Autumn to winter

It’s been a while since I updated with what’s going on in my life, so – for anyone who might have been wondering – here comes an abridged account of the past few months. (I’d like to talk in more detail about many of the things below, but perfectionism means that I’ve been putting off posting anything until it’s just right, which means this blog has carried on being empty! So for the meantime, a whistle-stop tour of what’s been happening since August.)

Nine Worlds was an absolute blast – I was shattered by the end of it, but I had an amazing time. I spent most of my time in the Queer Fandom track, with forays into various others, and loved performing at the Bifröst cabaret. The “Better History = Better Fantasy: Writing Outside the Binary”  panel that I spoke in was an incredible experience: the audience, the chair (Alex Dally MacFarlane), and the other panellists (Koel Mukherjee and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz) were all bursting with information and enthusiasm, and the discussions sparked were so valuable. I took a lot of notes and really should write about this properly at some point, but, yeah, it was such an awesome space – and I was really pleased that even though this wasn’t a panel “about” race, the other two panellists were women of colour (because structural racism/sexism still exists in queer spaces, and definitely exists in SFF, and can only be addressed by empowering marginalised voices). I enjoyed every session I attended, was wowed by the beautiful things for sale in the vendors section, and briefly cosplayed as Queen Chrysalis. And the geeky disco was great. (Absurdly, I think a favourite moment was when I realised that every time I was a speaker (and one time I wasn’t), I had managed to get the room briefly and intensely angry about all the inherent misogyny in Steven Moffat’s oeuvre. Seriously, he’s all over British television right now, and there’s insidious sexism oozing out of everything he creates.)

If you’d like to read more about Nine Worlds right this minute (as opposed to waiting for me to write more, if I ever get round to it) there are some lovely reviews up on blogs Serenity Womble  and Ferretbrain – I’m linking to those because even though I didn’t go to all the same sessions as those bloggers did, their experiences and perspectives (as feminist and/or queer people who felt welcomed) are pretty close to mine. Oh, and following my talk in the Academia track about Margaret Cavendish as an early writer of (or precursor to) SFF, I was invited to contribute an article on this topic to the first issue of Holdfast Magazine: it’s available to read online here.

If Nine Worlds was intense, the Edinburgh Fringe was… well, perhaps a new word needs to be invented to describe how intense it was. I’d been in Lashings show-runs before (Oxford Fringe 2012 and 2013), so I’m used to them as distinct from our more variety-show style gigs; I’d stayed in the Edinburgh Lash-flat before (as a guest) so was prepared for the delightful ‘queer feminist vegetarian commune’ vibe of life there; however, combining the two for a week of performances was new and challenging, particularly as someone with unreliable health (I was unwell for quite a bit of my time there). The packed auditorium of radical queers on the last night was the perfect reward. As well as performing in the Lashings queer panto Fanny Whittington, I managed to do some poetry at Flea Circus‘s 3-day slam and Other Voices’s alternative spoken word cabaret, and saw some great shows (highlights included Sophia Walker’s poetry, Rachel Parris’ musical comedy, and Lisa Skye’s highly individual one-woman show Ladyboner).

My costume for Transpose as The Queer Agenda – a hand-lettered t-shirt and a rainbow bustle. I wore this with rainbow galaxy leggings!

Staying with the topic of performances, my absolute favourite thing the past few months was the Hallowe’en edition of Transpose. There were readings from Kat Gupta, Jacq Applebee, Sandra Alland and myself; films by and about trans disabled people (introduced by Sandra Alland, who was given funding to mentor them in making these films); and music from Squid and the Krakens (moonlighting as They Came From The Sea) and of course CN Lester. Everyone was, pardon the expletive, fucking brilliant – and €385 was raised for Transgender Equality Network Ireland. I also loved how creative the costumes were – CN came as the Gender Binary, which led to a number of similarly conceptual costumes such as the Lavender Menace (a superhero/ine in delicate shades of purple) and Fifty Shades of Grey (an all-grey outfit strung with housepaint colour sample sheets) . My costume was the Queer Agenda (see picture!) and there was also a contingent of Lashings villains: Dick and Osbourne from Fanny Whittington; and from Cinderella, the eeeeevil Baroness Scratcher and her son Boris (who, along with Dave, comprised the Snotty Stepbrothers). The auction was full of highly tempting items, including a year’s supply of CN’s baking (!!!) and a cross-stitched “Don’t be a dick” sign. Again, I really want to write more about everything, but for now – there’s an review of Transpose (written on Facebook by a long-time fan of the events) reproduced in CN’s link above: there’s also a review (with pictures!) on Jacq’s tumblr, and another review here.

