Academic

Queering Localities, Day 1

~ Cheryl

OK, so I was late to this because I have to talk to some lovely police people. I know that many trans people have had awful interactions with the police, but each local force is a big organization full or many different people and the ones who come to the SARI training want to learn and be better. I’m happy to help and encourage them.

The one session I did sit in on was all about Oxford, which is a very queer university. One of the most interesting things about it is that any queer history of Oxford is inevitably a queer history of the British upper classes.

If you want a taste of the history, read all about Parson’s Pleasure. Anyone who was anyone (male) in Oxford in the 1920s (the period in which Brideshead Revisited is set) would have gone there. Including, apparently, C.S. Lewis. I don’t think Aslan would have approved.

Also Oxford did an amazing job this year of queering their museums. Hopefully we can repeat some of that success in Bristol.

Queering Localities

~ Cheryl

I will be off to London tomorrow to attend Queering Localities, a conference dedicated to teaching those myopic London folks that there is queerness outside of their city boundaries. I’ll be joined by my friend, Julian Warren, who for many years was head of Bristol Archives and who has been an invaluable assistant in researching Bristol’s LGBT History. The conference is free and open to all, so if you happen to be around please drop by.

I won’t be there until mid-afternoon on Thursday because I’m training police cadets in Bristol tomorrow morning. Julian and I are in the 11:10-12:30 slot on Friday. That slot also features my good friend Surat-Shaan Knan, who will be talking about LGBT+ migrants and asylum seekers.

New Digging for Britain

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The latest series of Digging for Britain, the BBC archaeology series that reports on the best digs of the past year, has just started. I caught up with last night’s show over dinner and have been blown away by some of the discoveries.

Let’s start at Meonstoke in Hampshire where the University of Winchester has been excavating what was thought to be a Roman villa but has turned out to be a temple complex dedicated to the goddess Dea Nutrix. What is interesting about this goddess is that she’s not Roman. She is generally shown breastfeeding children, but Roman women were not big on breastfeeding. They had slaves to do that for them. Celtic women, on the other hand, did breastfeed, and these temples are found in the Celtic parts of the empire. That probably means that we are looking at a Celtic goddess who has been incorporated into Roman religious life in much the same way as Isis became popular in Rome. The site in Hampshire may well be similar to Bath in that it is a Roman temple built on the location of an ancient Celtic holy site.

There were two features on Stone Age Britain. One looked briefly at the mysterious “square circle” discovered at the heart of the Avebury ring. There’s still a lot to be learned about that, but it is clear that Avebury was a populated settlement, not just a religious site. Far more interesting for me was the news that we appear to have completely misunderstood long barrows such as Cat’s Brain in Wiltshire. Rather than being burial mounds for individuals, they appear to be mounds constructed over communal longhouses that have been decommissioned and burned. What is buried is perhaps not a person, but a community.

My favorite report was one on the dig by the University of Bristol at Repton on what they believe to be the first over-winter camp of a viking army in Britain. The camp is known from later reports in viking sagas, but we’d not had any proven archaeology until now. The new dig has found clear evidence of an army camp, including evidence of weapon-making and ship repairs. The site is associated with a mass grave of some 300 vikings, presumably killed in the battle with the Mercians reported by the sagas. Excitingly several of the dead are women, some apparently with battle wounds. Obviously we can’t prove that they were warriors, but isotope analysis of their teeth shows that they came from Scandinavia with the army.

Oh, and Alice Roberts has adopted my hair color, so I feel properly professorial now.

Who Gets to do History?

~ Cheryl

The blog posts following on from the Creative Histories conference have been coming regularly for several weeks now and we have got to the point where my contribution has been posted. I talked about who gets to do history, and in particular the idea that certain groups of people (mostly old white men) are somehow able to be “objective” while other groups (mostly women and people from minority groups) are seen as having a biased view. You can read my post here.

New Gendered Voices Magazine

~ Cheryl

Earlier this year I attended a really great conference at Bristol University called Gendered Voices. The group that puts it on also publishes a magazine, and for the latest issue they kindly asked me to contribute an article. So I wrote them something on trans people in the Inca Empire. They also put me in the cover collage, which is dedication above and beyond the call of duty.

