History

Schools & Families Day – Museum of London

~ Cheryl

Sir Derek Jacobi learns his lines
The final part of my weekend in London was the Schools & Families Day put on by Schools Out at the Museum of London. Whereas on Saturday I had been mainly supporting trans friends, and speaking myself, on Sunday I got to see new stuff. I had a fabulous day.

One of the first thing I noticed on arrival was a book stall. It turned out to be run by Letterbox Library, who specialize in books for children that have equality and diversity themes. I immediately encouraged them to get in touch with Fox and Sarah about stocking Are You a Boy or are You a Girl?, but I was delighted to see that they had 10,000 Dresses and I snapped a picture to send to Marcus Ewert. The day sort of took off from there.

Stuart Milk was due to read from the children’s book about his uncle, so I wandered along to say hello and ended up doing gopher work as he was expecting some people to come to interview him. I was passing through the museum lobby when I spotted a familiar looking gentleman looking a bit lost. So I introduced myself and took Sir Derek Jacobi up to where our event was taking place. He was due to read some children’s books later in the day, and to my delight he picked Marcus’s book as one of the ones to use. I snapped the picture above and sent it off to go viral, which it duly did.

Then it was back to the lecture theatre to catch up with Juno Dawson. I’d not read any of her stuff before, but having now heard some of it I can thoroughly recommend it. She’s also lovely. We had a bit of a chat about transitioning in the public eye.

Sir Derek was up next, and I managed to get a quick chat with him. I told him how his old friend Claudius had been responsible for making the Rites of Attis part of the official Roman Religious Calendar. (There’s even an official Castration Day, when Roman trans girls got their op done.) His readings of the kids books were fabulous. There was video taken, so hopefully one day I’ll be able to share his reading of 10,000 Dresses with you.

Little did I know that Chris Riddell was also in the audience. He did a few sketches, including this one (thanks to Marjorie for the link):

Next up I went to see a great presentation by Subodh Rathod about gender fluidity in Hindu religion. Vishnu has a female avatar called Mohini who is, naturally, incredibly beautiful. She has a famous dance. Obviously Mohini is of great interest to the hijra community. Subodh was assisted by Kali Chandrasegaram who performed the dance at the end of the talk.

That was at least 2000 years of living trans history right in front of our eyes.

Sir Derek Jacobi learns his lines

I also got to meet the fabulous Juno Roche, got to hear my new pal Laila El-Metoui talk about the amazing work she does on diversity in adult education, and saw the Gay Men’s Choir perform. All in all, it was a pretty fabulous day.

Huge congratulations to Niranjan Kamatkar and his team for putting on a great weekend, and to Sue Sanders for the fabulous work that she does making these things happen. Bristol has a lot to live up to. No pressure, eh?

My February Schedule

~ Cheryl

It being LGBT History Month, I have a pile of public engagements. Most of you won’t be able to get to them, but I’m listing them here just in case, and because it will explain why I’ll be so busy.

That, of course, does not include the three training courses I am doing for different NHS organizations (in Minehead, Bristol and Exeter), the events in London and Manchester I’m attending but not speaking at, and the whole week of looking after Stuart Milk in Bristol. With any luck, I’ll get to meet Susan Stryker, Tom Robinson and Juno Dawson. If I am really lucky I might get to say hello to Gandalf.

LGBT History Month Is Here

~ Cheryl

It is February. The insanity is starting. I am going to be so busy over the next four weeks.

I’ll have more about my schedule in a later post, but write now I want to draw your attention to a magazine that Schools Out UK has produced to send around the country. There’s an online version of it available here. Congratulations to my pal Adam Lowe for doing a fine job with the layouts.

The magazine runs to 64 pages it in. Much of it is ads, which supports it being given out for free. However, there are lots of interesting articles. It includes messages of support from a bunch of VIPs. There’s some guy called David Cameron in it, and Jeremy Corbyn. And Nicola Sturgeon, of course. And then it gets down to the substances with things like a Bowie retrospective, an interview with Bisi Alimi, and an article by me about trans people and religion. I’m on pages 26 and 27.

