (1991).
Cyborg 2 (1993): Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie, together at last!
The otherwise forgettable Alien Resurrection (1997) with the inimitable Winona Ryder as a very convincing android.
Austin Powers (1997).
S1m0ne (2002). I know, I know; she's not a physical robot.
And who can forget the amazing forced-fellating-of-the-bomb scene in Terminator 3 (2003)?

But we mustn't blame Ah-nold. This headline says it all: "Engineering Students Invent Female Robot, Penis Reattachment Machine."

Androids and Robots in the Movies.
Robots On Film (a big list).
Here is a list of female robots on television, from The Bionic Woman to the Buffybot.

And its not just homo sapiens: Robotic female birds confuse males: "At the end of the display, some males—mystified by the lack of further interest—would simply jump on the crouching female and try to mate" (more).

Turning to art:

How to Draw Manga: Giant Robots, including female robots, because "not all mecha are macho!"
Robobabes on the Babes in Space site.
And don't forget HR. Giger.

But female robots are not just for a good time. Soon, they will be changing our bedpans. Well, maybe not everyone's bedpans: Valerie, a Domestic Android sells for US$59,000.

But don't despair. Women are taking back the robots:

"Robots and Girls — A Promising Alliance": science education and girls.
Badass Robot of the Month: Blackarachnia.
Women who collect robots.
Quiz: What Robot Girl Are You?.

¹ And see "The Nature of the Female Cyborg: Evidence of Will in the Mechanical Woman" by Francesca Myman.

June 26, 2004

Tiptree publications

Matthew Cheney writes:

Tachyon Publications will be reprinting Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of the best stories of James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), for whom the Tiptree Award was named. (Tachyon is also publishing The James Tiptree Award Anthology.) The book is due out in the late fall/early winter. A contents listing for the previous edition is here.

This is wonderful news. Cheney goes on to note that many of Tiptree's stories are difficult to find, and mentions on-line editions of "The Women Men don't See," and "The Screwfly Solution."¹ I have taught the former story in sf classes, but had not even read the latter until seeing Cheney's link. He wrote a long and thoughtful post about it last March, in which he attributed the flaws in the story — and there are some — to the pitfalls of writing commercial sf. He concludes, however, that the story's virtues overcome its failings, and I agree.

It is a difficult story to read: humanity is hit with pockets of gynocidal madness, in which men brutally kill women and girls. Cheney writes that there is no deus ex machina, but I would argue that in a paradoxical way, there is: it seems that aliens have caused the madness in an effort to depopulate the earth prior to taking it over. So there is no hope for the species, whereas until this point it was always possible that the madness would end (previous periods of comparable violence are noted in passing, for example the witch hunts). But even though the story leaves us facing the end of humanity, at least the horror was not caused by something within us as a species. A little while ago I wrote about various explantions, in sf, of humanity's self-destructive behaviour. This from a scientific report in Tiptree's story:

A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioural expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage involves (a) many of the same neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both.

But then she side-steps. This story is the most fascinating example I have found of a woman writer using sf tropes to mask a painful and frightening argument. After all, this is presumably the first time these aliens have come. Which means that earlier incidences of gynocide, not to mention the constant, everyday violence, occurred — occur — without help.

¹ Found one other Tiptree story on-line: "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats"

June 25, 2004

Gender links

The Dominion posts a link to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test. Something for my Gender Studies class in Sept.

Check out Christine's posts at ms.musings about the HUGE class action suit against Wal-Mart.

Sarah Bakewell reviews Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (via Cup of Chicha). I will order this for our library, pronto; at first glance it seems to be an updated, indepth analysis of some of the same dynamics Gayle Tuchman and Nina Fortin looked at years ago with regards to the 19th-century, but with earlier writers.

June 23, 2004

Misc. links

[click for larger view]

"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).

The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).

SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.

Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.

American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).

Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).

Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).

June 21, 2004

Choosing a novel

for my upcoming introduction to gender studies course.¹ I had thought of Morrison's Beloved, of course, but it's been done to death and I wanted to do something Canadian. I want something accessible, that treats gender and race issues, by a contemporary author. One of my colleagues recommended I look at

Anita Rau Badami's The Hero's Walk and Tamarind Mem,
Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and
Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters.

I think that I will go with Tamarind Mem. The Hero's Walk is set entirely in India, and I wanted to be able to talk about cross-cultural experience. Desirable Daughters fits the bill and I look forward to reading it myself, but I think it might not be entirely accessible to a lower level class of non-English majors, and Cereus Blooms at Night is wrenching, even just skimming through (it is for that reason that I thought of, and discarded, Ann Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees: it is simply too daunting to think of reading it again, even though I know students love it.) But there is still time to drive the staff at the bookstore crazy by changing my order, so if anyone has any other suggestions, please don't hesitate to send them on.

¹ Issues of Gender (ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Jennifer D. Marshall) is the main course text.

June 16, 2004

Wet dream turned nightmare

[Click image for larger view]

The comic links are coming fast and furious. This from Christine at ms.musings: an introduction to Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man (illustrated by Pia Guerra), the story of the last man on earth. Natalie Nichols describes the series:

[T]he story follows Yorick’s uncertain quest through post-apocalyptic scenarios Vaughan based on real statistics. Electricity is a luxury, flying is virtually unheard of, and all the great rock bands are dead. The Secretary of Agriculture is president, a man-hating cult torched all the sperm banks, and what’s left of Congress is mostly Democrats. (In one darkly ironic scene, wives of dead Republicans briefly lay armed siege to the White House and demand their husbands’ seats.)

