sundries

[rm]

Sexism, let me count the ways: a new book in the UK asserts that women who allow nannies to help raise their children produce boys who grow up to be adulterers. And the girl children? Well they just become sluts and substance abusers.

The high school that canceled the prom because of a lesbian in a tux also reportedly repeatedly suspended a transgender student for earlier this year. In the realm of the slightly bizarre, this has come to light through Dan Savage, who has a good record about a lot of things and is entertaining as fuck, but has also been repeatedly faily regarding transphobia.

Wreckage of WWII plane found in Oregon.

That man who would become Pope Benedict XVI was kept more closely apprised regarding a sexual abuse case in Germany than previous church statements have indicated. Anyone got any insight into precedence/likelihood of the pope resigning?

I know we're supposed to hate A.I. (which I still think came perilously close to being one the greatest films ever made in spite of all the ways it falls apart; when I think about what it could have been had its vision fully succeeded I can barely breathe), but I can't introduce this link in any other way: Man Hatten, the place where the lions weep.

Dear Amanda Palmer: The problem with hipster racism is that if people don't know you it doesn't sound like a joke (which was never very funny anyway); it sounds like racism. Also, despite the illusions that celebrity media and internet culture encourage, most of the people who are really pissed off at you right now, don't know you; hence your racist joke sounding, you know, racist. Also, please stop contributing to our societal abuse of the word irony.

That said...

Dear Everyone Else, I am extremely sick of people calling her "a bitch" and "a slut" and other gendered terms that are about shaming female gender and sexuality because they either are (rightfully) angry about this latest debacle and default to those words (I'm working on it too!) or, and this is what I'm really irritated about, because they don't like that she's marrying Neil Gaiman.

This thing is about Amanda Palmer and who she is in public. While this thing may or may not be relevant to who she or Gaiman are are in private, if you don't know them personally (_personally_, not whatever quirk of internet/celebrity culture put the whole Internet on a first name basis with them) who they are at home isn't relevant to you, and the jealousy and misogyny I've seen directed at her deeply, deeply muddies the water in the critical response to her work and the performance of her public life. Please knock it off. It's not helping, and it's not appropriate.

At long last, a URL and registration information for the Bristol conference at which I'll be presenting the paper about mourning for fictional characters: Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception.

Observation about White Collar fandom: Look kids, the rape narratives are back. No, really. Rape hasn't been a huge topic in Torchwood fandom at all. White Collar fandom? Rape, rape, rape, prison rape, prison rape, prison rape. Some of it's kinkmemes, some of it's people processing their own experiences, some of it's just there, but I'd forgotten this aspect of fandom. This sort of thing was prominent in Harry Potter fandom, but it had slipped my mind the degree to which its thematic absence from Torchwood (although I've seen a few stories here and there) is atypical of both fandom and media in general.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Re: "hipster racism". If you haven't seen it already, go grab Lester Bangs's "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" and check out the chapter "The White Noise Supremacists", wherein he said many of the same things thirty years earlier. He was just as uncomfortable about the way people in the punk underground were using casually offensive things as a kind of bonding, us-against-them ritual, with "them" being anyone who wasn't in the room -- so it wasn't deliberately racist, but it had the same net effect. No, most people really do not understand the unthinking effects of their language on others -- or, when they do, they often want to assume everyone else is in on the joke, when some people may not even be aware there IS a joke.

And re: the abuse of the word "irony" -- I'm tempted to blame a certain Canadian singer, but I suspect she was simply making public the damage already done to the world by so many years of unthinking bad usage.