Some thoughts on fanfic and the Tiptree

Posted on by Liz

My personal opinions and not meant to represent the award administrators or be any sort of official statement…

A rambling overthink:

I think “Arcana” and much fanfic should be looked at as an experimental form, or as being like artists’ sketchbooks. Sketches in art are nifty, even if the artist isn’t Davinci. As a reader and critic, I often enjoy raw, ephemeral work and find something of value in it, while I find much “professional-quality” writing to be dull, with all its quirky edges smoothed off by workshops, MFA programs, editors, the standards of market forces, considerations of literary genre, and so forth. I would rather read an ungrammatical unfinished poem of raw power that goes somewhere unusual than I would read a high-falutin’ perfectly crafted New-Yorker-ish sonnet that doesn’t say a damn thing. Both may have literary merit, and ideally, a work has all possible positive qualities (As our Tiptree winner this year, Air, does have.)

Literary standards vary widely. In an award such as the Tiptree, or in a comprehensive anthology, I believe that it is important to represent works that are good by different standards of value. A work is “good”. Good for what purpose? Good for which people?

Of course, you may read all the above and agree with it, and yet still question the jury’s decision to longlist this particular story.

What can I say? I like edge conditions, and I pushed a boundary, and a lot of people disagree with me. So, let’s talk about this and learn whatever can be learned from it, and then move on to talk about the other books and stories on the list. For example, “Little Faces” which is also conveniently online. What’s tiptroid or not about that story? How about the writing style and quality? What do we think of that?

How about “A Brother’s Price” and its gender explorations? I’d be interested to hear from people who feel like it challenged gender roles and those who feel it didn’t.

Anyway.

Objections to the longlisting of “Arcana” that I’ve read in the last couple of days include:

1. it’s fanfic and should not be eligible under the bylaws of this award, or any professional sf award
2. it’s not good fanfic of its type
3. it’s not well-written
4. it’s unfinished
5. it is not tiptroid enough. It does not expand or explore gender, but instead re-ifies traditional gender roles.
6. It is illegal because of copyright laws. The author and the award are in some kind of legal danger.
7. It is plagiarism. (I think the people who use this term are particularly unclear on what “plagiarism means. It is not plagiarism.)
8. The Tiptree jury should have more diligently gone through the body of fanfic to find more, and better, examples of tiptroid fic. IN their copious spare time.
9. It was unethical of the jury to longlist this work, because it might embarrass its author
10. The author should have been contacted and asked if it was okay to longlist her unifinished story. (By the award administrators or the jury, or me in particular.)
11. The Tiptree Award bylaws should be rewritten to exclude poor-quality writing. (I would love to see the subcommittee that writes those bylaws…)
12. Liz Henry has done something moronic. We thought she could not go lower than teh Venom Cock, but, sweet pregnant crack-smoking jesus, she has.
13. The Tiptree award is annoying and run by feminist cranks who should not be taken seriously by any rational human being or writer of Quality. They might have once had a shot at legitimacy in the Real World, but now they’ve blown it. How embarrassing!

Pantryslut, a former Tiptree juror, rolling her eyes at the kerfluffle:

1) You’re allowed not to like things on an awards list. 2) The processes of even awards you like and respect are not without flaw or question. 3) I think there is a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the long list happening.

Vito-excalibur and commenters continue to wish that the story were a better representative of fanfic in general.

Matociquala’s journal has an extremely lively discussion. In it, the predominant threads are not questioning the value of fanfic in general, but focus on the Tiptree Award’s process of gathering nominations. Cija comments:

I think the inclusion of fanfic, especially dirty, self-indulgent fanfic, in the Tiptree longlist (or shortlist, or the award itself) is a fine fine idea, although judging from the quotes you provide, this one doesn’t seem to be notably dirty or self-indulgent. Too bad.

In particular, I thought it was interesting that there was a perception of the story being the uninformed choice of a well-meaning outsider to the genre of fanfic… or maybe it would be more accurate to say the fanfic communities. (That earnest yet clueless outsider would be me (according to them… a lot of assumptions about how much of an outsider I am). More about this further down in this post.)