[snort!] I will look out for this one. And it sounds like a good possibility for future sf courses, though don't tell Martin Rowson. (Hey! There are literary allusions; the protagonist's name is Yorick, fer cryin out loud).

I suppose one would have to read from the beginning to find out why the monkey is wearing underwear.

June 09, 2004

The Lammys

The Lambda Awards for 2003 have been announced, and the winner in the Science Fiction/Fantasy /Horror category is Helen Sandler (ed.) for Necrologue: The Diva Book of the Dead and the Undead (Diva).

Links:

An extract from one of the stories in the collection, "When the car slammed into me" by Charlotte Cooper.
A review, and another.
Interview with Helen Sandler (08 January 2003).
The Locus Index to SF Awards: The Lambda.
Lambda Sci-Fi Recommended Reading List.
Alternative Sexualities in Fantasy and SF Booklist.

June 04, 2004

Eliza Haywood

I'm working on an entry about Eliza Haywood for an encyclopedia of erotic literature.

I love Haywood. I even named my desktop computer after her, and greater love hath no woman. Her career spanned four decades, from the vogue of amatory fiction in the 1720s, of which she was a pioneer, to the novels of education of the 1740s and 50s. Some critics have described this trajectory in terms of repentance or conversion, but I prefer the argument that she was particularly adept at gauging the literary marketplace.

And, as you can see from the portrait, she was a major babe.

Some Haywood links:

A resuscitated reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood, Andrew Ball, Oxford English Dictionary.

Eliza Haywood's Feigning Femmes Fatale: Desirous and Deceptive Women in Fantomina, Love in Excess, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (PDF), Emily Kathryn Booth (MA thesis, English, East Tennessee State University, 2001).

The Fortunate Foundlings, Being the Genuine History of Colonel M — — Rs, And His Sister, Eliza Haywood (e-text).

Catherine Ingrassia's page: bibliography and chronology.

"Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century": Catherine Ingrassi.

"The Language of Feminised Sexuality: gendered voice in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and Fantomina" (PDF), Tiffany Potter, Women's Writing 10.1 (2003).

"The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s" (PDF), Sarah Prescott, Women's Writing 7.3 (2000).

Selected Bibliography: Jessica Smith and Paula Backscheider.

The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, George Frisbie Whicher (1915).

The textual architecture of Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Earla A. Wilputte, Essays in Literature (March 22, 1995).

June 02, 2004

Best Barbie site ever

No idea what's being said here, as it's all in Spanish, but as they say, a picture's worth a thousand words.

[Warning! Sensibility alert: entwining of various bits of plastic. Just so you know.]

(Thanks to Long story; short pier).

June 01, 2004

Law & Order art

with a major focus on Lenny, may he enjoy his retirement:

(from Boing Boing).

Interesting which television shows get poached, and in what ways. Though as well as this highbrow stuff, there is plenty of more standard Law & Order fanfic out there (you're all of legal age, right?):

Prosecutorial Discretion
Exculpatory Evidence!
Law & Order slash fanfic
FemFic.org: Law & Order
Law & Order Slash Links
The Law & Order: SVU Femslash Site Index

May 28, 2004

Must ... control ... fist ... of death!

I just had to delete thirty comments all from some porn site promoting more varieties of rape than I would have thought possible. And, I'm very bitter for having now been made to think about them. So, here are some light-hearted links. Go on, chuckle!

Finally — American politics explained.

The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles (from the Rake, living up to his name). I'm trying to decide between May the Foreskin Be With You, Ass-Hole O Mio, and Yank My Doodle, It's A Dandy. Okay, you may not want to visit this page. But at least there's nothing about rape there.

Gawker says that Soul Plane is "the Citizen Kane of blacksploitation airline industry films." Shatnerian says that this is "The Movie Blurb of the Day. I say, they are both right.

Stephany Aulenback's Beckett for Babies project continues apace. I regret not having sent in a photo of the Jinker Boy, but he is just so purposeful.

Check out The Blog of Death, a blog of obituaries (link from Portage). Okay, that one's not funny. But now I feel better.

Thanks for being there.

May 26, 2004

Some links

Feministing has a post about Cindy Sherman, Photographer extraordinaire, and links to some other feminist artists (Yay Guerrilla Girls!).

The Ex-Classics Web Site takes on the needful task of reproducing texts formerly influential, now out of print, such as the Newgate Calendar with its tales of crime and depravity.

Million Book Project (via Maud).

Two very funny links from Boing Boing: Donald and Mickey insinuated into various canonical works of art, and famous nudes with clothing on.

This is doing the rounds. Reminds me of those little videos of Dave Pogue on the Macworld CDs. Do those guys go to some speech school somewhere?

Common Errors in English and How to Recognize Plagiarism (both via Palimpsest).

The Power of Woe, The Power of Life. Images of women in prints from the Renaissance to the present (from Plep).

Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 now out (via Crooked Timber):

Around the world, more than a billion people's lives were ruined by extreme poverty and social injustice while governments continued to spend freely on arms.

May 25, 2004

Little rubber role models

Vernica Downey points towards the awe-inspiring Librarian Action Figure (see also Barista and her funky shades). Following the various links, I came upon the fabulous Monster Women: the buxom batwoman, pictured here, and five of her friends. If I had a wish list, these would be on it.

May 22, 2004

Gender resources

Mary Robinson's "A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination": A Hypertext Edition (via wood s lot).

African American Women Writers of the 19th-Century.

The History of Rape: A Bibliography compiled by Stefan Blaschke (via wood s lot).

E-books by Women Writers, from Louisa May Alcott to Zitkala-S.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Women and Computing.

