Racheline Maltese

can we please get a barbershop for dykes around here?

I think it’s fair to say that most people who are, or have ever been perceived as, female at any point in their lives hate getting their hair cut. It’s expensive, time consuming, and never exactly the way you want it. There’s skin care advice you don’t want, fretting about the grey you actually like, and inane questions about the heteronormative life you may not possess. And they if do get your hair right for a half a second they go and blow dry it and screw it all up so that you have to wash it again the second you get home. Let’s take a moment to share our collective pain.

Okay. Moving on.

Now, if you’re a woman or otherwise perceived/misperceived as female and you like to wear your hair short, it’s a whole new bucket of fun. Yes, I really want it that short. No, I’m not edgy or daring. Yes, I’ve worn it this short before. Yes, I’m sure. No, my boyfriend doesn’t have an opinion, because I don’t have a boyfriend. And when I did, do you know what his opinion was? His opinion was, you should cut my hair the way I want it cut.

I’m very specific when I get my hair cut, and I give them as much info as I can: “It’s been two months since my last cut, I want a basic men’s hair cut, straight across the back, part on the left, everything brushed forward, bit of fringe in the front, if it’s long enough that it starts to curl take more off.”

And yet….

Today I had to assure my stylist I was a lesbian before she would stop advocating for me to “soften the look” and stop fretting about whether or not I was sure, as I sat there grinning viciously and thinking about the men who taught me how to be the type of beautiful I am.

What part of, “I wear custom suits, and I want this crap that ruins the line off the back of my neck” do you not understand? Oh, all of it. Right.

The haircut turned out fine. But seriously, I hate this process, which is why I get my haircut once every two or three months, as opposed to every three weeks like I should.

So let me put the word out: if you are a queer person who has ever thought about opening a salon for other queer people (bonus points if you’re a dyke, genderqueer or transmasculine and are thinking barbershop) in NYC, please do. I would happily pay a lot more and, in fact, spend a lot of time on the subway, even traveling to the far reaches of Brooklyn, to be among my own people, not get asked about the husband I don’t have, avoid the awkward when I bring reference photos of men who aren’t androgynous, and have someone cut my hair who understands that if I don’t feel a fucking razor on the back of my neck at some point in the process, they are doing it wrong.

it’s almost spring trash day

It’s almost, marginally, spring here. It’s nice. I’ve been pretty much stuck in the house though, dealing with various illnesses, desperately trying to finish various articles for various books, and adjusting to this home office thing, which has its pluses and minuses, and the wrinkles of which I really want to sort out before Patty comes home in about a month. Home. Patty. Good. She’s really awesome, you know.

Astounding actually. She just called me. She’s in Mumbai. She’s not supposed to be in Mumbai. She’s supposed to be in Baroda, having taken an overnight train from Delhi last night. Since the ticket indicated a boarding time and end time, 8:30am, she assumed that time was when she’d arrive in Baroda. Nope, train stopped at Baroda in the middle of the night and she woke up in Mumbai. But, friends from her dig have family there, she’s been well taken care of, and she’ll get on a train to Baroda tomorrow.

If it were me, I’d freak out. But she’s good.

Now, on to stuff….

First thanks for being so totally awesome and engaged with the big post about and the link to the mourning work yesterday. I spend a lot of time having certitude about this stuff and being shameless about this stuff, but it’s also deeply scary, vulnerable space for me, on intellectual and professional levels as well as personal ones.

Next, speaking of Bristol-related stuff, Ika Willis has a great post about the horror of hate speech delivered in a reasonable tone, and that thing where queer people are expected to do hard, unpleasant work that should be unnecessary, for free, to spice up someone else’s “conversation” about hate (now with correct URL, sorry about that). No thanks.

In the department of things that make me uncomfortable, things that also remind me of home (even if I was an interloper, even if I am 10 years older than everyone in this article, even if the name makes me shudder): New York’s newest list of 400 to be on, the Native Society. Mostly this reminds me that I need to decide whether I am going to the Hewitt reunion this year or not (although I certainly won’t make Patty suffer through it again; she can rescue me after).

