Sunday Linkfest!

[jhameia]

Hope ya'll had a happy Sunday, folks! I mostly didn't, since I spent most of this morning reading for a paper I'm writing on Woolf's Orlando, in which I cast my Judgey McJudgementalson eye on it through an anti-oppression, anti-transsexist/transmisogynist/transphobic lens. Then there was a snowstorm, and when I was walking home, I walked full-on into a faceful of ice pellets. I had to duck behind a wall for a couple of minutes there! With my back to the icepellet storm! My ears hurt =(

Anyway, links.

New study on stemming the tide in women leaving engineering. Closely related: Women of color in tech: how can we encourage them?

Malaysian history books have been more and more censored by the government. There's some stuff in there which I'm sure was never in my textbook, and I wish I'd kept my old ones for reference. And if you can read Malay, here's the lesson plan for teaching Interlok, that controversial novel that is, as it turns out, pretty fucking racist upon close reading. Oh my beating heart, that lesson plan.

A photo of a maid shouldering a camouflage knapsack, while in front of her, the soldier to whom the knapsack probably belongs to is diddling on his phone. Says something about class privilege there, don't it?

I re-visited this old post by dolphin_grrl which was written way back during RaceFail: Yelling Class, about a course she had to take that tackled racial inequality and the deeply uncomfortable yelling atmosphere that ensued.

An open letter to Lt. Choi and other queer personnel re: DADT and the hypocrisy of wanting to be part of an institution that would ask them to kill other people, among them queers not in the US Army.

Changing corporate gender: a case study. How offshore oil rig workers slowly changed their behaviour and lowered workplace injury rates by taking on more "femininely gendered" sort of perspectives.

What transmisogyny looks like. It's old, but I found this while researching for my paper and I couldn't not share.

Why the U.S. is destroying its education system. In the same vein, the newest investment bubble is higher education.

A list on how to respect someone with Asperger's Syndrome. And another more specific list. Reblog if you can!

Review of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran, by Fatemeh Keshavarz, which is a critique of Reading Lolita in Tehran with a useful term: New Orientalism.

A convention to avoid: KeyCon; BackUp Project has more.

io9's 10 of the most Embarrassing Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in SF.

Star Wars from a Muslim perspective.

One way to guarantee you won't get published. Editors and publishers can get in touch with Kay and Bart to find out who this ass is.

Jim Hines was kind enough to extend an offer to those who pulled out of the Wicked Pretty Things anthology.

HG Wells was not the first man to write about a time machine.

I, too, want a book I can sleep in.

Hope your Sunday was better than mine, and hope you have a great week ahead!

Comments

[the_future_modernes]

Hope ya'll had a happy Sunday, folks! I mostly didn't, since I spent most of this morning reading for a paper I'm writing on Woolf's Orlando, in which I cast my Judgey McJudgementalson eye on it through an anti-oppression, anti-transsexist/transmisogynist/transphobic lens.


Dear God I'd love to read that. I just saw the film and was UNIMPRESSED. (teh art direction and cinematography were fine. The plot and characters were. not.) I don't really want to chance the book.

[jhameia]

Ha. The Sally Potter film? I enjoyed it far more than the book. But then, I cannot stand Modernist stream of consciousness texts. It does interesting things with gender, but Orlando as a transsexual character? No. It's pretty fortunate that Orlando isn't often taught as a transsexual text (transgender and queer, though) but to be perfectly honest, I find it a very cis-centric, heteronormative text. And the MAGICAL TRANSFORMATION! bugs the everloving fuck out of me. A lot of people love it, though.

I have my outline up at LJ if you want to see it. I might cross-post it here.

[the_future_modernes]

The magical transformation irritated me. The naivety and self-absorbed regard that Orlando has as a male-iding person irritated me.

[jhameia]

Self-absorption and obliviousness runs through this book too. It gets *slightly* better once Orlando becomes female, but not by much.

