The Sexy Geek Ideal Imaginary: Do We Have a Problem?
I’m going to direct you all to read Geek Feminism’s post entitled “‘Geek Girls’ and the Problem of Objectification” as a starter, because much of what I’m going to say below stems from the fascinating discussion taking place there. But to start, I’ll offer the following quote: There’s nothing wrong with wanting attention and approval in one’s community. What cosplayer and geek wouldn’t want those things? What female geek doesn’t want to be welcomed into the community with enthusiasm and excitement (instead of derided as a harpy feminist or annoying squeeing fangirl)? The problem, then, isn’t what women do, but a culture in which the only way that women can be recognized as a desirable part of the culture is when they participate by making themselves consumable sexy objects for geek men. One of the problems with geek culture is how readily it has moved to adopt the paradigms of the cultures that exist outside of it (the very cultures which at one point looked down at geeks for being, well, geeky). I don’t have a problem with sexy geeks, or sexy geek clothing. In fact, most people don’t, in principle. There’s nothing wrong with looking sexy, or wanting to look that way. The problems arise when the sexy geek becomes the image we hope to attain (or, rather, that women hope to attain, since men, by and large, are not compelled to fulfill particular and very impossible physical images in order to achieve acceptance and “love” from others).* Specifically, it’s a very particular kind of “sexy image.” An image which says “only people with certain dress sizes and certain body proportions look sexy in the sexy clothes.” Because that’s an image that women will try to fit, even if their bodies aren’t designed for it. Even if doing so is bad for them. Even if doing so could end up killing them or destroying young girls from the mind out. There’s nothing wrong with sexy, but there’s something very wrong with the way we use it. Geek culture really shouldn’t have ideal body images. Not in any immediate sense. We should be just as willing to commend someone for wearing cat ears and a tail in any body shape (or gender) as we would someone wearing a skimpy ninja costume (is it fair to say that certain clothing is body specific? I don’t know. It seems horrible to suggest as much…). They should be seen as equal forms of expression. But I don’t think we’ll ever be there, in part because we have and will always be a highly sexualized culture. Clothing deemed “sexy” will always elicit seemingly positive responses (objectifying responses, but positive nonetheless because of our perceptions). I would be lying if I said I didn’t have those responses for Slave Leia cosplayers, or that sexy geek calendar everyone is talking about (I won’t buy such a thing, but seeing the images will undoubtedly elicit a reaction). But I’m aware of those responses. And it’s never stopped me from saying hello to people who don’t dress like Slave Leia (and, in fact, it’s helped me talk to those people, because I’m uncomfortable around half naked people in public). But I’m also aware of how many of those responses are socially conditioned — of all those times when I’ve seen someone who doesn’t look like a “hot girl” and reacted poorly in my head. I’ve had to shut those things out, because geek culture should always be about the geekery, not about what people look like, how they dress (unless they dress in people’s skin or something), and so on. It’s not about who should be pretty or who wears the sexiest clothes. It’s about a whole different set of ideals (in my head). This is turning into a ramble, though, so I’ll shut up and move on. I say all of this as a geek and someone who has attended geek-oriented events (and hopes to do so in the future). I’m not particularly pleased by the subversion of geek culture’s original disaffected attitude towards standardized models for engagement. Maybe what I see in my head is utopian nostalgia, wherein women were more likely to be accepted into the group as people because they were geeks too and not because they wore bikinis. And, well, it probably is utopia and formed out of nothing. Because women haven’t been a part of geek culture, largely speaking. They’ve been excluded for all kinds of stupid or sexist or unintentional reasons. Not to the extent that women weren’t a part of it at all, mind you, but certainly to the point where you could look around and not find a whole lot of them there. Now? It seems like they’re all over the place (and hello to you all), but following on their heels are the ideologies that still turn entire generations of young women into anorexics, etc. Nobody should have those things forced on them. What are we going to do about it? I don’t know. I really don’t. —————————————————- * — I don’t want to suggest that men are not susceptible to “ideal” body images. They are. But the pressure is less pronounced than it is for women, and likely not as well-researched.