I’ve decided that to go with my suits and other anachronistic habits, I want some letterpress business cards. Recommendations, anyone?

Today’s crowdfunding link is about bread. Really. Bread. I can’t eat bread, because I have celiac disease, but if I could eat bread, I would eat this bread, so folks — get some bread! (Seriously, once Patty is home I may order some for her).

Can we talk about Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull? Because that is some masterful design work (both makeup and costume). It’s also dark. Powerfully so, in that troublesome way where the bad guys always have the best outfits (see: Jack’s coat = awesome; John Hart’s coat = AWESOME). I’m fascinated, both in fact and fiction, about the marketing of evil, both as evil (as happens with villains in fiction) and as the supposedly right thing that’s actually horrific beyond previous imagining (which is generally the insidious way it goes down in non-fictional life). Fascinating stuff on the screen, even more fascinating, I suspect, when it comes to the reception it’s getting and is going to get (I had a long, enjoyable email thread with Christian yesterday about Bad Things That Will Happen in Fandom Regarding This Character and Why We Should Write a Torchwood Battles the Red Skull Fanfic immediately). Who are the bad guys that keep you awake at night, not because they are too terrifying (and they are), but because they are too fascinating for your comfort?

Finally, there’s this awesome search string that keeps sending people to this journal: “In what ways can we look at fiction as history?” I’m sure there’s some actual scholarship on it out there, but once I crawl out from under all these deadlines, I’m going to take a stab at my own take on it, because I adore the question so much.

On that note, I need to go finish some stuff so Kali and I can get back to our book, which is all about the uncomfortably human lives of some mostly awful (and evil) people, and Erica and I can get back to our musical, which is about some people that aren’t awful at all, but get vilified for the work they do and the concerns with which their lives and bodies provide them.

On the tangible realities of absence

On July 10, 2010, I presented a paper, “Tangible Reality of Absence: Fan Communities and the Mourning of Fictional Characters,” (which you can now retrieve to read in its entirety at that link) at an academic conference in Bristol in the UK. It’s something of which I’m quite proud; it’s also something that was quite difficult, and was, and remains, complex in ways I could not have anticipated going into it.

I didn’t really think of myself as an independent scholar before Bristol. Sure, I had a (not scholarly) pop culture book out and had presented some papers on the academic tracks at Harry Potter cons, but that was just me enjoying some attention for thinking and talking about stuff I really dig. I didn’t know what to call it or what it said about me or how to integrate it with the fact that I am a fan and I’ve never really understood why I should be ashamed of that.

Submitting a paper to the conference, Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception, felt like something of a moral imperative to me when I read the CFP, which circulated fast and furiously around LiveJournal for its inclusiveness of fan studies and desire. But for me, the magic phrase was, “Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters,” because that was me.

That was me in fourth grade when I spent all my time daydreaming about having tea with Alexander the Great. And it was me every time I’ve had to go on a trip alone, and there was no one there but characters I’d loved and made friends with to hold my hand when the plane took off. And these anecdotes, although largely unspecific and chosen for their romanticism, aren’t just stories to me. Maybe it’s because I’m an actor, because I’m trained to pretend, but I know the feel of all those different hands that have soothed me as we’ve hurtled down the runway.

Because I live in the world with my partner and my friends and my colleagues, I know to say these experiences aren’t real. But because I’ve experienced them, I also know to say they aren’t not real either. And until I read that CFP, I didn’t know that I was really allowed to talk about that, not the love, not the connection, but the embodiment of it that has been with me my whole life, as a type of magic and as a form of ghosts and as an instrument of shame.

What to write about became clear pretty fast. Ianto Jones had just died on Torchwood and everyone I knew kept asking why every once in a while they felt like they had to pop into the bathroom at work just to have a good cry, weeks and months after the fact. I knew I couldn’t answer that question, but I thought maybe I could answer why it was happening about this character and why it always seemed to happen about certain types of characters and yet not others; it wasn’t the degree of fannish love that seemed to generate this mourning, but something else. I’d seen it with Severus Snape, too. I’d heard about ways “the ecstasy of grief” had consumed various Whedon fandoms. And thought I knew, like everyone thinks they know, that people once wore black armbands to mourn the death of Sherlock Holmes.