Renaissance Women Online.

The Center for Women and Change: Women's Resources.

Women Online Worldwide.

"Trashing the Hallmark card mom" by Katy Read at Salon, with links to various mothers' organizations (via feministing.com).

May 20, 2004

Sexism in literary reviews

The Literary Saloon has been having an introspective look at gender bias in its review practices here, here, and here. I applaud their honesty, though they ruin the effect by commenting,

Looking at the piles of books around us most likely to get reviewed next it also doesn't look very promising — a few women's names peek out, but only a few. So it doesn't look like this will be chick-lit central anytime soon.

"Chick-lit central"?!?

( The NY Times Book Review, my bookish periodical of choice, had the best record of the journals they looked at, with 30% of their reviews treating books by women.)

May 14, 2004

Bridget Jones' feminine protection

Laura at Apt. 11D points towards a story about a new marketing campaign for "edgy" tampons (yikes!), but the ad looks like nothing so much as the cover of one of those ubiquitous chick lit novels.

May 10, 2004

James Tiptree, Jr.

Tild Dallelie has an informative post about Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) at Blog Sisters (cross-posted to her own blog).

May 07, 2004

Gender links

Burningbird discusses the scapegoating of female soldiers for Abu Ghraib. From Media Matters for America:

Ann Coulter, right-wing pundit and syndicated columnist, said:

I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation.

I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious.

[FOX News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, May 5]

A "girl general"??!!?

Normal-looking women modeling bathing suits (Thanks, Jill!).

May 06, 2004

Gender links

Save the Children has published a report on the State of the World's Mothers (from Blog Sisters).

The Bush regime is attempting to rewrite women's history (from Netwoman).

Class hatred rears its ugly head in media coverage of female soldier "who comes from a trailer park" (from Boing Boing). (Maud links to new revelations).

Feministe has two posts on war crimes, and Rivka at Respectful of Otters has two entries on the Taguba Report.

People gendering robots (from Slashdot).

M3P players with make-up mirrors marketed to women (from misbehaving).

Get a "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" tee.

April 27, 2004

In the air

Rooting around in my backpack, avoiding marking, and found this little bear. Awhile back the Jinker boy got it from McDonald$. As far as I know he hasn't ever seen the Di$ney movie, but he took one look and said, "A Mummy bear!" I was taken aback, having nothing like this dressing gown in my closet at home (I assure you!), and chagrined, too, that the dress code is already so firmly entrenched: he's only three. But he was holding it and smiling, and then he brought it to his face and gave it a big kiss. So my "click" moment turned into an "aww shucks" moment.

(Maybe I could find some tiny little rollers for it.)

April 25, 2004

Bad news for Orson Scott Card

In a post to FeministSF, Petra Mayerhofer links to an article about successful parthenogenesis in mice. She includes a list of sf novels which treat parthenogenesis:

The Y Chromosome by Leona Gom
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The Demeter Flower by Rochelle Singer
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Mizora by Mary E. Lane
The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Wingwomen of Hera by Sandi Hall

I would add Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast series: Walk to the End of the World (1974), Motherlines (1978), The Furies (1994), and The Conqueror's Child (1999).

And note to Charnas: the Japanese researchers did it without the use of horses.

Update (6:16pm): Lee Anne Phillips adds the following, via FeministSF (sorry, I'm not going to add links!):

Katherine V. Forrest, Daughters of a Coral Dawn & Daughters of an Amber Noon
Jane Fletcher, The World Celaeno Chose
Jean Stewart's Isis Series
Donna J. Young, Retreat: As It Was!
Merrill Mushroom, Daughters of Khaton
James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"

Update (7:38pm): Pat Mathews adds the following, via FeministSF (sorry, I'm not going to add links!):

Rainbow Cadenza, by L. Neil Schulman

April 22, 2004

Stand up for Women's Lives

The March for Women's Lives! will take place in just a few days, on April 25, 2004.

Several posts about abortion in the last little while: see particularly Lauren's searching entry at feministe and ampersand at Alas, a Blog, here and here.

Addendum (23/4/04): (And George's post, here.)

I know it when I see it

Art or porn? You decide. Via Plep.

My score? "You scored 8 out of a possible 10. There are two explanations for how you've done so well. 1: You're a devotee of great cinematic art, and recognise key moments in film history when you see them. 2: You have a huge stash of vintage porn."

My lips are sealed.

Children and the academy

There have been a series of posts lately on the singles/parents divide between academics and related issues. Don't have time now to do more than list them as I am getting my kid ready for his first dentist appointment in about an hour. (Sorry, gotta go; continue without me.)

A little while ago Netwoman noted the difficulties of being a woman with children on the job search in her post about "The Mommy Candidate" in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Today, The Little Professor notes two other articles in The Chronicle: "Unmarried professors are outsiders in the Ozzie and Harriet world of academe" (huh?), and "Singing the Grad-School Baby Blues."

Laura at Apt. 11 D cites those same articles in a long and thoughtful post on the subject (with good links to the ongoing discussion in other blogs).

And, see this earlier post.

Update (5:16pm): Back from the dentist. The Jinker boy was a little prince. Chuck has an excellent post on the question of singles vs. marrieds in which he makes the crucial point that it is the competitive job market that is really at issue here, and is in effect turning us against ourselves. I heartily agree. There are some practically feudal aspects to the ways in which our profession is organized that affect all of us, no matter what our family status.

Update (23/4/04): the conversation continues at Apt. 11 D and Moment, Linger On.