Writing serious historical stuff for a magazine like this is a bit hard. I kept wanting to put footnotes in. I believe that there will be an HTML version of it available soon, with links and a recommended reading list. I’ll let you know when that goes up.

Lesbian Nuns, in 17th Century Ethiopia

~ Cheryl

One of the things that comes up time and time again in the work I do on LGBT history is that, when source material has been translated into English, if there has been LGBT content then it has been left out, or mis-translated, so as to erase the evidence.

The latest example of this has been the life of Walatta Petros, a 17th Century Ethiopian nun whose struggles to protect Ethiopian Christianity against the Catholic Church earned her a sainthood. The book also happens to be the earliest known biography of an African woman (possibly excepting Egyptian material which may not exactly qualify as biography). You can read more about Walatta and her life in this Guardian article.

Alison Flood (for ’tis she writing the article) sensibly warns us against assuming that Walatta was anything like a modern lesbian. While lesbianism is named after goings on in ancient Greece, the modern idea of the lesbian is very much based on ideas about the nature of same-sex desire developed in the 19th Century. However, I suspect Alison may be wrong to assume that Walatta’s vow of celibacy meant that no hanky panky went on. Back in those days it is entirely likely that “celibacy” was interpreted as refraining from potentially procreative sex, not as refraining from any sexual contact.

International Trans Studies Conference

~ Cheryl

Next September (7th-10th) the University of Arizona will be holding an international transdisciplinary conference on gender, embodiment, and sexuality in Tucson. I can’t go, of course, because it is in the USA, but it does look very interesting. I was particularly intrigued by this comment in the announcement:

It is our hope that this conference will help launch an international transgender studies association; the conference schedule will include a business meeting to discuss this possibility, and to entertain proposals to host future international conferences.

Oh yes please! And can we have the conference sometimes held in countries that I can travel to?

Anyway, if you are interested in going, the information on submitting papers is on Facebook.

Fortunately one event I can go to is Moving Trans History Forward, which is taking place in Victoria, BC in March. That should be seriously cool. And I get to see Vancouver and Victoria, which I have never done before.

I spent much of day scouring bookstores in Glastonbury for books on Mesopotamian history and religion. I got some good stuff too. Trans history FTW!

Communing With The Ancestors

~ Cheryl

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Silver_cauldron.jpg/800px-Silver_cauldron.jpg

Photo by Rosemania via Wikipedia.

Yesterday I was in London. The main reason for that was to interview Stuart Milk from the Harvey Milk Foundation. You’ll be hearing a lot more about that in the coming weeks. However, as I was there I took the opportunity to visit the Celts exhibition at the British Museum.

Of course the BM has a lot of great Celtic artifacts in their normal collection. The big question for this exhibition is what it could bring that you can’t see for free. As it turned out, the Museum had brought in items from all over the UK and other parts of Europe. I think it did rather well.

The highlight is undoubtedly the Gundestrup cauldron, an item that I have seen pictures of many times but have never viewed in person. Interestingly, despite the obvious Celtic imagery, it is believed to have been made in Thrace, silverwork of that type being unknown in the Celtic world.

The largest item on display is a reconstruction of a Brigante chariot, which I suspect would be even more impressive in motion than it is just sat there. The Snettisham Hoard certainly wins for bling but it is a BM regular so doesn’t count. In any case my favorite torc was this beautiful silver one on loan from a museum in Stuttgart. It is rare to see a torc with such naturalistic end pieces.

Other items of interest were two musical instruments, a gorgeous Irish harp and the Deskford Carnyx. There were also many items from the Christian era, and I discovered that the tradition of the distinctive Celtic ringed cross started because stonemasons were unable to prevent the arms of big crosses from falling off without the additional support.