So I submitted an abstract, got a yes, and then began this completely ridiculous journey that I couldn’t possibly have expected at the time, one that involved being a receptacle for other people’s grief, a great deal of defending fannish love, too much anger (on my part and a lot of other people’s), several trips to the UK, and a tattoo. It’s a story I’ve intended to tell since I first started working on this project, but I’m still not sure it’s one I know how.

I first went to the UK in April 2010 with Patty. She was speaking at a conference in London and had business in Cardiff. I would visit the Ianto memorial site while she did that, because it seemed reasonable that I see the thing that was going to account for a full third of the paper. That experience didn’t really turn out how I expected, and then we got stuck in London besides, due to the volcanic ash event. There was a point where I was in tears of frustration, sitting on the Internet, tweeting: “I am stuck in the UK due to a volcano with a non-working vortex manipulator. Doctor stuck in the US. And Ianto’s dead.” It was, frankly, completely hilarious, but the whole situation was also super strange. It’s funnier if you’re a Doctor Who fan.

By the time I touched down in the UK a few months later for the Bristol conference (presenting the paper, I might note, one year and one day after the episode of Torchwood in which Ianto died was aired), I’d already survived a heated panel on character death responses, that was both wonderful and awful, at Gallifrey One. I’d discovered that the act of morning for Ianto which I personally was the most emotionally responsive to was committed by someone with whom I had argued in a mutually ungracious fashion on- and off-line. I’d watched both creators I admire and people I’m friends with endure ongoing harassment and threats over this thing. And I was holding, somewhat unexpectedly, a hell of a lot of secrets.

These secrets were told to me along the route of this project by people of all genders, ages and sexual orientations. It happened more often in person, confessions over drinks, than online, but it happened a lot. It included fans, people who hadn’t thought to characterize themselves as fans, and professional creators who in some cases had at least distant ties to the property in question. It included people I knew well and people who were essentially strangers to me.

The secrets fell into two clear and simple categories. The first, “When Ianto died, it felt like I’d been the one that had been killed off.” The second, “It felt like I’d lost my lover.” And lest you think I am in any way outside of this experience, let me be clear in that my response was only ever two things: “I know,” and “Me too.”

That’s not really something I’ve wanted to admit, but not because of the stigma associated with fannishness in the general world, or the stigma associated with this type of transgressive, embodied fannishness amongst fandom itself (see the paper for a discussion of Snape’s Wives), nor even because acafen are suspect enough for the love we bring to the table of our scholarship. Rather, it was an experience I’d had that was agonizing and private, and lacking beautiful words for it, I did not wish instead to offer words that were merely adequate, or worse, inadequate. That overall feeling, while now a gentle and passing regret as if for a joy I once had, remains.

It’s not something I think I have much else to say on, but the reason I’m saying it at all is important. One of the themes that emerged out of the Bristol conference was that of exile and secrets. It was very powerful to me as a human being and as a scholar and as a fan. It was very powerful to me as a queer person. And when I got back to my hotel that night, I posted to LiveJournal and asked people to keep fewer secrets about their experiences of the world. Which is why I think I owe this conversation this particular, arguably absurdist, truth, regardless of what it makes you think of me.

Long before Russell T. Davies killed off Ianto, I did. Well, Kali and I did in a 200,000+ word fanfiction epic, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. I’m sure you can Google and find it on the Internet with great ease. I’ll warn you that it’s chock full of porn, has a very narrow doorway and will absolutely, positively make you cry. But, because it’s important to me not to value original work differently from transformative work, because I believe they are two deeply distinct exercises, I want you to know that I’m really damn proud of this story and that I reread it sometimes, in part because we learned a lot of stuff, some of it about life, while writing it.

One of the things I think we learned, looking back, is that death is often about despair, but it can also be about hope. This isn’t about heaven or any codified spirituality, but rather, about a way of facing the world, a world that, necessarily, eventually, leaves us all behind. And I suspect that mourning is one way we attempt, as humans, to try to reinject hope into that experience of despair.

