Power, abuse, fandom

On July 5, 2014 By Liz BarrIn art, conventions, fandom2 Comments

Warning: Contains discussion of sexual abuse, including that of children, in a variety of contexts.

Marion Zimmer Bradley enabled her husband to sexually abuse children, and molested her daughter. Though the business with her husband was apparently common knowledge in some circles, it has only been brought into the open in the last few weeks, and the allegations from her daughter are recent. Natalie Lurhs at Radish Reviews provides links to discussions, including depositions.

As Natalie — along with others — is saying, fandom needs to take a long look at its history and start addressing these issues. But it’s not just us: the fashion industry is still dealing/failing to deal with Terry Richardson; the Australian military has a long history of bastardisation, sexual assault and ongoing abuse in a variety of contexts; the Catholic and Anglican churches, the Orthodox Jewish community of Melbourne, the Salvation Army — secular or religious, celibate or promiscuous, straight or gay, all the identities that don’t fit neat binaries, there’s potential for abuse. Humans arrange themselves into hierarchies, and then we defend our new status quo, and in doing so, create a space where crimes can be concealed.

In my day job, I’m a court transcriber. All too often, I deal with child sexual assault. The other week, I had to listen and type as a defence barrister argued that the sexual penetration of a child under 12 was not rape, because the child might have been “promiscuous”. (I tend to type this stuff with some nice animal pictures on my second screen, or while doing some mindless internet shopping.) Sickening stuff.

I can’t do anything about the legal system except produce accurate transcript and hope that it comes to the attention of someone who’s in a position to do more. And try to vote for candidates who are interested in reform. What I can do, as a fan and a con runner (people who are chairing Continuum 11: me), is try to make fandom and convention spaces safer. This isn’t always easy, especially as I’m a relatively young con runner who isn’t part of the whisper network. I have pretty good instincts about people, and access to fans with longer memories, but I worry that isn’t sufficient.

Continuum has a code of conduct which includes a harassment policy. It’s revised annually, along with internal procedures for dealing with complaints, and the committee is made aware of it. This year, we had copies of the code of conduct posted in the foyer and published in the con book. We also make it clear that children’s programming is not childcare, and children must be accompanied by an adult at all times. (And, in the kids room, adults must be accompanied by children.) We welcome having children in our community, and we want them to be safe.

I think it’s good that the convention community is doing some soul searching and working to improve the safety of children. But cons aren’t the whole of fandom, and the con-going community is by far outnumbered by fandom online.

Is the internet safe for kids? AHAHAHAHA NO. And I’m not here to tell people with real, actual children how to supervise them online. I just have a cat, and I can assure you that he’s not allowed on the internet without an adult human present.

But here’s the thing: fans create fan work, and some of these artefacts are problematic in terms of their sexualised portrayal of children.

Now, drawing [insert underaged characters here] porn is not the same as recording the abuse of an actual flesh and blood child. But in Australia, and some other jurisdictions, the law doesn’t draw a distinction. This has been the source of much amusement on the internet, not to mention inconvenience to, say, academics doing studies of manga. But there’s a reason: it is not uncommon for abusers to groom their victims by exposing them to illustrations depicting characters from children’s media in sexual situations. Back in the day, these were pretty crude sketches. These days, abusers just hit Tumblr.

In 2007, LiveJournal suspended a whole mass of accounts based on keywords in profiles and interests. This was a heavy-handed and largely pointless exercise — among the deleted were survivor communities and Nabokov reading groups — and it turned out that LJ had been moved to act by a sketchy and homophobic group that claimed to be targeting paedophiles. LJ failed to communicate with its userbase, and this was basically the beginning of the end of its use as a fandom base of operations.

Aside from LJ’s singularly poor handling of the matter, Strikethrough — so called because suspended accounts had strikes through their names — triggered debate in fandom about the place of fanworks that portrayed underage sex. A lot of it has been lost to time and friends lock, but among the voices were survivors who found catharsis in fictionalising their experiences. But there were also red flags, like people saying, “Well, my writing attracts real paedophiles, and I’m nothing like that!” and arguing that it’s a myth that children cannot consent to sex.

The general consensus, in the end, was that the portrayal of underage sexuality was a legitimate fannish expression, and anyone who felt otherwise was a kink-shaming, sex negative prude. And this has been on my mind in the past few weeks, because I read the Breendoggle documents, and that attitude, couched in the language of the 1960s, is exactly how Walter Breen got away with child abuse.

And no, most people writing or drawing underage sex in fandom aren’t paedophiles. But if their work is being posted in public, it’s out there to facilitate child abuse. And it’s easy to find, whether you want to or not. (There’s a reason I don’t search Avatar character tags on Tumblr.) It’s a myth that you can wander around the internet and just stumble across photographic child porn by accident, but fan art? It’s everywhere.

(Spoilers: “But I’m just appreciating the aesthetics of the child porn!” is basically a police interview cliché. It has its own bingo square. Or would, if my colleagues and I were tasteless enough to make a child abuse bingo game. Which we’re not. Obviously.)

It’s part of the nature of the internet that we can’t control what happens to something after it’s posted — especially with groups that are determined to be as antisocial as possible, and yes, I’m thinking of last week’s Legend of Korra “livestream” that had rape porn in the ad breaks. But I think it’s worth coming back to this issue again and reconsidering it in light of recent revelations and current knowledge about the way child abusers operate. We need to consider our current status quo and the opportunities it creates for abuse. Otherwise, in another twenty years, we’re just going to have more of these terrible revelations.

Mass Effect 3 and Australian border protection policy

On May 20, 2014 By Liz BarrIn gaming1 Comment

Front Desk Log

Civilian processing ratios:
Adults, 60% sent to integration
Children, 85% sent to integration

Suitable candidates are being assigned temporary living areas in alphabetical order. Family units are being preserved for ease of processing.

Last year, as Continuum drew nigh, I promised myself that when the convention was over, I’d give myself time to play Mass Effect. Lots of my friends were into it, and it seemed like a pretty cool game. Now, almost exactly a year later, I’ve completed my first play-through of Mass Effect 3.

