Feminism

Hello Again Toronto

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I am safely arrived in Canada. It has been a fairly painless trip, thanks in no small part to great friends in London and the excellent staff on the Heathrow Express.

The movie selection on Air Canada was not great, but they did have some good documentaries. First up there was a biography of Mary Tyler Moore which I loved. Obviously back in the 70s I would have settled for just being a woman, any woman, but Mary’s TV show was still a shining beacon of possibility for me. I loved the fact that Oprah shot a version of the opening credits with herself as Mary. And yeah, I have been to Minneapolis and seen the statue.

I also managed to catch a food show about artisanal cheeses in British Columbia. It featured Little Qualicum, Moonstruck and Salt Spring Island. So when I get to Victoria I want to check out this place and see what I can buy.

Oh, and I set the high score on the entertainment system’s trivia game. I have no idea how often the scores are re-set, but it you happen to be flying Air Canada do take a look and see if you have the same aircraft as I had.

Bath Ruby, A Very Different Software Conference

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I spent today in the Assembly Rooms at Bath. There was a definite air of eccentricity in having a software conference in such a stately, Georgian venue, but if you are going to hold a conference in Bath, why not?

I was at Bath Ruby because I had been asked to present a talk on Trans*Code. It was only going to be a 5-minute lightning talk. I expected most of the day to be given over to tech stuff. I was very wrong. My how software conferences have changed.

It didn’t seem that way at the start. There were around 500 people at the conference. The vast majority were young, white and male. I think the women marginally outnumbered the people of color (though of course some were in both categories), but if you removed the sponsor representatives, who were probably not tech staff, the numbers might have tipped the other way. I may well have been the oldest person there.

Then the conference started, and the very first piece of admin mentioned in the welcome session was the Code of Conduct, which mentions Gender Identity. That set the tone for the rest of the day. Now sure there were technical talks, but there were other things too. There was a talk about how to get involved in open source projects. There was a talk about getting fired — how employees can cope with it, how employers can do it better. And there was a talk about unconscious gender bias. A longer version of this talk.

Which was awesome. (And there’s lots more good stuff from Janet Crawford here.)

I don’t suppose that all tech conferences are like this these days. However, the Python community and the Ruby community seem to be very progressive. It is very heartwarming.

My talk seemed to go down well. People listened respectfully, and applauded when I was done. A few people came and thanked me afterwards. Job well done, I think.

And the tech stuff? I got to see the best tech presentation I have ever seen in my life (except possibly the one where Kevin Roche had us moving individual atoms with his software). Sonic Pi is a seriously cool thing. And it is bundled free with every Raspberry Pi computer.

Women Do Math (in the movies)

~ Cheryl

Now here’s a heartwarming story for International Women’s Day. Back in the 1960s, three brilliant African-American mathematicians — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson — were the brains behind NASA’s Friendship 7 program that launched John Glenn into space. Their story is told in the book, Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly (due out in September). And recently casting has been announced for a 2017 movie based on the book. Taraji P. Henson was already on board to play Johnson. She has now been joined by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

Yep, that’s the Archandroid, in the movies, in a story about the early days of the space program. Awesome.

Kudos as well to Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith and Barbara Holley who are apparently in Shetterly’s book but not yet in the movie, probably because Hollywood likes to combine people into single roles for easy of story-telling.

Seriously, go read Shetterly’s website. It is great. Also, while you are about it, get Hannu Rajaniemi’s Collected Fiction and read “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB”.

Women in Broadcasting on Bristol 24/7

~ Cheryl

The nice people at Bristol 24/7 (in particular Pamela Parkes) have done an article on, and I quote, “Bristol’s brilliant women broadcasters”. Naturally it doesn’t include all of us: no Paulette, no Mary Milton, no Claire Cavanagh, Laura Rawlings or Alex Lovell. However, it does include a bunch of my colleagues from Ujima, and it includes me. If you want to have a read, and see me having a pop at a BBC institution, you can find the article here.