The last two words of the story come in a sign off to a letter. They are, Be grand. Kali and I, on principle, will rarely say who wrote what part of our stories and often we can’t remember ourselves, but this was mine, something I’d written jokingly about halfway through the project, that then became our focus and our target point. When Ianto died months later on Children of Earth, I told her I was going to get those two final words of our story tattooed on me and that it would cause fandom drama and that I didn’t care, because it wasn’t about Ianto, it was about me.

So when I landed in the UK for the Bristol conference, on July 8, having (in a case of the worst timing ever) spent the previous day in the emergency room with a kidney stone, I thought maybe it was time to get that tattoo. It was about so many other things by then — being in the UK, becoming a scholar, and the very way that I’ve really always chosen to live my life, the costs be damned — that, combined with the source narrative anniversary and the conference, made it seem like the timing was perfect. It was perfect. But the truth was, I also wasn’t sure.

I looked up Into You, one of the most well-regarded and difficult to get an appointment at tattoo shops in London. I knew it could sometimes take months to get an appointment there, but I decided that if they could squeeze me in, in some fluke during my 36 non-consecutive hours in London, I would get the tattoo.

It turns they’d had a cancellation and they could. So I took the tube to Angel and put a 40 quid deposit on the work that day, fresh off the plane. I left for Bristol the next morning, did the conference the day after, and then returned to London the day after that. The next day, with just hours before my flight, I had the words Be grand carved into my back in black ink, before boarding a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Some days, I hate that I can’t see it without a mirror, but it remains fundamental to this narrative and important to me that people see it when I am going.

Later that year, at the opening night party of the 2010 New York Musical Theater Festival, a stranger asked me if the tattoo was a command to others or a reminder to myself. I was there on a fluke, one related to another strange and risky international pilgrimage from another time in my life, and I smiled, knew the world was right, and simply said, Yes.

Other than giving a related presentation specifically on illustrated media (comics, manga, anime, etc.) at the 3rd Annual Comics & Popular Arts Conference at Dragon*Con in September 2010, I’ve taken a bit of time off from working on the death and mourning stuff since Bristol. I needed the break. It was hard. I didn’t realize how much it meant I was holding, but my desire to continue and broaden this work is immense.

Since the initial paper, which you should really go up to the first link in this thing and read if you haven’t because this post is kind of a box set with that, I’ve stumbled on some more criteria that seem to inspire this mourning response to the loss of fictional characters. I’ve also become acutely interested in people’s personal stories about the intersection of grief and fiction — mourning acts they engaged in secret and as children; mourning for fiction happening, or not happening, contemporaneously with non-fictional loss, etc. There’s so much here on both a scholarly level and on a level that speaks to personal essay and anthology about these very strange, supposedly secret, embodied and emotional experiences of love and loss.

So I don’t know where all this goes next, although I’ve clearly got some ideas. And I don’t know when it goes there, because I do have my own joyful and grand life to be living. But I know that it does. I’ve got two words carved into my back that say so, and everything’s already happened anyway.

Be grand.

sartorial absurdity

You all know I love suits right? On me, on other people. Pretty much on everyone if they’re good suits. Yum suits. So, while my all-deadlines-all-the-time life continues (but don’t worry, some real content is coming here soon; I’m just waiting for something to go live so I can link you to it and talk about it), I need to pause for a second to share with you this sartorial absurdity highlighted on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight:

Personalized pinstripes.

While I have to go do some statistical analysis at the moment, I ask you to please, please, weigh in below. Awesome? Horrifying? Both? What would your pinstripes say? More importantly, my fannish friends, what would fictional characters’ pinstripes say? Because I really, really need to know.

Following up

I am under the weather and under the deadline gun today, but I wanted to post two quick links clarifying the record on various things.

First, Christian posted a long explanation of the “If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him” buttons. That search string directs a lot of people to this journal, but those interested in that, should visit him. I loved this essay like burning and it let me roll around in a lot of fictional joy and grief. Christian has also cross-posted this at his Livejournal, where a lot of great discussion has ensued.

