Academic

Trans Studies Now – The Conference

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The purpose of my trip to Brighton was to attend an academic conference at the University of Sussex. The title of the conference was Trans Studies Now, and the objective, fairly obviously, was to present the very latest in trans studies across a range of disciplines.

Roz Kaveney was one of the keynote speakers, and she opened up the conference with a talk about her work. That included a reading from Tiny Pieces of Skull, some of her own poetry, including her Inanna poem, and a poem by Catullus that she has translated.

The Catullus poem is about Attis, the consort of the Goddess Cybele who, myth has it, castrated himself for the love of the Goddess. This is usually presented to modern readers as being the result of a fit of madness — being unable to possess the Goddess, Attis choses to castrate himself rather than have any other woman, or he’s driven mad by her beauty, anything but the actual reason. Catullus, Roz notes, make it very clear that Attis wanted to become a woman. He is, of course, the archetype of the Galli — the castrati priestesses of Cybele whom I mentioned in my trans history talk. I’ll be having a lot more to say about them in future.

For now let’s just note that Catullus also involves lions in the story. Lions are, of course, sacred to Ishtar/Inanna, and Cybele’s cult originated in Syria, which is not that far from Mesopotamia.

My paper was due up on the first session after Roz’s talk. I was paired with a Californian trans-male poet, Jonathan Bay, who is now based in Edinburgh, and with my new friend Emma Hutson with whom Roz and I had had dinner the night before.

Jonathan’s poetry centered on trans issues. I particularly enjoyed the one about his nervousness about going through US immigration (even as a citizen, as a trans person it is scary), and the one about his transphobic uncle who moved to Montana rather than live close to Jonathan.

Emma gave a really good paper about the “standard narrative” of being trans, and how one size definitely does not fit all. She clearly has a very good understanding of complicated historical narratives such the rise of transgenderism and the split in the trans community it engendered. For a first time giving a paper at a conference it was very impressive. (Believe me, I have heard a lot of bad papers, especially at ICFA.)

The audience listened quietly to my paper and seemed to have enjoyed it. Only Roz was sufficiently well-versed in SF to ask in-depth questions, and she’s heard most of the content before, so I didn’t really have much to deal with. In the absence of questions, I offered to give them an example of trans-themed SF. A few of you will know what I mean when I say I read “Goldilocks” for them, and that appeared to go down well too. My paper is available from Academia.edu.

After lunch we had the second keynote speech, which was by Katherine Johnson. She’s been in trans studies for a long time, and gave a fine overview of the history of the field, and where it is now.

The afternoon paper session that I attended featured three presenters from outside of the UK. Olivia Fiorilli is from Portugal, and gave a very nice summary of the state of trans pathology in a variety of European countries. Olivia correctly identified a growing trend towards depatholgisation of the condition, and democratisation of treatment. As I said to her afterwards, it is rather ironic that the roadblocks that gender specialists deliberately put into the pathway with the intention of weeding out “unsuitable” candidates for transition have ended up encouraging people to find ways around the standard treatment pathway, which in turn has caused the gender specialists to adjust their protocols in an attempt to retain control of the process.

Next up was Olga Lidia Saavedra Montes de Oca who is from Cuba. This was a really fascinating paper. Under the old Communist regime gender roles were strictly enforced. Adopting proper gendered performance was seen as being evidence of being a good Revolutionary. Of course trans people existed in Cuba, just as they do in every other country. Typically they would leave home so as not to cause embarrassment to their families. Now that there has been philosophical change in the government, many of these trans people are being welcomed back home, because for Cubans family ties are apparently paramount.

Finally we had Sabah Choudrey, who is one of the founders of Trans Pride and also a Muslim. He gave an excellent presentation about how trans people of color are excluded from trans narratives and trans activism. In the UK that generally means actual exclusion. In the US, where there are greater numbers of TPoC, it generally means separatism — there are white trans activists who are the ones who have a chance of getting the ear of the government and access to what little funding is available; and there are TPoC activists who have to do everything for themselves but seem to get a lot more done.

The final session was a film about trans life in Turkey, but by that time I had been off email for over 24 hours so I took time out to check email. I gather that the film was quite distressing.

Overall it was a very interesting day. I met lots of good people, and I hope that Sally Munt and her team as Sussex do this again.

Brighton Next Week

~ Cheryl

Advance warning to Brighton people. I will be amongst you next week. There is a conference called Trans Studies Now taking place at the University of Sussex on Friday, June 12th. There will be keynote speeches from important people like Roz Kaveney and Lewis Hancox. And there will be me talking about science fiction and how gender might evolve in the future.