Today on Ujima – Feminism!

~ Cheryl

With LGBT History Month over and International Women’s Day not far off we switched gears on Women’s Outlook today and went 100% with a feminist agenda.

First up I was delighted to welcome back Sian Webb from Bristol Womens’ Voice. Sian and her team are organizing a festival day at M Shed on March 12th to celebrate International Women’s Day. They have rather more resources than I did for the LGBT History Festival, and have a really spectacular event planned. It is only one day, but they have three streams of programme and some really cool stuff. Further information is available here.

For the next hour I was joined by Jess Read of the Women’s Equality Party. I must confess that I’d been a bit nervous of these folks in the past because they seemed to have a bit of an air of White Feminism about them. However, Jess was very firm on the need for intersectionality, including acceptance of trans women. The discussion ranged over a wide variety of issues including how WEP would manage its non-partisan stance. It was really refreshing to have a politician in the studio who a) said that she didn’t want to be a politician, and b) said that her party’s aim was to put itself out of business.

You can find the Bristol branch of the Women’s Equality Party on Facebook. There is also a Bath branch which is somewhat nearer to me. You can find your local branch here, and I do believe that’s Ceri in the picture at the head of that page so I’m guessing it is a Bath branch photo.

In the final half hour I was joined by my friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke to talk about the fabulous Fight Like A Girl anthology. The link to book for the launch event is here. It will be awesome, especially Fran Terminiello’s demonstration of the use of sharp, pointy things. Hopefully the panel I am chairing will be good too.

We may have mentioned a whole bunch of amazing women writers in the process, including Juliet McKenna, Kameron Hurley, Tansy Rayner Roberts, NK Jemisin, Glenda Larke, Mary Gentle, Gaie Sebold, Foz Meadows, Danie Ware and many more.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here, and the second hour here.

Jo will be back in the studio tomorrow morning to talk to Paulette about World Book Day on the Education Show.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Sisters are doing it for Themselves – Eurythmics
  • Why? – Tracy Chapman
  • Independent Woman – Destiny’s Child
  • Let’s Talk About Sex – Salt n Pepa
  • Unstoppable – Liane La Havas
  • Stone Cold Dead in the Market – Maya Angelou
  • Horse and I – Bat for Lashes
  • Ghetto Woman – Janelle Monáe

Jess chose the third and fourth tracks. She’s a big Beyoncé fan. We managed to avoid coming to blows over whether Bey is more or less awesome than Janelle Monáe

Let’s Talk About Sex

~ Cheryl

It seems to be a day for writing about things I am doing. As well as the story, I am delighted to announce that in September I will be a keynote speaker at an academic conference.

No, seriously, I will. The conference is called Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives (PopSex for short) and is entering its second year. It is run by my friends Bethan Jones and Milena Popova, and takes place at the Watershed in Bristol. Last year was a great success, and hopefully this year will be as well. The call for papers is here. I’m looking forward to some great material.

Of course this does mean that I have to write a speech. No pressure, then.

On Adding Diversity to Events

~ Cheryl

Last night I spotted a tweet from Juliet McKenna linking to this article about the pressure on people to do things for free. Although the article is ostensibly about the tech industry, much of what it says applies to publishing too. The current discussion in the UK about paying authors to appear at literature festivals is an obvious connection.

And yeah, I relate to it. Almost everything I do outside the day job I am expected to do for free. And, as I noted to friends on Twitter the other day, I can’t even do things for “exposure” the way authors can. I am expected to do things for “the good of the community” and not take any credit for it, because taking credit would be exploiting the community for my own selfish ends.

But I’m not here to whine. I’m here to talk about one specific point that the article makes. It says, “We know that not paying speakers and not covering speaker expenses causes events to become less diverse.”

Now that’s true, and the article links to this lovely X-Men-themed post to make the point. However, it is very easy to come away from that thinking that paying speakers will make your event more diverse. In fact it might get you into even more trouble. Here’s why.

