FailFandom to Hugo Awards: Pity? I don’t think so

by Yonmei

Women writers have tended not to be shortlisted for the Hugo Awards. Hugo Award short-lists (the top five works or authors nominated) have tended to be men-only or male-dominated. This tendency has been excused or this bias denied by assertions that there are not enough women writing SF: not enough women being published in SF: not enough good writers of SF are women: that women who write SF are shyer, less numerous, or less able, than men. Not, in other words, that the fans who nominate for the Hugo awards (the minority subgroup of the members of the previous Worldcon and the current Worldcon) could be biased.

But there are plenty of women writing and editing and drawing and working in SF today, and indeed in the past ten years this has been so. They just weren’t getting nominated. I wrote about this James effect (women writers tend to be devalued or ignored) which I believe to be one of the direct causes of this in a post at this blog in December last year: I was feeling tired and depressed and the post is fairly cynical.

I was identified at last year’s worldcon in Montreal as a member of “Fail Fandom” – that is, one of the fans who’d been part of Racefail 2009. (The fan who so tagged me had a habit of picking on the white fans who’d peripherally been part of Racefail and apparently simply not seeing the fans of colour who were more directly involved.)

With the helpful assistance of Kevin Standlee and Tim Illingworth and Cheryl Morgan, I put forward a late amendment to the Hugo Awards:

If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.14 [which is the section that defines the "top fifteen" list, published within 90 days of a Worldcon's closing ceremony].

The details are in the post linked to, but presuming that the six categories affected by this amendment would be Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Book, and Best Fan Writer, I looked up the short-lists for the Hugo Awards as far back as 2000, and found that for the past decade, there wasn’t a single year in which the amendment would have lain unused: every year since 2000, there has been at least one short-list in each of these categories which was men-only, and most years, more than one. Another measurement I looked at: how often have the numbers of women and men been approximately equal in those categories? Eight times in total (out of a possible 60), and never in Best Short Story.

What changed this year?

Not one of those six categories is a men-only short list. (In fact, the only men-only short list in the Hugo Awards this year is that of Best Professional Artist.) Also, the numbers of women and men are approximately equal in three out of the six categories: Best Novelette (three women, three men) and for the first time in over a decade the Best Short Story category (two women, three men) and, in a complicated kind of way, the Best Related Book category (six entries, three with women authors, two major works of feminist science-fiction).
Continue reading »

Filed under Awards & Recognition, activism, fandom, women writers | | Comments (6)

Orson Scott Card, meet Alan Turing

by Yonmei

Reading various discussions and justifications online about whether or not to boycott Shadow Complex – a new game which is written as a prequel to Empire, Orson Scott Card’s novel/game about a liberal conspiracy taking over the US – brought this to mind again. There’s a thoughtful article by Christian Nutt in Gamasutra: The Complex Question and another by SurplusGamer in Destructoid – both defending the principle of a boycott, whether or not you take part.

Peter David, the writer of Shadow Complex, takes the rather disappointing position that (Kotaku) “If anyone wants to boycott the game and thus damage me or Chair while doing nothing to change Orson’s opinions, that’s naturally their right. Or…They can display the sort of tolerance for someone who is different from them that they feel is lacking in Orson and thus prove they’re better. Your choice.”

Orson Scott Card was born on 24th August, 1951, six years after Alan Turing had received an OBE from the British Government for his services to the Foreign Office during WWII. Those “services” at that time remained unspecified: we know now that Turing had been working at Bletchley, building a computer out of stone knives and bearskins that could crack the German codes of the Enigma machine. He called his computer the Bombe.

In his lifetime, Alan Turing visited the US twice, two years at Princeton University (1936-38), and a stay of five months over nine years before OSC was born: November 1942 to March 1943. Before he went to Princeton, he published a paper famous now in computer science: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which he outlined the concept of a Turing Machine. The Universal Turing Machine was, in concept, a programmable computer. Like Ada Lovelace before him, Alan Turing could conceive of computer programs before technology was sufficiently advanced to build the machine that could run them.

In 1942-43, Turing worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and Bombe construction in Washington DC. Alan Turing was probably more responsible for the Allied victory in WWII than Winston Churchill: as Churchill himself would have agreed, if he hadn’t been there, someone else would have stood up: but there was only ever one Alan Turing. (He enjoyed long-distance running, and apparently used to frequently avoid the wartime transport difficulties by running the 40 miles between Bletchley and London when summoned there for an important meeting.)

