Detention at Hutto: Video, Stories, Action

I had read about this before, but to my shame, I didn't follow links or watch videos. I was distracted by other things. I don't know what they were. But I didn't follow up on this when I first heard, and I should have.

Other feminists weren't as tunnel-visioned. They, and various kinds of civil rights activists, were on it. And they did get linked.

But in case any of you all were satisfied, as I was, to absorb few scraps and statistics as you skimmed through your blog reading, and then gloss past the rest of the story -- here are a few pieces of the story that have moved, and enraged me.

The ACLU describes conditions at Hutto:

While Hutto authorities maintain that "residents" are treated humanely, they are, in many ways, treated like prisoners. At the time of the ACLU's initial court filings, child detainees had to wear prison garb. They received one hour of recreation per day and opportunities to spend this hour outdoors were very rare. Children were detained in small cells for about 11 or 12 hours each day, and were prohibited from keeping food and toys in these cells, which lack any privacy. Although some of these conditions have improved slightly, they are still far from adequate.

In addition, access to adequate medical, dental, and mental health treatment is severely limited and, as a result, many children suffer from chronic ailments that worsen as they are left undiagnosed and untreated. Children are not afforded meaningful educational opportunities. Guards frequently discipline the children by threatening to separate them from their families.

The ACLU has taken action through lawsuits:

The ACLU recently filed lawsuits against federal officials charging that conditions at the Hutto facility violate provisions of the 1997 court settlement Flores v. Meese which mandated that children in federal immigration custody should be:

• released promptly to family members when possible


• kept in the least restrictive setting possible


• guaranteed basic educational, health and social benefits

The ACLU lawsuits seek release of the children together with their families from the Texas facility under appropriate and humane supervision. According to Lisa Graybill, Legal Director of the ACLU of Texas, “The choice is not between enforcement of immigration laws and humane treatment of immigrant families. There are various alternatives under which both can exist.”

*

The children that the ACLU profiles are Lithuanian, Venezualan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Romanian, and Guatamalan. They range in age from 3 to 17.

A child called Fredy has suffered representative problems with food, and health. He "has received inadequate medical care while in detention. On one occasion, he saw the nurse because of a cough and fever. The nurse barely looked at him and gave him cough syrup. Fredy is still suffering from this cough. Orbelina has asked for more syrup, but she was told that there is no more. For the last several weeks, Fredy has been light-headed and always looks like he is about to faint. Fredy has been taken to the nurse and told that nothing is wrong and that there is no medicine for his light-headedness. When Orbelina begged, she was told that they were saving the medicine for other children because it was not Fredy's "turn" for medicine."

He and his mother have even had their religious freedoms restricted. They "may not confess privately with a priest because a guard must always be present. Guards always force attendees to leave immediately after services end."

Three-year-old Marusia has been given inedible, adult food that causes her to throw up and have stomach pains. She "cannot understand her detention and is desperate to leave Hutto. Sometimes, she picks up a bag and says goodbye to her friends as though she were leaving, and cries hysterically when her parents tell her she cannot. At other times, Marusia repetitively sings "Ya me voy!" ("I'm leaving!"), or picks up telephones that she passes and asks, "Lawyer? Lawyer? Are we going?" although there is no one on the line. When taken outside for recreation, Marusia has attempted to climb the fence to escape from Hutto."

The children are afraid, anxious, angry, and depressed. Eleven-year-old Fredy has "has literally begun to bang his head and hands against the wall in frustration." Eight-year-old Yarely's "trauma has caused her to regress psychologically; she now communicates frequently in baby talk, talks about her fear of ghosts, and constantly wants to hold on to her mother for protection."

Two of the plaintiffs' personal statements are available online, in PDF form. At the bottom of this page, you can see drawings made by the children. You can listen to a podcast about what has happened, and is happening.

"I am scared of the guards," says Egle Baubonyte (in the plaintiff's statements). "I also remembered that the guard can have any criminal record as long as there are no deaths." She adds, "I am terrified of being separated from my mother... we need each other to stay sane," and, "They treat us like we are nothing."

"Sunny has only been outside a handful of times since we arrived at Hutto," says Saule Bunikyte, speaking of her nine-year-old daughter. Saule speaks of threats that guards have made to mothers, saying they will take away their children. She speaks of unreasonable restrictions placed on the children -- such as the children only being given one minute in the shower. "Sunny freaked out, she was crying," says Saule, "she felt bad because no kid can take a shower in 1 minute. She hates this place and she does not understand."

*

Some of the links I mention at the beginning of this post are months old. Some progress has been made in that time. At ACLU.tv, the ACLU reports that it ten of the children it originally represented have been released. Seven more children are detained. And while the ACLU's acheivements are laudable, let's not overlook the pivotal sentence in their description of Hutto: "Although some of these conditions have improved slightly, they are still far from adequate."

In many ways, America's racist policies seem to be escalating. Bush is lobbying to increase troop numbers in Iraq to more than 200,000*, while congress has caved into continuing to fund the war, and Bush has grabbed for even more executive power in the case of national emergency. As America scrambles to kill brown people abroad, it -- or at least its racists and conservatives -- has also been galvanized around the terror of brown people out-breeding the population from within.

America is hysterically xenophobic. Brown people are other. Hunt them down in Iraq; purge them from the states. Define immigrant as meaning "brown" and "other," and white immigrants from Eastern Europe are included as a bonus. The terrorists are blowing us up, so lock them in inescapable cells. The immigrants are outbreeding us, so lock up their families and their children. Imprison the threat of fertility.

*

From the Unapologetic Mexican, contact information:

T. Don Hutto Residential Center
1001 Welch St.
P.O. Box 1063
Taylor, Texas
76574

Phone: 512-218-2400
FAX: 512-218-2450

--

Straightforward links to blogs linked into the post:

Woman of Color Blog
The Unapologetic Mexican
Vortex(t)
Texas Civil Rights Review
Glenda in the Land of Oz
Truly Outrageous (hosting the 31st carnival of feminists)

This is an incomplete list of blogs that have spoken on the subject. If anyone has any other links they'd like to add, I would be happy to add them to this list as soon as I have an opportunity (my internet access will be spotty this weekend).

I'm also happy to update the possibilities for action if people have recommendations for concrete steps, other than contacting Hutto, the ACLU, or one's representatives.

*merci, Ginmar

Practical Steps for Helping Malalai Joya

Heart at Woman's Space: The Margins reports a great list of ways for people to take concrete steps to help Malalai Joya, who has been suspended from the Afghan parliament for insulting warlords.

Here are some of her suggestions, but make sure to check out her post!

YOU CAN do so in the following ways:

- Write to Afghan officials and file your protest for expelling and prosecuting Joya, while the terrorists and human rights violators in the parliament were provided immunity before any court for their past crimes last month.

- Express your concern for Joya’s security during the court sessions as the fundamentalists currently hold key positions in Afghanistan’s judiciary.

- Circulate this letter and ask lawyers and defenders of human rights in your area and country to come forward and help Joya during her court proceedings and defend her.

- Donate to Joya’s security fund online at https://www.malalaijoya.com/donor/donor_info.php to help improve her security with necessary equipment and facilities, while she is now deprived of all official facilities.

Letters of protest can be sent to the following sources:

President Hamid Karzai
khaleeq.ahmad@gmail.com
president@afghanistangov.org

Supreme Court of Afghanistan
aquddus@supremecourt.gov.af

Afghanistan’s Parliament
hasib_n786@yahoo.com

Interior Ministry
moinews@gmail.com
wahed.moi@gmail.com

Justice Ministry of Afghanistan
info@moj.gov.af
hidayatr@moj.gov.af

We thank you for your prompt action and support and hope you will forward a copy of your letters to mj@malalaijoya.com.

Unfair to Middle Class White Guys?

By Nancy Jane Moore

Since Timmi brought up WisCon, I thought this blog would be a good place to explain a little about the panel called "Unfair to Middle Class White Guys."

We on the panel think the title was meant to be ironic. Or even sarcastic. We didn't chose it and frankly we find it a little obnoxious. But we've heard that a few people fear it was intended as a backlash panel for those who don't think the issue of gender balance in publishing is worth talking about.

Rest assured, it's not: We plan to have a serious -- though hopefully not humorless -- discussion of why the magazines end up with more stories by men than women.

And, since they put that word "white" in the title, and since we've heard about some backlash at the awards given by the Carl Brandon Society along the lines of "why isn't there an award for white men" -- see the WisCon Chronicles for details -- we're going to talk about race and science fiction as well.

We don't plan to go in for bashing. Or making stupid jokes. We'd really like to have as honest a conversation as possible about the diversity issues in SF/F publishing.

