54th Down Under Feminist's Carnival

Okay, wow, the last time I hosted the Down Under Feminist's Carnival was the eighth edition, and now we're up to the 54th! Nobody point out to me what a terrible number that is.

The next edition of the Down Under Feminists Carnival is planned for 5 November, 2012 and submissions can be made up until November 2, though it would be excellent for me if you would submit before that. Submissions can be sent to yiduiqie [at] gmail [dot] com for those who can’t access the blogcarnival submissions form.

Submissions must be of posts of feminist interest by writers from Australia and New Zealand that were published in October. So submit early and often, please, and tell your friends!

There is no official theme for this edition of the carnival, though the unofficial theme of this blog is always race and ethnicity representation, so please definitely feel free to use that for guidance! (Do you sense a post brewing on exoticism and feminism and my experiences in China? oh yes indeed)

The 53rd edition of the carnival is available now at Opinions @ bluebec.com and is filled with all sorts of awesome and interesting posts.

queer australian teevee

I’m not watching much Australian television at the moment, because I’m in China and sadly ABC iview isn’t available outside of Australia, but I have been making an effort to watch two shows: Outland and The Newtown Girls. Coincidentally, these are both humourous shows about Australian Queers.

Outland is a six-part series that just finished on ABC1. It's a comedy about a gay science fiction club in Melbourne. I’ve been watching it via iTunes (AUD2.99 an episode; AUD16 for the lot).

The Newtown Girls is a ten-part webseries, a dramedy about the dating lols that accompany "returning to the scene." I didn't realise dressing up as Xena counted as a part of returning to the scene but it's all good. I’ve been watching it on the website (no cost).

Both of these shows are not only Australian and set in queer communities, but my favourite characters on both are queer ladies of colour. This makes me so happy.

Rae is an Indigenous sci-fi fan in a wheel chair. She wears awesome clothes and is a little insecure about her body but she’s not afraid of calling bullshit when it hits her. She’s played by Christine Anu, who is a super awesome TSI with a twitter.

Alex is a young Asian woman living it up in Newtown. She’s addicted to coffee (looks like an espresso) and she’s cheerful and forthright and she wears awesome clothes. She’s played by Renee Lim, who is an Asian actress from Perth who is a doctor in her spare time.

How could I not love them? I love them.

It took me a long time to become comfortable with being a queer Australian woman of an Asian background, and sometimes it’s still something I have to fight with other people about (more on that later), but it is my identity and I love it. And I’m so happy that there are two queer Australian women of a not-white ethnicity on my television (well, on my laptop), who speak like me and are portrayed by actresses I already liked and also one of whom is a science fiction fan like meeeee.

wednesday linktastic

Things I am apparently currently bad at: link posts.

I don't like to group these link posts, because their inherent intersectionality makes grouping hard, but I'll never post if I don't.


things to do with gender (including gender norms, and trans* issues)

Love It/Shove It?: Dan Savage Can Shove It at the Jaded Hippy:

This constant conflation of sexual organs with sex identity and gender identity is one of the major obstacles, in my experience, with acceptance of and real respect towards trans people's identities. The idea that penis=man and vagina=woman is so entrenched that (cis) people just do NOT question it, even when contradictions of that assumption are staring them in the face. Oh, you look like a woman, talk like a woman, etc. but if I find out you have a penis under that skirt you are clearly "really" a man, or, at the most generous, "were a man once." That you could have been a woman ALL ALONG is not even up for consideration.

And that dynamic is being reinforced here.

This is old, but I think is a good summary of things, Tracing this Body: Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism.

A Series of Questions, a photography series.

Many documentary photographic projects that deal with trans issues exploit the genders of their subjects, pointing to an "otherness" or inappropriately exoticizing their bodies. A Series of Questions seeks instead to make visible the transphobia and gender-baiting that can become part of everyday interactions and lives, forming a fuller picture of the various lived experiences. In so doing, this work contrasts with the dehumanizing approaches that predominate the images made of transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and gender-variant people, which often focus solely on their gender or trans status, or use them to further a specific point about social construction and gender.

People I know are in it! ♥

At 8Asians, No More Girly Boys: Chinese Elementary School Teaches its Boys to be More Masculine.