[the_future_modernes]

I know! There is the surface shite where OMG I am a woman now and I can't do this and this and this! but, alas, her learning remains on that shallow path. She has sex, has a child, and ends up being remarkably unwise for all of her 400 years. In the meantime that article you've got on Brazilian city ending hunger is making me so happy I could die, to quote lady gaga. PLUS the participatory budget story that got linked to is making me so FUCKING HAPPY!!!!! THIS is what I want citizenship to be!!! of course, the entire indivildualist culture of the US has be attacked and dismantled but can you IMAGINE the benefits of this stuff??? Oh sometimes I feel the world is going to explode, and then I get stories like this and those in makeshift, and I realise that I really need more uplifting radical changing stuff on the ground stories, to leaven the seemingly unending tragedies.

[jhameia]

Yeah, the novel ends with Shel coming back from sea. No baby. It really is quite infuriating how Woolf refuses to go any deeper, and the fact that this was a wondrous writing device (literally, she woke up one day and decided, I'm going to write a story about my lover Vita! Except it will span hundreds of years, and she'll change from a man into a woman!) so I find it appallingly appropriative. I don't know. I tried to get trans folks' perspective on the book but I found very little (just one review...).

I totally hear you on the action on the ground stuff. It opens up SO MUCH in terms of alternative ways of *conceiving* the world, what kinds of possibilities there are, and what the world could REALLY be like.

[katherineokelly.livejournal.com]

On the "What transmisogyny looks like," I thought the author came off as defensive and close-minded on the issue of male privilege in particular:

When trans women are told that they need to stop being assertive and strong because it is a sign of male privilege... that's transmisogyny.

Well, it certainly could be. Or it could be the person is being appropriately called out. (It's more likely a transwoman would be told she needs to check herself than that she "should be less assertive/strong," but I could see a defensive transwoman interpreting it that way.) On AbsoluteWrite, the writer's forum I frequent, there's a whole forum just for QLTBAG folks, and a particular thread just for trans folk. Some of the transwomen are people who just discovered their transness or are still questioning. Unsurprisingly, some of these people who have spent the first 30, 40 years of their life as a man and just realized a week ago that they are women are still dripping with male privilege. Two already have been banned from the thread for making classic bingo card-style ignorant male statements slamming everything from lesbians to transmen.

If a person who grew up "white" discovered late in life that she had Native American blood in her and went on to embrace this culture for herself, she can still be dripping with privilege from long decades of another way of life.

Transwomen aren't immune from having to check themselves after being conditioned with male privilege messages of how much they're worth and what sort of roles and behaviors they're entitled to.

When trans women are pressured into being silent, rarely offering their opinion, and refusing leadership roles for fear of being seen as male or accused of having male privilege, that's transmisogyny.

Again, maybe. Or maybe they're being asked to be silent because they're talking too much and not giving space for other voices. Maybe they're being refused leadership roles because leadership roles are already overdominated by transwomen in trans paces. My transman friend complained how often this happened on TS forums where 90-100% of moderators were transwomen (even in the transmen-only room.) They really dominated the show. Same thing in the Trans thread on AbsoluteWrite. The conversation is 95% by and for transwomen. When a transman makes a comment, it's ignored and talked over. When a transwoman or curious cisperson makes a comment about transmen, it's often dismissive in a "they have it easy" sort of way.

When trans women are afraid to analyze or discuss the role of male privilege in their life because of the way accusations of male privilege have been used as weapons to silence, shame, and misgender trans women, that's transmisogyny.

You know, my own privilege is a source of shame for me. Maybe that's okay. I can understand transwomen being afraid to acknowledge male privilege for being misgendered--that's awful. But if you're avoiding talking about it 'cause "Gee, that makes me feel bad," then maybe it's still something worth talking about.

Transwomen are definitely squeezed out of feminist and ciswoman spaces, but so are transmen from the "boy's club" or cismale spaces (Which gets a lot less sympathy and attention because it's dismissed as "business as usual".) And as far as trans spaces, if transwomen continually dominate the show and squeeze out other voices, maybe it's worth examining how this came to be instead of labeling the request to back off a little as transmisogyny. =/