The exhibition was at pains to point out (presumably primarily for American visitors) that the term “Celtic” has only recently been applied to native British peoples (and by “British” I mean “not English”). Greek and Roman writers never used the word to refer to the inhabitants of these islands. However, there is a distinct cultural connection between the British tribes and those continental peoples who were described as Celtic. It also demonstrated how Celtic artistic styles influenced Romano-British culture, and the art of Anglo-Saxon and Viking arrivals to the islands.

The so-called Celtic Revival was also part of the exhibition. I was particularly impressed by the Book of the White Earl, a collection of early Irish literature put together by an Irish earl in the early 15th Century. There was some fairly impressive Welsh cosplay nonsense too. We do seem to have a talent for inventing this stuff.

Druids dress and regalia © Medievalhistories

Photo via MedievalPictures.com

Give Us Back Our Henge

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This week’s archaeology story of note is that someone has discovered the quarry in Wales from which the bluestones at Stonehenge were cut. The Guardian has a report.

From an archaeological point of view the main story is that we now know a lot more about how the stones were quarried. However, the thing that has excited the journalists is that the stones appear to have been cut several hundred years before they were raised at Stonehenge.

Now of course it is possible that it took that long to get the stones to Salisbury Plain, but that seems unlikely. The other possibility is that they were originally erected somewhere in Wales and only later moved to Stonehenge.

All of which has given rise to lots of silly speculation about the English having stolen a Welsh monument, or having been sold one by some neolithic Taffy second hand monument dealer, presumably at a vastly inflated price (and possibly under the pretense that they were buying a bridge).

Except of course that the bluestones were erected at Stonehenge around 2900 BCE. There would not be any English in these isles for over 3000 years. It is entirely possible that one of the social groups that lived in southern Britain at the time stole (or bought) the stones from a rival group. It is also possible (and bear in mind that there is strong evidence of a thriving trade between Stonehenge and Orkney) that the inhabitants of the island saw themselves as a more or less united social group. No one really knows.

Of course I could argue that all of the inhabitants of the islands at the time were Brythons, whom we can describe as either Welsh or Cornish, and that the Scots and Irish were Goidels who arrived much later. But then Kari would probably tell me that I’m spouting Victorian twaddle so I shall restrain myself.

But Stonehenge is Welsh, obviously.

On Trans and Africa

~ Cheryl

Thanks to the fabulous Monica Roberts, I have discovered Iranti, an African queer rights organization based in Johannesburg. They appear to have excellent links to trans rights groups in many parts of Africa, and even put on pan-African conferences. Here is a great little video that they have made:

Right now, of course, such organizations are concentrating mainly on improving the lives of trans people. While some countries do have decent laws, others do not, and medical treatment also lags significantly behind other parts of the world. However, I hope that in due course organizations like Iranti will have the time to do more research into ancient African cultures and the place of trans people within then. I found found glimpses of evidence, but so much has been destroyed by European colonialists, and of course I have no knowledge of any African languages.

That African cultures were more accepting of trans people than European ones seems fairly certain. What evidence I have got parallels similar social systems elsewhere in the world. Also it appears that acceptance of queer people of all types among African Americans was much higher than among white Americans until fairly recently. There’s lots of evidence from musicians involved in the Dirty Blues in the first half of the 20th century, for example.

One of the things that really annoys me as an historian is the tendency of cis people to completely deny the possibility of trans identities in past times. Of course there is no way that we can prove how people from the past identified, and even if we could talk to them we’d probably find that their concepts of transness don’t match entirely with our own. The ways in which trans people understand their identities vary wildly both with time and between cultures. However, it is undeniable that people did lead lives in which they maintained identities that did not correspond to their birth gender, and to insist that all such acts were masquerades and deceits seems to me to do a great disservice to those people, and to be intellectually untenable.

