Academic

Fafnir – Call for Papers

~ Cheryl

Fafnir – Nordic Journal for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research is a new, peer-reviewed academic journal which is published in electronic format four times a year. The purpose of Fafnir is to join up the Nordic field of science fiction and fantasy research and to provide a forum for discussion on current issues on the field. Fafnir is published by FINFAR Society (Suomen science fiction- ja fantasiatutkimuksen seura ry).

Now Fafnir invites authors to submit papers for its next edition, 2/2014. Fafnir publishes various texts ranging from peer-reviewed research articles to short overviews and book reviews in the field of science fiction and fantasy research.

The submissions must be original work, and written in English (or in Finnish or in Scandinavian languages). Manuscripts of research articles should be between 20,000 and 40,000 characters in length. The journal uses the most recent edition of the MLA Style Manual. The manuscripts of research articles will be peer-reviewed. Please note that as Fafnir is designed to be of interest to readers with varying backgrounds, essays and other texts should be as accessibly written as possible.

The deadline for submissions is 28 February 2014.

In addition to research articles, Fafnir constantly welcomes text proposals such as essays, interviews, overviews and book reviews on any subject suited to the paper.

Please send your electronic submission (saved as RTF-file) to all three editors at the following addresses: jyrki [dot] korpua [at] oulu [dot] fi, hanna [dot] roine [at] uta [dot] fi and paivi [dot] vaatanen [at] helsinki [dot] fi. For further information, please contact the editors.

This edition is scheduled for June 2014. The deadlines for the submissions for the next two editions are scheduled at 31 May (3/2014) and 31 August (4/2014).

[And if you would like more information about the journal, ask me – Cheryl]

A New Book, and a New Imprint

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Wizard’s Tower published a new book today. Or rather the book was published by a brand new imprint: Grimoire. You see, I am now an academic publisher.

How did this come about? Well, an academic journal called the Journal of Children’s Literature Studies had the plug pulled on it by its publisher. At the time there were five whole issues left unpublished. As you may be aware, academics don’t often get paid for their writing when it is published, but they get benefit in other ways because they are able to list their publications on their resumes, which helps their career. The people who had essays in the five unpublished issues were somewhat upset. So Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James asked me if I could rush an ebook edition into print. That is exactly what I have done.

So you can now buy The Final Chapters, which contains the five final issues of the JCLS. Obviously these are academic essays, but I find this sort of thing interesting and hopefully some of you will too. Plus I have hopefully helped the careers of a bunch of young academics.

This was something of an urgent job, because for complicated academic reasons we needed to get the papers published by the end of October. I should apologize to all of those people anxiously waiting for the next Lyda Morehouse novel, Messiah Node (especially Lyda). That is half done, and now that The Final Chapters is on sale I can get back to it.

Special thanks are due to Andy Bigwood for providing a lovely cover in a very short space of time.

I’m very much hoping that I will be able to do some more academic publishing in the future.

A Nordic Academic Journal

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Swecon is taking place this weekend (with Jo Walton, Lavie Tidhar and Karin Tidbeck as Guests of Honor). I’m way to busy to be there, which I’m sad about because it looks like being a great convention and there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. One of the things that has happened is the announcement of the creation of a new academic journal: The Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.

It is the creation of my good friend Merja Polvinen, and most of the people involved are folks I have met at the FINFAR academic conference that takes place prior to each year’s Finncon. However, if you look at the press release you’ll see two non-Nordic names on the advisory board. One is Adam Roberts, on whose website the press release is posted. Adam and Merja have some common research interests and have been friends for some time. The other one is me.

Naturally I’m deeply embarrassed about this. I want the journal to do well, and I can already hear the tut-tutting as certain parts of the UK fannish establishment write it off because of my involvement. But Merja did ask very nicely, and I want to reassure people that I won’t be reviewing the contents or anything like that (except perhaps if they get submissions on trans issues). I’ll be mainly promoting the Journal to friends outside the Nordic world, and giving occasional advice on publishing matters.

The launch has already garnered some media attention in Finland with one of the editors, Jyrki Korpua, being interviewed on the radio and a mention in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s leading newspaper. Hopefully the Swedish press will pick it up over the weekend.

Work on the first issue is already underway, and I believe that it will contain at least some of the papers presented at this year’s FINFAR meeting. This makes me feel slightly less guilty for not having gotten around to writing about them yet. Issues will be published online, so you will be able to read them.

I guess this is also an opportune moment to note that Wizard’s Tower Press will be launching a new academic imprint on Monday. Stay tuned.

Queer in Brighton: The Conference

~ Cheryl

I spent yesterday at the conference in Brighton co-organized by the Brighton & Sussex Sexualities Network, Queer in Brighton, and Brighton*Transformed and held at Brighton University’s Grand Parade campus. It was a lot of fun. Personally I was very happy to spend time with a bunch of queer folk who were academics, radical, intersectional and (because even intersectional doesn’t always include me), trans-friendly. I gave a paper about understanding the gender identities of people from history, which I should be posting a podcast of in due course, and I made a bunch of new friends. What follows is a brief overview of the event.

