Linkspam: vintage photos, the value of diversity, and SCIENCE

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Here's something to cheer us up: vintage photos of queer couples (no captions; sorry).

Liv has written up notes from a talk on the political context of current health reforms.

George Takei continues his fabulous self with these glorious responses to statements by fans of different-sex marriage [content note: heterosexism].

Author Elizabeth Conall has put together a spreadsheet for randomly generating demographically diverse minor characters!

From the Geek Feminism blog: Structure and Justice: a really valuable post on why ideals of 'structurelessness' and 'authenticity' in the workplace may not work for people who are LGBTQ+, disabled or neurodiverse:

If you are queer, or trans, or have mental illness, or all of the above, you probably know something about the perils of presenting yourself as you really are. Dan-Savage-style coming-out narratives notwithstanding, many of us who are placed socially in these ways find that we cannot be completely authentic in all aspects of our lives. I definitely want to express myself, but I have to balance that against other needs, like being able to make a living in a capitalist society... In my opinion, it takes a lot of privilege to assume either that greater authenticity leads to greater happiness, or that the only reason you would leave who you are at the door when you step or roll into work is the formal, organizational structure of the place where you work.

In "young women of colour doing amazing science" news, this week we bring you 18-year-old Eesha Khare, who's invented a new kind of battery - that takes less than a minute to charge, lasts ten times as long as traditional batteries, will fit inside mobile phones, and is flexible enough to be incorporated in roll-up displays. Yes, please!

This is my real name. This is real.

Posted by kaberett


As I said recently: hello, my name's kaberett.

And that is absolutely true.

kaberett is not my wallet name - the name in my passport, on my Prescription Pre-payment Certificate, on my various institutional ID cards - but it is no less real for that. I am the only person using "kaberett" as a name; search the Internet and you'll get me, and a bunch of German-speakers using non-standard spellings.

My wallet name isn't the name under which I perform; it's not the name under which I write; it's not the name under which I have formed countless close friendships; it's not the name under which I provide sex education and health advice; but: it is no less real for that. There are two other people with my wallet name living in my area (one has a private pilot's licence; one spends a lot of time on student theatre), and I have at least one relative who (superficially) shares it.

Both names are real. Both names are equally real.

Both names are chosen.

Neither is the name I was given at birth.

I chose "kaberett" before I had settled on "Alex"; I decided on "Alex" because "kaberett" felt right.

Both names are patchwork: of who I am; of who I was; of who I hope to be. They started out too large: I echoed inside them and looked over my shoulder, unable to tell who was calling me. And then: I grew into my names, settled them on my shoulders like a coat, and I got out my scissors and my needles and my thread and I took them in where they were still too large; added in another stripe - another layer of nuance - where they constricted.

And I have worked for these names - for these identities - and they are consistent, solid, whole. I refuse to do either of them a disservice by relegating them to the status of "pseudonym" or "fake"; I refuse to countenance the question "Ah, but what is your real name?" - as if I could, should, have only one; as if my name should not be context-dependent; as if the name chosen for me by people who didn't yet know me is more real than my names.

---

We are fond of these distinctions, though: between "real life" and "online", as though they can be meaningfully separated; as though through the mediation of technology our actions become fantasy, our selves fantastical. Yes, online we can fly - but the communities we build are no less valid for that.

So then, predictably: we go the other way: with "meatspace", for example, a graphic and unpleasant image. And, yes, for some of us - and I do here include myself - our bodies make unpleasant roommates; and yet - the mind is not purer than the flesh. Embodiment neither corrupts nor tempts me.

---

And so, in the end, to neutrality: my real name is what I say it is. My real life is what I say it is.

I am here, and I am real - and so are you. So are we all.

