My Favorite Fiction From June 2012 -
- Contact by Eileen Gunn I love stories where humans encounter aliens that are SO alien. This one is told from the alien’s POV and works really well.
- Winter Scheming by Brit Mandelo [TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence.] What I like best about this story is that it starts out in an unexpected way given what’s really going on (which you understand at the end). Very well structured and executed.
- Immersion by Aliette de Bodard I had trouble with this one at first because one of the POVs was hard to grok, but I liked where the story went in the end.
- If The Mountain Comes by An Owomoyela Engaging meditation on scarcity and class.
- Mother of All Russiya by Melanie Rawn I’m not sure about this one. I liked he story in general, but I’m concerned about the characterization of Master Cheng. I’d be interested in discussing it with anyone who read or will read it.
- Tiger Stripes by Nghi Vo This story slowly builds up and worms into you.
- The Inconstant Moon by Alaya Dawn Johnson If you have’t read Alaya’s novel “Moonshine” and you’re into vampires or the 1920s or supernatural-inflected historical fiction, go out and get it RIGHT NOW. It’s jazz vampires! If you’ve read “Moonshone” or the sequel “Wicked City” thenyou’ll like this story, too. It’s a prequel and tells the tale of how the novel’s protagonist, Zephir Hollis, first came to NYC.
- Daddy’s Girl by Amy Sundberg I love the main character of this story like burning. She’s is so damn fierce!
My rebuttal to the argument "But it's *just* a movie!" (or TV show, or book, or entertainment...) -
The bottom line on this issue is simple: If you think that a piece of media such as a movie, TV show, book, or song is merely entertainment and ingest said media without giving any thought to how it influences or shapes you or the culture you exist in, You Are A Sheep.
What!? You cry. Again:
You. Are. A. Sheep.
A poignant post by alexandraerin:
For Our Protection
The way that Black bloggers who talk about race are expected to be mindful about not triggering the people who keep coming at them and keep arguments with them going while not having a single thought given about their mental and emotional health in the midst of this…I just can’t help seeing a parallel between that and the way that Stand Your Ground laws are interpreted and enforced. We create or co-opt structures — laws, manners, social conventions — for our protection, and we use them to defend ourselves, or even to attack, but we won’t tolerate them being used against us, or even in the defense of others.
(via karnythia)
Peggielene Bartels, A.K.A. King Peggy, is currently the King of Otuam, Ghana.
She was chosen to be one of only three female kings in Ghana, and when she discovered that male chauvinists wanted her to only be a figurehead, she said: “They were treating me like I am a second-class citizen because I am a woman. I said, ‘Hell no, you’re not going to do this to a woman!’” When she encountered corruption and the threat of embezzlement to the royal funds, she declared “I’m going to squeeze their balls so hard their eyes pop!”
King Peggy has maintained her work in Ghana’s embassy in Washington, D.C. while making education affordable in Otuam, installing borehead wells to produce clean drinking water, enforcing incarceration laws to deal with domestic violence, replenishing the royal coffers by taxing Otuam’s fishing industry to improve life in the village, and appointing three women to her council.
“Nobody should tell you, ‘You’re a woman, you can’t do it,’” she insists. “You can do it. Be ready to accept it when the calling comes.”
Quoted from the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Ms. Magazine.
(Source: pizza-grrrl, via zesticola)
Why Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is The Ultimate White Guilt Fantasy -
These ideas about Lincoln and the Civil War are what I like to call White Guilt Fantasies. The kinds of stories white Americans tell themselves about the history of our country to make themselves feel better — or, at least, not have to grapple with the realities of the things their forefathers thought or did.
And this White Guilt Fantasy pervades Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. So much so, it inserts several plot points, incidents, and characterizations into the movie that are so unbelievable, the part where vampires actually exist comes off as far more plausible than the rest.Everybody get your popcorn, the comments are going to be epic in their awfulness.
(*book spoilers*)
So, I read the book (and I’ll admit I enjoyed it) largely because GDT laid the groundwork for Vampire Overlords taking over all of humanity (in the Strain trilogy) and because slavery was terrible and then made so much worse by a scene where Abe sees a Plantation Owner sell his older and injured slaves to vampires for food. Sadly, this review makes me want to not see the movie now. I was really looking forward to seeing a complicated thing with added complications on the big screen. That doesn’t seem to be what happens.
I did hear that the book took a more nuanced approach. I guess it’s too much to expect such things from movies.
By the way, ‘ware comments. It’s getting even more fantastically full of white tears than I imagined.
People & People:
dis bitch
can we talk about all her awkward appropriation and her use of Japanese women as her ‘slave dolls’ who weren’t allowed to speak at all as part of their contract?
this bitch is like the queen of cultural appropriation
and this shit has always creeped me out, but i had no idea that she didnt let them speak…what the actual fuck?
peep the lyrics to “rich girl”:
I’d get me four Harajuku girls to
Inspire me and they’d come to my rescue
I’d dress them wicked, I’d give them names
Love, Angel, Music, Baby
Hurry up and come and save meso shes into having pet asian women to name and dress up? if that isnt some dehumanizing psycho shit then im a fucking unicorn frog
tbh i hope her and dita von teese fall of a cliff
*shudders*
I think it says a hell of a lot that I’ve never once seen these women’s real names and I have never seen an interview or even so much as a soundbite from them. All I know of them is those little doll perfumes and Stefani’s creepy ass music.
