How Do You Define Art?

You may remember last week I linked you to the Interstitial Arts Foundation Jewelry auction and pointed you over there to bid? Well today is the start of the the Third Interstitial Arts Salon online discussing:

We’ll be talking about creating visual art inspired by texts, about the relationships between narrative and wearable art, the cultural history of personal adornment — anything we can think of!

I’m linking to this because I think it’s always interesting to talk about what constitutes art, fine art and where different types of art intersect. It’s like that saying “A comic book is low-brow art but a painting of a comic book, that’s high-brow art.” That’s where my interest lies, especially because I write SF/F and spend a lot of my time explaining to friends that SF/F is more that Star Trek, that there’s a whole slew of artists exploring intertextuality and intersextionality. When I write a story I always think of other art forms or ways of writing that I’d like to incorporate and my stories almost always have a soundtrack that I listen to over and over while I write them (helps set the mood).

One of the things I really liked about my undergrad is that we weren’t required to just take fiction classes even if that was our emphasis, we could take poetry class or play-writing. We weren’t hemmed in by what does and doesn’t constitute our art. We were able to find those spaces in between different writing genres. Now the Interstitial Arts Foundation goes beyond that, they’re talking about literature, music, film, jewelry making (and more!) and the spaces in-between these realms.

Anyway that’s enough of my insane artsy ramblings for now but I think this discussion is something to at least follow along with even if you have nothing to say.  

 

Movie Review - Kirikou & The Sorceress

Kirikou & the Sorceressis a French animated film from 1998 based on an African folktale and it’s something I’ve been meaning to check out for years. It got a good review from one of the feminist blogs I frequent a few months ago (can’t remember which one) and a couple of my friends with ties to France have recommended it to me multiple times. Anyway my friend Bankuei owns it and ended up lending it to me and last weekend I finally watched it.

Now I know a lot of my friends and people I respect loved it and it’s hugely popular in France but for me personally my reaction verged on - Meh. I mean I thought there were great things going on but there were also things that really bothered me and made me twitch. Weighing those two reactions against each other makes it an unenthusiastic thumbs up from me. I’m not sorry I watched it but is it one of those films I would buy and re-watch, not so much.

Viewed through my anti-racism lens I liked it a lot, there were no parts that were problematic or made me cringe. In fact I thought it was very relaxed and wonderfully set up. I thought that despite the fact that it was made in France it had a very African feel to it. The animation of the characters was fantastic with different colors of skin, different breast shapes and sizes and most of the characters were simply human. The characters that were snappy or mean, were just snappy or mean there was no attempt to really link that with their blackness which I found refreshing. I also really liked that the nudity of characters was not a huge factor. I thought that Kirikou was a very interesting character and I liked him from the start and I felt the same about Karaba, the evil sorceress who has eaten all the men of the village, that he must fight. I thought she was an intriguing character that could have done something revolutionary. In that little “could” lies the problem.

Viewed through the lens of my feminism, I was much less happy with the story. I felt that Karaba was pretty two dimentional but in a way where they seemed to be actively trying to not make her flat and just failed, which made it even more disappointing because there was all this potential. I have a couple of specific issues with her characterization and a couple of plot points but they’re quite spoilery and I think will go in a post for Feminist SF - The Blog (I’ll let y’all know when that goes up).

Overall I say rent it, watch it, it’s definitely worth that and you might actually like it a lot and want to buy it. I mean the feminist blog I read loved it for some good reasons, those reasons just didn’t outweigh the problems I saw.

Movies, Cops & Emails 5-09-08 Links

I’m going to designate today an actual writing day so just some quick links and I’m gone.
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WOC PhD deconstructs the Iron Man film in The Summer of Men (Some Spoilers)

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I’m not asking for a completely sympathetic image of Arabs that glosses over the real role of warlords in prolonging and exploiting the conflict; saying any group of people is all good or all bad is an unprovable position. However, presenting flattened out stereotypes of Arab people as blood thirsty war mongers is the kind of war propaganda I had expected to be dismantled by this film not reinforced by it.
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Ultimately, Rhodes is reduced to a whinier, darker, version of the machines that Stark surrounds himself with throughout the film. Interesting, some people have said that slavery came to an end because of the rise of machines and an MTV ad once compared slaves to “obsolete machines,” and before you say I am taking it too far, remember that insipidly inaccurate Will Smith version of I Robot? It too compared the plight of machines to those of black people.
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There is nothing enlightened or feminist about being self-aware and still willing to be objectified because you are in love with your objectifier. And there is certainly nothing empowering for women in a character who has the nerve to demean and mock other women for falling for that same man’s charm.
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Lauren Williams over at Stereohyped briefs us on the NYPD Sued For Using Fewer Resources For Missing Blacks. All I can say is about damn time and I wish I could quote the whole article, just go read it now.

