Racheline Maltese

queer rage and the grocery toll

I shop at Whole Foods not infrequently, and while I shouldn’t have to justify this to you, I suspect I’ll be asked to, so let’s get it out of the way: I have celiac disease, and, for better or worse, I eat some packaged products; this means that there are limited places where I can acquire many of those products, and some are only available at Whole Foods. It’s also convenient one of my work spaces.

Unfortunately, getting in to the Whole Foods generally means my passing a gauntlet of people asking if I have a moment for gay rights. They’re raising money for HRC (the Human Rights Campaign), and I find the whole thing extremely angry-making.

First things first: My gay dollars don’t go to HRC anymore. Why? Because HRC can’t even stand to put its cause in its name. Because HRC has repeatedly backed off on defending the rights of trans people for the sake of expediency. Because HRC represents assimilation that is neither relevant to nor possible for me. Because HRC seems to be actively uninterested, not just in the issues trans people face, but also in the issues that women and people of color in the queer community face. There are better places for my gay dollars (and we’ll talk about what they are later).

Next: I resent a social interaction in which I am effectively framed as uncaring and bigoted to a group of which I am actually a member because I don’t feel like engaging with street solicitation. For me, this is just an irritation that I may well be blowing out of proportion. For a queer person in the closet (and yes, they exist, even in New York), it’s particularly and uniquely cruel.

Additionally: I dislike the implication that because I’m shopping somewhere like Whole Foods (and, again, in my case for medically necessary reasons that I shouldn’t have to justify to you), I’m obligated to have a discretionary funds for whatever cause has camped out in front of their door.

Obviously, I want people to give dollars to queer-rights (and other) causes. And, I have a significant amount of empathy for people that do that street solicitation job, having once worked for NYPRG for a couple of miserable weeks when I was 17. But between my feelings about HRC, my dislike of the guilt thing, and my genuine concern for people not prepared to be out as queer or queer rights supporters, the whole thing just ticks me off. And that’s before we get to some of the tactics the solicitors use to get attention (don’t tell me to smile, don’t flirt with me, don’t block my path — how dare you? — it’s predatory and nasty and it’s targeted at women far more than men).

Mostly though, I’m just really sick of doing the “I gave at the office,” dance (normally I give from home, but I have remembered to do various donations at work, so hey).

Queer rights organizations I support and who don’t put me in an awkward, crappy position when I’m trying to buy food I can eat? Lambda Legal and The Trevor Project are at the top of the list. I’ve also given money to DADT-repeal groups and equal marriage rights groups in multiple states, as well as local, NYC LGBTQ community organizations.

Which brings me to another part of why I’m angry that has nothing to do with Whole Foods and HRC: I spend a lot of money fighting for my rights. I shouldn’t have to do that.

There are a lot of basic fiscal costs to being gay that have been well-documented including those of taxes, inheritance and benefit costs due to a lack of federal marriage equality; the financial stresses related to employment and housing discrimination (which is perfectly legal in most states); medical costs related to medical professionals who are unhelpful or unfamiliar with dealing with LGBT clients (and let’s not even talk about the costs of medical transition for those seeking that — it’s a fortune and almost never insurance covered). And, in case it’s not obvious, these financial stresses impact the different subgroups within the LGBT community differently, making these issues even more complex and complex and critical. So are we clear now that no matter how much people talk about affluent queer people because of the DINK theory (dual-income no kids), that the fact remains being gay costs money and actually leaves many queer people (and particularly trans people) struggling with poverty?

And if we’re going to talk about costs, let’s not forget these damn activism dollars! I’m glad to have the extra income to put money into these causes. But I hate it. I hate having to do it. I hate how often I find myself tossing another 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 dollars at something or else there will be no counter-voice to more commercials on TV about how I’m a terrible person or actively working to destroy a world I don’t even understand (I grew up in NYC, among artists, I don’t even understand the things I’m supposedly dangerous to). When I give money it shouldn’t have to be about survival and with this sense that it’s never enough (and don’t get me started on having to give money to politicians who don’t actively support or admit to supporting my equal rights because the alternatives are just so awful).

Look, I’m not a big fan of the “born this way” theory, possibly because I’m so queer in terms of my attractions and gender that it’s hard to know what “this way” means; and I sure as hell shouldn’t have to be medicalized (and “born this way” is medicalizing. We never talk about how straight people are “born like that” — they’re normal, I come with celiac disease and gayness. Not cool!) to have my rights. But I gotta tell you, run the numbers, and then tell me why anyone would say, “Hey, I’ll be gay! I can live a carefree life of expensive vacations and fabulous houses!”