Which brings me to this post on the Beyond Victoriana website, which has a very strong reputation among steampunk fans. It is about Mary Jones, someone assigned male at birth who lived as a woman for much of her adult life. Personal testimony quoted in the article suggests that Jones was happy in her female identity, proud of her womanhood, and accepted by members of her community. Nevertheless, the article goes full on with the misgendering, deadnaming, freak show and deceit narrative. It is at times like this that you realize that cis people who talk about intersectionality tend to have a memory lapse about what the word means when it comes to trans women.

The LGBT History Showcase

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Every November Schools Out, the charity which founded LGBT History Month, has a showcase event to launch the following year. I’m not entirely sure why it is so far in advance of February, but I’m guessing that in January people are busy with preparation and the weather is bad, while in December everyone is tied up with Christmas, so late November is about the earliest they can do it.

This is my first year attending the event. It took place at Queens’ College in Cambridge, which is very nice. During the afternoon there was a marketplace where various LGBT-friendly organizations had stalls. Then in the evening there was entertainment. Being a hopeless party girl, I was mainly there for the latter. The theme of this year’s event was religion, belief and philosophy.

The hosts for the evening were Claire Mooney, a lesbian musician, and Cyril Nri, a gay actor. They are both lovely people, and they kept the evening moving smoothly.

The evening was bookended by Rev. Razia Aziz. While her family background is Muslim, she’s a non-denominational minister, making her an ideal person to do the blessings. She’s also a singer and voice coach, which was very obvious from her performance. Sufi mystics have produced some of the best poetry ever.

There was a fair amount of civic stuff to get through. The university, city and county had all signed up to the following Equality Pledge:

We believe in the dignity of all people and their right to respect and equality of opportunity. We value the strength that comes with difference and the positive contribution that diversity brings to our community. Our aspiration is for Cambridge and the wider region to be safe, welcoming and inclusive.

There was a variety of speakers on religious and philosophical issues. Robert Brown (proudly wearing his King’s Cross Steelers rugby shirt) talked about equality in Nichiren Buddhism. My friend Surat Knan gave a great talk about being trans and Jewish. Terry Weldon took on the near impossible task of representing Catholicism to LGBT people, which he did best by regaling us with scandalous tales of gay popes. Dr. Lucy Walker played us some of Benjamin Britten’s church music. Dr. Alison Ainley, from Anglia Ruskin’s philosophy department, talked about some of her favorite LGBT-friendly philosophers.

We had a little bit of film, in the form of two really great animations produced by Bobby Tiwana. They don’t appear to be online anywhere, so if you do see Bobby advertised for an event locally go along and see his films.

Another South Asian contributor was Manjinder Singh Sidhu who became an internet celebrity all over the subcontinent thanks to this amazing YouTube video in which he talks to his mum about how parents should deal with a child who comes out to them as LGB or T.

Music was provided by Mark Jennett who sang “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, a Rogers & Hammerstein song from South Pacific. Take a look at the lyrics. It is rather depressing that people could write such things in 1949 and we don’t seem to have learned anything from it.

Topping the bill was Labi Siffre, who performed his massive hit, “So Strong”. It is as much about being gay as it is about other types of civil rights. Labi also gave a short talk from a rationalist point of view, asking religious leaders who condemn LGBT people to provide evidence that we should believe in their invisible friends, and that they speak for such beings.

What a trooper too. When I was chatting with Sue on email earlier in the week she told me that Labi was unwell and had needed to go into hospital. She wasn’t expecting him to be able to make the event. And yet there he was.

Thanks are due to Sue Sanders, Tony Fenwick and the rest of the Schools Out team who put on the evening. Thanks also to Tony for starting off the evening by stressing the importance of intersectionality to LGBT rights. As he said, if you suffer from intersecting oppressions, difficult choices do have to be made. I have some sympathy with Terry Weldon, because there are times when I have to defend feminism to trans people. I can’t not be a feminist, but sometimes what is done in the name of feminism by others is utterly abhorrent.

After the event a bunch of us headed back to the hotel where the Schools Out crew were staying for a drink. And that’s how I ended up in a hotel bar chatting to Labi Siffre about science fiction. It turns out that he was a huge fan as a kid, and read just about everything that was going. These days he’s more into song writing and poetry, and doesn’t have much patience for long, rambling novels, but I shall hit him up with some recommendations anyway.

