breaking news: Virginia Woolf’s Moon-Lander

by Laura Q

We interrupt this blog recess to bring you breaking news: Virginia Woolf has been spotted in a Moon-Lander.

My nearly 2yo daughter came to show me. More frequently, Woolf, Sappho, Frida Kahlo, Emma Goldman, etc., are found piloting construction trucks, but today a special trip to the moon was order.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled menu of outrage.

Filed under Art & Graphics, Women in Space, Young Adult, feminist whimsy | | Comment (1)

Amazon suppresses GLBT titles

by Ide Cyan

Amazon, the multinational online book (& other media) seller, has begun implementing a new policy change which has the effect of suppressing hundreds of GLBT-themed titles under misleading and injurious pretexts.

The sales ranks of an increasingly large number of titles dealing with homosexuality have been stripped from their listings, in order to exclude them from best seller lists, which makes it impossible to track their popularity on Amazon now, and also affects internal search results, which are tied into the popularity of the books, effectively suppressing the presence of these titles on Amazon’s online inventory by making them much more difficult to find, although the Amazon listings for some titles may still appear — for now — at or near the top of Google search results.

The pretext for this suppression is the exclusion of “adult” content, implying sexual content, from best-seller lists, but the reality of this is that material dealing with homosexuality is targetted regardless of its sexual content: erotica and romance novels are not the only casualties. Children’s books such as Heather Has Two Mommies, and classic gay-themed literature from E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, to more recent novels from Sarah waters and Tiptree Award-winner Nicola Griffith, as well as informative self-help guides for teenagers, and sociology texts that are queer-friendly or feminist, are indiscriminately suppressed; whereas popular heterosexual erotica, homophobic texts, and collections of Playboy photographs are still allowed keep their sales rankings.

Here is an early report on the LJ community meta_writer, which quotes an Amazon representative answering an author’s query as to why the sales ranks for his Young Adult, gay-themed novel were no longer listed:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

The Meta Writer community has contact information for Amazon in their list of related links, and another entry contains an evolving list of suppressed titles: Amazon Censorship – Who is affected?, with many links to the titles in question. (NB: heavy loading time for that page, due to the number of titles and comments adding more.)

Many authors and readers are calling for action. The subject is being followed on Twitter, too: search under the term “#amazonfail“.

There is an online petition protesting the new policy here, but the effectiveness of online petition being disputable, contacting Amazon directly might be more effective, though some people are reporting finding it difficult to get in touch with the company.

The policy change affects not only the USA-based Amazon.com, but also Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca .

Here are some additional links on the subject:
Blog entry “Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?” at Jezebel. (Heavy loading.)
CNET news article: “Amazon criticized for de-ranking ‘adult’ books”
LA Times Blog entry: Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner(found via Ambling Along the Aqueduct)

Filed under Art & Graphics, Books & Literature, Publishing, Sexuality & queerness | | Comments (11)

Book cover snark

by Liz Henry

Alternate captions:
“Why is there a bloody ice cream cone in my butt crack?”
“The Devil Wears Sno-Cone”
“Is that an ice cream cone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
“Yay! At least they left me part of my face! Enough to eat this Type O Sorbet!”

Possible sequels:
The Succubus Engineers
Succubus-Empress of Dune
The Succubus Christmas Carol
Succubus Riders of Pern
Kushiel’s Ice Cream Cone

Filed under Art & Graphics, Books & Literature | | Comments (3)

Nifty header images wanted for our new template

by Liz Henry

We’re messing with the back end and templates and blog design and all that. Expect more changes and fixes and fancy things over the next few days!

If you would like to contribute some images, that would be swell. Ideally we’d have lots of different header images for the banner at the top of the page. We have one already that we’ll try out soon. 

You might notice the buttons at the bottom of each post – visible on the individual post pages. They’re for social bookmarking sites like reddit, digg, sk*rt, del.icio.us, twitter, and facebook.  Please digg and tweet and share our posts all you like!  

 

Filed under Art & Graphics, about this blog | | Comments (24)

et in Arcadia alter ego

by vito_excalibur

Alters #2: Power Boy

“It shows what I am: male, healthy, and strong. If women want to degrade themselves by staring and drooling and tripping over themselves, that’s their problem, I’m not going to apologize for it.”

Second in a series of drawings I hope to be able to update semi-regularly over on my LJ. (No promises.) Familiar characters; what might they have been like, if things were a little different?

And while I’m at it, I might as well link to the fisking of Wizard’s How to Draw: Heroic Anatomy that sparked the whole thing.

Filed under Art & Graphics, Comics, female characters | | Comments (5)

Feminist SF video installation

by Laura Q

Arizona State University awarded some artist grants, and this one caught my eye (thanks to Google news alerts):

“El Dorado” by Hilary Harp. The artist, with collaborator Suzie Silver, will create a 20-minute non-narrative video about a space station where aliens meet in a nightclub. Funding will go toward producing a series of five one-minute, stop-motion sequences. This project is an extension of feminist science fiction, in which criticism of gendered subjectivity leads to the invention of more plural and heterogeneous social relations. Harp is an assistant professor of sculpture at ASU, while Silver is an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Harp lives in Tempe.

Some of the others look interesting too.

Filed under Art & Graphics, TV & Film, Writers & Artists | | Comment (0)

Judging Books & Their Covers.

by Naamenblog

I’ve been reading the Elemental Logic series by Laurie J. Marks and I have to make an observation. In all the recommendations I’ve gotten for this series and in all the reviews I’ve read, I’ve not seen this issue brought up. This does not mean it hasn’t been brought up elsewhere I simply haven’t seen it and would love to get links to places it was discussed.

This post will contain very minor spoilers and quotes from the book in connection to a characters physical appearance.

Continue reading »

Filed under Art & Graphics, Books & Literature, Race & Racism, female characters | | Comments (33)

Watercolor paintings by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

by Liz Henry

Yesterday I got a nifty 2007 calendar with art by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. You can see her galleries and art for sale over at her website, Shadowscapes.

There’s foxes, dragons, cranes, butterflies, women in swirly drapery with even swirlier hair riding giant tigers and playing magic panpipes while gazing into crystal balls underneath gnarled old trees. I think my favorite one is on the cover of the calendar, and especially the fox near the bottom who’s reading a book in one of the baroque stone architectural details – a fox in glasses with a sparkly star at her nose.

The art is very woman-focused, so here’s a shout out on the Feminist SF blog for Stephanie and her beautiful paintings.

Filed under Art & Graphics | | Comments (2)