Session one began with Katherine McMahon, a performance poet who argued convincingly for the spoken word community, not just as a focus for revolutionary politics, but as a valuable means of enabling people from marginalized minorities to feel good about themselves.

She was followed by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah, who is a chaplain at the university, and who talked about being queer and Jewish. I find progressive Judaism fascinating. Their rabbinate is apparently 50% female and 15% queer. Rabbi Sarah is a former lesbian separatist. She has a book out called Trouble-Making Judaism, which some of you may be interested in.

I was up next, and I was followed by Jane Traies who studies the life stories the life stories of lesbians over the age of 60. For some of those people the scars of the homophobia of past times have never faded. Jane told of people who were still not out to their families, and who were afraid to take advantage of new political freedoms because they didn’t trust government not to take them away again once they had everyone’s names on file.

The final session was by Raphael Fox, one of the stars of My Transsexual Summer, who talked about the film production company that he and his co-star, Lewis Hancox, had set up to allow trans people to tell their own stories, free from interference from big media companies with their own agendas. I have enthused about the My Genderation films here before, and will continue to do so because they are great. I have an interview recorded with Fox which I will podcast once he’s had a chance to vet it.

After a coffee break we were treated to keynote speeches by representatives of the organizers. Brighton*Transformed is a new, Heritage Lottery Fund backed project that seeks to collect and tell the stories of trans people in Brighton. Their presenter, E-J Scott, spent much of his time telling us just how important it is for trans people to be able to tell their own stories, because once the mainstream media gets hold of them we are inevitably exploited and almost always denigrated in some way. Only by making our stories available free from media bias will we be able to let the rest of the world see that we are ordinary people, not disgusting freaks. The same points are made in the project’s launch video below.

The other keynote speech was by Lesley Wood of Queer in Brighton which has produced a more general QUILTBAG history of the city. Those of us who have been involved in such projects all smiled quietly when Lesley explained some of the difficulties involved. “There is almost no end to the ways we can upset people,” she commented. Oh dear me yes.

During lunch, Fox, E-J and I did short video interviews for QTube, an LGBT programme on Brighton’s local TV station. They also filmed a lot of the presentations including mine. I was really pleased to see that sort of thing happening. I’m looking forward to seeing Bristol having community TV as well.

After lunch the papers resumed with Lisa Overton talking about her research into queer communities in New Orleans and how they have rebuilt their lives after Katrina. Lisa’s academic field is disaster studies, and before she mentioned it I hadn’t quite realized just how hetero-normative news reporting of such events is. Of course I’m always happy to hear about N’Awlins, a city that I love. And I was delighted to find out in the pub afterwards that Lisa and I have a shared passion for pretty dresses, food, and Angela Carter novels. Lisa introduced me to her friend Vanessa, and that’s how I ended up at Dig in the Ribs for dinner.

The next paper was from Jeff Evans who has been painstakingly sorting through court records from Lancashire to try to get a true picture of gay history in that part of England. What he found was very different from the picture you get from reading about gay life in London. His research period stretched (as I recall) from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th. The number of prosecutions for buggery in his data are too small for many statistically significant conclusions to be drawn, but it was interesting that 98% of them involved working class men, and a high percentage, particularly earlier in the period, were for bestiality rather than male-male sex. Also very interesting was that there were some parts of the county where the police were keen to prosecute, and others where they never did. The moral panic that supposedly gripped London in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial apparently didn’t make it as far as parts of Lancashire.

Kate Turner’s paper was all about queer identities in Scotland, as exemplified by Scottish writers such as Ali Smith. She was followed by Kath Browne who presented Ordinary in Brighton, an academic study of QUILTBAG life in the city. That sounds very interesting, but being an academic hardback book it is hideously expensive. You can find out more about the project here.

The final session opened with Rose Collis who had run a fascinating project teaching young queer folk in Worthing about the history of QUILTBAG folk in their town. Alva Traebert, from the University of Edinburgh, talked about her research into QUILTBAG folk in Scotland and some of the negative attitudes she has faced from colleagues in academia as a young, and not obviously lesbian, woman doing queer studies in a redbrick university. My favorite was the guy who told her that there were hardly any gays in Scotland and that she should move her research to Canada where they apparently “like that sort of thing”. Be proud, Canada, be proud.

Pawel Leszkowicz is a freelance museum curator (who knew that there were such things? I didn’t) who has been looking around the museums of Sussex and has discovered a wealth of early 20th Century art by painters mostly famous for their war work, but who also happen to have all been gay men.

The final session was from Sally Munt who, together with a number of the other local academics, is bidding for a big government grant that they will use to study QUILTBAG communities to understand how they work to provide social support in the absence of traditional family structures. This will all be done through the medium of art (due to the nature of the funding). One of the people they have on board is Alison Bechdel. And thanks to this presentation I think I have a paper topic for Loncon 3.