Ever heard of Romona Moore? I hadn’t either. She was a 21-year-old Hunter College student who lived in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn with her parents, who are immigrants from Guyana. When she left the house to go to Burger King one night five years ago and didn’t return by the next morning, her mother, Elle Carmichael, called the police. The police told her she shouldn’t even be calling for a 21-year-old missing woman.They didn’t help and closed the complaint that an officer had drafted out of pity. In the four days that followed, as the police refused to help Carmichael by opening an investigation, Romona Moore was being raped and tortured by two men in a house a few blocks from her home. They beat her death on the day that police reluctantly launched an investigation. Carmichael had to help the police find her daughter’s body by conducting her own amateur investigation.
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Here’s a link to the full Village Voice articles with details of what Romona had to go through, exactly how the NYPD ignored calls for help and how the family organized on their own. WARNING - SEXUAL ASSAULT TRIGGERS plus heartbreaking and angering (not at the author but at the NYPD and Det. Carey in particular) especially the last line of the article.
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In a post from a few weeks ago Less Lee Moore over at The Automatik talks about those annoying white pride emails we’ve all recieved and refutes it point for point in Not Proud of Being White

This is an extremely significant point. The United States of America didn’t come into being until the Revolutionary War of 1776, but for the preceding 150 years or so, it developed through the suffering of those that the settlers considered to be subhuman and according to theologian Cotton Mather “enslaved because they had sinned against God.”
THERE ARE SOME VERY IMPORTANT POINTS AHEAD SO PLEASE PAY ATTENTION.

The citizens and residents of a country that is founded and predicated on such beliefs must continue to champion these beliefs because to do otherwise calls the very existence of the country, not to mention their own rights and freedoms, into question.
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A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant, but any color can be in the Miss America pageant.

Again, only addressing the African-American issue, it must be noted that The Miss America pageant began in 1921, but according to Wikipedia, Rule Number Seven stated, “contestants must be of good health and of the white race.”

No African American women participated until 1970, although African Americans did appear in musical numbers as far back as 1923, when they were cast as slaves. Until at least 1940, contestants were required to complete a biological questionnaire tracing their ancestry.

Vanessa Williams was the first African American woman to win the crown in 1984 but resigned because nude photos of her surfaced, although she is still listed as the official winner.

If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships you know we’d be racists. There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US. Yet if there were ‘White colleges’ THAT would be a racist college.

AfricanAmericans.com does list 60 “historically black colleges and universities.” That’s only 60 out of the thousands of regionally-accredited ones in the entire country. Statistics across all colleges show that white college students outnumber African-Americans by eight to one. Thus, most colleges are in fact, white colleges.

When GLBT Groups Advocate for Bashers…

Most of you have probably heard of the Lawrence King shooting. If you haven’t the rundown is that Lawrence King is a 15-year-old POC child that was shot twice in the head by one of his bullies McInerney after turning the tables on him. McInerney’s defense seems to be that old “gay panic” classic, you know that King flirting with him drove him to do it. The defense completely disregards the fact that King flirting with him was an attempt to get McInerney and others to stop bullying him and leave him alone. We’ve seen the old gay panic defense work over and over however and the child may well get off but that isn’t even what I want to talk about.

The DA in this case has decided to try McInerney as an adult but there is a coalition of GLBT groups that are agitating to have him tried as a juvenile. When I first saw this information a couple of weeks ago something about it bothered me but I couldn’t put a voice to it.

Well here it is, Lawrence King was a Person of Color and McInerney is White and none of that is being interrogated or taken into account anywhere that I’ve seen. Many of you who know me know my issues with a lot of the mainstream GLBT groups (which are similar to mainstream feminist organizations) in that they purport to advance the causes of all GLBT folks but are overwhelmingly White and focused on issues, such as marriage, that have more of an effect on and interest from White middle class GLBT folks than anyone else.  I point you to a wonderful essay written a few years ago by Kenyon Farrow - Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black. 

