A more inclusive con?

Stephen B: “I first noticed how unusually inclusive Nine Worlds was about two minutes after collecting my badge from the front desk. Wandering down the corridor I found myself in… a geek feminism session.

“I was greeted cheerfully and given a quick intro to what was going on, and then left to join the various groups sitting around the (very popular) room at tables and in small lively seated circles on the floor. The crowd in this room didn’t know my views or that I write for BadRep, and I’m a straight white male – generally not a famously marginalised group – but I felt immediately welcome.

“In the next room along, Bronies were playing guitar and handing out cupcakes. They also had a rave DJ. In that moment, I suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical SF convention.”

Safe space?

Viktoriya: “I went to Nine Worlds and I wasn’t groped, harassed, belittled or condescended to. I felt comfortable enough to walk around dressed in my own clothes, and not necessarily the elaborate armour of ballgowns, cosplay or similar I’d adopted when frequenting prior conventions.

“More to the point, I felt comfortable enough to go around ON MY OWN. I can’t stress this enough. I stopped going to conventions because it had become apparent to me that I was paying a great deal of money to attend an event where it was pretty much guaranteed that I would be assaulted in some way, whereas daily assault is something most women can have for free simply by walking down the street in London. Why pay for the privilege?”

“Not being groped, forcibly intoxicated, called a cocktease, an uppity feminist, a silly little girl, or asked to kiss someone for the amusement of male onlookers – it was like a whole new world.”

“Also, I managed to convince my work friend to come with me to Nine Worlds. You guys, you have no idea of the stress associated with this.

“What if someone was a dick to her? What if she was assaulted? What if she hated it? Then I would be the work friend who convinced her to spend money on the the thing that was dreadful.

“So not being groped, forcibly intoxicated, called a cocktease, an uppity feminist, a silly little girl, or asked to kiss someone for the amusement of male onlookers – it was like a whole new world.”

Stephen: “It seems that every big convention recently has had a wave of harassment and bad experiences for some attendees. NineWorlds appeared to do things right instead, with a kick-ass anti-harassment policy and some seriously great content.”

Running a content track

Hannah Chutzpah: “It was an honour and a privilege to be asked to run the creative writing track. I spent pretty much the whole run-up panicking and convinced my everything would be a huge disaster…. right up until the second session where my longtime frenemy – author Chris Farnell – gave a talk on ‘Working the Time Machine: writing time travel so it makes sense’.

“We had a packed out room, with people hanging out the doors. Then, as the crowds left and I patted Chris and myself on the back, starting to believe this whole thing might work – this toy car, sent by the Bronies (pictured) whirred through the door full of cupcakes.”

Fandom and atmosphere

Stephen: “Nine Worlds is set up to include a wide range of fandoms and geekery, and all the different fans are welcome in the same space. There was so much going on, I barely saw the other Team BadRep folks.”

“It wasn’t just ‘here’s the gay corner’, so it felt much more open to (say) the B and the T and the Q of ‘LGBTQ*’. Which – as a bi girl – I found very, very refreshing.”

Hannah: “I didn’t get out to as much of the rest of the fest as you two, but the main thing which spilled across every room, hallway, lobby, breakfast bar and so on was the extremely friendly and welcoming nature of the whole conference.

“The only other geek con I’ve been to was the SFX weekender, which wasn’t unfriendly , but I also can’t remember half as much mingling (or half as many reasons to mingle) as there were here.”

Stephen: “I’m not a convention-goer. The friendly atmosphere and lack of judging at Nine Worlds was the kind of pleasant, safe space I’d assume any good con would try for, but from everything I’ve heard in recent years this one got it unusually right.

“I saw tweets from people saying that having dedicated LGBTQ* content made such a difference to their time there. Even the Bronies didn’t seem to get the usual derision, mostly because they were just unrelentingly happy and frequently gave you cake.”

Faves?

Hannah: The two standout workshops for me, personally, were fantasy novelist Tom Pollock’s creative writing workshop on Making Monsters – which generated at least one idea I’m going to be writing into a short story.

“Also, Emma Newman ran a workshop on ‘Fear and Writing’ – drawing on her own experiences as an author.

“Two takeaway things for me were her describing procrastination as a fear-based behaviour, and
that perfectionism is fear’s favourite coat. Emma – thank you. That stuff really spoke to me. Like, more than my shrink does.”

Viktoriya: “It was wonderful to have so many different tracks, and to NOT have diversity and inclusiveness be shunted off to the side with, “oh, well, we’re covering that in X track” – rather, you had panels on inclusiveness and discrimination across all the different tracks.

Hannah: “And since it wasn’t ‘here’s the gay corner’ it felt much more open to (say) the B and the T and the Q sections. Which – as a bi girl – I found very, very refreshing.”

Stephen: “On the Friday night I went to a swordfighting workshop with Miltos Yerolemou, the actor who played Syrio Forel in Game of Thrones.

“It was a lot of fun, and at least two thirds of the attendees were women (one of whom was you, Viktoriya, and I totally clocked your expression of demonic glee when you got to swing a very large wooden sword, which suggested you enjoyed the session!).”

Viktoriya: “I loved that there was a knitting track, and a My Little Pony track, and a board games track. It stressed the diversity of interests that are brought together under the fandom and geek umbrellas in a way that cannot be present in any single-show or single-theme convention.

“The fact that the ‘celebrity guests’ were actually there for panels, activities and workshops primarily, with singing autographs very much a secondary activity, was even better. I despair of the autograph factories modern conventions have become. Queueing for eight hours is not my idea of fun.”

Could-do-betters?

Viktoriya: “Well, OK, let me argue with myself for a little bit. I’m going to nitpick here, not out of anger but because the organisers have shown a genuine interest in learning from their mistakes and in improving the experience in coming years.

“So, accessibility. I don’t know what the experience was for those attendees with limited mobility, but I am relatively able-bodied and even I found it a bit cumbersome navigating the stairs in two hotels with only the few lifts.

“Ultimately, that’s what I’m looking for in a convention: committing to doing better next time when mistakes are made.”

“Some of the multimedia was a little difficult to engage with without risking pain – strobe lighting, very loud soundscape, and so on.

“Bringing in a general warning system (a sign on the door?) of strobe lighting for those affected by it, and doing a soundcheck before launching the sound and leaving it at whatever level, would be good.”

Stephen: “I went to the board games hotel only briefly, and there were lots of steep stairs, but then that’s the one used for loads of much bigger cons, so I’m sure they must have a solution in place?”

Viktoriya: “Well, big cons tend to have a like it or lump it policy. They have priority queuing for fans with mobility issues, but that’s about it as far as I’m aware. Individual cons may have a better provision, but I don’t know.”