Update (23/4/04): Brayden King adds his two cents, and concludes, "all workplaces need to do a better job of making room for the family." Samantha Blackmon is shut down when she takes issue with the idea of single people as "the last underrepresented minority on campus." And Liliputian Lilith reminds us of the impermanence of categories.

April 19, 2004

Reversing vandalism

For a year, an unknown person mutilated copies of books on GLBTQ topics¹ in the San Francisco Public Library and left them with little typewritten advertisements for a Bible radio station inside. He was finally caught, but what to do with the books? Click here to see "Reversing Vandalism," an amazing collection by various artists, professional and amateur, made from the damaged books.

From Maud, via Bookninja.

"For Duf" by Dacey Hunter, courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.
[The glass highlights the words, "What were you afraid we would learn?"]

¹ Okay, I'm being snotty, quoting this. So be it: "Though the vandal had clearly relied on the library catalog to seek out books on gay issues, he evidently did not understand the search results: Among the books destroyed were works by author Gay Talese and those concerning the Enola Gay, the famous World War II warplane..."

April 17, 2004

Kill Bill without apology

ms.musings links (scroll down) to an interview with Uma Thurman about her role in Kill Bill:

"I'm not going to buy into that 'because it's a woman it has to be worse,'" she said. "If it's a character, it's a very male character. I mean, the scope of the journey that the character goes through is something that you wouldn't blink twice if you saw Mel Gibson's Mad Max in this position, or Clint Eastwood. The character is severely abused, and it's a revenge story. It's about someone being victimized who, yes, was a former professional assassin.

"It's comic booklike road-kill. It's a very, very familiar story. What is different is that I am a woman and the person fighting their way back out of the grave, the person seeking revenge, the person taking the beating and the person coming back for more fearlessly is me, a woman, and not your typical man. For people to find that to be anti-feminist is interesting to me, because for as many people who find it upsetting on that level, there are many more who find it more sort of exciting and inspiring to see a woman exhibiting as much strength and aggression and power as you expect from a male in storytelling....

Thurman drew inspiration not only from Gibson and Eastwood but two strong women: Gena Rowland's Oscar-nominated performance as a woman hiding a child from the mob in Gloria and bodacious blaxploitation heroine Pam Grier, who is now a regular on Showtime's The L Word.

Thurman spoke of the revelation she had watching both parts of Kill Bill.

"I realize that I didn't grow up watching a movie where a woman was portrayed as so tough and so strong and so fierce and brave," she said. "I went through many other wonderful adventures, but I never saw that, and if there was one thing that I got back out of all the work that went into it, all the pain that went into doing it, it was that that gave me something back. Like, 'Wow.' Like it or not, Kill Bill is an example of that, and that's not common."

It's my birthday next week. I have asked for dinner and a movie.

Addendum (20/4/04):Boing Boing links to an on-line game based on the movie. Caveat: it's in Czech.

April 16, 2004

What would Richardson think?

Stephany Aulenback points towards Eric Brown's Digital Epistolary Novel, Intimacies (beware seizure-inducing intro). The plot:

Two young professionals "meet" through a mis-sent e-mail. They become "attracted" in cyber-space and tentatively agree to a "real" meeting. A brutal assault follows. The obvious suspect is the e-mail partner, but one person is unconvinced. A series of surprises and revelations follows — all delivered in digital form, all entirely possible, and all representing ways we now learn of events in our world where virtual reality constantly fights its counterpart.

Brown, "a former English professor who teaches executives how to write," says in a NYTimes interview that the plot is based on Pamela, but it sounds more like a modern-day, hyper violent Clarissa, at least from the description above. Not to mention the photograph of the mascara-stained woman on the site.

April 14, 2004

Today's sf links

1. Oodles of definitions of sf, via The Mumpsimus, one of several interesting links on offer. I like Darko Suvin's definition:

[...] SF is ... a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.

2. The Male Malaise. Speculation about the long-term untenability of the Y chromosome (125,000 years long-term). Ends with references to various female utopias and some good links. Via ms. musings.

3. And finally, extending the Easter festivities just a few more days, we have a 30 second version of The Exorcist re-enacted by bunnies. Via Alas, a Blog. Which seems to be indulging in a lot of levity of late.

Addendum (7:51): 4. Wonderful zombie parody at Yankee Pot Roast.

Today's Barbie link

"Anti-Barbie becomes Russian icon": the story of an average-looking young woman who was the popular favourite to represent Russia in the Miss Universe pageant. Via feministe.

April 13, 2004

Off my list

Well now I don't have to feel guilty for never reading Ender's Game: Orson Scott Card authors homophobic diatribe between novels. Via Alas, a Blog.

Update (15/4/04): Bookslut gets misty-eyed about Orson Scott Card. She writes, "His politics and his books are separate." I don't see how they could be, and in the one book of his I have read, they weren't (see comments). But I love Bookslut and will certainly not stop reading her, despite a slight lack of rigour in this single instance.

April 10, 2004

Pre-school locker-rooms, Jesus on roids, and why Barbie really left Ken

Three posts from ms.musings:

A story pointing to Jill Storey's meditation on sensitive sons, "Act like a man" at Salon.com (sorry, subscription required, but the Ms. piece gives a good overview), and another on the hyper-masculinization of Jesus.

And, a young woman is awarded damages after being suspended from school for wearing a tee-shirt that read, "Barbie is a lesbian."

Update (14/4/04): Alas, a Blog has a thoughtful post on the Salon story.

April 08, 2004

"Domestic blogs"

Laura at Apt. 11D writes about to Brayden King's recent post in praise of what he calls "domestic blogs" (less cutesy and more inclusive than "mommy blogs," I'll admit).