It was an uncomfortable game. Not just because I knew that the [infamously unsatisfying] end was nigh, and not just because the writing seemed less layered and interesting than the first two games. (That’s not just my imagination, right? There seemed to be a lot of points where your choices in previous games, like the identity of the human Councillor, was disregarded. And there were less background conversations than there used to be, although I adored the two [female] soldiers standing guard outside the war room, bitching about the state of the universe.)

In ME3, the galaxy is at war. The legendary Reapers are seeking to destroy all sentient life, and few places are safe. And where there is war, there are refugees. The game is full of displaced persons. Those with particular skills are recruited to work on an anti-doomsday device, the worst-kept secret in the universe. (“If your government happened to be working on a secret project…”) The rest wind up in refugee camps, the most visible of which is a holding area in the Citadel docks.

The Citadel is the political and cultural centre of the galaxy, a millennia-old space station of immense power and beauty. Through the trilogy, we meet its underprivileged, but not like this. Over the course of ME3, the refugee camp grows increasingly crowded, its residents increasingly despairing. Armed guards stand at the entrance. Characters talk disapprovingly of the way the Citadel pretends the refugees, and the war, don’t exist. The refugees themselves are humanised — if you can use that word for such a diverse group of species* — in various ways: a girl waits for her parents to arrive; a human man with a French accent tries to make conversation with an alien who doesn’t want to talk.

The recurring idea here is that a society which mistreats refugees is inherently sick. For an Australian, with our policy of locking refugees in concentration camps, which are increasingly being moved out of the country into whichever poverty-stricken nation can be persuaded to take them, this is stark stuff. I had to take a break from the game for a couple of weeks, because it was getting politics in my escapism, and I was tired.

Late in the game, we visit the planet of Horizon, a human colony first established in Mass Effect 2. There, it was a pleasant little planet targeted by the Collectors, aliens who are using human genetic material to create an abomination. Now, it’s the home of Sanctuary, a haven for refugees.

We know from the start that there’s something very wrong about Sanctuary. It appears to have been infiltrated by Cerberus, a terrorist organisation that’s pro-human the way Tony Abbott is pro-conservation. On arrival, refugees are ordered to discard any communication devices. (On arrival in Australia, asylum seekers who arrive by boat often have phones, satnavs and even their medicine confiscated and destroyed.) Datapads indicate that refugees volunteered to man the reception area in exchange for the promise of better accommodation. The facility is full of dead Cerberus soldiers, and dead Reapers.

As we progress through the compound, we learn two things: the facility was run by Henry Lawson (voiced by Alan Dale), an Australian businessman obsessed with creating a genetic dynasty. His “daughter” — actually a clone with a doubled X chromosome — Miranda was a team mate in Mass Effect 2, voiced by Yvonne Strahovski with the accent of a posh Sydney private school girl. And Henry Lawson was working with Cerberus to continue the work of the Collectors, using human DNA to create monsters and, eventually, they hope, control the Reapers.

Progress Update

Rejected subjects have proven useful for preliminary genetic testing. The death rate is 100% of course, but the data being gathered is critical to improving subsequent testing on viable subjects.

A society which mistreats refugees is inherently sick. And isn’t it interesting that this false haven for refugees is run by an Australian?

Mass Effect 3 was released in 2012, well after Australia’s policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers was entrenched. I don’t know if the echoes here were intentional, but I somewhat doubt it — the franchise seems pretty apolitical in real life terms, and putting Henry Lawson in charge of the facility is just taking advantage of an existing yet heretofore unseen antagonist. But it’s interesting, and a bit chilling. They got politics in my escapism, and the effect is thoroughly disquieting.

* “‘Human rights’. The very term is racist.” – Azetbur, the original Klingon social justice warrior, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Your fabric is problematic

On May 3, 2014 By Liz BarrIn craft2 Comments

On Easter Saturday morning, I impulse purchased a sewing machine. From Ikea. Not only does Ikea sell sewing machines, but they’re cheap enough (AU$79) to be an impulse purchase. Amazingly, it even seems to be a good machine — or at least, easily equal to the Singer machines I used in high school. I understand that technology has marched on, and sewing machines now come with inbuilt computers and USB ports — why? I have no idea! Give me time, though. I’ll figure this out — but this just goes forward and backwards in a variety of stitches. It’s small, but solid, and the interior parts don’t look flimsy.

So now I am (re)learning to sew. In the past, I’d mess up a pattern and decide on the spot that sewing clothing was not for me. WELL, THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. (I mean, I have a job, now, and if I stuff up, I can buy more fabric and try again.) At this stage I’ve done a gathered skirt and a loose, drapey top. Both are basically rectangles sewn together. BABY STEPS.

Naturally, I’ve also been looking at a lot of online fabric stores. (This is also because I like to have something pretty to look at while I’m transcribing stuff, and for some reason my employer has blocked Asos and Etsy.) And I have learnt, to my complete lack of surprise, that a lot of fabric prints are … well, problematic. Grotesquely racist is another frequently applicable term.

I’m not at all surprised by this because crafting communities, in general, are dominated by middle-aged, middle-class women who think golliwogs are hilarious. I’m told that the golliwog thing is less widespread outside of
Australia, but the general ignorance remains. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about some of the particularly vexing fabrics that have crossed my path.

Fabric design depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Mexican apparition of the Virgin Mary. — Personally I don’t see the appeal in wearing the Virgin Mary on a skirt, but that’s just me.

This is from Alexander Henry’s Folklorico collection, which is basically stereotypical Mexican iconography on fabric. The whole collection is deserving of side-eye, but I’ve chosen to discuss the Virgin of Guadalupe because I actually know something about it.

BASICALLY, in 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to an indigenous Mexican man, addressed him in his language, and told him to build a church on the site of her appearance. There followed a series of miracles, culminating in the appearance of this image on the man’s cloak.

Now, this is notable because, while the Catholic church, like most major European institutions of the 16th century, was heavily into colonialism, this was the first time a significant religious figure had appeared to one of the colonised peoples, not to mention speaking in his own language. And certain aspects of indigenous dress were incorporated into the miraculous image. It’s kind of like Mary was saying, “Yup, we’re all united.”