Yeah, they wouldn’t, and that’s despite the shiny happy picture of affluent normative queerness that HRC wants me to sponsor when I’m trying to buy groceries.

The Duchess and being mercenary by the year

I have just watched, in the name of research, both Gosford Park and The Duchess. Even as they bracket the time periods which Kali and I are smushing together for the novel, they both speak to it in that they are stories where no one is happy and everyone is constrained by matters of class and gender.

While Gosford Park is, by far, the better film (and I will readily admit I could watch Clive Owen read the phone book), it was The Duchess, which is deeply flawed in its structure (is it about the illicit romance between Georgiana and Gray or is it about the home situation between the Duke, Georgiana and Bess? — the film chooses one, and then when that seems unlikely to be as marketable or as easily a subject for a PG-13 rating, it chooses the other and becomes a bodice ripper before reverting back to its original trajectory), that is sticking with me in a way that is, actually, quite a bit miserable.

This sense of misery is, of course, ludicrous. A film about a vastly confining, misogynistic world I’m perfectly familiar with? Why should I find that troubling, when I not only know a bazillion versions of that story, but am, in fact, often engaged in creating similar stories.

But I suppose this is what is successful about The Duchess and, I suspect, why it was so poorly reviewed — not because of its structural flaws, but because it renders more successfully than many other films the confinement of the women of its story. For the tragedy is not that Georgiana is treated terribly by a man she loves, but merely by a man she is giddy to be chosen by as a child.

It’s the film’s rendering of her feeling of it being some sort of coup that she’s chosen, based essentially on no specificity of her own, to be a Duchess that makes it so effective. Even when I didn’t care about the affair with Gray or lost interest in the not-as-well-rendered-as-it-could-have-been friendship with Bess, I remembered that — those first 15 minutes of the film, that made me so shamefully curious, as I often am, of what it would be like to live in a world where one has but a single, clear, and universally accepted purpose regardless of what you get up to instead.

And yes, yes, I know it would be dreadful. Please don’t give me that obvious lecture. Obviously, it would be stifling. Obviously, I also wouldn’t even be of that class. But I just can’t help but wonder what it would like to have goals simple, clearly-articulated, and pre-chosen for me.

To be honest, I think a lot of women wonder about this; I think we’re often subjected to the suggestion that it’s reasonable for us to doubt the goodness of choice in our lives. And while that suggestion is almost always malicious in its intents, I don’t think the questions the suggestion leads us to ask are inherently bad. I mean, women in Switzerland didn’t even have the national right to vote until the 1970s; the world for my sex can, I think, always be different, in really terrifying ways, in a heartbeat. If it couldn’t, we wouldn’t have all these end of the world films in which women are some sort of chattel within a week and a half of civilization’s breakdowns.

Look, I’m just so fucking scared of medical stuff, you know? And surely there were young women terrified of the idea of childbirth in 1795 and did they just think, they would endure whatever physical miseries were involved with the process so they could have an heir, get a nice check or the house or the piece of jewelry and then be left to their own devices?

I just wonder what it’s like to be so mercenary with one’s body, not one hour or evening at a time (a mode not difficult for modern people to understand, I don’t think), but one year at a time — I mean, a year is an eternity in our digitalness, isn’t it? I have a very good imagination, but that one (marital relations and childbirth out of duty and for the ~~paycheck~~ gift) is truly beyond me, which may be, in fact, why I generally find it easier to write men, at least when working out of the here and now; it is easier for me to pretend that their choices and joys might be things I’m more likely to understand.

send mongeese immediately

I am not, in general, afraid of snakes. An old roommate of mine had a ball python that an ex of hers had left her and I used to have to feed it because the whole mouse thing freaked her out. Snakes are cool.

I do, however, have some particular primal fear of cobras from watching Rikki Tikki Tavi too many times as a little kid. Of course, being afraid of cobras is perfectly reasonable except for the part that there aren’t any in North America (other than zoos) so who really cares, even if I did have a lot of nightmares about them as a child.

So in short: snakes good; cobras bad. Not really something I think about that much.

Until I call Patty in Gujarat and she’s like “So hey, I was sitting by the trench talking to Judy and the older woman who works in my trench started screaming and I was like ‘what what?’ and then I turned around and there was a snake slithering behind me and she threw dirt on it and then it went over by some trees. But it’s the trees where people take their tea breaks so everyone was really freaked. But they found it and killed it later and hung it in the tree.”

