Month: March 2018

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Alex Heberling Leave a comment

rosalarian:

rosalarian:

Feminism is having a wardrobe malfunction.

Does your brand of feminism remove barriers for women, or simply move them around? Does is expand options for women, or does it just shift them? You don’t liberate women by forcing them to choose option B instead of option A. What is comfortable for you might not be comfortable for someone else, and it’s entirely possible that what you see as oppressive, other women find comfortable or even downright liberating.

Before you think the girl in the middle is a strawman, let me tell you I used to be her, back in my misguided youth. I considered myself the standard to which other people should adhere. But that was stupid. It’s not up to me to tell people how to dress, and it’s much nicer to let everyone choose for themselves.

Some women would feel naked without a veil. Some women would find it restrictive. Some women would feel restricted by a bra. Some women would feel naked without one. Some women would feel restricted by a tight corset. Others love them. Some wear lots of clothes with a corset. Some only wear the corset and nothing else. What makes any article of clothing oppressive is someone forcing you to wear it. And it’s just as oppressive to force someone not to wear something that they want to wear.

Rerun for International Women’s Day. 

And also, if you erase the fact that this comic is in support of sex workers and turn this into a toned down “free the nipple” thing, you don’t get to have the whole pie. You don’t get the whole pie until everybody does.

Have you been in fandom for a long time? Help us out with our research!

Alex Heberling Leave a comment

knitmeapony:

cfiesler:

Have you been part of fandom for at least ten years (even non-consecutively)?

We’re Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym, longtime fan community members, and also researchers in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. We’re conducting a survey about how fan communities migrate across platforms! So if you’ve used multiple platforms in that time (Livejournal, Tumblr, AO3, Usenet…), we would love to have you participate!

The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. The survey should take on average about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. (There will be more questions depending on how many platforms you’ve used, though you can skip through questions if necessary.)

We will ask for some demographics (any of which you can skip) so that we can describe how fan communities are different from other communities, but won’t require any identifying information – unless you would like to give us your email address so we can inform you about the results of the study.

Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this survey with your social networks!  And if you’d like to find out more about Casey’s previous research about fandom, see this Tumblr post: http://cfiesler.tumblr.com/post/139029976190/an-archive-of-their-own-a-case-study-of-feminist

Click here to take the survey! And please reblog!

If you have any questions at all, please contact Casey at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu.

I can personally vouch for @cfiesler being an all around rad human, if you haven’t already seen some of her research and stuff, and y’all should consider doing the thing if you’re old as shit like me.

Middle-grade author responds to queer-themed book controversy

Alex Heberling Leave a comment

Middle-grade author responds to queer-themed book controversy

biandlesbianliterature:

I didn’t set out to write a controversial book.
I still don’t think I wrote a controversial book. P.S. I Miss You tells the story of 12-year-old Evie, whose older sister Cilla leaves home to stay with her great-aunt after getting pregnant in high school — and after months of fighting with her devoutly Catholic parents. After Cilla leaves, Evie copes by writing letters. She writes about how hard seventh grade is. She writes about drifting apart from her best friends. She writes about June, the new girl in school, the one who’s funny and silly and pretty. She writes, in letters, the thoughts she can’t say out loud — that Evie is developing a crush on June.
That Evie might be a lesbian.
That Evie might disappoint her religious parents, too.

P.S. I Miss You, a middle grade novel which didn’t get to have a proper book tour because schools turned it away for having queer content, is coming out on March 6th! Consider preordering to show there’s a market for LGBTQ middle grade books!