The paper which was to make Turing posthumously famous far outside his particular fields of mathematics, logic, and cryptology was published in Mind, in 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence: in it he proposes what was to become known as the Turing Test. He wrote a computer program to play chess, before there was a computer built on which that piece of software could be run. He invented the concept of storing a program in a computer, long before anyone built such computers. He was the founder of computer science. He is acknowledged and honoured by the annual presentation of the Turing Award to the person responsible for the greatest innovation in computer science.

“Jane”, the AI software that becomes sentient, in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, is Orson Scott Card’s clearest literary debt to Turing: though there is another fictional character whom Card dealt with very similiarly to Turing. Anssett, the former Songbird, who is chemically castrated in Songmaster as a consequence of having a sexual relationship with another man.

In November 1951, Turing had finished his first long paper in mathematical biology. In December, Alan Turing picked up a young man, invited him home for sex, met him a couple of times more, and then the young man broke into Turing’s house with a couple of friends and robbed him. In the course of their investigations into the burglary, the police established that the young man and Turing had had sex, and Turing (who kept his notes on the case in card folder labelled “Burglary and Buggery”) found himself on trial for homosexuality. He was convicted – he was unquestionably guilty of the crime! – and lost his security clearance, so he could no longer work on government cryptanalysis; he was given the choice of jail or chemical castration, and chose castration.

This was all in accordance with the principles which Orson Scott Card advocated in 1990 (and has since, consistently, defended) – principles which he explicitly says should be applied to “the polity, the citizens at large”:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity’s ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships. The Hypocrites of Homosexuality

Just as Card advocates, Turing did not go to jail: he was nonetheless sent a clear message that he could not be permitted to remain an acceptable, equal citizen of British society. He had flagrantly violated society’s regulation of sexual behaviour – and the penalty was one which Orson Scott Card could have written of with relish.

Alan Turing was born in 1912: it’s possible he could be alive today, aged 97. In 1953 he was writing what biographer Alan Hodges describes as a “sudden explosion of ideas about the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics and relativity”. But he’d lost so much: he’d lost what Orson Scott Card proposed a man like Alan Turing should lose – the right to be regarded as an acceptable, equal citizen. His friends at Cambridge spoke for him in court and stood by him until death: but he lost his job, he was subjected to routine harassment by the police, and – a known side-effect of the hormones used to castrate him – he had grown breasts. On 7th June 1954, he ate a cyanide-laced apple, and he died.

In the video linked to here (Alan Turing’s death) his friends discuss the motivation for his suicide and all assert that it couldn’t possibly have been the hormone castration or the police harassment, because he was always so witty and amused about that, never seemed troubled at all.

I first heard of Alan Turing in my high school biology class, when I was 14, and the teacher was talking to us about what was life and what was sentient life and how could you tell: I first played with an AI program (as a joke – it used BASIC arrays and BASIC’s not-very-random numbers – worked to fool teenage boy-nerds, but that’s an easy game) when I was 19. I was a computer science nerd: I knew what I owed to Alan Mathison Turing.

There is a petition now active on the Prime Minister’s website, that will remain live till 20th January 2010: if you’re a UK citizen, you can sign it here. The petition asks for a formal apology to Alan Turing – an acknowledgement, by the government, of their wrong-doing towards him, and recognition of the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended Turing’s life.

I have never been sure how Orson Scott Card justifies his homophobia to himself: I know he loathes being identified as a homophobe, because he would rather think of himself as a normal person with a normal distaste for and hatred of gay men who normally wants gay men to be kept in the closet, and chemically castrated or otherwise punished if they fail to keep themselves out of sight. Peter David feels we should show tolerance towards Card for being “different” from us: though that is not what Card himself advocates. I’m not in a position to say one way or another about a boycott of a game I wouldn’t buy – I’m not a gamer.

The Alan Turing Year, 2012, will be a celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing on the occasion of the centenary of his birth on 23rd June 1912. He never got to be 42. Orson Scott Card, whose writing career was made by computers both real and fictional, shared a planet with Turing for less than 3 years.

—
Update: 9th September. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement in response to the petition: “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Filed under activism, politics | | Comments (23)

Mindblowing SF Lists

by the angry black woman

The other day I asked folks to name me some mindblowing sf stories, novels and authors in response to this silliness here. As I expected, you came through, as did a bunch of other people over on this post asking for mindblowing sf by women. I collated all of the data and came up with these massive lists of mindblowing SF. Thank you for all of your help :)

There were a couple of reasons why I posted it on Tor.com instead of here or The Angry Black Woman. One, I can always link to them, and that’s important and useful, too. Two, I wanted these lists to exist on a mainstream site that wasn’t particularly about race or gender activism but instead about science fiction and fantasy in general. Because I want people who stumble across or seek out those lists to see that these are not just the concerns of women and POC, but concerns of the entire community. Some folks need a reminder of such.