Once you get to the point of paying speakers, you start having serious budget issues. You have to get that money from somewhere, and that somewhere probably means your attendees. The only way you can get people to pay more to come to an event is to put on speakers that the public will pay a lot of money to see. That means having speakers who are famous, which in turn leads to having more straight cis white men, and paying them more than you pay the other speakers. Before you know it, you end up like UK literary festivals and are spending all of your money on celebrities and politicians who haven’t even written the books with their names on the cover.

So no, paying speakers alone will not make your event more diverse. The only way to do that is to have a specific policy to implement diversity by encouraging the sort of speakers you want to attend, and helping them financially if they need it. And you have to be prepared to swallow the drop in attendance and revenue that may bring. Because when it comes down to it, this is the real problem.

https://twitter.com/tadethompson/status/692073206321123328

Job Security While LGBT, Lack Thereof

~ Cheryl

Yesterday a story that I have been following for some time finally broke so I am able to talk about it. My friend and colleague (via the Translation Awards), Rob Latham, has been fired from his job as a tenured professor at the University of California Riverside. His dismissal was against the recommendation of the UCR Faculty Senate, and is based primarily on charges which almost everyone involved appears to agree were fabricated.

Obviously I only have Rob’s side of the story, which you can read here. However, even if the charges are true, they are considerably less serious than things that straight professors just get a rap on the knuckles for.

The point here is that Rob is by no means the only person to be a victim of this sort of thing. It used to be the case that you could be fired just for being gay. In many parts of the US you can still be fired just for being trans. These days we are supposed to have employment protection. All that means is that now your employers have to go through the effort of creating trumped up charges of misconduct as an excuse for firing you.

There are many reasons why I am self-employed. This is one of them.

So That’s What Fury Road Was All About

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Watching Max Max: Fury Road left me rather puzzled. I couldn’t work out what the scriptwriters were trying to do with the plot. It could have just been a two-hour car chase with lots of explosions, but generally Hollywood likes a bit more than that. What passed for a plot didn’t make any sense to me, given the supposed feminist ethos of the film.

Over the weekend I spotted a tweet from Hiromi Goto pointing at this article. Suddenly it all makes sense. And my opinion of the film has gone down a few notches.

The Buzz Begins

~ Cheryl

LGBTHF banner
I have spent much of today working on social media publicity for Bristol’s part in the 2016 National Festival of LGBT History. There’s a lot going on.

The main events are on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st. However, I’m still working on stuff for other days, some of which involves Stuart Milk. Hopefully we’ll have announcements on that soon. One of the reasons I have been slightly frazzled of late is that I got a message saying, “Stuart got a call from Archbishop Tutu asking if he can go to Cape Town for a few days”. Because that’s the sort of thing that happens to Stuart.

Meanwhile my genius graphic design pal, Ceri Jenkins, has been producing the most amazing banners and such. The one above is intended for use on Facebook and you can see it in action here. I also have a pinned tweet these days. Slowly but surely Ceri is dragging me into the 21st Century.

By the way, if you have an event that needs social media promotion, Ceri does this stuff for a living. I can put you in touch.

Of course most of you won’t be in Bristol to see any of this happen. However, I will also be giving talks in London on February 6th and Manchester on February 27th. More news of those in due course.

New Year Things

~ Cheryl

I don’t see any point in making resolutions that I’m not going to keep, so for now I’m just going to try to say “no” a bit more often, especially when it involves people asking me to do work for free. In any case, to be honest my planning horizon doesn’t extend much beyond February. If I manage to get through that month without any major disasters the year will have gone well and I can start thinking about other things. I’ve just had to turn down an event in Bath because I’ll be in London at the time. February is that sort of busy.

Meanwhile some of my friends are resolving to do good things. Jo Hall is once again going to read more women authors, which is a fine and wonderful thing. I understand that Pete Sutton will be joining her in the challenge this year. I’ve just been looking at a year in review piece I have written for someone, and the stats look like this:

Male authors: Ian McDonald, Paul Cornell, David Barnett, Ken Liu, Hannu Rajaniemi, Ante Aikio, Robert Irwin. 7 in total.

