beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I made a new year's resolution to write 1000 words per day, just to get started doing any writing at all again. So far I've made them by complaining about Big Finish Audios, but to listen to more of those I'd have to change devices, so, I need some topics to ramble on about.

Today: Designing female superheroes.

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I guess if I'm going to invent or design a female superhero, for one thing I'll make them in a set so they've got other powerful women to relate to, and for another what I'll really be trying to do is remake or rescue existing supers. Because what I really want for those women has, sometimes, happened. Paradise Island and Amazons and a competition to find the best and Wonder Woman comes to man's world, trying to live up to her mother, and inspires women everywhere, including two more Wonder Girls. Batgirl takes up the mantle of her own will, and so does Batgirl and Batgirl after her. Black Canary and her daughter Black Canary. Oracle. Power Girl. Fire and Ice. They've all had their moments where they were exactly what I wanted, needed, them to be.

I'd want to take all the best bits of that, and then, somehow, I'd want to make sure they never got screwed over again.

... to invent lady superheroes the way I want them, I would have to combat systemic sexism in the media.

... which inventing them right would be only a small step towards doing.

I dreamed that walking between this familiar universe and the universe next door was, in some locations, as easy as trying to see a magic eye picture. Look at the world one way and there's our road along a cliff edge, look at it another and there's the wall between worlds and a door through it. And on the other side it got weird, to the point that the appearance of identical humanity was just concealing an entirely alien culture.

There were at least six genders. But they were indistinguishable to our eyes. To us they looked just masculine and feminine, but to the locals they were clearly also at least three different modes of being. There were natural born humans, creations of biological origin, and creations of non biological origin. And these were perceived as gender lines, with distinct roles in courtship, mating, carrying children, raising them, as well as distinct relations of power.

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So there were Princes, Princesses, women who couldn't bear children but could make creations of biological origin, creations of biological origin, and creations of non-biological origin. And men. That's at least six, but maybe ten, genders.

The creations of non biological origin intrigued me. I never figured them out in the dream. Thor in the Allspeak called them something like scathach, which while asleep I didn't understand at all. Having looked it up it's Gaelic for something like Shadow/y or Shade/y, or the personal name of a Scottish warrior woman and martial arts teacher. That makes me think Immortals, because warriors. But there's a lot to work with in an order of creation called Shadows.

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Of course if you leave out the Immortals entirely you can get a tidy six part system: born humans can have genes copied to make creations of biological origin, and either can have minds copied to make creations of non-biological origin.

Other systems tend to treat these more like races, yesno? Racial discrimination based on mode of being, owning creations perhaps? But the way the differences are all about procreation and possible futures kind of lends itself to a gender system. And that's still about power. And defamiliarising in this way can highlight that.


I do like the idea of recombining shades to make a new person from two or more minds. If I keep the mechanism as Immortals and Quickenings then it's going to have to stay fanfic, since that style of Immortality through energy transfer is specific to Highlander rather than a generic mechanism. Filing the serial numbers off would be tricky.



Of course making a story out of all this would be tricky. It didn't have a plot, just an unraveling of why we weren't using words or recognising each other in the same ways. I'd have to tie that to some life and death stuff to get it to move anywhere.


I just liked the new toys it presented though, gender and reproduction broken down into new elements, and how very deeply different that would make a society however much else appeared the same.

I just got around to watching the last Sherlock. I'm afraid I have to agree with much of tumblr: That was stupid. Also, sexist. Also, stupid.

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I was reading a thing where a(nother) female writer of science fiction said how she has to use a gender neutral nym to get respect / sell in that market. She said she was frustrated by it because gender shouldn’t matter.

I have to disagree. Gender matters. It’s just not a disqualification for anything.

When I go to the book shop I have a two step sort process on books. One, is it by a woman. Two, is it about a woman. Anything in the SF&F section that matches those criteria and isn’t from a series I gave up on already is going to get bought.

I am not, on the whole, overburdened by books.

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I want to read women doing heroic acts for selfless reasons based in compassion and a strong sense of justice and a need to protect others. I can name a lot of guy books where they do that. It’s not actually hard. I want to read about awesome competent women who have skills they gained by study and hard work. That’s not actually unusual, right? I mean, the world works like that. So where are we?

I’ve been looking in the by+about women books in the hopes we can reflect our experiences in our work maybe better than annoying men can. I am not a damsel or a tower princess, at least not while I’m reading. I want to be a starship captain or a fleet admiral or a paladin or a book learned witch. Why can’t I find where to send my money?