Am I an expert on fanfic? No. Have I ever read it? Yes. I’m not strongly part of any fanfic community, but I’ve read it a little here and there. I have even written it, though mostly badfic. I particularly loved the old “pottersues” community and its hilarious snarkiness. Might there be fanfic out there, mpreg fanfic, that everyone would hail with as Tiptroid and literary enough ? Hell yeah… Please nominate it asap!

About legality: I think this is bunk. I don’t think about whether a story is “illegal” or not when I read it. Do people think that if there were censorship laws, that awards should not consider that kind of illegality? So, “free speech” is one thing when it’s about a nation or a government… but another thing that we should respect when it’s a corporation who “owns” an idea? What are people really worried about here? Last time I checked, fanfic writers were not being sued or thrown in jail… nor were they smashing the state or destroying the idea of intellectual property or sucking away the hard-earned dollars of authors starving in garrets… And the existence of the fanfic doesn’t make people not read or watch the original/”owned” stories. At most, they might be sent a cease and desist letter which they could then put up on the Chilling Effects site which is part of some great legal efforts to fight that kind of atmosphere. About plagiarism: hahaha. Give me a break. Then go look up the dictionary definition of “plagiarism”.

Moving on from there.

Then we get into the nitty gritty of what the story does and whether it’s tiptroid or not (which is hard to talk about, since everyone has a different idea of what “expanding and exploring gender” means.)

Back for a moment to the idea of being Tiptroid, and “good”… Tiptroid for whom?
Am I demanding stuff that expands *my* concept of gender? Or what I think and percieve as “most people’s” ideas of gender, or even “my idea of sf fandom who might be interested in the Tiptree’s ideas of gender?” It turns into a lot of doublethink very quickly. And I wanted very much to avoid any sort of “more genderfuck than thou” chest-beating on the jury.

Okay, so, back on matociquala’s journal, I said:

Once the story gets past the set-up and the rape scene, there’s lots of detail about a macho guy’s response to being pregnant. Nick’s sudden vulnerability, loss of independence, and the changes he goes through were interesting. Snape’s “protective father/husband” responses were really weird because of the (former) macho-ness of Nick.

katallen, cija, and others get quite deep into the issues. Katallen questions whether it’s an mpreg at all, since Nick is “really” a hermaphrodite and has been all along, and knew it, and so did Snape and the Ministry of Magic. (Though I would add that Nick was in denial about it for most of his life.) “The macho image is shown to be a fraud — and so a macho guy’s reaction to being pregnant is never explored.” She adds, “it didn’t feel gender expanding so much as gender conformist… However much Nick hides or denies it, the sex that gets pregnant is there to be made pregnant, to bear children, and (once a feminine side is exposed) will be lusting after sex with their rapist, crying every five minutes because of their hormones, and need a real man to get them safely through pregnancy.”

cija says:

there are ways to wallow in illicit fantasy without making the narrative defend the essential rightness of the false construct, if that makes any sense. I am all for the wallowing, but not so much for the embedded defense. It is tricky to do the one without the other, but vastly preferable.

Yowza, cija, if I were a man, I’d be begging you to let me have your babies. I still disagree, but there you articulated the exact location of the problem and point of disagreement.

and katallen again:

I don’t read a lot of slash fic, but enough to have met dozens of stories where two masculine characters, subsequent to sex or falling in love, gradually morph into a het couple — with the smaller/prettier/smarter of the two men taking up the feminine role (homemaking, sexual jealousy, physical and emotional dependance etc)

Coffeeandink made some cogent remarks and gave a link to thasallia’s post on how distinctive characters are often transformed in fanfic into more conventional roles (wow, I loved this post…):

