Art

The Un-Straight Conference – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

April Ashley Exhibition
Well, that was a roller-coaster of a day.

The conference thus far as been excellent. I tweeted a lot (the official hashtag is #UnStraightConference if you want to see what other people are saying about it. Also several major sessions are being webcast here. Here’s a quick run-down of what went on today.

We began with Nicholas Hasselqvist from the actual Unstraight Museum, which is based in Sweden. He talked quite a bit about how even Sweden fails dismally when it comes to things like helping LGBT asylum seekers or standing up to the International Olympic Committee. He also talked about some of the amazing outreach work he and his colleagues do around the world. One of the key stats he mentioned is that there are around 55,000 museums in the world; of them 312 are dedicated to Elvis Presley, but only two (his and the Schwules in Berlin) are dedicated to LGBT lives.

During the Q&A on Nicholas’s talk we chatted briefly about the difficulty of assigning identities to people from history. He mentioned the case of Queen Christina of Sweden, whom many Swedes believe to have been a lesbian or even trans.

After the break Nicholas has us all participate in the creation of a museum exhibit. We had all been asked to bring an artifact that had personal importance to us. We then had to write a brief blurb for it, do a short video talking about it, and have our photos taken with it. Each personal entry was put together to form an exhibit item. In under an hour we had created a really great little exhibition. There were some very moving stories being told, and a few extraordinary exhibits. Several people mentioned pop stars as having been inspirations. One exhibit was a pair of sunglasses that were once owned by David Bowie. (Lauren, I am so jealous!) Being utterly shameless, I gave them a photo of me with a Hugo trophy. That should infuriate a few people in fandom.

After lunch various people from Liverpool museums and Homotopia, the arts foundation that did most of the work creating both the April Ashley exhibition and this conference, talked about their work and how they managed to create such a high profile event. I was seriously impressed at how much commitment and buy-in the diversity project had from senior management in Liverpool’s museums. Nor were they content with just exhibiting stuff, they wanted to change people’s minds through doing so.

Of particular interest was Ann Bukantas from the Walker Gallery, which has put on a lot of LGBT-themed art exhibits of late. (They had a David Hockney exhibition recently, and now have Grayson Perry). From her I learned about the transvestite artist, Phil Sayers, whose specialty is appearing as a woman in his own art, often recreating famous works of art with female subjects. Sayers is the only artist in the over 100-year history of the Walker whose art has been attacked by an irate member of the public.

Finally we came on to the creation of the April Ashley exhibition itself. I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now here’s the official trailer for it.

The bit at the end where April talks about finally getting official confirmation of her identity after over 45 years (thanks to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act) totally tore me up. I very nearly sobbed out loud, which would have been very embarrassing.

The rest of the day was given over to breakout sessions. I attended two. The first was about an exhibition viewing punk history from a queer perspective (with particular focus on Poly Styrene). The second was about the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which exists to preserve the work of the great Finnish gay artist.

One of the more interesting questions we addressed during the day was what level of openness about LGBT issues straight people are prepared to tolerate. Val Stevenson of Liverpool John Moores University, who gave the presentation about the punk exhibition, noted that the shopping mall where she was exhibiting was very prudish about sexualized images, despite its shops being covered in advertizing featuring highly sexualized pictures of near-naked women. Durk Dehner from the Tom of Finland Foundation said he and his colleagues are very reluctant to let any of their collection out of their control because so much of Tom’s art is deeply sexual and they fear other organizations would want to sanitize it before putting it on display.

Back, then, to April. I had a look around the exhibit, and I must say that it is beautifully done. It looks great (though April is so beautiful it is hard not to have her looking great), and the content is good too. Some younger trans activists are likely to be outraged by it because it does include the whole man-into-woman narrative, but sadly such things are still necessary when reaching out to the general public. Bev Ayre, the Project Director, said that April was initially reluctant to have her pre-transition life mentioned at all. However, taking it out would have erased both her connection to Liverpool (where she was born and grew up) and her suicide attempt.