The final session was a round table in which we all discussed ideas for next year’s conference. I suggested that we do something on queer creativity. Obviously that would give me an opportunity to talk about my favorite writers, but I’d also love to see Jon Coulthart as a guest speaker, and Katherine McMahon organizing a spoken word event in the city in the evening, with Hal Duncan as a guest. Stella Duffy could come and talk about theatre. I think Brit Mandelo will still be in Liverpool then, so we could get her along. I want to see Fox giving a workshop on movie-making. Yeah, I know, I am full of ideas. I’m bad.

Now if only we could have conferences like that in Bristol…

Back To Brighton: BSSN Conference

~ Cheryl

While I was in Brighton for Trans Pride, Fox told me about an academic conference that was due to take place in the city in September. The title of the conference is “Life Stories, Histories and Differences” and, as you might guess, it is about queer histories. Fox and Lewis were planning to do a presentation about the My Genderation films. I offered them a paper too, and I’m delighted to say that we both got in. You can find more about the conference here.

As I was a bit late getting in, they don’t have the title of my paper on the website, but it will be “Their-stories: Interrogating gender identities from the past”. It will be about how we present the gender identities of people from the past in the history that we write.

The conference is on a Wednesday, so I guess it will be hard for most people to get to, but if you are interested attendance is only £25 (£15 for the unwaged). You can register here.

Oh, and this will give me an opportunity to try out a couple more Brighton restaurants in advance of World Fantasy.

In The Mail: Parabolas of Science Fiction

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Every so often, the nice people at Wesleyan University Press send me presents. One arrived this morning. It is Parabolas of Science Fiction, a collection of academic essays edited by Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger. The title seems a little contrived, but the content looks interesting. According to the blurb:

The fourteen original essays in this collection explore how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations.

The contributors include Gary K. Wolfe, L. Timmel Duchamp, Graham Sleight and Rachel Haywood Ferreira. I’m looking forward to reading it. Also, thank you Wesleyan, I note that for an academic title it is very reasonably priced in ebook and paperback forms, so you lot can check it out too.

New Feminist SF Study

~ Cheryl

Last night I got email from Lyda Morehouse drawing my attention to Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study by Carlen Lavigne. It sounds very interesting, and Lyda understands that it mentions the AngeLINK series quite a bit. Of course being an academic work it is ferociously expensive, but the ebook is more in my range. Before I commit my $20, has anyone out there read it? Opinions?

Talking of Lyda, I’ve just listened to the latest Outer Alliance podcast, which is a live recording of a panel on QUILTBAG SF&F from Arisia. One of the audience members gives an enthusiastic recommendation for Lyda’s books. There are lots of other great recommendations in the show notes too. Good job, Julia.

The Tolkien Lecture

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

As Kij Johnson said in her opening remarks, the great thing about an inaugural lecture is that there is no precedent, nothing to constrain what you can and can’t talk about. Even the title isn’t much of a straightjacket as the lecture series is not supposed to be about Tolkien, only in honor of him. Thus Kij was free to talk about her own approach to fantasy. Mostly the great man whose spirit we were invoking was absent from the narrative, but having had time to think about what Kij said, I have come to the conclusion that it was very much a lecture that engaged with Tolkien, even as it barely mentioned him.

Kij based the lecture on work that she has done with her students at the University of Kansas, and that in turn is based on Brian Attebery’s work on categorizing approaches to writing fantasy (e.g. in Strategies of Fantasy). This area has since been addressed by others, for example Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy. During the lecture I found myself wondering where discussion might have gone had Farah been there (I talked to Kij later and she has good practical reasons for her use of Attebery). Adam Roberts didn’t turn up either — the snow kept a lot of people away — so he wasn’t around to pour scorn on the whole idea of taxonomies, as he is wont to do.

I have a great deal of sympathy with Adam on this point. The trouble with taxonomies is that the people who design them tend to get obsessed with proving that their own scheme is correct and complete, forcing them into ever more bizarre contortions in order to shoehorn every work into the boxes they have created, while writers like Mike Harrison, Kelly Link, China Miéville and Kij herself merrily run around blowing those boxes up.

The usefulness of taxonomy is the way in which it allows us to examine how pieces of fiction work, and that’s how Kij was using it with her students. For me, the most interesting part of the lecture came when she was explaining how her students found ways in which works, particularly her own, did not fit on a simple axis between mimetic (realistic) and fantastic fiction.

Kij’s own fiction is remarkable in the manner in which she drags us into the story with carefully crafted detail (see the following post on the writing masterclass for more discussion of this). And yet she often does this in settings which are totally bizarre. There’s no way in which stories like “Ponies”, “Mantis Wives” and “Spar” can be said to be in the real world, even when they are so obviously about it. During the lecture, Kij made a remark about how fantasy is inherently meta-fictional because its very unreality informs you that you must be reading a story. I flagged this as important at the time, though it took a night’s sleep to work out why.

Of course there is a sense in which all fiction is unreal. That can be a very useful point to make if your purpose is annoying idiot LitFic fans who argue that SF&F are “no good” because they are “not real”. Here, however, it misses the context. As we are discussing literary theory, the remark has to be understood within the traditional theoretical definition of fantasy (as developed by Todorov, and subsequent writers) as being fiction about that which cannot happen, as opposed to that which could be a report of real events (mimetic fiction) and that which might plausibly occur in the future, but cannot happen now (science fiction). Also one’s position on the axis from the mimetic to the fantastic is very much dependent on the relationship between the reader and the text. It is a matter of suspension of disbelief.