Second, in what may be the last addendum to the “Buffy bullying incident at Gally,” I just got a comment providing more information on What Really Happened. Which is to say, not a minor (sorry about that; I look really young for my age too, and I know that while people tell you it’s flattering, it can also be annoying, so my apologies!) and not, apparently and thankfully, someone who wound up upset by what happened. All of which underscores that fact that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me; but also that stuff that isn’t meant to hurt can hurt people, even people on the periphery of the situation, like myself. It’s given me, and I hope all of us, a lot to think about. The comment is fantastic both as a followup and in terms of considering some other fannish phenomena. If you’ve been following this story, I urge you to click on the link.

do you hear the people sing?

As I think anyone who knows me knows, I am an unabashed lover of both musical theater and politics. And, I believe that American politics are often at their best, or worst, when those politics are engaged in theatrically. It’s political theater for a reason, and I think we’ve lost a great deal in the discourse due to the current societal devaluation of both rhetoric and performance.

Which is why this Les Miserables moment from the Wisconsin protests has me in tears, especially as word is coming out that among other petty actions by the Wisconsin governor in this struggle, he has just ordered that the windows of the capital building be welded shut in order to prevent food deliveries to the occupying protesters.

Read the stuff. Watch the video. Pay particular attention to the protesters in the background of the footage uninvolved with the planning of the intentional performance. People singing along, and one man, right at the beginning, who smiles and seems to take his hat off in respect.

Stories matter.

butch isn’t ugly

Butch Lab Symposium is a blog carnival/round-up where participants blog independently on a monthly theme related to butch identity, and then later post a list of other participants’ pieces.

This month’s question, “What do people think ‘butch’ means? What are the stereotypes around being butch? What do people assume is true about you [or the masculine of center folks in your life], but actually isn’t? What image or concept do you constantly have to correct or fight against? How do you feel about these misconceptions? How do you deal with them? Do you respond to these stereotypes or cliches? How?” seemed particularly on point for me.

In my essay in Whedonistas I talk a good deal about how hard I find it to identify with the women of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series. I don’t look, or feel, like them by default. Yes, sometimes I wear dresses and present femininely, and, when I do, I can be quite good at it. Sometimes it feels comfortable and sometimes it doesn’t.

My life as a boy, meanwhile, is very much the same way, and, and the end of the day, it’s hard for me to have a word for what I am because there are such rigid definitions, not just of male and female, but of butch and femme. Sure, I have the de rigueur short hair, but the fussy suits make people questions my masculinity cred in the queer community as surely as they make some people questions the masculinity of foppish men in the world of more mainstream gender roles (see: my off-hand remark about Wesley Wyndham-Price in my Whedonistas piece).

As far as I can tell, most people think butch means a whole lot of things that don’t really have very much to do with me. Of course, there’s the role of the butch/femme dynamic in the lesbian community past and present, and I’ll confess I have some affection for its cultural presence in my world, even if it’s largely worked against me and mine (I’m not just butch, my partner wouldn’t define as femme (again, check Whedonistas for more, but she keeps a pick-axe under our sink), and a whole lot of femmes I know that have dated each other are really sick of explaining to people, that yes, really, two femmes can be together!).

But more than that, there are just all these cultural expectations of masculinity that get bound up in butchness that make me really uncomfortable, not just because in a lot of ways I’ll never measure up, but because in a lot of ways, I don’t want to. Because gender is often defined through others (the “a man is a man because of how a man responds to a woman” theory of gender), butchness often seems to become about what it’s not, and as such, often seems to engender a great deal of rhetoric that is covertly, if not overly, misogynist.

Being butch doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, mean I have to have certain interests (e.g., sports, which I largely don’t care for), skills (e.g., Patty changes lightbulbs and deals with tools because I am largely useless at these things), and social and sexual roles (my own being unnecessary to describe for the sake of this entry). And it certainly shouldn’t require me to be misogynist, which is something I see more and more gay women complaining about lately — butches that assert their butchness by denigrating femmes in all the same ways that women get denigrated by men in het culture.