(Source: honey-heroin, via zesticola)
Why Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is The Ultimate White Guilt Fantasy -
These ideas about Lincoln and the Civil War are what I like to call White Guilt Fantasies. The kinds of stories white Americans tell themselves about the history of our country to make themselves feel better — or, at least, not have to grapple with the realities of the things their forefathers thought or did.
And this White Guilt Fantasy pervades Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. So much so, it inserts several plot points, incidents, and characterizations into the movie that are so unbelievable, the part where vampires actually exist comes off as far more plausible than the rest.Everybody get your popcorn, the comments are going to be epic in their awfulness.
(tw: brutal gay bashing) Black NYC 8th Grader Blinded in 1 Eye After Brutal, Anti-Gay Assault -
But it gets better lil Kardin
Now u can’t see out of one eye because str8 people can’t raise their fucking kids. I hate heterosexuals right now
Do u have any idea what it’s like to walk down the street waiting to be gay bashed?These fucking people.
>I hate heterosexuals right now
So every single person who’s heterosexual goes around blinding little boys? okay, sure.
I applaud your bold stance in being willing to stand up and say that the real injustice in a hate crime case that left a child half-blinded is that everyone doesn’t know how awesome you are.
“
TRIGGER WARNING.
“The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear. She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”
In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her. “She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”
” ——Ron Rosenberg, talking to Kotaku about the Tomb Raider reboot.
You can imagine my thoughts on this, but I wrote a post to illuminate them, anyway. This is some base misogyny, and the dude isn’t even ashamed about it.
My new writing computer! 11-inch Samsung Series 9 (Taken with instagram)
[video]
“
So let me get this straight – it’s a problem if my mom listened too much to my dad, but it’s a heroic act if the President made a massive change in a policy position that could affect the entire nation after consulting with his teenage daughters?
While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview. In this situation, it was the other way around.
I guess we can be glad that Malia and Sasha aren’t younger, or perhaps today’s press conference might have been about appointing Dora the Explorer as Attorney General because of her success in stopping Swiper the Fox.
Sometimes dads should lead their family in the right ways of thinking. In this case, it would’ve been nice if the President would’ve been an actual leader and helped shape their thoughts instead of merely reflecting what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee.
” —Wow, Bristol Palin, you are a MQ.*
*Can you guess.
(via cijithegeek)
um. hey. direct insult to the President’s intelligence, go!
“that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking…”
ah. so let’s forego all the developments in medicine. don’t want to disrupts thousands of years of thinking about health. let’s go back to leeching. or better, let’s just leave loved ones to the wolves.
while we’re at it, let’s forget about planes. after all, folks just knew man couldn’t fly for centuries. millenia, even. that’s thousands of years, for the cheap seats. shut down the airports.
can i also point out that the definition and purpose of marriage has changed several times in the past and that folks seem to ignore that rather conveniently in their passion to “save” it?
(via deliciouskaek)
Once again I say: Bristol, shut the entire fuck up and take all the seats. When you prove to me that you have one iota of understanding about history then maybe you can have an opinion at this time.
(via karnythia)
Bristol Palin.
oops
Welp.
(Source: gipartieswithtrees)
in regards to the HONY thing. i was wondering if maybe this is something that ties into the ability for him to go as far as demand all these people to take that image off the net. i guess many ultra orthodox jews have been harshly shunned for outting any kind of sexual assault/rape/molestation. i am sure this article has a possibility of creating a kind of stereotype and i am not interested in creating one. but i found the whole timing interesting. the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/nyregion/ultra-orthodox-jews-shun-their-own-for-reporting-child-sexual-abuse.html
This article made me want to throw up. I couldn’t even finish it. No community, regardless of religious or cultural values, should ever put barriers to child molesters being brought to justice. Any community that allows people to abuse children has an obvious cancer.
(via karnythia)
Riley touched on this a long time ago with their Rules of a Whiteness-Free Discussion. However, I’m interested in digging a bit deeper to figure out a new way of talking about social justice online.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reflecting, and I’m starting to believe that POCs need our own movement that comes at social justice from our ways of doing things. Currently, I’m feeling increasingly confined by the Whiteness of how social justice (including anti-racism!) is framed in online discussions, and how inauthentic and disconnected I feel whenever I participate in it.
What I want to see instead is a way of framing social justice that’s rooted in our identities as POCs. For instance, I want to see more discussions about queerness and ethnicity that focus on queering the [insert ethnicity] way. I want to see more discussions about social justice from the framework of cultural values, history, myth, religion, etc. I’d love to see less emphasis placed on “I do this because this is what it means to be an ally” and more on, “I do this because this is what it means to come from this culture with this history.”
Of course, different POC communities will frame things differently, but the possibility of sharing our collective wisdom would, in my opinion, offer us many ways to learn about and heal ourselves and our communities. Here is one example, but I imagine that there must be more.
However, I want to get this started by hearing from you. How does your culture affect how you do social justice? How do you envision social justice rooted in culture? What specific ideas and values do you speak and act from? What do you find in your own culture that you want to see more of in how we discuss social justice online? What questions do you have for anybody else who’s currently or potentially doing this sort of thing?
Context. Nuance. Fact-checking.
As well as a debunking of myths about ourselves that even PoC hold.
(via blackamazon)
