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

Possessing a sharp mind, and with the good fortune of coming from a family that could afford quality education, Cannon had attended Wellesley College and graduated with a degree in physics in 1884. Finding the limited career options of home life boring, and having little in common with her peers, being (paraphrasing from her autobiographical writings) older and better educated, Cannon returned to Wellesley in 1894. Guided by her former instructor, the formidably minded professor Sarah Frances Whiting, Cannon took graduate courses in astronomy and spectroscopy (a relatively new development in imaging at the time), and discovered her true calling.

After two years of graduate study, and looking to get access to Harvard’s superior telescope facilities, Cannon was hired at the Harvard Observatory as part of the group that would become known as “Pickering’s women”. The Harvard Computers, to use the group’s actual name, were a small group of women hired by Edward Pickering to work through the raw data being gathered by the observatory (this of course being a time when a computer was still generally a person who calculated things, not a machine). Pickering had hired Cannon and her fellow computers largely because women were cheaper to employ than men, allowing him to hire more of them; a neccessity given that the rate at which data was being gathered was outstripping the rate at which it could be processed.

So, what was Cannon earning, given her degree and graduate work at one of America’s most prestigious private colleges, and the fund set up by the wealthy physician Anna Draper to support the observatory’s work? Somewhere in the region of $0.25 to $0.50 an hour. This put her slightly above an unskilled factory worker, and somewhat below a clerical or secretarial worker. What would a lot of us do in the face of woefully poor pay despite excellent qualifications and a natural talent? Probably look for new work, or failing that become disillusioned and start putting in less effort than perhaps we should.

Fortunately for modern astronomers, Annie Jump Cannon had a passion for her field, a drive for progress, and a rather brilliant mind for organising and classifying abstract data. Rather than throw up her arms in frustration at the poor pay and oten tedious work of examining stellar images she set herself to the task of examining the bright stars of the Southern hemisphere.

Now for some vaguely sciencey details: at the time, there was a disagreement between two others working at the observatory, Antonia Maury and Williamina Fleming, as to how stars should be classified. Cannon pioneered a third system, classifying stars based on the strength of their Balmer absorption lines (one of a set of series that describe the spectral line emissions of hydrogen atoms, the strength of a star’s Balmer absorption lines provide a reliable indicator of the stars temperature). This provided a thorough and yet elegant means of classifying stellar objects, dividing them into letter categories based on temperature. When astronomers refer to our sun as a G-type star, that’s Cannon’s classification system in action.¹

Following her groundbreaking work on stellar classifications, Cannon remained dedicated to the field of astronomy, eventually receiving a regular appointment at Harvard as the William C Bond Astronomer, in addition to receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford (the first one given out to a female academic). Her legacy lives on for astronomers, both in the ongoing use of her work and in the Annie Jump Cannon Award, given out by the American Astronomical Society to pioneering female researchers in the field. Even off the planet, Cannon’s memory lives on, one of the Moon’s craters being named in her honour.

So, next time you’re looking up at the sky, keep in mind Annie Jump Cannon, who more than likely labelled most of the stars you can see.

(As a final note, Cannon was not the only woman working in the Harvard Observatory at the time to do amazing things. Henrietta Swan Leavitt‘s work on Cepheid stars arguably provided the vital theoretical underpinnings on which much of Edwin Hubble’s work was based. She received almost no recognition for her discoveries during her own lifetime.)

• 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. For the curious, the stars are classified from hottest to coldest as O, B, A, F, G, K and M. The hotter stars tend to be more massive and less common than their colder cousins. The classes are further sub-divided into 0-9, 0 being the hottest in a class and 9 the coldest. Our own sun is a G2 star.