Entries tagged with feminism

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: "You?" "You do?" "John!" "Who'd have thought it?"

Entry tags:

'bustability

Mmm, that was a pretty nice long weekend, all things considered. I mostly took a break from the internet, cleaned up my room/part of my apartment in preparation for the new bookcases I'm getting next weekend (finally, my books will have a home), hung out and sung along to 1776 with a lot of wonderful people at

omnia_mutantur's, perched on some MIT stairs with my roommate to watch Boston's best fireworks display in years, cooked some tasty things, and was grateful (if mildly guilty) for my apartment's AC. Also I didn't draw much, tsk. I need to try and be productive more steadily and less in bursts. I did get my comics anthology submission all wrapped up and submitted Friday night, though, so there's that - now I'm back at the point I was supposed to be at right after college. \o/ /o\

I have one last The Last Airbender-related link to share (for now), which I think is rather important: The Last Airbender: who is to blame? by

glockgal at

racebending. It's about the danger of scapegoating M. Night Shyamalan rather than focusing on the institutionalized racism that is really at the root of the TLA debacle, and even comes with handy visual aid. (Sure, Shyamalan has been showing his ass quite enthusiastically throughout, but he's not behind the decades of systematic whitewashing in American cinema, and his likely disgrace won't prevent more of the same in the future.)

I haven't found the energy to write about Wonder Woman and why the "reboot" bothers me so much ... probably because I find Wonder Woman so difficult to talk about in general? I've stayed away from past discussions of her because they tend to focus around how some people find her boring or unrelatable, whereas I have this lingering childhood hero-worship that makes their perspective very difficult to comprehend. Also, I find that it's hard to take off the lifelong comics-reader goggles to a certain extent; I've realized that Diana's previous lack of pants didn't bother me, depending entirely on how she was drawn/characterized in her individual appearances. I've had a lot of feminist anger about the portrayal of female characters in superhero comics since the age of eleven or so, but the star-spangled bathing suit doesn't entirely fit into that for me. Relatedly, I still haven't found the words to defend her importance to me as an icon, in spite of the fact that nostalgia for "classic" superheros has been an enormous issue with DC recently (and I've fallen squarely on the side of irritation with that attitude - would have even if I could put aside the rampant racefail that's been involved, which I can't).

It's much easier to explain my anger about the deaths of her mother and culture, and possibly my longtime irritation at most "grim and gritty" superhero revamping, but ... yeah, my thoughts are just not together on this. /o\ I love that I can write a huge paragraph about how I don't know how to write about this issue, too, sheesh. For now, though? Gloria Steinem sums it up. (Still behind on the coverage, too, but that caught my eye.)

Also, I'm starting to catch up on the current Vividcon warnings/ablism/etc discussion, though I feel like the posts I've read have been too scattered to give me a comprehensive picture yet. However, I generally tend to come down on the side of making fannish spaces as safe and comfortable for everyone as possible (except as regards being called out for fail), and against jumping on marginalized people (at all, but specifically) when they ask for what they need. This is one of those uncomfortable instances of fannish fail where some of the faily things are being said by people I've liked and respected over the years, which is always extra-fun.

Whew. I don't think it's necessarily that fandom is more full of fail than usual lately; I think it's getting more attention than it used to (at least, in my "corner" of fandom). The sheer volume is getting a bit hard to follow, with the increasing IRL/art obligations, but I want to keep up as much as possible. (It helps that I've developed an interest in an older fandom where the fic mostly doesn't mesh with my stylistic tastes! My life is clearly the hardest, pfft.)

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: eerie canal (college glee club)

Entry tags:

we know every mile, every foot, every inch of the way

Things I really want to be doing:
-designing a Wonder Woman costume for Project Rooftop
-top-secret Eroica fanart project
-Mulan fanart. (Just rewatched it last night. Love it. Hate the Disney Princess promotion, and its effect on Mulan fanart on dA . . .)
-Monstrous Regiment fanart
-more Eroica fanart
-Teyla/Dr. Keller fanart
-reading Teyla/Dr. Keller fanfic (why is this apparently nonexistent?)

Things I really need to be doing:
-writing my

yuletide fic (and not panicking so much, it's mid-November)
-working on my

go_exchange submission (that deadline isn't too far off)
-working on my original comic projects
-y'know, looking for a job and an apartment and that (a job so I can have Photoshop again!)

Well, one way or another, I really need to stop reading so much Eroica fic and work on something. Such a slacker.

Bionic Woman doesn't look the least bit interesting tonight. Meh. (And while I'm at it? Heroes, you suck at the women, so much. For goodness sakes, Stargate: Atlantis is doing a better job!) I'm quite tired of my sudden inability to be interested in utterly male-centric shows, even though I think it's the "right" attitude to have in many ways. I could have these good feminist opinions and at the same time somehow manage not to be constantly frustrated. That would be nice.

(Why Eroica is such an exception to my woman-less-ness frustration, I do not know. I want the next volume already; it brings me such joy, and so much of the fic I've been reading lately is depressing. Why on earth is there so much angst and even deathfic for this of all fandoms? At least I have

mosellegreen's daily series of "Fabulousman" ficlets to cheer me a bit.)

Pfft. I'm gonna go catch a bus downtown and pick up Gail Simone's first issue of Wonder Woman. Eee.

Current Mood: worried
Current Music: dirty business (dresden dolls)

Entry tags:

we're all so sick of waiting

I, um. Huh.

I don't really know what to think? I mean, I miss Joss' shows, all three of them, and Eliza Dushku played my favorite role out of all of 'em. I've missed her. My first reaction was Joss + Eliza = SQUEE!