“Then there’s the issue of diversity in organisers and session leads. Part of this is maybe due to the fact that it was the first Nine Worlds, but the organisers, session leads and attendees were overwhelmingly white.

“Take the panel on Problematic Issues – some odd things were said during this sessions, and it was also an entirely white panel (so discussing representations of race was rather awkward). I think it was trying to cover too many fandom issues: racism in fanfic and fandom, fetishing gay sex, writing male characters and ignoring female ones, reaffirming heteronormative norms, etc. In an hour.

“Contrast this with the Racefail 101 panel in the Books track, which brought together awesome writers of colour to focus on writing characters of colour, and seeking out writers of colour.

“Given the number of tracks and the number of organisers required, I’d suggest that the lead organisers work on diversifying the track leads.”

“With accessibility, big cons tend to have a like-it-or-lump-it policy. They have priority queuing for fans with mobility issues, but often that’s about it.”

“Finally, I disagree with Steve on the inclusiveness extended to the Bronies, mostly because in the sessions I was present at, they were frequently the butt of the joke.

“Fundamentally, I think it’s uncool to include something as a track (and therefore give implicit approval of its existence) and then spend the weekend being a bit weirded out by it. I don’t claim to be part of the MLP fandom, but I thought it was a bit harsh.”

Stephen: “I didn’t see the panels where Bronies were mocked, but I did see a lot of people commenting out loud that this was their first experience of them and they thought Bronies were awesome.”

Viktoriya: “I wonder if part of it isn’t a reflexive ‘let’s build a hierarchy’ instinct. Certainly there was that feeling at times at the fanfic panels, and some of the comments re: board gaming from attendees. The Bronies were the only ones where I heard panellists commenting on it, though, and there is some evidence that attendees felt a bit singled out.”

“What I do think is great is that the organisers of the Problematic Issues panel realised what had gone wrong, and have publically acknowledged it and committed to doing better next time.

“Ultimately, that’s what I’m looking for in a convention. There were a few tweeted mentions of positive and negative feedback (which, to their credit, the Nine Worlds twitter feed retweeted).”

Let’s wrap this up…

Hannah: “I think everyone involved understands it was a first attempt at a huge thing and the learning curve was, and will continue to be, pretty damn steep – but I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of it or more excited about next year.”

Viktoriya: “Since there’s a year until the next Nine Worlds I guess I’ll conclude with some general links on the inclusion and harassment issues – if you’re thinking of going to a convention and are concerned about safety, or if you have been harassed at a convention and want to know how to report it, have a look at these resources:

• Elise Mathesen’s experience of reporting sexual harassment here, including a contact and resource list for reporting it here.
• Carrie Cuinn’s experiences and guide for reporting are here and here
• Finally, the odious Ted Beale was recently finally expelled from SFWA. NK Jemisin has written a blisteringy on-point post on racism and misogyny in SFF, Beale’s expulsion, and the behaviour which led to it.

“Most of all, I loved the fact that I enjoyed Nine Worlds so much, I have already decided I’m going next year. No uncertainty, no hmm-maybe and oh-yes-perhaps. I’m going next year because it was wonderful. How can you argue with that?”

One reason behind how badly the Vagenda article was received was, I think, the authors’ attempt to address a relatively specific issue (‘Leave Caitlin alone, she’s working-class and hardly anyone else in the UK media is!’ – as if that isn’t in itself a whacking great elephant in the room, on which more later), and to address it in the more or less specific context of the kind of feminism they’d seen and experienced in the UK, without recognising that, well, feminism is really fucking big.

As explained in this post, ‘feminism’, even just within the UK, is not and never has been exclusively ‘a white, middle class movement’. The history, theory and practice of feminism is diverse, multiracial, international, and takes in issues of class, age and sexuality among others. Throughout feminism’s development there have been, as noted here, tension, discussion and conflict within the movement over how this diversity is represented, and, as noted here in 2008, there continue to be.

The concept of intersectionality is, in part, a way of helping to articulate this diversity. This was the very term Vagenda identified, oddly, as an example of unhelpfully academic language, when in fact, as the vast majority of responses to their article have pointed out, it’s one that’s relatively simple to explain by reference to lived experience. It’s also a term whose practical relevance is easily proved; in the immediate fall-out from Caitlin Moran’s failure to question Lena Dunham on the racial diversity of Girls, her fellow journalist Bim Adewunmi did a comprehensive and accessible job of clarifying why this mattered, both explaining intersectionality and making a positive case for it:

I am a woman, a black woman born in London to Nigerian parents, a Muslim woman (who does not wear a hijab or veil). I am educated and self-employed but relatively low-earning. These things, as standalones or collectively, define how I see the world. One often bleeds into the other so comprehensively, they seem almost interchangeable. This is, in its most basic form, what we call intersectionality: the idea that we wear a lot of caps, and often in challenging one wrong, we are challenging many. In reading that Moran tweet, my first thought was: “I cannot afford to take off my ‘race cap’ and focus just on the plain ol’ sexism that plagues the television industry; and nor do I want to.” – Source

Intersectionality allows the integration of systems of oppression – patriarchy, capitalism, racism, among others – to be identified, analysed, and challenged, and it provides a means of transcending and critiquing single-issue politics. The theory may be obscure, the practice surely is not.

There is an identifiable, and to some extent understandable, urge within some pop-feminist platforms to crusade against a feminism which they describe as too theoretical, remote and academic to gain mass appeal. The idea of a divide between academic and populist ways of promoting progressive politics is not unique to feminism; a similar debate periodically engulfs much of the left. How can ‘ordinary women’, or indeed ‘ordinary people’, be appealed to in language which will resonate with their everyday concerns and not alienate them by using words of more than two syllables?

But the first half of that question doesn’t automatically imply the second. Being ‘ordinary’ doesn’t mean being stupid. It doesn’t mean not having been to university either. Politics predicated on the assertion of an academic/middle-class versus populist/working-class divide are, at best, disingenuous, presenting as mutually exclusive what is surely more a question of priorities.

There is a difference between wishing to focus on ‘ordinary’, material concerns – the gradual erosion of living and working standards under the present government; closures and funding cuts to women’s refuges and childcare services; the removal of housing, child, and disability benefits – and assuming that the people affected by these concerns cannot recognise, analyse and talk about them for themselves, in language which can be sophisticated as well as rudimentary.

Too often, in debates within feminism – often valid and necessary debates – over how best to engage ‘ordinary women’, these women are implicitly othered, there to be appealed to and won over by more enlightened middle-class feminists rather than considered capable of engaging in the debate on their own terms and by themselves.