So, I, of course, inquired as to the type of snake. Something poisonous, presumably.

Patty said it was either a cobra or not a cobra, but because she doesn’t speak the local language and her Hindi is pretty basic still and it’s hard to translate between snake types she wasn’t really sure. But she was, however, pretty sure cobra-status was discussed, she just wasn’t sure if it was or it wasn’t. So I asked her, based on my Rikki Tikki Tavi expertise, about various markings on it.

“Well, first it was behind me, and then it was dead, so I didn’t look that closely.”

By the time I next speak to Patty this will probably have ceased to be interesting to her. I, however, will be talking about it FOREVER.

SNAKE NEAR TRENCHES. COBRA STATUS UNKNOWN. DEAD AND DISPLAYED IN TREE.

Also, is it mongooses or mongeese?

true, but not for you

Since posting a blurb about A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the SurveyFail book, finally coming out, I’ve found myself circling back to the whole thing quite a bit. The most obvious reason for this is that I was definitely involved in that disaster.

While most of the Livejournal-based threads are locked now, I know there are screencaps around and there are certainly a number of posts that eloquently and summarize what happened in extensive detail (I’ve tried to link to some of the best throughout this post). I, personally, recall taking the authors to task on LJ for a number of things, including their use of the word tranny and, what seemed to me, their lack of even the most basic understanding of the sex industry — not as good or bad, but as something driven, like most everything else, by the engine of marketing.

All that, though, is ancient history. What isn’t ancient history is the book that has resulted from that mess and the blurb materials that have been floating around (you can see them on the product description at Amazon). If you have the inclination to read through them all you’ll note that, with the exception of the woman they got to write the book’s intro (a likely necessary marketing gesture in itself) all of the blurbs come from men. Sadly, in the realm of science, even (or particularly) science poorly engaged in, this is hardly surprising.

What jumps out at me the most, however, is one particular assertion in these promotional materials that, “Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women’s sexual interests are plastic and change frequently.”

It’s hardly the only “Wait, WHAT????” moment in those promotional materials (“Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men” is another real winner that seems to suggest that people would or should think that gay men are more like women than men; it’s snuck in, in the sentence structure, and it’s misogynist and homophobic), but it’s the one I feel like focusing on today.

While this supposed finding regarding a perceived lack of fixedness in female desire is, in some ways, hardly new (consider, for example the common assertion that queer women on average come out later in life than queer men, indicating to some that there is a change or lack of solidity in female desire taking place there), I’m going to hazard a guess that in the text in question it remains just as unexamined as ever (is this something innate to women or a result of societal pressure that makes it harder for women to own their desire-based identities in a consistent manner?).

But, more than that, in the broader context of the book’s promotional materials and the experience I had and witnessed in the research the authors attempted to engage in on LJ, this quote seems to be saying that women in their desire are mutable not for their own sakes, but for the pleasure and convenience of men. Creepy, ne? Of course, I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect very few people who regularly read this blog or who had experience with the authors would be willing to take that bet.

Now, I’ll admit, that I probably do need to accept more intrinsically that these sorts of books — good or bad — are never, ever going to be about me. I’m not most people. Or most women. I fit into the boxes badly. And that’s before you even get to the queer sexuality and gender. I mean, I’m left handed! Do you know how many studies that disqualifies a person from? To be frank, sometimes it makes me feel more than a little bit unreal.

But the fact (fact: solid, precise, unchanging) also remains that I’m a malleable (malleable: inconsistent and therefore fact-free; haven’t you heard? women are mostly made of lies) person. I am pliable. I am shifting sands and a thousand faces. Mainly because it seems like a bit of a crap deal to me to be one person all the time. And I’ve never been that way for anyone’s pleasure but mine.

It’s one of those things I have to explain more than I’d like: just because I have sex, doesn’t mean I will have sex with you; just because I am water, doesn’t mean I am fluid for you. It’s so basic. I kind of can’t believe — whether I’m a boy or a girl or normal or not — that the world is still full of books (and people) that don’t get that one.

And while we’re on things that are just wildly untrue, can I just note that I have never been cautious like a detective agency? I’ve been reckless like one, though, once or twice. Sherlock fandom, would you care to weigh in on metaphors of detection and sexuality? I bet it would be awesome!