To finish up, here’s Labi, doing pretty much what I saw him do last night (except that I think last night was better).

Thoughts on Lili Elbe

~ Cheryl

A few days ago Buzzfeed ran an interview with Eddie Redmayne which suggests he has tried really hard to be respectful in his role as Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl. It’s not like he doesn’t know trans women, after all. He had a major role in Jupiter Ascending, so will have spent a lot of time with Lana Wachowski. The interview was conducted by a trans woman as well, so full marks to Buzzfeed for giving us access there.

However, no matter how good an actor is — and Eddie is very good — he can only work with the material he has been given. This article, written by someone who has seen the script, suggests that the film is going all out for the gone-too-far-fetishist angle. That’s going to make it very uncomfortable viewing.

Of course the film is based on a fictionalized version of Lili’s life, not a biography, so goodness only knows how the narrative has been twisted to fit the requirements of the cis gaze.

I don’t know what first hand accounts are available, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to read the originals. It is possible that we’ll never really know what Lili and her wife, Gerda, were like, or what they thought of each other. What we do have, however, are Gerda’s portraits of Lili. You can see some of them, and some of Gerda’s lesbian erotica, here. Bear that in mind if you find the film portraying Gerda as a betrayed heterosexual wife.

That London – More Diverse Than You Think

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

My thanks to Caroline Mullan for pointing me to this article on the BBC website. It is reporting on the results of a DNA study by the Museum of London on human remains dating back to the founding of the city by the Romans some 2000 years ago.

By the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, the Roman Empire already stretched all the way around the Mediterranean. It included Egypt, Carthage and other African countries. The racial make-up of the soldiery, and of the slave community, was highly diverse. The people who built London, therefore, were anything but monochrome white.

And that’s not all. One of the skeletons studied, the so-called Harper Road Woman, was very unusual indeed. She was a native Briton, but although her bone structure clearly showed a female body she had a Y chromosome. This suggests that she had an intersex condition, probably Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Given the time in which she lived, she would not have known this. She would just have wondered why the gods had cursed her with infertility.

There’s another great story for my history of gender variant people.

Meanwhile, In Darkest Somerset

~ Cheryl

The Guardian breathlessly reports that the UK’s oldest graveyard has been discovered in a cave in Somerset.

Well, not discovered, exactly. That happened in 1797, so they are a trifle late on that piece of breaking news. However, they do have a press release about some scientific tests that show the cave was in use over a period from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago.

I’m slightly disappointed to learn that the graveyard is not still in use by descendants of the original users, but I am sure that someone is busy doing genetic tests on the locals to try to connect them to the burials.

Rumors that some of the skeletons were found to have been buried along with the deceased’s favorite articles from the Daily Mail have been dismissed as a piece of made up nonsense of the sort normally found in tabloid newspapers.

TWOC Girls On Film

~ Cheryl

Trans Day of Resilience

Today in Trans Awareness Week I have news of two film projects about trans women of color.

First up the film MAJOR!, about the life of Miss Major, premiered in San Francisco on Friday. I dropped a fair amount of cash on the Kickstarter for this one because having had the honor of meeting Miss Major I very much wanted to see it happen. Obviously I couldn’t go to the screening, though the production company did do a lovely thing of encouraging people to buy tickets and donate them to poor trans women of color, so Kevin and I did have tickets to the event. Someone who did go is Jules Vilmur, a woman whose trans daughter committed suicide at 17. Jules writes movingly about the experience here.

Also there is a fundraising campaign in progress for post-production on a film about Marsha P Johnson, one of the best known trans women at the Stonewall riot. Sylvia Rivera is also a character in the film. The trailer they have on the campaign page looks very good. As I saw someone say on Twitter, this is what the Stonewall film ought to have been like.