If you want to attend, details are here. And if you can’t go you should be able to follow along on Twitter.

As it is a formal academic conference, my paper will go up on Academia.edu after the event.

And because it starts early in the morning I’ll be in Brighton on the Thursday night. If anyone wants to catch up for dinner and/or a drink in the Marlborough, please let me know.

Hello Brighton, Coming Your Way

~ Cheryl

I’m delighted to report that I’ve been selected to present a paper at Trans Studies Now, an academic conference taking place at the University of Sussex on June 12th. Roz Kaveney and Lewis Hancox are keynote speakers, so I’m in excellent company. Plus I get to go to Brighton and talk about science fiction. Sounds fun.

Brighton folks, obviously not all of you will be able to make the conference, but I’ll need to stay over the night before so maybe we can catch up then.

The Liverpool University SF Collection

~ Cheryl

Liverpool University is home to the only major collection of SF&F literature in the UK. The material came mainly from the Science Fiction Foundation, but a number of authors and fans have also donated material. Andy Sawyer, the librarian, gave me a tour of the stacks, and I got to hold the Hugo trophy that John Brunner won for Stand on Zanzibar.

This really is a very special resource, and I note that Andy and his colleagues are dependent on donations. They can’t just go out and buy things. Unfortunately keeping eBooks is complicated because of DRM nonsense (library policies tend to be driven by what the big publishers want them to do), but I’ll make sure that Andy gets a copy of every paper book that Wizard’s Tower produces. I think I also have copies of every BristolCon program book. And I’m going to take a look at my audio archives because there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to keep all of that stuff online forever.

Libraries. They are good things. Please support them.

Thank You, Liverpool

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night was great, particularly the response from the audience. Loads of people came up to me afterwards and said they’d be going out to buy books.

I’ll do a longer post later, with the slide pack, but I can’t do that right now because the Internet access here won’t let me FTP. For now I’d just like to thank the following:

  • Alan Greaves and the Flagship team for inviting me and organizing the event
  • Andy Sawyer, the University Library and the SF Foundation for sponsoring the event
  • The Vice Chancellor, Professor Beer, for her support and for understanding the importance of diversity
  • The 100+ people who turned up to listen to me ramble on
  • Leah Moore & John Reppion for looking after me so well in the evening
  • Brew Dog for opening a Liverpool bar and stocking the bacon-flavored beer

Audio recordings were made. Fingers crossed those will be available fairly soon.

Translated Fiction Survey

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

There is a project going on at Bristol University at the moment that is looking at translation of literature from smaller European nations. As part of this they have a reader survey on SurveyMonkey. I am sure that they would be very grateful if you all filled it in. You can find it here.

By the way, there will be an academic conference at the university on the same subject in September. If anyone is interested, the call for papers is here.

And for local and London people there are a few other, less academic, events listed here.

New Fafnir Published

~ Cheryl

A new issue of Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, is now available online. I shall definitely be having a read as there is no way I can resist an article whose abstract begins thus:

In this article, I argue both Margaret Atwood in Handmaid’s Tale and Sheri S. Tepper in Gate to Women’s Country use the same three ‘women type’ characters to explore ideal female gender roles and their relationship to society. Further, I argue that both authors use these characters as part of their bigger rhetorical engagement with the American gender essentialist political movements of 1980s.

It is written by a man too. This will be interesting.

There is also an essay celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sun Ra. So gender politics and Afrofuturism (and jazz). What’s not to like?

First National Festival of LGBT History

~ Cheryl

As we lumber towards 2015, various things are starting to ramp up. One of the events in my sights is the UK’s first National Festival of LGBT History, which will take place in Manchester during February (because that’s when we do LGBT History Month in the UK). You can find lots of exciting details at their newly revamped website. You may also note that there is an academic conference attached to the event, and if you look carefully through the programme you will find that I’m giving a paper. I may be talking a bit about Alice Sheldon.

Academics at Worldcon – What Went Wrong?

~ Cheryl ~ 22 Comments

I spent much of my time at Worldcon in Capital Suite 6 where the academic track was taking place. Most of the panels I attended went very well. There were occasional moments of embarrassment, and future conventions please note that Ronald Meyers should never be allowed to moderate a panel again. His performance in the session featuring Maureen Kincaid Speller and Gillian Polack was a disgrace and deeply disrespectful to his panelists. From my point of view, however, the only real issue was the microphones.