But, getting back to flipping gender expectations, I can think of several body-swap fics in FS fandom that do a lovely job of this, but I also think there have to be other gen or het fics that do a good job of showing how gender isn’t the easy assumption that we tend to make it. And how are we defining gender roles anyway? How are we coding male and female these days? One of the reasons I rarely read slash is because I have little interest in seeing a masculine character feminized, in more than the subtle construct way (i.e., I don’t want to see John Crichton act like a girl except for in the, “Shit, the whole way I look at the world is suddenly reversed and I’m getting my ass kicked by a girl” kind of way.) I’m not interested in that sort of coding between men, but again, that’s my personal preference. However, again, that whole reversal of gendered expectation is interesting and I wonder (not reading a lot of femslash), if a similar thing happens there. Does one of the women become “the man” in the story?

Katallen says:

…what interested you wasn’t examining how a man would cope with pregnancy but the reactions of a Western middle-class female who is secure in her equality and her personal relationship to her gender (75% of the world’s population are still chopping wood and carrying water by three months and never aren’t met with sexism) having to cope with a new image, that’s imposed both by her own biology and societal reactions to pregnancy and motherhood.

So, the more sophisticated slash and fanfic readers read Brunson’s Nick as a very typical-for-fic manly man who is feminized. Nick’s weepiness and girliness and moments of vulnerability perhaps annoy, because they seem to reify this particular gender stereotype. Now, I don’t like that stereotype either! And yet I know many strong, independent women who get pregnant and then start falling into many stereotypical roles. As I pointed out somewhere on the many-tentacled thread on matociquala’s journal, this is a common theme of mommybloggers. “How did I get here? What’s going on? What the hell just happened? How can I get my life as an independent person back?” Nick seems to me to react similarly. Coded as a man’s reaction, that “wtf!” reaction can be seen as interrupted entitlement. Which exposes the interrupted entitlement that some women, raised to expect some measure of equal rights or gender-blindness, experience. I found that interesting, and I still do! Is that because I’m a United Statesian upper-class mom and housewife? Gosh… um… probably. However, I am not in ignorance of feminism, world politics, women who live in poverty, and class differences in general.

There was also a strand of people saying that I in particular (because I said in public that it was me who pushed to longlist “Arcana”… (and I said it in public because I felt I had to, since half the people reading already suspected it was me and were making coy statements to indicate it, and because of needing to stand up and defend my judgement and the story’s author, and also out of consideration for the tender feelings of my fellow Tiptree jurist, who seems eager to distance themself from the OMG Not Literary Enough works on the list) ummmmm where was I?) People saying that I was an outsider to fanfic. Such as….

katallen:

…an external advocate who doesn’t appear to be comfortable that they have a grasp of what’s a typical or representative product from the community they’re trying to gain attention for. (Rather like a missionary displaying poor quality domestic pottery when he could, at least, be showing what they trade with the tribe next door.)

and elisem:

What it easily can slip into being is condescending. Not saying the nominator in this case meant to condescend, but the missionary aspects of this…

This seems to me like a valid criticism. Well, since I have no professional status in anything particularly, and no vested interest in pretending that I’m a big expert and infallible, why should I not realize this fairly instantly when it’s pointed out to me, and try to respond? And actually, I think about this kind of issue a lot, since I deal with problems of cultural appropriation both as a feminist and as a translator. I had not thought of being an outsider and of perceived condescension in this context. I did make some effort to learn and ask about fanfic communities, as I also asked around about tiptroid SF in non-English languages, and about other genres like comic books. (I actually nominated the comic book “Y: The Last Man” to that end. ) In retrospect, I did not make ENOUGH of an effort for the ambition to push the award’s parameters a little further out. In my defense, I did put quite a lot of effort into it, and into the Tiptree Award as a whole, and overall, I think we all did a good job. It was an amazing education, the entire process.