Not sure what I think about the concept, though. After all my irritation with bad female characterization . . . Dushku's character in "Dollhouse" sounds dangerously like a woman with no personality. Maybe that would interest me if that didn't happen to a lot of female genre characters anyway, all the time; having an excuse for it wouldn't make it fresh, wouldn't make it any less frustrating.

I couldn't stomach a show that plays with a female character as, well, a doll, with that as its nifty psychological appeal. I'm sure the show will be about how horrible it is to play with people as dolls; but frankly, at this point? That's not enough. I wouldn't want a "dark" show like that right now, without the catharsis of seeing the woman break free of dollhood. If the show aims at giving Echo agency, as well as messing with the nature of identity, that could be great. Maybe. Otherwise, it'd just be too damn depressing, too metaphorically close to home.

The trouble is, it's been awhile since I really trusted Joss to do a good job with problematic subject matter. Buffy gets hailed as a great feminist success, but it had a lot of problems, and this one doesn't sound like any sort of guaranteed improvement. (People talk about Joss writing great female characters, but all I have to do is think about Fred from Angel, and I'm really worried.)

sometimes she will be completely elegant, completely naive, completely helpless.
Is it me, or are there alarm bells ringing somewhere?

I guess I'll just have to see. I wish he'd drop some of his comic commitments, anyway, because gods know he's pretty much proved himself incapable of juggling too many projects at once.

I hope I'm just being paranoid and jaded, and that this show will turn out to be filled with squee after all. (Would you believe me if I said that I still consider myself to be a Joss Whedon fan? I mean, I watch/read/at least partly enjoy just about everything he works on. I dunno.)

Current Mood: ranty
Current Location: another tiny temp job
Current Music: we are more (erin mckeown)

Entry tags:

but baby, face it: that's what it's been for us

I've been having some very angry feminist days lately. Maybe it's time to cut down on reading WFA every day? Because much as I enjoy a lot of the writing there, I'm clearly hyper-sensitive lately. I mean, there is certainly plenty to be angry about (that last link = SPOILERS for "Death of the New Gods"), and that's just in pop culture/comics (and a very small sample at that). Our whole culture is sick. But it's not particularly useful to feel angry all the time, particularly when a lot of it is more of the same every damn week.

This kind of anger and frustration is really always at the edge of my consciousness (what I get for being a fan of comics and genre entertainment, I guess), but I think it's affecting me even more than usual. Certainly it's been impossible to escape or ignore when I'm watching TV, lately.

I think this may turn into a rant . . . it's been coming for awhile. Not to be expecting finesse. ^^; (Cut to protect recent spoilers, more or less, but if you aren't caught up on Heroes, Bionic Woman, and/or Stargate: Atlantis, you might want to skip.)

Heroes has never exactly been a shining example of happy-feminist television. The show's usually relatively multicultural and diverse (for mainstream American TV), at least with its male characters. But, last season, the only two major female heroes were very blonde and generically "attractive" (not that I don't love Claire, and Nikki's okay, but wow); the one really major female character of color was a textbook WiR, and quite a few other women were killed off as well. (Charlie's also a pretty WiRish example, though I did like Eden's heroic death.)

( This season, well. )

Bionic Woman, meanwhile, is a relatively average action show. Jaime's a pretty boring main character, lacking in much personality, but at least she looks great kicking ass (I know, I suck like a big hypocritical sucking thing sometimes). She can be a total idiot sometimes (she discovers that Will has had files on her since two years before they met, but he's still the only man she ever loved? wtf?), and I hated that unborn-baby-death-trauma BS they threw in for no reason, but at least Will died, so we don't have to watch her suck by trying to forgive him or continue to be in a relationship with him, which I'd worried about. Also, in spite of cooperating with them most of the time, Jaime remains healthily furious when the people who changed her try to control her. That's something.

Really, though, I'm watching the show for Sarah Corvis (AKA Katee Sackhoff, siiiigh), and particularly for the scenes with the two Bionic Women together. Their chemistry is incredible, and their relationship would be the most interesting part of the show even if they weren't so very fraught with subtext. (So very. Where are my boatloads of femslash, people?) If Sackhoff leaves the show, I might very well drop it, but . . . I've been starving for female relationships lately, and Jaime has both Sarah and her sister (which could be done better, but it's a start), so there's enough to keep me in there. That, and the fun ass-kicking. I have missed Buffy more, recently.

Lastly, of course, there is Stargate: Atlantis, arguably my biggest fandom show. I've been less in love with it lately, in large part because I am feeling so very female-oriented right now, and SGA has rarely done a good job with its women. Teyla is a really fabulous character, but they rarely seem to know what to do with her, so she usually takes a backseat to plots focusing on her male teammates (though she generally proceeds to be completely awesome in the backseat anyway). Elizabeth was apparently even more difficult for the writers to deal with, stumbling along 'til she was finally dumped. Which made me angrier than I expected, though I at least appreciated that she was allowed to go out more or less in a blaze of glory.

Of course, this new season did add two new female characters to the cast; Sam Carter, imported over from SG-1, and Doctor Keller. I've remained cynical, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by the most recent episode, ( Doppleganger. )

At least there's always Avatar: The Last Airbender. Katara's a bit of the annoying self-righteous "girl is the heart and soul of our group" cliche, but she's often pretty kickass. Toph is amazing. Azula bores me, but her cohorts are fresh and fun. And yeah, those girls do relate to each other! (Katara and Toph could stand to do it more, but still.)

[ETA:] Note to self. Do not forget to do this!