So, women authors: it’s totally up to you which name you use.

Just tell me how to find you if y’all are hiding for the dudes’ sake.

Cause it matters to me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/01/parents-guide-girls-ambitions-women

Government to tell parents how to make their children "aspirational" and "ambitious for themselves".
Because clearly the solution to structural inequalities is to tell individuals they need to try harder.

I guess this may not be obvious to people who have achieved the sort of power that can make this stuff happen, but: sometimes, wanting is not getting.
Telling girls to want more... have we not been asking? Have we not been trying? I rather thought we were.

But no, not according to this bollocks. Apparently we hold ourselves back.

This is not feminism. This is the same old same old in high heels.

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... oh dear, that's a terrible mental image...

ANYways: weird tropes that are common in fanfic and vanishing rare elsewhere - weird things fanfic does with gender.
It's not just the sex swaps that flip characters, either so they were always girls instead of guys or whatever, or so they get cursed or drugged or superscienced and have to deal. I've seen that in manga and a couple of SF things.
But this A/B/O thing that's mostly made of porn, it invents a whole new set of genders, and societies to go with them. The porn mostly makes me *facepalm* but the SF playing with gender stuff I can see the appeal of.

So now there's starting to be A/B/O sex swap, or letter swap anyway, so far I've seen people stay male but become alpha or omega, rather than get swapped to alpha female. They're treated as two different things, m/f and a/b/o, and I have only seen swaps within one letter set. And it seems like these fics are two tropes out from usual, like when SF posits a single change to the ordinary world, but subsequent SF can build on that story to tweak that change, and so on and so forth. So these stories only work because already the tropes genderswap and a/b/o exist.

There's also more than one thing around trying to use genetics and those grids or squares to figure out a/b/o biology and make it look like science. Most of them I feel would benefit from understanding the difference between chromosomes (such as X and Y) and genes (such as eye color). But it's not like I've studied biology for a couple of decades.

so the bunny part of this post is, why make it genetic? if a 'verse can have people get cursed or superscienced to make new and interesting bodies, couldn't a/b/o be that? I vaguely feel I've seen something of the like to do with werewolves. That's an infectious curse, but it's bundled with a lot of not-gender stuff. But say infectious curse is the why of a/b/o, then if it has been around for centuries or millennia everybody would be used to it by now. You couldn't predict letters by regular genetics, and it would drive scientists nuts trying. Or it could be more like the current state of genetics and sexual orientation, where there's people sure there's connections, but it's a big blurry mess picture not a neat little square. But their society would have been reshaped by this mysterious extra gender factor already.

Then add visitors from another planet.
I'm thinking Stargate style, goa'uld experimentation with nanotech, sudden infection, and instead of getting old or whatever everyone wakes up a different letter. Which would kind of resemble the Land of Light mess? But with more brain most of the time. That would be slow to notice as well, so it could be too late to quarantine by the time they realise anything is different.

Or visitors from another universe.
Always fun when someone mirrors in to a bdsm universe or something with such different basic assumptions. But then they go home and decide those dudes are weirdos. Well if they bring the weird home with them...



Trouble is if you get sudden change of whole societies by adding all the messy biological urges in a/b/o fics, you're pretty much looking at mass destruction and a whole lot of awful. Not the happy fun porn. Boo.

But there's already fics that go the dystopia route with this trope, a ton of them, so maybe there'd be a readership for a plague that messes with physical sex.


It could even be a helpful plague dropped by aliens who think we must be so screwed with only the two genders. Depending on how you decide the a/b/o thing tweaks fertility it could be meant to help with population problems. Like, switching humans from every month to rarer heats.

Stargate had that sterility plague. That was a thing people in that universe do to each other.

... Stargate has done some really weird things...




the other way to do it is to add it to the posthuman menu. Like, someone figures out how to do an upgrade that makes a/b/o. The mpreg upgrade, with interesting side effects. Then people would be choosing to become the new sexes. Society would have to adapt/adjust.

I like the social scale that a/b/o 'verses work at. a lot of fic, or superhero or SF or fantasy TV stuff, has a one off weird thing happen to only the protagonists, who get over it by the end of the story. The return to the template so the next writer has the same toys and sandbox. But picking any one invention/innovation and seeing what it would do to society is the SF fun stuff.