I’m really grateful to everyone who commented because you introduced me to some authors and fiction I hadn’t heard of or previously considered. I hope it spurs others to read some new stuff as well.

Another reason I’m grateful is that, when arguments about representation happen, often times we’re asked to give long lists of authors and stories the editor/reader/whoever should read or pay attention to or whatever. Just going off the top of my head I can often give them a few, but a big huge list is usually beyond me. I do not know of every author, every piece of fiction. When we’re confronted by people who claim that there just aren’t very many outstanding women or POC writers in the field, we can point to this and say: bullshit, bucko. Try again.

We have to be responsible for keeping track of and highlighting and celebrating and giving notice to our own and recording the accomplishments of our best. Because no one else is going to do it for us. If they’re not ignoring, they’re actively suppressing. Neither of which is acceptable.

Make lists, write reviews, pass on books, stories, and authors you love. Be heard.

(x-posted to ABW)

Filed under Books & Literature, Publishing, Writers & Artists, activism, lists, people of colour, women writers | | Comment (0)

The conversation continues

by Yonmei

I was going to call this One Minute Past Midnight And The Conversation Goes On Without You, but I was too tired too late for that to be timely. Justine Larbalestier, whose books just went on my oh, I must look out for that reading list, writes about online-versus-offline-behaviour.

“Indifference doesn’t result from hostility: it derives from being so comfortably in the majority that you never have to think that a minority have different needs. Hostility enters when the majority find themselves questioned, as of right, by the minority.” -me, October 2007

In better news, Seeking Avalon announced the PoC in SF/F Carnival Special Edition: Interrogating the Text, De-Colonizing the Mind: An Intra-PoC Dialogue:

This special edition of the PoC in SF/F carnival is once again dedicated to intra-PoC dialogue. Separated by time and distance, joined by personal experience and on/offline interaction, our lives together are not always a bed of roses. In the wake of recent events, what’s next on the horizon for intra-PoC relations?

More at Seeking Avalon, with a necessary caveat: “Since People of Color (PoC) is not necessarily a universally used term, especially by fans living outside of the US, I encourage those who have other ways of defining themselves (for example, non-white, fen of pigment, chromatic) to step up and participate.” Deadline for submission: 27th March 2009 Links and questions to: ladyj dot 965 at gmail dot com.

The call is out for submissions for the first Asian Women Blog Carnival:

…there is no specific theme. I would like to highlight the diversity of Asian women and topics regarding identity in Asian majority and Asian minority cultures. Submissions can range from feminism, representation, culture, history, work, activism, beauty, health, sexuality, politics, economics, philosophy, class, education, religion, how we identify and relate to other PoC groups, personal stories etc.

Also: “Please feel free to submit your own posts or suggest good posts or links by someone else for this carnival. Submissions from from women and men of colour as well as allies are welcome. All types of work, such as essays, prose, poems, personal narratives are accepted.” Deadline for submission: 3rd April 2009. Links and questions to ciderpress.

If reading about recent events has made you feel you want to do something, besides speaking up, two charities were recommended recently in the discussion of RaceFail 09:

If you’re in the UK, Afghanaid: “has worked alongside Afghan communities for over two decades. We currently work directly with over 500,000 adults and children focusing on long term sustainable development in rural areas.” About one-fifth of their workforce in Afghanistan are women: they teach both girls and boys to read, and teach both girls and boys about their rights as children. You can make a donation here.

If you’re in the US, Books For Africa. “A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to children in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa. Books For Africa is the world’s largest shipper of donated books to the African continent. Since 1988, Books For Africa has shipped over 20 million high-quality text and library books to 45 African countries. Millions more are needed.” You can make a donation here; if you want to donate some books, read the book donation requirements.

I mention country-specific charities because, if you live in the same country as the charity you are donating to, you can “gift aid” it (or whatever your local term is: the charity can claim the taxes you would have paid on that gift, thus increasing your donation). If people would like to suggest other appropriate charities based in other countries than the UK and the US, I’ll add them to the list.

Cease fire? Stop talking? Not now: not ever.

Filed under Race & Racism, activism, people of colour | | Comment (0)

Orson Scott Card: homophobic Humpty Dumpty

by Yonmei

Update: In the comment thread to this post, one person responded

I’m just curious as to why we are even ceding this much space to O.S.C., to spend so much energy refuting him…? Does anyone in the community take him seriously? I don’t… further comment I do think, though, that answering to his views in this way validates them as being worthy of consideration. To me, they’re just stupid hate speech chucked into the same bin as white power propaganda – i.e., absurd and laughable.