But anyway, what can you do? I, at least, can be entertained by the over forty people who tagged the book with mansplaining, among a couple of dozen (and counting) other unflattering tags.

creepy, icy trash day

It’s finally not snowing or icing in New York, but apparently there’s a storm covering most of the country. Meanwhile, the piles of snow here some of which are several feet high, keep melting and refreezing, making the city look like another world filled with strange flows of melted quartz.

Meanwhile, I had, hands down, the two most terrifying dreams I’ve ever had last night. I’m only starting to be not shaken now, about six hours after I woke up. This is a lesson for you writers: don’t develop magical systems right before bedtime (this is related to a lesson for actors: if you’re playing the Lady in the Scottish play, don’t work on your lines right before sleep or you will dream of murder) or you may have distressing encounters with the powerful, unseen and angry in your dreams. Wow. I can’t really overstate this one.

Speaking of other nightmare items: SurveyFail rides again. For those of you in fandom or who do fan studies, I assume the sentence, “Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex” from the book’s press materials strikes you as it does me: which is, “Yes, but no. In fact, really, really no. Aegjskgjsdfklsg;jgkslg!!!!” Have fun with that. And, fair warning, the part I’ve quoted is, horrifically, perhaps the least offensive of many of their “conclusions.”

I am deep, deep into my Sherlock analysis right now and am having scads of fun with it. You don’t get to have scads of fun with my data yet, but here, have a piece of fanfiction I really love: The Whore of Babylon was a Perfectly Nice Girl. Not recommended for those who don’t get the “Yes, but no” factor in the above paragraph or are purists about the platonic friendship between Sherlock and Watson.

For those of you who don’t generally watch MSNBC, which I know is viewed (mostly appropriately) as part of the newstaintment phenomenon, I just want to pause and recommend the work Rachel Maddow‘s been doing the last couple of days on the targeting of journalists in Egypt. She’s been doing a spectacular job on rounding up the details and explaining why it matters; it’s not just US journalists at risk, and it’s not just Western journalists at risk (no matter what CNN keeps saying). It’s ALL journalists. And bloggers. If you want to learn more about the risks journalists face around the world please visit the Committee to Protect Journalists. No matter what you may think of the current state of the art and science of reporting the news here in the US or elsewhere, the ability of journalists to do their work and survive doing their work, is critical to personal freedom and government accountability everywhere.

Changing gears to the department of crowdfunding: The Witches of Lublin is a radio drama created and performed by a lot of fantastic people, several of whom are friends. It’s currently raising funds to finish production and promotion. It’s a fantastic, feminist story with haunting music and is very much worth your attention. I had the pleasure of participating in one of the early readings of it and it’s been fun to watch it evolve. (If I make the the random Neil Gaiman noise at you, will that make you click? Seriously, Neil’s involved).

On a final, fairly random personal note, it seems like I may get to chop all my hair off for Gallifrey One after all. This is a long, somewhat complex, story, but I’m maddeningly shaggy right now. By Tuesday I find out if I get to hit the barber before I hit LA. We shall see. It’s a mixed thing, either way.

today’s trivial observation

You know that conversation that I assume most people have had with their parents at some point that goes like this?

Parent: Did you do that thing?
You: Yes.
Parent: No, really.
You: I did the thing.
Parent: I seriously don’t think you get how important the thing is.
You: I did the thing! Look, I’ll show you the evidence of my having done the thing!
Parent: Don’t act like that. I trust you, but the thing is really important. So did you do the thing yet?
You: OHMYGOD I DID THE THING LAST WEEK!

Sometimes, I feel like the entire Internet is a version of that amongst peers:

You: A statement about a thing.
The Internet: Well, what you failed to consider is exactly the thing you just said.
You: Yeah, I said the thing that you just said back to me. So thing!
The Internet: Because I really don’t think you understand the thing you said that I’m retelling you because you totally didn’t actually just say the thing, because the thing is only said when I say the thing.
You: Okaaaaaaay. Yes, the thing! I said! The thing I said which then you said, that started this thing!
The Internet: No really, you’re not getting the thing!
You: Wait… I said the thing and you said the thing! So we agree on the thing! Let us dance! Frabjous thing day!
The Internet: Thingthing somethingsomethingthing noyoudidn’t thing
You: But the thing… Oh, fuck it….

You know? Tell me I’m not the only one.

(And because it’s inevitable: No, it’s not you. Or rather, yes, it is you. Because sometimes it’s all of us).

all things imperfect and poisonous

Books are dangerous. And that’s a good thing.