…okay, or there is that longstanding tradition of Catholicism just absorbing the local culture wherever it went, and various pagan figures sneaking into the mainstream religion under cover of being totes Christian, honest. (Suffice to say, a surprising number of Irish “saints” were actually local deities.)

Either way, this image represents a really complex mixture of colonialism, imperialism, cultural genocide and cultural exchange. It is not, in my opinion, something to be made into a cushion cover or whatever. (I should say, I am generally not okay with wearing or displaying the iconography of a religion you don’t practice. When I was 15 I wore a silver Buddha pendant, because no one told me not to, but that was a long time ago, and I’m pretty embarrassed about it now.)

But there is one other good reason to think twice before you make that Guadalupe quilt. The belt worn in the original image was worn by Mexican women when they were pregnant. This is, therefore, one of the surprisingly few depictions of Mary as a pregnant woman. And that means that the image has also been adopted by Catholic pro-life movements.

Now, my mum’s been a pro-life activist since before I was born, so I don’t automatically recoil from the concept. But I also don’t plan to go around wearing a Virgin of Guadalupe sundress. It’s a bit like the language of flowers — the message is only significant to a tiny number of people, but nevertheless, is it really a message you want to be sending?

Revisiting My Sister Sif

On April 26, 2014August 3, 2014 By Liz BarrIn books, Uncategorized1 Comment

‘Will Sarah stay with my grandmother?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said warily.

‘Mummy won’t talk about her. Is she upset because Granny is a brown lady?’

‘Maybe.’

A sailor falls in love with a beautiful Islander woman. The relationship breaks down over cultural differences; their children struggle to find a place in the world.

A sailor falls in love with a mermaid. The relationship breaks down because he’s an alcoholic and she is crippled on land; their children struggle to find a place in the world.

Despite the mermaids, My Sister Sif is science fiction. Published in 1991 and set in 2000, this is the story of Sif and Erika, the youngest children of the marriage between the sailor and the mermaid. Sif, 17, is dreamy and gentle; Erika is a pushy 14 year old with a cynical streak as wide as the Pacific Ocean.

Following the death of their father, they’ve been living with their older sister Joanna in Sydney. Joanna is a land-dweller through and through, determined to reject every aspect of her heritage, even their Scandinavian names. (Erika is the only child with an Islander name — her family call her Riko, short for Rikoriko, but she identifies as Erika.)

Knowing that Sif will never adapt to life in Sydney, Erika schemes to send her home to the Pacific island of Rongo, and makes the trip herself a few weeks after. But a stranger is coming to Rongo, too, a young American scientist who falls in love with Sif. Erika hates him, but the real threat to her family is something far more abstract and dangerous.

When I first read My Sister Sif, I was twelve. I’m pretty certain it was the very first genre book I read where the heroine was a person of colour. I picked it up on a weekend with my family — my old copy was lurking on my brother’s bookshelf — and wondered if re-reading it now would destroy all my memories of a book I had loved. The late Ruth Park was a white author, after all, and all the good intentions in the world can’t save you from accidental racism.

The good news is, I didn’t finish the book feeling horribly disappointed and disillusioned. The bad news is, that’s partially because I don’t know much about Pacific Islanders, their culture or how they’re portrayed in the media. Well, there’s Chris Lilley‘s Jonah (a delinquent Islander boy played by Lilley in brownface), but that’s about it. Google brought me a variety of blog posts by New Zealanders, arguing that Pacific Islanders are frequently portrayed as violent, alcoholic and not too bright. (Sad fact: even racist New Zealand media is more diverse than Australia’s — I’m thinking of the ad where a Maori kid prevents his Islander friend from driving drunk.)

This post is most reflective of Park’s portrayal of Islanders:

Pacific Islanders—particularly Polynesians—are portrayed as a simple people lacking in complexity, intellect, or ambition. Acting always as a group, Pacific characters can be seen running, fishing, eating, or playing with little or no differentiation between one individual and another.

That’s about it for My Sister Sif. Aside from the mixed race Magnus sisters, the Islander we see most of is Mummy Ti, who, though not their biological parent, is effectively their mother. Erika’s homecoming:

Soon I was in the small flowery shed behind the airstrip, and there was Sif, eyes sparkling in a brown face, and Mummy Ti, crowned with yellow hibiscus, and yelling with happiness.

Fat, floral and loud. These traits conform to stereotypes, but they also mark Mummy Ti instantly as a safe person, in contrast to the slender, chilly Joanna. Late in the book, Mummy Ti sets aside her cuddly persona to confront the girls’ mother, Matira, who wants to take Sif away:

Mummy Ti insisted on accompanying us. I watched her dress, in the old style — the flowing flowery dress called a Mother Hubbard, her beautiful black hair down her back, and a crown of orange hibiscus flowers on her head. She was majestic, like a Tahitian princess of ancient days. Her face was fierce. I knew she would fight Matira for Sif, if it came to that. I remembered her words, that she would not allow bad things to happen to us.

Whatever was in her mind — pagan spells or Christian prayers — was powerful. She said nothing, crouched on the sand above high tidemark, her eyes fixed upon Stig and our mother. Just the look of her made me uneasy. I was thankful it was not me she disliked.

Again, there is a strong element of stereotype, but reading this as a child, it was only the second time I had ever encountered a description of non-white majesty.

The first was in this very book, a few chapters earlier, and, of course, it’s Matira herself:

Just then our mother rose like a brown wraith out of the lagoon. Though she was old, she was not old like a landwoman. Her hair was a metre long, cloudy in the water like dark weed. On her head was an ornament of blue staghorn coral.

…Always when her arms were around me I forgot that Matira had run off to live with her own people when I was four, leaving me to my father and Dockie to bring up. There was enough seaperson in me to understand her homesickness.

Two powerful women, both mothers to the heroines. What’s remarkable here is that Erika loves and empathises with both of them, even the selfish and imperious Matira. Erika and Sif’s mother is criticised for her self-aborption, but she’s never demonised for it.

Nevertheless, the portrayal of the islanders as a whole is stereotypical and two dimensional. The only (human) islander we see much of is Mummy Ti; the rest are an amorphous crowd who enjoy movies, sweet food and a good joke. The other Rongo-dwelling humans with whom Erika interacts are Dockie, Mummy Ti’s alcoholic Scottish husband, and the local missionary, the Reverend Mr Spry. Good characters, but very much white dudes.

