The Mumpsimus

Rain Taxi has posted my review of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics . It's one of the best books I've read all year, certainly one of the best poetry anthologies I've read in a long time. Here's a sample of the review: Reading the book, with all its diversities, can be dizzying—and it’s a glorious feeling. Rarely do anthologies capture quite so much energy of expression. No reader is likely to find all of these poems to their taste, and that is part of the fun, because as we traverse the types and tones, we are challenged to define our own tastes, desires, and identities. Who am I when I read this book? we ask. And: Who might I be? Regardless of our own relationship to gender, to bodies, to love, lust, and loss, we will find ourselves somewhere within these pages, within these lines. Here are voices to hear—voices that, because of all their differences, are ineluctably human: our friends, family, neighbors, ancestors, lovers, ...

We are committed to recognizing and respecting the complex construction of sexual/gender identity; to recognizing trans* women as women and including them in all women’s spaces; to recognizing trans* men as men and rejecting accounts of manhood that exclude them; to recognizing the existence of genderqueer, non-binary identifying people and accepting their humanity; to rigorous, thoughtful, nuanced research and analysis of gender, sex, and sexuality that accept trans* people as authorities on their own experiences and understands that the legitimacy of their lives is not up for debate; and to fighting the twin ideologies of transphobia and patriarchy in all their guises.  [read more] I agree with everything in the new "Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism" , and so just sent my name in to be added to the list of signers. The statement is well-written and thoughtful, a nice counter to the reckless, hateful statements and actions of certain people who have taken...

One of the most interesting discussions I saw at the AWP conference was one sponsored by VIDA , with editors and writers talking about the results of VIDA's 2013 count of female and male writers in various publications. This year, they were able to offer a particularly revealing set of graphs showing three year trends in book reviewing at major magazines and journals. The only report of the discussion I've seen so far is that of VIDA volunteer Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown  (although I'm sure it was covered by Twitter when it happened). Hoover gives a good overview of the panel and the issues. I took lots of notes, so will here add some more detail to try to show how the discussion went. After introductory remarks by moderator Jennine Capó Crucet, the first responses were made alphabetically by last name, and so two men began: Don Bogen , poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review , and Stephen Corey , editor of The Georgia Review . Bogen noted that, ins...

  Last week's Readercon was among the best of the many I have attended, for me at least. Inevitably, there wasn't enough time for anything — time to see friends, time to go to all the various panels I had hoped to go to, time to mine the book dealers' wares... Nonetheless, it was a tremendous pleasure to see so many friends and acquaintances again, as well as to be immersed in such a vibrant community of people who love to talk about books. I've been on the Programming Committee for Readercon for the past two years now, which changes my experience a little bit, because I find myself paying closer attention than I did before to how the panels end up working in reality (after we on the committee have puzzled over their possibilities for a few months) and to how people on the panels and in the audiences respond to them. (Note: We're actively trying to expand the invitation list to Readercon. If you have any names to suggest [including yourself], please see here f...

I had no intention of ever writing anything ever again whatsoever about Prometheus , or even mentioning the movie ever again in my life, but I just read two great pieces about it, so can't resist sending attention to them. (One links to the other, in fact.) First, Elaine Costello's amazingly rich, provocative, nuanced, thoughtful, beautiful stream-of-theoryness wonderings about the film — about its economies and genders and races and religions, its unsaid saids and said unsaids. ("...which reminded me that the spaceship is a military-industrial [and so imperial-colonial] apparatus...") Here's just a tiny taste of an extraordinary tapestry: What I wonder about is this: if David really can be read as an anti-colonial and anti-corporate saboteur, why does this progressive message, this transgressive messenger, still have to wear the most Aryan body imaginable? I’m aware that casting an actor of color as the android character would have made the slippages th...

I haven't hated a movie as much as I hated Prometheus in a long time. It is a movie that screams for mockery. Some of my favorite writings on it so far... Nick Mamatas: In the grim meathook future of this film, corporations rule the planet, CEOs rule their corporations on whims, and women wear naught but Ace bandages as undergarments, the poor sexy sexy things. Kameron Hurley: In the world of Prometheus, we all came from white dudes, who went around seeding the universe with their magical, life-giving sperm. Genevieve Valentine: One of the saving graces of the psychosexual terrorization in the Alien franchise is the leveling of the gender playing field – the rape threat they represent is omnipresent and sexually indiscriminate. But not in Prometheus ! Thanks, Prometheus . Richard Brody: Which is to say that, despite the lack of intentional humor, lots of things in the movie are laughable, from the giant tiki-head of primordial power or the flying crull...

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People?   It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets: Why We Oppose Pockets for Women by Alice Duer Miller 1. Because pockets are not a natural right. 2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them. 3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them. 4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets. 5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled. 6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets. 7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature. 8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry ...

