High Water

1. Reader poll results for sci-fi overwhelmingly male despite many women writing in genre, SHOCK. Commenters prove point about cultural sexism while laughing at how "forced" the idea is. (No, I know, never read the comments. I'm a masochist, what can I say.) Yeah, sure, it's not the readership's fault, it's just that women don't write good sci-fi. Suuuuuuuuuuuure. If I had a bingo card and a bottle of gin I could be wasted by now. ("When I scanned the names, I just saw people. Never struck me that this could be an issue..." Pfffft I bet. Isn't it funny how one often sees "just people" when looking at a mostly-male list and "a lot of women" otherwise?)


2. Not entirely unrelatedly, strange new worlds, a post by paxpinnae about conventions and gender representation.


I mean, I know all about nerd sexism. It is pretty much like regular sexism. It has tunnel vision and systematically devalues the contributions of women in general while also being obnoxious to women in particular. There are fewer women in many of the nerd spaces perceived as being in the nerd mainstream*, because they are essentially men's clubs but with different social standards, and because there are fewer women AND there is a men's club environment there is possibly even more sexism to go around for the women who are there. This is basically the only way I can think of offhand to explain the disproportionate amont of sexism I have experienced in certain nerd spaces compared to out in society at large - since society at large is also ridiculously sexist. Because for serious, in no other environment has my ability to think been so consistently and openly questioned due to my possession of a pair of breasts.


* No, you guys, it is true. Don't bother. There are welcoming, diverse nerd spaces, and then there are western comics conventions. (Random example picked by googling "UK comics convention" and clicking on the guestlist. The first one I looked at. Read it and weep. From pretty much any "minority" perspective.)

1. A book has been released in Sweden! It is called "six feminist myths" ("Sex feministiska myter"). These myths are, apparently:

1. gender is socially constructed
2. women get paid less for the same job
3. it's harder for women to have a career
4. men hit women
5. women work more
6. women get worse healthcare

The first couple of reviews I found went in the direction of "he used sources! so HE MUST BE RIGHT!"

So I guess we're done here...

No. Wait.

(I think it's by one of those "we are all wonderful but function in COMPLETELY different ways which can never be brought together and we should accept that, now get back to the kitchen. I call this equality." people, from a very cursory google.)


2. I, on the other hand, am reading En Riktig Kvinna : Om Biologism Och Könsskillnad ("A Real Woman: Biologism and sexual differentiation" or something) by Sara Arrhenius, which is pretty much the antidote. More on this when I'm further through.


3. So I hadn't really heard about the fallout from that clusterfuck of policing that was the IAAF & Caster Semenya's right to compete as a woman, because sometimes I am just kind of out of touch, but then I caught something about it on the radio a while back and it made me furious. So furious! Then it came up again in conversation with Valborg yesterday. The whole thing is just. Waaaaagh. Here you go, if I am not the last person to have heard this one.

So today I'm introducing another member of my little personal pantheon of Swedish queer feminist comic artists (OK, I will grant you, it is a very specific pantheon): Karolina Bång! Handboken (The Handbook) is a mix of stories about people who fall outside of various norms, bits of queer & feminist history told in comic form, and bits of how-to guide to alternative relationships!

This time I've got a little selection of mostly one-page comics to offer you, about queerness, norms and boundaries. This post is NSFW & some comics deal with rape culture.


There's something that most girls have learnt...

( Read more... )

Shake That Norm

( Read more... )

The norm ghost: It's trying to get you!

( Read more... )

The end of the nuclear family: A Utopia

( Read more... )

Previously translated strips:

- Snapshots of a patriarchy: The myth of the stone age, by Liv Strömqvist
- Creativity - a comic about making things by Liv Strömqvist

Latest contribution to Awesome 70s Shojo Week from starlady: A, A' (Hagio Moto)

I'm sticking with Ikeda Riyoko a little longer, although I promise that I have some other people to talk about as well; I might as well just get this out of my system first, right? Today we're on a manga I don't actually like all that much, which might be a bit out of the spirit of the thing, but I think it's maybe worth talking about anyway.


Claudine is one of Ikeda Riyoko's shorter stories. It's only around a hundred pages long, and I have to say that it does feel like a summary of quite a long & complex story rather than a story which actually should have been that short. Anyway: the short version of this post is that this is another of those reach-exceeding-grasp manga, of which this group also produced quite a lot. I think it's the widest miss of Ikeda's that I've read. Which isn't to say that it's devoid of interest.

This story contains a lot of elements that you'll have seen before if you've read much of Ikeda Riyoko's work; the pseudo-historical setting, the floppy shirts, the gender issues, the father who wants his daughter to be a son (but not too much of a son). Oh and the angst! And suicide! And manipulative relationships! I think we are basically only missing drugs and mystery wasting diseases?

Wikipedia is currently describing it as a classic yuri story, but if that's how it's widely thought of then I'm afraid people are wrong again, because although the female-bodied main character is addressed as Claudine and with female pronouns for most of the story it's still a story that focuses on a character who is struggling with being trans.