(Slightly more defensiveness: I can’t know everything about everything, but you know… I do know a hell of a lot about SF and about literature in general, and… (back to the comment made by katallen about class and feminism and women-chopping-wood) actually I am particularly well read in world literature in general, across a broad time span. This, at least, helps me be confident of my own critical judgement having a *very* broad base to draw upon. People who don’t know me personally might not know this, and I tend to get treated like I’m a ditz, and about 20 years younger than I am, and I have found a generally suspicious attitude from some hard-core SF fans who think I have not been fannish enough, or something, because I did not go to Whatevercon for a bazillion years and don’t get their filk jokes. Er, whatever… blow me… Actually I’ve gotten both the “Britney-Spears-listening teenybopper bubblegum-popping ditz” and the “romance-novel-reading men
opausal crazy cat lady” judgements… make up your minds already… which is it? Oh, nevermind, I am large, I contain multitudes… )

(And a side note about comics: as I continue reading them I have developed a fascination with The Hulk, especially Peter David’s work. And I think The Hulk does some amazing explorations of masculinity. The thought of explaining this to a Tiptree jury gives me hives, frankly… Hahahaha… Grimjack is also very cool. But anyway, I love comics now and am looking forward to a lifetime of reading more of them! )

As for the unfinished-ness and roughness, or rawness, of the story: this seems to me comparable to conversations about blogging. Blogging is its own genre. Its literary standards are not the standards of mainstream literature. I maintain that the rawness is part of it: You can blog as if you’re writing a magazine article,but then you’re just writing a magazine article. The experential quality of a blog is important, and its development, its immediacy. It is the exposure of process. It is a little bit like, it’s part of a very intense conversation. A magazine article is a polished monologue. A blog entry is an offered bit of conversation, offered in a way not always possible in face to face life. (And, it woudl be interesting to explore the idea of intimacy, trust, exposure, intimate conversation and ideas people have about pillow talk, in this context.) People engage with blogs like they do with conversations. Now in some ways we think of all textual interaction as conversation. Intertextuality is the history of conversations. But blogs depend on that idea, and push it further, and we don’t really understand what it’s doing or how it works or what that means yet. Fanfic has something similar going on, and no, I am not super qualified to talk about that, but from my seat over here in a somewhat analogous country, I’m waving in recognition. A group production, a community involvement in the production… and absolute exposure of that as a process.

*deep breath* *realization of giant digression*

*** Oh yeah, and also I should link up to Nick Mamatas and commenters – but I haven’t read any of that yet. I’m sure there’s a lot of meanness but also a lot that’s funny in there. At least he has the grace to make fun of the entire Tiptree award, instead of just one author, or me in particular.

It is kind of tempting to do a close reading and mockery of particular badly-written or quirkily-styled sentences from ALL the other Tiptree winners… because you know, that is something that I could easily do. All of them. I love parody, so why not apply it across the board, to make it less of a cheap shot?

***

The comments in juliansinger‘s journal are also interesting. I try to look past the “Liz is condescending” bits… which I have tried to answer, defend myself a little bit, and learn from… But you know, as if I need special lessons about queer feminist lit, and otherness? How can I help feeling a bit defensive!

***

Anyway, as I kept reading thassalia’s commenters… and then branching out into their journals (omg, I love the web…) I came across stuff like alara_r’s analysis:

If the body parts are girly, it isn’t manslash. 🙂 If the characters know they have been switched, I am more likely to describe it as “genderfuck”, because there you get a quasi-slash dynamic where Still Guy A *knows* Former Guy B used to be a guy, but now he’s a girl, so the body parts are het but the minds are slash. However, the femslash was femslash because it was a universe where the characters were born women rather than men, so they had no reference point to understand themselves as men, though we the readers knew.

Can I just say again that I think that the theorizing about gender here is great and fascinating? A tip of the hat? Without being accused of being condescending, can I admire and enjoy this discussion? Can we get thassalia or some of these very knowledgeable people as Tiptree jurors? That would be excellent!

Here is a key thought: In order to *get anywhere deep* in discussing why a work is gender-expanding or exploring, you have to : a) talk about your own gender b) talk about your own sexuality and what makes a work “good” for you… jouissance is in many ways about sex. That is part of why these discussions are difficult for some people, perhaps.