I should note that Bev and her colleagues put in a huge amount of work to get the local trans community involved with the project, and to have them tell their stories alongside April’s. Credit here should go to local trans activist, Jenny-Anne Bishop, who worked tirelessly to get the local trans community on board. Several local trans people have been working as volunteers at the conference.

The final event of the day was also trans-themed. It was the opening of a small exhibition titled, “Ken: To Be Destroyed”. Some of you may remember this Guardian article from late last year about a woman called Sara Davidman who discovered that an uncle of hers had been trans. Sara has created a small museum exhibit about her relative (K, as Sara now calls her) which is now installed alongside the April Ashley exhibition. In many ways it is a very sad story, because of the way in which K had been forced to live in the closet all of her life, and how even now members of Sara’s family don’t want to be associated in any way with what they perceive to be the shame of K’s existence.

I was expecting this trip to be fairly emotional, but I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be until I started looking around April’s exhibition and I was reminded of how much she had inspired me as a teenager. Of course there was no way I’d ever have been that glamorous but she was, as Laverne Cox has it, a Possibility Model. She showed me that life was possible. Sadly April is currently very ill and her planned appearance at the conference tomorrow has been cancelled, so I will not have a chance to thank her personally. I am doing so here instead.

April, I would not be me without having had your help.

Women, Art & Invisibility

~ Cheryl

Over the last few days I have watched a 3-part series on BBC4 called The Story of Women and Art. Structurally it follows a pattern dating all the way back to Kenneth Clark’s classic Civilisation: an academic with a mildly eccentric presentation style takes us on a tour of great Works of Art and enthuses over them. It is a while since I watched Lord Clark’s magnum opus, but I’d be prepared to bet that most, if not all, episodes go by without mentioning a single woman artist. Amanda Vickery has set out to put the record straight, by rescuing great art by women from obscurity (frequently back-room storage areas in museums and galleries) and putting it back on display, at least on our TV screens.

Unlike novel-writing, which has always been seen as a domestic activity, the creation of Art — by which I mean primarily painting and sculpture — has, for most of history, been the domain of men. Indeed, in much the same way as certain types of writing — most obviously romance — have been deemed “women’s work” and therefore of lesser value, so certain types of artistic activity — paper-cutting, embroidery, etc. — have been deliberately excluded from The Academy because they are the preserve of women.

I suspect that there is a correlation with fantasy literature here. According to Vickery, the highest form of Art is deemed to be History Painting; that is scenes from history, classical mythology or the Bible. Of this, War Painting is a particularly valued sub-genre. Interestingly, women artists flourished in The Netherlands in the 17th Century specifically because the fashion for art moved from dramatic scenes of human passion to the still life. Women were deemed incapable of producing war painting due to their lack of participation in war (cue Kameron Hurley rant). More damningly, however, History Painting, and associated sculptures, tended to emphasize the use of nudes, after the style of Greece & Rome. It would have been improper for a woman artist to study the male body in such a way as to be able to render realistic nudes, and if she did manage to do so that would be taken of proof of her sluttish nature. Women artists were therefore doomed either way.

Nevertheless, many bold women did manage to make their way in the arts, despite all of the barriers placed in their way. I’d like to highlight just a few.

Artemisia Gentileschi lived in Italy in the 17th Century and was adept at mythological paintings. She produced this (Susanna and the Elders) when she was just seventeen.

Susanna and the Elders - Artemesia Gentileschi

Later in life she joined her father at the court of Charles I in London where she helped him produce this ceiling at Malborough House in Greenwich. It is titled “An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown”. No wonder Charles got his head chopped off if he gave out pompous commissions like that.

An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown - Artemesia Gentileschi

Moving into the 18th Century, I was surprised to discover that Marie Antoinette was a great patron of women artists. This portrait is by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The dress is probably one of many designed for her by the founding mother of the French fashion industry, Rose Bertin.

Marie Antoinette - xxx

Sadly the killjoys of the Revolution did not approve of women taking up artistic pursuits, except perhaps knitting.

Finally, here’s the finest war artist of the British Empire. Every British schoolboy knows this picture. I suspect that very few know that it was painted by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler; or that she actually stood in front of a Scots Greys cavalry charge to get a proper sense of what it should look like.