Finally there’s a great article about 19th and early 20th Century trans women over at Autostraddle. Some them are featured in the film, Paris in Burning, and if you are European Coccinelle is actually pretty well known, but the rest I had never heard of. It is a fascinating read.

The illustration for this post is from an art project featured here. The picture I have chosen to use is by B Parker of BreakOUT!.

271 Trans people have been killed as a result of transphobic hate crimes in the last 12 months. Almost all of them were women of color.

Looking for Lesbians

~ Cheryl

Le Rat Mort, Paris
Yesterday’s Annual General Meeting of OutStories Bristol went very well. Thanks to the fabulous Bea Hitchman we had a good crowd of interested outsiders to make us quorate; and thanks to expert training from Kevin I was able to speed through the formal part of the proceedings very quickly. That left us plenty of time to listen to Bea.

The subject of Bea’s talk was the historical research that she did into lesbian life in fin de siècle Paris when writing her novel, Petite Mort. Researching LGBT lives is never easy, because so much is erased or hidden behind obfuscating language. In the case of lesbians there is also much pseudo-history written by men who are more interested in the titillating power of girl-on-girl sex than they are in the reality of lesbian life.

So sadly the idea that in order to signal oneself as a lesbian in Paris what one did was purchase a poodle, have it splendidly coiffured, and tie a bow around its neck, proved to be untrue. French lesbians did appear to have a fondness for dogs, but eccentrically decorative poodles were not de rigueur.

There were, however, lesbian bars, including La Souris (the Mouse) and Le Rat Mort (the Dead Rat), which bespeak a possible fondness for things small and furry. Toulouse-Lautrec was a regular visitor, as he was rather fond of painting pictures of lesbians.

Still with animals, I learned that Sarah Bernhardt, who was bisexual, had an exotic menagerie whom she took everywhere with her. This included a cheetah, and a boa constrictor which sadly died because she fed it too much champagne.

All in all it was a very entertaining talk, for which thanks again to Bea. If you have an event that needs an excellent speaker on lesbian issues, or indeed anything to do with historical fiction, do consider her.

After the talk, all of the lesbians hit the alcohol. They did not object to me joining them, which pleased me on a number of levels. One of those is that the Golden Guinea has an excellent selection of beer. I got to try Jurassic Dark, a dark wheat beer from the Dorset Brewing Company. Highly recommended.

Jurassic Dark

A Man of His Time

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Much of the discussion I am seeing around the dropping of HP Lovecraft as the face of the World Fantasy Awards has centered on him being “a man of his time”, and therefore inevitably racist. The generally unspoken assumption is that he was no more and no less racist than any of his white writer contemporaries. In furtherance of this discussion, dear readers, I give you James Ferdinand Morton.

Morton was 20 years older than Lovecraft and an established literary figure. Born in New England, he could trace his ancestry in the region back to the time of the Pilgrim Fathers. He was a former president of the National Amateur Press Association, the ‘zine producers’ club of which Lovecraft was also a member. He was a prominent member of the Blue Pencil Club of Brooklyn, a writers’ club which Lovecraft joined. Morton introduced Lovecraft to Sonia Greene, whom Howard later married. And in 1922, when the then president of the NAPA resigned, it was Morton who suggested that Lovecraft should take on the post.

Morton was also an anarchist. For a few years he lived in commune in Washington State. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and wrote a book titled The Curse of Race Prejudice. He lectured widely on a variety of subjects including workers’ rights and feminism, both of which he supported. He was an early supporter of Esperanto, the proposed world language, becoming vice-president of the Esperanto League for North America. In his later years he converted to the Bahá’í faith, an offshoot of Islam generally recognized as a separate religion.

Before they met, Lovecraft denounced Morton as someone who participated in the, “wanton destruction of the public faith and the publick morals”. However, once they did get to talk they became firm friends. They kept up a lengthy correspondence, Lovecraft’s end of which has been preserved and published. I don’t own the book myself, but it is reviewed over at Innsmouth Free Press.

