Tag Archives: science fiction

Fus Ro Linkspam (14 September, 2012)

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Photo of a single pink ribbon tied around a wire, shot against the sky by tanakawho

Signal boost: Dragon*Con, backup ribbons, and wolves in sheep’s clothing

As noted in Linkspam comments, there’s a dispute at the moment between the organisers of Dragon*Con and the Backup Ribbon Project. The Backup Ribbon Project is an off-shoot of the Backup Project and distributes badge ribbons for con attendees to attach to their badge, reading “Backup” in large letters, showing that the person wearing the ribbon is committed to backing up someone experiencing harassment.

On August 20, Dragon*Con released a statement, reading in part [my emphasis]:

At times, good intentions can lead to bad situations. Dragon*Con has become aware of a potentially dangerous situation involving a self-started project that provides ribbons for fans identifying themselves as people who are able and willing to help another fan in the event assistance of any sort is needed in a difficult situation. While we absolutely believe that the creation of this movement was done with the best intentions to protect fans, we feel that it presents a possibility for a person coming in as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” perhaps luring someone in distress to an even more dangerous situation. Providing a ribbon for someone to wear to give them any type of “official” sanction when no screening has taken place is quite frankly, scary to us. To that end, we have asked the individual to stop providing ribbons for Dragon*Con attendees. We think a lot of our fans and believe strongly in the message that if you see someone in trouble, you should always be willing to help out or get someone who can. We expect no less and you all have never disappointed.

The Ribbon Project responded on August 21:

Please know that, as of this time, Dragon*Con has informed us that it will NOT be sanctioning people wearing or distributing Backup Ribbons at the con, nor will it be confiscating ribbons. We regret this was not included in their official statement…

We stand by our conviction that the benefits of making the Backup Ribbon Project accessible to as many people as possible far outweighs the risk of a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Yes, there will be a risk of some Bad!Person taking advantage of the situation, but we believe that risk is minimal.

What do you think? Which has the greater risk, false allies, or difficulty finding any allies?

Wall of Spam, by freezelight on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Life, the Universe and Linkspam (29th May, 2012)

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Quick Hit: Women Win Nebulas!

It is so splendid when excellent people are recognized for their excellence! It’s delightful that Octavia Butler won a posthumous Solstice Award and that Connie Willis was given the Damon Knight Grand Master Award. And! I am personally over the moon that Jo Walton’s Among Others won the 2011 Nebula.

I loved this book so very much and if I haven’t already forced it into your hands, you are to imagine me doing it now: this is a geek feminist coming-of-age novel, and it is full of wonders.

Quick hit: new feminist Doctor Who blog!

For Doctor Who fans, a new blog has launched, Doctor Her.

Doctor Her is the brainchild of Courtney Stoker, who has also written about Doctor Who for Geek Feminism:

Doctor Her’s first post is Which Companion is the Best Feminist Role Model for my Daughters? The start of an on-going research project.

Re-post: Steampunk, Tech, and TARDISes: A Cosplay Tale

During the December/January slowdown, Geek Feminism is re-publishing some of our highlights from last year. This post originally appeared on July 1, 2011.

Cross-posted at From Austin to A&M.

So the idea of my cosplay project (which I have completed a big chunk of, but am putting on the shelf for a bit, so that I can mull it over in my subconscious) was pretty simple. Most people give these very simplistic answers about their motivations for their cosplay: it’s fun, it’s for the pure love of the show, it’s about hanging out with other fans, I like the character, I like the character’s costume, etc. I suspect, like most fan scholars, that something more complicated than those reasons go into cosplayers’ decision-making. So I chose a particular cosplay trend—women cosplaying as the Doctor—and tried to get beyond those reasons, both through interviewing and by “reading” the costumes. Which, of course, has all got me thinking about my own motivations and decisions in the cosplay I wore to Gally. Obviously, the premise of my project is that cosplayers don’t necessarily consciously know all the reasons they make the decisions they make in their cosplay, and I don’t consider myself an exception to that premise. In fact, I knew I wasn’t sure what it was about a steampunk TARDIS dress that held such a fascination with me. I only knew, as I told a friend at the time, that if I could dress as the TARDIS and wear a bustle at the same time, I’d be a happy lady.

Bustle time! Me in my steampunk TARDIS dress at Gally 2010. The dress consists of a white button up shirt, navy blue corset with appliqued windows, navy blue skirt with panels and a screen-printed “POLICE TELEPHONE” sign, navy blue bustle, and black headband with “POLICE PUBLIC PHONE BOX” painted in white.