Female authors: Catherynne Valente, Emma Newman, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, Aliette de Bodard, Nnedi Okorafor, Naomi Novik, Elizabeth Hand, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Rachel Hartman, Justina Robson, Ann Leckie, Stephanie Saulter, Natasha Pulley, Zen Cho, Leena Krohn, Maria Turtschaninoff. 16 in total.

PoC count: 6 of 23 (possibly 7 if you count Sami as PoC, which I think you probably should).

Translated works: 4 of 23.

The list isn’t very good with regard to actual LGBT authors, but in terms of books with major LGBT characters I have 12 of 23.

The obvious conclusions from this are that a) I’m a hideously bigoted feminazi who is out to destroy all men, and b) that I need to read some non-binary authors.

Today on Ujima: Pagan Festivals and Stuart Milk

~ Cheryl

We were a little light on guests for today’s show, it being that time of year, so I am especially grateful to Liz Williams and Trevor Jones for coming all the way from Glastonbury to be with me today. Most of you will know Liz as a science fiction writer, but you may not know that she and Trevor run the Cat & Cauldron witchcraft shop in Glastonbury. I had them on the show to talk about midwinter festivals. We covered a wide range, from the origins of Santa Claus to Roman Saturnalia and German Yule. My French colleague, Melody, was on hand to provide a European perspective.

You can listen to the first half of the show here.

At the start of the second hour I shamelessly used my place in charge of the microphone to send a Christmas message to Kevin. After that I played the interview with Stuart Milk that I recorded in London a couple of weeks ago. Thanks again to Dan Vo and his colleagues at Heavy Entertainment for the use of their studio.

If you want to see some of the things that will be happening in Bristol for LGBT History Month, check out the OutStories Bristol website. There will be lots more posts coming during January.

Melody and I were joined in the studio by Mary Milton who, amongst other things, is the Producer of ShoutOut, the LGBT radio show on BCFM (and now a host of other local community stations). In the final half hour we had a chat about the state of LGBT rights and what we we need to do to improve matters.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The playlist for the show was inevitably seasonal, though I did try to avoid most of the obvious choices. Having to play mostly black music helped a lot. I was especially pleased to be able to play Eartha Kitt. The full playlist was as follows:

  • Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
  • Sun Goddess – Earth, Wind & Fire featuring Ramsey Lewis
  • Santa Claus is Coming to Town – The Jackson 5
  • Run Rudolph Run – Chuck Berry
  • All I Want for Christmas – Mariah Carey
  • So Strong – Labi Siffre
  • Winter Wonderland – Booker T and the MGs
  • Hot Stuff – Donna Summer

As Paulette is on holiday in Vietnam I’ll be hosting the show again next week. If anyone who lives in or around Bristol fancies being on, do get in touch. It is hard to find guests at this time of year.

On Mary Sues

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I still haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie, and while the Internet (in flagrant violation of FREEZE PEACH) is preventing anyone from telling anyone about the film I have gathered that there is something of a meltdown in fanboy circles because the lead character has Girl Cooties. Angry tweets are flying back and fore on the question of whether Rey is a “Mary Sue” or not.

Much of this depends on what one means by “Mary Sue”. Conveniently for a Twitter argument, there seems to be no actual agreement on this (see TV Tropes). This allows everyone concerned to say that they are factually right and anyone who disagrees with them is factually wrong. This is the very essence of a Twitter argument.

Historically, of course, Rey cannot be a Mary Sue because the term originated in fanfic and meant a supporting character who represented the author. Authors can’t insert themselves as the main character in fanfic because the main characters have to be the canon characters of the series the fanfic is based on.

However, as the TV Tropes article makes clear, the term has since migrated out of the fanfic community, and much confusion has resulted. TV Tropes attempts to define a Mary Sue thus:

In other words, the term “Mary Sue” is generally slapped on a character who is important in the story, possesses unusual physical traits, and has an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.