And the goal, as I see it, of the Tiptree, and of many feminist endeavors, is to make space for difficult conversations.

For anyone who has gotten through this rambling brain dump… I don’t have time to make it pretty right now … In the interests of transparency and bloggishness, I’m just trying to be as honest as possible and put some ideas out into the world.

Feel free to trash me and my judgement, and make fun of me some more. *sicilian hand gesture* But lay off of the story’s author, okay?

I should do a close reading of some sections of Arcana, and try to show exactly what it was I liked about it.

I liked this comment on Em’s work, from one of her longtime fans:

I’ve been in fandom for a long time, long before the internet in fact. I was absolutely thrilled to see your name listed on the Tiptree Award long list. I remember having to re-read it several times to be certain that it was really you. You have no idea how thrilled I was to see a fanfic from you listed there. It made my day.

and this one:

i don’t really know what we’re talking about, but there are people in fandom who haven’t heard of em brunson?

And I agree with Schnaucl and her commenters. I hope that Em puts her fic back up, and I look forward to reading more of her stories… the crackfic and also published work if that’s where she goes with it in future. I thought her writing was fabulous, entertaining, funny, and thoughtful, and again, I stand by my longlisting of it. Yes, I know (and knew) it was an in-jokey crackfic in answer to a specific community’s challenge… and I thought that was fucking cool.

***

*************

People have suggested the following sources for slashy, possibly tiptroid fanfic:

Amanuensis – LJ
We Read Crap So that You Won’t Have To

from cofax7:

There are best of lists all over the net. They’re call recommendations sites. Google “Bright Shiny Objects” or “Polyamorous Recommendations” and you’ll find a ton of worthy fiction, of the slashy and non-slashy kind.

The sidebars of those sites look very intriguing.



Strange Horizons / Speculative Literature Foundation reading

Posted on by Liz

This Wednesday, May 10, at Valencia Street Books — There will be a rapid fire reading and generally fun hang-out at from 7 to 9pm. Rapid fire! 3 minutes each!

I’ll be reading along with a bunch of other people, including Charlie Anders and Susan Marie Groppi, Tim Pratt, Heather Shaw, Jeremy Smith, Vylar Kaftan, Corie Ralston, Thida Cornes, Lori White, Pat Murphy, and Keyan Bowes.

I always have a great time at Valencia Street Books, because Alex generally greets me with the joy of a meerkat finding a, well, whatever the hell makes meerkats freak out with joy and spaz out, a nice juicy grub or a crippled grasshopper maybe. Anyway, zie always picks me up and swings me around in the air with strong skinny arms and a manic grin. We know each other from old “Skiffy” game-playing days at University of Chicago, where I used to kick Ken Hite‘s ass at every board game and make him beg for more.



gender wars in Argentina

Posted on by Liz

I’m still editing my thesis and while looking over the bibliography for the hundredth time I had the horrifying realization that I had dissed Jean Franco by only citing a book she wrote in 1969 and nothing since. I think it is too late… but anyway in looking up Franco’s work online I came across this:

The Gender Wars

In July of last year, several members of the Argentine planning committee that had drawn up the guidelines for a nationwide curriculum resigned when they discovered that changes to their proposal had been made, apparently by the Minister of Education under pressure from the Catholic Church. Mention of Darwin and Lamarck had been eliminated, references to sex education had been erased, and the word “gender” had replaced by “sex.”

“Gender” rather than sex (in this case género and sexo) was especially controversial.

its use “intended to provoke an ideological shift and to generate a new conception of the human person, of subjectivity, marriage, the family and society. In short what is proposed is a cultural revolution.” Using the word gender “as a purely cultural construct, detached from the biological,” he warned, “makes us into fellow travelers of radical feminism.”

Then he quotes Shulamith Firestone. Ha. Kind of ha. Not really funny when you think about it.

Wow.