There is, however, a second group of nonhuman islanders in the mix: the menehune. They have their origin in Hawaiian mythology, dwarf-like people who are skilled builders and craftsmen. Like the mermaids, they aren’t magical fantasy people here, but an indigenous people dealing with colonisation, loss of culture and the destructive effects of climate change. Erika’s best friend is a young menehune boy named Pig, who is attempting to embrace modern culture:

Pig wore jeans, which he had stolen from a clothes line down in the village. The legs were too wide for his muscular limbs, so he had slit them up the seams. The jeans now flapped around his legs like the cowboy chaps you see in ancient Western photographs. Pig was unbearably arrogant about his jeans. He was convinced they were magic and could turn him into a modern boy. He was that rare creature, a menehune who wished to join the rest of the world. So he caused great anxiety in his tribe.

Pig worries his father by wearing his hair in spikes, eating too much sugar and messing about with human stuff, and he’s closely allied with fellow-outsider Erika. Erika, in turn, respects his culture while acknowledging, and worrying about, his differences. The menehune are facing extinction — fewer and fewer girls are being born, and the changing climate is affecting their traditional homes. This parallels Pig’s attempt to turn away from his heritage, without judging his personal choice.

Reading My Sister Sif as an adult, I found it problematic but still engaging and powerful. As a kid, I found the environmental subplot tedious and heavy-handed; as an adult who is aware that the Pacific Islands will be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, I found it chilling. Yet it ends on an ultimately hopeful note, even if my eyes were blurred by tears by the time I hit the final page.

One interesting feature: the parallels between My Sister Sif and Ruth Park’s most famous novel, The Harp in the South. Published in 1948, that was a controversial depiction of life among the urban poor of Sydney. It, too, centred around two sisters, one shy and delicate and the other brash and too clever for her own good. And it, too, featured a character of mixed race who has trouble finding his place in society. In that case, the character is Charlie Rothe, a man of Aboriginal descent, a member of the Stolen Generation, who ultimately marries Roie, one of the heroines. (It’s a portrayal with some fairly racist clunkers, as you’d expect from 1948, but also — a man of colour marries a heroine. Actually, he marries both of them, Roie ultimately dying from poverty-related complications in childbirth. In the ’40s and ’50s. He was totally played by a white guy in the TV adaptations of the ’80s, so well done, Australia.)

Secrets & Lies & WHAT I CANNOT EVEN

On April 12, 2014 By Liz BarrIn media3 Comments

A few weeks ago I blogged about Secrets & Lies, an Australian crime drama set in Brisbane. I summed up the first episode thusly:

Manpain. No sympathetic adult women. One person of colour, unsympathetic. The hero has never read a detective novel ever, and is following the How To Look Totally Suss playbook. Nevertheless, the mystery is interesting and I like the setting, so I’m probably going to keep watching.

I thought this series ran for 10 episodes, but it turns out that, no, that’s just the US remake. The Australian series only goes for six episodes — which means it’s done, it’s finished, and I’m about to spoil it for you.

Are you ready?

Because chances are, this is the ending for the US version as well.

Sure?

Okay. The hero’s young daughter did it.

It’s not made clear how old Eva is meant to be, but “between eight and 12” is the range. She wears her hair in two pigtails, is devoted to her dad, and is the only female character who is both sympathetic to him and not sleeping with him. (Thank God.) She’s an adorable moppet, so of course she killed a five-year-old boy to drive his mum from their street. Of course.

Now, the thing about crime fiction in any medium is that if you’re going to go dark — and child-murderers is very dark — you need to make the story worthwhile. You can’t just chuck it in as a shocking twist that also conveniently punishes the kid’s mother for not loving the hero enough. The actress was incredibly good at portraying both Adorable Moppet and Child Sociopath, but the writing didn’t justify it.

Of course, I really wanted the hero, Ben Gundelach, to be guilty. I wanted this whole thing to be his unreliable narrative of denial mixed with guilt mixed with actualfax murderous intent, because that was the only way his characterisation would make any sense. Because in the wake of finding the body of the child, Thom, he goes on a rampage of lying to police, hiding evidence, accusing neighbours, assaulting grown men, assaulting teenage boys, and more. In the final episode, he breaks into the home of the bereaved mother armed with a shovel.

His behaviour was actually scary! And sending out all sorts of red flags in terms of potential for violence and irrational rage. Yet the narrative was all, “Well, you know how hard it is for men when they’re accused of murder…”

Now, I don’t need characters to be squeaky clean. One of the most tragic and compelling moments in Forbrydelsen, aka The Killing is when Theis Birk Larsen, the father of the murdered girl at the centre of the plot, has his cronies abduct a teacher from her school and torture him into confessing. It’s absolutely clear how Thies’s behaviour is driven by guilt and fear — but we’re not meant to cheer him on. And at the end of the series, he goes to jail.

Secrets & Lies wanted us to be on Ben’s side. And I just can’t do that. And in real life, even white, middle-class male homeowners are charged with assault when they punch a teenage boy, even if the outcome is usually just a good behaviour bond and a fine.

So at the centre of this story, we have a deeply unpleasant hero, who isn’t even especially competent. And he’s surrounded by women who should be really interesting female characters … except we’re meant to hate them. A quick round up:

Christy, his wife. As the series opens, she has just told him she’s leaving him. But it’s not his fault he had an affair with Jess, the woman across the road and fathered her son! (Yeah, I was totally right with that prediction, by the way.) He only did it because Christy had had an abortion, and even though he said he was totally okay with it, he wasn’t! And she is career-driven and terse, not vulnerable and sexually available like Jess!

Tasha, his teenage daughter. She’s on the cusp of adulthood and independence, and is almost certainly sexually active, and she doesn’t buy her father’s bullshit for a second! HOW DARE SHE?

Eva, the adorable moppet who loves her dad and blames women (Christy and Jess) for breaking up the family. And she’s really sorry she killed Thom, because it caused her father manpain.