There are lots of other really interesting articles in the issue, and you can read it for free, here. Enjoy!

Not Korean Enough?

~ Cheryl

Book Twitter today, in between the excitement over the US elections, has been busy fuming over this tweet:

https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/927993475026563072

It is a particularly crass example of something which I fear is rather more common than we’d like to think, particularly in literary fiction (or at least fiction that thinks of itself as literary). It is also an example of the sort of thing I was talking about in my paper at the conference in Italy.

Now of course I was talking about trans people in fiction. How does that relate to Koreans? Well, in the case above what I think the editor is really saying is not that Chang’s characters are not Asian enough, but that they don’t sufficiently conform to the editor’s stereotypical idea of what a Korean-American character should be like. In other words, the editor doesn’t want authentic Asian characters, what they want are characters that will appeal to the book’s presumed straight, cis, able-bodied, white audience, of whom the editor assumes themself to be typical.

The same is true of trans people trying to write authentic characters. Here’s a quote from Meredith Russo, author of If I Was Your Girl, after she was asked in an interview to give advice to trans authors who want to get published.

Like, right now, the story that the cis world is most ready for and willing to accept is like “The Danish Girl”. It’s like “hello, I am a trans person, hello, I am a boy who thinks he is supposed to be a girl. Here’s me dealing with it. Here’s a very heavy emphasis on how all my cis friends and family feel about it. I might die. I’ll probably be heartbroken at the end.”

See the similarity? Russo is saying that publishers don’t want authentic trans characters, they want characters that conform to a cis readership’s expectations of a trans character. Nicola Griffith tells me that disabled people face similar issues.

The good news is that, with the small sample size I have of recent YA books about trans people (the subject of my paper) it seems much easier to get an authentic portrayal published in genre fiction. My theory is that’s because the publishers of genre fiction don’t think that character is all there is to a book. They are happy to buy a book on the basis of the plot, and not worry whether the readers will demand certain narratives for the characters.

OutStories AGM Audio

~ Cheryl

I have posted the audio recording from the guest lecture at the OutStories Bristol AGM. The lecture is titled “EP Warren’s Classical Erotica: LGBT+ activism and objects from the past” and is given by Dr. Jen Grove of Exeter University. A copy of the slides can be downloaded here.

EP Warren was an early 20th Century Classicist who developed a passion for collecting evidence of same-sex relations in the ancient world. Most famously he gave his name to the Warren Cup, now in the British Museum.

The lecture was sponsored by the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol in honor of the birthday of John Addington Symonds, 19th Century Bristol-born writer, art historian and pioneer of homosexual rights.

Queering the Classics

~ Cheryl

Things are starting to gear up nicely for LGBT History Month 2018. In particular I am delighted to be able to confirm that I will be appearing at a conference at Reading University on February 12th. The event is called LGBT+ Classics: Teaching, Research, and Activism and other confirmed speakers include Jen Grove, Alan Greaves and a keynote from Jennifer Ingleheart. I feel totally like a serious academic among all that lot.

Registration for the conference isn’t open just yet, but if you are a classicist there’s an opportunity for you to get involved too. There will be time during the day’s schedule for a series of short (five-minute) spotlight talks by delegates. If you’d like to participate, details of how to submit can be found here.

Historical Fictions Research Conference

~ Cheryl

I had entirely forgotten that the deadline for paper submissions for this conference was yesterday. I have mine in, but I checked with Farah and due to a pile of other stuff going on she won’t be looking at anything until next week. So if you would like to present, get something in now. It is in Stoke which is a great opportunity for those of you irritated by endless London conferences. And Jerome de Groot is giving one of the keynotes.

Full details of the conference and CfP can be found here.

Italy Part 3 – The G-Book Project

~ Cheryl

I’ll write more generally about the conference later, but right now I want to talk about a specific project that the MeTRa Center here is spearheading because I think that it is very important.

The G-Book Project is a joint initiative by academics and librarians in Italy, France, Spain, Ireland, Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is funded by the Creative Europe Culture Programme. The project has three main objectives:

– To support the circulation of “gender-positive children’s literature” at the EU level;

– To stimulate and encourage local librarians to stock such books; and

– To raise awareness in local communities about the importance and benefits of such books.

