Silence, consent, rape.

This entire post contains potential triggers for frank and occasionally graphic open discussion of sexual abuse and assault, sometimes first-hand. It is all rage-inducing. There is a lot here. There is a very strong trigger warning for this entire post. It all goes under the cut.

Protected: oi.

T

This.

F

You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently comments!

Signal Boost: M. Night calls A:TLA whitewashing “ironic.”

A

“It’s called irony,” Night said of the controversy in a follow-up phone call exclusive to UGO.
…
M. Night Shyamalan: Well, it is the most culturally diverse tent-pole movie ever made. And I’m proud of it. It’s part of what drew me to the material, to see the faces of our whole world in this new world. And only time will assuage everyone and give them peace. Maybe they didn’t see the faces that they wanted to see but, overall, it is more than they could have expected. We’re in the tent and it looks like the U.N. in there.

There you have it, folks. People who protest whitewashing=unable to comprehend irony/sore because we didn’t get our way about casting.

Please, please, go to the comments of this article/interview and politely respond.

Resources:

• wistfuljane: Roundup: The Last Airbender’s Fail!Casting
• racebending.com / racebending
• aang_aint_white
• racebending.com
• bossymarmalade‘s post from yesterday about the further whitewashing of the franchise with the new release of the graphic novel based upon the white actors
• Visual evidence of the ethnicity of the original series
• delicious/tag/racebending

  (Know of other resources? feel free to link. and please spread the word.)

  ETA: MANAA responds, very eloquently.

  You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently comments!

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  Posted by bookshop on Mar 30, 2010 in fandom, film, politics | 0 comments

the uproar rising, no way out, no end–

 

• i saw blood done sign my name last week. it’s a film about advancement of civil rights and a hate killing in the small-town South in the 70′s. i feel i need to warn for random white privilege (it’s based on the autobiography of a white child whose father, a pastor, was an ally, and there’s a lot of ‘look at the white guy rock the boat’ that detracts from the story’s larger theme of how the black community came together and demanded action and change in their town). and it definitely had its share of flaws as a film. but it had strong performances by a very talented cast, and i found it earnest and moving. if you get a chance, do try to go see it.
• Does anyone know if there’s a public version of deepad‘s entry where she talks about the cultural misappropriation of Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty? I was trying to explain to someone why I have issues with Bray’s writing the other day (I’ve talked about this, and especially her toying around with the dead lesbian trope, before); but when I went to pull up the post as a reference point it was locked.

  Although “WE DON’T FUCKING EAT SNAKES!” sums it up pretty nicely, I think. ETA: here it is! Thanks, (whose journal you should all be reading.)

• Signal boost, courtesy of on Twitter: the campus of UC San Diego has been plagued by ongoing race-related incidents for the last month. It started with 2 extremely appalling ‘unsponsored’ frat parties designed to mock Black History Month, one of which, spearheaded by members of Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity, called itself “Compton Cookout.”

  It escalated into what seems to have become a horrific spiral of racefail: students using racist symbology all over campus, including hanging a noose in an on-campus library, and using the n-word to describe student protestors on a campus radio show. In response, minority students walked out of a teach-in in protest of the university’s attempts to deal with the situation, and the community has been scrambling ever since to deal with the fallout. It’s my understanding that UCSD had a very small minority population to begin with, and recent events have brought to the surface a number of deep-seeded issues and underlying racism, as well as sexism and other issues of minority discrimination.

  StopRacismUCSD has been documenting the events and urging action.

  ___________

  I am reading The Iliad, and there is this one passage that I can’t stop thinking about.

  Book 12
            They rushed to obey him,
  Some swarming over the top at once, others streaming in
  through the sturdy gateways — Argives scattering back in terror,
  back by the hollow hulls, the uproar rising, no way out, no end –
  
  

  Book 13

  But once Zeus had driven Hector and Hector’s Trojans
  hard against the ships, he left both armies there,
  milling among the hulls to bear the brunt
  and wrenching work of war — no end in sight –
  While Zeus himself, his shining eyes turned north,
  gazed a world away to the land of Thracian horsemen,
  the Mysian fighters hand-to-hand and the lordly Hippemolgi
  who drink the milk of mares, and the Abii, most decent men alive.
  But not a moment more would he turn his shining eyes to Troy.

  ___________

  lately i’ve been feeling that i am doing exactly nothing with my life. And by “nothing,” I mean: nothing that’s a betterment, either of myself or the world around me.

  I think I need to break clean away and start over.

  <3

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  Posted by bookshop on Mar 2, 2010 in books, fandom, politics | 0 comments

Good news in a week full of bad news the world over:

Bloomsbury has just announced that they will be releasing a new jacket for Magic Under Glass, with a model who more accurately reflects the main character’s ethnic and racial identity.

I am so admiring of all the fans, readers, editors, and writers who spoke out about this issue.

New Year’s Resolution #7: Stop buying YA from Bloomsbury.

I‘ve been looking forward to the debut YA novel Magic Under Glass for months. I ordered it before the first of the year! it came! The author, fabulousfrock, sent me a bookplate! I was excited!

And then I wasn’t.

This is the description of the main character of Magic Under Glass from the review of the book by The Book Smugglers:

This is the U.S. hardback cover of Magic Under Glass, published by Bloomsbury USA:

That…. is not anyone who looks like Nimira to me.