In such narratives, liberal commentators often employ presumptious ideas of what ‘a working-class girl’ might think of feminism, without having any meaningful direct experience of this on which to draw. Back in March, by contrast, the Camden New Journal writer Pavan Amara produced an excellent piece for The F-Word in which she interviewed a variety of working-class women and recorded their opinions and attitudes towards feminism. Her conclusion – that working-class women face preoccupying problems of poverty and inequality, and frequently regard mainstream feminism as remote and irrelevant – is the same kind of thing that Vagenda’s post was trying to get at, but far more plausibly expressed and empirically grounded. My problem lies not with that argument itself, but with the patronising ideas about class which seem to inform so many presentations of the argument.

It’s particularly galling to see an assertion with which I agree – that class is an aspect of identity too often left out of debate – being used in ways which can actually shore up negative assumptions about class. From Vagenda’s article:

Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse (what are they going to do? Protect or feed themselves with theory? Women cannot dine on Greer alone.) “This woman does not represent me”, they will think of their well-meaning lecturer, because how can she, with her private education and her alienating terminology and her privilege, how can she know how poverty gnaws away at your insides and suppresses your voice? How would she know how that feels?

(I assume there’s been an unintended elision between secondary and university education made there, since in my state comprehensive we had teachers, not lecturers, and I’d be frankly astounded if any of them had been privately educated – they’d been educated, yes, but by the state, exactly as I was being. ‘State-educated’ shouldn’t be used as a synonym for ‘stupid’ either.)

Generalisations like this are often in danger of buying into narratives which see working-class parents, schools and communities as unable to impart education or instil political consciousness in the same way as their middle-class counterparts, and which present working-class girls as the helpless inhabitants of some kind of neo-Victorian netherworld, a perspective which is, again, less helpful than it clearly wishes to be.

What this perspective also neglects is that Women’s Studies, at least in the UK, was rooted to a large extent in attempts by women of generally less privileged backgrounds to question and critique the privileges of existing academia and to draw attention to neglected perspectives and experiences, including those marginalised by virtue of class, race, age and sexuality. That feminism in academia is now considered middle-class and irrelevant perhaps says more about the squeezing out of attention to and discussion of class-based analysis within it; the erosion of empowering traditions of adult education and of self-education through libraries and community colleges; and the pricing out at postgraduate and increasingly at undergraduate level of poorer students, than anything about education’s intrinsic appeal to and suitability for anyone outside the bourgeoisie.

The unhelpful aspects of these well-intentioned arguments are compounded by the fact that those who find themselves in the position to make them to a mass audience are hardly ever working-class themselves. The restriction of access to politics, media, arts and entertainment to those with the parental support or independent wealth to get them through unpaid internships, or maintain them in precarious freelance work, is referenced increasingly often as it becomes more glaringly apparent, but hardly ever with a view to how the situation might be changed. Caitlin Moran is frequently held up as a representative of The Real World on the grounds that she had it tough once upon a time, as though her current individual high profile makes up for the fact that there is hardly any mainstream media or political platform for those who continue to have it tough right now. To their credit, it’s not as if Vagenda don’t recognise this:

What feminism needs is more voices – a whole chorus of them. By all means, we can criticise those already at the top, but we should be combining that with a real desire to listen to women from all walks of life and their experiences: to actively seek them out, rather than waiting for the lucky few to claw their way into our ranks. Giving them jobs on newspapers so that they can write movingly and persuasively about the inequalities they suffer.

But what should also be recognised is that an intersectional perspective is vital in facilitating these developments, and that intersectionality affects the very focus on ‘ordinary’ concerns which these arguments advocate. The political climate since the banking crisis of 2008, and the imposition of economic austerity, has only sharpened the need to prioritise issues of material inequality and financial stability – especially for women. Much of the burden of analysing and opposing the impact on women of rising unemployment and the erosion of the welfare state is being shouldered by women whose identities mean they are under attack from several intersecting angles: as low earners, as mothers, as women of colour – very often, all three. Here for instance is Ava Vidal interrogating the myth of reliance on benefits as a ‘lifestyle option’ (and doing so, incidentally, in highly accessible language):

The promotion of a multiplicity of voices within feminism is surely better done in ways which challenge alienating ideas of what ‘feminism’ is, rather than in ways which risk entrenching these ideas by presenting feminism as an intrinsically white-normative and middle-class-normative movement which should benevolently open its gates to ‘others’.¹ I believe that a lot of working-class awareness of disadvantage and oppression is already informed by what we may as well call a feminist impulse, even if the women in question wouldn’t necessarily call themselves feminists.

Equally, while there’s nothing wrong in seeking to engage ‘ordinary’ women in feminism through using ‘accessible, populist’ language, it’s also not too much to ask for this language to be conscious and sensitive, free of condescension and stereotyping, and seeking to be inclusive through attention to race, ability, age and sexuality as well as class. The problems of the ‘ordinary’ working class are inherently intersectional: material inequality is intersected by racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, all experienced as real and immediate issues rather than matters of abstract theory. It’s just that this generally takes place outside a media and political mainstream which is increasingly the preserve of a homogenous and insular elite. Liberal condescension which pays lip service to issues of race and class is less meaningful than attempts to address the many failings in cultural and political representation which make it increasingly difficult for non-privileged voices to be engaged with on their own terms.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: I think it should be noted that Team BadRep, who are (among other things) predominantly white, wouldn’t seek to claim that we always avoid falling into this trap in everything we do – almost certainly we don’t. But it’s important to try.

Wobbly Utopia

Let’s be honest, Star Trek has had some bad press over the years. Its gender politics were sometimes a bit wonky. Its racial politics also wobbled a bit. Its view of homosexuality was that it didn’t exist, and if it did, only aliens were gay (and if they were hot, semi-naked female aliens, so much the better). Most people in the Western world have seen at least one episode of the original series, and if they saw it at any point other than the ’60s, they may have formed some negative views. There were probably Forehead Aliens involved, and the sets probably wobbled a bit. Captain Kirk spoke… with many… pauses… and… gestures. Spock raised an eyebrow. McCoy said, “He’s dead, Jim,” and at least one redshirt died to prove it was serious. And maybe it was interesting at the time, and had some interesting ideas, but then ten million spin-offs followed, and then there was a film, and Zoe Saldana ran around in a miniskirt while Chris Pine fought Zachary Quinto in an erotically-charged episode of fisticuffs on the bridge.

This is all true, and the less said about the debacle of Enterprise, the better. But the thing is, none of this detracts from the achievements of the original series. I’ll start with this cast photo…

Original Trek, second season cast. Image (c) Paramount

You’ll notice several things immediately:

1) everyone is wearing implausible outfits and has magical levitating hair;

2) the women are in miniskirts; and

3) the Russian guy is definitely wearing a wig.

But look a bit closer. This is a second season cast photo, so that places it in 1967/8, in a show marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. There are people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and there are also two women. Neither are secretaries.