I talk a lot about how stories have shaped me, how they have, in their way, saved my life at various times. It’s entirely true, of course, but it’s also a simplification and so much prettier than the truth. Increasingly, I also think it’s a disservice to stories — stories I love and stories I want to tell. We’ll get to why later.

Right now I want you to know that stories have saved my life.

They’ve also made me cry and made me angry. They’ve made me feel alone, ugly, scared and victimized. They’ve made me ill. They’ve made me fall in love. They’ve taught me how to seduce, how to lie, and oddly (and this is totally true) how to ride a horse. They’ve made me victorious and taught me a thousand names for my otherness.

Stories aren’t comfortable — they are what we can be, what we were, what aren’t, what we desire and what we fear. And it should, I think, go without saying that not all stories are for all people and not all people have the same tastes and needs in stories.

Despite the large amount of fan and pro work I’ve done related to the Harry Potter series, I’m not a huge fan of YA. I don’t usually read it unless pressed by those close to me (who are, as a rule, fans). So I don’t really have an obvious personal investment in the controversy regarding Bitch Magazine‘s list of 100 YA Books for the Feminist Reader. I haven’t read most of the books on the list, and I probably never will.

But how the list got put together and how it seems the list got changed, is deeply troubling to me.

Stories, like words, have a great and terrible power. Some of us want stories that show the world at its best and some of it at the worst of its worst. And both of those types of stories, among hundreds of others, can provide the same value and feed the same personal, individual need for various individuals. It troubles me, deeply, that it seems (again, remember, this is Not My Area of Expertise) Bitch decided that some stories that show the way the world can hurt, simply can’t help. Anyone. At all. Ever. Because for some people, not all people, they were harmful.

Here’s the thing. I write stories about terrible people. Kali and I write stories about terrible people in terrible worlds. We write about colonialism. And racism. And there is misogyny in the plot of the book we’re working on so horrible sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night. And we write that stuff not because we advocate it, nor because we want to provide a transparent object lesson in its horrors. We write that stuff because we have a story to tell, not about a fantasy world you will long to live in, but one which, like historical reenactments, seems beautiful until you realize how if you were there it would chew you up and spit you out and grind you into the dirt and never respect you for a second. It is the world not as we wish it were, but as we believe it already unfortunately is.

So our thing? That’s not going to be a story for everyone. And, to be frank, I think we might be concerned if it were. But it’s something we find value in working on from our own personal intersectionalities of privileges, marginalizations and experiences — stuff that we certainly have overlap on in some regards, and stuff which we totally don’t in others.

I ultimately can’t tell you if the books that first were and then weren’t on the Bitch list are good or bad books. Or take, as opposed to show, views that can only cause harm. What I can tell you, is that orthodoxy when approaching the complex intersections of art and social justice, can be really harmful to both art and social justice.

I love, for example, C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. Aside from a fabulously constructed narrative that can’t but appeal to a Cold War baby like me, it has helped me internally address female power, concepts of ownership and loyalty, and the consequences of being smarter than the average bear. It’s also a book that has a lot of profoundly ugly moments surrounding consent and sexuality, and it’s not a book that could have told its stories without those moments.

Too, I think of the film of V for Vendetta. While flawed, I find its rendering of Valerie’s Letter near perfection, and, as such, it is profoundly important to me as a queer person. Unfortunately, that sequence is almost impossible for me to watch. Due to my own medicalized childhood, I find it disturbing and personal to the point of inducing a feeling of nausea in me. It hurts me. It harms me. And I value it desperately.

Clive Barker’s Imajica also comes to mind. It is a book I’ve read a dozen times, but also once threw across the room because a private moment in it so reminded me of a private moment in my own life. It is a talisman to me, this story of a man who has forgotten who he is and a third-gendered creature whose true form can only be seen when observed desired by a third party. But, it’s also a book with a troublesome, at best, central Magical Negro trope (that one may or may not consider to be somewhat mitigated by the author’s personal life) and a pretty significant problem with women.

And then, of course, there’s Ender’s Game and everyone who grew up taking solace in it and then had to confront the reality of the beliefs of the man who created it.

Beautiful stories can be told by ugly people. Ugly stories can teach us beautiful things. And everyone’s mileage varies on everything, all the time. I’m someone who likes stories that jab their thumbs into my wounds; all readers certainly aren’t like that or don’t even necessarily have the luxiry of being like that.