But, if I reject the external assumptions of what a butch is, what’s left to define me as butch, at least on the days where I would consider myself such? The answer, is, simply, that I don’t know. This is striking, not, however, because of any need to self-define a role in the community of gay women, but because of what it says about gender on a wider scale. If there is nothing that is essential to butchness (although I’m sure a lot of us, probably even me, would say we know it when we see it), then there is, also arguably, nothing that is essential to masculinity.

And that’s when people in the heterosexual and heteronormative world, especially if they’re politicians it seems, start getting really scared. If masculinity or femininity — if butchness or femmeness — only exists in the eyes of others, how can you ever really be sure you are what you say you are? Is it too much to ask that people be that self-assured of their gender identity, whether it is consciously constructed or not? And is this challenge to the idea of gender certitude why the idea of gender as flexible and self-defined makes some people so angry? Or why trans and gender non-conforming people are so often in so much danger?

On this theme, I was struck particularly by Rachel Maddow’s segment last night on political truth. In passing in that segment (it’s towards the end, for those of you not wanting to watch the whole thing), she mentions the way that people try to insult her when these arguments about political truth come up — they say that she’s gay and that she looks like a man.

Now, I don’t know whether Maddow identifies as butch or not, but I do know that in her off-camera presentation she reads so much more masculinely to me than she does on camera (and effectively admits to same in the segment, although even more briefly). I imagine, based on my own experiences, that that’s a hard bargain to make every night. It’s a moment she doesn’t linger on in the piece, but it points the way to one clear thing: “looking like a man” is, apparently, for many people, one of the worst things a woman can do.

But for some women, that’s not an insult. Hell, it can be the best thing we’ve ever damn heard. Which gets me to the misconception about butchness — whether my butchness meets some butch standard or not — that aggravates me the most: butch isn’t ugly. It’s not a presentation that derives out of some failed femininity. It’s not this thing we do because we were bad at what we’re supposed to do. It’s just this thing we do.

On the list of preconceptions about butchness that come from both inside and outside the queer community, this one is, I recognize, seemingly trivial. But, using people’s self-definition as a slur is a nasty business, and defining butchness as ugliness is a special type of misogyny that is restrictive and vicious for all women, regardless of whether butchness is even anywhere on the map of their world.

it’s raining (and not snowing!) trash day

It’s trash day and I’m in the middle of moving offices. In the rain. Pray to your gods for me, as long as they’re not evil.

Last night I booked Patty and I for San Francisco. I’m super excited, as I haven’t been in about four years. SF, is, for me, one of those towns I feel like I could never live in, but that resonates for me pretty intensely emotionally. Anyone out there have any recommendations for gluten-free restaurants (particularly in Chinatown) or bakeries? Also, I need a rec for the high-end hot restaurant that we just have to try. Giant redwoods, yes? Never done it. Combined with a tour that drops us in Sausalito for an afternoon with a trip back on the ferry? Speak to me. This will be my first trip there that’s not for business or visiting elderly relatives.

But enough of where we’re going, since that’s not ’til August. Let’s talk (briefly, one more time) about where I’ve been. The Whedonistas launch was rad (here, I make the thoughtful face); the books were snapped up, and the reviews (all good) are starting to trickle in. So yay.

And despite various logistical difficulties and the “but wait, wasn’t it a Doctor Who convention?” factor, a few pictures of my cosplaying Arthur from Inception did happen and are floating around Facebook. Main lesson there: everything takes longer than you think, and despite Arthur being really the perfect cosplay for me in terms of him being slight and not super tall, I carry myself like I take up a lot of space, far more so than Arthur does. Ah well, always Jack at heart, I guess.

In news of the world, which, as usual, you should really be paying attention to, things in Libya are a heartbreaking bloody mess that’s absolutely a legacy of colonialism and the US’s willingness to make nice with terrible people if it provides even an illusion of guaranteed access to oil at prices we deem marginally tolerable. While CNN hasn’t been particularly good for what’s going on in the big picture, and their analysis is spotty and US centric, I can’t say enough about some of these phone interviews Anderson Cooper’s been doing. Really heartbreaking. As usual, remember this stuff isn’t happening in just one country. Protests continue throughout the region.