Once we are out of the fanfic realm, however, the word “irrelevantly” no longer has meaning. And that leaves us with, not only Rey, but also Luke Skywalker and pretty much every hero out of the Joseph Campbell school.

So why the fuss? Well, let’s go back to that definition again and focus in on another word: “unusual”. What I suspect is happening here is that for the straight cis white male community it is entirely reasonable for one of them, no matter how humble his background, to turn out to have amazing magical powers, have a royal background, and become the savior of the galaxy. For a girl to do the same (or a queer person, or a PoC) is, to them, utterly preposterous. Hence accusations of Mary-Suedom.

This is effectively another side of the coin that results in charges of fantasy fiction being “unrealistic” if it has PoC or women as heroes, or queer people existing, even though those same books might include dragons, wizards, immortal elves and trees that walk.

There is, of course, another side to this, and that’s the aspect of the Mary Sue being a representative of the author. I suppose it is entirely possible that JJ Abrams sees himself as a kick-ass teenage girl, but somehow I doubt it. I’m happy to believe that Abrams put a character in the film that young women might want to identify with, but providing characters for the audience to identify with is a thing writers do. What exactly was George Lucas’s intention when he created Luke?

In any case, such things have a fine literary tradition. If you want a classic example of an author-insertion Mary Sue (or Gary Stu if you must, but I don’t see why we can’t continue to use a female term to act as a default for all humanity) you need look no further than the literary novel about a middle-aged professor of English in an unhappy marriage who has an affair with a beautiful young student.

Film Review – Tangerine

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Last night I took myself off to the Bath Film Festival to see Tangerine. The showing took place in a small arts center that looked and felt more like a folk club than a cinema. The audience looked more like a folk club too, in that they were mostly older than me (sorry Talis). Except of course this was Bath, so they also looked very staid and English middle class. We might have been in church. C of E, of course. I rather wondered what they were going to make of the film.

Hey bitches, we gon’ tell you what’s goin’ down, yo!

Welcome to Los Angeles, alien people of Bath.

Tangerine is a film set among the trans hooker community of LA. It is famous for two things. Firstly it was shot entirely on iPhone 5s. I am not competent to judge the effect or quality of this, though the colors did seem interesting at times. Secondly it not only stars trans women as trans women, it involved them in the production as well. Indeed the script is based on a true life experience of one of the stars, Kiki Rodriquez, who plays Sin-Dee Rella.

The basic plot is that Sin-Dee gets out of jail on Christmas Eve to find that her boyfriend, Chester, has been unfaithful while she was inside. She determines to take revenge. Chester is a pimp and a drug dealer, so perhaps this was all rather predictable.

Yeah, Chester is an arsehole. But then, when you sit back and think about it, every male character in the film is an arsehole in one way or another.

Quite a few of the women are not very nice either. This is, after all, a film about very poor people doing what they think they need to do to get by, and often making very poor decisions in the process.

The film is also a black farce. Because people do make poor decisions and then shit happens and it all kicks off.

This is a very long way from the sort of thing that is currently being done over here, or indeed in shows like I am Cait, to improve public opinion of trans people. I can just imagine the torrent of concern trolling that Sarah Ditum is going to produce over this. “Oh! *clutch pearls*, trans women are criminals, they are drug addicts, they swear all the time. How horrible! We must help them by locking them away and preventing them from doing those disgusting things that they do! Or at least stop them from doing them where we can see them.”

But you come to that conclusion only if you don’t think about what goes on in the film. Here are a few pointers.

Sin-Dee and her best friend, Alexandra (beautifully played by Mya Taylor) are women, pretty much indistinguishable from other LA hookers save for the thing in their pants that makes them valuable to a certain type of John. They are not “men in dresses” because they are not being played by men in dresses trying to channel what it is like being trans.

People do what they need to do to get by. Even Yeva, the Armenian immigrant woman whose husband has a thing for trans hookers, knows that.