King links to a recent Times article, "The New Family Album: More parents are using online blogs to share photos, memories, gripes and advice with friends — and strangers." The article, while generally upbeat, has some exceptionable language:¹

Mommy blogs often take navel gazing to new and uninhibited depths, recording every aspect of parenthood, from the pregnancy blood test through the umbilical-cord clipping to the latest triumph in toilet training — complete with photographs, video clips and message boards.

"Navel gazing"??!!? Well, perhaps, but not at one's own navel. The article goes on,

Nobody tracks the number of family-oriented blogs, and estimates of the blogging universe range from 300,000 to 3 million sites, but by all indications, baby blogs are becoming more common. According to an October 2002 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents, and 53% of online parents say the Internet has improved the way they connect with family; 61% say it has boosted relations with friends. At Lycos, which is host to two blog sites, moms are regarded as the future. "The new blogging world skews female," explains Michael Sikillian, marketing manager for Lycos Web Publishing. "One day," he predicts, "every family will have a blog. Instead of putting drawings up on the refrigerator, you'll scan them into your computer and upload."

I like the idea of the blogging world "skewing female," though I would question the absolute correlation implied here between "female" and "domestic/family/baby." There are certainly lots of men who blog blog blog about their children, and many, many more women who blog about something else entirely. I would hope that the blogging world "skews" female—though skewing implies going off-course, when any right-thinking person can see that what is meant is moving on-course—because more and more women feel blogging holds something for them.

All of which brings me to the question of the categorization of this blog. I think scribblingwoman is pretty mixed. It's written by an academic with wide interests and a pre-schooler. It's not a "domestic blog," or a book blog, or an sf blog, and it's not always an academic blog. Every now and then I think of putting divisions in my blogroll, but just as I can't categorize this blog, I don't want to diminish others. Certainly some blogs are extremely focused, but many are not. King writes,

I prefer to think that although blogs may offer distinct kinds of content, domestic blogs can be just as intelligently-written and analytically precise as any other kind of blog. For a good example see Laura at Apt. 11D.

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I started to read Apt. 11D when I found it listed somewhere as an academic blog, and I know that many others position it in that way.

I think I will stick to my alphabetized blogroll.

Why do we have to keep reinventing the wheel, anyway? Has everyone forgotten Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist kept differently coloured notebooks about the various aspects of her life? Disintegration ensued, until she realized what was happening and reintegrated her life, symbolized by her decision to use one notebook. (It's a very long novel so I'm sure I'm leaving something out. But you see my point. And without the trouble and expense of analysis.)

Anyway, the very name of this blog evokes the dismissal of early women writers as dilettantes, ignorant of learned and literary culture, dragging down the noble profession of "author" by their inclusion of the personal, the domestic, and the trivial. So you see, I have a mission.

¹ Dawn Friedman, who blogs at This Woman's Work and who was interviewed for the Times article, offers a quick correction to the way her remarks are reported.

Update (8/2/05): Well, I knucked under and introduced categories into my blogroll. But I agonized over it, I really did.

April 07, 2004

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957)

This via the always-interesting wood s lot: Ursula LeGuin translated a selection of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the only Latin American woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1945). Mark Woods posts the following poem, one of several of which LeGuin includes both versions on her site, and I have reproduced it here because, well, it's been my reality too, for the last three years:

Song of Death

Old Woman Census-taker,
Death the Trickster,
when you’re going along,
don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,
smelling for the milk,
find salt, find cornmeal,
don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world,
People-Collector --
on the beaches and byways,
don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized,
that flower he grows with,
forget it, Rememberer.
Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand
drive you crazy, mix you up
so you can’t tell
East from West,

or mother from child,
like fish in the sea.
And on the day, at the hour,
find only me.

from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Trans. Ursula LeGuin (2003)

April 02, 2004

New (to me) blog/women's writing

Check out Notes in the Margin. How could I not blogroll a blog which quotes from Peter Høeg's Smila's Sense of Snow, one of my favourite books?:

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin.

Some interesting links right up: an 86 years old woman self-publishes a novel about her life in the depression (23/3/04), and the Feminist Press has reissued three pulp novels by women (13/2/04).

From the Feminist Press: The suggestively named Dix Steele is an ex-airman, an isolated, tough-talking drifter.

Lynn is innocently flattered by what seems to be his fatherly interest in her, which includes invitations to stylish parties and to his spectacular country estate. But fatherly interest is not what David Dwight has in mind, and he usually gets what he wants.

The Girls in 3-B reveals in heart-breaking detail the hidden world of mid-century America, where women live on their own in seedy apartments, have premarital sex, get illegal abortions, yearn to be artists, experiment with drugs, and, if they are so inclined, discover a mannered, thriving lesbian underworld.

I can hardly wait.

March 31, 2004

Tiptree Award, 2003

The winner of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award — "an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender" — for 2003 is Matt Ruff for Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls.

News from the FEMINISTSF listserv.

March 27, 2004

Wonder women

Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"

I would LOVE to see those issues.

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

Just saw "FEMILIAR,"

"a feminist textile/mixed media installation" by an artist named WhiteFeather, at the Saint John Arts Centre (show ends March 29). Interesting; an old-style feminist production, including two pieces which list menstrual blood — and one, uterine blood — among the fixins. But I liked it, unregenerate second-waver as I am¹, particularly the hair pie (what it says) and the matrimonial bedsheets, a triptych of sheets with embellished slashes in the centres which reminded me of nothing so much as the series of scenes in Salmon Rushdie's Shame (1983) in which the protagonist, a doctor, is introduced to his soon-to-be wife in a series of consultations, piece by piece through a hole in a sheet.²

It is a powerful show, that reveals the earthy, organic, and binding nature of the over-determined "feminine." Anyone who is able to catch it in the next two days is encouraged to do so.