I could talk at length about what Star Trek has done in promoting a vision of a multicultural, utopian future. The crew included a Russian crewmember at a time when the Cold War was going strong; it included a Japanese crewmember not so very long after WWII and not in a chop socky or waiter role. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, when Kirk and Uhura are forced to embrace in the otherwise execrable episode, Plato’s Stepchildren. (In fact, the actors ensured that the actual kiss, rather than a simulated one, was shown, by pulling faces in all subsequent retakes.) The Federation itself is a multicultural utopia, where member nations hate each other and violently disagree on everything, and yet will work together for the common good just the same.

Living in the Future

I could focus instead on the technological impact. I could talk about classic Trek ‘inventing’ a cornucopia of future tech, from mobile phones to warp drive to transporters. Sure, warp drive remains an impossibility, and thus far transporters have only managed to send bits of plastic from one transporter to another, more akin to The Prestige than true teleportation, but how many people were thinking about it at all before Trek dreamed it up? Someone always has to dream up the idea before it can be invented. Sure, Trek only invented their Feinbergers because they didn’t have enough money and had to make do from scrounging through the waste bins of other shows, but that’s the beauty of it. Other people’s rubbish – when painted purple and hung on the wall – was enough to inspire people. Now that’s impressive.

Fandom

Or I could discuss the creation of slash fiction, of how it came about in the 1970s in response to the cancellation of Trek. Of how fans – primarily female and in their 20s and 30s – loved the characters and missed them so much that they got together and wrote stories for them. Many of them got published and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list – AC Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son was a fanzine before it was a book, for instance. I could talk about how they took the names Kirk and Spock and made them into Kirk/Spock, the slash in the middle indicating a homoerotic relationship. I’ve read the early slash efforts, and frankly, they’re not terribly good: it’s primarily people writing about sex they’re not having, in plots that aren’t convincing, with art that is a bit lacking. But the thing is, it’s astonishing that those early fanzines existed at all, that communities sprung up with such fervour and dedication to focus on one little show, long-cancelled. These days, ‘slash’ means an m/m story, irrespective of fandom. Many young fans have no idea of the origin of the term and, influenced in equal measure by anime yaoi naming conventions, will mark the pairing with an x (eg. KirkxSpock), yet still refer to the relationship as ‘slash’. The name endures.

That’s not all that Trek decided online. When the internet started up, the Trek groups had a tricky problem: both classic and TNG‘s main characters shared letters. This was a disaster at a time when Usenet was the main source of contact, and subject lines were limited to a small number of characters. Naming and pairing conventions quickly sprang up, with the order of the letters indicating the pairing. American film rating systems were brought into use. [FIC] TOS: New Dawn, K/S, Mc, NC-17 (1/1) was instantly decipherable as a post title. Trek fandom has had a massive impact on fandom in general, its conventions and rules seeping through a multitude of others.

Making History

Then there are the people that Trek has influenced. How about Rev. Martin Luther King, for example? In a candid conversation with Nichelle Nichols, he expressed his admiration for her work as Uhura, and urged her to remain on the show at a time when she was considering quitting. Or maybe Dr Mae Jamison, the first African American woman in space. She, too, watched the show as a child and was inspired by the example that Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura set.

“I’ll protect you, fair maiden.”

“Sorry, neither!”

– Sulu tries to ‘rescue’ Uhura, but she’s having none of it in the first season episode, The Naked Time.

Mae Jamison, being awesome.

How can you NOT love a show that gives you this much awesomeness?

“Ah,” I hear you cry, “but you’ve only talked about the impact of the show, not the show itself! I distinctly recall some dodgy gender politics at work…”

A Handy Viewing Guide for the New Recruit

Yes. OK, I admit it. Star Trek, like many shows at the time, had its writing farmed out to a pool of writers that took story outlines and turned them into scripts. Maybe they knew and loved the show and its characters, maybe they didn’t know them from Adam. Sometimes you had Harlan Ellison delivering City on the Edge of Forever, and sometimes you had Arthur Heinemann’s The Way to Eden, where space hippies sing songs and the viewer writhes in agony. So what? No show out there can claim to have 100% hit rate, and when Trek got it right, they really got it right. So here are a few episodes to check out, mostly from Season 1, but a couple from the later seasons:

1. Where No Man Has Gone Before: where two members of the crew develop god-like powers and the inevitable happens. There is gratuitous eye-candy, in the shape of Kirk’s bared chest. Meanwhile the lead female character is dressed in exactly the same uniform as everyone else, down to the ridiculous bell-bottoms. She’s the ship’s psychiatrist, and ends up saving the day… sort of.
2. Charlie X: where a young boy with god-like powers… yes, OK. But this is a creepy, scary little episode, with eye candy provided by the semi-naked Kirk wrestling for no apparent reason. More disturbing is Charlie’s attempted rape of a crewwoman, his reactions coarse and demanding and selfish, and hers grown-up and mature. He may be the one using violence, but she never once relinquishes her control.

“There’s no right way to hit a woman.”

– James Kirk to Charlie X, after the latter slaps Yeoman Rand’s bottom, Charlie X.

3. The Menagerie: where the original pilot is reworked. Trek does loyalty, captivity, mind-control and extreme measures.
4. Balance of Terror: the Cold War episode, where Kirk informs a crewmember that bigotry has no place on his bridge.
5. Devil in the Dark: where the crew learn not to make assumptions about appearances.
6. City on the Edge of Forever: where Harlan Ellison disavows all knowledge of this rather excellent episode. Kirk, Spock and McCoy end up in 1930s Earth, where Kirk meets Joan Collins, a peace activist who runs a homeless shelter. She’s strong and independent and a visionary, and is unmistakably the love of his life. (Therefore, according to the requirements of drama, she must die.)
7. Mirror Mirror: Where Uhura wears an even more revealing uniform, and evil!Spock mind-invades McCoy.
8. The Enterprise Incident: where the opposing Romulan commander is female, and is tricked in the expected way. What isn’t expected is her dignity throughout. Kirk and Spock treat her throughout as their equal.
9. Is There In Truth No Beauty?: Where Trek had a blind character, and had her as the lead guest character for the episode.
10. Turnabout Intruder: where Kirk and an old flame – who has a grudge – trade bodies. This episode, for all its flaws, is fascinating. Janice Lester was a contemporary of Kirk’s, and they were briefly involved. However, she never got command, something she attributed to her gender. In Trek-world, she has no argument: her gender is irrelevant. In 1960s America, this is something so obvious that it was rarely mentioned: of course her gender stopped her from getting command, no woman could possibly be a military commander! Lester’s fury is so intently realised that you can’t help feeling sorry for her, for all her insanity… and rooting for her, just a little.

“Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”

– Janice Lester, Turnabout Intruder

Trek and Me

Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009

So, there it is: my deepest, darkest secret. I studied maths and music as a child because of Trek. I got into fandom because of Trek, trying to navigate newsgroups in a cybercafe at age 13 when an Amstrad was the height of luxury. I have the DVDs, and a few of the books, and many of the friends. And above it all, when people ask what I want to do when I grow up, my immediate, unspoken reaction is, “I want to be an astronaut.”

Tell me that’s a bad thing.

Round Two: Sassy, Sassy Superheroes

Jenni: I demand to know what the costume designers were thinking when they called these travesties Captain America costumes, or Ninja Turtle or Wolverine costumes. I mean, I don’t think you could get into a S.H.I.E.L.D. base dressed like that and claim to be Cap. Masters of disguise, these costume makers are not.

But you look nothing LIKE Wolverine!

I was the kid who thought ‘shoddy work’ when comic book inkers coloured in panels of Wolverine’s costume the wrong colour. What do you expect will be my reaction when you try to sell me that and call it a Wolverine costume? The only time I’ve seen a male superhero wear a skirt that short was when Deadpool put on Jean Grey’s costume and insisted he was an X-Man.

Rob: Just for the record, I’m planning to do that particular Deadpool outfit for a convention next summer.

Markgraf: Fuck NEXT SUMMER, do it for THIS WEEKEND!

Miranda: This Green Lantern one’s not so bad. Good: it still has those huge abs printed on it! No toning down the muscle power for the ladies. Less good: The lines on the front come over like a bra made out of sinew. Even She-Hulk does not possess this feature.

Sarah J: Sassy Thor Girl is quite amusing. The Mighty Avenger! It’s the coy way she’s cradling the hammer that makes it. And her angry thunder god fluffy boot-tops. Are they intended to represent clouds? Anyway, I think this is one example among thousands of the failure to translate power from a masculine to a feminine character. Thor is big and strong and powerful! Look at his beard, muscles and giant throbbing hammer! Thor Girl is… er… sexy? Sassy? Look at her fluffy boots of death!

Sassy!

Miranda: Yes! The failure to translate power thing you just said? I think that nails it. Look at how Marvin-Martian-girl has no war helmet. Also, I find it really weird how these manufacturers seem to think adding heels to things in the promo shots is logical – the worst offender by far is this shot of a Neytiri from Avatar costume. That character lives in a rainforest, rides a psychic dinosaur and is part of a tribe considering waging a war, in effect, on consumerism. The electric blue stilettoes scream “just took that dinosaur on a sweet trip to Topshop”. Which sort of ruins the whole nature-hippy vibe.

Rob: Also, this seems relevant.

Miranda: Yes. This is all, really, less about Halloween specifically and more about general societal trends around gender and bodies and clothing writ large. Why are we meant to be so uncomfortable with male flesh on display in this way? Sexy male costumes do exist, but they tend to be seen as much more out of place at a general house party than a woman in stockings and suspenders.

Jenni: By the way, I think these posters are amazing. They were created by STARS – Students Teaching Against Racism, at Ohio University, and I think they really get the point across about cultural appropriation and racism at costume parties.

Sarah J: Those posters are ace.

Miranda: Yes. Yet another reason why Sexy Chinese Takeaway should just go on fire.

Jenni: Take Back Halloween and their well-researched selection of costume ideas are still going strong, judging by this appearance on The Mary Sue. I mentioned them in the Halloween post I made on BR last year. Goddesses, queens, warriors and pirates – all costumes I’d consider!

Miranda: And for everything else, there’s always Angry Birds, which is just bringing everyone together in a transcendently glorious sexy-free world of cushioning and big eyebrows.

NEXT: What we’re wearing, and our absolute favourite WTF costume Yandy.com has yet spewed into the world

I want to think about icons, and how activists use them, particularly how protest movements – satirically or seriously – “borrow” figures from previous eras – art, history, legend – and recast them for current ends. On the one hand, as a post on the F-Word nearly a year ago outlined with feeling, this can create frustration, particularly around the idea of setting up individual “heroes” – even when they are rooted in metaphor – within a protest dynamic, which will usually derive much of its force from sheer collective whump. On the other hand, like any exercise in comparing bits of art, looking at the feminist movement’s choices of icons and allegories paints an invigorating kind of conversation down the centuries.

Let’s start with Joan of Arc, resurrected forcefully by the suffragettes in the early 20th century to grace more than a few posters … and an impressive spate of parades.

Yes, parades.

Deeds, Words, and Military Martyrdom

Check this out.

This is Elsie Howey in April 1909 – the month Joan of Arc was beatified by the Catholic Church – preparing to ride a white charger through the streets of London in armour as part of a parade to celebrate noted suffragette Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence’s release from prison.

Two years later, in June 1911, Marjorie Annan Bryce (seriously, you have to see this next pic) led WSPU members through London the same way as part of a procession organised a week before George V’s coronation. (The horse was led by a young woman dressed as Robin Hood.) The Women’s Coronation Procession was one of the largest WSPU demos, and it marched with Joan of Arc at its head.

Three years later, in Baltimore, Ida Baker Neepier also climbed onto a horse whilst clad in armour. Earlier that same year, English Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan had expressed his consternation in a speech that the suffragettes wanted “to make Joan of Arc one of [their] patronesses”.

Joan – canonised in 1920 – was a central icon for the women’s suffrage movement in Europe and North America. The WSPU in particular, with its emphasis on militant tactics, were especially enamoured of her, and Hilda Dallas designed a poster featuring her, wearing a tabard emblazoned with the word JUSTICE, to promote their magazine.

Oh, and here’s the thoroughly don’t-mess Nellie Van Slingerland with a load of “Joan of Arc Suffrage League” flags in NYC. (Would you mess with this hat? I thought not.)

Joan was a perfect fit for the suffragettes, personifying militant force and virtue simultaneously. For context, Victorian literary culture allowed plenty room for female heroism of a certain kind; for example, Grace Darling was idolised. But the demands of heroism, when they force the heroine of a Victorian novel out of the domestic sphere, often spring from a moral imperative (the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Law And The Lady, for example, defies the men around her to save her man from himself). Adopting Joan as patroness – a woman who had abandoned domesticity for battlefields only to act on imperatives sent to her in divine visions – gave the suffragettes’ cause similarly pressing moral overtones.

Joan herself was something of a hot topic at the time; Sara Bernhardt had appeared as her on stage in 1898 and publically endorsed women’s suffrage after the Joan of Arc Suffrage League welcomed her to the US in 1910. The tragic events of the 1913 Derby saw Emily Davison cast as a literal Joan in WSPU eulogies; they were quick to capitalise on the acquisition of a contemporary martyr-narrative to go with historical ones. In the US, when Inez Milholland, who famously asked the President how long women should wait for Liberty, died of pneumonia in 1916, she was directly represented as Joan by artists.