Dinah, the white hooker, thinks that she’s better than Sin-Dee and Alexandra. She has, after all, been socialized to think that. She’s not.

Everyone has dreams, whether it is Alexandra’s singing career, Sin-Dee’s relationship with Chester, or Yeva’s happy home life. In Los Angeles most dreams are paper thin, masking the ugly reality beneath.

And when it comes down to it, trans women of color are on the bottom of the pile. All that they have is each other. The relationship between Sin-Dee and Alexandra is the most powerful thing in the film.

The end of the film was greeted in absolute silence. But that means that no one booed, and no one walked out. My indispensable new pal Ceri had her ears well tuned to comments as people left and there was some concern that the film had been exploitative. Trust me, it wasn’t. It was real. The Danish Girl will be exploitative, though most cis people watching it won’t understand why.

The bottom line is that Alexandra and Sin-Dee are girls very like me. They are girls like Roz Kaveney wrote about in Tiny Pieces of Skull. Roz went through a period of having to swim in that world; I got lucky and found Kevin so I avoided it. What Alexandra and Sin-Dee go through is reality for very many trans women around the world. If you can’t accept them because of how they live — if you need to have stories about white, middle class trans women in order to accept us — then you are not really doing the job.

If you’d like to see more of Mya Taylor, she has a staring role in a forthcoming short film about the life of Marsha P Johnson. The production company could do with some help with post production costs. Here’s the trailer.

Official Trailer for Happy Birthday, Marsha! from sasha wortzel on Vimeo.

Best of British?

~ Cheryl

Normally I don’t pay much attention to mainstream “Best Of” book lists. We all know the drill, right? Men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men. Oh, and any SF&F books included are excused as being not really SF&F because they are Literature.

But Timmi Dumchamp clearly has a stronger stomach for such things than I do, which is presumably how come she discovered a list of Best British Novels compiled by 81 international literary critics. Surprise! Almost 40% of the books listed were by women.

I think that tells us quite a lot about the British literary establishment.

For more see Timmi’s post here.

Supergirl Hits Her Stride

~ Cheryl

Elsewhere (not yet published) I have described the Supergirl TV series as Cosmopolitan does superheroes. I still stand by that, because every episode seems to have at least one plot element straight out of a women’s magazine guilt column. I have stuck with the show because it is fun (yeah, OK, and because of the eye candy), but it does have its serious moments and episode 6 was one of them.

To start with, this is the episode in which Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart is amazing in this role) explains to Kara that women aren’t allowed to get angry at work. Perry White can get away with throwing a chair through a window. Heck, he can probably get away with throwing a chair at an employee. Women, on the other hand, aren’t allowed to get angry. If they do, it will count against them. Being angry is a manly thing to do, it is not womanly.

This is also the episode in which we are introduced to General Sam Lane, Lois and Lucy’s father. General Lane hates aliens, especially Kryptonians. He also hates Jimmy Olsen. He doesn’t quite go as far as to say that this is because Jimmy is black (which he is, these days), but you can see it in his eyes. He’s a very clear representation of a particular sort of American, and I’m pleased to see the show taking that on.

Finally, a major plot element of the episode is Kara having anger issues. Cat takes her off to a cocktail bar and explains that if you are angry and stressed at work that probably means you have deeper issues bothering you. Kara has a bit of a workout and realizes that she’s angry because she’s different from everyone else, and will never have a “normal” life. Right on, Kara. There are lots of women who will agree with you on that one. Because like you, we are deemed to be not quite human. And we don’t get super powers in exchange.

It’s World Fantasy Outrage Season (Again)

~ Cheryl

Today has been pretty much swallowed by the Tara Hudson case, and looks set to continue that way. I’ll update when I can. In the meantime here’s some SF&F content for you.

Last weekend something called the Women’s Freedom Conference was taking place. It looked like a really great event, especially in the support it was giving to trans women of color. But it used the hashtag #WFC2015, which I kept reading as World Fantasy Convention. It was very confusing.