Well actually microphone technique was a major issue throughout the convention. Far too many panelists either refused to use them, or forgot they were doing so, and were inaudible a lot of the time as a result. Academics were particularly bad in this respect because they are used to having to address a large room without use of a mic. It is matter of professional pride to them to not need one. But I’m a radio presenter, and if I don’t use the mic properly no one outside of the studio will hear me, so from my point of view good mic technique is essential. More convention panelists need to be aware of how to use a mic properly.

However, out there in Internet land I am seeing several people complaining about the academic track and saying how badly it worked. This surprised me. We have had such things at Worldcons many times before. If large numbers of audience members were unfamiliar with the format, and for example kept interrupting the papers, that must have been because they were new to the idea, not because academic tracks were new to Worldcon. There is, of course, an open question as to whether the three-paper plus questions at the end format is appropriate within a convention setting, especially if the papers don’t have a lot in common (and you can’t always guarantee that they will). But I’m really surprised to see people questioning whether an academic track has any place at Worldcon. We are planning to have one at Archipelacon, so feedback would be appreciated.

The Trans Stuff at Worldcon

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today there was an academic program section that included a paper on trans characters in science fiction. It was given by Paul Ballard, and I went along to see what he had to say. I was completely floored when he opened up by recommending that people read this. It is a bit outdated now. I need to do a new version.

Paul works with a trans youth group in Kent so he knows his stuff. Like me, Paul is concerned that trans people are being misrepresented in fiction because of a desire by cis writers to use them for entertainment, or to make political points. He made an interesting point that for a character in a novel to count as trans that character should have a specific will to change in some way; it was not enough to have forced change, or change that is entirely natural of the character. I need to think a bit about this, in particular with reference to people who see themselves more as gender-fluid, but it could be a useful distinction.

Mention of characters that shift genders naturally brings us naturally to The Left Hand of Darkness. Paul noted that the Gethenians really aren’t trans people in a Terran sense. I noted, as I often do in such discussions, that it can be read as a book about Trans Panic; that is the discomfort (and sometimes murderous rage) that cis people can develop when confronted by a trans person whom they thoughts was cis. Also giving a paper in the session was Jason Bourget, whom I had previously met when we were on a trans issues panel together in Montréal. Jason is a Le Guin scholar (and presented a good paper on gender in The Dispossessed). He noted the debate over the fact that Le Guin had used male pronouns for the Gethenians, and said that the Trans Panic reading only works when male pronouns are used. If female pronouns had been used, Genly would need to be gender-swapped to female (and probably made a Radical Feminist) for the same reading to work.

By the way, trying to read a paper which talks about trans people and transhumanism, which are two very different things, is very difficult. We need new terminology.

Kathryn Allan – Accessing the Future

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Kathryn Allan, who is co-editing the Accessing the Future anthology with Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire. The anthology will focus on themes of disability in science fiction. We also talk about how Kathryn came to be the current recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (and a quick shout out here to Margaret McBride who is indeed awesome as Kathryn says).

The sound quality is slightly ropey at my end, which is probably because I forget to cover up the big, flat screens around here with something soft. I really do need a home studio. However, we seem to have avoided picking up the person using a powered trimmer next door throughout much of the recording, which is a big relief.

Disability activism is an area that I’m not very familiar with, so if I have inadvertently used inappropriate language please accept my apologies in advance (and do suggest how I could do better). Apologies also for keeping bringing the discussion back to trans issues, but that’s what I know and hopefully it does make it clear how intersectional all this stuff is.

When you have had a listen, please go and back the anthology project.

Update: Who forgot the embed link. *headsmack*

Vintage Visions

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I got a book in the mail. It doesn’t happen often these days, but one publisher I am always happy to hear from is Wesleyan, who produce some marvelous academic books about science fiction.

This week#s loot was a book called Vintage Visions, and subtitled (because academic books always have subtitles) Essays on Early Science Fiction. It has been put together by Arthur B. Evans who is an expert in the work of Jules Verne, but the book covers a wide range of different topics. The essays are all reprints, and some are not that new, but they all sound interesting. Andrea Bell has an essay about a Chilean novel dating from 1878; Rachel Haywood Ferreira surveys the roots of Latin American SF; and a piece by Susan Gubar about C.L. Moore that was a pioneering work in the study of feminist science fiction from 1980. Crunchy.

Finncon – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Despite being up into the small hours watching Argentina & Netherlands try to bore each other into submission, Otto, Paula and I were up early this morning to drive to Jyväskylä. It is around a 3 hour trip, but we needed time for a break along the way and to allow for Unexpected Roadworks. In the Finnish summer there are always Unexpected Roadworks, the unexpected thing being exactly where they are, not that they will be happening.

For our break we stopped at Karoliinan Kahvimylly, which is the sweetest little coffee house I have ever seen.