What do they mean by “gender-positive”? Primarily they mean books which avoid harmful gender stereotypes of the “girls can only do these things, boys can only do those things” type, but instead are empowering for all children. That will include positive representation of LGBT+ people and relationships.

One of the outcomes of the project will be an online database of recommended books, split into two age groups of 3-5 and 6-10 years. Other outputs will hopefully include reviews, support material for teachers, parents, etc., and interactive aspects such as games and an interactive story.

Naturally part of the work will be to find suitable books to include. That may be more challenging in some of the target languages than others, but hopefully that will also spur translations. I will be pestering some of you about this over the next few weeks.

And yes, I know, Brexit stupidity means that there is no official UK involvement, but thanks to our Irish pals books in English are eligible.

Italy Part 2 – The Venue

~ Cheryl

I have been to a fair few conferences in nice venues around the world, but I am pretty sure this is the most spectacular.

On Wednesday I tweeted that the landscape in Italy is very like parts of California, but with more sheep and castles. Something else I should have noted is that Californians mostly build on the flat because that’s easier for cars, but Italians, more particularly old-time Italians, build on the top of hills because that’s easy to defend.

Sometime in the 10th century, maybe earlier, a warlord build a castle on top of a hill in Bertinoro, a small town between Bolonga and San Marino. It continued to have a military role up until the 15th century, and at one point in 1302 Dante Alighieri found refuge there. From 1581 it became the palace of the local bishop, and it remained as such until 1969. In 1994 it was purchased by the University of Bologna and converted to a conference center.

Quite aside from being in a fabulous medieval building, the views are spectacular. On a clear day, which yesterday was, you can see the Adriatic and the Croatian coastline in the distance. My phone camera doesn’t have a good enough zoom to show the coast clearly, but look!

https://twitter.com/CherylMorgan/status/923155739794866176

And here’s the room where I gave my paper today:

https://twitter.com/CherylMorgan/status/923160970918354944

The residential area is in a former seminary just down the hill from the Palace. I confess that I am well out of breath by the time I have walked up the hill in the morning, but I am sure that the exercise is good for me.

Romans, Historians and Me

~ Cheryl

Out there in Internet Land there is a website called Write Where It Hurts. It bills itself as, “A Community for Scholars doing Deeply Personal Research, Teaching, and Service.” Inevitably that means a lot of trans stuff. One of the things they want to do is to get trans people writing critical reviews of research about trans people done by cis people, because this is very much a thing that needs to be done.

I have written them a piece about Roman history which, for length reasons, has been divided into two parts. Modern historians can be quite clueless when discussing trans issues, but with Rome we have the additional complication that almost all Roman texts that have come down to us were written by well-to-do, white-ish men who lived in a society that could be deeply misogynistic. They are not exactly reliable when it comes to matters of gender, any more than Caesar could be trusted when describing the barbarian depravities of the people he wanted an excuse to conquer.

Part 1 of the essay concerns the Emperor Elagabalus, who allegedly offered a massive reward to any surgeon who could transform him into a woman. Did he really say that? Or was that just a story made up to discredit him? Do our own feelings about such a statement make us more or less likely to believe that he really said it?

Part 2 will appear next Wednesday. It is rather more spicy as Nero is in it. I’ll be talking mainly about his wife, Sporus who, depending on how you read the history, was either a pathetic victim of the Emperor’s depravity, a scheming gay man, or a trans girl who was made an offer that she couldn’t refuse.

WorldCon Academic Track Podcasts

~ Cheryl

Worldcons are such busy events that huge swathes of activity can take place within one without you being aware of them. I spent very little time in the academic track at Helsinki, and consequently I had no idea that a series of podcasts was being recorded. There are now five available. I’m not sure if there will be any more.

I have listened to two of them. The one with John Clute and Gary K Wolfe about estrangement is hardcore LitCrit. I think I probably need to listen to it again to follow it all. However, I can say that it has some very interesting points to make about the changing approach of science fiction to ecological disaster, and about the nature of weird fiction.

The one with Andrew M Butler and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen about gender in films and TV is also very interesting. It goes off the rails slightly when they try to talk about going outside of the gender binary, but there’s some great discussion of Wonder Woman and Doctor Who.