Scotland Forever - Elizabeth Thompson

All in all it was a fascinating little series, if a little depressing in that it showed that the problems women writers have in getting recognized are if anything less than those faced by women artists.

The Invisible Women of Pop Art

~ Cheryl

While you lot were all watching Eurovision, I was watching a very different sort of pop. BBC2’s Culture Show was running a special about the women who were prominent in the Pop Art movement back in the 1960s. It is now available on iPlayer for those who can access such things. The link is here. And here’s an extract from the program blurb:

However back in the day, pop art was not just a boys’ club. The scene was full of female artists, tussling with sexuality, violence and consumer culture every bit as much as their male counterparts. Strangely, their work has been consigned to the margins of history — they started out together, shared the same art dealers and were shown in the same exhibitions, but as the boys’ prices skyrocketed, the girls’ stayed put. By the end of the sixties they had pretty much been erased from the pop narrative.

Sound familiar? Yes, it is exactly the sort of thing that people have been complaining happens to women science fiction writers.

Of course, while I am familiar with most of the SF writers, I knew very little about Pop Art beyond the few men who have become legendary: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Blake. I was therefore delighted to discover a whole bunch of women artists who were famous at the time, even if their achievements have been subsequently erased.

My favorite work from the show was Pauline Boty’s portrait of Lewis Morley, which sadly I can’t find online. Overall, however, I really liked Jann Haworth‘s soft sculpture. I was instantly reminded of the famous Trebor Softmints commercial that used Cockney Rebel’s “Mr Soft” for the soundtrack. The author of that commercial claims it was inspired by the work of another soft sculpture pioneer, Claes Oldenberg, but the figures look very like Haworth’s and in any case I had learned from the program that many of Oldenberg’s work was sewn by his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Much as Haworth’s contribution to the Sgt. Pepper album cover has been erased from much of art history, so van Bruggen’s role in creating work with Oldenburg tends to be forgotten.

Along the way we learned a little bit about cultural prejudice against Pop Art. I was amused to see Huw Wheldon fulminating about pernicious, low-brow influences such as movies, pop music and science fiction.

Anyway, it was a fascinating program which I am glad I got to see. And Alastair Sooke did a fine job of presenting it. Because yes, no one would have paid any attention to what the show had to say about women artists, had a man not been out front to say it, eh BBC?

Bah! Here’s Mr Soft.

And here’s the original with actual Steve Harley vocals.

Tove Jansson Exhibition

~ Cheryl

Spring is a strange time in Finland. The trolls hibernate underground over winter, digging themselves nice, warm burrows deep in the rock. They wake up in spring in a panic and tunnel straight up towards the moon, leaving huge holes all over the countryside, often in the middle of roads. Workmen can be seen all over the country busily filling these in.

As we didn’t have to get on the road to Turku until the afternoon, Otto and I took ourselves off to see the new Tove Jansson exhibition at the national art gallery, the Ateneum. It is huge, and contains many different aspects of Jansson’s work. The Moomins take pride of place, of course, but they also had originals of the illustrations she did for The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland, and lots of other stuff besides.

During WWII Jansson did illustrations for Garm, a Swedish-language satirical magazine. It is named after Garmr, the ferocious hell-hound from Nordic mythology, which is entirely appropriate for something that intends to savage all and sundry. Jansson was clearly a very sharp political cartoonist.

For all the fine paintings and drawings on display, however, my favorite items from the exhibition were the incredibly detailed models that she made of the Moomins and various buildings that featured in the stories. An enormous amount of time and love must have gone into making them.

The exhibition is open until September, so anyone planning to come to Finncon should be able to take it in.

Beer Tasting (and Croatian Art)

~ Cheryl

Bevog Baja - Filip Burburan


I have been saying for some time that Bath has two superb independent bookstores, but it also now has a really good whisky shop: Independent Spirit. Indeed, I will be there tonight for a tasting of Japanese whiskies (so make sure you are following me on Twitter then). Chris and Christian, who run the shop, are super friendly, incredibly knowledgeable, and always happy to chat to customers. If you are in Bath, do pay them a visit.