Jess, the Gundelachs’ neighbour, mother of Thom, occasional lover of Ben. She’s perfect in every way — I mean, pretty much a doormat — until the second-last episode, when Ben discovers that she has bipolar disorder (!) and is occasionally paranoid (!!) and violent (!!!). And she had an earlier daughter, who died of SIDS, and everyone knows that’s just code for “my mum’s a crazy bitch who killed me to death”.

After this SHOCKING REVELATION, Jess spends the rest of the series Being Crazy, rolling her eyes and laughing inappropriately and making false rape accusations against Ben. I’d have ragequit on the spot, but with 19 minutes left of the entire series, I was in too deep.

They’re the main female characters. There’s also Jess’s Sister, Who Doesn’t Take Ben Seriously For Some Reason, and the Bitchy, Slutshaming Older Neighbour, and the Neighbour Who Totally Hides That Her Husband Is A Paedophile.

All of these people are white, because this is set in a magical alternate Brisbane with no people of colour. In six hours of TV, we had exactly two non-white characters: a guy who appeared in one scene, was pissy to Ben for little things like NOT DOING HIS JOB and vanished; and an extra, who didn’t actually speak. Both were in the first episode. After that, it’s just a sea of white. Even the taxi drivers are white, which is … demographically unlikely.

(Other ways this is set in a magical alternate universe version of Brisbane: a week or so before Christmas, a character wears a puffy jacket because it’s raining. Someone lives in Brisbane and OWNS a puffy jacket. In the week between Christmas and NYE, people are wearing long pants. It’s weird, is what I’m saying.)

In short, the series was a strange and off-putting exercise in accidentally demonstrating male privilege. It wasn’t particularly well-written. The mystery didn’t hang together cohesively. The hero was repulsive.

The biggest mystery about the whole thing is that ABC (the American network, not Our ABC) were already producing a remake before this had even aired. Have they thrown out the scripts and started again from scratch? Certainly they’ve made the characters’ names more Anglo-Saxon and less Western-European-Ethnic — “Gundelach” has become “Garner” and Corniell, the police detective, has become “Cornell”. But said detective has ALSO been genderflipped, and is now played by Juliette Lewis, which intrigues me, and also goes a long way towards fixing the Women Problem. (There’s also an African-American character, who I think is Cornell’s offsider or similar, but it doesn’t look like a big part.)

I wanted this to be successful, but also actually good. It was neither, and I’m disappointed.

On the other hand, this is actually a good time for Australian TV. This weekend sees the premiere of The Gods of Wheat Street, a magic-realist (!) series about an Aboriginal family (!!). My hopes are high, people. Showrunner Jon Bell has worked on Redfern Now, which is a hell of a better pedigree than Secrets & Lies had.

Secrets & Lies

On March 5, 2014 By Liz BarrIn media3 Comments

Secrets & Lies is Australia’s attempt at a Broadchurch/The Killing style of mystery, self-contained but with a focus on the impact of murder on a community. I enjoy a good (fictional or historical) murder, and I was intrigued by the Brisbane setting and the fact it was picked up for an American remake before it had even aired. I am far too Gen Y and cool to watch live-to-air TV, plus my house doesn’t have an aerial, so I hit tenplay. Which I mention just because I approve of legal streaming television in general, and this was a good service with a nice, crisp stream, so well done, Channel 10.

The official blurb:

Secrets & Lies is a gripping six-part series that tells the story of Ben Gundelach (played by Martin Henderson – The Ring, Little Fish, Bride & Prejudice and Devil’s Knot), an everyday family man who finds the body of a young boy and quickly becomes the prime murder suspect.

My blurb:

Manpain. No sympathetic adult women. One person of colour, unsympathetic. The hero has never read a detective novel ever, and is following the How To Look Totally Suss playbook.

Nevertheless, the mystery is interesting and I like the setting, so I’m probably going to keep watching. And blogging.

I’m also going to keep on pointing out the incredibly white cast, because WOW, that does not look like Brisbane, even the upper middle-class river-side suburbia part of Brisbane. It’s just so typical of Australian TV that no one even stops to think about diversity. And if anyone dares to point it out, they’re accused of racism.

And I really hope the writing of the women pick up, because so far they’re pretty two-dimensional. Don’t go looking for an Antipodean Sarah Lund here, because all the cops with speaking roles are dudes.

But like I said, the mystery is interesting. I’m kind of hoping that the hero turns out to be the murderer, but I think we’re too deep inside his head for that sort of twist. I am, however, going to predict that he’s the dead child’s father. STAY TUNED.

On awards and self-promotion

On February 8, 2014 By Liz BarrIn Uncategorized

It seems like every year, the SF community has a kerfuffle about promoting one’s award-eligible work with the aim of getting it nominated. There are those who think it’s unbelievably tacky, but there’s also the point that marginalised groups tend to be overlooked if they don’t put themselves out there.

Have some links!

John Scalzi made a series of tweets, which basically boiled down to “Promote away, don’t be a jerk.”

Adam Roberts writes, essentially, “Sure, marginalised groups are easily overlooked, but self-promotion is really tacky and distorts the nomination process, so don’t do it.”

Scalzi politely disagrees so we don’t have to.

For women, this issue came to the fore last year, when Seanan McGuire was accused of excessively promoting herself. She had made, in fact, two posts about her eligibility for nominations.

Amal el-Mohtar writes further on that subject.

All of this is to say that the Chronos Awards are now accepting nominations, and No Award is eligible for Best Fan Publication.

Additionally, our individual posts are eligible for nomination under Best Fan Writing. We are particularly proud of these:

(by Liz Barr)

For Your Bookshelf – The Deep by Tom Taylor

For Your Bookshelf – The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

The Sea and Summer

Pacific Rim, welcome to the blog!

(by Stephanie Lai)

The Exotic Place as Other (and notes on Cinder by Marissa Meyer)

Pacific Rim and the Chinese Jaeger program (and what that means in 2013)

Australia’s Jaeger Program, ps racism and history

It’s a shame, mind, that Stephanie’s series of posts on Serangoon Road don’t count as science fiction, fantasy or horror, because they surely deserve all kinds of awards. Someone should buy her a bottle of vegan wine as compensation.

Clause 6.4 of the Chronos Awards rules states:

6.4 No Award: “No Award” shall appear last on the ballot for all categories.

So, you see, you’re practically obliged to nominate us! Right? RIGHT?