These days, however, we’re not falling over Joan of Arc button badges (although I do own this pretty natty sketchbook from the Museum of London) and Joan is not the Twitter avatar du jour for fully half your feminist mates, because that honour belongs to another female icon…

The Return of Rosie the Riveter

We still can’t get enough of her. Clasped to the bosom of the women’s lib movement in the 1970s, Rosie’s been a staple on flyers, books and posters ever since.

The woman from the We Can Do It! poster – known colloquially as Rosie the Riveter, although she was not, unlike Norman Rockwell’s poster, which was far more widely circulated, ever officially given that title – has, like Joan in the 1900s, been embraced by feminist campaigners as a a key visual figure. Minimally circulated in the war itself, rediscovered as the women’s movement gathered speed, “Rosie” is arguably as famous in her capacity as a feminist pop culture icon as a piece of WW2 propaganda; having borrowed her, we can’t stop remixing her, making her more bluntly feminist, more cheekily self-aware, undercutting the patriotic feeling of the original, or just because, from under a pile of retrokitsch retouches, she gives many of us a more direct sense of legacy than Joan. Although many feminists claim emotional kinship with the suffrage movement, it is Rosie that they totemically hold on to.

Fridge magnets, wall clocks and coasters, many replacing “We Can Do It!” with “Feminism!” populate Cafepress in mushroom clouds of pouting and elbow-baring with a regularity that is by turns reassuring – look how far we’ve come – and galvanising – and we’re not done yet – but also carries a ring of predictability, mainly because I often find myself hoping we’re all still considering which “we” we’re talking about who “can do it”.

Rosie’s enduring popularity with feminists is good-ironic or hmm-ironic depending how you look at it. Sociological Images produced an excellent article earlier this year, Myth-Making and the ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster which ably demonstrates her limitations as a feminist icon, particularly in terms of her original status as a possible anti-trade union figurehead – we can do it (if you guys don’t ever strike, so better not!).

On the other hand, the persistence and force with which feminists have held fast to Rosie has created a new cultural space in which she exists beyond WWII as a feminist symbol in her own right – we discovered just how often she appears on Google for “feminism” in this post.

There’re many images are out there of real-life Rosies, who often aren’t as primped, glamorous or white. To your right is one such worker in 1943; many women (and men) of colour who did not feature on the war’s posters at all, played a crucial role in winning it. The many Rosie remakes on the market, all of which are uniformly white, have so far not engaged this issue. The more amusing ones include Buffy going retro and Princess Leia following suit. Meanwhile, celebrities including Pink have posed as Rosie. And on the explicitly feminist media front, the cover image of Cath Redfern and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming The F-Word also references her with a knowing wink.

A section of Judith F Baca’s mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles features a panicked Rosie being swallowed by a television, titled “Farewell to Rosie the Riveter”:

The inference is clear – the reminder that after the war, women went, in droves, back to homemaking. And it’s this that partly sits behind Rosie’s continued resonance; the War is still such a milestone, representing simultaneously the power of a female workforce and the limitations placed upon it.

And what about now?

Everything Old Is New Again (Again?)

… And it’s only in the last century that women have got the vote, women have had the right to go to university, and this government cannot be responsible for taking hard-won women’s rights away from us, ‘cos the damage they’ll do if they pass this bill… will undo decades…

– student protester dressed as suffragette speaking to the Guardian, December 2010

The suffragettes themselves, who once dressed up as Joan of Arc and declared her their cultural totem for the age, are now totemic in their own right. The women who held a woman who died in the 14th century up as their patroness have now inherited their own set of legendary laurels. What do we think about this? How useful is it? I’m honestly not sure.

LibDem Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone’s office was picketed last December by student protesters dressed in the WSPU’s signature colours of green, white and purple. Whilst on the 26th March 2011 landmark anti-cuts demonstration spearheaded by GoingToWork, I spotted replica pieces of suffragette propaganda being carried down Whitehall.

Meanwhile, feminist climate change pressure group Climate Rush have resurrected the entire apparatus of Edwardian propaganda aesthetics. Their promotional material, which is replete with obvious references to the imagery of the suffrage movement – big hats, button boots and sashes – that dominates the public consciousness, uses slogans such as “In the Name of the Suffragette”.

I doubt this would faze the WSPU leadership, who were adept self-mythologisers even in their time. They knew they were making history, and the Pankhursts particularly were anxious to dispense with self-effacement in the face of what they saw as the pressing need for deeds over words. I admit I’m not sure what I think of the Rush’s implied assertion that the WSPU’s goals, aside from their slogans, would necessarily marry up with those of climate change activists in 2011 (Emmeline Pankhurst did, after all, stand as a Tory candidate, when all was said and done, and the upper echelons of the WSPU did little to help working class women such as Dora Thewlis).

Perhaps the most interesting of these modern takes on early 20th century protest propaganda is Climate Rush activist and artist Cordelia Cembrowicz’s lithographs which feature a more diverse range of women than the many iterations of Rosie.

I do wonder what will be on our posters next. Are we done yet, in these trying times of savage cuts that themselves remind of past eras, with suffrage and sainthood, with rivets and rolled curls? Should we be? I’m not sure.

I’ll be on some of the demos, finding out.

Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.

One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.

This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!

– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9

The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,

[A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.

Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.

The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.

While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.

Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.

The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.

Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.

The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.

In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

Born in Alabama in 1956, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago in 1959 to take advantage of the better educational opportunities there. Jemison took to the sciences with ease, doing well enough in her studies that she was able to enrol at Stanford University aged just 16.

In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist. She said, ‘Don’t you mean a nurse?’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that’s not what I wanted to be.

– Mae Jemison

Jemison faced barriers due to both racism and sexism at Stanford, particularly in the engineering department, a place that was (and unfortunately to some extent still is) the domain of well off white males. She describes, looking back, occasions where professors would ignore her input while congratulating her male classmates for the exact same comments, and credits her success in part to the youthful arrogance of a teen allowing her to push on through.

After getting her chemical engineering degree Jemison went on to study medicine at Cornell, graduating in 1981. She did extensive work abroad during her time there, ranging from Thailand to Kenya as a primary care provider, and eventually joining the Peace Corps in 1983. With the Peace Corps she served in Sierra Leone, acting both as a medical doctor and a writer of guidelines, care manuals, and research proposals.

So, we’ve established she’s pretty goddamn awesome as both a doctor and a scientist. But I promised you a doctor in space, and so far it’s all been ground bound¹. So, onto her career with NASA.

Rejected on her first try, Jemison was accepted into the program in 1987, the first class of astronauts to be enrolled after the 1986 Challenger disaster. She worked in launch support at the Kennedy Space Centre while training for her launch, helping to send other shuttle flights up into orbit. Her own turn came in 1992, when she became the first black woman to go into space, flying aboard the shuttle Endeavour with the six other astronauts of STS-47.

