Sidetracks - August 11th, 2012
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ladybusinessSidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.
➝ Calico Reaction has a great post on the Hugo process this year. It was her first year voting and she breaks it down, as well as provides some thoughts about the process. My thoughts on the process: the OTW consumed my life because of Surprise Chair, I got to read none of the nominees, and didn't feel right voting in the end. This is why next year both of you need to do Supporting Memberships with me. IT CAN BE A PROJECT. ;__;
➝ The more and more I hear about conventions, the more excited I am to go to my first one.
➝ Hark, a vagrant 341. The commentary from the bottom is great: "God, what a nightmare! To wake up to Straw Feminists in the closet, one of the greatest bogeymen of all time!" Don't miss the rest of the commentary and the sketch that started it all.
➝ Look at this awesome gender neutral toy store! Oh gosh. *___*
➝ An interview with Danielle Henderson, the creator of Feminist Ryan Gosling. I had no clue that started as flashcards. Wow.
I say the premise of having it all is a social construct developed to divide and placate women, and it’s a bag full of bullshit. We don’t want it all … You’d be amazed what we could do with just a tiny bit of autonomy! We know how to stretch one civil right into at least five.
➝ Music recommendation from me this week, Battle Beyond by Crunk Witch:
➝ At Slate, Jacob Silverman writes Against Enthusiasm: the epidemic of niceness in online book culture.
I’m of two minds about this piece: on the one hand, it makes some useful points. It would be disingenuous to pretend that this cult of nice doesn’t exist in some corners of the world of online reviewing; that “Be Nice” isn’t often used to shut down discussions; that there isn’t a fair chunk of blogs that behave like unpaid marketing departments for particular publishers. But on the other hand, I think Silverman is much too quick to conflate any kind of enthusiasm with vapid niceness. I don’t think of myself as cowardly or incapable of critical thinking, and yet my blogs and social media accounts are certainly biased in favour of sharing things I like. I don’t avoid bad books altogether (nor would I want to), but I spend more time engaging with things I find… interesting and worthwhile, certainly, even if not exactly flawless, than with things about which I’d have nothing positive to say.
I’m not saying everyone should make the choice to completely avoid flawed or problematic books – the world of online reviewing would be much poorer without critical voices willing to offer thoughtful commentary on these pieces of writing. And plus, who can accurately predict what they’re going to like 100% of the time? If we always play it safe, we’re going to miss out. Having said that, I think choosing to focus on the things you like is perfectly valid, and I’m really uncomfortable with the implication that the people who do this are all thoughtless or merely giving in to social pressure. I don’t know what their reasons are, and generally I try to avoid making simplistic generalisations about other people’s motivations. But I do know you can be both enthusiastic and critical; that successfully explaining why you think a book succeeds takes as much intellectual engagement as explaining why it fails; that a lot of people who are biased in favour of sharing things they love are also consistently thoughtful and bring so much to online book culture.
All this to say: criticism is valuable and no one should feel pressured to be nice all the time, but neither should we feel that we have to write x% negative reviews in order to show our cred. I don’t want to decide whether a blogger is intelligent and worth reading based on their ratio of positive to negative reviews. That would be... well, pretty vapid of me.
➝ My favourite response to Silverman's piece was probably Roxane Gay's:
But why are we even framing criticism as either negative or positive? The most interesting book reviews are those that make me think, the reviews that bring out interesting themes in a work. Good criticism is not merely about liking or disliking a book or exploring a book’s merits and failings. Good criticism, for me, is about trying to understand how the book works and what it offers, or doesn’t, to contemporary culture, where the book fits within a tradition, and how it speaks to history.
Exactly.
➝ Jodie, you’ve been doing a great job of covering the Olympics for LB (you’re like our on-site reporter) – especially of showing that it’s perfectly possible to be excited about the games and have a whole lot of fun with them while still being aware of, and willing to address, the issues that surround them (See, Mr Silverman? Enthusiasm and critical thinking FTW). In case you missed it before, I thought you’d be interested in this Racialicious piece, On the Olympics & Being Indigenous. Hooper’s point about how the Olympics are political no matter what is a particularly good one:
Here is the part that I need to say out loud even though it’s neither new or profound: every aspect of the Olympics is political – who is there, who is not there, where they are held, where they are not held, the sports that are involved, the sports that are not involved, the sports women are allowed to compete in and those we are not, the basic human rights of transgender athletes, whose history is told and celebrated and whose is silenced, the privileging of the competition of able bodied athletes and the fact that the social costs of the games fall squarely on the backs of the economically poor.