Now the coalition that is calling for McInerney to be tried as a juvenile holds a lot of overlap with the groups that are at the forefront of the push for gay marriage. Many of these are groups that have specifically have been called out before for ignoring issues that queer POC, differently-abled folks & Folks of Lower Socio-Economic levels. Basically they’ve been accused of ignoring the same groups that the mainstream tends to ignore.

In light of this history of alienation what does it look like when they stridently advocate that a white boy who has killed a POC be tried as a juvenile? Well, it sure ain’t pretty.

Now I’m not saying that I want McInerney to fry. In fact I’m attempting to be really objective and leave my personal feelings on the case out of this. What I’m saying is that if we want to show mercy, we show it equally to everyone. Where are these groups when the victims are White and the perpetrators of queer bashings POC? Are they out advocating that those underage youths be tried as juvenile? I haven’t heard anything like that but I don’t know every queer bashing case that happens in the world. So if they do happen to do this sort of thing for every queer bashing involving underage kids (and I’ve somehow just never heard of it), please let me know and I’ll be happy to let go of this knot of anger in my gut and write an apology.

But my guess…my guess is that I won’t get any replies with a case of a single or group of POC youths that killed a White queer child having this huge coalition of GLBT organizations pushing for them to be tried as juveniles. I’m not saying the organizations are doing this consciously but when we realize that we live in a White patriarchial society that automatically values the life of its White citizens over anyone else. When we think about the fact that any POC child who commits a crime gets the book thrown at them while White youths are generally given a slap on the wrist. Everyone remember in Texas last year when the white girl who burned down her family home got probation while the black girl who shoved a hall monitor got 7 years in prison? (Note: Shaquanda was finally released after more than a year in prison though the harshness of her sentence and the reasons behind it were never really addressed.) We could also talk about the ongoing Jena 6 problems and who got charged in mutual fights (hint: it wasn’t the White kids).

These are just a couple of examples of it but this happens all the time. White teens who commit crimes are constantly excused on the fact that “They’re young, they have their whole life ahead of them.” POC youth are rarely (if ever) given the same consideration. We’re considered bad from birth on virtue of our skin, so the thinking becomes “Why not lock them up for a good long while so they can’t get into trouble?”

I’m all for mercy for people who make mistakes, because we all make mistakes. And I’m not saying these coalitions should stop pushing for McInerney to be tried as a juvenile. I just hope that when this happens and it’s the reverse, when it’s a POC child whose queer bashed a White child that I’ll see all these same organizations advocating that that kid be tried as a juvenile.

And until I do see that this whole thing is just another case where our pain and our anger and our bodies and our lives mean nothing when compared to white folks.

 

 

 

‘Sexual Assault’ & ‘Disengaging Online’

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TRIGGER WARNING: This account of sexual assault is so stomach turning. Basically a girl on a school campus (that actually has a trail/path nicknamed “the rape trail”, I’m just gonna let that sink in) was accosted by a man who tried to dry hump her, she fought him off and screamed that he had sexually assaulted her a crowd of men gathered and a gentleman ripped off her shirt and fondled her breast while the rest of the guys in the circle cheered. Thankfully she fought her way out of that situation and good on her for speaking out and spreading her story around. 

This really brings up my thoughts on Women and Self-Defense which are basically that I definitely think it’s a very good thing to learn self-defense but we cannot just focusing on that when we discuss rape. We, as a society,  all to often ignore the rapists, their socialization and a culture that allows them to believe that rape is okay and normalized. I fully support training in self-defense but when people just throw that out as a “cure” for rape it angers me because it implies that women should be responsible for rape in some way and takes away the responsibility of the rapist. How about we start punishing rapists like they should be punished? How about we show people that this is not acceptable in any way? Anyway those are just my two cents.

Avalon’s Willow links the attack and the men’s reactions and subsequent attack to the Madonna/Whore complex which is something I hadn’t thought of but makes a whole lot of sense.   

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So one of the posts I half wrote yesterday and ended up deleting was about engaging and disengaging with folks. I might revisit it later. It was about how do we decide when someones a troll, when do we not engage, when do we stop giving second chances. Well my friend Bankuei just put out a post, Disengagement Tactics, that touches on some of these issues while discussing ways to limit your interaction with the crazy. One of my favorite parts:

Because, you know, sexist, racist, and heterosexist ideas are totally totally oppressed views these days…(”Man, did you hear? They lynched another straight white guy! Then the cops shot him 50 times. Then he got raped! We’re so silenced, it’s like being invisible! Maybe if we got a white guy in political office, we could change things!”)