I wouldn’t have cared less if 2,000 people had gone up before me … I would still have had my hand up, ‘I want to do this.’

– Mae Jemison, speaking to the Des Moines Register in 2008

For the next 190 hours Jemison would orbit the Earth, one of the select few to see the planet from above for themselves.² She conducted a series of life science experiments on how living organisms responded to the microgravity of space. This included one of her own devising, to study the effects of orbital conditions on bone cells. On September 20th 1992, Jemison and the rest of the mission’s crew returned safely to Earth, having spent the last eight days being awesome enough to risk death in the name of science.

STS-47 was to be Jemison’s only space mission, as she retired from NASA shortly after her return. She wanted to focus on social issues surrounding technology, its impact in developing nations, and means of mitigating future-shock. To this end she founded two rather cool organisations. First up, doing applied research, there’s the Jemison Group, set up to develop technology for daily life, which has worked on projects including thermal energy generation for developing countries, and satellite communications for facilitating health care in West Africa.

Her second project was the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named for her mother. The foundation runs international science camps for students in their teens, aimed at encouraging people to think globally about how technology can deal with problems. The group works to build critical thinking skills and scientific literacy, which is a pretty damn solid aim.

Oh, and a last point of geeky coolness (which obviously is the most important kind), Jemison appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation after LeVar Burton discovered she was a fan and invited her to take part. That makes her the first real life astronaut to have featured on the show. It’s a neat bit of circularity, given that Jemison cites Nichelle Nichols’s performance as Lt. Uhura as one of her motivations for joining NASA.

So, doctor, astronaut, advocate for science education, and she even got to hang out on the bridge of the Enterprise. That’s a pretty good definition for a badass life right there.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

1. Well, excepting an incident in Sierra Leone where Jemison commandeered a hospital plane to evacuate a volunteer with meningitis and worked throughout the flight to keep them alive, racking up an eventual total of 56 hours solid work.
2. As of today only around 500 people have been up there, depending on exactly what you define as “in space”.

Alright then, Friday Night Lights (the film, not the TV series). It’s the true-ish (true in as much as any Hollywood adaptation of real events is ever true) story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, a highschool American football team based out of Odessa, Texas. Based on the book of the same name by H.G. Bassinger, it’s really quite an amazing depiction of the levels of pressure placed on young players in a town that has nothing else going for it. Odessa is the sort of town where you get into college with a football scholarship, or you stay there and live out the same life your parents did.

It might be a somewhat unusual choice for this site, given that it’s focused entirely on the macho-tastic world of American football, and features less than a handful of female characters – all defined by their relationship to one of the males (the coach’s wife, the quarterback’s mother) – who get maybe 10 lines in total. But stick with me here, because the film does raise a few issues worth discussing.

First up, let’s just cover why this film counts as a favourite. American football, more than perhaps any other sport, is self-mythologising. It builds up a grand narrative, spins out legends, and casts itself as something more than just a bunch of millionaires in armour running into each other. Go watch a highlight video, or an episode of America’s Game, which shows the story of each year’s Superbowl winner. Everything about them, the way the footage is cut, the music, is all part of narrativising the events, making myths. And Friday Night Lights captures that perfectly.

Part of the reason the film captures that feeling so well, and part of what makes it a good film (other than some excellent cinematography and casting) is the soundtrack. The film is almost entirely accompanied by the work of Explosions in the Sky, a sweeping instrumental act native to Texas, where the events take place. Take a listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go do something grand.

But enough of the fanboying. Let’s look at the issues this film brings up.

The first interesting thing the film handles is issues of race. Texas, particularly the smaller towns, is not well known for its progressive attitude towards racial equality. So when the championship game turns out to be against the state’s first all-black team, Dallas Carter, this is a big thing. And you know what? It’s handled pretty damn well. It can probably best be summed up with one particular quote. The coaches and assorted hangers-on of both teams have met to discuss where the game will take place, and how it will be adjudicated to ensure fairness. Asked about referees, the Panthers’ coach suggests hiring a team of officials. Asked whether these zebras¹ will be black or white the coach replies “I believe a zebra’s got about the same amount of black stripes as he does white ones.”

It’s not just the coaches. The players on the Panthers are a pretty varied mix of black, white and Latino. It’s hard to say how much of this is credit to the film makers, and how much is merely a reflection on the make up of the real life team the events are based on. What is definitely to their credit though is the way these characters are handled. The film makers resist the temptation to give us Male White Lead #27b and make the entire film about the quarterback. Instead we get equal screen time devoted to several of the characters (with the arguable show-stealer being Derek Luke as star running back James “Boobie” Miles). It’s nice to see.

The second issue we get in the film, which I’d argue is relevant to basically everyone, is the pressure placed on young people and the struggles of forming an identity. In the context of the film this identity is mostly about defining yourself as a person beyond what your town expects of you as a player. But the basic principle applies to any youthful deviation from accepted norms, which is probably something a fair few readers here have experienced. Telling the world you identify as a feminist might not immediately seem the same as telling your dad you don’t care that much about football, but I think the film does a nice job of showing the universal pressures of youth that tie both experiences together.

Being the champions is basically all the town cares about. On game day, everything shuts down as people leave their workplaces to go watch the game. It’s made clear to the coach that if they don’t win the state championship he should probably think about finding a different down to live in. Win and you’re a local god, lose and you’re a pariah. The alcoholic former-champion father of one character captures this particularly well, kind and caring when the team’s winning, drunk and abusive when his son makes a mistake. How does someone grow and learn to be themselves faced with that?

It’s a good film, it raises some interesting points, and it gives a fascinating look into the life of small town Texas. And for all that it shows the darker side of football, it’s still the film that made me go out and start playing, so it has to get some credit for that.

1. Zebras being a nickname for referees, due to their black and white striped tops.

First up, there’s something interesting about the way the series presented sexuality. Straight sex was shown in abundance, with not one episode going by that failed to meet HBO’s Mandatory Nipple Quota. That said, very little of it was what you could consider “ordinary” – instead we get an array of incest, non-consent and prostitution. We never see Ed and Catelyn Stark together, or any of the show’s other (non-sibling) couples. The closest we have is Danaerys and Drogo, and by the time their partnership becomes less disturbingly non-consensual we pretty much stop seeing them as well. Straight sex, then, is abundant but somehow always unpleasant.

Renly and Loras: soon to vanish from the screen faster than you can shave an armpit.

