WORLDCON: Or, what these panelists need is a trans academic

I went to Worldcon last weekend. It was good, I guess, I don't know, I was pretty sick. I spent a lot of time sitting around feeling miserable for myself. On the Thursday, though, I managed to drag myself along to two panels: queer themes in SF; and trans representations in YA SF.

A word on going to panels: I avoid panels on race! Because usually they make me angry! Dr S has, for example, a write up of a panel she went to that devolved into lots of excuses for Joss, what a fucking surprise. It was just like another panel we did that one time, about representations of 'the other' in SF, that devolved into lots of excuses for Joss (from our audience, not from any of the panelists). Anyway now I only go to panels on race and ethnicity in closed safe spaces.

Trans panels are probably going to be the same, I think (not that I, as a cis person, would necessarily or automatically be welcome in a safe space, depending on the requirements of that space), but I'd never even seen trans issues on a panel description for an SF con before, so I thought, why not? See what it is like.

It was like this:

At the queer themes in SF panel, I had to walk out. It was almost as if (and this is a bigger issue I had with Worldcon overall), the panelists were on the panel because they were queer, rather than because they had any intellectual, authorial or otherwise reason for being on there. To my knowledge, all of the panelists were cis. There was talk of sexuality, and then any time they tried to talk about issues of gender or, specifically, trans things, it would come back around to sexuality. Gender and sexuality were constantly conflated, and I came away feeling as if they were trying to talk about trans issues, but completely and totally lacked the language to do so. Better trans-related discussion came from the audience; in fact one of the panelists kept sensationalising the descriptions of trans reveals in stories. I don't know how better to describe this (and my notes at the time didn't elaborate further) - it was all just very odd.

As a cissie, I cannot make this call, but I sort of felt like, if they weren't going to do it with any sort of competance, maybe they should have just talked about sexuality and left the trans issues out of it.

The second panel I attended, on trans representations, was a much more (for me) positive experience. The chair was Cheryl Morgan, a trans academic. The panel was composed of two cis authors, both of whom have written well-received trans characters (Alison Goodman, the author of 'Eon,' and Hazel Edwards, who co-wrote 'f2m: the boy within,' with Ryan Kennedy but who coincidentally also wrote 'There is a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake,'). Cheryl Morgan was really great about flagging whether there needed to be a quick trans 101, and then went in to defining sex and gender terms, just to be clear.

Some things I wrote down in the panel: often in SFF, 'trans' isn't used, instead some other term is used; Hazel Edwards highlighted how people always wanted to see a picture of Ryan Kennedy if he wasn't present (what a fucking surprise, people want to know if he's masculine enough urrggghhh); lots of SFF assumes that in the future, 'changing' gender will be easy (I am reminded of that Neil Gaiman short story, with the rebooting); heavy emphasis on collaboration/talking to people (this comes from a cis perspective, I think, and a clarification that there is no one trans experience).

Anyway, what a surprise that the panel that I felt dealt better with trans stuff (using my arbitrary measurements of better) was the one that centred (or referenced) actual trans experiences and voices. I know that wasn't the point of the queer issues panel, but it just felt so kind of hack job that...yeah.

books or stories (not necessarily SFF) that ended up on my 'check out sometime' list due to these panels:
'Luna' - Julie Anne Peters
'Questors' - Joan Lennon
'Eon' - Alison Goodman (I understand that there might be some cultural appropriation issues)
'f2m: the boy within' - Ryan Kennedy + Hazel Edwards (which actually was already on my toread list)

cross post: isms in our vegan

I'm talking about racism and classism in veganism over in the other blog.

Also just a reminder that I have a tumblr; I've not abandoned this blog! Just having trouble writing big posts at the moment.

crosspostering

So, I've missed crosslinking some posts of me about the place.

I've made two link posts about animal rights/ethics issues at the other blog: one and two; and at vegaroo I've blogged about vegan adventures in perth.

I went to a Greens' fundraiser on the weekend, and, though the Greens are an environmental political party, I was disappointed to see that there was a higher emphasis on 'happy meat' than on vegetarianism at the fundraiser.

Also I have a new tumblr. I am still using my original tumblr for social justice commentary and pretty pictures; but I am also tumbling at fuck yeah lgbt batman, about, you guessed it, lgbt happenings in the batverse, fannish or otherwise.

what a jerkface

via lauredhel at Hoyden About Town, is a really great graphic about the election promises so far, and why Tony Abbott is a jerkface. You can click the link for a transcript of the jpg.