Apparently there will be further information about WhiteFeather sometime next month, on the CBC Artspots site.

¹ I hadn't really thought of myself in this way until very recently, when taking part in an exchange at feministe about whether or not Germaine Greer is a disgrace to feminism. Part of me — a small part, inside — writhes and twists and wants to say, "Come on, guys, The Female Eunuch; cut her some slack." But I digress.

² It was not a successful marriage, in case you were wondering.

March 26, 2004

Picturing women

A link via Blog Sisters: Picturing Women, a site that "explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative."

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

March 25, 2004

Talk about lapsed

To follow up on the story of the mouth-shaped urinals that caused such consternation earlier this month, Boing Boing links to a photo of nun-shaped urinals.

It has always struck me how often nuns become the stand-ins for people's general dissatisfaction with the Catholic church. Funny, that.

Just a matter of time

Just overheard an ad for a new medication for "erectile disfunction" (otherwise known as getting older) that managed to make that scary list of possible side effects read at the end into a recommendation: "While rare, if erections last longer than four hours, seek medical attention." Just so.

Now if they could just cure migraines. I was home in bed with my ice packs all day. Crap.

March 21, 2004

Passages

Two links from an interesting blog I stumbled across called consumptive.org: "art, photography, and the uncanny":

18/3/04: photographs of recycled paper. Much more exciting than it sounds. (Scroll down to bottom of page.)

27/2/04: Time lapse photography: a woman aging 69 years, smiling throughout.

Gendered comments

So far, no comments on Netwoman's post about comments and gender. Under what circumstances ought one to delete a comment? Are comments from men treated differently from comments by women?

Addendum (22/3/04): feministe picks up the thread and describes how an overtly feminist site can become a lightening rod.

March 19, 2004

Followup on urinals

Rather than just complaining in her blog, like me, Ms. Lauren at feministe actually contacted Virgin Airlines, whose order for the urinals put them in the news in the first place, and received a response which she posted earlier today. Virgin was shocked — shocked! — that their plans, overseen by two female designers, apparently, caused such a furor.

Sigh.

March 18, 2004

Men of conscience are asked to hold it

Saw this on Boing Boing listed under "Funky-cool pissoires." The only problem Xeni Jardin notes is a copyright issue: apparently some forward-thinker already patented "the mouth-shaped urinal."

For a little more analysis, check out feministe and Trish Wilson.

And here's a link to the story on Fashion Wire Daily.

Update (23/3/04): Boing Boing is unrepentent.

March 14, 2004

Gender and blogging

A post from Laura over at Apt. 11D on whether or not it's true that women don't write political blogs, and how can we define politics. Laura links to "The Blogosphere: Boys 'n' Their Toys," an article by Brian Montopoli that provides some history of the development of the blogosphere from its "origins in the male-dominated tech world." The article quotes an estimate that only 4% of political blogs are written by women, but I tend to think, along with Laura, that this indicates a very narrow definition of "political."

March 13, 2004

Gender and voice

Here, via feministe, is an intriguing post from PinkDreamPoppies at Alas, a Blog, about the gendering of written language: the ways in which we gender it, as readers; the ways in which it is shaped by the gender of the writer. Pop quiz: What gender is PinkDreamPoppies? If you answered, "female," why, you'd be wrong. The post also mentions that gender-in-writing test that I mentioned sometime ago; a number of other women also report being identified as male. Be sure to read the comments, too.

March 12, 2004

Hi, Hir, Hirs, Hirself

An interesting conversation begun at long story; short pier and picked up at languagehat and Tenser, said the Tensor about non-gender-specific pronouns (or the need for them. Or not) in English. Various references to the pioneering work of sf writers in addressing the issue, such as Iain M. Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and Samuel Delany. Like many of the commentators, I have become quite comfortable with "they," as in, "Everyone should bring their texts to class" rather than "his or her books," but while this usage is more and more accepted, it is not yet universal, despite its extensive pedigree back to the fourteenth century. One of the commentators at languagehat points to a fascinating site called Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class which has a useful section on the singular "they"/"their"/"them"/"themselves" construction. And who dare argue with Shakespeare

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
(Comedy of Errors IV.3)

or the King James Bible?¹

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. (Philippians 2:3)

¹ Almost half finished Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Very readable, though subtlety is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of the narrative. A little before my period, though, so I am not the best judge.

13/3/04: typo corrected. Sorry, languagehat.

February 24, 2004

Yet another post on Naomi Wolf

Haven't yet mentioned the Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom incident, though it has been all over the blogosphere and in the media. (The Invisible Adjunct breaks the story here.) But no, I have not characterized it correctly; I have echoed the sensational turn the story has been given in the media. It is not really the "Wolf/Bloom incident," or even the "Wolf/Paglia incident," though it seems that the latter would dearly like to make it so — and the media is sure picking up on the cat-fight angle — but rather the Wolf-being-stonewalled-by-Yale incident. And "incident" is surely the wrong word, too; according to Wolf what she describes is a long-standing practice rather than something as self-contained as an "incident." At any rate, I want to wade in long enough to say that whatever criticisms one may have of Wolf and/or her writing and/or her motivations, she is absolutely correct to blow the whistle, not just on a lecher, bad health notwithstanding, but more significantly, surely, on the institution that continues tacitly to condone his actions. That was not twenty years ago.

Though I have to say that the inclusion with the story of a photo of the toothsome-although-big-haired Wolf, circa 1982, seems gratuitous.