Absolutely fascinating… I am going to have to at least mention Franco’s later work and I feel really dumb for not looking earlier.



Ejaculation and translation

Posted on by Liz
I was poking around in violently engulfing Steiner’s book “After Babel” the other day and imagining my parody regendering of some of his more ridiculous passages. All the bits where he writes about translation as penetration and ejaculation and most particularly the “onanism” sections about how when men masturbate there’s “more” ejaculate (than what other times? haha, what?) and therefore translation, which is like sex, is less powerful than solo authoring, which is guys wanking off.

If anyone were to write… seriously… as a work of scholarly theory… something similar about women masturbating being a bold semiotic act, can you just picture the outraged backlash?

I’m going to write the nastiest, most pornographic parody…

Anyway, Steiner is a total nutjob. I prefer the lunacy of Mary Daly if I’m going to read some far-out mind-bending theory.



free wireless at the library

Posted on by Liz

My network was down and so I headed over to the library to get some work done. It was surprisingly cosy, pleasant, and welcoming out on the sidewalk on Middlefield Road. Free wireless, cafe tables with umbrellas, and really good music on decent speakers… the only thing missing was an espresso cart. About 30 high school kids were there in a nebulous swarm, chatting, and I’d say over half of them texting on their cell phones. Something was being arranged… a lot of them were waiting for some other group which finally showed up and they all went into the library.

I remarked on the niceness of the “internet library cafe” to this guy in the photo and then on impulse was like, “Hey! Can I blog you?” He was slightly taken aback. “Yes.” (unspoken: wtf! why is this little riot nrrd taking my photo? ) He (Bob) seemed like he could handle it just fine. Alas, I looked at the web site on his card and there’s nothing there! But now I’m totally wondering if he’s This guy and we were totally sharing a technological and social infrastructre? Or was he this guy and I could have had a fascinating conversation about the Khmu dialects & linguistics? Or is he the CTO of this company? Maybe he’s ALL OF THEM…. But if so, what’s with the cheap Vistaprint card and broken web site, dude?

Menlo Park… Palo Alto… check… tons of laptops. Redwood City? Not so much. I guess we’re gentrifying. I hope the town doesn’t lose its cool character as it gets richer and more silicon-valley-ish.

I wish some of those teenagers would have given me their myspace addresses.

Work on my thesis was horribly derailed by the lack of network at home – and by my having to pound on fixing it all day long. (After a lot of floundering, labelling everything in our co-housing network closet, 2 calls to comcast, and buying a new router, which helped, it finally was solved by upgrading my airport firmware and a restart/reset.)

The great thing about the library net cafe: I felt like it was really a public space, being used properly. A public square. There were no obnoxious rules, you didn’t have to buy anything, you didn’t have to be there for a particular reason. You could just hang out. No one came to give the teenagers a hard time (I *hate* that when I see it, and always speak up to point out how dumb it is.) We all spoke to each other – kids, guy in suit, and the kind of skeevy looking hairy guy in the painty shorts who was regaling the kids with stories of past drug busts as they tried to control their eye rolling and smirking and kind of failed. Anyway, it’s a really nice public space. And right across from City Hall, too!



provocations

Posted on by Liz

While I’m writing all this feminist criticism I do find that I spend a lot of time describing and refuting sexist criticism.

There should actually be a special category or word for works that especially offend, that are so egregiously sexist that they sting feminist to action. They make it all very clear. Really, work like this does us a favor. It needs special mention, a category of its own.

This occurred to me the other night as I was talking about feminist science fiction with Laura Quilter. What to put in the femsf wiki? I was trying to argue for this “worst offenders” category for feminist sf. What are the books that outraged me when I was 12, and made me suddenly realize I was not, as a girl, included in (male) universalist claims to represent humanity? What made me shriek, “Hey! That’s not ME… and it pretends to be. So I better stand up, say something, and represent.” What are the touchstones of sexist thought?