And suddenly we are back with Tolkien. In his famous essay, “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien argued that it was the duty of the fantasy writer to create a believable world as the setting for the fiction. That’s why the world of Middle Earth is so incredibly detailed. Kij does not do this. Her stories have incredibly realistic levels of detail, and yet their settings are often so fantastic that their unreality is beyond doubt. The reader is forced to confront the unreality of the setting, and ask herself why the author has done this.

Tolkien insists that successful subcreation, and consequent suspension of disbelief, is required when writing fantastic fiction:

The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

However, in doing so he is casting aside the whole of meta-fiction, the wonderful, knowing nod-and-wink to the audience that we have become so familiar with over the years since The Lord of the Rings was written. Meta-fiction relies for its effect on the fact that both writer and reader are aware that a story is being told. There are all sorts of reasons why a writer might choose this style of work, but in Kij’s case I think it is primarily to draw attention to the deeper layers of meaning within the story.

Tolkien famously insists that The Lord of the Rings is not allegory, and he’s right. There is no sense in which, for example, one character stands in for someone else, in the way that Aslan stands in for Jesus in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. That does not mean that Tolkien’s novel is devoid of meaning. It is simply that the meaning is more subtly expressed, buried beneath layers of plot and character development. Most people now accept that The Lord of the Rings was influenced by factors such as Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, and by the industrialization of England, but I am sure that you can still find reviews that claim such statements are “reading things into the book that are not there” (a phrase that always causes me to cringe).

It is perfectly possible to write a simple, mimetic story about, say, failed relationships. However, fantastic fiction has a long and honorable tradition of being used to address an issue in ways that encourages the reader to think more deeply about it, by divorcing it from actual events. My usual example here is the way that Juliet McKenna uses fantasy to discuss political issues while side-stepping the emotionally-charged link to real world events that would skew the way that readers approach the book.

Unfortunately, the further removed from reality your novel, the less obvious your subtle buried connection to the real world becomes. Readers, many of whom only want comfort or escape, may fail to see it (and get quite angry when some smart-arse critic such as myself points it out). I don’t know why Kij writes the way that she does, but I’m guessing that the purpose of this grabbing of the reader by the throat and forcing her to confront the unreality of the story is a tactic to get people to think. We are invited to ask, “why is she telling me this?” “What point is she trying to get across?” “What does the author want me to take away from this?”

I guess that there will always be people who think that “Spar” is just a cute tale about a human woman and an amoeboid alien having lots of sex, or that “Mantis Wives” is just a story of every-day creative cannibalism amongst insects. There will also be people who don’t want any deeper meaning to their reading. This, however, is an essay about literary theory, and that would probably not exist if all readers were like that. For the rest of us, the message of the lecture is that there is more than one way to do fantasy. Tolkien pretty much invented one very successful approach. Kij happens to be using an approach in which detailed subcreation has a part, but in which jolting the reader out of the secondary world is not just allowed, but essential to the intent of the author.

I’m not sure what Professor Tolkien would have made of all this. I rather suspect that he would have been dismissive of both Modernism and Postmodernism. But literature would be a boring place if Tolkien’s approach to fantasy was the one and only technique that was allowed. A series of lectures on fantasy literature should explore other approaches, and contrast them with the way that Tolkien worked. That’s exactly what Kij did (even if you have to peer below the surface of the lecture to see it).

More #TransDocFail Links

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I know you are probably getting fed up with this stuff by now, but this story does illustrate very clearly just how manipulative the press can be if they want to be, openly spreading ideas that they must know to be false when there’s a minority group that they want to pillory. I noticed yesterday some discussion on Twitter about how applications from students from South Asia wishing to study in the UK were down sharply in the past year — a 25% drop from India, 13% down from Pakistan. This was blamed squarely on the Daily Malice stirring up hatred against foreign visitors and immigrants, which in turn leads the immigration service to impose ever more draconian policies.

I’ll bring this back to Leveson at the end, but first lets look at some of the press coverage.

First up, here’s Ed West in the Telegraph, claiming that there is no medical evidence that gender reassignment improves trans people’s lives for the better, and that academics who try to prove this are being hounded out of academia. On the face of it the article sounds quite sympathetic towards trans people, but anyone who knows a bit about the subject can quickly see that it is all founded on lies and distortions.

A key feature of West’s argument is the story of J. Michael Bailey and his book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Bailey claims that there are only two types of trans people. There are “homosexual transsexuals”, by which he means trans women who are sexually attracted to men, and there are “autogynophiliacs”, by which he means trans women who are sexually attracted to women. Like most people who make a living from publicly abusing trans people, Bailey largely ignores the existence of trans men. They don’t rate anywhere near the same amount of column inches in the media. You’ll note also that Bailey’s terminology clearly implies that trans women are, and can only ever be, men.