A Dangerous Method Dartmouth College has a long-standing relationship with the Telluride Film Festival, and every year a group of films that premiered at Telluride are shown as part of the Telluride at Dartmouth  program, a highlight of any northern New England cinephile's year. (It was at Telluride at Dartmouth last year that I saw Never Let Me Go .) This year, I've decided to try to see as many of the films as I can, and unless exhaustion wears me down, I expect to see five of the six. (Unfortunately, The Kid with the Bike , the new movie from the Dardenne brothers , is playing on a day when I have a prior commitment.) I won't do in depth reports on the films here, I don't think, because of a lack of time, but I do want to record initial impressions. The first film shown was  A Dangerous Method , David Cronenberg's best comedy since Crash . Most people probably wouldn't classify A Dangerous Method  as a comedy, and it's certainly not being sold...

I previously discussed how I used The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction  in the "Gender & Science Fiction" course I taught this past term, and promised to discuss the novels in another post. Well, here we are! The students had to read five novels: four that we all read together, and one of their choice from a list I gave them. The four we read together were: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler Shadow Man by Melissa Scott The list of novels they needed to choose one from was: The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Ammonite by Nicola Griffith Native Tongue by Suzette Haden-Elgin Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson Life by Gwyneth Jones China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor The Female Man by Joanna Russ Air by Geoff Ryman City of Pearl by Karen Traviss I chose these texts for a variety of reasons...

Inspired by a list from Esquire of "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read" -- which, aside from perhaps a few other problems*, includes only one book by a woman (Flannery O'Connor) -- Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis at Joyland asked folks for suggestions of books by women that men should read. The resulting list is a lot of fun, and a fine place to go if you're looking for suggestions for what to read. (Also, you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates's commentary on it. But you read his blog anyway, so I don't need to tell you that, right?) I'm in a frivolously list-making mood, so thought I would add and ditto a few choices, though I'm going to narrow my parameters a little... 25 Works Of Fiction By People Identified As Women (As Far As I Know) That I At This Particular Moment Think Might Be Interesting To Men Who Are Curious To Read More Of Such Things, Though Of Course Tastes Vary Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker So Long a Letter by ...

Cheryl Morgan has written two things you must must must read: "How Not to Write a Trans Character" and the piece it introduces, "The Bone Palace" , a review of a novel by Amanda Downum. The review is comprehensive and thoughtful, using the novel as a problematic example, and so it is about much, much more than the book itself. I haven't read The Bone Palace , so can't comment on whether I agree or not with Cheryl's take on it, but the evaluation is not the important thing -- what's important is that Cheryl generously offers us a way of thinking and rethinking representations that have real effects in the world. Toward the end, the review includes a discussion of the Sandman  story A Game of You , with reference to something I wrote about it that Cheryl took exception to. I left a comment on Cheryl's post to clarify what I at least thought I was trying to say, however incoherently, but I'm not going to reprint that here because really I th...

Here are links to PDFs of a couple of old science fiction stories that may be of interest to some folks. (Both, as far as I have been able to tell, did not have their copyrights renewed and so are in the public domain; I'll get rid of the links if I discover otherwise.) "The War of the Sexes"  by Edmond Hamilton was first published in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales  and reprinted once, in the version I have a PDF of, in The Avon Science Fiction Reader , no. 1 , in 1951. It's a terribly silly story, bad in just about every conceivable way, and pretty hilarious because of it. "The Queen Bee" by Randall Garrett was published in the December 1958 issue of Astounding  and has never been reprinted as far as I can tell. It is not even remotely hilarious. I found it, in fact, quite disturbing to read. It is a revolting story, a representation of a sick male fantasy made "necessary" by circumstances. (I suspect Joanna Russ may have had the s...

Some things of interest... If you liked my recent column on Sexing the Body , evolutionary psychology, gender, etc., then you should really keep your eyes on the ongoing series of posts about sex science at the essential (though not essentialist) Echidne of the Snakes . Over the holidays, she read three books on the topic -- one I mentioned in my column, and have also praised before, Pink Brain, Blue Brain ; but also two I haven't yet seen, Delusions of Gender and Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young. At the very least, read Echidne's first post of seven short conclusions reached after finishing the books. Great, great stuff. And if you're curious to know more about this stuff, and Pink Brain, Blue Brain in particular, here's a lecture by its author, Lisa Eliot. I was hoping Aaron Bady would respond to the New York Times article  "In Sudan, a Colonial Curse Comes Up for a Vote" , and lo and behold, my w...