It is clear from that review that Lovecraft and Morton debated issues of race, each trying to convert the other to his view with singular lack of success. Lovecraft, therefore, is not someone who merely absorbed the racist rhetoric of his times. He is someone who firmly and proudly held racist views, and who strongly defended those views when one of his closest friends tried to talk him down. Lovecraft is someone who could write in a letter to that friend:

I’d like to see Hitler wipe Greater New York clean with poison gas – giving masks to the few remaining people of Aryan culture (even if of Semitic ancestry). The place needs fumigation & a fresh start. (If Harlem didn’t get any masks, I’d shed no tears…. )

And that, dear reader, is why, despite his many achievements, Lovecraft is not a suitable person to be the public face of an international award.

Bristol Lit Fest – Book Bazaar

~ Cheryl

Book Bazaar
On Saturday morning it was off to the Harbourside, where the Festival of Literature was putting on a day-long Book Bazaar. Many local small presses were taking part, including Tangent and Silverwood whose products I know well.

Our little corner of the event featured books by Wizard’s Tower, Kristell Ink and the North Bristol Writers group. The photo above (for which thanks to A A Abbott) shows me happily surrounded by lovely hardcover books. My thanks to Jo, Roz and Kevlin who have all taken a turn selling my books when I could not be there.

The event also included talks by authors and publishers. I particularly enjoyed Lucienne Boyce talking about how to research historical novels (complete with discussion of Samuel Pepys’ sanitary arrangements).

My final event in the Festival will be BristolCon Fringe tomorrow night, where the readers will be Joanne Hall and Jonathan L. Howard. It will be my first opportunity to hear some of Carter & Lovecraft, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

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.)

The Ascent of Woman, Part 4

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

So there was another episode of Dr. Amanda Foreman’s wonderful documentary series This one took us up to the present day, and focused on revolutionary movements. It also took us back to Africa, which I was very pleased about.

Foreman started off with the French Revolution and the pioneering feminist, Olympe De Gouges. Sadly it turns out that Napoleon was a right misogynist, and between him and the Jacobins women ended up worse off after the Revolution than before it. And that despite them playing a key part in the Revolution via the March on Versailles.

Women also played a key part in the Russian Revolution, and for a few glorious years under Lenin Alexandra Kollontai made Russia a world leader in women’s rights. Sadly the men gradually took back control, and Stalin was having none of that feminism nonsense. Foreman got to interview Pussy Riot, which was interesting.

Meanwhile in the USA Margaret Sanger was pioneering the concept of birth control, and managed to find a wealthy backer to finance the development of the contraceptive pill. Apparently in the bad old days of the early 20th century the US Postal Service regarded mention of contraception to be “pornography”, so mailing leaflets about it was a felony.

Eventually we arrived in Africa and an interview with Lindiwe Mazibuko who was once Leader of the Opposition in South Africa, and another with Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka who heads up women’s issues at the UN. We had some very brief mention of South America thanks to the liberation movements there, but it was very superficial. It is such a shame that they only had budget for four programs.

The overall thesis of the program was that we are moving into a time where social revolution will be driven by women, and will take place through education rather than bloodshed. It is a lovely idea, though I am not entirely sure I believe it. There are other things going on in the world that worry me deeply. At one point Foreman noted, “When a country is in crisis one of the first things to go are women’s rights”. There are plenty of countries in crisis right now, and more being added all the time.

Then again, she also said, “True revolution comes not from the death of millions, but from the death of prejudice”. That’s such a cool sound bite that if I was her I’d already be asking for it to be on my tombstone.

Foreman did a Q&A on Twitter after the show, which is storified here thanks to Gabrielle Laine Peters. The main point of interest is that she’s working on a book, which I will pounce on the minute it comes out.

I have all four programs recorded on my Sky Box. I might just watch them all again if I can find the time.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to persuade Dr. Foreman to do an interview for Women’s Outlook.

