QotD: how superheroines dress

Comix
Published on

Harley Quinn in her new, awful costume

From Comics Alliance‘s roundtable on The fashion of the new DC universe, Laura Hudson pinpoints what bothers her about the female heroes wardrobes:

I really wish we had artists who were thinking about how these characters would dress themselves. I bet a lot of them would dress sexy! But this is like — did you ever watch Beauty and the Geek? These women look how the girls did when the guys went shopping for them. Female superheroes always have the guys going shopping for them. Well, almost always.

The picture above shows one of the worst re-imagined costumes: Harley Quinn’s new outfit. Here’s what she actually looks like, as originally designed by her creators Paul Dini and Bruce Timm for the old Batman animated series, creating one of the classic Batman villains, one of the few modern ones to be as iconic as the Joker or Catwoman or the Penguin. This new look? Not so much. Far too stripperific.

Seventy years ago today

history, video, Warfare & Military history
Published on



Hitler made the biggest yet inevitable mistake of the war and started Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. Though incredibly succesful at first, it turned out to be far from the cakewalk the Germans had expected. The tenacity and fighting power of the average Soviet fighting man (and woman) was far greater than anybody, including Stalin, had accounted for and the Russian defence might have been in disarray in the first few weeks, it never broke. The Germans needed to deliver a knocout blow and once they failed to do it, the outcome was inevitable.

Three short years later and the Russians launched Operation Bagration, swept the Germans out of their country and inflicted the worst German defeat in the entire war: it was this, rather than the Normandy Landings, that meant the end was near. In the west we have a tendency to airbrush the Soviet contributions to the defeat of Germany out of our history, but without them, we’d all be speaking German stilll..

The version of The Internationale above is sung by SWP activist and folk singer Alistair Hulett (best known for being in Roaring Jack) with backing by Jimmy Gregory. Sadly Alistair Hulett died early last year due to liver cancer.

Girl cooties in science fiction

Feminism, Life under Capitalism, science fiction
Published on

Judith Tarr comments over at the SF Signal post about the importance of the Russ Pledge:

I am actually new to SF Signal because when I gafiated, I gafiated like holy whoa. Blew completely out of the genre and went mainstream.

It’s not any better there. And my real heart is in the genre.But when I came back…well, it’s over on my guest blog. The world I found myself writing in narrowed down something fierce at the turn of the millennium. There just weren’t any choices, apart from a specfic few. And I was so disconcerted, and taken aback, and beaten down as it went on, that I got to the point where if I was going to post somewhere, I’d start, then delete it. “Why bother? Nobody cares what I have to say.”

(You’ll have to scroll down quite a lot; SF Signal doesn’t do comment links.) She expanded on the same sentiments in later guest post, detailing her own personal history with “girl cooties”:

2001:
“You want to sell some more fantasy? Great! But can you do female protagonists? And put more romance in? Romance sells.” – OK, no problem, but I’d really like to do a male protagonist for this one if I–
“No, you can’t do that. You’re a girl. You need to write about girl heroes. Also, don’t get exotic. Really. Can you write something set in England?”
2003: “Yes, I know this is a secondary series in an established fantasy world. Yes, I know it’s a great story. And it has plenty of romance. But you have to tell it from a female POV. You can’t sell male POV.”
2005: “Female POV. Romance. Fantasy. You’re good at it. Don’t write anything different. And no, no male protagonist. Please.”
2009: “We love this strikingly unusual cross-genre book! It’s brilliant! We just hate to let it pass. But Marketing feels it’s too ‘girl-friendly’ for science fiction.”
2010: “This is full-on, grand-scale, old-fashioned space opera. Twenty years ago we’d have killed to get our hands on it. Unfortunately, we just can’t sell a book like this any more, unless you’ve been publishing books like this for, well, the past twenty years.” – Actually I would have, I wanted to, I tried. But.
2011: Time to think really seriously about that androgynous pseudonym. No, not because I’m giving up. Because I’m the mood to experiment, and I like to test hypotheses in the real world. A woman writing science fiction set in the medieval period is, by universal fiat, writing fantasy. Likewise if the science fiction is set in a preindustrial technological period, though it’s actually a prequel to a cycle of space operas that predated Stargate by a fair few years. One of those got sneaked into print a few years back as, you guessed it, a fantasy. With a pointed historical sting in the tail. (Points if you can guess, accurately, which one that is.)(It’s not under a pseudonym.) Now it might be the tech level that’s doing it, but all things considered…