This panel is at 10:30 on Saturday night (in Senate B) and we'd really like to have a good turnout. I know the panel is opposite some very good parties, but you can party before and after. Come spend a little of your Saturday night talking about important issues!

Q: When Is Being Criticized Like Having Your Limbs Blown Off by a Landmine? A: When The Criticism Comes from Someone with Less Privilege Than You

Awhile back, I read an excellent post by the women's studies professor, and feminist blogeger, Hugo Schwyzer, called Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger.

In this post, he writes about how the men speak in his women's studies class:

...two of the guys did something that I see over and over again from men in women's studies classes. They prefaced their remarks by joking "I know I'm going to get killed for saying this, but..." One of them, even pretended to rise from his desk to position himself by the door, saying that "Once I say this, I know I'm going to have to make a run for it." Most of the women laughed indulgently, and I even found myself grinning along.

...one thing I remember from my own college days that I see played out over and over again is this male habit of making nervous jokes about being attacked by feminists. In my undergrad days, I often prefaced a comment by saying "I know I'll catch hell for this". I've seen male students do as they did today and pretend to run; I've seen them deliberately sit near the door, and I once had one young man make an elaborate show (I kid you not) of putting on a football helmet before speaking up!

All of this behavior reflects two things: men's genuine fear of being challenged and confronted, and the persistence of the stereotype of feminists as being aggressive "man-bashers." The painful thing about all this, of course, is that no man is in any real physical danger in the classroom -- or even outside of it -- from feminists. Name one incident where an irate women's studies major physically assaulted a male classmate for something he said? Women are regularly beaten and raped -- even on college campuses -- but I know of no instance where a man found himself a victim of violence for making a sexist remark in a college feminist setting! "Male-bashing" doesn't literally happen, in other words, at least not on campus. But that doesn't stop men from using (usually half in jest) their own exaggerated fear of physical violence to make a subtle point about feminists.

There's a conscious purpose to this sort of behavior. Joking about getting beaten up (or putting on the football helmet) sends a message to young women in the classroom: "Tone it down. Take care of the men and their feelings. Don't scare them off, because too much impassioned feminism is scary for guys." And you know, as silly as it is, the joking about man-bashing almost always works! Time and again, I've seen it work to silence women in the classroom, or at least cause them to worry about how to phrase things "just right" so as to protect the guys and their feelings. It's a key anti-feminist strategy, even if that isn't the actual intent of the young man doing it -- it forces women students to become conscious caretakers of their male peers by subduing their own frustration and anger. It reminds young women that they should strive to avoid being one of those "angry feminists" who (literally) scares men off and drives them away.

Criticism is not fists! This is a brilliant observation.

Of course, it's obvious. If I say "Your idea is sexist," then I'm not literally slugging you in the face. But at the same time, the joking frame allows the analogy to pass unnoticed. And when it passes unnoticed, its effect can be insidious. The women act to protect the man's feelings. They soften their criticism so they won't fulfill the violent imagery of the man's preemptive metaphor.
But I want to take it farther than Hugo does. People don't just say "don't attack me" as a way of getting feminists to back down. They also say it because they have a sense of being attacked. Criticism is not fists, but people really seem to perceive it that way.

And the less privilege the person who's making the criticism has, the more it feels like an attack. In this post, Ginmar (feminist veteran and SF writer) quotes Amanda Marcotte (ex-campaign blogger for John Edwards, who writes for the feminist blog Pandagon) : "“The less right you have to talk in the eyes of the hierarchy, the louder you seem. Which is probably why black women are seen as the loudest people ever.”

We see this in a lot of places, right? The common sense conviction that women talk more than men cannot be supported, and in fact, people find data that suggests that -- in ordinary conversation -- men talk more than women. If researchers externally impose a requirement that both men and women speak the same amount, then they both report that it feels like the men hardly got a chance to talk at all.

Women aren't supposed to talk, so when they talk, they're seen as talking A LOT. Black women really aren't supposed to talk, so when they talk, they're seen as talking REALLY LOUDLY.

Women aren't supposed to criticize, so when they criticize, it's not just words -- the surprise of their criticism feels like fists. And when women of color criticize? Well, then it's World War III.

WIMN's Voices Reports: Afghani Woman Suspended from Parliament for Insulting Warlords

From WIMN's Voices: Malalai Joya is Suspended from Parliament.

A few excerpts:

Twenty eight year old intrepid Afghan MP, Malalai Joya, has just been suspended from Parliament for comparing warlords in power to donkeys. Joya is the youngest and most outspoken member of Parliament and has survived 4 assassination attempts for denouncing warlords, many of whom were funded at various times by the US government in the fight against the Soviets (1980s) and the Taliban (post-9-11).

...It is clear that the US’s post-Taliban experiment in Afghanistan intended to fool Americans into believing that Afghan women were being liberated. We were convinced by the Bush administration and the mainstream media that “democracy” and “women’s rights” were the new buzzword in Afghanistan. But the US government did several things that ensured women’s political, economic and social rights would never be realized: they empowered the misogynist pre-Taliban warlords who now sit in government, they installed a pro-warlord puppet President into office (Hamid Karzai), and they have fought a futile war in the countryside against “Taliban remnants” that has achieved nothing but a legitimizing and strengthening of the Taliban. How could women possibly have any rights in such a situation?

...Today women in the Afghan Parliament have two options: they can remain silent and betray the people they are supposed to represent, thereby ensuring their personal safety. Or they can speak out in defiance of the blanket of silence surrounding the war criminals, and risk their lives like Malalai Joya. In such a context do words like “democracy” and “women’s rights” have any meaning?

Read the rest.

A Frequently Asked Question

Last weekend at a dinner party attended by several sf writers (including me), the question arose, “Why aren’t people out in the streets?” This question is so frequently asked that no one even bothers anymore to finish stating the question with the objective being “out in the streets” would presumably serve. And in fact it’s so familiar a question that I’ve never really taken a good look at it. No doubt it will be raised at WisCon this year, just as it was last year.

Everyone sitting at that table was smart. (In some cases, very, very smart.) And yet it apparently did not occur to any of us to propose a rephrasing of the question that would allow us to do more than play with the occasional data point and many amorphous generalizations about “them.” There was a comparison made, of course, to the Sixties. Someone did mention that the Military Draft had been a powerful motivator, but there was still dissatisfaction that things had gotten this bad and “people” weren’t out in the streets making life difficult for the Evil Overlords. And then someone did mention Cindy Sheehan: she was out in the streets. But not one of us thought to ask, “Why aren’t we out in the streets?” Now, having realized that not one of us asked that rather obvious question, on rephrasing the question “Why aren’t people out in the streets” to “Why aren’t we out in the streets,” I find myself faced with a new, related question: Who do we think “people” are, if not ourselves?

In fact, of course, there have been “people” out in the streets since Inauguration Day 2001. (That was one of the last occasions I myself was “out in the streets.”) Code Pink shows up everywhere. And the Raging Grannies. And parents of soldiers. And veterans. They’re constantly out in the streets. And some of those people who’ve been out in the streets have been serving unprecedentedly harsh jail sentences—many of them nuns and priests and other deeply religiously motivated people.

So tell me: why do you think all we aren’t out in the streets? If the only answer you can think of is necessarily framed in terms of “they,” then you’d also better answer the question of why you are not a part of the “them” you want to see save us all.

Aqueduct Goes to WisCon: a preview

Aqueduct is going to WisCon! (Big surprise, huh?) We’ll have a table in the dealer’s room, of course. And we'll be throwing a party with Payseur and Schmidt on Friday night in Room 623, at which we’ll be launching Kelley Eskridge’s new collection, Dangerous Space, and Nicola Griffith’s new memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party. We'll have food and drink and conversation and two door prizes involving chocolate; Nicola and Kelley and I will be there all evening, and all of our other attending authors will be there at least some of the time. Everyone is welcome, and we hope to see a lot of you there.