But stories, from all sorts of sources and with all sorts of flaws, have saved my life. Sometimes by teaching me I was a fool. Sometimes by teaching me I was wrong. Sometimes by opening my wounds to get the shrapnel out. Sometimes by disappointing me. Or by shaming me. Sometimes, just by reminding me that I’m still here.

Stories that hurt us, and hurt our peers and groupings and compatriots, in ways that are not useful, in ways that are ignorant, cruel, exploitative, hateful, mean-spirited and just plain careless or lazy, are worth speaking out about, always. But I think it is so important that we remember not only that poison comes, unfortunately, in many forms, but also that some poisons have worth for some people in some circumstances precisely because they are poisonous; someone exactly like you may actually feel totally differently about a story you love or a story you hate or a story that caused you pain to no use or fairness.

This is a post, regrettably but necessarily, without a neat conclusion. It can’t have one, because this is not an argument about what Bitch Magazine should or should not have done or an act of advocating for some idea of what is and isn’t appropriate in either responding to art or in conducting social justice. It can’t be, because I am not only speaking solely for myself, but against the perils of orthodoxy.

Stories are complicated. So are people. Maybe that’s because they’re made up of each other.

news selection, narrative, fiction and non-

I have started, stopped, and restarted this post four times. Basically, all I’m trying to do is talk about Egypt, media, propaganda (as a value-neutral political marketing word), and news selection, about how history isn’t just written by the victors but by the editors.

The problem is that I’m exhausted. That the news hasn’t slowed down enough for me to eat a meal away from a screen (honestly, sometimes as many as three live screens) since the Giffords shooting. And I’ve been on the night-shift for the last week, covering Asia and Europe. Then on Friday at about 3am, I spoke to Patty in India who has no news access there, to tell her Egypt was falling.

Fundamentally, the unifying nature of all the stuff I do is that I’m interested in how we tell stories, whether they be fiction or not fiction. I’m interested in (although not exclusively) the space between what we think we’re talking about and what statistical examination of what we’re saying actually shows we’re talking about. When we talk about the news, we call this agenda-setting theory, although many of its basic principles can also be applied to fiction. Time, however, has a much different function when dealing with fiction over non-fiction because fiction is generally happening in a forever-past that is also a constant-now and non-fiction is generally happening linearly and currently.

When you choose what news to read to garner information about the situation in Egypt, you are performing an editorial function on behalf of yourself and engaging in news selection. When it’s easier for you (if you’re in the US) to access The New York Times vs. Al Jezeera, or you are leery of accessing Al Jezeera because of its association in the US with terrorism (which, if you’ve ever left Al Jezeera on for 24 hours like some of us also do CNN, you’d realize is essentially absurdist), you are being impacted by news selection activities from others that ultimately help dictate your own news selection choices. When you read an article or watch a TV report, no matter where it is, there has been news selection that impacts both the language used in that report, the prominence of the placement of that report in the media in question, and the decision to make that report available at all.

News selection is the central manipulation (again, used here, like propaganda above, as a neutral term) through which we understand the world. But, as viewer, we mostly don’t feel like this is the case. What we don’t see as or don’t personally select, we don’t consider; it is often as if the material we do not select never even existed to be chosen or not. So there is the news we see, and there is nothing. Even if we don’t trust the news we see, our ability to be mindful about what didn’t make the selection available to our personal experience is often incredibly low. That’s why agenda-setting theory is so compelling. That’s why the agenda matters so much.

Fiction can be considered in all the same ways (and on the many more detailed levels that also come into play with news-related agenda setting theory, but I’m not sure I’m getting there in this post). Story selection happens much the same way and is conducted by you, by writers, by editors and then by the journalists and pundits of fiction: critics and fan communities. How much screen time did Jack and Ianto’s relationship get in the first two seasons of Torchwood if we count it scene by scene or statement by statement? How much screen time does it get in fandom if I look at the number of fanfiction stories self-described as focusing on that part of the shows narrative? What does the audience member ultimately see? What was in the story or what they were told (or participated in telling others) was in the story?

It works with anything really. Compare how many statements in the Harry Potter books were meant to showcase that bullying was bad to how many statements showed characters you were supposed to view as heroes engaging in bullying without repercussion (another fun one there is to look at what the films say about tragedy vs. the books solely due to character age in the text vs. casting ages in the films).