According to Bailey’s theory, “homosexual transsexuals” change gender primarily so that they can have sex with as many men as possible. It’s not clear what evidence he has for this, but he notes, “Nearly all the homosexual transsexuals I know work as escorts after they have their surgery” and “Prostitution is the single most common occupation that homosexual transsexuals in our study admitted to”. It doesn’t occur to Bailey that these people might be working as prostitutes because they can’t get jobs thanks to endemic discrimination against trans people in the labor market. Instead he notes that they “might be especially suited to prostitution”. Remember, this is people like me that Bailey is talking about.

As for the autogynophiliacs, I’ve written about this strange, made-up condition before. Basically Bailey is suggesting that people change gender because they are sexually obsessed with the image of themselves when cross-dressed. It would be laughable if the idea wasn’t treated with such seriousness by the American Psychiatric Association.

The publication of Bailey’s book was accompanied by a publicity campaign trumpeting its challenging and ground-breaking science, and on the basis of that it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. The Lammys, remember, are for books which promote LGBT people. There then followed an outbreak of outrage amongst the trans community, and several complaints against Bailey by people who had been his research subjects. Amongst other things, we learned that, as part of his research, Bailey had had sex with at least one of his subjects. Great devotion to science there!

West claims that Bailey was “effectively hounded out of academia”, but in fact his college ignored or dismissed all of the complaints against him. All that happened is that a book that vast numbers of trans people regarded as offensive and defamatory was dropped from the nominees list for an award intended to promote positive images of LGBT people. You can read more about the story from trans academics, Lynn Conway and Joan Roughgarden.

As to the absence of medical evidence for the efficacy of gender reassignment, well, I’ll admit that searching for academic papers can be hard, but I had a go. It took me about 10 minutes to find this. It is a review of NHS gender treatment produced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. It includes references to a number of academic studies looking at outcomes of treatment. Here are some of the results:

Charing Cross is a very large clinic with a long-standing reputation in the field; in twenty years of practice, they have only had three patients who reverted to their original gender – Shirzaker et al. (2006) Oxfordshire Priorities Forum – Minutes of Meeting 27/09/06

in over 80 qualitatively different case studies and reviews from 12 countries, it has been demonstrated during the last 30 years that the treatment that includes the whole process of gender reassignment is effective – Pfafflin & Junge. (1998) Sex Reassignment. Thirty Years of International Follow-up Studies After Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Comprehensive Review, 1961-1991; English Ed. by Jacobson & Meier

no patient was actually dissatisfied, 91.6 per cent were satisfied with their overall appearance and the remaining 8.4 per cent were neutral – Smith, YLS. Van Goozen, SHM. Kuiper, AJ & Cohen-Kettenis, PT. (2005) Sex reassignment: outcomes and predictors of treatment for adolescent and adult transsexuals, Psychological Medicine 35:88-99.

A survey in the UK also reported a high level of satisfaction of 98 per cent following genital surgery – Schonfield, S. (2008) Audit, Information and Analysis Unit: audit of patient satisfaction with transgender services.

A further study on outcomes in trans women shows that they function well on a physical, emotional, psychological and social level – Weyers, S. Elaut, E. De Sutter, P. Gerris, J. T’Sjoen, G. Heylens, G. De Cuypere, G. & Verstraelen, H. (2009) Long-term assessment of the physical, mental and sexual health among transsexual women, Journal of Sexual Medicine 6:752-760.

Now of course the Telegraph is the sort of publication that is likely to claim that there is no scientific evidence for climate change, evolution or heliocentrism, so I’m not surprised at West’s claims, but if you look the evidence for the value of gender treatments isn’t hard to find.

Gay Star News also covered the Richard Curtis story, and as you might expect it did a rather better job, but it also did it’s best to cover it’s backside by supplying what journalists euphemistically call “balance”. It notes a Facebook campaign in support of Dr. Curtis, and gives almost equal space to someone who has spoken out against it. Now of course there is an actual complaint from a real patient here, and that needs to be investigated. But it should not be “investigated” by means of articles in national newspapers that throw in a whole lot of spurious additional accusations of malpractice and attempt to cast doubt on the wisdom of providing anyone with treatment. Also there are currently 259 people in the Facebook group. I’ve only noticed two complaining. Journalists know that the amount of space you give to an opinion is critical in determining how much credence readers give to that opinion. By giving almost equal space to the contrary view, Gay Star News is suggesting that the trans community is equally divided on the issue. That’s not what I’m seeing at all.

They are very careful to describe the stories being related on the #TransDocFail hashtag as “alleged”. That’s often journalist code for “probably made up”. And the examples they pick to showcase are mainly name-calling. The much more serious incidents are ignored. You can get a much better idea of the level of abuse by looking at this useful list of lowlights from the hashtag.

The Guardian tried to add a little balance of their own by accepting this article by Jane Fae which does a pretty good job of covering the issue. Spectacularly it also makes a first appearance in The Guardian for my vagina. Not a picture, of course, but definitely a mention. I’m going to count that as an almost Amanda Palmer level of awesomeness, though I’m sure that Amanda herself has done far better.