Bujold's Vorkosiverse has a combination of the box that makes babies, the minority group hermaphrodites, and sex change operations that are simple and effective. Any herm has decided to stay a herm, because it would be simple for them to be he or she if they wanted. Similarly anyone sticking with the two earlier sexes. And while the boxes that make babies apparently need the genetic contributors to be one male and one female (see Athos sending out for the female contributions), anyone can switch themselves so they, personally, grow male or female parts to contribute. But each innovation, existence of herms, box that makes babies, sex changes, is only explored separately. If you add them all together the possibilities multiply a lot.

And that's without thinking about quaddies or what can come out of a lab on Jackson's Whole.

Marvel's mutants who are just born that way are one kind of interesting, but seeing how society responds to people making themselves over to match their dreams, that's a lot of kinds of interesting. Like, there's a whole set of rhetoric about how people are just born this way (whichever way, sexuality, race, disability), and it's usually aimed at the idea that they can't help it so people should just live and let live. But what if all that stuff is optional? more fighting, less, same but different?

the future is going to look very very complex to us.

you know, if humans survive to get there.




I should start writing fiction and not just bunnies.

I've had Avengers bunnies so long they're about to get Jossed by actual Joss.

... and yet all I do is keep telling myself to start any kind of thing at all...

Okay, there's other stuff in there, but I keep poking River's story a lot.
... despite choosing to focus on the one episode where she appears mostly as a very small baby. :eyeroll:

So: there must be meta around about River Song. And arguments. And wank.
And it has now become relevant to my degree to wade into that lot and see what people think of her and why they've got a problem with her.

... I'm probably going to regret this.

Anyone know where to find some good arguments about River?
Good in any sense you like, good as in convincing or good as in they've been rolling on for years now and show no signs of stopping.

I know what I think about her after reading all these theory books, but I'd like to see what other people think, and there's a weird shortage of academic essays about women in Doctor Who.



... if anyone knows any academic essays about women in Doctor Who, please to link those too, for they are very relevant.




Today I am not having a tantrum yet. Is good.
... #xfingers#


Now I must go and think of an introduction to explain why I am writing about these things that is not 'the Doctor told me to' because academic discourse doesn't think that's a proper good reason.
(I know proper good reasons but I've got to go line them up and write them down)

So far today I have watched Spider-Man and Spider-man 2. 3 is in the machine doing the annoying DVD menu thing.

I am not much enthralled by Peter Parker's dilemmas. ( Read more... )

On the other hand in both movies there are moments that I really, really like, specifically the ones where Peter is not the only hero. The rest of the city is dealing with the same stuff, right alongside him. The firemen and police are responding, just his webs get him there faster or give him an edge against the stranger sorts. And there's the moments, like on the bridge with the cable car in the first movie or on the train in the second one, where the crowd just steps up and says you mess with him, you mess with all of us, or you want him, you go through us. And, yeah, the bad guy demonstrates the ability to go through all of them, but those ordinary people are right there trying. It doesn't make him uniquely heroic. And then Aunt May has a speech about how there's a hero in all of us. So that's solid, that's right, that's people working together and the only difference about this one guy is he's got more of a chance.

Back to things that irritate me: of all those background people, it's always guys having those moments. ( Read more... )

Screaming is annoying me lately. Not that women in movies do it, but that only women do it, and that it never, ever turns out well. ( Read more... ) There's a function and purpose to screaming, and it's not just about the one woman in danger doing the screaming. A scream is both a call for help and an alert system, an alarm. Social groups of animals have individuals who hang out around the edges and watch for bad things and then make a big noise. Valuable role, allows everyone else to react appropriately. But in humans the ones making the big noise are somehow inappropriate, even though it is clearly good for the survival of others if they notice if a supervillain is about to do their thing. It is never considered valuable to alert others, to call for help, to get in multiple witnesses, to avoid handling it yourself in the dark. The loner who ends up with his word against a dead guys on why someone died? That's a hero. The screamer who would have had all actions known to a group? Well that's just a damsel in distress. It's stupid, it's not functioning correctly, it's a wrong way to value things. Kicking all the arse might be the fun part, but people who make all the judgements alone are scary. So it should be of the good to make a big noise and get a crowd to react appropriately, be that run toward or run away.

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I know I forgot the story on the 3rd one after last time I watched it, and these characters don't live in my head between viewings. But they're okay films.



So now I'm trying to fit them all together with Avengers movies, even though I know they're slightly different 'verses. ( Read more... )

Next I shall watch all the X Men films. Except for First Class because the shop didn't have it.

Or possibly I shall sleep.

Three blogs full of photos and art:

http://www.jimchines.com/2012/01/striking-a-pose/

http://justsayins.tumblr.com/post/14957660366/this-needs-to-stop-and-let-me-tell-you-why
http://justsayins.tumblr.com/post/15063906958/its-funny

Two people trying to pose the way women in drawings and cover art do, one gender swapped, one a martial artist contortionist. Neither can get the poses. One is hilarious.