Instantly a few revolting candidates spring to mind… Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and certainly Podkayne of Mars. For me, I think, attempts to create the “plucky girl” stood out more strongly than the usual objectifications of women in fantasy and SF. I identified with John Carter of Mars easier than I did Arkady Darrell, for god’s sake.

Well, I’m led to think of all this again as I contemplate the horrors of Sidonie Rosenbaum’s “Modern Women Poets of Spanish America.” It sounds good, doesn’t it? But its horrible sexism was one of the main inspirations for me to translate Juana de Ibarbourou’s work. Rosenbaum praises and insults Ibarbourou sometimes in the very same sentence – she’ll refer to her freshness and sponteneity and then “lack of profundity” and “superficiality of thought.” She’s primitive, she’s ardent, etc. It’s a classic example of what (in How to Suppress Women’s Writing) Joanna Russ calls denial of agency. It’s as if the poetry just flowed unconsciously from Ibarbourou’s “brain”… not that Rosenbaum thinks she has a brain, so I should probably say “flowed unconsciously from her very being.” As soon as Ibarbourou writes about anything other than “take me now, i’m nubile and willing!” then the critics slam down on her for being a) pretentious b) boringly intellectual c) pretending to have understood suffering d) being obscure e) being too complicated. Even though they were previously saying she wasn’t complicated or mature ENOUGH.

Well, it’s endlessly annoying.

My point is, in part, that I have a strong impulse to slam the people who are trying to make anthologies of women writers and who do it in a way that exacerbates the entire sexist discourse of what women write and how and why and whether it’s “really” any good or not.

This means that as I leap into publishing my thoughts on the subject I will be criticizing pretty much everyone else in my field.

Luckily most of them are dead.



Flora & Fauna & poems, oh my

Posted on by Liz

04-21-06_1618.jpg
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I help to organize the Art21 series of poetry readings in Palo Alto, and am going to miss tonight’s reading. But I had to drop by in the afternoon to drop off the amp and microphone, and so got to meet Becca Goldman, the artist whose work is up in the gallery right now. I really enjoyed her graceful paintings… and it was nice to meet another sort of punky GenX-y person (she has a tattoo inside her ear) who is seriously into beauty in this complicated but gentle way. I sometimes write about punk rock lesbians smoking crack in the gutter while smashing guitars, and sometimes about lilies and egrets bending gracefully in the moonlight, so I’m down with the multiple facial piercings next to bunny rabbits and camellias.

I also love her for watching M. for a minute while I ran back to the car for the amplifier! She showed him a book about elephants who paint – he was charmed – and I tried to make him have an Educational Experience by pointing out that Becca was an Artist and look at all her paints and palette and stuff… “She is an Artist, just like your Auntie.” M. acted nonchalant. I think he does not like to be observed in the act of learning something – he likes to know everything already when you tell him, but that’s difficult when you’re only 6 years old.

Tonight’s reading features Sharon Olson and Murray Silverstein – both with books from Sixteen Rivers Press. I haven’t yet read Sharon’s book, “The Long Night of Flying,” but I’ve heard her read for years at Waverley Writers, at Jeff Grinnell’s Tuesday nights at the cafe on California Avenue, at the old San Jose Arts League, and at Art21. So I’m extra sorry not to get to hear her read a lot of her work all at once – it’s good!



all the poets, they studied rules of verse….

Posted on by Liz
It’s not the first time I’ve noticed but I’m annoyed this morning at how Spain is apparently not part of “European poetry”. It must take a lot of effort to keep doing the Spain Is Invisible Dance.

You know a lot about medieval French verse forms? Great! I love you! Bring it on! But you don’t know everything, so don’t act all like, You Are Europe. (Note the sidebar.) And Spain, how is that Not-Europe? All the Germanic languages? Everything else? (Oh… we meant only the most important and influential European forms.)

Of course we all know what it is. It’s paternity anxiety, cultural inheritance, and the geneological tree – in that model, it goes Greece- Rome – Italians – France. Potency, real virility, can only reside in one cultural empire at a time, in the head of the household. Bastards aren’t so important in that family tree and in fact might even be embarrassing. And there is room for only one tree. The whole rest of the world is bastards.