Or, take a look at Buffy and Angel, do a gut check, and then see if that matches up with the focus the shows ultimately put on life vs. death. The message you extrapolated might be different than the one you were actively being told depending on where else you were getting information-selection on the two series.

The many iterations of Sherlock Holmes, particularly that of the recent BBC series, Sherlock, provides us with a particularly fun one if we look at, on a scene-by-scene or statement-by-statement bass, statements about character’s sexualities and compare those frequencies and shares to what goes on in fandom. Are the canonical characters that surround Sherlock in the narrative (that is, his fictional audience) queering him? Or is that solely an act of fandom (his non-fictional audience)?

News-selection and salience when compared to audience responses can have predictive qualities regarding media influence. They can also highlight, especially with regard to fiction, what are effectively optical illusions of the soul.

The place where this stuff can, and often does, intersect the most vividly is when we have news rounded up, tightly edited and set to music. It’s like the montages of those who died in the last year we get at the Academy Awards or in that “a look back at the year that was” stuff that airs non-stop between December 27 and January 3 because there’s usually little new news in the world when so many people (at least people with the power and resources to agenda set) are on holiday. These things are news selection on top of news selection: a greatest hits of the agenda, framed in narrative styles we more closely associate with fiction.

Mostly, I think of these things as interstitials and station promos that make me tear up if I watch CNN when I’m feeling particularly fragile. But thanks to the Internet, cheap and relatively easy video editing, and a world in which huge numbers of people outside of agenda-setting institutions (unless you choose to count the Internet as one), finally, have the power to be agenda setters for more than themselves, Tamer Shaaban has made this video about the current situation in Egypt. It is exceptional in its use of image, music, rhythm, and framing to connect the viewer not just to the events, but to a selected emotional state about those events. When I first saw it yesterday, it had 10,000 views. At the time of this posting? Nearly 200,000.

History is a type of story we tell. And it is told not just by the victors, and not just by writers, but also by editors. In the world as it is now, we are all, in one way or another, increasingly capable of being those editors, if only for ourselves. And that experience of the world, and our increased of ability to share that experience of the world, both helps us understand stories as they happen, but can, in fact, also help obscure them.

I can, for example, try to aggregate the facts that seem pressing and relevant to me from multiple broadcasts — which is one form of news-selection — or I can tell you that sometimes it seems that history (by which, of course, I also mean narrative, and mythology) focuses to a point always in certain places, like Berlin. And, this week, like Alexandria.

It’s all true, in its way. But is any of it accurate? If news is arguably a showcase for the public events of the human heart, are facts truly certain or viable? And if fiction showcases the truth of our collective longings, what matters more — the stories we’ve actually seen or the ones we’re convinced we did because they were what we wanted, so much and more than anything?

practical intersectionality

In the course of a hellish commute today, I took part of my journey by taxi. My cab driver was from Guinea and we spoke at length about Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Israel and the legacies of colonialism. For a stressful (and expensive) morning, this was pleasant, engaging and interesting. We ranged over other topics too — how much the weather in New York has sucked this winter, his son’s student loans, working in the media, where we had traveled, and why it costs more to fly to Senegal from the US than to Australia, despite the flight to Senegal taking half the time.

And then, somewhere, in the ranging of topics, he says to me that when in Morocco last year he met a man from Saudi Arabia who said he would not travel to the US because “Men marry men there; even the animals do not do that.”

The animals, of course, actually do, do that, even if they are short on wedding planners. But it’s the classic now what? moment, isn’t it? I had no way of knowing whether or not he approved of the Saudi man’s perspective. And I had no way of knowing if he did, whether it was a topic he was open to discussion about. And I had no idea what my obligations were both in assumption and in action — it’s extra tricky in a cab, particularly, because not only am I a guest (albeit a paying one) in someone else’s space, I’m in a car with a stranger, and that’s not necessarily the best time to be outing oneself or fighting for social justice (Seriously, years ago, I demanded a cab pull over and let me out after the cab driver issued a string of slurs about people of Chinese descent after trying to hit a pedestrian crossing the street legally in front of us. The cab driver then locked the doors from his control panel, wouldn’t stop the vehicle for me to get out, and started threatening me until I held up my mobile and said I was calling the cops; the experience was sincerely frightening and I am now very reluctant to try to change anyone’s mind from the backseat of a taxi).

So I said, effectively nothing. I nodded and went Mmmmhmmmm.

The cab driver continued, “I said, yes, they do there, and he said he would not go.”