They don’t only sell whisky, of course. I’ve been trying to learn a bit about rum from then in advance of meeting Karen Lord at Ã…con. I can heartily recommend this stuff. But I can’t really afford to stock up on whiskies and rums, so mostly what I buy when I go into the store is beer. Which brings me to the picture at the top of this post.

Recently the store has started stocking beers from Bevog, a new microbrewery from Austria (specifically a town with the lovely name of Bad Radkersburg) which is making huge waves in the beer community (#3 in this list). They do have a pale ale and an IPA for those of you who like English beers, but much more interesting from my point of view are the oatmeal stout and the smoked porter. They are both delicious (though I do admit that I’m a sucker for anything smoked and your mileage may differ).

What’s more, all of the beers have superb artwork on the bottles. The picture above is from the oatmeal stout. The artist is Filip Burburan who is from Rijeka in Croatia (a city I visited last year). Croatian friends, you need to make more noise about this guy. He’s amazing. The signature character for the smoked porter is below.

Bevog Ond - Filip Burburan

While I’m talking about beer, I can also recommend Floris Mango. It is a Belgian wheat beer stuffed full of fabulous mango goodness. Of course the dudebro real ale fans are going to hate it. It is a wheat beer for a start. But I reckon it is absolutely perfect for a warm summer’s day. Delicious.

More Women Artists

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

When Sissy sent me that lovely Mirka Andolfo art I asked her if she knew of any other women artists that she could recommend. Here’s what she came up with.

Ma fille, mon amour by Aurore Barois (Vurore)

This is by Aurore Barois (Vurore), who is a French artist. It is a portrait of her daughter.

Dragon Painting by Sonia Leong

Sonia Leong is a well-known British manga artist. I’ve mentioned her work before after seeing her at the Bristol Comics Expo. The work above is titled “Dragon Painting”

Monster Plant by Cindy Bertet (Didizuka)

And finally we have “Monster Plant” by a Belgium-based French artist, Cindy Bertet (DidiZuka).

Women artists. There are plenty of them. You just have to look.

Some Art From Europe

~ Cheryl

Xmas card by Mirka Andolfo
One of the great things about art is that translation generally isn’t required. I love the way that Neil Clarke sources cover art from all over the world. Yesterday I got Christmas greetings on Facebook from my Greek friend, Sissy Pantelis. She used a piece of art by an Italian artist, Mirka Andolfo, which I reproduce above. Mikra is mainly a comics artist, and I believe that the girl in the picture is a character from a series called Sacro/Profano. You can see more of her work here.

Picacio Calendar Reminder

~ Cheryl

There are only a few days left for the Kickstarter for John Picacio’s 2014 calendar. This is the point where I have to remind you that these things won’t be available in the shops. The calendars can only be purchased through the Kickstarter campaign. If you want one, you need to pledge now.

I saw some of the art at World Fantasy. It is really, really gorgeous.

Picacio 2014 – It’s Here!

~ Cheryl

The Kickstarter has only been live for an hour or so, and it is already almost one third funded. Stretch goals are, I think, pretty likely. I have just ordered my 2014 calendar. You can get yours here.

Oh, and check out where John got the music he used in the video. 😉

Today On Ujima

~ Cheryl

Paulette is on holiday, so hosting of today’s Women’s Outlook show fell mostly to me. My thanks to Jackie for giving me 15 minutes off for a breather. Aside from that I did a whole two hour show.

We began with an interview with James Peries of Bristol Old Vic, talking about the show he put on as a memorial to the Jamaican/British playwright, Alfred Fagon. This is a fascinating, if somewhat depressing story. Fagon moved to the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s and, after spells in the railways and army (where he became a boxing champion) he moved to Bristol and got involved in the theatre. Acting led to writing and production, and he got as far as having one play produced on BBC2 before his untimely death. The way in which he was treated by the Metropolitan Police following his death is a national disgrace, and I’m very pleased that a statue of him was put up in Bristol. The award named after him, which benefits young African and Caribbean playwrights, is producing some tremendous results.

By the way, if you are in Bristol, you may want to check out the Old Vic’s production of Great Expectations. The part of Miss Havisham is being taken by Adjoa Andoh who will be better known to you as Martha Jones’ mum in Doctor Who.

