Not Yet Time for a Lady Time Lord

Look I know it's probably unexpected, but I don't support a female Doctor Who.

Why would we do that?  Why would we pretend that it's ok for a shape shifting time-travelling immortal alien to be portrayed as anything, and by anyone, other than a (probably straight) white man who has spoken English from birth?

Sure Missy shows that Time Lords can change their bits, as Mr X pointed out to me, but really that just proves the point.  Missy/The Master is a villain character (usually) and they do all sorts of weird and Not Normal things, being female is clearly just another one of those aberrations.

Also what will we do with all the toilet seats in the TARDIS?  Will they have to be permanently glued down now?  Oh the (in)humanity!

Surely Doctor Who isn't The Doctor without a sonic screwdriver (don't mention Capaldi's sunglasses, sssshhhhh, never happened) and we can't expect a lady to carry around a manly tool of that type (penis compensator?) especially as her clothes won't have any real pockets.  Will she have a sonic silicon pot holder instead?  Can't see much lock picking and computery twiddling happening with that!

Finally, and this will be hard for some readers to accept, but our society just isn't ready.  There are still countries in the world where women have not yet been state leader, can't be lawyers, have little access to education, are barred from driving and even voting.  We should be working hard on all of that, not rejoicing at the mere breakthrough of a woman playing an iconic TV character who has inspired generations and is at the apex of the world's biggest English language fandoms.

Look away from the small beautiful victories and see how we still fail.  Despair at our lack of power, not stomp our feet as the cliffs crumble.

Do not, ever, hope.

I don't do comments here anymore - you can find me easy peasy on Twitter @juliefairey and similarly on Facebook.

Heavyweight Sunday: Torchwood

Star Wars was my first movie, a metaphor for tolerance if not celebration of difference if ever there was one.  I’ve explored ideas about social structures through science fiction ever since.

So when Torchwood began it was a no-brainer I’d be watching.

Aliens.  Gadgetry.  Explicit and regular examination of gender and power.  Probably the hottest sex scenes, with all manner of couplings, I’ve seen on a mainstream television show, because desire is explicit by everyone participating.  Set in Wales, so able to gently critique England as the centre of the universe, and using that as a plot mechanism, repeatedly, to explore issues of class.  Every single main character exploring attraction at one point or another to the same and different genders.

Season 3 is remarkable.  Brutally stripped back plot spoiler: Aliens want to take 10% of Earth’s children as recreational drugs.  They will release fatal viruses if Earth’s leaders don’t agree.  They can do this; they have the technology.

What makes it remarkable is for the first time, Torchwood turns their beam on the machinations of the state responding to the crisis, in particular, the British government.  A kinda sci-fi imagining of how western governments might react to such a dilemma.

We don’t come out well.  The UK government had authorised, in 1965, a gift of 12 children to the same aliens, from a children’s home because “no one will miss them.”

The theme is extended to present day.  First British ministers offer asylum seeking children in detention centres.  When this isn’t enough for the aliens, the British state decides they cannot risk the children who will work in our hospitals and our schools, run our country.  But the Deputy Prime Minister says some children matter less:

“If we can’t identify the lowest achieving 10% of this country’s children, then what are the school league tables for?”

So the army rounds up children at school.  Many, many parents keep their children home.  The army rolls into working class areas, into council estates, and pulls children away from screaming parents.

The British Ministers don’t like what they are doing.  There is no joy.  But there is the ability to decide that some people are worth less than others.  That some people matter less.  And therefore, the ability to sanction the unspeakable.

This series was almost unwatchable.  As with all good sci-fi, the issues it was exploring were only human.  How do we decide worth?  What is the power of the state for?  When it comes down to it, where do you stand?

One of the many scenes which made me cry featured unarmed men on one council estate running at soldiers kitted out with batons, guns and riot gear, to try and buy their children time to run away.  And one police officer, watching in horror, taking off his uniform to fight with the men he knew, rather than stay safe with the state.

Fantastical?  Not so much.  Can we really say, in Aotearoa today, that all of our children matter the same to the state?

