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

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

If I misrepresented it as uncomplicated, I'm willing to mea culpa to that

I appreciate that. This is a conflict which is frequently mischaracterised in ways which can be very damaging (Americans giving money to the IRA, for example, without apparently understanding exactly what they're funding), hence my objection to your terminology. I'm sure you appreciate these are issues which are deeply sensitive and personal for many people (my uncle was a British soldier in NI, as it happens). It's easy enough to tell a joke like that in a bar in Denver; tell it in Belfast at the wrong time, the wrong place, it could be worth someone's life.

Honestly, I doubt you're going to have luck finding any kind of ethnic joke which is less loaded in terms of its political history and intersectionality - the reason these jokes endure is because they sting, and that sting has to come from somewhere.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Both my sister and I went out, in our time, with soldiers who served in Northern Ireland, and both of them told us jokes which were both funnier and sicker than the example given. The difference? When it could have been (and was) you on the end of that bomb, you get a level of in-group entitlement to make jokes about it that people who weren't there and who didn't have their necks on the line simply don't. That seems to be a point which delchi seems simply to miss; there are people who can make jokes because they are making them from within the target group which are absolutely unacceptable from people outside the group.