Homosexual acts are distinctly less common in the series. Between female characters we get some slight implications with Danaerys and one of her serving girls as she learns how to please Drogo, a scene that is noticeably less graphic than the straight scenes in the show. The one time we are shown things by the same standards is a particularly unusual scene. The focus throughout is pretty much entirely on Lord Baelish as he instructs two recently arrived prostitutes. The scene is somewhat reminiscent of moments from (link is not worksafe) American Psycho, where Bateman does much the same, the sex a mere sideshow to his monologue. It places the male character directly at the centre of the scene and becomes almost parodic as Lord Baelish informs one of the pair to “be the man” in their actions.

And lastly, gay male pairings. We get one, and it’s an interesting one. On the one hand, it’s significantly more overt than it is in the books. Where the books give us a few sly remarks and implications from people, HBO pretty much flashes a giant neon “HEY GUYS, THEY’RE BONING” sign. And yet nothing is actually shown, only implied by sound effects, and the pair are then immediately written out for the rest of the series. Yes, they leave in the books as well, but given that HBO has already shown willingness to make changes, why not go a little further and develop them more fully? Certainly, HBO hasn’t shown a problem showing male relationships in past titles – see Michael Hall and Mathew St. Patrick in Six Feet Under, for example. So why the shying away this time?

Next up, issues of race. These have been widely discussed across the internet (see for example this, which we recently linked to), so I won’t go into it too much here. In summary, the handling of race is fairly disappointing and the presentation of the Dothraki never rises much above the Savage Other. The one key comparison that really illustrates this, and which is worth talking about in a little more depth takes place in the first episode.

Viserys simply can't *cope* with all this awfully tiresome uncivilisation.

The Starks, as we are first introduced to them, are going about the business of executing a deserter from the Night’s Watch, the brotherhood that guards the great wall in the North. It’s all shown as very grim and honourable, in that way that the Starks are throughout the series. No one takes any joy in it, but it’s a necessary task and the younger Starks learn a lesson about duty and suchlike from watching this poor chap get beheaded. Later we see the marriage celebrations for Danaerys and Khal Drogo. It’s a wild party with dancing and public sex. A fight breaks out over one of the women, ending with the disembowelling of the loser. Two public deaths, two very different contexts. When the (very, very white) men of the North kill someone it’s honourable and we sympathise with them. When the Dothraki do it it’s savage and lets us know that they’re Not Like Us. And that’s a problem.

Lastly, a minor character worth discussing: Lysa Tully, sister to Catelyn Stark. She’s an uncomfortable character, and a hard one to depict tastefully. If Cersei Lannister has something of the manipulative Lady Macbeth to her portrayal, Lysa Tully is entirely caught in the moment of “out damned spot, out I say!” Driven into a state of paranoid mania following the death of her husband, and with an entirely inappropriate relationship with her sickly son, there’s just something awkward about the implications of her character. As with a few others (notably Hodor), it’s a character that it’s hard to see how HBO could have done right without massively deviating from the source material.

Okay, that’s the last I’m going to say on Game of Thrones until season two rolls round. In the mean time, book five is finally out after a generation-long wait, so there’s that to get through between now and next spring.

Marian was born in Philadelphia in 1897, the eldest of three Anderson children. Her mother had previously worked as a school teacher but was unable to do so in Philadelphia due to stricter controls on the qualifications needed by black teachers as opposed to those for white teachers. The family was active in their local Union Baptist church, and Marian’s aunt Mary encouraged her to sing with the church choir.

From age six onwards Marian began to sing at local concerts and functions, encouraged by her aunt. She had a clear talent from the start, and by her teens was earning several dollars for a performance.¹ After attending high school – which was paid for by charitable donations raised by her pastor and other local community leaders – Anderson applied to the Philadelphia Music Academy, but was turned away. The reason? ‘We don’t take coloureds.’

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning

Undaunted, Anderson sought private tuition from the talented Giuseppe Boghetti.² Boghetti was a good teacher, and Anderson would credit him with expanding her repertoire to include classical works and arias in addition to choral music. She took these skills to the New York Philharmonic, winning a voice contest there in 1925. The prize was the chance to perform in concert with them, marking the first major critical success of her career.

Despite being critically acclaimed and applauded by all who heard her, Anderson’s career struggled to take off in the United States. Much like Josephine Baker she found difficulty getting bookings due to racism, and like Baker she responded by touring heavily in a more welcoming Europe. She toured extensively through the 1930s, befriending many influential people in the music field who were impressed with her voice. Toscanini, Jean Sibelius, and Kosti Vehanen were all amongst those who worked with her or applauded her voice.

Those Lincoln Memorial crowds. All 70,000 of them.

For all her European success, there were still issues in America. In 1939 Howard University sought to have her perform at Constitution Hall. The hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who denied her the chance to play there on grounds of race. This kicked off a storm with many DAR members resigning in protest, including board member Eleanor Roosevelt. This is where we get that aforementioned lovely example of people stepping up to do the right thing. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Anderson’s manager, members of the NAACP, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes arranged an open air concert for Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The performance was a huge success, attended by over 70,000 people, and with a million or so more listening in by radio.

Four years later the DAR asked Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. She accepted.

I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.

– Marian Anderson

Although she was trained for it and regularly performed operatic arias in her concerts, Anderson shied away from appearing in actual operas. She was offered positions consistently throughout her time in Europe, but felt she lacked the acting talent to accompany her voice. The exception to this was 1955’s appearance with the New York Metropolitan Opera in a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Machera. This was the first time a black singer had been counted amongst the regular cast.

The next decade was studded with achievements for Anderson, almost too many to give each one the detail they deserve here. which frankly is sign of brilliance in itself, when you have too much cool stuff to actually describe at any great length. Between 1955 and 1965, then, she:

• sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy
• was appointed a UN delegate
• was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• sang at the 1963 March on Washington
• … and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Oh, and she released an album of poetry, songs and spoken word pieces dedicated to her beloved pet cat Snoopy. A busy and exceedingly well spent decade.

Anderson retired from public performance in 1965 with a farewell tour that began at Constitution Hall and ended in New York’s Carnegie Hall. By the time of her death in 1993 she would accrue a list of honours and accolades quite staggering in length, including but not limited to honorary degrees from three different universities, a Grammy, a Silver Buffalo from the Boy Scouts of America, and her likeness on postage stamps and $5000 Series I Savings Bonds.

There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move – and he, in turn, waits for you.

– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning

For further reading, check the following:

• Marian’s autobiography, My Lord What A Morning, which is unfortunately quite hard to get a hold of.
• Raymond Arsenault’s The Sound of Freedom which goes into much more detail on the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert.
• Allan Keiler’s A Singer’s Journey provides an in-depth study of Anderson’s life.
• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
1. Which may not sound like much, but for early 20th century America it was pretty damn impressive.
2. Born Joe Bogash, he had changed his name to something Italian sounding in the hopes that it would boost his opera career. It didn’t, and he returned to America in 1918 to open studios in New York City instead.
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