More election links soon.

reading the internets

I'll write an actual post again one day, honest.

Genderbitch has an awesome post up: Feminist Disavowal of Cissexism, taking down three common arguments that are used when Genderbitch tries to talk about Feminism's problems. This post is totally awesome, but it's also relevant across the board - it's not just a problem when talking about cissexism in Feminism, but also racism and ableism (to my experience). Go read it!

Following on from that, CL Minou writes at TigerBeatdown an ALSO very excellent post, Left Behind: About the Failures of Feminism. Highly recommended!

NY: 17-month-old baby killed by man 'trying to make him act like a boy instead of a girl'. What it says. :o(

Cara writes about Emergency Room Allegedly Denied Treatment to Woman Because She is Trans. Ugghhh people suck. Filled with good links for reading.

Israel to expel 400 children ISRAEL will expel 400 native-born children of non-Jewish foreign workers to help safeguard the country's Jewish identity.

Tom Cho writes I’m Chinese-Australian but...

What I want to ask is: why is it really so astonishing that a young Vietnamese-Australian can write convincingly and intensely about this Colombian scenario? Which is to really ask: Is it me or is there something faintly patronising about this compliment, as well-intentioned as it is?

Population debate hides an ugly racism

The day after the election announcement, several newspapers featured front-page photos of the Prime Minister, garbed all in white, and her (male) deputy - each bearing an exceptionally robust looking, if slightly bemused, white infant in their arms. If the central issue of the election is population, these images of the - reconstructed and thoroughly contemporary - white heterosexual family underscore that the lowering of the birth rate is off the agenda.

Totally romanticised but: The melting pot that is modern Australia

The final six MasterChef Australia contestants emerged this week, two of them gay, three of Asian heritage. Two were lawyers who would rather be cooks. And all were crowned national heroes by decree of the viewing public: about 2 million a night and perhaps twice as many for tomorrow's grand finale.

These wannabe chefs are a snapshot of modern Australia, an ark among nations. They also represent a shift in social trends that were evident before MasterChef but which have been ''crystallised by the show and perhaps accelerated by it'', says Rebecca Huntley, director of the market research firm Ipsos Australia, which has tracked the impact of the program.

Islanders plead for help as homes sink

on more than one language

Hey so, I speak some languages! And I am very interested in the structure of languages, and how they work, and how languages contribute to our thinking! I am one of those people who enjoys learning many languages. (I speak three, from time to time, four if 'a sort of Manglish-Malay patois' counts as a language. And I enjoyed learning German for a year and a half! But then I moved and didn't find a new class. Anyway.) I like being able to communicate with lots of people! I like reading about languages! As if I was some sort of language nerd! Also, I lament that I didn't do linguistics at university (sometimes I wish I did chemistry, too).

So hey: this is a post about languages (as opposed to language, which will be another post later).

A few blogs have been linking to and/or discussing this New York Times article: As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language. The article itself talks about Indonesians who cannot speak Bahasa Indonesian, or speak it badly; speaking English instead. But as Michel S at Ruminations on a Distant Homeland* points out, there are reasons why this is a little less dramatic than the article articulates. Bahasa Indonesian was adopted as the national language only in 1928, so for huge chunks of Indonesia, the official language is not actually their first language anyway.

Similar issue in Malaysia. I have friends (or family of friends) who, despite growing up in Malaysia, never learnt Bahasa Malaysian (BM) very well. When you grow up in a house speaking (for example) Cantonese, and go to an English speaking school, and all your friends speak Mandarin, well, BM becomes just another subject you have to do, and some people are good at it, and some people aren't.

That's not me passing comment on whether one should have to learn the national language. That's just, you know. An anecdote.

Speaking of national languages, in the USA there's some concerns the opposite way, that sometimes people don't speak English in public, and therefore English is at risk (?!) and maybe it should be the national language. My word, what a fucking outrage. So What if Nobody Speaks English Anymore at change.org is a look at that, and asks the question: does it matter?

THIS MAY SHOCK YOU (note: if it does, I am very concerned), but maybe speaking more than one language is kind of cool, and possibly even useful! The WSJ has an article up that doesn't say anything new, but is a nice summary of research that demonstrates that language shapes the way we think: Lost in Translation. Here is a large excerpt:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

In fact, here is a 2009 essay on exactly this research! How does our language shape the way we think? I highly recommend this piece, it is a good essay and I refer to it often.