Look, our original purpose here was trolling, and we’re not going to let a little thing like “Liz, that’s a terrible joke” stop us.

Nomination rules:

5.1 Eligible nominators and voters: Nominations will be accepted only from natural persons active in fandom, or from full or supporting members of the event hosting the award. Where a nominator may not be known to the Awards subcommittee, the nominator should provide the name of someone known to the subcommittee who can vouch for the nominator’s eligibility.

5.2 Nominations: The nomination may nominate any number of works in any category. However, the nominator may nominate any given work only once in a category. All nominations must include the name of the nominator. Where a nominated mark does not meet the criteria for its nominated category, the committee may move the nomination to the appropriate category; or where a work does not meet any criteria, refuse the nomination.

5.3 Timing of Nominations: Nominations shall be open for a minimum of 30 days. Postal nominations shall be counted as valid based on postmark or receipt, whichever is earliest, if received before the final deadline set by the committee.

I have some feelings about that “must be active in fandom” bit, and “known to the organisers” and all. But the first time I nominated someone — hey, I think it was Stephanie! — I said, “I am active in fandom, and here is my blog to prove it SO THERE,” only without the SO THERE. Alternatively, you can become a supporting member — or even a full member! Please feel free to come to our convention! — of Continuum. It’s a great convention! And I’m the membership officer, and shall think loving thoughts as you are entered into my database.)

More information about nominating, and other categories, and a link to a longer list of eligible works, can be found on Continuum’s website.

Saturday morning links

On January 25, 2014 By Liz BarrIn books, links, media, movies, politics4 Comments

Note: Links may not actually be posted until Saturday afternoon

Stuff Stephanie has been doing

Writing! She has a series of posts about Chinese-Australian identity at Peril, and has written a piece on voluntourism, ethics and actually making a difference for The Toast.

Australia (is terrible)

Australia Day has more violence than any other public holiday! What this article doesn’t mention is that very few of this violence is directed at white people, which means the current HARD LINE LAURA NORDER stance currently being adopted by New South Wales isn’t going to help in this instance.

This might be time-sensitive, but comedian Aamer Rahman has been retweeting some of the racist hate he gets.

Feminisms

Group dynamics on a female podcast – a bunch of my friends do Verity, an all-women Doctor Who podcast. Now, I am terrible with podcasts, so I don’t listen to it regularly, but it’s clever and interesting and often very funny. However, some people (male people) think Team Verity need to be a bit … nicer.

New blog: Intersectionality Times, “a place that hopes to provide a safe space for those of us who are ‘othered’ by mainstream Australian feminism.”

Stealing sexy calendars isn’t Jesus and it isn’t radical – “If your activism involves turning over tables and then leaving them there for minimum wage workers to clean up, please rethink. If your feminism involves “breaking glass ceilings” and leaving other women to sweep up the glass, stop.” I really couldn’t put it better.

Dear James Delingpole: You are the problem – “Little boys are not universally sociopaths in training: nurturing and love are not exclusively feminine traits. But that’s what they can sometimes become, if, as so many people do, you assume that boys are naturally monstrous, and consequently neglect to teach them the empathy, kindness and respect for others you’ve already decided they’re incapable of learning.”

Media

A Chinese space opera trilogy is coming to the US Anglosphere – this isn’t new news, but I’m reblogging it mostly so I remember. Also, it looks like some of Liu Cuxin’s short fiction is available in English on Amazon, so note to self, get into that.

I’ve been re-watching Star Trek: Voyager for the first time since … well, since I stopped being a Trekkie, back in the early 2000s. I’d like to say that I’ve been inspired with meaningful and clever thoughts about the series, but … well, apparently nothing has changed since I was 14. Except that I’m playing a fun game of, “Did I actually watch this multiple times, or did I just memorise Jim Wright‘s review?”

But in the same universe, Grant Watson has been watching and blogging about the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Economic injustice

Why your shoes won’t save the world – the problem with “buy one, give one” charity.

Race

Not your Asian sidekick – the fight for diverse identities – an Australian account of the recent hashtag, and why it’s important.

Why I prefer “black” – On identity, race, nationalism and more. Of note: I don’t use the term “person/woman of colour” for myself because, from an Aboriginal perspective, this phrase does not carry the same political weight and indeed, to be “of colour” to me is to also be comfortable with people defining my background by those old blood quanta percentages, which I reject.

This is something I try to keep in mind: although “person of colour” is widely accepted, and generally not considered offensive, it is by no means a universal phrase. (I had to explain this to an American recently. It was … challenging.)

Food

How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? This article covers a lot of ground, but the answer is basically “intersectionality”.

Also, I am kind of touched by the notion that $4 is a lot to pay for toast. Bless you, America, but your prices are artificially low.

(It’s not just America. Mel from Subversive Reader was ranting on Twitter … yesterday? About $2 baby shirts, and the fact that the fabric alone costs more than that. As she said, someone isn’t being paid their due, and you can bet it’s not the Australian retail worker at the final point of sale.)

Frozen

Last week, Melbourne experienced a record-breaking heatwave. I coped by hiding out in an air-conditioned cinema and watching Frozen.

I had initially planned to give Frozen the old boycott-by-ignoring-and-basically-forgetting-it-existed, because of that animator’s comments about it being sooooooo haaaaaaaaaard to animate women, because they have to have facial expressions but still remain pretty! I was like, dude, you work for a company that’s fairly well-known for its animated female characters, I’m pretty sure you can figure it out.

However, increasing numbers of my friends were seeing it, and coming away talking it up as totes feminist and progressive. My curiosity was piqued! Also, it was really hot.

And I enjoyed it! I thought it was a decent movie in its own right, but played with Disney tropes in an interesting way. And if you had told me that Disney would do a movie about an agoraphobic princess, I wouldn’t have believed you. AND YET.

Okay, I don’t think Elsa is actually agoraphobic, or has any other condition that maps to contemporary psychology. But the way her fear of her magic, and hurting people with her magic, manifests is so close to agoraphobia (and other things — Anna hints that she assumed her sister was obsessive-compulsive) that it felt quite right to me. Likewise, in finally embracing her abilities, she displays a hint of the femme fatale, making her possibly the most knowingly sexual Disney ~~princess~~ queen yet.