Treasures of the Indus

~ Cheryl

So I promised you a second post. Then I got distracted by emails from clients. Sorry, back on it now.

In fact, here it is. Treasure of the Indus is another 3-part history series. It is part of BBC4’s India series. The history of women rates a show on BBC2. The history of India and Pakistan does not. This is a shame, because this too is a very good series.

It is presented by Sona Datta who has the benefit of Indian ancestry, though she was born in London. Her family are from Kolkata, which puts her right in the mix as far as the whole India/Pakistan/Bangladesh situation goes. Yes, I know that is very recent history, but current affairs tend to have their roots in the past, if only because the idiot British will have messed things up with their inept colonial rule.

Episode 1 is all about Pakistan. Two things stand out. Firstly the people of Pakistan were building enormous cities 5,000 years ago when Europe was still in what gets called the Stone Age. Check out Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Secondly, Pakistan was a Buddhist country long before the invention of Islam, and indeed it exported Buddhism to the rest of the world.

Episode 2 is all about the Mughal Empire; that is, the Islamic conquest of Pakistan and Northern India, and the subsequent flowering of a truly magnificent civilization. Someone had to build the Taj Mahal, right? And of course the Taj was a tomb for a much loved queen. Mughal emperors had lots of wives, but they were more fond of some than others. If you want to learn much more about Nur Jahan than Amanda Foreman had time for in Ascent of Woman, watch this program.

The final episode is about the rest of India, which today is predominantly a Hindu culture. Given the polytheistic nature of Hinduism, I had always assumed that it was a survival of more ancient beliefs. I was very surprised to find out that it is a more recent religion than Buddhism, and indeed displaced Buddhism in much of India. Hindiusm has a very neo-pagan approach to religion, allowing people to find their own path to God through a bewildering choice of deities. Datta couldn’t resist having a go at Western religions for their inability to adapt to a scientific worldview, and threw in some stuff that would make Fritjof Capra proud (yes, I’m am aging Hippy, sue me).

I love that we are getting more documentaries fronted by women, and by people of color telling their own cultures’ stories. There is so much history that we didn’t get taught in school.

The Ascent of Woman – Part 3

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The third and, it seems, final part of The Ascent of Woman was broadcast last night. This one looked at more recent times, but continued the international flavor. There were six women featured in all, some of which were very familiar to me and others who were not.

First up was Empress Theodora of Byzantium, whom you all should know as she has been the subject of fine novels by Guy Gavriel Kay and Stella Duffy.

Then there was Hildegard of Bingen, who among other things was the first person in the world to write down musical compositions. The section in which Amanda Foreman chats to a German nun about Hildegard’s writings on the female orgasm is priceless.

Christine de Pizan is another character who should be well know as she is widely cited as the author of the first work of feminist philosophy. Her two books on The City of Ladies were apparently very popular with women politicians of the time.

Given that this was a BBC series, we had to have one British woman in it. The honor went to Queen Elizabeth I, and was accompanied by some rather jingoistic nonsense (not from Foreman) about the primacy of Shakespearean English in world literature.

After that it was off around the world again, and two women who were much less familiar to me. The first was Roxelanna, the chief wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. She is believed to have been a Russian rather than a Turk, and she played a very powerful role in the governance of the Ottoman Empire. Suleiman was no mug, of course, but together they made an exceptionally capable couple.

The final slot went to Nur Juhan who was the chief wife of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir. I knew next to nothing about her before the program, but like Roxelanna and Theodora she appears to have been an exceptionally capable politician and indispensable to her husband’s rule.

Overall I was really pleased with the series. It did turn out to be mostly a story of specific women rather than a history of womankind, but I loved the international focus that it had. I’m disappointed that it didn’t cover the Americas and Africa (save for a brief mention of Hatshepsut), and I’m sure than Foreman could have filled an entire season had she been given the budget. But it is a start, and judging from my Twitter feed something that has captured the imagination of women viewers.

I’d say “more please”, except that we actually have more, just not from the same person. There’s another post coming.