You may recall that last fall, Justine Larbalestier’s incredible book Liar was at the center of a storm of controversy over the fact that its publisher, Bloomsbury, had whitewashed the cover and used a white face to represent an African-American heroine. After the ARCs started coming out and people started to realize what had happened, enough of an outcry went up on the interwebs that Bloomsbury acted fast and changed the cover to feature a beautiful and far more accurate portrayal of the main character, Micah. (My rec for Liar is here.)

The publisher of Magic Under Glass? Guess who!

The cover of Magic Under Glass? It’s been public since the Liar controversy. Bloomsbury was able to yank the original cover of Liar and change it 2 months before it went to press. They had over six months to do the same for Magic Under Glass.

But it was a debut novel whose author didn’t have a foothold in the publishing world that would allow her to protest, as Larbalestier did. Also, the reviewing blogosphere generally doesn’t review books before they’re published. So without the author to spearhead a call to action, there has been none over the whitewashing of Magic Under Glass, and Bloomsbury? Well, obviously, they weren’t concerned.

Until we come to the always awesome Book Smugglers, who with the new cover in hand, close their review with, “Nimira is supposed to be dark-skinned !!!! The book trailer captures that and is true to the book (check it out ) but the girl in the US covers is definitely white.”

______________________

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT FUCKING YEAR. THANKS A LOT, BLOOMSBURY, FOR RUINING THE ONLY DEBUT NOVEL OF 2010 THAT I REALLY WANTED TO READ. ENJOY SPENDING THE MONEY I GAVE YOU FOR IT, BECAUSE IT’S THE LAST TIME I EVER BUY ONE OF YOUR BOOKS, YOU RACIST ASSHOLE SHIT PUBLISHER. FOR GOD’S SAKE HOW DOES THIS CRAP KEEP HAPPENING?
______________________

1. I really wanted this to be a review of Magic Under Glass. It’s too late to save this book from its cover, and I do want to encourage everyone to read it, talk about it and support fabulousfrock. But after this? From now on?

2. Stop buying books from Bloomsbury Kids. You’re on a budget crunch this year anyway. Stop buying books from Bloomsbury. (NOTE: please see Edit, below.)

3. All of you amazing, fantastic readers who are working on your YA novels: don’t sell your works to Bloomsbury. Sell them to publishers who encourage diversity, publishers who respect chromatic cultures and characters.

4. Support Tu Publishing. It’s necessary. It’s important.

5. If you’re as outraged by this as I am, say so. The contact info, including email, for the Bloomsbury Kids’ Marketing office is available here.

thinky thoughts

Things I am thinking about.

- gendered language, and language that expresses complicated and/or problematic power dynamics. i am trying to use less strongly gendered words and phrases. it’s pretty easy, so far, for me to notice when i use certain words pertaining to the traditionally female. it’s easier for me to check and/or correct myself. i’m having a much harder time noticing when i use traditionally male-centric words. it is really hard to analyze speech patterns when thinking about the connotations of words makes you realize just how much of your vocabulary is rooted in expressions of complicated power dynamics. i’ve been thinking a lot more about that lately, too, especially in the ways we’re encouraged to express women relating to each other (the catfight, the bitchslap, the wife versus the other woman, the cheerleader vs the nerd with glasses; all these relationships that force women into power struggles that are male-instituted); but it’s nothing i can really even critique at this point, just stuff i’m trying to be more aware of.

- whether Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the rest of the Millennium trilogy is anti-feminist; whether it exploits women with pervasive themes of violence, or whether its point (wake up to the war of violence against women) makes the extremity of violence in the books/film unnecessary. i am torn about this, honestly; i’ve thought about it a lot internally in comparison to Watchmen, to figure out where on the spectrum it lies between “casual exploitation,” “conscientious use of exploitative themes to make a point,” and “exploitation to make a point that ultimately gets lost in all the exploitation.”

i think ultimately Larsson’s story (at least the first book; i’ve not read the rest yet) is largely problematic but saved by the presence of several strong female protagonists, especially Lisbeth Salander. has a discussion going about the movie v/s the trilogy. i’d love to hear thoughts here as well. (i also share more of mine in my mini-review of the book.)

it sounds like, from what P said, that the film leaves out a lot of extenuating nuances that the book left in, and gives us a more shallow & exploitative storyline. i think Larsson very carefully tried to make women anything but catalysts for male violence fantasies in his book; whether they fell victim (the murder victims), escaped (harriet), stayed to fight (lisbeth), or found a way to navigate between the superimpositions of male desire (erika), they definitely weren’t pawns.

- i tend to keymash and use text-based emoticons as i type, very casually. have done so for years. i have not thought about how this could potentially impede communication for readers, but has just put up a post that touches on how vital adaptive technology is in a computer-based enviroment.

i think the only thing to do is to recognize that adaptive technologies are not generally equipped to parse things like gibber-speak and d-facing. and since there aren’t enough spoons to go around as it is, i will have to find a better way of communicating flail-based emotions.

________

but enough thinking. What I would really like, if there are any country music fans out there? are country music recs. Lately I have been wanting tons of Jace Everett & Taylor Swift & Trisha Yearwood & Alan Jackson in my life. Who else should I be listening to?

finally: this is the most awesome thing i’ve seen all week. Zombies vs. unicorns? Zombie unicorns, of course.