Continue reading →

Pillar covered by colourful advertising bills

Maiden, mother and linkspam (6th December, 2011)

  • The Ada Initiative is holding an AdaCamp in Melbourne, Australia on January 14 for everyone interested in supporting women in open tech and culture, from wikis to open government to digital liberties to open source. Applications to attend close December 14.
  • GNOME Outreach Program for Women Participants Continue to Impress: The accomplishments of the women who participated in Google Summer of Code this year are impressive. For example, Nohemi Fernandez implemented a full-featured on-screen keyboard for GNOME Shell, which makes it possible to use GNOME 3.2 on tablets.
  • How not to market science to girls: This is an apparently successful Australian company that sells science kits for kids. That’s great, and some of the kits look pretty good. The problem is, they split some of the kits into ones for boys, and ones for girls. And that split is exactly what you think.
  • It’s 1980 and women’s writing is being dismissed: Quote from Ben Bova: Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.
  • Repost: What I Thought About Twilight: And the verdict is… surprisingly not terrible… My conclusion is that one of the things that I think makes it popular with teenagers also negates some of the moral panic argument: Bella’s agency.
  • Women in Open Source Survey: We all know about the challenges that open source software faces when it comes to women, and the number of women in the open source world actually has been a frequent argument of discussion and research… [Sourceforge] just launched a survey based on the original FLOSSPOLS 10 questions.
  • Scientific American Defends Marie Curie—and Women Scientists—in 1911: As the first woman editor in chief of Scientific American, I’m keenly aware of the sense of standing on the shoulders of giants—some of them clearly frequented our editorial offices in 1911. I thought you’d enjoy in its entirety an editorial that ran in the January 21, 1911 issue.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Anne McCaffrey

In memory of Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey

We lost Anne McCaffrey this week, to stroke. Yonmei remembered her gloriously at FeministSF (and if you don’t know her inspiration, reading that makes it even better.)

I was nine years old when my frenemy Claudia (precociously elegant with her hair in a glossy pageboy) read aloud to me: “Lessa woke, cold.” Dragonflight was my first contraband, and F’lar one of my first crushes. In a corner of the high school playground, determinedly ignored by the kids with friends, I was comforted by my flight of fire lizards, or hurtling through space as an embodied ship. When my text adventures in CPM/BASIC actually executed, it was like the black crystal picking up and amplifying my voice. I was young enough to extract maximum escapist value from McCaffrey’s worlds before her writing started to pall.

I hadn’t thought of her in years when I chuckled over Liz’s fierce and righteous takedown of gender (and race and disability) politics on Pern. McCaffrey was a product of her time, no question, and not the worst by any means. Ursula Le Guin works strenuously to re-examine and correct her older work, and with mixed success, but that’s part of what makes Ursula Le Guin so very full of awesome. We can’t expect it of every writer. Now, as we mourn McCaffrey, we have to find some way to honor both the worlds she gave us and the ground we’ve covered since.

Our foremothers fail in myriad ways, and we will doubtless look like hypocritical assholes to future generations too. Re-examining assumptions is good and important work (and might help us avoid our own worst excesses.) But without foremothers like McCaffrey – and the other writers of sexy, problematic contraband, like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jean Auel – we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Thank you, dragon lady, for teaching us to sing.

Wall of Spam, by freezelight on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Rising above our sordid linkspamming nature (9th September, 2011)

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Wall of Spam, by freezelight on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

More horrible than your worst linkspam (18th July, 2011)

  • Black and WTF: photographs of suffragettes. In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera to covertly photograph suffragettes.
  • A bit of an oldie, but relevant to our recent Google+ discussions: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.
  • Great 101 comment from karenm77 about why it was creepy to proposition Rebecca Watson at 4am in an elevator. (Via tigtog.) Yeah, in case you missed it.
  • Sheryl Sandberg & Male-Dominated Silicon Valley: an interview with Facebook’s COO. You can’t come [into space], [Sandberg’s son] said. I’ve already invited my sister, and there’s only one girl in space. At first, Sandberg laughed. And then it dawned on her that there is only one woman in these movies.
  • Debunking the Top 5 Myths About Lady Scientists: So, people of the universe, when I tell you that I am a scientist, the only conclusion you should draw is that I like science.  Not what I look like or how I dress.  Not what I like to do in my free time.  Not how I interact with other people.  And real world, get used to me because I am your average scientist and I am not at all who you try to say I am.
  • A linkspam of a linkspam: Meanwhile, Back in SFland: While I was off enjoying the company of several thousand women (and an increasing number of men, as Sharon Sala graciously noted while accepting her lifetime achievement award) in Romanceland, the gender wars seem to have broken out in SFland again.
  • You can’t fight sexism with sexism: So, please, before you write about getting women into the game industry, first check and make sure that you’re not perpetuating the very attitudes you’re arguing against before you publish.
  • Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide: Cogent criticism of the demographics of the open-data movement.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.