Also, Anna is basically me, if I was a Disney princess. Except that I wouldn’t go haring off after my sister in a snowstorm, wearing a summer dress. (Sorry, sis.)

With that in mind, here are some interesting and useful Frozen posts:

7 moments that made Frozen the most progressive Disney movie ever – I try to avoid that kind of hyperbole, because it’s nearly always wrong/oversimplified/ALSO WRONG. But these were good features!

How Ariel became Disney’s bad woman: a look at Frozen and The Little Mermaid – so I completely disagree with this post’s taken on Frozen, but I really love it for reclaiming the feminism of The Little Mermaid. IT’S COMPLICATED.

(Having said that, as an adult, I now find it quite sad that Ariel is only 16 when she makes the irrevocable decision to change species and get married. That’s so young!)

Here I Go (Despair of an Alto) – I can’t actually hit a note or hold a tune, but if I could, I’d be an alto. So this speaks to me on a very profound level.

A summer Christmas

On December 23, 2013 By Liz BarrIn Uncategorized10 Comments

YOU GUYS, IT’S CHRISTMAS! I mean, it’s the Christmas season. And while I used to be quite grinchy about the whole thing, I’ve given in and admitted that I love the tinsel, the food, the drink and Billie Piper’s cover of “Last Christmas“.

I mean, it probably helps that Christmas is a religious holiday for me, so in addition to the general secular cheer, the season has another layer of meaning. Hell, Christmas has lots of meanings, some of them contradictory.

And some of them are pretty localised. Christmas is a beacon of hope in the darkest time of year! It’s a time for families to huddle together against the cold! Why, Christmas just isn’t Christmas without snow!

Yeah, nuh.

A crowd of Santas stand on a beach. Many carry red and white striped surfboards. One holds a ham up to the camera. — These surfing Santas are part of supermarket chain Aldi’s Christmas advertising.

Christmas, in Australia, takes place in early summer, just a few days after solstice. Most years, if a church has air conditioning, it’s running full blast through the Midnight Mass. The Christmas Eve vigil Mass is often held outside. (Well, it was in my home town, where “outside” meant a nice, empty field, not a busy inner city street!)

Mulled wine is just the starter for sangria. (No, seriously, you know that vile glögg sold at Ikea? A third of a bottle, a third of a bottle of cheap shiraz, some soda water and some orange. SO GREAT.) My mother only drinks at Christmas, so we drink a bottle of fizzy, cheap Lambrusco with lunch and then have a siesta as the afternoon gets hotter.

Oh, the food. Even if I became vegan tomorrow, I’d have to make an exception for Christmas. Sure, we have our turkeys and our chickens, but one year, Mum baked fish and served it with a vast array of salads. Most years, she roasts a lamb on Christmas Eve, and we eat it cold for lunch the next day. (If it lasts that long. “Elizabeth, stop picking at the lamb!” is the annual Christmas refrain.)

I haven’t been home for Christmas for a few years, and this year I’m feeling really low about that, so forgive me if I become nostalgic.

In fact, all this festive nostalgia drove me to Pastures of the Blue Crane by H F Brinsmead, one of my favourite books as a kid. It’s the story of a lonely, snobbish girl whose father dies, leaving her a grandfather she never knew, property in northern New South Wales, and a bunch of family secrets. For a book with an explicitly anti-racist message, it’s also amazingly racist, but that’s the ’60s for you. Here is the heroine’s new next door neighbour describing her Christmas plans:

‘Now, I’ll be very hurt if you and your grandad don’t come over and have Christmas dinner with us! I’m counting on you. I’ve got a turkey – we’ll have it cold – and avocado pears with french dressing and stuffed peppers. I feel really inspired over tomorrow’s dinner.’

And it’s taken me this many years to realise that “avocado pears” just means avocado, not some unholy combination of avocado and pear.

The event itself:

It was eaten on a trestle table under the great Moreton Bay fig-trees at the edge of Clem’s lawn … Clem’s new brick house was not large and would never have contained the eighteen diners whom they managed, without any trouble, to muster. These included two very old aunts, a married daughter with three small children, the married daughter’s husband and parents-in-law, Clem’s father – who was about Dusty’s age and universally known as Butch Bradley – and various other people claiming connexion. This assortment of people seemed to enjoy each other’s company with gusto, drawing the newcomers into their circle as though they, too, were part of the country and its life.

The meal was such a major affair that it trailed on well into the afternoon, finally merging into a cold tea.

That, to me, has always seemed like the ideal Christmas: outdoors, with lots of food and even more family and friends. Which is kind of weird, now I think about it, because mine is a rather small, isolated, indoorcentric sort of family. We have never gone to the beach on Christmas Day (too crowded) to play beach cricket (too crowded, also, cricket is a team sport, and therefore something we do not do). I have vague memories of my grandparents hosting a barbecue in summer once, but whether that was for Christmas, I have no idea.

Things we don’t do for Christmas in Australia:

Holly. Doesn’t grow here. You can buy plastic holly, but … why?
Mistletoe. It does grow here, but it’s a noxious exotic parasite. Except for native mistletoe, obviously, which belongs to the local ecosystem, but no one kisses under that. (Do northern hemisphere types really kiss under mistletoe? Seriously?)
Hang Christmas stockings over a fireplace. Okay, we might do that, in houses that have fireplaces (mine does, and we done), but we also don’t…
Have roaring fires at Christmas time. Apparently that needs to be pointed out.

Things Australians do do on Christmas Day:

Dream of a white Christmas. IDEK.
Roast stuff, leaving the kitchen a steaming oven of PAIN and HEAT. Why? I DON’T KNOW. But those baked fish were totally worth it.
Drink a lot.
Drink seasonally inappropriate beverages. I don’t know what it is about Christmas that has me saying, “Yes. Brandy. That’s what I need in my belly right now.” But there you go.
Exchange cards and sing carols featuring snow.
Write op-eds about how seasonally inappropriate traditions have to go.
Eat at halal restaurants and lament that the shops are closed because of some damn Christian holiday, and it’s not like anything changes for Eid or Ramadan, does it? (Cultural variations may apply.)