Two sessions will be featuring Aqueduct's authors reading from their work:

Andrea Hairston, Wendy Walker, Nancy Jane Moore, and L. Timmel Duchamp will be reading from 10-11:15 a.m. Saturday morning

Eleanor Arnason, Kelley Eskridge, Nicola Griffith, and Nisi Shawl will be reading from 2:30-3:45 p.m. Saturday afternoon

Other programming our authors will be participating in include (in chronological order):

Friday

Opening Ceremonies—Sue Lange will be participating as Broad Universe’s representative

Lifestyles of the Rich and Supernatural Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m. M: L. Timmel Duchamp,Holly Black, Carla M Lee, Catherine Lundoff

Saturday

Women Authors You Probably Never Heard Of (But Should Read!): The Karen Axness Memorial Panel, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: David Lenander, Lesley Hall, David Peterson, Laura M. Quilter

Genre Tokenism Today: The New Octavia, Saturday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nora Jemison, K Tempest Bradford, Candra K. Gill, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbahu, Nisi Shawl

Liking Your Life in an Unlikeable World: Personal Energy for Political Work, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Hanne I Blank, Eleanor Arnason, Debbie L. Smith, James A Trimarco, Élisabeth Vonarburg

Foremothers of Today's Feminist SF, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: L. Timmel Duchamp, Jeanne Gomoll, Lesley Hall, Lynn Kendall

Making Good Books, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Liz L. Gorinsky, John D. Berry, John Klima, Heidi Lampietti, Wendy Alison Walker

The Ten-Foot Shelf Of Perdition: Books to Avoid, Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Lesley Hall, Chris Hill, Betsy Urbik

Feminism and the Problem of Gender for the Source, Voice, and Identity of the Woman Who Writes/Feminist and Science Fictional Resources for the Cultural Critic of Technoscience (Academic Papers) Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. L. Timmel Duchamp and Joan Haran

Can Technology Be The Answer? Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Graham Sleight, Eleanor Arnason, Richard J. Chwedyk, Gregory Frost, Will Ludwigsen

SF&F — Revolutionary or Conservative? Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. M: Andrea D. Hairston, Eleanor Arnason, Paul Kincaid

Outreach to Non-Readers Feminism, Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. M: Joan Haran, Alicia Ellen Goranson, Graham Sleight, lucy ann synk

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading, Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. Leah Rose Cutter, Jennifer Dunne, Rina Elson, Anne Harris, Sue Lange, Katherine Mankiller, Lyda Morehouse, Jennifer Pelland, Kristine Smith

Making War on "War" Saturday, 9:00-10:15 p.m. M: Jean Mornard, Paul Kincaid, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Wendy Alison Walker, Laurel Winter

Criticism: Beyond Slamming And Mythologizing, Saturday, 10:30-11:45 p.m. M: Paul Kincaid, Andrea D. Hairston, Michael Marc Levy, Natasha Minnerly, Maureen Kincaid Speller

Unfair to Middle-Class White Guys! Saturday,10:30-11:45 p.m. M: Nancy Jane Moore, Eileen Gunn, John Klima, Deb Taber

Sunday

Carl Brandon Society Update, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nisi Shawl, Candra K. Gill, M. J. Hardman, Victor Jason Raymond

Let's You And Her Fight, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Alan Bostick, Lee Abuabara, Joan Haran, Liz Henry, Steven E. Schwartz

The Object In the Story, the Story In the Object, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Kat A. Beyer, Catherine Anne Crowe, Wendy Alison Walker, Terri Windling, Erzebet YellowBoy

Adventures in Peacemaking, Sunday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Jeanne Gomoll, Lesley Hall, Rosemary Kirstein, Naomi Kritzer, Jean Mornard

Romance of the Revolution, Sunday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Paul Kincaid, L. Timmel Duchamp, Laurie J. Marks, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Lyn Paleo

Little Girls on the Hero's Journey, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Nisi Shawl, Kate Elliott, David L. Emerson, Rebecca Marjesdatter, Kerrigan Valentine

Speculative Fiction Theatre, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. Liz L. Gorinsky, Andrea D. Hairston, Reina Hardy, Wendy Alison Walker

The Human Genome, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Sue Lange, Vylar Kaftan, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Allan Moore, Rebecca K. Rowe

Writing About War, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Naomi Kritzer, Eleanor Arnason, Yoon Ha Lee, Kelly McCullough

Writing as Spiritual Practice, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 p.m. M: Susan Palwick, Lori Buschbaum, Patrick James Rothfuss, Nisi Shawl

Words Like Icebergs, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 p.m. M: Nicolle Minnerly, Nicola Griffith, Natasha Minnerly, Lawrence Schimel, Catherynne M. Valente

Glorifying Terrorism, 11:30pm -12:45 a.m. Readings by Vylar Kaftan, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Rachel Virginia Swirsky, James A Trimarco

Monday

How Dense Can We Get? Options for Making a Better Future, Monday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nancy Jane Moore, Paula L. Fleming, Philip Edward Kaveny

And of course, most of us will be available at the Sign-out on Monday morning.

That’s lot of programming, much of it conflicting (meaning that, as usual, we’ll have be missing a lot of one another’s panels and facing some hard choices).

I’d be very open to posting notes or comments about WisCon on this blog. If you’re interested in contributing, please contact me at conversation@aqueductpress.com.

Sci Fi Reading List, Recommended to Feminists

I wrote this recommended reading list of science fiction work for the folk at Alas, a Blog, who aren't deep into the science fiction culture. I doubt anything on it will surprise anyone in this audience -- since, you know, some of it was *written* by y'all -- but just in case there's anything here that intrigues anyone, I thought I'd toss it up for your perusal.

*

Awhile back there was a thread at I Blame the Patriarchy about feminist science fiction. Here's an incredibly incomplete list of some feminist-minded science fiction that I love. The stories and novels won't be shockingly new to most people who are well-versed in fantasy & science fiction, but I think they're newish to people who don't really watch the genre. I'm also going to skip some of the more obvious feminist canon, such as Tiptree, Butler, Delany, Russ, LeGuin, Atwood, and Piercy. If you haven't read them, go out and read them!

With those provisos in mind, I'm confining myself to three short story recommendations, and three novel recommendations, so please don't take this list as representative of anything except the first few wonderful things that occurred to me. I'll probably revisit the topic later. :)

SHORT STORIES:

• Knapsack Poems by Eleanor Arnason
  
  "Knapsack Poems" by Eleanor Arnason is what I've been calling my favorite short story since I ran across it in an anthology last year. It's about some convincingly alien aliens whose physical presence involves a radical reinterpretation of gender and body. Since it's online, I'm not going to say more. Go read. :)
  
  
• Love's Body, Dancing in Time by L. Timmel Duchamp
  
  Love's Body, Dancing in Time is a short story collection by L. Timmel Duchamp, the editor of the feminist publisher Aqueduct Press. In this collection, she explores gender, sexuality, and self-definition, through interesting characters, worlds, and extraordinarily beautiful imagery. All of the stories reflect a deep engagement with feminist ideas, rendered striking and moving through Timmi's unique interpretations.
  
  Timmi's work has an academic cast which the pedant in me really enjoys; one of the stories in this collection is an alternate history examination of Abelard and Heloise, written as an academic paper. My favorite story in the collection is "The Gift," the story of a woman from a world with a binary gender system who travels to another world and falls in love with a man who is a member of a third gender.
  


• With Her Body by Nicola Griffith
  
  The stories in this collection are striking and dark, with strange, beautiful imagery. My favorite story in the collection is "Yaguara," the last story, which carried me away -- past writer brain, past self reading the book.
  
  In the afterword, L. Timmel Duchamp writes a fascinating analysis of Griffith's stories; she discusses Griffith's exclusive use of women as sexual creatures which creates a world where women are not othered in response to men's sexuality. She also talks about the constructs our culture has built around feminine versus masculine fiction -- for instance, how universality is constructed as masculine, so that feminine characters are seen as 'limited' and 'embodied.' While Nicola's stories were so beautiful as to carry me past the intellectual interpretation of the work while I was reading, I was pleased to have the concepts brought to my attention by Timmi's afterword when I was done.

NOVELS:

• Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
  
  This book weaves through the consciousnesses of three black women in different places and historical periods: a slave in the Carribean; a dance hall girl who was the lover of Charles Baudelaire; and an Egyptian slave girl who worked in a brothel, and later became a saint.
  
  I found this book utterly seductive. Reading it was a profoundly moving experience, for me. The prose is gorgoeus, and there's a kind of fiery, driving strength that propels the tension through disparate places and events. The reader gets to know each character intimately, and Nalo's deft, insightful, poetic prose allows each storyline to carry the weight of untold and unwritten histories. Unsurprisingly, it's really smart about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, spirtuality, history, and the tension between colonized and pre-contact reality. For more good reading, check out Nalo Hopkinson's blog.
  


• The Slave and the Free by Susie McKee Charnas
  
  The Slave and the Free seems to be a rerelease, compiling the books Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines which were originally released separately. I wasn’t sure whether or not to include these books, because they seem to me to be just as much feminist classics as Tiptree or Delany, but I don’t think I’ve met many non-science-fiction-oriented people who’ve read them. And that’s sad.
  
  These books postulate a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which women's oppression has become literal slavery, homosexuality has been naturalized, and the men interact according to the hierarchical guidelines of age cohorts. A female slave escapes the dystopian society at the same time as it begins to collapse. Leaving the boundaries of the country where she was born, she joins the Freewomen who live outside. Among them, she finds not utopia, but an ambiguous society. The novels raise sophisticated questions about what utopia and dystopia are or should be, always choosing the complicated answer over the simplistic one.
  