Linkspam: why Black dolls matter, spoilers, and Iron Man 3

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Iron Man 3: neither as subversive or as anti-racist as it likes to think of itself. Two excellent critiques [CONTENT NOTES: racism, spoilers] are provided by crossedwires and wistfuljane. (Content note: The crossedwires article appears to refer to actor Ben Kingsley, who is a multi-ethnic British man, as though he were white -- the analysis of orientalism and racial bait-and-switch in the film is still complex and interesting, though). Elsewhere on the Internet we've also come across a round-up of disabled characters and ableism in Iron Man 3, and a discussion of how difficult it was to get a movie that contained both a woman and a black guy. While we're at it, why not have an essay on how to be a fan of problematic media?
>
Tumblr wishes you to know that [NSFW] sexism is over... or at least, it doesn't really believe that, but it does consider drawings of male game characters, in the style of female game characters, a good way to illustrate the point. You want pictures of young men in stylised bicep-emphasising armour so huge it's a wonder they can move at all? Tumblr has them for you.

Sociological Images reports on the makeover of Disney's Merida in preparation for her release as a doll. Unfortunately few surprises, here.

... speaking of characters: however careful you are, it's incredibly difficult to avoid spoilers these days - especially if you want to read twitter. 17-year-old Jennie Lamere coded up the solution... and won the Boston hackathon, at which she was the only woman present. Diversity in tech: it's a good thing.

Sophieology takes a look at societal messages given to teenage girls in an article entitled This Trendy “Strong is the New Skinny” Thing (and what it could mean for the next generation of girls) [content notes: dieting, body-policing, disordered eating, weight loss with numbers given, implicit acceptance of "fat is bad"].

This is amazing -- Black is Beautiful: Why Black Dolls Matter tells the story of a new documentary film by Samantha Knowles that will be premièring later this year (trailer below). The article contains interviews from several dollmakers and doll collectors, plus some fascinating photographs.

(video description: Trailer for Samantha Knowles' film 'Why Do You Have Black Dolls?'. A short montage of dollmakers, collectors and historians talking about why it is important to them to have, make and learn about Black dolls, interspersed with images of the dolls themselves).

On the topic of the stories we tell, Indigenous History asks: What if people told European history like they told Native American history?

Researchers at the University of Minnesota are gathering data on LGBTQ people working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields for a report to be published as an academic paper. They are focussing on the US, but respondents from around the world are invited to provide their experiences.

The British Humanist Association is calling for the upcoming marriage bill to permit humanist marriages, in line with Scotland and Wales - in England, humanist ministers are currently unable to perform legally-binding services. Here's an easy way to write to your MP.

A thank-you, and why we do what we do.

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Firstly - thank you all so, so much for helping us reach our funding target for Fanny Whittington! We raised £1,419 - our target was £1,250 - and so we can joyfully announce that we will indeed be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. We'll be performing at Gryphon 1, on the 12th-17th and 19th-24th August, 8:15-9:15pm. You can book your tickets here. Everyone who backed us, we'll be in touch about your rewards this weekend!

Secondly - the rest of this post was written by a Lashings fan who wants to remain anonymous. They were going to post it on their own web presence, in the context of encouraging their friends to donate to our fundraiser, but ended up feeling uncomfortable with this level of public disclosure about their mental health. They sent it to us and said we could use in our fundraising campaign if we liked. We have decided to post it here as a thank-you to everyone who contributed - this is what you are helping us do.

[Content warnings: bullying, professional negligence, depression, suicidal ideation.]

------

Portrayals of people like us save lives.

No really.

I was badly bullied at school. Over my accent, my physical appearance, my weight, my ethnicity, my intelligence, my hobbies, my non-native-British vegetarian diet, my not yet apparent to me but apparently very obvious to everyone else non-normative sexuality by which I probably mean my gender presentation... I was emotionally abused on a daily basis for many years, and suffered physical violence on occasion too. I became physically ill, and suicidal.

When I reported this to the school, the teacher responsible for my pastoral care called me into her office, and made me write lists of things I was grateful for and things I was looking forward to. This was an exceptionally painful exercise Things I remember including on the list: 'no one spat at me today'. 'I said something in class and no one laughed'. I know that being thankful for what you have is supposed to be, like, mood-boosting or something, but mostly what it did for me was grinding me down, forcing me into awareness of how tiny the things I was grateful for were. My suicidal ideation dramatically increased. My class mates laughed at me for having to spend time in the pastoral care office, and accused me of fucking the teacher responsible.

And I remember, so, so vividly clearly the week that I wrote in my little book of enforced gratitude that this week, I wasn't going to kill myself because I wanted to see Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer kiss another girl on television that weekend.