I don't get why all the art ends up samey. Sometimes the books are pretty samey too, but it's still daft. Book covers that bear no resemblance to the characters inside are persistently irritating. Book covers that just aren't physically possible? *eyeroll*

I like the picture on the martial artist's one of some real flashy moves. I want more like that. Real skill looks better anyways.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/04/why-british-public-life-dominated-men

Someone did counting of people writing and presenting news and current affairs programs. The papers or shows that get up to 1/3 women are doing well. 1/5 is more likely. And it is frequently just the one woman on her own. But some shows manage to be 100% male still. They did a lot more counting in a lot more places and talked to the gatekeepers and heard some reasons. Like, that it's from subconscious lazy, inviting people they already heard of, who just happen to be disproportionately men. Also mentions people of color and attempts to do counting on twitter with the hashtag "diversity audit", though I'm not on twitter and can't get that to work. Is a good long article.

Half of viking burials actually women
Previously the graves were figured to be for males because they had swords and armour and, you know, Boy Things. But how did people know they were Boy Things? Not by looking at the bones. They just now did that. "The bones were sorted for telltale osteological signs of which gender they belonged to, rather than assuming that burial with a sword or knife denoted a male burial." Now they have looked at the bones, half of them were guys, half of them were women.

... is this how women get invisible? Did they just not actually look before?

So, now they have found that half of Vikings was women (or roughly, maybe, could have been), what does the article conclude?

"Women may have accompanied male Vikings in those early invasions of England, in much greater numbers than scholars earlier supposed, McLeod concludes. Rather than the ravaging rovers of legend, the Vikings arrived as marriage-minded colonists."

... you see the *facepalm* in that paragraph?
Why phrase it that women accompany men when they were 50/50?
And why, when the witness reports say they were kick arse ravagers, conclude that the reports are wrong, because women were there so it must be Secretly About Marriage?

There's more context and evidence and the move here start a family version is probable from other stuff I've read, but those two sentences do not belong on the end of this report.

Women had swords. And shields. And viking burials with them.
Conclusion: Women kick arse too.

I've only got the first 3 eps transcribed so I can't count 4 or 5. Also even when I've got an accurate list of speaking characters I won't be able to count 5. I'm not watching that again.

But I'm going to count people in the first 3 days. I go through the transcript, copy all the names of speaking people, label them best as I can see (currently from memory), and then add people up. I can't count the children, they are Many and Varied.
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So it works out at about 41-44% women and 15% people of color for these three episodes.
Which is... actually vaguely embarassing since I vaguely felt there were A Lot Of Women, and we're still not up to half.
But for the show is doing better.

Very roughly. Still need to check.
Need the names and categories for people in day 4 and 5.

This is a first draft and I shouldn't draw conclusions from it.


I haven't figured out Bechdel pass/fail yet. Two named women, yes. Who talk to each other, yes, but is it about a man or in a group including men? Have to check. Think y and y.

That requires brain and reading or watching tho. And I've done a bunch of that for right now.

also I should be asleep by now.

http://characterscount.pbwiki.com/Torchwood#view=page
http://characterscount.pbworks.com/Torchwood-S1%2C-S2
Yes, someone made a wiki so if the theoretical crowds of fans all help count then we can put all the numbers in the same place.
Still working on formatting, standardising and accessibility.
It was pointed out my pretty color codes aren't helpful for people that don't see pretty colors.
Also, some of them are too pale for me to read, now I think about it. :eyeroll:
So I made it a bit different.
I will make it different again once I think of a better way to phrase it.

I also added a column for the test the person counting SG1 does where it's the race equivalent of Bechdel, two people of color talking about something other than a white person. I've filled in a few, but where there's more than two characters involved I might have to watch again to check. And I'm not watching again for a while. But it being a wiki other people can fill in the boxes if they happen to know.
... okay, actually, I could figure it out from my notes and have spent the morning doing so.

I keep feeling like the thing where two people of color seldom get to talk is less of a Thing than the one where two women don't get to talk to each other, because there's a half the country of women and less than half of people of color here. But I also am the first to say it doesn't matter if women aren't much in the military or whatever because they're making up stories and they can make stories better. Also while a random sample might be 10% any given person of color will have ancestors of color too, just for starters, so their lives aren't random and should have more people in. So I think it's my feeling I need to change.

details on people of color below the cut
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