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted . It's about one of my favorite books of nonfiction, Ann Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body . I first tried to write it as a straightforward appreciation, but for reasons that will become obvious from the column, I couldn't do that right now. So I broke the voices in my head into two configurations, X and Y, and had them talk to each other -- they're neither and both "me", and that proved to be just the distancing effect I needed. Here's a sample: X:   Anyway, what I was saying was that I wanted to talk about  Sexing the Body , which was one of those books that, when I first encountered it, completely changed my way of viewing the world. Y:  No it didn't. X:  What? Y:  I was there. You first read it for a graduate course on sexuality and science where a chapter was in the course packet. You sought out the book for a paper you wrote about Eugen Steinach, one of the crazier of the crazy bunch of ear...

Some readers seem interested in my (Machiavellian) thought process when creating classes, so here is another in an occasional series about what I'll be teaching in the upcoming term. First off, I owe thanks to all the folks who offered ideas and experiences when I asked for opinions about gender and science fiction . Your responses not only helped me clarify my goals, but also helped at least one other teacher who, it turns out, is proposing a similar class at his university. The Gender & SF class looks like it will have about 10 students, a few of whom I've had before and who were among the best students I've taught, so, naturally, I'm excited. Selecting the final list of books was painful because as I plotted things out day by day, there just wasn't enough time to do all I'd thought I should even minimally  do. I'm compensating for this a little bit by having the students each read a book of their own (I may do this in pairs, maybe singles -- I...

My brain doesn't seem to want to participate in year-end roundups this year, as every time I try to think about what books or films or music or legumes I've encountered, I mostly go blank. I seem to have lost the capacity to link such experiences to the experience of time in annual chunks. I wouldn't in any case be able to write a "best of the year" post because I've spent a lot of this year catching up with stuff from other years (well, no old legumes -- that would be gross...). Probably still a hangover effect from my years as series editor for Best American Fantasy. However, some books, at least, do come to mind as things I haven't posted enough about here, and which I would like to recommend. So if you get some good giftcards or something during the holidays and feel impelled to buy something; or if you happen to want some stuff to look for in the library, here are a few titles (arranged alphabetically by author) I've thought rewarded the time...

Since I've been spending the past few weeks preparing a Gender & Science Fiction class, there's very little I seem to want to write about at the moment other than the thing Kate Bornstein calls "the gender cult". Thus, we have yesterday's Strange Horizons column (written a week and a half ago), "The Failure of Masculinity"  and today's latest episode of the Sandman Meditations , "Men of Good Fortune" .  They are in many ways companion pieces. By the way, I haven't had a chance yet to mention that Strange Horizons is holding their annual fund drive .  SH has paid contributors, volunteer staff, and no advertising revenue other than that which comes through Amazon Associates links to books.  This is SH's tenth year of putting out a new issue nearly every week.  It's an amazing endeavor, and the archives are rich with a wonderfully varied collection of material.  They are able to do so because each year lots of readers th...

I've just been approved to teach a class next term at Plymouth State University called "Gender and Science Fiction".  It's an upper-level Topics in Women's Studies course, open to any major.  I've been talking about such a course to my colleagues at the university for at least a year now, and so I'm very excited and have spent a lot of time coming up with possible syllabi.  I now have, I think, at least 5 years worth of material that I'd like to share and discuss in one term. That, of course, is not possible, so I'm pruning and shaping and focusing.  For instance, perfect as  Trouble on Triton is for such a course, I can't imagine spending less than a month on it, and I also think most of the students would still struggle unprofitably with it, because most will not, I expect, be experienced readers of science fiction, so it's unlikely I'll use it, or at least all of it.  (I do want to include some Delany, of course, but may go inst...

In fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men I object to anything that divides the two sexes ... human development has now reached a point at which sexual difference has become a thing of altogether minor importance.  We make too much of it; we are men and women in the second place, human beings in the first. --Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 19 Dec 1884 [quoted in Monsman] I first tried to read The Story of an African Farm some years ago when I went on a Doris Lessing binge; I hadn't heard of the novel before reading Lessing's praise of it, and what she said intrigued me.  But I went into The Story of an African Farm expecting it to be, well, a story , and it was soon apparent that, for all the book is, it is only "a story" in the loosest sense -- indeed, it's more accurate to say it is a book containing a lot of stories, but even that misses much of what is wonderful and unique in Olive Schrei...

I'm stealing these points from a recent post from Cheryl Morgan because they're important and succinct, and I like a reminder now and then myself: 1. Every time you make a joke about how someone born female is “really” a man you are reinforcing the idea that trans women are something shameful. It is like kids in a school yard yelling “spastic” at the current target of the bullies. 2. Every time you describe trans women as “deceptive” you are denying their gender identity and their right to live as they feel appropriate. You are also making it harder for them to get access to jobs, health care and so on. You are labeling them as inherently dishonest. 3. Every time you describe trans women as deceptive sexual predators you are reinforcing the myth that trans people only do what they do in order to satisfy perverted sexual desires. 4. Every time you advise men to be wary of being “deceived” by trans women you are providing support for the “trans panic” excuse for murdering...