I looked forward to that portrayal of those lesbians. I was grateful for it. And I am alive today, because I hung on long enough to see it, and then gradually, bit by bit, things got better.

I was at the Lashings of Ginger Beer Time performances of Cinderella. And I bounced along with everyone else because there they were, on stage, in public, telling stories about people like us. With a happy ending and everything! And I cannot, simply cannot overstate the importance of that. I am alive, today, because once upon a time someone told a story about someone like me, and it came into my life at the right moment.

Finding that there are people like us out there in the big wide scary world is so, so important. Hearing our stories retold is what makes us human. It's what keeps us alive. That's what these guys do. That's what you're paying for.

Plus it'll make you laugh. Make you squee. If you're lucky, make you think. That's what stories are for. And that's worth paying for.

Links round-up: thank you, and more!

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

First of all, thank you all so much, once again. We made our fundraiser target and then some - and this is going to make an enormous difference to how affordable gigging is for us. We're so grateful. ♥

Second up, links!

Doing the rounds this week has been this excellent takedown of awful (and classist) journalism - From the BBC: how not to eat healthily for £1 a day.

Over on dreamwidth, kate_nepveu takes a critical look at the construct of the Mary Sue, via providing text of a talk she gave, entitled An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses.

It's apparently the week for it: Wear the Old Coat brings us an interview with Meline Marchetta on writing heroines.

Elsewhere in the blogsophere, the Assistance Dog Blog Carnival (#ADBC) is currently running. Over at After Gadget, yesterday's post was about tools for grooming - of relevance to all dog owners, not just service dog partners!

You may have read, this week, about Kiera Wilmot [content note: racism] - a US student expelled from her school, and threatened with being tried as an adult, for conducting an extra-curricular science experiment on school grounds. There's a petition at change.org.

At Brute Reason we have a [content note: street harrassment] very patient, very clear, very point-by-point explanation of Why You Shouldn't Tell That Random Girl On The Street That She's Hot.

From the Fandoms and Feminism tumblr following the recent events at Supernatural NewJerseyCon: An open letter to all fandoms - from a bisexual fan. This essay encapsulates a lot of the reasons why we do what we do here at Lashings -- in particular: '[M]edia representation is like a mirror. You see yourself reflected back at you in a thousand spectacular ways. Except, for queer kids, we have no mirrors, we only have windows.'

This week tumblr bring's us polycule's Your Sexual Health Rights, a charter on healthy communication, negotiation, and enthusiastic, informed consent. What do you think? What would you add or remove?

Actually, let's make that broader: what are your thoughts on the above? And what have you been reading this week?

Fanny Whittington: why we need your help

Posted by Orlando and Galatea




Our editorial blog post is coming out a little early this week, but it’s for a very good reason: we need your help.

As you hopefully already know, we’re trying to raise the money to take our panto Fanny Whittington to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. To make this happen, we need you.

I [Orlando] am still a relatively new Lasher, but I’m a long-time fan. I first saw a Lashings show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010 - and I loved it so much I came back the next night. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen people talking on stage, in real life about things like consensual kink, heteronormativity, fat-shaming, and the stereotyping of queer women. It grabbed me by the gut and pulled me in. Lashings spoke to me in ways nothing else had. And I know for sure that I wasn’t the only one. At Lashings we get so much feedback saying how much what we do matters to you - how important it is for you to see people like you on stage, and remind you that you’re not alone. How important it is that we’re bringing our politics to people who haven’t thought about this stuff before, or haven’t been able to find the words for it. How important it is that we’re representing queer people, poly people, trans people, ace people, kinky people - and representing them as real and human, not just ciphers for an issue. Reading the reviews of our last pantomime still makes us a little teary-eyed.

Illustration by Marguerite; design by D. Gopal

And this time around, the show's concerns don't stop at sexuality and gender. By inverting the traditional story of 'Dick Whittington', by making our heroes the rats of London - the creatures that we're always told are dirty, dangerous and deviant - we've hit on some powerful ways of talking about what's going on in this country at the moment; about the ways in which some of us are scapegoated, exploited and blamed. The only problem we ran into while writing the show was that whenever we thought of something particularly egregious for the villainous Mayor to do, it usually turned out that the current government had already done it. Making jokes about anti-immigrant policies, bedroom taxes and DLA cuts is hard, but it's important too: as Max and Terry the pun-making, joke-cracking, 'Les-Mis'-filk singing rats point out to one another, if you don't laugh about this stuff, you just end up crying about it.