Unfortunately The Guardian also chose yesterday to publish an article by Suzanne Moore in which she argued that trans women should put up with being abused and ridiculed by her because of the need for feminist solidarity. She also repeats the classic Janice Raymond and Julie Bindel line about trans people reinforcing the gender binary (and so are anti-feminist). You can find a more nuanced (by which I mean not written by Moore herself) view of the whole furor over at The F-Word.

Finally in this round-up of links I’d like to give credit again to Sarah Brown for starting the whole thing. Here she is talking about it. Her article also includes a link to a 5-minute slot on BBC Radio Cambridge in which she and Christine Burns discuss the issue with a very supportive interviewer.

Now, I promised you a link back to Leveson. Thanks to my pal Eugene Byrne, I discovered this blog post by the Met Office complaining about lies and distortions being spread about their service by the Daily Malice. Incredibly, the Malice article even contained a lie that had been the subject of a successful complaint to the Press Complaints Commission when it first appeared in the Telegraph. So not only does the Malice feel free to print lies, it will do so even when another newspaper has already been censured for doing so. And this is not some despised minority we are talking about here, this is a matter of the accuracy of scientific work. So next time someone tells you that British newspapers can be trusted to self-regulate, I recommend asking for a balanced assessment.

Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien

~ Cheryl

Pembroke valkyrieAs promised over the Holidays, here are the full details of the lecture that Kij Johnson will be giving in Oxford later this month, and the writing course she is doing the following day. I hope to see some of you there.

PEMBROKE LAUNCH FANTASY LITERATURE LECTURE SERIES IN HONOUR OF JRR TOLKIEN

(Oxford, January 3, 2012) Pembroke College have invited award-winning author Kij Johnson to deliver the inaugural Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien. The first annual lecture in the series designed to explore the history and current state of fantasy literature will take place on January 18th at 6 pm, it was jointly announced today by Meghan Campbell, President of the Pembroke College Middle Common Room (MCR), Catherine Beckett, Deputy Development Director, Pembroke College, and Kendall Murphy, Representative of the Pembroke College Annual Fund. Professor Johnson will also offer a fiction masterclass at Pembroke on January 19th from 10 am until noon.

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.

‘Fantasy literature informs contemporary society’, said Campbell. ‘Any glance at current cinema offerings — or at a list of the most popular films of all time — demonstrates that fantasy is still the mode in which we tell one another stories. This and our members’ desire to celebrate Professor Tolkien’s connection to Pembroke made the lecture series an obvious choice’.

‘The Development Office is pleased to partner with Pembroke’s MCR and broader student communities in honouring the contribution made by Professor Tolkien to the life of the college and to world literature’, said Beckett. ‘Having Professor Johnson offer the inaugural lecture is a dream come true. Her humane and searing fiction, and her expansive vision of the role and possibilities of genre, will place the series on a proper foundation’.

‘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 Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien is precisely the sort of project the Annual Fund was designed to support, thanks to its resonance within and beyond the Pembroke community’.

Kij Johnson’s ‘fiction in the fantasy mode’ has won the Hugo, the Nebula (three times running), the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She has written two novels set in Heian-era Japan, The Fox Woman and Fudoki, available from Tor Books, and a story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, available from Small Beer Press. Among other subjects, her writing explores the human-animal interface, ancient and medieval Japanese culture, and narrative form.

She has taught at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, where she is also Associate Professor of Creative Writing.

Both the lecture and the fiction masterclass are free and open to the public, but online registration is required to reserve a place on the fiction course. Please go to pembrokemcr.com/Tolkien for more information.

LoneStarCon 3 Call For Papers

~ Cheryl

I’m delighted to see that my friend Karen Burnham has been put in charge of the academic track for next year’s Worldcon, LoneStarCon 3. I’m sure she will do a fine job. I’ve received a Call for Papers. Karen is looking for work that focuses on the convention’s Guests of Honor: Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Willie Siros, Norman Spinrad, Darrell K. Sweet, Leslie Fish & Joe R. Lansdale. Papers on Steampunk, Old West/frontier themes, and Spanish language science fiction will also be particularly welcomed. I wish I could be there. For those of you who can, here are the important details:

Paper proposals must include a 300-500 word abstract and appropriate bibliography. Proposals are due by December 31 2012, and participants will be notified by February 1, 2013 if their paper is accepted. All participants must be members of the convention. They will deliver a 15 minute reading of their paper as part of a panel, followed by a Q&A. Attendees may present only one paper at WorldCon, so please, no multiple submissions. All submissions (and any questions) should be sent to the head of the academic track: Karen Burnham (academic@texas.lonestarcon3.org).

I’m willing to bet that there will be one or two papers about this particularly famous piece of Spanish language science fiction that has recently been re-issued.

Melded Again

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have a contribution to the latest SF Signal Mind Meld: Non-Fiction Books About Science Fiction That Should Be In Every Fan’s Library. I see that I am in excellent company, including Gary and Jonathan. I thought when I wrote my piece that I had probably listed too many books, as few works are truly essential, but I see that many of my colleagues have suggested even more. There are a few books there I really should have mentioned, and many more than I’d like to read myself. You can find the whole thing here.