Lambda Literary Award: Celebrating the LG, Kicking the BT in the Ass
I won’t profess to understand the full history of the Lambda Literary Foundation (to which the award belongs). As a Foundation that has in recent years honored lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and other-sexuals (genderqueer, etc.) writers, the place is near and dear to my heart. But then they announced this: LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group) – Awards for the remaining Lambda Literary Award categories will be based on literary merit and significant content relevant to LGBT lives. These awards will be open to all authors regardless of their sexual identity – All book award judges will be self-identified LGBT The above is the result of a lot of discussion and arguing among differing camps of the LGBT community (supposedly, though I’ve yet to hang out with any LGBT people who disagree so much as to make a concession like the above remotely rational). But it is also the third major response to criticism about how the awards are structured. According to their 20+ year history, the award went from accepting submissions “based solely on a book’s LGBT subject matter” to being restrict to self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer authors” in 2009. This, apparently, is what has created the divide. Some believe the award should go only to writers of the LGBT persuasion (broadly defined), while others think that the awards should reflect LLF’s function to promote positive LGBT images, as their mission statement makes clear: The Lambda Literary Foundation nurtures, celebrates, and preserves LGBT literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility and encourage development of emerging writers. But even more importantly: the previous guidelines couldn’t be reasonably enforced, as Nicola Griffith points out in her post on the recent changes — “if you can’t substantiate (check, prove, police, ensure) eligibility, it’s pointless.” The problem, then, has to do with representation. The new categories are oddly LG- and gender-normal-centric. One of the new awards (for debut fiction) is oriented only towards gay and lesbian people (both of which would be associated with standard genders); the other two are geared towards people who identify as male or female. The other categories, presumably, are open to just about anyone, so long as the content of their work is relevant to LGBT people. But the new awards are oddly exclusionary, giving the T side of the “LGBT” label little room to “play.” Where exactly to transgender or transsexual or genderqueer people fit into all of this? While Cheryl Morgan and I have had our differences (in days of yore, as they say), I think people should read her slightly angry response to the changes, or at least this juicy quote: First of all, why is one award specifically restricted to “one gay man and one lesbian”, while others are for “male-identified and female-identified” people. At least the latter appears to include some bi people, which the former seems to exclude. As for trans people, apparently they are OK for the first award if they identify as gay or lesbian, but not otherwise, and they are OK for the other two awards is they are male-identified and female-identified, but not otherwise. Let’s face it: When an important award which is supposed to celebrate LGBT issues in literature doesn’t get how its policies discriminate against its own target demographic, then something is seriously wrong…
SandF Episode 5.1 (Torture Cinema Meets Mansquito) is live!
Our listeners were kind enough to select Mansquito for our Torture Cinema feature this week (which might include some of you). If you don’t know anything about the movie, that’s probably a good thing. I strongly suggest listening to our humorous and slightly angry review instead. It’ll save at least 60 minutes of your day (seeing how the movie is about an hour and a half, and our review is 1/3rd of that). In any case, here’s the episode! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go edit something, and then blog about something else…
What Are You Reading? Inquiring Minds Want to Know
In the interest of giving all of you the floor to talk about books, I’d like to know what you all are reading and what you think of it (anything counts, from articles to audiobooks). I am currently smack dab in the middle of the following: Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham (and Mark Buckingham) Loving it! The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein Interesting, but I need to get deeper before I can make a valid judgment. Gateways edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull Some really smart stories in here! Future Media edited by Rick Wilbur Just started! When the Great Days Come by Gardner Dozois So far: loving it! Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation by Louise Pratt Just started! But I’ve read it before, and it’s an interesting text. Maps of Englishness by Simon Gikandi Just started! The English in the West Indies by Froude (can’t remember the the first name) Just started! The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader Just started! The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance Just started! I also finished a few short stories by Mary Robinette Kowal (“Clockwork Chickadee” and For Want of a Nail — the latter won the Hugo and is quite good). And yes, I realize that is a lot of reading. I’m a grad student. So sue me… So what are you reading?