Meanwhile, things in the US are pretty intense too. Aside from the war on women with bills aimed not just at legalizing violence against abortion providers, but federal level bills that seek to eliminate funding for women’s health and family planning services, the biggest news story is arguably coming out of Wisconsin, where union issues and the right to collective bargaining are front and center.

I’ll be frank; I’m both a union member (SAG now, and I’m a former CWA member) and someone who hasn’t been following this story as closely as I should be. But the right to organize is critical even if modern unions don’t always function how I personally want them to.

So, one of my readers asked me to link to some stuff. This includes videos (and transcripts) as well as links to various roundups. This isn’t just Wisconsin anymore, either, but has spread to Florida, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

Let’s also not forget that New Zealand has had a terrible disaster. Here’s some words from someone there on what it’s like and how you can help.

Meanwhile, in the realm of people making stuff and how you can help, PodCastle is looking for voice actors. Additionally, while I’m not much for comics, if I were, I’d probably be a huge fan of (or making something like) Baritaria Historicals – The Assassination of King Valliet and The Birthday of the Princess. Check it out.

Oh, and that reminds me, both the empires in the book Kali and I are working on finally have names now, a fact which, while unimportant to my day to day life at this particular moment in time, helps me sleep better at night.

See you from the other side.

today’s acafen problems

These may amuse you, because even as I grapple with them, they are amusing me:

1. I realize that Jones is a ridiculously common surname, especially in the UK and especially in Wales. But generally when I’m writing academic articles, I mention the character’s whole name the first time I refer to them, and then refer to them by their last name throughout the rest of the article. Which is all well and good, until you’re writing an article about the Whoniverse that necessarily must mention both Harriet Jones and Ianto Jones and may mention Martha Jones, and I don’t really want to go traipsing about in scholarship being all familiar with these folks and calling them by their given names, but the constant use of their full names is remarkably awkward (although probably what I’m stuck with — I simply cannot refer to even a fictional prime minister by her first name). Meanwhile, on Twitter someone tells me that in Wales it is common to deal with the problem of Joneses by referring to them with reference to what they do. So, Jones the companion? Jones the … whatever it is we think Ianto does at Torchwood? Jones the PM? Somehow, that gets even more awkward in terms of construction, despite being infinitely more hilarious.

2. The Face of Boe presents a similar problem. Do I reference him continually as the Face of Boe, or do I, after the first mention, shorten that? And if so, do I shorten it to the Face or Boe? If I shorten it, I’m leaning towards the Face. That said, on Twitter, this provoked amusing levels of varied opinion and raised the issue of appropriate pronouns for the thing/person/tentacle monster/Face/Jack. Help me, Internets, help me!

3. Apparently, according to the Sherlock commentary tracks, everyone does this, but I keep writing (in a different article than the DW one mentioned above) “Sherlock and Watson” when I meant to write “Holmes and Watson.” This is an entirely aggravating up-hill battle that I shouldn’t even need to be having.

I have these sorts of problems a lot, and recently felt sort of embarrassed that on some of the HPA stuff I’ve been doing about gender and bullying I keep referring to Snape as Severus, as if he’s an old friend. But of course, for me, fictional characters are old friends, even if that’s inappropriate to disclose in most scholarly settings (of which the HPA isn’t one).

I even tried to determine if I get the most antsy about first name/last name issues around characters about whom I’ve done transformative work (fanfiction, for those of us who aren’t being delicate about it), but that really doesn’t seem to be it either (although, it’s surely the case regarding both Snape and Ianto Jones). I suppose that it’s just, as it often is in my writing, mostly about cadence.

For the other folks out there doing scholarly work, what weird problems do you have of this ilk? Because it surely can’t just be me. And I need some amusement while I stare at the 50 pages I need to write in the next few days while also moving my office.

the activism trap

Being an activist can really suck. Let me show you how.