The second half hour of the show features Suzie Price-Rajah who is part of the team organizing the Art on the Hill art trail in South Bristol this coming weekend. There’s load of amazing stuff going on. I wish I had the time to go along.

The whole of the first hour is available via the Listen Again feature here.

As noted above, Jackie took over for 15 minutes at the start of the second hour, I think talking mainly about garden gnomes. I’m back after that talking to Suzie again, this time about her career as a diversity trainer.

The final half hour had me talking to Marti Burgess and Delroy Hibbert about the Media Diversity UK campaign, which you may know from the @WritersOfColour Twitter account. Much as I love doing radio, and have my own little piece of the diversity jigsaw to push forward, I very much want to see these folks do well.

The second hour of the show is available via the Listen Again feature here.

When I get the time I will make both the Alfred Fagon and Media Diversity interviews available as stand-alone podcasts.

Where Has She Been?

~ Cheryl

Yes, it has all been very quiet here for a while. What have I been up to? Well, a couple of my fabulous Finnish friends have been visiting the UK, and I took time out to show them around Bath, Bristol and London. Here are a few observations that resulted from that.

Jim Burns and Gary Erskine are very fine fellows and it was a pleasure to catch up with them at the Bath Comic and Sci-Fi Weekender. Thanks also to Andy Bigwood for his generosity. He’ll know what I mean.

The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is bigger and more extensive than I thought it would be. Most of it is free too. Well worth a visit. Some of the stuff in there is now a little embarrassing, such as the tiger personally shot and donated by King George V, but they have done a good job of putting most of their older material into context. I was particularly interested to discover Rolinda Sharples who is the best of the local artists on display.

We had dinner at Harvey’s Cellars and very splendid it was too. The goat curry, ribs and creole prawns were particularly good, and I loved what they did with Bristol Cream — adding a touch of orange does wonders for it.

And finally, I am still very fond of the Old Operating Theatre, where we launched the Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. As London museums go, it is affordable and delightfully eccentric. Hopefully being right next door to The Shard will get it a lot more visitors.

Today on Ujima

~ Cheryl

I got to host the whole of the first hour of today’s Women’s Outlook Show. My first guest was a wonderful poet called Doreen Baidoo who told us all about various projects that she has worked on. I also got my colleague Jackie in to talk more generally about poetry. The second guest was Sarah Thorp who runs the Room 212 art gallery on Gloucester Road. Both of these interviews illustrate the fabulous diversity of art projects in the city. You can listen to that hour here.

I also hosted the final half hour of the show, for a very special interview. As often happens, the Listen Again system’s clock and the studio clock were not quite in synch, and the interview laps over in the first minute of Tommy Popcorn’s show. Rather than ask you to listen to both, I have taken the liberty of patching together a quick edit containing just the interview, which I will post separately shortly.

Today On Ujima

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

On today’s Women’s Outlook show I spent the first half hour talking to Sarah Ash, author of some fine fantasy novels. In addition to being a novelist, Sarah is also an enthusiastic anime fan, and the second half of the interview is spent mainly enthusing over that. I have learned, from her, that there will be a Blu Ray edition of Cowboy Bebop out next year. I’m starting saving up now.

In the second half hour I talked to Claire Judd of Harvey’s Cellars, a fabulous eating an entertainment venue in Bristol based in the old cellars of the Harvey’s Sherry company, which in turn are the old cellars of a 13th Century Augustinian Monastery. According to Claire they have a space that would be idea for author readings, or perhaps a book launch. I am now pondering the possibility of launching a fantasy novel in 13th Century cellars. Oh, and the restaurant specializes in Creole tapas. 🙂

Along the way we also talked about the fabulous Bristol Blue Glass, from which Harvey’s sherry bottles are made. And I learned that the cellars have an art gallery. This gave me the opportunity to utter the phrase “steampunk furries” on air. Check out Julian Quaye to learn more.

All of this is available in the first hour of the show, which you’ll be able to find here for the next few weeks.