Two of the others look at other cultures. Aliette de Bodard and Emmi Itäranta talk about writing fiction in a second language, while Ken Liu and Stanley Chan talk their own work, which means Chinese S&F. There’s also Edward James & Jyrki Korpua on epic fantasy. All worth a listen, I think.

Creative Histories, the Blog Series

~ Cheryl

As some of you may remember, back in July I attended the Creative Histories conference at Bristol University. One of the things to come out of that will be a series of blog posts on Will Pooley’s Storying the Past website.

The full list of posts making up the series can be found here. As you will see, mine is not due up until November 22nd, but there will be loads of great material before then. Many of the posts are based directly on papers from the conference, and I’m looking forward to catching up with those papers I wasn’t able to see. I am, of course, particularly interested in the use of “choose your own adventure” games as a means of teaching history. My post, however, is nothing to do with my paper (which was on steampunk). Instead I talk about who gets to do history, because they are assumed to be objective, and who gets told that their work is too subjective and can’t be considered. This is all directly relevant to what I talked about at the Trans in Academia conference on Saturday.

Update: I had the date of my appearance in the series wrong. It should be November 22nd. I have corrected it above. Apologies to anyone who saw the wrong date.

Trans in Academia Conference

~ Cheryl

On Saturday I was in London to give a paper at a very special academic conference. It was specifically for trans-identified people to talk about their research, and their experiences of life in academia.

Before I go any further, however, a brief word on terminology. The official title of the conference was Trans, Intersex and Gender Non-Conforming in Academia 2. I’ve been using trans as a very loose umbrella term because the whole thing needs a bit of unpacking. Firstly, while some intersex people do end up transitioning gender, many of them are perfectly happy with the gender they were assigned at birth. Therefore they should not be included in the term “trans”. Gender Non-Conforming is a relatively new term that is being used to indicate those people whose presentation is outside of social gender norms, but who are happy with the gender that they were assigned at birth. Again those people don’t strictly count as trans, but they are generally discriminated against as if they were trans. Yeah, I know, it is complicated.

I’m not going to say too much about individual papers and presentations, because the conference maintained a media blackout. Some of those presenting were concerned about their own safety, or the safety of their families, if it became known that they had attended. However, I can make one general point.

A lot of the issues we covered dealt with policy in various forms. There was policy to keep trans people safe in an academic environment, policy in the health service, and policy within areas control by the government (passports, prisons, legal gender recognition). In all of these cases it was very clear that there is a lot of good policy around, but that policy was useless if it wasn’t backed up by enforcement. All too often, policy exists, but most people ignore it, and those with the power to enforce it don’t have the will to do so.

Aside from that, I got to meet lots of interesting people, found some more trans historians, and had lots of conversations about science fiction. It was fun day, and the whole thing was very well run by Sahra Taylor. We need to do this again, and next time we need to make sure that Sahra (or whoever else is in charge) gets more support.

Ahoy London – Conference on Saturday

~ Cheryl


Look at this awesome free conference on trans, intersex and gender non-confirming people in academia. It features fabulous folk such as Jay Stewart, Meg-John Baker, Sophie Labelle, Natacha Kennedy & Kat Gupta. And me, I’m afraid, but the program is double-streamed while I’m on. Come along and say hello. Booking details here.

Special thanks to Sahra Taylor for doing all of the hard work of organising this, and to Mollie for the best accessibility provision I have ever seen at a conference.

Farah on Heinlein

~ Cheryl

For some time now Farah Mendlesohn has been working on a book about the work of Robert A. Heinlein. We have chatted about it occasionally, and I have been itching to read it. However, Heinlein produced a lot of work, and the resulting book was so long that Farah hasn’t been able to find an academic publisher willing to take it. Consequently she has decided to go through the crowdfunding publisher, Unbound. Farah needs to raise enough money to get Unbound to publish the book. Any excess raised is being shared between The Foundation for America’s Blood Centres and Con or Bust. You can support the project here.

Forthcoming Appearances

~ Cheryl

Here are a few places where you will be able to find me in the coming weeks.