The Olympics are political and they reflect the politics of the both the ruling nation-states of the world and corporations. You can wear a shirt with Canada on it. You can wear shoes with Adidas on them. That’s fine, because it’s “not political”. Unless of course you’re Indigenous and these corporations and nation states are causing never-ending harm, destruction and trauma to your land and your people.
This may not be new, but it does indeed bear repeating: neutrality is a political choice, especially when it means upholding the status quo.
Interestingly enough I’ve often seen book bloggers express a similar sort of sentiment to that of the Olympics Charter: they say they make a point of avoiding politics altogether in their reviews because they want to remain neutral. It goes without saying that no one should ever feel pressured to become an in-your-face political commentator, but it’s useful to remember that this desire to always be neutral can become a stance in its own right, and that politics are far more pervasive than we tend to give them credit for.
➝ The Washington Times' article Sacrificing boys to promote girls: Pop culture is producing male losers is, unsurprisingly, an infuriating load of crap. Last year Jodie and I deconstructed an article pretty similar to this one, and what we said then still stands now.
➝ We all need something uplifting after that, don't we? So here's a stage filled with giant fairy tale books, from Tomorrowland festival in Belgium.
➝ We Are Many, We Are Everywhere: The Rumpus publishes a comprehensive list of writers of colour.
➝ As I added that last link it dawned on me that many of the pieces I've been linking to lately have been by Roxane Gay, who seems super smart and sensible and always says useful things - and does she have a blog I could subscribe to, or social media accounts I should be following? I found her on Tumblr, and these two posts on friendship were very timely for me. The words "I just get along better with guys!" have thankfully not left my mouth in a good ten years, but it was still fascinating to read about how someone else has navigated all the toxic cultural myths that surround female friendships. And the first post gave me hope that I, too, can one day learn to be a good friend, no matter how late in life it happens.
➝ I generally think personal preference should be respected when it comes to what we choose (or don't choose) to name ourselves, even though no term exists in a vacuum. Having said that, girl germs makes some interesting points:
Anything about girlhood is considered infantalizing, creepy, immature, a product of sexism–how men eroticize young girls. But I think that’s bullshit. Girlhood is not only about men’s fantasies. You take away so much when you reduce it to that.
A while ago I read a book called The Girl Within. Its thesis is more interesting than the entirety of the book, but the idea is this: as women, who we were when we were young girls, before we reached adolescence–before we became self-conscious, insecure, so concerned with men or what other people think of us–holds an important key to our true selves. There is a kind of carelessness, strength, bravery, movement forward in that girlhood.
I know the new rule is that you’re supposed to call female-identified adults “women.” I’m not saying we should go back to calling ourselves “girls.” But I want to remember there is value in that part of ourselves too, and it shouldn’t have to remain constantly invisible.
On a side note, earlier this year I read the book that's recommended in the comments, Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus, and it was amazing. Definitely one of my top non-fiction reads of the year.
➝ Foz Meadows does a full run down of the racial problems of the premise and content of 'Revealing Eden' by Victoria Foyt and Foyt's problematic response to the racial criticism of her book.
➝ I found out that the Olympics has a space for athletes who are out or want to talk about LGBTQ issues called Pride House, which is awesome. Following the links at the Pride House site led me to SB Nation where a running list of activities involving out Olympic athletes is posted. Coming from a country where men's football is huge and it's extremely unusual for a male footballer to be out to the public while playing competitively I kind of assumed there wouldn't be many Olympic athletes who were out publicly, but was I ever wrong.
➝ This is an Olympic link I found through work, which I think is interesting. As London gears up to tranform the Olympic village into regular housing, including some social housing, Inside Housing magazine looks at the social housing legacy from some past games.
➝ Beth Tweddle takes bronze in the indivdual bars final!!! In general I think all the athletes who medal and compete are excellent but Tweddle is one of those athletes who I have been cheering ever since she started. People were so crap to her when she first came on the scene, because of the way she looked but she kept on doing her best. Now she has a medal after three spectacular turns at a difficult routine that was flabbergasting.
➝ And if I'm going to mention Tweddle how can I not talk about Gabby Douglas, gymnast superstar that she is? Racialicious congratulates the first African-American woman to win the individual all around competition at the Olympics. All the ladies outdid themselves in the gymnastics contests, but Douglas was on such special top form.
➝ Before I move on from Olympic coverage (it's the last week, so I promise a sports related news break before I start in on my Pisitorius fangirling when the Paralympics begins) let me give a shout out to GB team member Nicola Adams, the first women to get gold in Olympic boxing :D
➝ To finish up, Ana I thought you might like this post from Alex Dally Macfarlane about wanting more female friendships and other female relationships in SF. Is this a good time to call for recommendations from anyone reading for books about female friendship?