  
• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
  
  I wasn't sure whether or not it was fair to call this book explicitly feminist -- not that it doesn't reflect feminist ideas, but feminism doesn't seem to me to be one of its projects. And then, as I was poking around on the internet, I saw that it's a recipient of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award -- which is given to science fiction work that plays with gender. The characters in this novel are indeed portrayed with deep characterization that doesn't abide by gender roles, but I imagine that the Tiptree committee may have been drawn by this book's portrayal of a world in which homosexuality has been heavily stigmatized (in America) and made illegal (in China). In this novel, China is the major power, and America is a colonial backwater, which has significantly altered the political and cultural landscape of the world.
  
  The novel is told in episodic bursts. The main character has three or four chapters, but the people who wind through his life get to tell their own stories, often in ways that don't relate directly to the main character's plot. I was drawn in by the book's simple imagery and prose, and by the effortless way in which it drew deep characters and a startling world. The prose is both deceptively light and emotionally evocative. Each turn on world politics, race relations, and gender, feels effortlessly smooth and accurately drawn.

A Brief Conversation with Nancy Jane Moore

Timmi: Nancy, you’ve been a lawyer for a long time, even if you haven’t practiced law for all of that time; and you are also trained in the martial arts, which you do continue to practice as a part of your daily life. Training in the law imposes as much of a distinctively structured mental discipline as training in the martial arts does. In fact, thinking about this, I imagine that these two disciplines have taught you very different (though not necessarily mutually exclusive) ways of perceiving, evaluating, and acting in the world. Often the disciplines that have shaped a writer’s mental and perceptual processes exercise a significant influence on what and how they write. Would you say this has been true for you? And if so, you could you offer us some concrete details of that?


Nancy: I began my study in Shorin Ryu Karate—a hard-style Okinawan form—but most of my training has been in Aikido. These days I'm also learning some T'ai Chi. Why I started is an interesting question. I usually tell people that I got the idea from watching Diana Rigg play Emma Peel in The Avengers, and that has an element of feminist truth: That show did leave me with the idea that a woman who trained in martial arts could handle herself against men.

But the deeper truth is that I always felt a call to the path of warriorship. The Japanese term for the way of the warrior is budo, which also means to turn the spear, and that is my concept of warriorship: to be the protector, not the rampager. I use the word "call" deliberately, because I suspect this is not unlike the "vocation" of the person who becomes a monk or nun.

I feel a similar call to writing—and especially to writing fiction. Thinking back to childhood, I remember a core desire—as basic as the call to warriorship—to spend my life creating art. Writing became my art form because I had some innate talent for the manipulation of words and ideas. But all writing is important to me—not just creative writing—because I have learned over the years that I don't understand an idea until I have written about it.

And—likewise—I don't understand the principles of Aikido until I try to move with them. So both writing and martial arts are rooted in a sense of vocation, and are also key to how I understand the world.

They have one more important thing in common—depth. As I continue to train in Aikido (and bring T'ai Chi into the mix), I learn new things, some of them things I never even thought about before or realized I wanted to know. The same thing happens to me in writing. Both arts give me the sense of peeling off layers without a preset idea of what I might find.

Both writing and Aikido are tied to communication. Aikido training requires a partner, and you learn from how you train with that partner—essentially working on yourself while working with others (a daunting task at times). Writing needs a reader—though because you do the work in advance, you don't have the immediate give and take of Aikido. Still, the intent to communicate is there.

In martial arts. I started out with a desire to be tough—I recall with both pleasure and amusement the bruises I brought home from karate class, bruises that often freaked out my male friends. Somewhere over the years I have lost most of that desire—though tough still shows up if you make me angry. Now I am most interested in changing things by blending (as we might say in Aikido). That change came from a combination of greater skill and openness to new ideas.

I see a similar progression in writing. I know I started with a simple desire to write adventure stories in which women had the adventures. Now, though, what I want to write is so much more complicated, so much more nuanced. I still want to tell stories about women warriors, but my concept of warriorship is much broader than it used to be. My women characters don't look as much like warriors as they did in my first published story, which was about a woman soldier who ended up in command of a small troop in a losing war. ("Change of Command," published in Sword and Sorceress 6, bless Marion Zimmer Bradley.)

One other thing about martial arts: I have reached a point where I have almost no ambition connected with my study. I just want to learn. I teach some Aikido these days—I find I learn a lot by teaching at this point—and I'd like to get good enough at T'ai Chi to teach that, too, but I'm not striving to be a master instructor.

As a writer, though, I have ambition. I am actively interested in selling my work, in getting published and noticed. And money would certainly be nice. Mostly, though, my ambition is to write something great—and that involves continuing to learn.


Timmi: I think many people (specifically, those who are unfamiliar with the concept of "budo") would be surprised to hear that the call to warriorship is a call to be a protector rather than a rampager. Add to that, there's a popular perception that martial arts, for women, is "self-defense," which is a very different goal from the goal of being a protector.

I'm currently reading a book by Kim Chernin called My Life As A Boy. The premise of the book is that in her late thirties, after her daughter went off to college, the narrator (the book is classified as nonfiction, so I think we're supposed to take the narrator as the author herself) “became a boy” in the following sense:

If a woman in her thirties turns into a boy, that may mean she's having trouble getting out of the place she's in. She requires the instinctive, wholly natural ruthlessness of a boy. He will leave home; everyone expects it of him...he's off into the world, he's a boy, he's going... Women, especially mothers, know in every moment who is waiting for them to get back home, to call in, to fetch them; this knowledge is what it means to be a woman. Therefore the fate of a girl, the future she's definitely growing into, holds the certainty of restriction.

What makes me think of this book now is that the narrator says that the moment of transformation, when she "turned into a boy," came when she felt a desire to protect the woman standing beside her at a demonstration: "I was taller than she was, the sort of person someone would lean up against, the strong one, the one who can support the other." Elsewhere, the narrator notes that her husband, Max (whom she leaves when she "turns into a boy"), had always taken care of her. I find this way of thinking quite problematic, myself. Surely many women have experienced a powerful desire to take care of others (especially if they are younger, less experienced, or older and physically frail, and of course if she's a mother and they're her children). I know I have (and I am childless). Since this is a very interesting and underexplored subject for women, could you elaborate a bit more on what it means to feel called to be a protector (not so much in an ethical as a psychological sense)?

Nancy: My experience is quite different from Chernin's, as you describe it. Put in those terms, perhaps in some ways I was always a “boy:” I am larger than the average woman, I'm an older sister, and I have no brothers. I took on the role as my “baby” sister's protector when I was about five, and in many ways my father treated me more as a son than a daughter. That is, he wanted me to pursue the career he didn't have and he challenged me intellectually from an early age. So perhaps some of my calling toward the protector role comes from that upbringing—even though I didn't take up martial arts until I was 30.

But, like you, I don't think the protector urge is foreign to most women. Traditionally, it is confined to certain situations—the classic example of the mother protecting her child from a wild animal, for example—but I suspect most women have found themselves in situations where they felt the duty to protect someone else.

However, I also think the idea of being a protector—and particularly a protector of women—is hammered into men so thoroughly that both men and women tend to assume that the role is a male one. So women tend to downplay their experiences of being protectors, while men feel obligated to protect others, even when they aren't really capable of doing it.

The concept of protection is a large one, but of course the immediate image—especially in a discussion that includes martial arts—is protection from physical violence. And I fear that most women do not feel capable of protecting either themselves or others from physical attack. But I don't think this means they don't have the desire to protect others, or won't jump in to do so in dire situations. In fact, I suspect—though I have no data on this—that unskilled women are more likely to fight to protect someone else than they are to fight to protect themselves.


However, if a man is present, I suspect (and again, I'm talking about impressions—I've never seen any research on this subject, though it would be fascinating to read) that most women will defer to him to handle the attack. And most men will probably assume it's their job.

Like the issue of women in combat, this is a minefield in gender relations. I recall a discussion I had with a friend of mine who was a Vietnam veteran. The first time we discussed the idea of women in combat, he absolutely rejected the idea—and he at that time was trying hard to be a good hippie and was not generally anti-feminist. When we discussed it again some 15 years later, he told me how difficult the issue was for him on emotional grounds. “If I wasn't protecting others by going to war, then why was I doing it?” By that point, though, he was willing to acknowledge that some women might also want to protect others.

Protecting someone else on that most basic physical level—the life or death level—is a big responsibility. It's frightening. And as a society, we have not finished working through how we feel about this for both men and women. Our movies—and even our fiction—are more likely to show us women who can't take care of themselves or others, except for a few very exceptional cases, generally superheroes of some kind. I suspect this reflects the fear of most women that they can't fight effectively and the need most men have to see women as someone they must protect.