And then he changed the topic because I clearly had nothing to say.

And I still don’t know if I failed because I didn’t press for an answer and abandon the vehicle due anti-gay sentiment from the driver, or if I failed because I assumed a threat where there was only an ally. I just know that I’m pretty sure that I messed this one up somewhere along the way, and that even the correct choice (which may or may not have event existed) might not have been the wise one.

It’s intersectionality and ambiguity like this that makes my heart hurt. And it’s awful when the only consolation is that this is the sort of stuff that, ultimately, none of us are really that good at. I’d like to be better at it, but I’m not even sure if, in scenarios like this, it’s possible to be.

there’s so much snow we can’t even see the trash day

Trash day is going to be kind of serious today, because I’ve got some stuff on my mind, but I hope it will keep you engaged anyway, and there’s some fun stuff too, including updates on a few older stories here towards the end of this post.

You need to be watching the Middle East right now. First, there was Tunisia. Now, there’s Egypt, which has just shut down all Internet traffic in and out of the country. There are also large protests in Yemen and additional reports of smaller protests in Libya and Lebanon.

The thing about events like these is that they tend happen very, very quickly even if the precipitating conditions are generally long-standing. If protests like this succeed in their immediate goals (i.e., regime change) that also tends happens very quickly. However, you should be careful not mistake the volume of information flying about these things for that happening-very-quickly factor. Journalists struggle with this. Audiences struggle with this, and folks like me who do media and news analysis for fun and profit (seriously, I have professional training and experience this stuff; I’m not just talking about random blogging) struggle with this. Combine that with the disparity between the nature of information flow where the events are happening and where you’re watching from, and it’s hard to know what’s going on, especially now that Egypt is effectively an Internet black-out zone; SMS and mobile service also seems to be out or on its way out, and there are additional reports of land-lines starting to go down. An hour after I first posted this I am now seeing reports of the government cutting water and electricity throughout multiple cities.

Next, LGBT people are still being murdered in Uganda, whether that “Kill the Gays” bill goes through or not. And part of the reason they’re being murdered? US religious activists who, unable to engage their agenda fully in the US, went to Africa to see what they could do there instead. When I wrote about this on my LJ, one of my fandom friends linked me to a fund that supports an LGBT-inclusive church in Uganda that’s run by a Ugandan minister. If you have other suggestions for how people not in Uganda can help address this mess, please leave a comment.

Now that we’ve gotten that stuff out of the way, it’s worth noting that I don’t think of myself as a political or activist blogger, even though I certainly blog about both to varying degrees here and on LJ. But I do think that Sady Doyle has a lot of interesting things to say about the realm of nasty reactions from readers at her Tumblr. I don’t get quite the same types of hate as Doyle does, and I very much suspect I get it from a different audience (although that may have more to do with my origins on LJ, which has a different male/female ratio than some other spaces on the Internet, than anything I actually do or write about), but Doyle nails some trends in nastygrams directed at female-types on the Internet with this:

… I generally think it’s the same for every woman who receives a massive amount of blowback. Either you seem too sure of your own worthiness as a person, or you seem too sure of your opinions; either way, something has gone wrong, because you don’t hate yourself, and we need to fix that for you.

I think anything I have to add to that is probably superfluous today.

Okay, fun things!

It wouldn’t be trash day without linking to something on Kickstarter. This project is already fully funded, but there’s still time to get in on it and get your very own math dice, which I personally think should be a featured element in any sort of Doctor Who table-top role-playing game ever.

And, speaking of Doctor Who, as we do around here: Ride-in Daleks!. Kids only, and alas, I have no kids to put inside Daleks. Maybe the cats though…. would that be wrong?

And we have some updates on some previous stories:

I’m going to get to eat cups! But yet on a more serious, and continuingly relevant, note there was a slight bit of dramarama in comments on that project over on Kickstarter as the deadline neared. Someone showed up to say that the people running the project were bad people, provided no details, and offered an analogy that may or may not have had direct relevance to whatever accusations they were trying to make. I don’t know the Jelloware people, and I don’t know the person speaking out. But I do know if you’re going to say, “Hey, you shouldn’t support these people” you need to say why. And if you don’t? I’m going to refer you back up to the previously quoted remarks from Sady Doyle.

Next, it looks like the Internet stepped-up and Teresa Jusino will be joining us in LA for the Whedonistas launch!

Finally, for those of you following the hawkward situation at the Library of Congress, the bird has been rescued.