Writing: It’s Really About Winging It
I’ve been following Mark Charan Newton’s blog for some time now. He’s the author of Nights of Villjamur, City of Ruin, and Book of Transformations, an environmental activist, reviewer, and too many other things to put in a post without wandering into random topics. He recently posted an interesting response to a Guardian article about Tobias Wolff, from which I draw the following quote: While I’m in no way intending to put myself anywhere near Wolff on an achievement level, I can really agree with his statement about faking it. Every single time I sit down to write, I feel like I’m winging it. From all the research I do to watching all the reviews come in, it still doesn’t feel real. Those poor Amazon reviews seem like a plot to expose me by those who know the Truth. I should be just as humble about what I will write below, as I am even less accomplished than Newton in my writing career (a couple of short fiction sales, no novels with agents, and a long list of rejects for stories I am told are quite good — thanks Adam). The interesting thing about writing is how muddled the field has become. There are so many classes and workshops and books about the process of writing that the reality of the writing process seems to have gotten lost. Everything about writing is about “faking it” or “winging it.” Fiction is always already a symptom of overactive imaginations, its very formation founded in the campfire dramas and ancient mythologists who made up lofty explanations for the strange world in which they lived and the great heroes and monsters that inhabited it. We keep this tradition going by telling stories about people that don’t exist (or about people who do exist, but have become caricatures of their former selves). Some of us make up our own mythologies and worlds (such as Newton and myself), while others wander into the realm of the everyday or the extraordinary of the real world (the good, the bad, and the ugly). And at the end of the day, there aren’t any rules or standards for the writing process beyond the arbitrary ones we set in regards to the language itself — and many authors break that too by providing stories written in various kinds of non-standard English (Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias S. Buckell, for example, use different version of island-based dialects in their work). So when writers get down to talking about their successes, of which I have very few, I think they are exposed to the inadequacy of the method: that is that we can’t exactly say “why” we have succeeded, except to say that someone liked whatever it was we wrote. There are no hard and fast rules of writing. There is no magic advice that holds true for everyone. Some say to be a writer, you have to write all the time, but plenty of writers do the exact opposite and do just fine. Do this, or that, or do both at the same time, at different times of the day, half on a Tuesday, three times on a Friday, and never on a Sunday unless it’s the 1st of the month…when it comes down to it, we’re just making it all up — the rules, the stories, the methods, our styles, etc. I suspect that the more accomplished a writer becomes, the more able they are to put a brick wall in front of that part of themselves that reminds them of their obliviousness. You’d have to, right? Because to spend your entire life thinking that this might be the day someone figures out you’ve tricked them into thinking you’re a good writer…well, that would suck.
Weird Tales: The Editorial Fiasco
There’s something troublesome about what is going on with Weird Tales. Yesterday, Ann VanderMeer, the current-(no-longer)-editor of the magazine posted an announcement that she would not longer be editor. More disturbing was the news that Weird Tales had been sold to another editor who seems to have purchased it in order to edit it himself (this fellow being Marvin Kaye). The entire staff has been dropped, without much in the way of warning or transition. Poof. Done. Over. I’m sure there was something going on behind the scenes that we don’t know, but it doesn’t seem all that relevant when you consider the lack of professionalism going on here. To add insult to injury, apparently the first thing Kaye intends to do is launch a Cthulu-themed issue of Weird Tales, taking the magazine backwards many decades. It’s almost as if they don’t care what Ann did for Weird Tales — dragging it out of the shadows of its past. To be honest, I find myself agreeing with much of what Jason Sanford has already said on this issue: Which brings me back to what I mentioned earlier about Ann’s vision. Without a strong editorial vision a magazine can easily founder in the marketplace. Unfortunately, my take on Kaye’s vision, which is based on the type of stories he’s published in his anthologies over the years, is of someone in love with storytelling as it used to exist. The fact that his first issue as editor of Weird Tales will be “Cthulhu-themed” supports this view. I’m not alone in this thinking. On Twitter, John Joseph Adams was asked what he knew about Kaye and replied “Not much, but I would expect WT to revert to the magazine it was 30-40 years ago.” Warren Ellis echoed this by saying that Kaye is “clearly very retro in his tastes.” I simply don’t get why we need more Cthulu stuff. There are so many anthologies already out there, and more hitting shelves every day. I get that Cthulu is fun and classic, but isn’t the point of Weird Tales as it currently stands to get beyond rehashes of Lovecraftian thematics into other visions of the weird, macabre, bizarre, and downright strange? And isn’t going back to Lovecraft and Cthulu and all these classic forms of horror and weirdness taking things in the wrong direction? It seems, to me, like a mighty dickish move. I don’t know Kaye, so perhaps he has good intentions and things got out of control. But a lot of readers of Weird Tales are already talking about cancelling their subscriptions and many others are practically in boycott mode. If the last few years have taught us anything about the genre community, it doesn’t like it when someone else takes a dump on someone they like, even if the perception itself is inaccurate. We just don’t like it. I guess this is farewell. Sad, but true. Ann will be greatly missed. Maybe she’ll start a Weird magazine of her own one day. That would be mighty cool, no? (Hint hint to any company wanting to start a magazine and in need of a staff…) ——————————- P.S.: I linked to Jeff VanderMeer’s blog primarily because I don’t know how long Ann’s post will remain up on Weird Tales considering how dickish it makes Kaye’s move seem. You all might also be interested in Warren Ellis’ take.