The whole debacle provides some interesting perspective on this post from Jon Mandle at Crooked Timber about Harvey Mansfield's reminiscences about the "good old days" at Harvard when men were men and women were status objects. And also on this post at the Little Professor which links to a post at academicgame about proposed policies at the U of California against faculty/student relationships.

Addendum: 25/2/04: 10:21am: The mutual admiration between scribblingwoman and unlocking the air continues apace. May I direct your attention to this pithy analysis?

U.S. Postal Service champions gay rights

Re. the Dr. Seuss commemorative stamp:

First Ernie and Bert, then Tinky Winky. But surely the world of Dr. Seuss is uncontroversial? Wrong.

February 12, 2004

A couple of things...

My new

arrived today and I'm too excited mucking around with it to think straight, but here are a couple of things:

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber writes about gender neutral language and why it's okay to use "they" for the singular.

The Books Every Educated Person Should Read post is up to 216 comments and 8 follow-ups. People cannot resist lists. (Or offering advice.)

Maud Newton links to Based on the Book, a "compilation of over 950 book titles, short stories, and plays that have been made into motion pictures" using IMDB.

feministe has a lyrical post on, among other things, putting young children to bed.

February 11, 2004

Rape Culture

An excellent post by Ampersand on Alas, a blog about the elements that make up (our/everyone's?) "rape culture." Be sure to read the comments as well.

Crossposted to writingwomen.

LeGuin; Foucault

Two links from the inestimable Maud Newton:

First, from The Guardian, an online discussion with Ursula LeGuin in which she briefly touches on the Harry Potter books: "good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." Of course, she mainly discusses her own work, but it's hard to resist dishing the dirt.

Second, a review, by Ed Halter in the Voice, of two new books which take exception to the Foucaldian notion of homosexuality as an invention of the nineteenth century, which ends with the evocative question,

Does the modern gay man or lesbian have that much in common with Hellenic boy-lovers, French libertines, or ancient Chinese scholars who carried on openly bisexual affairs? Ironically, because of their deep complexity, [Louis] Crompton's portraits [in Homosexuality and Civilization] could equally suggest that the only shared factors persisting across millennia are indeed acts and desires, not identities.

Addendum (5:09pm): Jessa Crispin at Bookslut also mentions the LeGuin piece.

February 07, 2004

On the gender front...

Plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose. Here are two sobering links in this the year of the goddess 2004:

A woman sets off airport security alarms with the chastity belt her husband apparently forced her to wear. (Link from BlogsCanada)

(It was harrowing browsing through what came up when I googled "chastity belt." Who knew?? Somehow this is not what I imagine the proponents of sexual abstinence had in mind.)

Final chastity note: "Two historians say chastity belts are purely medieval myths." Medieval myth, contemporary reality. Huh!

Second link: Another reason not to buy fashion mags: here are two (1, 2) before and after pictures. (Link from feministe. feministe goes on to link to an "uglification" contest — whereby people Photoshop celebrity photographs — and I find it pretty offensive that for many people ugly = old.)

Cross-posted to womenwriting.

Addendum (4:37pm): On the basis of the foregoing, I have applied to join the Bloggers over forty webring (link to the right).

January 19, 2004

What I've been doing

Had a surprise birthday party for Joe on Friday, which wasn't, as it turned out, a surprise, though he was very gracious and played along. I'm now exhausted and broke, but it was a good party.

Have a migraine today and spent it in bed with my trusty ice-packs. Awake now at this ungodly hour but back to bed soon. Cancelled class tomorrow; it's for their own good.

My laptop has died. Enough said. How to get a new one? Sigh.

The new blog for the women's writing class is percolating nicely.

December 05, 2003

Crash test dummy

Two weeks ago I had my sf class read J.G. Ballard's Crash. (For anyone unfamiliar with the novel, here is the blurb from the back cover:

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist' turned 'nightmare angel of the highways,' experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

A little overblown, but you get the idea.)

This is the second class I have asked to read this novel, and while the previous one uniformly disliked it, they did so with none of the vehemence of the current group (see here, here and here [26/11/03:9am]). Of course they are two different groups of people, but I wonder if asking this year’s bunch to blog might have increased their comfort levels with me, and each other, and allowed them to be more forthright.

One aspect of the whole discussion has given me real pause: two students told me that the novel had made them extremely uncomfortable due to events in their own pasts. I had not considered this possibility with this particular text; certainly it’s full of graphic descriptions of sex and physical injuries, but the sex is consensual and the injuries are from car crashes: it lacks the sort of coercion, abuse of power, or interpersonal violence that would have automatically impelled me to issue a content warning. Actually, I have only once ever put something on a course that I thought warranted such a warning: I showed Boys Don’t Cry last year in my intro. to gender studies class, because the subject was important enough to override considerations of comfort (here is the official page from Fox, which manages not to mention that Brandon Teena was transgendered). I put Crash on this year’s course as part of a section on technology interfacing with sexuality (we also read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex”), but while it is an early example of the treatment of this theme, because of the reactions this year I doubt I will assign the whole novel again. Perhaps just an excerpt; there is one published in the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition that I have, that would work.

Anyway, apart from anything else, I realized that I don’t want to read it again, so how can I teach it?

The whole discussion was an interesting exercise, however. The students questioned whether it is sf at all, and I have to agree that it is only in the broadest sense. It seems to be set at the time of the writing (pub. 1971), but it is strangely prophetic in its evocation of a world where individuals are disassociated from any sense of community by the impersonality of their surroundings; to whatever extent that was true thirty years ago, it must be even more so now. And even though that last may be arguable, the novel is prescient in terms of sf trends.