Now of course one woman’s experiences don’t make a trend, but at the very least it makes for a useful — as Coffeandink put it — “contradiction of cultural narratives of straightforward political progress over time”. From Judith Tarr experiences it seems science fiction and fantasy publishers have become less welcoming to anything that doesn’t fit into a neat little subgenre, exacerbated by a gender essentialism that assumes that men write/read hard sf and women paranormal romances and never the twain shall meet. The insistent rumour that only two female sf authors still have contracts in the UK doesn’t help here either.

In general, from the discussions currently going on in especially British science fiction/fantasy circles, it does seem as if the options for female writers in particular have only narrowed over the past thirty years, with less women being published, less being read/reviewed and those who do make it forced towards what publishers think are typically female subgenres: urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on. What I’m wondering about is how this trend correlates with that other trend of increased commercialisation and globalisation of publishing in the past thirty years. Because I think it does.

Back in the seventies there was room made for more diversity, for feminism in science fiction because writers, editors, reviewers and publishers were able to act outside of narrow profit/loss considerations. Not that publishing ever was a charity, but it makes a difference if you’re working for an independent family business or if your publisher is part of a multinational media conglomerate which sees novels largely as fodder for its television or movie investments. The bean counters have taken over and they’re wary of taking chances. What they want is predictable, repeatable successes, formula fiction and anything that doesn’t fit a succesful subgenre is not even considered.

And of course this sort of thinking reinforces the systemic biases already present in science fiction, with the result that it has become correspondently harder for women — and writers of colour — to be published…

DO I have to say his name? DO I have to speak his name?

Music, video
Published on



There will be a hell of a lot of Bruce and E-Street Band fans tonight who’ll be listening to some variation on the song above, in memory of the Big Man, King of the World, Emperor of the North Pole, Clarence Clemons, who died this Saturday due to complications from a stroke. Only 69 years old as well, way too young to die.

It was his saxophone, as much as anything that defined the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, always there in the background, driving the songs and sometimes in the foreground, making them. Rosalita is one of these songs, a concert favourite, unthinkable without the Big Man there to lay down the horns. Jungleland is of course the other one:



Sometime in the mid-eighties Clarence Clemons also had a rare hit without Bruce and the rest of the E-Street Band, working with Jackson Browne on their own album, coming out with a song so very eighties that it makes me happy each time I hear it:



Goodbye Clarence; you’ll be missed.

Brian Haw

Activism, Antiwar, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq
Published on

It doesn’t matter that Brian Haw was hanging around with D\avid I\cke kooks too much at the end of his life or that his death was posibbly hastened by putting his trust into quackery rather than proper medicine, nor do questions of how effective an anti-war protestor he was. After all, none of us managed to prevent the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, while the War on Libya has proved we haven’t even learned anything from those disasters. What mattered was that Brian Haw had the courage of his convictions to camp out in front of Parliament for years, serving as a living reminder to the fuckers who had voted for these wars that no, the people of Britain did not agree with them and thought them wrong.

He did this so well that the then Labour government created and implemented a law designed specifically to stop him demonstrating in Parliament Square. In typical New Labour fashion, they did this so ineptly that the resulting law applied everybody but him, as he was grandfathered in. (The law only allowed demonstrations to take place if at the start of a demo it had police approval, but Brian Haw had started his demonstration years ago, so…)

Somebody who managed to get under the skin of Blair and co to such an extent that they had to change the law to get rid of him (and failed) and who did so for all the right reasons, deserves our deepest respect.