Question Design – Help Please

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

I’m hoping that I have a few helpful academics amongst my readers here.

As I guess most people know, a lot of research in various fields revolves around questionnaires. You get this in politics, in marketing, and in sociology. The matter of questionnaire design is therefore important, because badly designed questions can bias the results, right?

Now suppose you are designing a survey to measure public attitudes towards something, say science fiction. It seems to me self-evident that if your questionnaire is relentlessly negative about the subject then you will a) encourage a negative response and b) leave your respondents with a more negative view of the subject than when they started. To illustrate the point, here are two short sets of questions.

Neutral Questions

On a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) please rate the following:
1. How intelligent are science fiction readers compared to readers in general?
2. What is the quality of writing like in science fiction compared to other fiction?
3. How likely are you to want a science fiction reader as a friend?

Less Neutral Questions

One a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) please indicate how you feel about these statements:
1. Science fiction readers are stupid people who live in fantasy world.
2. Science fiction books are very poorly written.
3. Science fiction readers are dull, boring people with poor personal hygiene.

See what I mean?

I’m sure that someone, somewhere has done research into the comparative effectiveness of these two strategies. But finding that research isn’t easy, and an academic who has inherited the “less neutral” methodology from previous work in the field isn’t going to be able to challenge those previous methods without proof that they are suspect. Has anyone out there ever done any work on questionnaire design, or read any work on it, that might help?

Of course the survey I’m actually interested in isn’t about science fiction readers, but I think you can probably guess what sort of social minority it is still viewed as acceptable to study in this way.

Africa Revisited

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Here are a few follow-ups on the subject of African science fiction.

First up, with thanks to DaveH for the heads-up, the BBC World Service has a programme narrated by Lauren Beukes which includes interviews with Neill Blomkamp (District 9), Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi), Jonathan Dotse, and Nnedi Okorafor. It is well worth a listen (and includes Lauren pronouncing her last name). You can find it on the iPlayer.

In addition I attended an event in Bristol at the weekend at which Mark Bould and Roger Luckhurst presented a couple of French films on colonialism as works that could be interpreted as science fiction. This was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a bit of an academic exercise, but it was interesting all the same.

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (literally Statues Also Die, but I’d translate it as Even Statues Can Die) is a 1953 film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais about the effect of colonialism on African culture. The central argument of the film is that by removing African cultural artifacts from their cultural context and placing them in museums we are not preserving culture, we are killing it. That’s an important message, and one I need to take to heart as I’ll be helping stage a museum exhibition (albeit nothing to do with Africa) in the next few months. However, it isn’t in itself science-fictional.

What got the film into the event is the fact that at one point the narrator says, “We are the Martians of Africa”. He then goes on to talk about diseases, which makes it fairly clear that Marker and Resnais had Wells in mind when making the film. Wells, of course, wrote The War of the Worlds in part in reaction to the genocide of the native Tasmanian people by European (mostly British) settlers.

Given when it was made, it is unsurprising that, despite their good intentions, Marker and Resnais come over incredibly patronizing at times, but the film is visually stunning. You can see the whole thing on Vimeo, though sadly only in French. There’s a subtitled version on YouTube, but because of length restrictions it is split into three parts.

The other film was La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese filmmaker who lived part of his life in France. The SFnal connection here is even less obvious, though the extreme lack of communication between the heroine and her employers has a lot to tell us about alienation. Diouana, a young woman from Senegal, takes a job as a maid with a French couple living in Dakar. When her employers return to France they invite her to come with them, with disastrous consequences.

I’m going to display my prejudices here. There are good reasons for studying films. There’s much more room to read meanings into images than with text. Also you get far more respect in the UK if your study of science fiction is confined to film. But equally it can be hard to get over a subtle argument in a film and this one left me largely with questions that got in the way of whatever story it was trying to tell.

Of course it doesn’t help that we are also working with a translation. Even the title is difficult. The subtitled version is called Black Girl, but that’s not what the French title means. Wikipedia translates the French title as “The black girl belonging to…” but (and hopefully Kari will correct me if I am wrong) I much prefer “The black girl from…”. That’s a much more accurate summation of how Diouana falls between two cultures.

Further events related to the African Science Fiction exhibition are happening this week. On Thursday evening there’s a talk about the relationship between the music of the Mbenga-Mbuti people (commonly known as “pygmies”) and the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Entrance is free, but you do need to book a place so see here for details. And on Saturday there are some free talks examining possible African futures: details here.

Ignorance at Work

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Following trans-related groups online means that I get to see quite a few surveys aimed at or about trans people. I try to fill them in because I feel that gathering data is generally a good thing to do. Every so often, however, you see a survey that is so bad that you quickly come to the conclusion that whatever results it produces will be a waste of time because the people who put it together have no idea what they are doing.

Today I discovered this survey. It was created by Drs Daragh McDermott and Poul Rohleder with the assistance of Ashley Brooks of Anglia Ruskin University, whom I name specifically because I think they need to be publicly shamed for an appallingly shoddy piece of work. It purports to be a survey about prejudice against trans men and women, but it is pretty clear from the poor way that the few questions actually about trans people were worded that the originators of the survey have no understanding of what “trans men and women” means beyond what they might have read in the pages of the Daily Malice. Given the survey’s obsession with aggressively negative questions about gay men and feminism, and the way in which it appears to try to lead respondents into expressing prejudice against both, I strongly suspect some sort unethical agenda at work here.