Head over and read the whole thing, hilarious and on point.

Jewelry & ‘Feminism, Race and a F/SF Author’

The mental fog has lifted at least enough so that I can give you a couple of links.

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First of all I don’t know how many of you guys remember my mentioning the anthology Interfictionsin my recap of WisCon last year. It was the reading early in the morning that I dragged my hungover ass to and it was totally worth it. I also have my copy autographed by K. Tempest Bradford whose story Black Featheris one of my favorites in the collection. So the poibnt of this is that there is an auction happening of jewelry based on Interfictions stories. Tempest has a picture of the piece she’s working on (earrings) and links to the auction itself and other pieces that will be on the block. Since I don’t have my ears pierced and it’s so not on my list of things to do I’m actually thinking of placing a bid on the necklace based on Valente’s story A Dirge for Prester John depending on how high the bidding goes. Anyway’s head over, look at jewelry and bid!

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The other thing is not a happy. Tamora Pierce who is an author I’ve read and enjoyed before weighed in on the fact that a lot of Women of Color inlight of the recent BS in the feminist blogosphere have been distancing themselves from the title feminist (which is not a new thing by any means). The way she does this is to list all the reasons she’s a feminist, which of course holds the implication that obviously these WOC just don’t get what feminism is really about. It’s just so problematic that my eyes actually crossed while I was reading it. It’s fine for her to identify how she wants, the problem comes in when the post seems to be decrying WOC or trying to pressure them into retaining that label. We all get to form our own identities, no one else gets to do that, no one. So after a bunch of folks called her on the fact that she wasn’t actually addressing any of the issues that were actually why so many had disassociated themselves from the word feminist she made an clarification, although it didn’t satisfy me mainly because I felt she was saying ’sorry feminism did this’ without really acknowledging the tone in her previous post.

Avalon’s Willow composed a response: Open Letter, Dear Tamora Pierce (and others) which is excellent and on point. Also read the comments because people bring up some really valid issues with Pierce’s work.

If you were at WisCon last year you might remember me talking about her Tricksters’ Duology in the What these people need is a honky! panel because while I actually do really like the duology I have massive problems with it. The white person coming in saving the POC revolution, the fact that the POC are so disorganized before she shows up to whip them into shape, the fact that it’s reiterated by quite a few of the POC in the book how amazing and wonderful she is and how they couldn’t have done it without her. I felt the works could have been just as good had Aly become part of the revolution, an intricate part perhaps but without actually becoming the mythical white 14(?) year old leader who teaches them how to revolt and to not hate the white folks who’ve enslaved their people for so long (I’m not even gonna get into the colorism aspects of the novel). But you know what those are her works and her decisions and she totally has the right to write and publish what she wants but when it’s out there in the public sphere it has to be realized that POC are probably going to read the work differently than most white folks and that we have that right to critique works according to our lens of being.*

Anyway Pierce showed up in the comments of the the entry and really…I don’t know how else to describe it…stomped her feet and huffed off. Then returned to reply to a couple of folks who had criticized her works and talked about them “trashing her” but I really think that implies some sort of attack or vendetta and that’s not what it’s about at all. It also to me felt like a fall into victimhood, where it became about her hurt feelings and the mean bullies, very derailing of the conversation and not of use to anyone involved in the discussion.

I understand it’s hard not to get defensive when your work and you are being called on some unconscious stereotypes but if like she said in her clarification post she does want to be part of a movement that advances all women she has to be able to listen to WOC and their concerns, even (I should say especially) if they’re about her. Anti-oppression work is not easy at all, as anyone who has gone through it will tell you, it is a constant ongoing process and a lot of it deals with confronting ugly truths about yourself and sitting with that heavy uncomfortableness. Basically you have to get over yourself and getting huffy because you feel you’re not getting props for trying is not a show of good faith, it’s more like showing your ass.

Huh, guess I had more words in me than I thought.

*I as a POC am working from a different POV where things that might in the author’s mind (at this point I’m talking about writers in general not Pierce specifically) seem like fun character facts or a way to make a character interesting automatically register with me as something problematic, stereotypical or racist. For example, you have this hugely muscled intimidating ex-army bodyguard, okay cool. You decide he should be slightly menacing, okay. You decide he should be black because you want some diversity. Okay well why does the only black character in the book have to be a gruff ex-army guy? The scary intimidating killer black man is the stereotype you’re playing on and that will automatically pop up on my radar. So things that may seem harmless to you are actually informed by your unconscious prejudices to some degree and while you don’t pick up on that? I will.