So women deal with a lot of mixed signals. They want to protect others, but they don't think they can. I'm working on a book about self defense that is intended to convince women—and men as well—that they can learn how to defend themselves. It's not a book on how to fight—fighting is a very small part of the whole process—but it is intended to convince people that protecting yourself and others is a skill that can be learned by almost everyone.

Perhaps that is why it's such a minefield—there's such a large mythology around fighters. Teaching people that the anyone can learn the skills of self defense, that it isn't just for the exceptional, is a challenge to a very established image of warriors as separate from everyone else. (Of course, some people will always be better at it than others, just as some people are world-class athletes while most of us just go out for a swim or a jog. But the extreme level of skill isn't required very often.)

As for the relationship between self defense and protecting others: I think they are two sides of the same coin. You can't protect anyone else if you can't defend yourself. I certainly took up the martial arts to learn to defend myself—I wanted to be able to walk down the street unafraid—but I wasn't motivated by any particular fear at the time. (It occurs to me that I assume that anyone who says they took up martial arts for self defense reason acted in response to an actual assault or a specific fear of attack, which may not be accurate.) In my case, I began my study out of a more general desire to be a warrior—a role I always saw as that of a protector, for some reason. Perhaps it was more of a philosophical motivation than a practical one.

Whatever the initial motivation, though, I should probably point out that nobody keeps training in the martial arts out of the simple desire to be able to defend themselves or others. After a few years, training is much more about the search for truth (or enlightenment or whatever name you want to put on it) than it is about how to fight.

And perhaps just a little bit about the fact that every time you learn some new move, it's just so damn cool. (Which brings us back to how martial arts study is like writing.)

Timmi: And your training in the Law?

Nancy: Law, for me, has always been a compromise profession and I have never made my peace with it. I turned to it in part as a substitute for warriorship—a way to take care of people—but I discovered early on that trial work (the most obvious version of lawyer as warrior) was an all-consuming job and the rest of the practice of law was, for the most part, tedious and limiting. I suspect that the only way I could have become fulfilled as a lawyer would have been to become a good trial lawyer, and that would have required me to lop off the rest of the things that mattered to me in life, including particularly the opportunity to grow and learn on the philosophical level.

I also went to law school because I was good at the basic skills of reading, writing, and speaking, because my parents wanted me to, because much of my early fiction writing wasn't particularly good, and because too many men said I couldn't do it because I was female. (I particularly recall a high school history teacher telling me that I'd be “just a housewife”—I've probably spent my whole life determined to avoid that fate.)

So unlike martial arts or writing, law has never been my vocation and I have had trouble respecting what I learned from it. I did learn a lot in law school—though I hated it, which should have given me a clue (undergraduate school drove me nuts at various times, but mostly I loved it). But it is valuable to understand how our legal system works and I do know how to think like a lawyer. In fact, essentially what legal training does is teach you how lawyers think and give you the analytical tools to solve problems. It’s very valuable—if the problem you’re trying to solve is legal—and it has made me aware of sloppy thinking (both my own and that of others).

But I wouldn't go to law school if I had it to do over.

Timmi: You went to law school in the early-to-mid 1970s, right? If my memory serves me, merely entering the legal and medical professions in those years was tantamount to storming the barricades. So in that sense your choice of a career in law must have been a bold move, yes? Many people assumed that women wouldn't have either the stamina or the smarts to make it in the professions. Were you surprised to find that the work itself wasn't very satisfying? And what career, if you had it to do all over again, would you have chosen to pursue instead?

Nancy: Yes, I went to law school in the first half of the 1970s and you're right—in many ways it was a form of storming the barricades. My law school class was 10 percent women, and that was an increase over the previous years. (Today, law school classes tend to be pretty evenly split between men and women.) And when I practiced law in Wichita Falls, Texas, in the late 70s, there were 8 women lawyers in town, out of a total bar of better than 100 lawyers. (I think I can still remember who all the women were and what kind of work they did.) At the time, people were debating whether women could really make it as trial lawyers—something that to me presages the current debate over whether women can handle combat.

For me, law school wasn't as bold a move as it might have been for other women. For one thing, my parents very much wanted me to go to law school. And I saw myself as different from the general run of women—an issue that I have since grappled with in feminist terms. I wasn't particularly good at “girlie” things, but I was tough enough for verbal sparring.

Given that I really didn't like law school, I don't think it shocked me much that I didn't like practicing law. And—in truth—I didn't do a very good job of building a career. I'm sure some of the barriers I ran into were caused by sexism; others I created for myself out of my hippie idealism.

I don't think I ever truly believed in the law. Law—like every other profession—has its core principles, and I've found—contrary to the popular impression—that most lawyers actually subscribe to them. One of those principles is that the law, while not perfect, is sacrosanct. Once we decide what it is, we must all follow it. So you get odd examples, such as John Ashcroft refusing to sign off on Bush's domestic surveillance program because he thought it went beyond the law, or judges lecturing attorneys about failing their responsibilities to their clients. I think these people are true believers in the principles of the law as profession.

As a child of the Sixties, I had trouble with truly believing in law in part because I was keenly aware that something could be legal and unfair at the same time. (I'm old enough to have gone to segregated schools and worked when the minimum wage for women was lower than the minimum wage for men.) My principles limited the jobs I sought. And while I don't regret the principles, they did limit my ability to spread my wings as a lawyer.

While I don't think I'd go to law school now, if I had it to do again, I must confess being a lawyer was a very useful role for me as a woman in a society struggling with gender issues. Lawyers, by definition, get taken seriously. Perhaps the most practical approach would have been to move to working as a legal editor much earlier—I find legal journalism much more satisfying that practicing law.

But if I had it to over—and if I had understood myself as well in my early 20s as I do now—I think I would pursue a journalism career. I wanted to write, and the way you become a writer is to write. Journalism makes you write quickly and figure things out.

I might have devoted some time to studying other areas, with an eye to writing about them. The great science writer Natalie Angier, in her new book, Canon, talks about studying science so that she could write about it. I think it would have been valuable to me as a writer to study various subjects and then write about them as a way to cement my knowledge as well as to educate others. And such a path might have also suited my far-from-one-track mind, which always wants to learn something new.

I might also have explored radio news in addition to print journalism. I have developed a great fondness for radio in recent years and particularly admire those who can do great live interviews with people.

But, essentially, I would have built my career around writing, rather than telling myself that I could always write on the side. That's not a political decision—going to law school was in many ways a political decision—but a deeply personal one. I wanted to write. The best career for me would have been one built around writing.

Timmi: Thanks very much, Nancy. Some of this relates to your essay in The WisCon Chronicles, of course, but some of it is new to me. I'm really looking forward to reading your book now in progress.

XKCD character: "Political debates... show how good smart people are at rationalizing."

I'd like to comment on this recent cartoon from the webcomic xkcd.



This cartoon was brought up on a science fiction message board that I read and participate in, at the end of a long conversation about politics. The conversation was about "tolerance," and I voiced my opinion that I'm very suspicious when people bring up the topic of "tolerance" as an abstract, because in my experience, people who are talking about tolerance in that context often want to coopt the language of civil rights in order to draw false equivalence between non-equivalent statements. "I support rights for gay people" and "gay people are immoral" are not equivalent statements.

While I like and respect the two people who posted this cartoon, the effect* of introducing the cartoon into the conversation is to minimize anyone who is passionate about politics by saying that their opinions are based not on clear thinking, or passion, or reaction to oppression, but on "rationalization."

There is a legitimate point being made in this cartoon, as any teacher well knows. Teaching in front of a classroom is a tricky business. It's difficult to be endowed with so much trust, and I appreciate that people struggle with that.

Outside of math, there are rarely objective and concrete facts that can be pointed to with absolute certainty, by anyone, from any place. 2 + 2 = 4 is not, or at least should not be, a controversial statement.

But the simple fact that someone can argue with me when I say "I support gay rights" is not an indication that I am simply "rationalizing" my position. To suggest it is so is to dismiss the concerns and oppression of gay people.

To say that caring about and debating politics is all about "smart people rationalizing" is the epitome of a priveleged statement. People who are fighting for their rights and survival do not have the privelege to say "oh, well, it all doesn't really matter" or "I guess this is just a difference of opinion."

In this country, black women have been sterilized for the color of their skin. I strongly doubt that my interlocutors in that discussion would have agreed that it was acceptable behavior. For me to argue against it -- for black women to argue against it -- would they call this an exercise in rationalization? I certainly hope not.