The second hour begins with a look at the daft things people leave behind on public transport (a parrot, really?). After 15 minutes we have Sarah back as our Woman of the Week, in which we talk mainly about music and the dire state of British education policy. And the final half hour is Paulette talking about the need to get people from ethnic minorities to give blood. That features the city’s Lord Mayor, Faruk Choudhury.

The second hour is available for listening here.

Shameless Ego Boo

~ Cheryl

Liburnicon poster

This is the poster from Liburnicon. I was very impressed. And I love the “skull & tentacles” logo that they had for this year’s con (bottom right).

Today on Ujima – Juggling, Glass, Twitter & Housing

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well that was a busy day.

What I knew about today’s show was that I was going to be interviewing Rod Laver, the amazing juggler who was part of Amanda Palmer’s show in Bristol. That took up the first half hour, in which we discussed Amanda, Rod’s act, the juggling world championships, running away to the circus and much more.

What I didn’t know was that I would also be interviewing Jackie Victory, a Bristol-based glass artist, who does some really cool things, and who gave me an excuse to mention Dale Chihuly on the radio. After the ad break I bring in a couple of the regular crew to talk more generally about art in Bristol. There’s a lot of it. One thing I didn’t mention, because I wasn’t sure of the dates, was the crazy golf exhibit at the Arnolfini, which looks like a lot of fun.

All of that is in the first hour, which you can listen to here.

The second hour begins with one of those “lighter look” segments that always gets serious and political in the end. We were supposed to be chatting, in a light-hearted way, about how to put off unwelcome attention from men. But that was partly inspired by the awful trolling that has been going on on Twitter recently, and that led to me having a rant about the proposed abuse button. I guess I need to do a blog post about that. And about the equally idiotic porn filter.

Paulette actually got on the show for one segment doing Woman of the Week with our fabulous Amy, but then she ducked out again and left me to present the final half hour on housing issues. I’m not sure that the discussion got anywhere, but at least people got opportunities to air grievances.

You can listen to the second hour here.

Update: I’m just listening to the first hour and there’s a blank spot during the first ad break. We had a small tech snafu. Don’t worry, it comes back.

Card Art Pleasure

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Panda Knight by Xue WawaBirthdays are odd these days. I got two actual paper cards, and almost 250 people wishing me well on Facebook. Mostly, of course, the latter was just people saying “happy birthday”, but one or two linked to art that might pass for card art. This particularly beautiful image came courtesy of my Greek friend, Sissy Pantelis. The artist, Xue Wawa, is a Chinese couple who have been working together for over ten years. You can find out more about them, including contact details for an English-speaking agent, here. More of their fabulous art is available here. They have a website too, but it is all in Chinese so I can’t tell you a lot more about them.

Amanda at TED

~ Cheryl

While I was getting all nervous about having to interview Tim Maughan live on air, Amanda Palmer was tweeting frenetically about her forthcoming appearance at TED. Scary as Tim can be, I suspect she had the harder job. But, as usual, she carried it off brilliantly. The talk is all about the Art of Asking, that is, how to finance a career in art by asking people to pay for it. It is well worth a listen.

I guess it helps a lot to have Amanda’s amazing personality to carry this sort of thing off. It also helps not to be British, and therefore not to have been brought up believing that it is horribly wrong to promote yourself in any way.

From my point of view, the other problem with following Amanda’s advice is that, if you have grown up expecting to be discriminated against, learning to trust other people is hard. It is something I keep having to work on.

Trans, Bodies and Art

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Over the past few days I have encountered several references to the use of trans people in art. Firstly there is this article, referencing the LGBT History exhibition, which appeared on Unmaking Things, a blog that is a joint production of the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum. We’ve also had a request, following on from the exhibition, to find trans people who are willing to be photographed for an art project. And finally, some asked on Twitter if I thought it was reasonable to claim to have gained an understanding of trans people through reading science fiction.

What these all have in common is that they involve the representation of trans people in art, probably by cis people. In her blog post, Lauren Fried notes that in the exhibition, “There is very little imagery which pertains to the (re)design of bodies here; instead, the histories of these bodies are referred to through objects and archival documentary sources.” This was very deliberate on our part and Fried, though her academic interest is in the design of bodies, understands why we did it. (I’ve since corresponded with her on Facebook.)