T’day is a day for reading.

I’ve started four posts today and none of them feel right. It could be the fact that I only got three hours of sleep last night or just general misfiring of synapses but I though that you guys should know I tried to post something today (I really did!) but it looks as if it’s not working today so instead I will spend time reading. I might cruise over to Strange Horizons or Clarkesworld or Fantasy Magazine. If you guys are lookingfor something to read I recommend hitting those (and the many other wonderful F/SF magazines online that I can’t seem to remember right now in this mental fog) or just hit some blogs in my blogroll, they’re all amazing and more entertaining than me, today at least.  

Final WisCon Programming Assignment!

So I just got the email that lists the panels I’m on for WisCon 32! Now the original email only had three panels but this final one added one more. When I saw the panel that was added I couldn’t supress a bark of laughter.

Here are the panels:

Title: Captain Jack’s Big Gay Torchwood
“The 21st century is when everything changes, and you’ve got to be ready.’ Is Torchwood breaking new ground, or just depending on our prurient tastes to grab viewers? Or both? Or neither? How do the gay relationships on the show compare with the straight ones? Finally, let’s hold a comparison among the various gay kisses portrayed on the show. “
Saturday, 2:30-3:45 P.M.
Capitol A

M: Naamen Tilahun
Jennifer Pelland
Mary Kay Kare
Penny Hill
Victoria Janssen

Title: Time To Put Down The Laptop?
“Everyone and her sister/brother/dog seems to be blogging these days. Do you find blogging a waste of creative energy and a bane to more polished fiction? Does talking about your process keep you from engaging in it? Counting your words rather than crafting them? Or do you think this is a false economy of scarcity? Does blogging actually help you write more, better, faster, better-crafted? If so, how? “
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Caucus

M: Alan Bostick
M.K. Hobson
Naamen Tilahun
Cecilia Tan
Vylar Kaftan

Title: Dissecting Privilege — Let’s Look At The Guts
“Few words are more likely to provoke a rapid, vehement response than ‘privilege,’ whether it’s agreement with, an accusation, or a fervent denial. What made this 9-letter word a 4-letter word? From its beginnings as ‘private law’ to the current bugaboo, panelists will discuss what privilege does and doesn’t mean, determine how we can get past fighting about the word itself, explore the situations and structures that lie behind it and reflect on the implications for societal change.”
Sunday, 2:30-3:45 P.M.
Capitol B

M: Laurie Toby Edison
Steven Schwartz
Richard F. Dutcher
Naamen Tilahun
Alan Bostick 
Paula Fleming

Title: Faux Diversity vs. Actual Diversity
“Firefly was set in an Asia-dominated future that mysteriously contained no actual Asian people. More recently, the Last Airbender features a rich variety of cultures and societies with details taken from many Earth traditions, predominantly Asian–and almost no characters who are identifiably not white. What is with shows that use other kinds of diversity (or just the trappings of diversity) to stand in for racial diversity? It may come from good impulses on the part of show’s creators, but is wrong, wrong, wrong in execution. We can talk about this in terms of racism, worldbuilding…possibly even (dare we say it?) cultural appropriation. Let’s discuss any and all shows that come to mind, either as bad examples or (hopefully!) as good ones.”  
Sunday, 4:00-5:15 P.M.  
Senate B

M: Linda McAllister
Rachel Kronick
Julia Starkey
Janine Young
Naamen Tilahun

Okay considering what I talked about on Thursday and what my friend Bankuei said tell me it isn’t hilarious that the panel they decide to add me too (Faux vs. Actual) has the whole Avatar thing in it’s description. So I got the email, I LOL-ed for a few minutes and then I started thinking about what I want to say in the panels I’m on. I already have a general idea for things I want to bring up in each panel, just wish I had my notebook so I could jot them down. Oh, well that’ll have to wait til I get home tonight.

Fantasy/Science-Fiction Reading List for API Heritage Month!

As some of you may know May is API Heritage month and in honor of that The Carl Brandon Society (dedicated to increasing the presence of characters and writers of Color in SF) has put out our reading list of F/SF by/about API:

Ted Chiang -STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS
A collection of stories from one of American speculative fiction’s most precise and beautiful writers.