The most obvious parallel is New Zealand armed police rolling into Tuhoe, treating the children of Ruatoki with absolute disdain.  Police boarding schools buses, terrifying kids, detaining them illegally.  It’s hard to imagine similar actions being signed off for buses headed to private schools in predominantly Pakeha areas.

But there are other parallels too, where the state might not be clad in riot gear.  About 270,000 New Zealand children live in poverty, according to the Children’s Commissioner.  These levels go up and down, depending on the state’s actions:

 

That’s a lot of our children, living in poverty, in families where their caregivers earn too little or the state allowances for looking after children are insufficient.

When the state rolls up to reduce real access to state allowances for those parenting, or introduce new measures to allow employers to pay less than a living wage for parents, or sells off state assets meaning essential services like power cost more, what we are really doing is treating some children as less important than other children.

It’s got a prettier face than Torchwood.  But the psychological process is the same, make no mistake.  Distance.  Othering.  Outright denial.  Killing off empathy.

In Torchwood, the British government start using “units” to describe the children they are sending to the aliens as living happy pills.  At Ruatoki, we talked about “terrorists” to justify that school bus being boarded.  And the language and images we use to describe the poor?  Subjective cartoon, anyone?

The motto of Torchwood Season One is: “The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you’ve got to be ready.”  Prescient?  Or cheesy beyond compare, allowing those of us that way inclined another chance to gasp admiringly at John Barrowman? Not for the first time, I’m going to choose both.

NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week: Women in Power

I'm super happy to be able to kill two birds with one stone and write a post that serves as not only a suffrage day post but also part of NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week. It's a snapshot of an honours research essay in progress and all my half formed ideas about the texts, so my apologies for this being so 'bitty' and the lack of conclusions - I'm not even going to make an attempt to have the paragraphs naturally flow into each other.

The topic is looking at two novels written the late nineteenth century which portray a future New Zealand in which women hold political office. I'm looking at how far these matched and related to the reality and the conceptions of gender they explore.

The two main texts (their titles link to free ebooks via the NZETC):

Julius Vogel's ‘Anno Domini 2000: Woman’s Destiny’ imagines the world in the year 2000, in which women, by common though not universal assent, are the primary holders of political office simply because they are believed to be better suited to the task. It primarily follows both the political career and romantic exploits of 23 year old Under Secretary for Home Affairs (later Imperial Prime Minister) Hilda Fitzherbert, but large sections of the novel are devoted to explorations of both political systems and technological developments. Vogel was a prime minister of New Zealand, responsible for introducing an earlier (unsuccessful) suffrage bill, and 'Anno Domini'  is widely - though inaccurately - considered to the the first NZ science fiction novel (though it was certainly one of the earliest). It received a lot of attention in the year 2000 for the accuracy of its prediction, not just in terms of women's place in society - in his introduction to the rereleased version Roger Robinson lists some of these (I would dispute some of his points, but they are still significant).

Less well known, and considerably more bizarre, is Edward Tregear's 'Hedged with Divinities' which follows the journey of a male protagonist who wakes us from a trance to find that all men (globally) have died of a plague which remains unexplained. In their absence, and in the face of the incompetence and shock of the remaining women – the socio-political institutions and the infrastructure of the country have collapsed, and Jack (the protagonist) sets about restoring the country to a functioning society. However the question of repopulation remains, and he reluctantly agrees to a mass marriage, despite his only interest being in his lover, Nelly, and at the end of the novel, as babies (both male and female) are born to his wives, he sets sail for a remote pacific island with her.

Things I am writing about, or that I've noticed, include:

Adventures in gingerbread

Really enjoying this season of Doctor Who (watching it as it shows up on Prime so please no spoilers from beyond A Good Man Goes To War aka the episode when we find out who Riversong is)

Here, in honour of Amy and Rory and Riversong and oh yeah, that doctor guy, is a gingerbread tardis.  You can read the story of it's manufacture, along with pics of the process, here.

There may be SPOILERS in comments, depending on where you are up to yourself, so please indulge with suitable caution.  I certainly intend to discuss in a bit more detail the Riversong identity revelation.

Cupcaking across the universe

Nom nom nom nom.

(Space) Adventures in Icing

Nom nom nom. 