Is it too much to hope for, that the AAP might just mention Uncle Garcilaso or Uncle de Leon?

Leaving aside the bigger questions of the poetic forms of the entire rest of the world which also might… just might… have “influenced” someone.

“… and the ladies, they rolled their eyes.”



More about the SXSWi women's visibility panel

Posted on by Liz

(reposted) Here’s my notes from before the panel. It’s still rough notes – I tried to lay out the idea very quickly.

I also want to note that Ayse, Jan, Tara, Virginia and I all talked a lot over email and then again before our panel, and it was super interesting to see the evolution of our conversation. And I hope we can all post some of those conversations as well as what we said on the panel!

An immodest proposal

We need protocols for identifying authorship. At BarCamp at many of the women’s discussions, we talked about people as tag clouds. Gender is just one of the possible tags. Put gender, identity into html markup just like the xfn markup for relationships. Or create some other protocol or standards.

Try doing some studies. We know what importance rankings look like with a genderblind algorithm. Then try labelling authorship and identities, try dividing the web and see what happens. Actually test it. Then re-integrate.

If you are going to ask a question like “who are the most important/relevant (to a topic) women bloggers” then you need to be able to identify them. Right now we can’t.

Other people could maybe tag or ID you, but your self-identification is the one that counts in the most important way for most algorithms.

More information is good. The individual author or blogger has control over their own flexible cloud of identities. More information could then be put into transparent algorithms that are flexible, so you can have a technorati-like engine but adjust it to your own (or someone else’s ) vision of importance.

Think of it like thermodynamics… through the identity-tag webs, right now you have a power imbalance on the net echoing existing power inequalities. I have this whole weird analogy of patriarchy as maxwell’s demon, as an invisible, imaginary gatekeeper that keesp imbalances going. If this system existed, then, what mechanisms would you invent to reverse its workings? You can’t kill Maxwell’s Demon – that’s not allowed, and it’s just too hard. Making it past the gatekeeper on an individual level is how you get tokenized, and it also keeps up the myth of meritocracy. You have to invent structural workarounds, other maps and roads.

It’s cheaper to experiment with restructuring technological spaces than it is to restructure society.

I think women need to be visible *to each other* in order for important conversations to develop. Trying to be “genderblind” doesn’t help women, because we still have many systemic inequalities which stack the deck against us. I think self-identification in the form of tagging, or identity authentication like I’ve heard Kaliya (Identity Woman) talk about, or a new XML standard, would help with this: if we’re going to ask who the most important women bloggers are, then we need to be able to find them in the first place. I’m arguing for identity-based markup and search, not just for all genders, but for any kind of identity like race, multiracial identifications, class, ethnicities, age. Authorship and identity in the mind of a reader (and the mind of a search algorithm) can’t be separated. Self-identification should be differentiated from the ways other people identify an author. Visibility should also be broken down into frames of references, so that we can ask, “visible to who?”

For example, we could do a gender-based technorati search to see which women other women think are important; then which women men think are important; then which women everyone does – and see if those rankings are drastically different. I suspect they would be different, and those differences would be *interesting information*.

We need many ways of looking at visibility. If I’m a firefly, I don’t care if humans see me. I want other fireflies to see me. Humans might *want* to perceive me. Or to put it another way, if I were an alien fnnargh artist, doing the fine art of fnnargh for other aliens, those aliens would want to be able to judge my fnnarghing compared to other aliens’ fnnarghing. Humans might think fnnarghing is totallly hilarious and weird and cool, and so they might want to be able to find it too and talk about it compared to opera; but the aliens don’t *care* what the humans think or how Snarx’s Forty-Third Fnnargle is really similar to Wagner. And if they do, they can search on what humans think, or on what humans think with a little bit of what aliens think weighed into the mix. In other words, we need identity, authorship, and open, flexible search parameters.