( Claudine )

I've been thinking a lot about identity in various forms lately. I've been trying to write about how I feel about my national identity, but that's defeated me several times now, so I'll give it a break and maybe come back later. Instead, expression of identity through appearance.

( Me. And the quest for something that fits. )

Social interaction - even online - sure does take a lot out of me sometimes. Argh.

But in better news, I finished reading Victoria Benedictsson's Money, and it was a really damn interesting book. I've mentioned a bit about it before, of course, but let's take this from the top: it's a novel written in Sweden in the 1880s, and was a contribution to an ongoing debate taking place at the time to do with marriage and the imbalance between men and women, double standards and all. A lot of the work concerned with the topic was by men, particularly Ibsen, and I guess Strindberg as well, so in that this is a book about issues concerning women's situation that was written by a woman it is, for its time, unusual. Interestingly, Benedictsson struggled to have her work taken seriously - it was dismissed as being about women's stuff, basically, and therefore not very important. Ibsen's A Doll's House, on the other hand, while also concerning issues with marriage and criticizing the way the whole institution worked at the time, was extremely controversial, but not, as far as I know, dismissed as unimportant!

The book is about a girl, Selma, who is married at the age of sixteen to a much older man without really knowing what marriage involves, because of ideas about keeping girls pure. She simply has no idea, particularly about sex. The book is about how she deals with her situation, really; it's about her journey through to... age 23, I think, and the conclusions she comes to about marriage. It really is an attack on marriage - a very carefully worded one, but all the same.* The attack is based on the inherent inequality - a situation in which men come to the marriage armed with far more knowledge of sex, are the ones who hold property within the marriage, and the ones who can be forgiven for sexual indiscretions too - and on the fact that for a certain class of women there were few options for supporting themselves besides marriage. Benedictsson, herself in an unhappy marriage to an older man, goes so far as to describe it as like prostitution: one sells oneself for money in order to survive. I seem to remember that there are characters who express similar views in A Doll's House, actually, though I'm only familiar with that piece from reading about it. I've neither read it nor seen it produced. Anyway! It was a real issue at the time, for the reasons mentioned above - particularly that women didn't hold property and weren't encouraged or allowed to earn their own living.

The book isn't perfect. I was worried when I began it that I wouldn't be able to get into it, because Selma seemed as though she had potential but things about her world-view were really frustrating and I wasn't sure about the direction it seemed to be headed for a while right at the start. This, of course, is kind of the point, as later sections showed. I did get really into it, actually, once I'd reached the point of her marriage; I was really interested to know what would happen to her and on the whole I wasn't disappointed by what did. She also does develop into a really interesting person. I thought she was pretty great. Striding around with a riding crop didn't hurt either, and nor did the female homoeroticism that crept into one of the later sections. Ahem. But the real point is that she's a good character, which is to say, flawed and interesting and with her own kind of strength and quite a bit of development. She also has strong views and expresses them.

I did think the message felt a bit... well, I've mentioned how carefully worded it felt, in that sort of balancing-act way of not wanting to push things too far, whether for fear of being unpublishable or fear of attracting too much criticism to deal with, and it did sometimes feel a little compromised as a result. Mostly I think it got through, though. I'm sure that a few other things struck me as not quite as great as they could have been, though I foolishly didn't make notes so don't expect elaboration. Oops. Overall, though, I liked it. Quite a bit, actually. I'd recommend it.

In short: proto-feminist literature I am really glad I read!

---

* In the afterward to the translation I read there's a little information regarding letters she wrote to a friend while writing the book, talking about what she felt she could and couldn't say as a female author and how she felt she had to worry about these things in a way a man probably wouldn't - particularly, open discussion of sex was problematic for her, and the book is very much about sex, so one finds oneself reading between the lines. To be honest, all that considered, it still feels really pretty frank considering when it was written.

Apparently I'm boring today. If I tried to post properly it would start out trying to be about Rose of Versailles or Irene Adler or in fact crossdressing as portrayed in Stuff What I Like generally, or how Murakami kind of only has one story and I somehow fail to mind, or whatever, and would devolve within sentences into a detailed explanation of where I buy my tea from in Stockholm and why and how terrible the tea you can buy in Swedish supermarkets is, with a possible aside on the concept of fika. I know this would happen because I tried, several times. (I did go all the way to Stockholm with the primary purpose of buying tea today, but somehow suspect that a blow-by-blow account is not actually needed.)


Alternative entertainment until such a time as I'm less dull:

oursin posts about queer womanhood in the late C19th at queering_holmes.

I'm still staring at queering_holmes with undisguised admiration, but I don't feel intelligent enough for participation today. I am, however, making notes.

&

valborg posts about a book called The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe.

I mention this partly as a flawless segue into the fact that the person known on this journal as Val is more generally known to Dreamwidth as valborg. Just so you know. Also because, you know, crossdressing.