IDAHO: Trying to do

For International Day Againist Homophobia and Transphobia (aka IDAHO) I thought I'd try to get out some ideas that have been percolating for a while.  I might bumble through this a bit, and I'm writing in the hope of getting some feedback about this, so please comment gently.  I'm going to focus more on the Transphobia part of IDAHO, as that's the bit that's newest to me and I feel I have a lot to learn about trans issues.

At school I remember an English teacher telling me to avoid using the same word too many times in a paragraph.  Writing about feminist stuff you end up using "woman" a great deal, and I struggle sometimes to come up with variants.  For a while there I thought I had a brain wave that would give me another option to alternate with, by using "XX."  So I played around with that for a while, months I suspect, peppering it gleefully through my rants about A, B and C, ignorant to what I was really saying.

I don't use it now, because being XX is not the defining characteristic of being a woman imho.  It's taken me a while to realise this, and I apologise wholeheartedly for it. 

I've done other exclusionary and unhelpful anti-trans stuff too, I'm sure, not least in writing about abortion focusing on "a woman's right to choose."  While I think there is a strong gender dynamic to the abortion debate, I respect that not everyone who becomes pregnant will identify as a woman.  And thus access to abortion is not just about a woman's right to choose.

I want to thank V for helping me have a few aha moments about this along the way.  I'm definitely open to some more.

To focus more on the overall point of IDAHO, I've been thinking about Yoda.  He was right about "...Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate..."  It seems to me that people tend to fear things they don't understand, and can't control.  One option is to just chillax and shrug and learn when you can.  But it seems there are lots of people who don't take that up and instead opt for the Dark Side.

Hating someone not because of what they've done but because of who they are attracted to, how they identify themselves, the colour of their skin, their gender - it all baffles me.  Why would you expend so much energy hating someone you've never met, or don't really know, because of something that is totally irrelevant to how you live your own life?

Today is a day to say no to homophobia and transphobia.  And everyday is a day to reject hate based on irrelevancies.  Hate someone for how they act; how they treat you, or their kids, or their dog, or their employees, or women.  But hating them for their identity or their sexuality?  That's just lazy - surely you need to know more about someone before you can feel that strongly for or agin an individual?  It must get really tiring to hate so indiscriminately. 

Big love to all my friends today.  If George Lucas had ever got around to making any more Star Wars films (and gee am I grateful he didn't after the terrible prequels) I hope he would have got around to Yoda telling us that love and tolerance are the antidote to hate and fear.  When it comes to being inclusive, try is on the pathway to do.

Joanna Russ dies aged 74

Writer and critic Joanna Russ has died peacefully in Arizona after suffering a series of strokes. She first came to prominence in the late 1960s in a science fiction world largely dominated by men. She is lauded as being one of the most outspoken authors to challenge male dominance in the field and won several major awards in it. She was also a prominent feminist essayist.  Her best known works are The Female Man (1975),  and - a book which was very important to me when I was trying to work out how to write - the scathingly brilliant How to Suppress Women's Writing (1984). I quoted from it in my thesis:

...As Joanna Russ wrote...“undoubtedly one response to Women can’t write is not to”... There is ample evidence that prior to the 1980s at least, women authors made up only a very small proportion of canonical lists in Western literary higher education. Russ found between 5 percent and 8 percent, although "the personnel change rather strikingly".[1]

In other words, having once made it onto a list of Great Authors Worth Studying, women don't stay there - they are replaced by another tiny handful of different women. Much of what she wrote in that book still holds true today. Read her.

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[1] Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing, p. 79. In Silences, Tillie Olsen came to a well-supported similar conclusion that the usual ratio was one in twelve. Florence Howe recalled how she and a young male teacher redesigned the required sophomore course in English literature at a women’s university: “We chose a series of “major” and “universal” works…in which there appeared not a single woman author nor a single admirable woman as central character”.  She also notes that “there was until 1969 no social context in which [her students] and I could find support” for a different approach. Florence Howe, ed., Women and the Power to Change, Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Research Series (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975), pp. 147, 50. This is pretty much the kind of teaching of "English literature" I encoutered at university in NZ in the 1960s.