I’m engaged with anti-bullying efforts for a bunch of reasons. This includes the fact that I was severely bullied as a kid, as a teen, during university, and periodically as an adult on the wonder that is the Internet; that I find working on anti-bullying initiatives healing; and that I believe my way with words and openness can help the cause.

But at core, the reason I want to stop bullying is so that people who are awesome have the space to do awesome stuff. It’s hard to make art, do research, be an awesome friend, teach kids, help animals, strive for political reform, provide awesome customer service or do whatever it is you do if you’re being bullied and recovering from being bullied. The best reason to support anti-bullying is so that more people have the space to be the most awesome versions of themselves they can be.

The thing is, when I spend all my time talking about stopping bullying or anti-gay harassment or sexism or transphobia or whatever thing I feel its critical to speak out about (and feel capable of speaking out about — there are lots of issues I support where it’s probably better for me to let other people speak while I keep learning), I don’t have time to do my awesome stuff. And then it’s a little bit like the bullies have won, because they’ve forced me to abandon my agenda and will for the purpose of responding to their actions and arguments.

This really sucks. And it’s emblematic of something I think most activists face at various times. From feminist advocacy to fighting poverty to stopping racism — when you have to be an activist all the time, it’s easy to lose the benefits you’re supposed to enjoy from that activism helping to make the world better. Balance is key, but, in a cruel world, pretty hard to come by.

Which is why I really want to stop talking about the Buffy thing (here, have a summary from someone who was there and isn’t me), because I feel that particular activism trap closing in around me. But, that said, there are a few remaining things I do want to address.

First, thank you for keeping it civil. While a few comments here have made me angry or upset, and while I disagree with some opinions I’ve seen expressed, no one really crossed the line in discourse here. That’s awesome, and I totally appreciate it.

Next, about that argument where you say, “Well, I want to take this person at her word, but she sounds awfully emotional, and therefore I can’t.” — That argument is a misogynistic rhetorical device that often gets pulled out against women who are upset and not against men who are angry. It’s happened in various branches of this discussion (which is now happening across Whedonesque, several blogs, and Livejournal). It’s an effective rhetorical device due to the way we treat women in this world, but it’s not actually good argumentation. It’s also angry-making. Please knock it off.

Additionally, I am really trying to avoid making a post about the whole “toughen up” thing and why it’s so problematic, as, again, I don’t want to get sucked into the negative self-impact activism trap I described in the opening of this post. However, it’s important to me that you understand the following things: First, there is no universal standard of appropriate emotional feeling; just as the Goblin King asks Sarah in Labyrinth what her basis of comparison is when she declares, “It’s not fair,” I would ask you what yours is when you say someone is over-sensitive. Second, it is my sensitivity that allows me to do what I do for a living — writing stories, examining pop-culture, performing, and eroding the artificial boundaries we’ve set up between scholarship and sentimentality. (A theoretical excess of) feeling, just like anything else, can be a tool, an advantage, and a weapon; it’s certainly one of mine. Trying to stamp it out or devalue it, isn’t just nasty, it’s illogical.

Finally, stop with the “free speech” and “censorship” noises. I’m a trained journalist. I give to the ACLU, and I am, like Rachel Maddow, an absolutist about free speech in the legal sense. Wanting to have as little government regulation of speech as possible is not, however, inconsistent with wanting people not to be egregious to each other; encouraging people to be civil in public; telling people to knock it off when I’m offended; and using the tools I have available to me to manage speech in the online venues that I host. Arguments to the contrary are disingenuous, and beyond this statement, I will not engage them.

What would I love to see going forward? I’d love to see more discussion, in general. Just hearing all these viewpoints (which are not split into two camps, but run a wide gamut) is, I think, valuable to everyone. I’d also like to see, as Chip from Two-minute Time Lord and I discussed late one night at this year’s Gally, con panels that have historically been about fans behaving badly branch out into discussions of how we can make things better.

I would also like to see discussion from activists of all stripes talk on how we can work hard, avoid burnout, and reap the benefits of the change we are trying to create in the world while continuing to be activists. It’s hard stuff, and we’re all still learning.

Now I’m going back to explaining why Sarah Jane Smith’s status as a journalist proves that the Doctor is real.