I’ve added a political follow-up at the end of this post which explains why I think it’s worthwhile.

—
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

1. Humpty Dumpty: there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!

In Orson Scott Card’s most recent essay on same-sex marriage, he offers as a scientific hypothesis “It is not unfair to give unique preference to monogamous heterosexual relationships, if that preference and those marriages benefit all of society — including homosexuals or potential homosexuals.”

In an earlier essay, published at the beginning of June this year, Card wrote about something he still remembers his father saying to him when 9-year-old Scott brought a book on “cave men” home from school: “Whenever science and religion disagree, one or the other or both of them are wrong.”
Continue reading »

Filed under Books & Literature, Race & Racism, Sexuality & queerness, activism, politics, science | | Comments (33)

Orson Scott Card, homophobic terrorist, against the orderly pursuit of happiness

by Yonmei

Orson Scott Card, folks:

The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to “gay marriage,” is that it marks the end of democracy in America.

Because when same-sex couples can marry, that means the majority won’t have been allowed to vote away a basic civil right – the “freedom to marry” from a minority. Which means the date on which democracy ended in America was actually 12th June 1967, when the judges on the US Supreme Court made a new law without any democratic process, striking down laws all over America that were enacted by majority vote: the judges asserted that the freedom to marry was a “basic civil right” because it was “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness”. (I do like that phrase: “the orderly pursuit of happiness”. Yay.)
Continue reading »

Filed under Sexuality & queerness, activism | | Comments (45)

The Internets work how they’re supposed to

by Liz Henry

Here is a quick summary of the wild and wooly LJ throwdown today in the Feminist SF blogosphere which some call Gropergate and some call the Open Source Boob Grab.

I would like to unfold it before you as I experienced it:

First, I saw Rachel Manija‘s post. I had to leave for work, so didn’t have time to read further or to do more than rant briefly in outrage that all we DON’T need in SF fandom is more encouragement for creepy-grope-culture and pressure for women to commoditize themselves for the benefit of men.

I thought about it all day from the little information I had. I thought about gay & lesbian and queer hanky codes to indicate specific detail about sexual preferences in gay bars, sex parties, and cruising grounds. I thought about the things that signify femininity, and gender in general. I thought over particularly painful and haunting incidents of sexual harassment I have experienced. I thought about doing sex work and what it taught me. I went “GRRRRR” big time and proposed that we ask MEN at cons to wear buttons that proclaim “Groper”, “Sexist”, “Ogler”, “Creep” and “Potential Rapist”. Make them identify, not us.

In a science fiction context, I thought certainly of the WorldCon boob grab perpetrated by Harlan Ellison. I thought of the girl I met at last year’s ConQuest who wore a button saying “I’m only 14, don’t even think about it” and was heartened yet saddened by what it implied. I thought of the extreme harassment and personal assault I have experienced in role-playing games with friends and at cons.

Then, just now, I read mystickeeper’s short summary. I learned that the original poster called this plan the “Open Source Boob Project”. Before I even finished the first screen of her entry, I was snorting fire because I love the open source movement and philosophy and think it’s a beautiful thing. I love the public domain, and copyleft, and Creative Commons. I question many mainstream ideas about private property and ownership, and intellectual property. And, I am involved with several organizations that support and foster the participation of women in open source. It did NOT make me happy to think of the words “women in open source” taking on a new meaning — the meaning that women’s bodies are privately owned property (owned by themselves, or their significant others) who should “open source” their bodies.

I then sat down to pound furiously upon my keyboard to give my ranty thoughts & reactions a good, quick, unedited ranty bloggity outlet.

THEN after I went through that whole nostril-flaring thought chain, I followed the link to the original poster’s journal entry. He had updated it and closed comments after over 1000 comments. People are surely still going to be emailing him for days, weeks, months. He apologized, and said that he realized now that it only made sense in context, with a group of people who knew each other and who thought it fun — In my opinion, in his mind it was like the hanky code in a gay bar, in the context it was in. And his apology reads as sincere and thoughtful to me. It doesn’t erase the wrong of it. But, I give him credit for making an attempt.

And the chances that the Project would get fucked up, making con spaces more amenable to hordes of stalkers and mouthbreathers who will grope and maul women, are pretty damn big. Hell, it’s already made women feel less safe by me mentioning it, and that makes me feel like shit. As it should.

Further, he says,

And while that’s not the way it happened – at least from the perspective of the folks who participated …[whiny bit deleted, out of mercy]

…It doesn’t matter.

I agree with that 100%. That is a decent apology, especially coming so quickly.