People suffer. Queer people suffer. Women suffer. Poor people suffer. People of color suffer. Our suffering is not a cheap political point, to be argued away by saying that our justifiable anger is merely an example of "smart people rationalizing."

But I don't really want to pick on the people who posted this cartoon. They're nice; they're smart; and I don't think either one of them intended to offend me. On a personal level, I'm not upset with them. But politically, I want to address the message behind that maneuver, and behind this cartoon, because it's larger than a single exchange in a debate.

Gender Differences and the Pleasures of the Text

Every time the issue of gender disparities in our genre’s publications comes up, I reflect on how complicated a phenomenon it is and how many different ways there are to address, explain, or engage with it. My own approach usually combines Susan Winnett’s observations in her famous 1990 article in PMLA, “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,” and my own understanding of discursive politics. The fact that we don’t have a single, intelligible way to talk about the problem is probably one of the reasons that we keep approaching it so clumsily and from such different angles. And as Winnett says,

Considering the last decade’s preoccupations with sexual difference and the pleasure of the text, it is surprising that theories concerned with the relation between narrative and pleasure have largely neglected to raise the issue of the difference between women’s and men’s reading pleasures. But this question seems to require critical tools that, for reasons I explore in this essay, have not been available. Indeed, the same analytic paradigms that give us professional access to texts have already determined the terms in which we accede to, comply with, or resist the coercions of a cultural program for pleasure that is not interested in---and whose interests may be threatened by---the difference of women’s pleasure.

Winnett is, of course, talking about the texts of capital-L Literature that is the usual object of scholarly literary criticism. But it seems to me that a large part of the problem we have talking about the differences in our genre is that, indeed, the terms in which the argument is cast are always those of the status quo and for that reason simply won’t be made to---maybe even can’t---accommodate the interests of women writers and fans. Of course, Winnett wrote that article back in 1990, and it immediately became one of the “critical tools” used by feminist critics to talk about the problem and has since been cited innumerable times by feminist critics exploring narrative politics. But seventeen years later, I don’t see that that’s made much difference to the literary critical establishment as a whole (which is, after all, still dominated by white men).

The opening of Winnett’s article, which immediately foregrounds women’s pleasure, is not only provocative, but also (as later unfolds) perfectly appropriate:

I would like to begin with the proposition that female orgasm is unnecessary. I am not, of course, saying that it is unnecessary to any particular woman that she experience orgasm or, for that matter, to any particular man that his female partner do so; rather, I mean that women’s orgasm and, by extension, women’s pleasure can be extraneous to that culmination of heterosexual desire which is copulation. Women’s pleasure can take place outside, or independent of, the male sexual economy whose pulsations determine the dominant culture, its repressions, its taboos, and its narratives, as well as the “human sciences” developed to explain them.

Winnett then describes male arousal and ejaculation in strictly visual terms and observes that narratology takes Freud’s “Masterplot” as the model for understanding narrative structure and asks “If they were conscious that the narrative dynamics and the erotics of reading they were expounding were specifically tied to an ideology of representation derivable only from the dynamics of male sexuality, would they not at least feel uncomfortable making general statements about ‘narrative,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘us’?” But, she says, on encountering a passage by Robert Scholes (from “The Orgiastic Pattern of Fiction”), she realized that asking such a question was simply naïve. She quotes Scholes:

The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act. In saying this I do not mean merely to remind the reader of the connection between all art and the erotic in human nature….For what connects fiction---and music---with sex is the fundamental orgiastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.

Scholes, in other words, insists that the structure of male orgasm is the one correct (and universal!) structure of artistic creation. Winnett remarks: “Even if we have become wary of the generic ‘man in society,’ we still might need to be reminded that such generalizations in such contexts indicate that the pleasure the reader is expected to take in the text is the pleasure of the man.”

We hear all the time in our genre, of course, that many men simply do not read anything they know to be written by a woman yet most women read without gender discrimination. (Obviously there are exceptions to this generalization, but it’s largely true and therefore meaningful to the discussion.) So what happens when men can’t take pleasure in certain texts written by women that many women take inordinate pleasure in? It’s obvious what happens, because I encounter this happening all the time (and not just with my own work or with the books I edit and publish for Aqueduct): the male critic or editor or fan reading them judge them boring, or clumsy, or dull, or inept---or “girly.” Such readers may well praise some work by women because often women writers choose to conform to the male sexual “Masterplot” of narrative. But they will be quick to dismiss (often with contempt) anything that they personally can’t understand or relate to with pleasure. As Winnett says,

For the male critic, the sexual pleasure of reading would seem to take place within a nexus of homosocial arrangements in which ‘the marriage of true minds’ is an affair ‘between men,’ as Eve Sedgwick has put it. In this system, woman is neither an independent subjectivity nor a desiring agent but, rather, an enabling position organizing the social fiction of heterosexuality. In its honest outrageousness, Scholes’s erotics of reading makes clearer than does Brook’s more subtle articulation that the patriarchy has a simultaneously blind and enlightened investment both in the forms of its pleasure and in its conscious valorization and less conscious mystification of them. And this realization does nothing but make it all the more frightening to contemplate the obstacles our own education has placed in the way both of women’s conceiving (of) their own pleasure and of men’s conceding that female pleasure might have a different plot.

Winnett shows how a narrative structure based on women’s pleasure might be delineated (and uses Shelley’s Frankenstein to do so). Perhaps I ought to note that she is not claiming that narrative should necessarily be understood as morphologically mimicking orgasmic pleasure (male or female): “I of course do not think that textual production and narrative dynamics are matters of sexuality alone…” In fact, in the second part of her article she challenges the dominant emphasis on narrative form (or narrative arc, which is how writers typically talk about it) as she notes that Scholes considers the sort of relations that interest women “merely thematic” (and not very interesting: Scholes dismisses as “situational-thematic” (for examples) “the role of mothers and daughters, situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth”), meaning that they can’t be recuperated within the structure of the narrative form (the way every aspect of the Oedipal plot naturally is). Scholes, by the way, chides feminist critics for spending so much time on what he sees as extraneous aspects of narrative.

“Situational-thematic”: Yes, this designation covers all the sorts of relations that tend to fascinate women when explored in fiction. And it denotes, I think, what Angry Black Women means by the “girl [or vagina] story.”

In sum, if you’re interested in why this difference in taste and perception of quality is so hard to talk about productively, it’s definitely worth your time to get hold of the article and read it.

Two Interesting Articles by James Trimarco

My friend James Trimarco is one of my favorite people in the world. We met at Clarion West in 2005, where we had the privelege to learn from the brilliant L. Timmel Duchamp. Working in tandem with one of the other writers in attendance, James was the first person to ever convince me that the label "radical" is something to embrace rather than be intimidated by -- that it is possible to hold radical (as opposed to reformist) politics and still be an effective presence in the world.

And he's lately published a couple of thought-provoking pieces which I'd like to share.

This year, Vanity Fair asked writers to answer the following prompt: In a country defined by video games, reality TV, and virtual friendships, with a White House that has perfected the art of politics as public relations, what is reality to Americans today? And did we ever have a grasp of it?

James won third place, drawing on his experience working as an anthropologist in the vastly different environments of Albania, and ground zero, to answer the question:

1. It's June of 2002 and I'm doing an anthropological study on the street trade in 9/11 memorabilia near Ground Zero. Dust still lines the gutters; the stink of charred plastic and blasted concrete lingers in the air. Church choruses from far-flung states sing hymns to comfort the many visitors who shuffle past. My colleague and I walk up to strangers and ask them about the vendors who cluster nearby, their tables full of Ground Zero–themed snow globes, picture books, and T-shirts. Do they approve of the vendors? Would they buy something from them? Or do they agree with the tabloid papers that the vendors are "ghouls" profiting off of sorrow?

People from all over the country, of every age and skin tone, denounce the vendors for sullying a place they call sacred. Others, sometimes even members of the same family, call the vendors an embodiment of the great entrepreneurial spirit that the buildings symbolized—they were called the World Trade Center, after all.

These people think in symbols and ideals. When they look at a vendor, they don't see just a Chinese immigrant, an African-American Vietnam vet, or an elderly Mexican woman. They see Commercialism on Hallowed Ground, they see the American Way in Action. Just around the corner, in the smoking ruins, some see Why We Are at War.

My friend and I enjoy this research. The feelings we're talking about are vivid and strong. At one point, I casually refer to a group of passersby as "tourists" and the guy I'm talking to, a construction worker from New Jersey, nearly punches me in the face.

"They're pilgrims," he says.

Pilgrims.

The whole article is available up at Vanity Fair.

He also recently published an article on David Icke at Strange Horizons.