Sesshu Foster - ATOMIK AZTEX
An Aztec prince or a Los Angeles meatpacker? The protagonist travels back and forth between two alternative realities, never sure which is real.

Hiromi Goto - HOPEFUL MONSTERS
Wonderful stories by the author of The Kappa Child.

Kazuo Ishiguro - NEVER LET ME GO
In a dystopian England, three children discover that they are clones produced to provide organs to the sick.

Larissa Lai - SALT FISH GIRL
Science fiction set in a dystopian near future in which corporate enclaves house lucky employees, leaving most of humanity to deal with increasingly strange ecological developments.

Amirthi Mohanraj (illustrated by Kat Beyer) - THE POET’S JOURNEY
A young poet sets out into the wide world on a journey to find poetry, with the help of a few magical creatures, she finds more than she ever expected.

Haruki Murakami - HARDBOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Mad experiments with the unleashed potential of the dreaming brain.

Vandana Singh - OF LOVE AND OTHER MONSTERS
The main character wakes up from a fire and doesn’t know who he is, but can sense and manipulate the minds of others. He is not alone in this ability. Singh takes us on a metamind ride.

Shaun Tan - THE ARRIVAL
A wordless graphic novel about immigration and displacement.

Bryan Thao Worra - ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EYE
Speculative poems that take us from the secret wars of the CIA in Laos to the secret edges of
the human soul and the universe.

Try and pick one or more of these up this month (that’s my goal), if you don’t already own them!

Links for Friday 5-02-08

I was gonna write a whole thing for some of these but then decided to just but most of the links out there with a little explanation, unless I get caught up and start to rant.

-Okay, in stupid-ass-lawsuit news citizens of the Greek Island of Lesbos (who are called Lesbians) are suing the GLBT community of Greece to stop them from using the word lesbian because “they claim use of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders and causes much embarrassment.” Okay on one hand it’s kind of laughable but yeah not really because what’s the primary assumption this whole thing is working from? The idea that being called a lesbian (in the queer sense) is something that one should be embarrassed about, that it’s something horrifying. It works on the assumption that lesbianism is wrong or unnatural and so being associated with it is something truly disgusting. So all this queerism plus the idea that you get to tell someone how to identify or not identify? Yeah, it’s really not so funny. If the Greek courts do grant this injunction they plaintiffs intend to take this lawsuit international.

- The 21st Carnival of Feminist SF/F Fans is up at Heroine Content. You should go check out all the genius links (and I’m not just saying that ’cause I’m linked to twice) because there are some truly amazing things linked. In fact it took me fifteen minutes to write that last sentence because I kept getting distracted by entries in the carnival. Isn’t that enough of an endorsement to get you to go over there and check it out?

- Yesterday was May Day! and there were protests all over and work stops at ports from San Diego to Seattle in support of immigrants, workers’ rights and against the occupation of Iraq. Couldn’t be at any of the rallies and want to see what it’s like? Well check out the video May Day Mashup a collection of highlights from the L.A. Rally over at Hot Potato Mash. It’s really amazing and powerful.

- Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day! Go check out all the super-cool blog posts and educate yourself on an -ism that’s rarely discussed.  

-Okay most of you know I am not a fan of Orson Scott Card (you’ll also know that’s a bit of an understatement) I find him extremely queerist and misogynistic. A lot of this probably has to do with his Mormonism, there’s also that book he wrote were it’s all about how close-minded and bad liberals are (now I don’t argue there are bad liberals but come on? really?)  Yonmei who back in October ‘06 wrote a fantastic five part expose entitled “Dissecting Orson Scott Card” (link goes to first part, link to the next part at bottom) has come back to him with Orson Scott Card is a misogynistic homophobic wanker this time talking about his misogynistic rant against J.K. Rowling where he gets supremely hypocritical and really just…wankery. My favorite part of his crazy is when he takes on J.K. for Dumbledore being gay: What a pretentious, puffed-up coward. When I have a gay character in my fiction, I say so right in the book. I don’t wait until after it has had all its initial sales to mention it.  Not that I haven’t made a similar argument about this issue but coming from Card it’s supremely laughable because yeah they’re gay up front and then they’re horrible castrated or killed or some other supremely depressing circumstances, it’s really a case of pot and kettle. Personally out of the two bad choices I’d rather find out that a character was queer after the fact than know all along and read about horrific things happening to him.  Anyway, go read the post and the comments.