Karoliinan Kahvimylly

The cakes were amazing. We had cinnamon buns. One each. That was lunch. I could not have eaten any more.

Despite the Unexpected Roadworks, which turned out to be the closure of the main highway into Jyväskylä from the south, about 30 km from the city, we arrived at the University in good time. It was great to see Irma Hirsjärvi again. As usual her kindess managed to embarrass me. This time I got presented with a honorary membership of Finfar, the Finnish Society for Science Fiction & Fantasy Research.

The first batch of papers were all very interesting. Hopefully several of them will turn up in Fafnir at some point in the future. We have another batch scheduled for tomorrow, but this evening it was time for sauna.

So: there was beer, there was roasting of sausages over an open wood fire, there were rooms that were hot & steamy, and there was skinny-dipping in the (surprisingly warm) Lake Doom (English translation, so called, as Bear reminded us, because Victor von Doom once had a secret base on the lake floor). There was also a considerable quantity of Death Whisky consumed (Jura Superstition, which you will understand if you have ever seen the bottle).

I shall leave Bear to report on her first experience of sauna. She has Nordic ancestry and clearly has the genes for it.

Meanwhile, as Irma is picking me up at 9:10 tomorrow for the rest of the academic conference, I am going to do some serious re-hydration.

Finncon, Day 0

~ Cheryl

Bear & Scott: “We’re very sorry, thanks to a mechanical problem we missed our connection in Iceland and we’ll be a few hours late.”

Finns: “Yeah, no worries. We remember when an airline lost Joe Haldeman. We coped with that. It will be OK.”

In other news, I think I have now done all of the necessary prep for my panels at Finncon. I have also eaten blueberry & cardamon ice cream, and tried a local coffee stout. The former was spectacular, the latter nice but not up to Wildebeest standard.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Jyväskylä for the start of the Finfar academic convention. I read the papers on the flight over. There’s the usual mix of quality, as you might expect from students. If you’d like to get a taste of the sort of thing Finnish academics produce you can take a look at Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.

Off to Liverpool

~ Cheryl

I’m heading to Liverpool today for a very unusual conference. This one. For all of you who did not click through, that’s The Un-Straight Museum, a conference on telling QUILTBAG stories in museums. It is being run by people from Sweden, and there will be folks from Finland there too, and from the Tom of Finland people in Los Angeles. The event is being held in conjunction with the April Ashley exhibit at the Museum of Liverpool, and on Saturday we get to meet April herself. Prepare yourselves for epic fangirl squee.

Tolkien Lecture 2014

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

2014 Tolkien Lecture


Sadly I can’t make this one, because I will be in Finland. It looks like it will be a great event. Also it is free, though you do need to sign up. The official press release follows.

(Oxford, April 9, 2014) Pembroke College have invited award-winning author Adam Roberts to deliver the 2nd Annual Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien. This lecture in the series designed to explore the history and current state of fantasy literature will take place on May 2nd at 7 pm, it was jointly announced today by Robert O’Shea, President of the Pembroke College Middle Common Room (MCR), and Kendall Murphy, Annual Fund Officer for Pembroke College. Professor Roberts will also participate in a free signing and wine reception following the lecture.

The series is intended to memorialize Tolkien, who was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke for twenty years; he wrote The Hobbit and much of The Lord of the Rings during his time at the college. The lectures are sponsored through a grant from the Pembroke Annual Fund.

‘The Tolkien Lecture was a great success in its first year, with attendees drawn from the university and the community’, said O’Shea. ‘We are pleased to have Professor Roberts as a lecturer this year, given his reputation not only as a science fiction author but as a critic who knows Tolkien well. We feel that Professor Roberts will continue the high standard established in the series’ first year’.

‘The Pembroke Annual Fund connects our alumni to current students and allows them to work together to make an immediate impact on college life’, said Murphy. ‘The Pembroke Tolkien Lecture is precisely the sort of project the Annual Fund was designed to support, thanks to its resonance within and beyond the Pembroke community’.

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published fourteen science fiction novels, the most recent of which are Jack Glass (Gollancz 2012), which won the BSFA and Campbell awards for best SF novel of the year; and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (Gollancz 2014; with Mahendra Singh). With his academic hat on, he has published articles and books on a range of topics including Tolkien. The Riddles of the Hobbit (Palgrave 2013) is the most recent.

Both the lecture and the signing reception are free and open to the public, but online registration is required to ensure a place for the lecture. Please go to pembrokemcr.com/Tolkien for more information.