I think it's really cool and interesting, the way that language shapes thought. And I mean, I think about this all the time in another way (removing ableist, transphobic, homophobic, racist, etc, words from casual use), but talking about the impact that grammar patterns have on thought construction is really cool too. What influence does language have on our personalities? On our cultures and traditions?

Anyway, given how cool it is, it's funny, then, that there's a rumour getting around that the Chinese government is looking to limit the amount of Cantonese on Chinese TV. Almost as if there's an attempt to impose a national language that was only made a national language in the last hundred years. It's been kind of a concerted effort. And here's an oldie but still relevant: Language is Power; Let us Have Ours:

Much of the evidence the world over suggests that bilingual and multilingual language processes accelerate one's capacity to acquire English. So why are Aboriginal children being treated as if this were not so? Why is the role that parents and grandparents play in teaching their children being diminished?

Aboriginal languages, for the most part, are not officially recognised and, therefore, sit outside the nation's formal structures.

So here's the thing about Mandarin, and also Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay, and in fact English, too: they're kind of dialecty. Sometimes they're not what you're expecting. Mandarin in Beijing is different from Mandarin in Xi'an. The Cantonese my family speaks (being from Malaysia) is totally different from the Cantonese spoken in China. The English I speak in Australia is quite different from the English I use in Malaysia (sometimes referred to as 'Manglish').

Which is why I like this article: Standard English and the Literate Argument.

Is literacy so important to credibility here? Or, let me rephrase: Is Standard English literacy so important to credibility here? Or, let me rephrase again: Is white, upper-or-middle class English literacy so important to credibility here?

When we discount people and their arguments because of their command (or lack thereof) of grammar, what we are really saying is: Your thoughts are useless because you don’t use the kind of grammar I’ve come to expect from literate people on the internet. What we are also saying is far worse: You don’t have the privilege to have learned the “correct” way of writing or speaking, and, therefore, your ideas are worthless.

OH SO MAYBE, just maybe, a push to a national language is some sort of defensive bullshit thing? Maybe there's some racism and/or classism involved? What an unexpected and surprising conclusion to my post!

I don't want to hear anything from anyone about how learning a second language is a privilege or any crap like that. Because I think it's pretty clear that learning a second language is, in many cases, something so built in to a society that you don't even notice - many people know more than one language before they go to school (if they get to go to school). And for many people, learning the 'national language' (official or not) is already learning a second language. Or a third language. My mum was speaking five languages before she started attending school, and she was from a really poor family. So you know, the argument is at the least very erasing. I'll accept 'in a poor urban white monolingual family in the middle of Perth it's hard to attend language classes,' or something. And I'm certainly not accepting 'it's hard to learn another language so therefore we need a national language and no-one can speak anything else in public or have tv in any other language' or anything. That's crap. Also 'omg we all need to communicaaatteeee.' Often, that argument is used against people who already went out of their way (or, to be honest, could hardly avoid) to learn someone else's language.



Some further reading and anecdotes on the things I have discussed above:

• A Soliloquy on Language and Race in Seven Parts by Ciderpress; on why English is the Lingua Franca (hint: it's not because it's easy) and, on how someone speaking a language you (someone not involved in the conversation) can't understand isn't a dis. It's just a thing. I ♥ ciderpress and this post.
• My Pidgin Does Not Signify Lack Of Intellect by Jha, specifically talking about Singlish and the Miss World Singapore thing.
• Some discussion on no respect for non-European first languages (discussion in comments is mostly relevant to what I've been rambling over): Australia (and elsewhere): So being bilingual is bad now?
• Weird article at Wired: How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand. Weird because it's very othering ('we' may not even understand, because 'we' are not the people using patois!), and also completely ignores the big reason for English being a lingua franca (mentions World War II and some other stuff; doesn't mention colonisation). But worth a mention for some linkages of ideas.
• The Power of Language, where Jo Tamar talks about language and privilege, and then I ramble for one million years in the comments.

*please note, the blog I have linked to has only one blog post on it! And no introductory! So I don't know anything about it, other than that I liked the solitary post.

ikea hacker badger haj

I like checking out Ikea Hacker, because it's Ikea! and it's mods!

I don't need to do any Ikea hackery right now, so I did the next best thing:



badger haj, a badge of our Ikea klappar haj.

This is basically my nerdy winter hobby.