First up we have BristolCon Fringe on Monday, featuring the legendary Anna Smith-Spark, owner of the deadliest shoes in the writing business, and Chloe Headdon, one of the best readers from the last open mic event. As usual I will be hosting, and interrogating the readers afterward. I may ask Anna what her shoes eat.

If you happen to be in London, on September 30th I will be at this conference on being trans, intersex and gender non-confirming in academia. I’ll be talking about trying to do trans history when many historians believe that people like you didn’t exist before the 20th Century.

October sees the annual Bristol Festival of Literature and we will once again be doing the ranty feminist author panel. I may talk a bit about Space Marine Midwives. And Dreadnought, always Dreadnought.

I won’t be at BristolCon this year as I will be in Bologna for an academic conference. I’m also doing one in Melbourne early in November, though only by Skype. If you are interested in either, let me know.

And on November 4th, if all goes according to plan, I will be at LaDIYfest in Bristol. Watch this space for details on what I might end up doing there.

Worldcon: Day 4

~ Cheryl

I was so tired last night that It forgot to set my alarm and woke up 1.5 hours later than planned. While I did get around 7.5 hours sleep, I didn’t get breakfast because I had an 11:00am panel and it takes almost an hour to get to the convention from my hotel.

Thankfully the panel went well. This was the one on the history of gender, which I had suggested. Originally I had been asked to moderate, but Scott Lynch kindly stepped into that role to allow me to talk more. He did a great job of keeping order on a panel with three very opinionated women (Jo Walton, Gillian Pollack and myself). My apologies once again to Thomas Ã…rnfelt who didn’t get much of a look-in, but had some great medieval history info when he did.

I spent most of the panel telling anecdotes about trans history, but I did also get to do some show and tell. There is a great company in the dealer’s room who make cuneiform tablets. If you have some text, they’ll do a custom one for you. So I got them to make this:

https://twitter.com/CherylMorgan/status/896301656656289792

For an explanation, see this blog post.

I also got to attend (and I had to queue early to get in for both) two trans-themed panels. Neither of them told me much new, but it was great to see packed out rooms for such things. The first trans panel I can remember at Worldcon was in Montréal in 2009. There were about 15 people in the audience, one of whom was a very hostile feminist, and all of the other panelists were cis. Here we had several trans-themed panels with a variety of identities represented (including non-binary people with no wish to transition medically), and all of them were younger than me.

Despite having got a decent lunch, the no breakfast thing meant that by mid afternoon I was fading fast. Thankfully Otto managed to catch me and steer me to the staff lounge for some vitamins before I collapsed. However, that was not before I managed to mistake someone for someone else on several occasions and embarrass myself horribly. My apologies to all concerned.

In the evening Thor came to see the masquerade. Despite beating on the roof of Messukeskus very hard, he didn’t get in. Thankfully he got bored after a while and I was about to get out to the party run by the lovely people from Storycom. I got to meet some young Chinese writers and a guy who has started a convention in Hong Kong. And we got to see Neil Clarke on film, which partially made up for his not being here.

I didn’t see the masquerade, but I gather that Miki Dennis got a big prize, as is only right and proper. Best in Show, however, seems to have gone to a very young person in her first masquerade. I want to see photos of that.

Overall things have gone very smoothly today. There are still queues, and some panels do max out, but the vast majority of people are getting to see what they want to see. The discussions I’m hearing in the hallways are changing from, “why don’t these idiots do something about the overcrowding” to “wow, this is an amazing convention!”. One day left, and I suspect it will only get better from here.

Buy My Book, Please

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments


The very fabulous Gender Identity and Sexuality in Fantasy and Science Fiction was published today. Copies are available from Luna Press in the dealers’ room, or through the usual outlets.

If you can’t stomach the thought of another essay on trans characters from me, you might want to get the book for Juliet McKenna’s article on the myth of publishing being a meritocracy in which men naturally rise to the top. Or you may prefer Kim Lakin-Smith reflecting on grotesque female bodies in the work of Frances Hardinge and Neil Gaiman. Jyrki Korpua’s essay, “What About Tauriel”, is one I’m keen to read after hearing him talk about the Peter Jackson movies today.

A very kind person that wasn’t Kevin asked me to sign a copy of the book today, so I know that at least one copy has been sold.