CHRISTMAS. I love it. Even this year, when I’m probably going to spend the day by myself, playing Mass Effect and drinking cider. And I hope that everyone reading this has a happy, safe day.

Worldbuilding: The Australian YA Dystopia

On December 18, 2013August 1, 2014 By Liz BarrIn Uncategorized2 Comments

This post started life on Tumblr, in response to the following conversation:

dominiquemorgenstern:

The Great Unanswered Question:

What the hell happens to every country on the planet that isn’t the US in YA dystopias

HMASFatty:

We’re just getting on with our lives. And mocking. So much mocking.

Me:

“Hey, Bazza, Panem’s 75th Hunger Games are on.”

“Seriously? Again? Why haven’t we invaded them and imposed democracy yet?”

“‘Cos I’m still waiting for my download of the 74th Hunger Games to finish. Fucking fibre to the node.”

And that would have been the end of it, except that, still chuckling at my own joke, I went and had a shower.

You know what happens in showers, right?

IDEAS. Unless you’re deliberately showering in the hopes of brain stimulation. Then your brain just laughs at you, and you sadly realise you’re doing nothing but wasting water.

I got thinking about what an Australian YA dystopia — well, really any Australian dystopia — would look like, and how it would work. Not that I’m treading new ground — remember my rant about The Sea and Summer? — but it’s not like America lets the existence of a couple of iconic dystopias stand in the way of publishing and filming more.

From Tumblr:

Apropos my last post, because this is something I think about a lot, especially since I saw Catching Fire last week, and am now re-reading The Hunger Games. And, dammit, I get sad that we don’t have a YA dystopia with an emotionally stunted iconic heroine played by Shari Sebbens and brooding and handsome hero played by Jordan Rodrigues of our own!

So the thing about Australia is, we’re roughly the same size as the United States, but much more sparsely populated. So in the event of some kind of technological cataclysm, such as a nuclear electromagnetic pulse coupled with radical climate change, we’re less likely to wind up with a totalitarian one-party state than a series of isolated communities that occasionally fight over resources. Some of those isolated communities might be totalitarian one-party states, though, if you’re into that sort of thing.

For example, Perth is separated from the rest of Australia by a GIANT DESERT, and Western Australia is a vast state in its own right, so that would be the first to separate. (Nightsiders by Sue Isle is a collection of novellas set in a dystopian Perth.) I’ve never actually been to WA, but it was the last state to join up when we were federating. (At one stage, “Australia” was going to be the eastern and central states, plus New Zealand. Ah, good times.) WA also has, to a considerable extent, its own isolated legal system, not to mention a lively secessionist movement. How well it would do on its own is debateable, but if we assume a system where the Federal Government and Constitution no longer function, I reckon WA would be the first state to go full independence/Mad Max style leather-clad anarchy.

Tasmania would go next, because it’s an island, and I shall refrain from making cannibal jokes out of consideration for … you know. We would also shed Darwin, which is closer to South East Asia than it is to other Australian cities.

Likewise, far north Queensland would probably be cementing its close geographic ties to the Torres Strait and New Guinea — in the coastal regions, at least. Further inland, you’d probably have your isolated homesteaders, the kind of people who already think they’re living in the End Times and prove it by voting for Bob Katter. Queensland, as people like to point out whenever the issue of daylight savings is raised, is basically several states smushed together anyway. I expect my mum will end up in Clive Palmer’s People’s Republic.

…Come to think of it, there’s a lot of mineral wealth in WA and QLD, not to mention uranium in the Northern Territory, but how much of that is of use to those states if large-scale international trade has collapsed remains to be seen. But it certainly brings them closer to self-sufficiency than, say, Canberra.

Then you have your larger state capitals, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. They’re all within driving distance, albeit a couple of days’ drive, so I can see that they wouldn’t be entirely isolated. But how much power the Federal Government has in those circumstances is debateable. (I mean, the Constitution gives a lot more power to the States than the Federal Government, but Federalism developed along with the technological resources for faster communication and travel.)

ANYWAY, what you end up with are several separate communities, not hugely trusting of one another. (Even now, you can see the old rivalries in the scrum that develops around GST revenue and Federal funding.) Stack on a few generations, let this develop as the status quo, let technology re-develop but keep in mind the effects of climate change, and what do you have? A totalitarian state? A laissez faire corporatocracy? Anarchy? All this and everything in between, depending on where you are?

Not to mention all the nations around us would dealing with their own problems, many of them small island states being swallowed up by the rising oceans. ”SCARY FORNERS INVADING HONEST, WHITE AUSTRALIA” is one of those right-wing tropes I prefer to avoid, but there comes a point where you’re wondering why they’re not knocking on the door.

Again, this comes back to those odd US dystopias where the rest of the world apparently doesn’t exist. Certainly in The Hunger Games, Panem includes Canada, but what’s meant to have happened to the rest of North America is a mystery. But that’s set so far in the future that no one — well, not Katniss, whose education has mostly involved coal and revolution — has any particular understanding or memory of the United States as a thing that existed.

Australia doesn’t get to be an isolated dystopia, because, much as some politicians would like to think otherwise, we’re not an isolated nation. The lines might wind up drawn differently, but we don’t get to stand alone.

Some local dystopia for you:

The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina is the first in a YA trilogy (I think) about young people with special abilities in a future, dystopian Australia. It’s also one of the few works of science fiction by an Indigenous author — oh, look, she’s a guest of honour at Continuum next year, plug, plug, plug. I actually didn’t finish the first book, because it wasn’t what I was in the mood for at the time, but I couldn’t actually say whether it’s good or bad or in between.

Karen Healey’s When We Wake isn’t precisely a dystopia — its future Australia is pretty great, provided you don’t care about refugees, or incredibly powerful militaries, and what not. In short, it’s very much like the present day — quite fantastic, as long as you don’t look at things too closely.

(Karen responded to my Tumblr post and described When We Wake as a pre-dystopia, which I think is great.)

An anti-rec: The Rosie Black Chronicles by Lara Morgan. I can’t remember if this is actually dystopian, or just plain old sci-fi. I was too busy facepalming at the terrible writing and general racism to pay attention.