I love this article: Consuming pop culture while trans: Disney's The Little Mermaid



stuff to do with ethnicity, race and culture

At Native Appropriations, Nudie Neon Indians and the Sexualization of Native Women.

What Kind of Card is Race? by Tim Wise is an old but good article.

Glass Icarus writes inscrutable, about yet another form of exotification and frustration and stereotyping.

At Overland, White Australia has a blackface history, by Maxine Clarke. What it says on the tin; something many Australians deny.

On Reverse Cultural Appropriation at the Merch Girl Tumblr.

ablesim

this is not gonna be coherent by unusualmusic:

Well, wasn't he fucked? Black teen male with Asperger's and mild autism who wanted to GO READ A FUCKING BOOK ends up ABUSED BY THE MOTHERFUCKING POLICE AND IN JAIL WITHOUT LAWYER OR MOTHER FOR 11 DAYS because some white asshole feels UNSAFE with him SITTING DOWN UNDER A TREE OUTSIDE OF A MOTHERFUCKING LIBRARY. I can't even. I cannot... He paid. He PAID for making some suburbanite racist human incarnation of vomit feel unsafe and so he/she made he PAY. Unleashed the power of the state to make him UNSAFE by MAGNITUDES of proportions that... goddamn. And at Wiscon, all these brown people who come to squeal with joy over media...we come to indulge in joy and you (letter writers and their brethren) claim that our very fucking existence makes you unsafe.

other stuff

Cyborg rights 'need debating now' OH YEAH.

An interesting discussion at Remade on The Politics of Fashion: Can you be smart, informed about world issues, and still think your personal style is pretty damn important?

Cadbury shies away from Aussie cynics , suggesting that Australians don't understand ethical branding.

billy sing, chinese-australian and dude

So Yuey at Asians Down Under has a post up with the text of an article from news.com.au, over the new mini-series about one of the awesomest Chinese-Australians ever, Billy Sing.

A mini-series about a Chinese-Australian war hero! Amazing! Awesome stuff!

Davis said the problem in casting Sing as a Chinese-Australian arose when he couldn't find a 60-year-old Chinese actor to play his father.

"Asking Tony to play it as Chinese would not only have been racist and demeaning. It was also financially irrelevant -- we could not have afforded the make-up," he said. "Whatever his genetic background, his culture was Australian. To me, he's very representative of every Australian whose parents were not born here.

Do you know who is playing Billy? THE DIRECTOR'S WHITE SON. DO YOU SEE WHAT THE PROBLEM IS HERE? APPARENTLY THERE ARE NO OLDER CHINESE ACTORS.

NO OLDER CHINESE ACTORS.

OH GOOD.

From the article:

Former Nationals senator Bill O'Chee, who became an army reservist when he left parliament in 1999 and was born to a Chinese father and an Irish-Australian mother, was "deeply disappointed" by the production.

"We'll now have people growing up thinking Billy Sing was white. But we are jealous of his memory," he said. Federal Queensland Liberal MP Don Cameron, who found the site of the South Brisbane boarding house where Sing died in 1943 with five shillings on his bedside, said it was "tragically wrong" to have the sniper played by a white.

When conservative, old, white guys are telling you that you can't whitewash someone, MAYBE IT IS TIME TO REALISE YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG?!

But it's not like media representation is important or anything. I mean, it's not like people would come* out of watching this mini-series thinking Billy Sing was white or anything! We can just tell him that he was Chinese-Australian! BECAUSE THAT'S WORKED SO WELL BEFORE.

No Chinese actors to play his dad! It's not like they couldn't have GOT A CHINESE ACTOR FROM CHINA OR SOMETHING, IF THERE REALLY REALLY REALLY AREN'T ANY OLDER AUSTRALIAN ACTORS OF CHINESE DESCENT.**

Here is some more reading on representation on Australin tv:

how would we look from outer space? by Shiny New Coin

The lack of Asians on Australian TV, and why it matters at Eurasian Sensation.

And the wiki link for Billy Sing.

Dude was a dude, and he was a mixed-race Chinese-Australian dude, and everyone should know that, especially so we can combat that THIS COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED ON WHITE ARMY HEROES IN THE WAR myth.

OKAY GOOD


ETA: Yuey has posted a follow up post here.


*I say 'would' because this series has not yet been picked up for airing.

**I'm pretty skeptical of this, that there are no older Chinese Australian actors.