All too often, images of trans people, both factual and artistic, are intended to other the subjects. We get the notorious “before and after” shots that the newspapers are so fond of running (and that trans celebrities are automatically asked for, even when an article featuring them has nothing to do with their transition or history). And we get gender-bending art displays that either revel in androgyny or present “you can’t tell” images.

Of course there is a place for such things. The exhibition does contain a portrait of a trans woman, local theatre director, Martine Shackerley-Bennett, who allowed her artist friend, Penny Clark, to chronicle her transition. You can learn more about the work Penny did in this YouTube clip.

There is also a long and honorable history of performers such as David Bowie, Boy George, Tilda Swinton and Andrej Pejić who delight in presenting an androgynous appearance. That is their right, and the questioning of gender boundaries that results from their actions is to be welcomed as it has done a great deal to advance public acceptance of trans folk.

Where problems arise is when people start with the gender-bending image and conclude, “this is what trans people are.” As I hope regular readers will be aware by now, the truth is much more complicated. While there are many trans people who would love to be as famous, good-looking and as brain-exploding as Swinton or Pejić, there are many who do not. Very few want to be the subject of “freak show” imagery.

So how does this fit into learning about trans people from SF? Well, if you’ve read my essay on the subject you’ll know that most 20th Century SF featuring trans people was written by cis people who seemed to have very little idea what actual trans people were like. It also tended to make the trans folk “issue characters”, by which I mean that their otherness was the significant thing about them, the reason why they were in the story. Respectful or not, it tended to be the literary equivalent of the freak show image.

The other thing about 20th Century SF is that it often features gender transition as a choice rather than as something the characters need to do in order to be themselves. The assumption is that future technology allows such essentially cosmetic surgery, and so people will opt for it. Iain Banks, to his credit, has always acknowledged that such choices are predicated on a society that has achieved gender equality. Few people would choose to become a member of an oppressed group in society. In our current society, where women are still second class citizens, and trans people are often barely accepted as human, the idea that transition is a lifestyle choice is deeply offensive to many who undergo it.

So does reading 20th Century SF actually help you gain an understanding of trans people? From one point of view, clearly not. I’ve had earnest people tell me that they know all about folk like me because they have read John Varley’s Steel Beach. This makes me want to put my head in my hands and weep. If that’s what you get out of your reading then you are in deep trouble.

On the other hand, what SF has always done is usualize the idea of gender transition. (Yes, “usualize” is a made up word. That’s because the word commonly used in a sentence like that would be “normalize”, and “normal” has all sorts of connotations beyond the mathematical.)

What I mean by this is that if you read SF (and to a lesser extent fantasy) then the idea that someone might change their gender is not strange and frightening. SF readers are accustomed to reading about things that might not (yet) be real, whereas those who do not read SF often excuse themselves by saying that they can’t accept things that are not real, even in a work of fiction (which is, by definition, unreal). If you can’t accept the possibility of a changing world in fiction, the chances are you won’t be too keen on actual changes in the real world.

So I do think there is a way in which reading SF can help people to accept trans people. Of course it isn’t foolproof. While there are some people for who reading SF as made them eager and willing to encounter aliens, there are others who feel it has taught them that the only good alien is a dead alien. I’m also aware that there are SF fans who are perfectly OK reading about people with green skin and tentacles, but can’t cope with ordinary humans who have brown skin, or breasts. Art does not affect all people in the same way. However, I can see how reading SF may have helped people to be more understanding about difference. Whether those people would have been as understanding without it, I can’t say, and neither can they. If they want to credit their reading as being formative, I’m happy to let them.

Wow!

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I’ve just seen Kinuko Craft’s cover for the new Freda Warrington novel, Grail of the Summer Stars. A quick Google led me to the original artwork on Craft’s own website. Craft apparently doesn’t want people copying that image, and while I have the skills to get past that I’m not going to. Instead here’s the book cover.

Grail of the Summer Stars cover - Kinuko Craft

But do click through and see the original. It is bigger and sharper. I do so love Craft’s art.