In case you've been living in the same cave as I have (in which case, "Hello! Care to share a hank of mammoth meat?"), David Icke is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the world is run by a secret class of reptiloid aliens who have infested the top ranks of society. They're apparently disproportionately represented among the Jews, but can also be found in other "ruling" classes, including the presidency of the USA. It was they who both taught the Egyptians how to build pyramids, and then forced them to do so. These days, they sacrifice children and feed on the blood of the innocent. From James's essay:

"The government made the hurricane on purpose. It's the same Brotherhood that's always been in charge. They're playing the same old game."

For a moment all of us were speechless. It had to be a joke. "What Brotherhood is that?" I asked, finally.

Roberto told me, "They're called the Anunnaki and they've been using humans as slaves for five thousand years." I sputtered and laughed but Roberto didn't laugh back.

James argues that Icke is so popular because his ideas have hit on a kind of culturally unconscious truth. The ruling class does not really sacrifice the blood of children, but post-globalization, it's increasingly possible to look at the world metaphorically in the way that Icke describes.

There are many cultural myths that function this way. For instance, there is documentation suggesting that enslaved Africans being brought to America feared that they were going to be eaten during middle passage. While African bodies were not literally used to fill European stomachs, they were used that way metaphorically. African fire engines are not literally powered by the blood of unwilling passengers, but there are some myths in Africa that suggest they are, and those myths have a certain metaphorical truth. Successful capitalists don't really carve out their empires by making legions of zombie workers, but there are myths about this in Africa too, and they also have metaphorical resonance.

James argues that Icke has tapped into one of these visceral cultural narratives that describes power dynamics in vivid, surreal terms. James writes:

The followers of Icke that I've known have often been members of minority groups, lonely and confused, and experiencing types of unemployment that are connected to shifts in the global economy. Like blacks in South Africa, they witness manifestations of incredibly complex problems that are difficult to understand from their vantage point. Unlike those South Africans, however, they don't have an indigenous system of folklore to provide an explanation. So they turn to David Icke, who weaves the warp of conspiracy theory with the woof of New Age and gilds it all with that system of folklore indigenous to the modern world, science fiction. In the end he creates a tapestry of belief that has a position on every issue and explains every atrocity, all while affirming the essential goodness of humanity.

James goes on to write about the ties between Icke's appeal beyond the page and the appeal of some mainstream science fiction narratives, comparing Icke to work like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which, as he notes, some activists have used as a touchstone for gathering their ideas about a utopic future. He dwells on how Icke manages, through science fictional imagery, to create and sustain not just the suspended belief of a fiction writer, but the belief of a myth maker.

How can feminists tap the resonance of those unconscious narratives, both in science fiction and in straight political narrative?

I fear we can't, or at least not directly. People gravitate toward Icke not just because his work describes metaphorical truths, but also because it underlies those truths with comforting lies. It allows the reader to always ally himself with good, and to escape any agency in his own situation. In creating a new myth, Icke relies on old mythic concepts of heroics, making his narrative compelling, but not helpful. One cannot galvanize around Icke in order to create change.

If nothing else, though, Icke demonstrates the importance of narrative. People believe in him because he can weave a compelling story, and because the framework he offers for people to rewrite their lives into is appealing. For those on the fringe in wealthy countries, Icke's story is a compelling way to make boundaries around the experience of alienation. Anti-feminist and white supremacist narratives have a similar appeal. Narratives get into people's heads. It's important for us to provide counter-narratives where possible, even if they aren't as popular and inflaming. The existence of counter-narratives gives people the ability to see through our framework, at least for a moment.

Objectification, War Crimes, and Dinosaur Bones

Cross-posted at Alas, a Blog.

Copyright Ursula Vernon: Behold the velociraptor, the terror of the Cretaceous...--pictured here with beloved stuffed T-rex "Mr. Gobbly."

I love dinosaurs.

Well, I do. Actually, make that extinct things. I love extinct things. Glyptodonts, for instance: giant, ice age armadillos with big club tails. And titanis walleri which is like the bird version of a T-rex, complete with wings that have devolved into little hands. And for sheer weird you can't beat the Cambrian fauna like opabinia, the five-eyed critter with a vacuum mouth, or hallucigenia, the spiky creature so strange that for a long time paleontologists were unable to tell which way went up.

At this point, I should make the disclaimer: I'm sheerly a hobbyist. I rely on my fiance for most of my information. He comes home from paleontology classes, or reading sciency things, and gives me the digest version (unless it's something like the BBC that I can pop over and read without confusing my social-science-addled brain). I don't always repeat things accurately. So, take me with a grain of salt.

Still, I love reading about extinct things -- probably in the same way that I love reading really weird science fiction novels. There's that sense of wonder: a creature that looked like this really lived? And dinosaurs have only gotten more exciting since I was little. No longer the grey and brown reptiles that lumbered across text books, looking only slightly more intelligent than heads of cabbage, we now know that some dinosaurs were probably closer to warm-blooded than cold, and thanks to lithographic limestone in China, we can even look at the impressions of dinosaur feathers.

Reveling in the nerdy joy that is extinct critters, my fiance and I have a collection of dinosaur books. This year, for my birthday, my fiance flew out to see me in Iowa and gave me, besides a week with his wonderful self, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.

This is a really good book. Apart from gorgeous, colorful illustrations (mmm, gorgeous colorful illustrations), it has different kinds of information than I've found in other books on dinosaurs. It features a number of drawings showing how dinosaur bones are found from different eras and ecosystems, for instance, and while my fiance is a geologist, I've never before appreciated the rock-heavy end of paleontology.

Alongside pictures of the dinosaurs, it also features descriptions of how paleontologists have come to the conclusions they have about certain animals. For instance, rather than just saying that caudipteryx couldn't fly, the book explains that the asymmetry of the feather mpressions we've found from the animal lead us to that conclusion. It's also very clear about when we're guessing. Many animals are known from only a specimen or two, often an incomplete one, and we don't really know what they looked like.

I had known before that we knew many dinosaurs from very few bones, but every time I learn anew how few, it astonishes me. Skulls in particular, the part of the animal that allows us to look dead creatures "in the eye," are especially likely to be crushed and destroyed.

We know so little of what life was like on the planet before we were here. What little we have are tiny snapshot glimpses: this dinosaur with a fan of feathers like a peacock, this gigantic devonian fish with a head covered in armor of bone.

And as I'm thinking these thoughts, I flip to the entry on Spinosaurus, and draw entirely the wrong conclusions.

Spinosaurus is a Cretaceous (that's the middle period of the dinosaur age) therapod (the meat-eating bipeds like T-Rex) with quirky crocodilian jaws and a gigantic sail on its back. At the risk of violating someone's copyright, it looks like this:



It's about 50-60 feet long, which makes it one of the biggest carnivorous dinosaurs that we've found (it's been called the biggest, but paleontologists are always finding new biggests, so I'm going to avoid the superlative). It was also the villain of Jurrassic park... 2? 3? One of the JP sequels, anyway. Note the big, weird sail on its back, which many paleontologists think was used for temperature regulation (you can find similar sails on a number of extinct animals, including a couple of the sauropods (the big dinosaurs with long necks like brontosaurus or brachiasaurus) and older creatures like dimetrodon).

Spinosaurus was originally found in Egypt in 1912 and its bones were displayed in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. In 1944, after sustained allied bombing, the fossil was destroyed.

Reading about that, I had that swift punch to the gut feeling of loss, that "oof" which isn't really conscious. These bones survived 95 million years. They survived the asteroid impact that caused the mass extinction event at the end of the Jurrassic. They survived ice ages. They survived humans poking around in the Egyptian desert, being generally destructive. They were mounted, and studied, and sketched, giving us a glimpse of our world's ancient past, and then they were wiped out by a bomb.

When was the last time I had that "oof" feeling when I was reading about human war casualties from World War II?

Oh, I have that "oof" feeling fairly regularly. I had a much more severe reaction recently when Twisty Faster at I Blame the Patriarchy posted a video of an Iranian girl being stoned to death. I wouldn't even call that an "oof" feeling, really. It was a terrible moment of grief and inadequacy which lasted, oh, 12 hours, before my brain reasserted its general keel of optimism, for better (I remain functional) and for worse (functional, but skimming triviality).

And I got the "oof" and worse from reading We Would Like to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families and watching Hotel Rwanda. But when was the last time that the horrors of World War II pried open my desensitized skin? I think it was reading The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, four or five years ago.

It took a moment, but as the "oof" feeling receded, I started to feel guilty.

And then, as the initial wave of guilt passed, I started to try to convince myself that my initial impulse had been reasonable. After all, a spinosaur fossil is unique and irreplaceable. When it's gone, it's gone, and all the opportunity to reclaim it is also gone. It signifies knowledge that will be forever missing.