Fafnir #1 Online

~ Cheryl

Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, has published its first issue. The PDF isn’t available yet,but you can read all of the articles online. This issues includes a number of papers originally presented at the academic conference at last year’s Finncon. There’s also an essay detailing the history of research into SF&F in Finland by Liisa Rantalaiho. You can read that issue here. The full ToC is as follows:

  • Editorial
  • Opposing Forces and Ethical Judgments in Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (Päivi Väätänen)
  • Agents or Pawns? Power Relations in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy (Esko Suoranta)
  • What is it that Fanfiction Opposes? The Shared and Communal Features of Firefly/Serenity Fanfiction (Hanna-Riikka Roine)
  • Good and Evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: Concerning Dichotomy between Visible and Invisible (Jyrki Korpua)
  • Scholars Opposing Forces: Report on FINFAR 2013 Meeting (Katja Kontturi)
  • FINFAR: A Gift from Fandom to Academia (Liisa Rantalaiho)
  • Peeking into the Neighbouring Grove: Speculative Fiction in the Work of Mainstream Scholars (Merja Polvinen)
  • Call for Papers for the 3/2014 issue of Fafnir

Finfar 2014: Call for Papers

~ Cheryl

This is mainly for those of you likely to be attending Finncon this year. I hand over to Irma Hirsjärvi.

What is Finfar?

Finfar 2014, Finncon’s academic conference, will gather together the foremost experts and students of fantasy and science fiction for two days at the University of Jyväskylä. Students and scholars of all levels are welcome; texts are welcome in English, Finnish, and Swedish.

Due to the participatory nature of the conference and limitations on time and space, the conference is open only for the participants and designated commentators.

Call for Papers

DOES MIND MATTER – DOES MATTER MIND?

XV SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY RESEARCH SEMINAR

Department of Arts and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä

Thu & Fri 10–11 July, 2014

The traditional, free annual meeting of science fiction and fantasy scholars is again hosted in conjunction with Finncon, this year in the University of Jyväskylä. The questions about the relations between mind and matter are wide open for discussion, and all areas of speculative fiction as well as the mediums are freely approached. We invite abstracts from various angles the convergence of mind, matter, time and space, ideas and arts, like “does mind matter”, “is there matter over mind”, or “does matter even care”. The mind/matter dichotomy is in connection to the questions of imagination and fantasy worlds and their materiality — like in dragonlands or steampunk.

Our Honorary member of Finfar, Cheryl Morgan will attend the English parts of the seminar. The commentators this year are Liisa Rantalaiho from the University of Tampere, researcher Markku Soikkeli, from the University of Helsinki Merja Polvinen and Paula Arvas, as well as Sofia Sjö from Åbo Akademi and Irma Hirsjärvi from the University of Jyväskylä.

We welcome all kinds of work focusing on science fiction and fantasy, whether you are working towards a seminar essay, article, MA thesis or a PhD. Papers can be in Finnish, Swedish or English, but if you wish to receive feedback from the international participants in the seminar, we recommend writing in English. The Guests of Honor are writers Elizabeth Bear and Hannu Rajaniemi and the Fan Guest of Honor the true new weird guy of Finland, Jukka Halme. However, even while/if we focus on the nature of reality and fiction through the themes of mind and matter, all the papers about the works of Bear and Rajaniemi, arts and quantum physics or new weird not to mention fantastic in general are most welcome as well.

The plan is that the first issue of the year 2015 of Fafnir — The Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research will again collect the articles from this seminar.

Please send your 300-word abstract by April 31st to hirsjarvi [at] gmail [dot] com (Word or RTF) with title FINFAR 2014 ABSTRACT [YOUR NAME]. Selection will be made and further instructions sent during May. The final paper should be 10,000–15,000 characters in length. Depending on the amount of abstracts we receive, we will try to accommodate papers not directly related to the seminar’s theme.

Welcome to Jyväskylä!

A Paper For Loncon 3

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I am delighted to be able to announce that I will be presenting a paper at the academic conference at the Worldcon in London this August. Here’s the abstract.

Trans-cending the Comics Code

While gender bending is a regular feature of manga and webcomics, appearances of trans characters in mainstream American comics have been few and far between. Indeed, they have been so rare that when Alysia Yeoh, a support character in Batgirl, came out as trans last year the media hailed her as the first ever trans character in comics. As usual, the media was wrong. Down the years, comics writers have found creative ways to address gender issues in their work. This paper looks at the history of trans characters in DC and Marvel comics.

Once again please note that I will not be looking at manga. That would be a topic for a separate paper, but only if I can learn a lot about Japanese culture before then. I have no desire to write a “Western gaze” piece about Japanese comics.

That said, hopefully one of two of you will come along to listen.