But to be able to keep doing this - we need your help. Everything that Sebastienne wrote last year is still true - more true than it ever was. Keeping Lashings going is really important, and keeping Lashings going is really hard. We’ve gone from being a tiny Oxford-based troupe doing shows in Oxford to an expanding collective with over 20 members, doing shows across the country. Almost every single show we do leaves us out of pocket, both as a collective and as individual members - charity gigs, student gigs, and academic gigs are never venues we make money. (Even with shows where the organisers are able to contribute to our travel expenses, we don’t turn a profit.) The two recent exceptions have been Lashings of Afternoon Tea Time in Oxford and Pirate Cabaret in London - both shows put together with the express aim of raising money for our Edinburgh run. This isn’t a complaint: we voluntarily do gigs in far-off cities for little-to-no expenses, because it’s important, and wonderful, and we love performing, and we love reaching new people. But also? It is hard, and draining, and it skews our shows towards being put together by those of us who can afford the time and money to travel all over.

Edinburgh is a different beast from all these shows. It’s somewhere where we can reach hundreds of new people - we can and do gain scores of fans, friends, and eventual collective members with every Edinburgh run. We rent a flat, and as many of us as possible spend a few weeks living in a blissful-yet-stressful queer-feminist bubble of singing and acting and flyering. The cost of Edinburgh is significantly higher than anything else we do, and it involves serious financial outlay. Currently, most of this is money that a few of us have been able to lend to the collective - there are Lashers who have put in several hundred pounds, such is their faith in the show. The only funding we have is us, and you.

We know times are hard, and money is tighter than ever with the government’s cuts that push marginalised people into further desperation. But now is the also the time that unapologetically angry, intersectional, feminist, queer, and left-wing voices need to be heard. We want to take vital political theatre to the Fringe this year. We want to skewer the austerity programme, make a show with real queer characters played by real queer people, and we want to make terrible puns while doing it. We hope you want us to do that too.

So - if Lashings' work has ever given you hope, or helped you feel less alone, or been there for you in whatever way - here is how you can be here for us: share this post, share the link to our IndieGogo, and donate if you can.

Links round-up: healthcare, gaming, and more

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

There's less than ONE WEEK to go on our IndieGogo fundraising drive! Please help us bring Fanny Whittington to Edinburgh Festival this year! Will intrepid young lesbian Fanny win the love interest of her dreams? Can she save her pet rat Basil from mortal peril? And - in a London where unemployment is illegal - can she avoid being the world's MOST UNPAID INTERN EVER? Fund our production, and find out for yourself! 

Life at the end: historical reflections on palliative medicine is a fantastic introduction to the (extremely recent) history of end-of-life care. The linked article is a brief overview, but itself links to the detailed study results and discussion, which are freely available online.

Almost a year ago, blogger and novelist and straight-white-guy John Scalzi wrote an article entitled Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. Predictably, the Internet kind of erupted. Last week, Samantha Allen (PhD student, instructor in Women's and Gender Studies, trans woman) described how she extended Scalzi's metaphor as a teaching exercise for a 100-level class in the article All Skulls On: Teaching Intersectionality Through Halo.

Reni Eddo-Lodge writes an excellent follow-up to her critique of Caitlin Moran and the response it received: This is white privilege.

There's been some very difficult talking going on over at Captain Awkward this week. The Captain let her own frustration get the better of her when answering a letter, but subsequently followed up with a lot more compassion, a lot of soul-searching, and a healthy dose of following her own advice when it comes to acknowledging being wrong. staranise, a therapist-in-training, provided perspective on dealing professionally with one's feelings about and towards one's clients; recessional responded with Righteous Wroth Rarely Is, an analysis of the high we get from righteous anger, and how it can seduce us away from compassion and intersectional thinking.

Jason Collins, star NBA player, has come out of the closet - the first time a current athelete in any US major sport has done so. "Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out."