Sadly it is quite a long survey, so I don’t want to encourage you to do anything with it. Also I don’t want you to get to the end feeling as angry as I did. My only consolation is that “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” will be as upset about the waste of taxpayers money on this nonsense as I am.

More On Africa

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There’s another SF in Africa event in Bristol on Saturday. This one is a fairly serious academic discussion all about treating stories of colonization as if they were science fiction. My friends Mark Bould and Roger Luckhurst will be involved. There are more details over at the BristolCon website.

I won’t be there for the entire event as I have duties elsewhere as part of my involvement with the local LGBT History group, but I should be there at some point.

Survey Design – Advice Needed

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Is there anyone out there who is an expert in designing surveys? The sort of thing you get on sites like SurveyMonkey. I’ve completed quite a few of these as a subject, and they’ve mostly seemed pretty badly designed. Now that I have to create one myself, I’d like to do better, and that means I need to learn.

Science Fiction and Technology – A Partnership?

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

My science writer friend, Jon Turney, has a very cool project underway. NESTA, an investment think tank, has commissioned him to examine the relationship between science fiction and technology. Basically they want to know whether science fiction has an influence on technological innovation, and if so how this works. My guess is that this project has its origins in Neil Gaiman’s comments about Chinese science fiction conventions at the British Library last year, and Damien Walter’s subsequent article here. I think Damien may have done a Guardian piece on the subject.

Anyway, Jon has asked me to help out. Some of you will have already heard from me, and I’m grateful to Farah and Edward for letting me browse their library while I was in London the other week. If this is of interest, please take a look at Jon’s blog and see what he is looking for. We do have some fairly specific requirements, and we do need evidence, not opinions.

If you have experience of working in an environment where science fiction has had an influence technological development then we’d love to hear from you. (And I know some of you work for people like Google, Linden Labs and NASA.)

I’m also looking for reading recommendations. Things like Francis Spufford’s The Backroom Boys, which examine the history of technology, come to mind. And of course we want specific examples of science fiction ideas that have influenced technology. We are making a particular case study of robots, and there are obvious examples such as satellites and space elevators. I’d like to find some other examples. And I’m looking for academic studies of robot stories.

If you are an SF writer you’ll probably be getting email from me in the coming months. I promise that answering it won’t be too onerous, unless you want to do more.

Please note that while this is a UK-based project we are not limiting ourselves to looking at the UK. Indeed, the question as to whether there are cultural differences that affect the way that SF and technology work together is one we may address.

Science Fiction in India

~ Cheryl

Yes, there is some, don’t be silly. However, this post is not specifically about fiction, it is about a book of essays. Science Fiction in India is a collection of academic papers that were presented at a conference in Varanasi in 2008. Academic works are often horribly expensive, but this one is available on the Kindle for just $6.99 (potentially plus taxes). So if you are interested in knowing what academics in India are writing about SF, this is a very good way to start. The book’s editor, Arvind Mishra, has more information on his blog.

The Hordes Arrive

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

This morning I did the meeting with the literary agency and discovered that the main staircase at this hotel is drunk. If you want to know what that’s like, imagine taking a corner in a car when the road has adverse camber. Now imagine walking up a staircase that does a similar thing. It is very disconcerting, especially when you are half awake.

The papers this morning covered a range of topics from the writing of Nalo Hopkinson and Octavia Butler; to Donald Duck comics; to myth creation in Middle Earth. At one point we ended up having a conversation about Tolkien-based religions. My new friend Sophie, who studies comparative religion and did her PhD in “Messiah figures in science fiction”, says there is a guy in Denmark doing his doctorate on the Jedi movement and a couple of Tolkien-based religions. I want to meet this chap.

Lunch was in a very nice Indian restaurant. A “hot” vindaloo in Finland is pleasantly flavorsome to an English palette, but it was only 8 Euro including a salad starter, rice, dahl, naan and a tea or coffee. Good value.

By the time we got back the convention was in full swing. There were people in anime costumes everywhere. Toni Jerrman reports that a local Japanese restaurant had to close because they ran out of food, being deluged with a crowd of people obsessed with everything Japanese. Cat ears are few and far between this year, as are “free hugs” signs, but I have seen some very impressive wolf heads.

The Turku committee is a bit young and green, and has managed some of the con-running equivalent of, “hey, let’s re-invent the wheel, I bet none of those old fogies thought of making one square before!” There are, ahem, some very strange scheduling choices, and the program book has the panels listed in alphabetical order. However, everything appears to be running with the customary efficiency and I’m looking forward to it getting into high gear tomorrow. I’m doing three things: a panel on selling translated fiction; a panel on this year’s Hugo nominees (which I expect we’ll scrap as it is scheduled against Richard’s GoH speech and one of the few Swedish language items); and MCing the masquerade.