One of my students wrote a somewhat more appreciative blog entry than most of his classmates, and I think it’s worth quoting at length:

Seeing the reaction of the class towards James Ballard's Crash, I felt inclined to say a few things about it that I think I left unsaid. When we were on our break i was explaining to Krystal how i had felt about this novel. I told her about when I had visited England when i was about 13 and my parents and I were at the Piccadilly train station and somehow i got seperated from my parents and I ended up getting up close to the actual platform of the tracks, eventually the train had come and it whizzed by me and it just caught me offguard. It didn't scare me neither did it fascinate me, for me those 30 seconds of the train whizzing by me with all the lights, sounds and wind will always be a memory. This is how I felt about Crash. The whole novel seemed to me as just a plethora of sexual images. To the point where I had just become numb. And this is where I maybe understood where Ballard was coming from. Media in the contemporary world seems to forcefeed society with images of violence and sex and more imporatantly death, to the point where we take it for granted. In my opinion technology has amost numbed us to these aspects of society. We watch violence and death on the news and it does not seem to affect us anymore. The abundance of sex and our continued interactions in everything that we come in contact whether it's advertisements, movies, sitcoms whatever, we take sex and it's societal implications for granted. Maybe Ballard believes that we shouldn't.

To an extent, I had to justify choosing the novel, and that made me think about it beyond the obvious human/technological interface idea. It is, above all, a novel of ideas. A concept novel. I think that Ballard had this neato idea about people who got off on car crashes as emblems of what he saw as dangerous social and cultural trends, but instead of writing a story, as one of my students wished on his Crash webpage, he sat down and wrote a whole novel. I have to say it: that sort of unremitting focus in spite of all other considerations: it’s such a guy thing. But that being said, and as I remarked to my students, they may have hated it but I doubt that they will forget having read it. They may forget characters or incidents, but they won’t forget the queasy feeling they had as they read it, or the central linkage of sex, twisted metal, and wounds. And how long do they think they would have remembered, in comparison, an earnest editorial, say, on over-dependence on technology? And really, how else can we measure the success of a piece of writing but by the strength of its impact? One of my students wrote :

There's a saying I've heard once or thrice that every personal library should have one book that can offend anybody. Well, now my library has such a book, and it's name is Crash.... it's staying in my library as that book that can offend anyone. A trophy, if you will, to a literary war-wound received during my university days.

It is a fascinating novel; it must be practically unique in being so full of sex, from cover to cover, yet in utterly failing to titillate. It is the most unsexy dirty book that one can imagine, and that can hardly be unintentional in a writer of Ballard’s talent. (That is one reason why the Cronenberg film is so irritating: it could not, by virtue of being a visual medium, never mind the beautiful actors, achieve the almost ascetic quality that the novel has. Perversely ascetic—degradedly and begrimedly ascetic—or do I mean passionless? Or just enervated?). No-one in it to like, or sympathize with. Or, to even understand. Ballard makes us feel the same disassociation, the same anomie, as his characters. I suspect that that is the real reason for the strong reactions from many readers, myself included.

I can’t help thinking that Ballard must have had in mind the old comparison between being compelled by something, and not being able to look away from an accident. “You know. It was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.”

December 02, 2003

Ear bugs

Sounds like something that could happen in the jungle, right? Or something that could—and did—happen to Chekov in The Wrath of Khan. But in fact, the term "ear bugs" refers, according to a show I heard on CBC radio a few weeks back, to those times that an annoying song gets stuck in your head. Someone, though I can't remember who and nothing came up on Google, is actually studying it, and has determined that women are more susceptible than men. I have no idea how to interpret that.

Help, I'm an academic trapped in the body of a woman!

On an interesting new blog called Echidne of the Snakes (billed as a minor Greek goddess), saw a mention of Gender Genie, a site where one can paste in text and based on an algorithm, the gender of the author is determined. I pasted in an earlier blog entry and was told that I was a male. As is Echidne, the minor goddess, apparently. Sigh.

September 28, 2003

More on Pope

To add to the discussion of Pope mentioned below: I owe to him the title of this blog, as he was grinding his teeth about scribbling women long before Hawthorne made his famous comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d—ned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

Pope's infamous attack on Eliza Haywood in The Dunciad
(published in 1728 and expanded in 1744)

See in the circle next, Eliza placed,
Two babes of love close clinging
To her waist.

was supplemented by a note, in case anyone missed the point: "In this game, is expos'd in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those Shameless Scribblers (for the most part of that Sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or imprudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortune of both sexes, to the ruin or disturbance, of public fame or private happiness." Haywood is offered as the prize in a urinating competition: ‘Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky,’ (II, 15.3-5). The second prize was a chamber pot. Jonathan Swift used similar language when he wrote, "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."

Alas, I cannot claim to the be first (or even the fiftieth, I am sure) to attempt to reclaim this slur and refashion it into a badge of honour, for there is Scribbling Women, a project of the Public Media Foundation which dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast in the U.S.A.; Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (1997), a book edited by Elaine Showalter; Style and the "Scribbling Women": An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Mary P. Hiatt; Domestic Goddess, a.k.a. "scribbling mobs of women," a moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction; a proposed collection called Scribbling Women: The Form of the Short Story, 1850-present; and many individual references. Clearly I cannot claim originality, though I would point out that all these other references are without exception to American women writers via the Hawthorne quote, while I of course, as an eighteenth–centuryist and a reader of British literature, prefer to be insulted by Swift and Pope.