I grieve for lost spinosaur bones. I grieve for the lost knowledge of what our planet's past looked like. I crave to hold our history in my hand, and really look back into time. I grieve for the lost opportunity to do that.

But what part of my reasoning about why spinosaurus is irreplaceable and worth grieving for does not apply equally -- and with, indeed, more strength and fervor -- to every lost person? Each of the eleven million casualties of the Holocaust were unique and irreplaceable; with their deaths, their uniqueness was lost to the world. By human action, they are forever missing.

Six hundred thousand in Iraq. Six hundred thousand in a day in Rwanda.

I can cite these stastics, and yet I still grieve for spinosaur bones?

It's a different kind of grief, I suppose. Yet when I consider the people that must have died in that bombing, and concentrate my attention on the fossil that was lost instead, I am objectifying the dead. I am judging their worth as objects against the worth of another object. By a subconscious absorption of economic law, I automatically value the rare object over the conscious one, and this, I suppose, is what Marxist analysts mean when they say that capitalism leads us fetishize other people.

How easy it is to make people into things with worth and value that can be placed in opposition to objects, like fossils, or even abstracts, like knowledge. How we suffer from trying to make people into objectified abstractions that we can move around like cogs in our head. This child's life for that man's freedom. Those people's deaths for these people's sense of security. This life for that ideal. So easy to slip unconsciously into the edges of it. I want to know about this ancient thing. I do not want to have to stop and consider the fullness of a human life, prematurely ended, and fit the full, incomprehensible breadth of it into my head.

A Letter of Comment on “Hanging Out Along the Aqueduct”

This came in the morning’s email, in response to my first “Hanging Out Along the Aqueduct” column (published in the Aqueduct Gazette, which can be downloaded gratis from Aqueduct’s site):

Dear Timmi,

I just discovered the blog and newsletter this weekend, so it's taken me a few days to catch up and I hope I'm not too late to join the discussion. I wanted to respond to your article in the Gazette. A couple of things struck me. First was your response to your intense reader's assertion that she knew you better through your writing than you could ever know her. I'll quote you here:

"... I realized that it was an imagined relationship, constructed inside the reader's head ..."

And from the other side, you said about meeting authors that you thought you knew from reading their work:

"I have a more realistic attitude toward texts (knowing, that is, that they don't convey the quintessence of their author's personalities.)"

Is it possible that your reader really did know you better than you could ever know her? Is it also possible that texts could do a better job of conveying an author's personality than a face to face meeting?

I think of fiction as the safe place to explore the darker, or perhaps even just not polite, aspects of my personality. I suspect there are parts of myself that make it into my work that I am not consciously aware of, and in this regard, I tend to think of my writing as a more complete revelation of my personality than I could manage in person. This is what makes the reader/author relationship so uncomfortable. I also realize, from both sides of the equation, that the reader will bring her own interpretation to the work. I don't think that this then equals an "imagined relationship." Even among my friends, I know that they see me differently from the way that I see myself, and that the reverse is also true.

One other comment: when reading a book I feel a strong connection with, I'm identifying with the author and not the plot or character. I'm always thinking of what it took to write such a thing and not imagining myself in similar situations as the characters. Does anyone else have such a "writer-centric" relationship to books they love?

Thanks for this forum, Timmi.

Sincerely,
Kimberly

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Dear Kimberly,

You raise some interesting points. First, I agree that the reader doesn’t have an “imagined relationship,” at least not in the sense you’re thinking of. I worried about what word to use there because I knew that “imagined” could (and probably would) be read as “imaginary.” I briefly considered “imaginal,” but that’s a word that means “Of, relating to, or having the form of an insect imago.” And “imaginative” seemed too close to “imaginary.” Briefly I considered “conceptual,” but decided that was too narrow to include all that I needed it to. Finally, studying the definitions of “imagine,” I concluded that at least one of the definitions could cover the sense I wanted to convey. Unfortunately, it is misleading. What I intended to suggest was a relationship that is carried on within the imagination of the reader. You see, by the time the text gets into the hands of the reader, the writer is no longer there. That is to say, the text is a mere trace of the writer that has a life (or not) of its own, independent of the writer. The writer may, of course, attempt to influence how others interpret the text but in the end is only one more interpretive voice where the text is concerned. The reader’s creation of an abstract notion of the writer is just that: a creation. The text may supply the reader with the materials to do so, but just as most people understand what they read very, very differently, so they will construct their own peculiar notion of the writer within their imaginations. It’s the writer’s texts the reader interacts with, not the writer. (Of course if they have interact with the writer personally in some way, it becomes another matter.)

You ask: “Is it possible that your reader really did know you better than you could ever know her? Is it also possible that texts could do a better job of conveying an author's personality than a face-to-face meeting?” And then you point out that for many writers, fiction is a “safe place to to explore the darker, or perhaps even just not polite, aspects of my personality. I suspect there are parts of myself that make it into my work that I am not consciously aware of, and in this regard, I tend to think of my writing as a more complete revelation of my personality than I could manage in person.”

While it is true that the best writing—particularly fiction writing—will be filled with the writer’s “tells” and will, moreover, display the sheer range of their imagination more blatantly than other sorts of activities might do (though there again, certain games and discussions of books, politics, and movies may do this just as effectively), an astute observer and listener can probably pick up some of the same things from their friends over the course of a long association. More importantly, though, the display of imagination, while shining a spotlight on the more occult aspects of a personality, only illuminates a very small area of it, which does not, in my mind, add up to “knowing” that person. Similarly, watching someone become temporarily insane (descending into terror or the first shock of grief, being overwhelmed with intolerable pain, or losing their temper on a grand scale, to take a few ordinary examples) will shine a spotlight on an aspect of their personality that may be raw and true, but again, that aspect is simply one part of the personality. Granted, you can’t really “know” someone until you’ve seen them lose it at a moment of tremendous stress, but though such “knowing” will add a certain depth to your image of tem, it won’t give you access to the real personality.

As for doing a better job of conveying an author’s personality than a face-to-face meeting, I don’t think it’s so simple. Frequently when I meet someone face-to-face for the first time, I have an experience similar to the one I had when I gave a colloquium talk at a major university a few years ago. Before the talk began, I circulated among the audience members who were munching on fruit, chocolate, and cheese. (This being my first public-speaking gig in an academic setting, I was too nervous to eat.) One of the faculty members attending, who I’d been aware had been watching me for a few minutes as I talked with others, approached me and introduced herself. She made it clear she was both taken aback and disconcerted by my failure to match her expectations. “You’re not at all what I expected! Because you know, I read every essay and piece of fiction on your website,” she said. “So I was sure I knew what you’d be like in person. But you’re so…small…and soft-spoken, and…gentle in your manner. I just can’t get over it!” I wanted to respond, “Sorry to disappoint you.” Or, “What did you expect, someone six feet-ten who pumps iron and eats nails every morning for breakfast?” But of course I didn’t—because I’d had this experience so many times before. The first few times this happened to me, I was dismayed. But later, I found it a little flattering to think that people who hadn’t met me thought from my style of writing that I was someone they hoped they’d never tangle with. But to return to your question. Applied to this disparity between the images my writing conjures up in readers’ minds and the image my physical appearance, body language, and voice conjure up in a face-to-face interlocutor’s mind, you would seem to be asking: which is the true image of my personality? And my answer would be: neither. Such images are always partial and incomplete.

As for your last question: I hope others (besides me) will offer responses to it. I would say that for myself, when I love a book, I have two kinds of responses to it (that I find complementary, though I’m not sure many other people would). The first is aesthetic: I’m transported to a textured state of mind that I carry around inside me for as long as I’m reading it. This is above all an effect of language, and one that seems utterly magical when I think about it. How does it happen? I suppose it involves a certain sort of textual synergy in which many elements come together with such power and coherence that one is transported into an altered state, and because one is transported, one feels the reality of the book’s imaginary. By this I don’t mean simply that the characters seem “real” or the details of the setting plausible. I mean the imaginative logic underlying the work’s voice and style and, perhaps more intangibly, its choice of detail, syntactical preferences, rhythm of the sentences, and formal structure, all of which combine perfectly to create feelings and perceptions and sensations and thoughts that constitute a place we would never have been able to visit on our own. The second response is analytical: I need to figure out how it’s put together, to elucidate all of its many relations—formal, thematic, as well as affective—and figure out how all these work to transport me into that wonderful textured state of mind that belongs uniquely to that book. Of course I don’t always have both responses to the books I love. But this is not, I think, a writer-centric response.

Thanks very much for your comment, Kimberly. This is exactly the kind of conversation we’re looking for here.

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Direct your letters of comment to conversation@aqueductpress.com. If you do, we'll enter you in our drawing for an Aqueduct book of the winner's choice.