THEN I read misia’s hilarious, perfect, beautiful, post: A Modest Proposal. It healed my soul, as did the many great comments. Misia proposes the Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project (OSSKBP). Here is the short version, but go read her whole post. It’s a treat.

1. Men who would like to be asked for permission before a woman administers one or more swift kicks to their balls shall wear the offical OSSKBP “Ask First Pin” at all times. This is a black lapel pin with a lavender question mark on it.
2. Men who do not wish to be kicked in the balls at all must wear a large visible official “No Kicks, Thanks” badge at all times, including when swimming, showering, and sleeping. They may also wish to avoid areas where large numbers of women are present, particularly at night. Some men may also wish to invest in assertiveness training…

Ha!!!
Many people chimed in with funny, apt comments: pantryslut with

“And always remember, we are creating a better, more honest world with this project. By being open about our desire to kick men in the balls, instead of shamefully hiding our pure, innocent, harmless feelings.

and vito_excalibur:

Why, the validation they will get from knowing that we find their testicles a worthy target will be a pure source of satisfaction and joy!

If you don’t get it they are mocking the things that guys say, Nice Guys who want women to be “liberated” about their sexuality with the agenda of getting some free pussy.

There is another lovely extended parody from roseembolism: “In this moment, all of the societal restrictions had fallen away, and we discovered an eBay-like need: We liked to express the desire to kick him inna crotch, and he liked the compliment of being noticed.” And there is GREAT in depth discussion in the post and comments inthe-red-shoes‘ journal. Oh, there’s so much. I can’t link to it all! The responses keep coming, with infinite depth. Can’t! Stop! Reading! Awesome! Internet! Naamen, you rock!

DAMN! This is some privileged BULLSHIT! This is disgusting! This the the illusion of endorsing open sexuality by opening up bodies that aren’t your own for touch! This is a way for you to get your rocks off groping womyn in public and pretending to be deep! This is enforcing the belief that womyn are public property!

Let me say it loud so thast it might -might- penetrate your skull:

WOMYN’S BODIES ARE NOT A PUBLIC SPACE!

The beauty of saoba’s declaration filled me with happiness:

“I am a person, actual and whole. I am not a walking interactive art installation for random passersby. I choose clothing to please myself, based on my own intent and the event I am attending.
I am not an ambulatory therapy object. I am not public property. ” – saoba

You may also enjoy coffeeandink’s fierce thoughts on the subject. I’d like to go digging through all the threads and find her comments as I am sure they are worth the hunt. If you do, please link that up in comments below. She disagrees that the dude’s apology is worth a damn. Actually I agree with her but I am a little easier on his sorry ass since I think about 99% of blogging dudes would have not even got as far as he did into actual thought, and that kind of CR work goes slow. I think when Scalzi told him he was wrong he listened… nevermind what all those chicks say… ;-)

The point I am winding up to, though, is that it is US who did the right thing here, all the people mostly women but some men, who went furiously type type typing immediately to their blogs and LJs and make the freaking internet EXPLODE with mockery, outrage, anger, orneriness, analysis, questioning, and criticism. THAT’S how it’s supposed to work! The feminist blogosphere is swift and fierce! It lays out the issues, it gets its hands dirty, it disagrees and shouts and does it right. Go team! What we all did, and the way this can work, is to head off shitty ideas at the pass. Obviously, not by forbidding anyone to flirt in any context, ever. But, by public discussion and debate. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Great Denial of the Boob Grab. I take heart from it, immensely so.

Filed under FSF Activism, activism, fandom, geek sexism | | Comments (64)

New Carnival

by the angry black woman

I just announced a new carnival that might be of interest to the readers here.  The Carnival of Allies:

Where self-identified allies write to other people like themselves about why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.

And when I say allies, I’m talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations. If you feel like you’re an ally and have something to say about that, you should submit to this carnival.

Visit the post to submit.

Filed under Online, activism | | Comments (4)

privacy, autonomy, religion (and science fiction)

by Laura Q

Okay, this is a long meandering post, mostly musings but rant-like in places, and perhaps only tangentially related to SF, but it is inspired by SF and mixed up with SF in my head, and I promise to weave some SF-ness into the post, too.

Clive Thompson has written of the “next civil rights battle” over the mind — specifically privacy and autonomy of individuals in their own heads, or “mental privacy”. He interviews three men (no women) about these issues.

Naturally I’m receptive to these concerns. Having our mediaspaces be free and unexploited is one of the central themes of the last fifteen years of my life — longer, depending on how one thinks of it.

But come on.

Continue reading »

Filed under activism, feminism | | Comments (11)