Of course WFC is generally on Hallowe’en weekend, so it will be starting in a few days time. Sadly it doesn’t look anywhere near as much fun. Last night Natalie Luhrs raised the alarm over this year’s WFC’s harassment policy. Outrage ensued, including this magnificent rant from John Scalzi.

Well at least I don’t have to worry about boycotting WFC this year. It’s in the USA, so I can’t go. But it is somehow comforting to see the outrage continuing without me. Were it up to me, my protest would be to have the most amazing cosplay all weekend.

Women’s Outlook Does Literature

~ Cheryl

It was all books all the time on yesterday’s Women’s Outlook show.

First up I had a great interview with Nicola Griffith, mainly about her wonderful novel, Hild. Naturally that brought us on the the position of women in Anglo-Saxon society and the more general issue of how women’s roles in history are erased. We also touched on the work Nicola has been doing on women and literary awards, and on the forthcoming film of Kelley Eskridge’s novel, Solitaire.

The full interview with Nicola ran to about half an hour, so I had to cut quite a bit. I’ll put the whole thing on Salon Futura when I get the chance.

After that it was all Bristol Festival of Literature. I was joined in the studio by Amy Morse, Kevlin Henney and Pete Sutton. We talked through just about every event in the Festival. You can find more details about all of them here.

To listen to the first hour of the show click here, and for the second hour click here.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Barry White – Let the Music Play
  • Percy Sledge – When a Man Loves a Woman
  • Duran Duran – Pressure Off
  • Sade – Nothing Can Come Between Us
  • Prince – I Wanna Be Your Lover
  • Cameo – Word Up
  • Heatwave – Boogie Nights
  • Parliament – Bop Gun

Yeah, I did play the new Duran Duran single. If you don’t know why, listen to the show. All is explained. (And it is a great song.)

Women in Translation – The Numbers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Over at the Three Percent blog Chad W Post has some data on the gender of writers whose work gets translated. This is for all fiction, not just SF&F, and the publication dates covered are 2008-2014. The numbers are stark. Post says:

I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.

Breaking the data down, there are 14 countries that manage 50% or better. Mostly this is because the actual numbers are very small. Wales, for example, has 100% women, but only one actual book in translation. Croatia does pretty well with 50% from 8 books. However, the only country in that group with significant numbers of works is Finland with 62% from 28 books.

I note in passing that Croatia and Finland are both countries that have made me very welcome.

Also I should note that Post appears to have assumed that gender is binary. The missing 2% in his figures above are books which are co-authored by people of more than one gender (for example the Engelfors Trilogy). Given how hard it is just to get binary gender data when dealing with other cultures, I’m not going to complain too much about that.

Data, Lovely Data

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Many of you will remember Nicola Griffith’s investigations into who gets to win literary awards, and who they have to write about to get one. The most interesting thing to come out of Nicola’s work is that not only are men more likely to win awards, but women are more likely to win if they write books about men than if they write books about women.

As with all such things, more data is always welcome, and the folks at Ladybusiness have been busily studying SF&F awards. Their data is now available, and it pretty much backs up what Nicola found. I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but here are a few highlights.

More books by men about men have won awards than all books by women that have won awards.

Books by women about men winning awards are roughly twice as common as books by men about women winning awards.

In terms of the gender of the author, the three worst-performing awards (in descending order) are The British Fantasy Award, The David Gemmell Award (which is UK-based) and the British Science Fiction Association Award.

Nicola’s observations about the data can be found here. I’m going to be interviewing her next week. It will be mainly about Hild, which is out in paperback in the UK this week, but the subject of awards may well come up.

Update: By the way, I see that the Ladybusiness folks got themselves into a bit of a mess through not knowing who is trans (even fairly prominently out trans people). They’ve made a few corrections. What they can’t do is make corrections where people are not out, so their data may well still be wrong. There are also issues with the way they have presented the data which appear to exclude trans women from the general category of women.