At Transpose I read one of my fairytales, “The Mermaid’s Wish” – a response to the Andersen story, rather than a retitling of my other mermaid-related fairytale – and, honestly, I’m really proud of how it went. As I said in my post about Verse Kraken, I find it interesting that I’m moving away from my initial model of expressly not-doing responses/retellings to specific stories, in which I was more about making use of prevalent tropes/themes/motifs as “ingredients” for new stories. I think it’s partly because the more research I’m doing, the more I want to engage actively with specific source texts as well as the genre as a whole. (I also keep meaning to blog about what I’m researching  – maybe soon…)

Related to this, I’m doing a workshop on fairytales at the upcoming LaDIYfest Sheffield this Saturday. It’s an all-ages workshop (by request of the organisers), and will hopefully get people thinking about gender and sexuality in fairytales and even inspire them to get writing their own. I’m very excited to have been invited to do this, and am really looking forward to it. The whole event looks like it will be fantastic – check out the full workshop timetable here. (If I feel up to it before LaDIYfest, I’ll write a longer post about fairytales – and I’ll definitely try to write something on here summing up the workshop, as I imagine it will be really productive and interesting.)

And on the topic of workshops, I also facilitated a workshop about transgender representation in student media at the recent ULU Autumn Liberation conference, using as case studies pieces published in student media in the past few years. Unfortunately it was the day after I received news of a good friend’s death, so I didn’t manage to cover everything I’d hoped to do. The group were forgiving, though, and I hope it was still more valuable than if I’d simply dropped out.

I’m currently unwell again – apparently grief lowers your immune system – and so have been spending a lot of this month indoors  and at something of a low ebb. I’ll admit I’m scared that this could be a health relapse, even though I know it probably isn’t. Most of this post was drafted a few days ago – before I went to the third in the Trans Seminars series at the University of Warwick, and in further advance of LaDIYfest, which is now tomorrow! So, I’ll leave discussion of the seminar for another time, and finally post this entry. 😉 I hope you’re all well, friends and readers, and I’ll try to get into the swing of updating more regularly!

Trans names, elf names, ‘silly’ names

There are some long and relatively serious blog posts in the pipeline – a write-up of the political/emotional rollercoaster that was NUS LGBT Conference, maybe a similar entry on NUS Women’s Conference, some information about the very exciting things I’m doing for Trans Media Action, a follow-up post to my coming out post – but in the meantime, here are some frivolous (and hopefully amusing) thoughts about names.

I’ve been chatting about names and naming with my friends recently – it’s an issue pretty close to my heart, and something I find very interesting. One thing that’s been coming up a lot is trans names – how naming oneself can be incredibly powerful and important, but also, how it can sometimes take you to uncomfortable places. In my previous post I linked to an entry at Trans Culture titled “you definitely named yourself” – it’s a collection of thoughts from different people about trends in self-naming (particularly among transmasculine people), and whether having an unusual name or fashionable name can somehow ‘out’ someone as having named themself, and as such, as trans.

Devoted Tolkien nerd that I am, discussions of choosing names eventually lead (by a winding road) towards thinking about how names functioned in Middle Earth. There’s all sorts of really fascinating stuff in there, particularly with regards to elven names. I like the way that names were translated from Quenya to Sindarin as times changed, preserving the meaning but not the sound*; and the way that names could be given to someone by anyone, on the basis of their deeds or features, and how someone could become known by this new name instead of the birth name they were given at birth  – for example, Galadriel’s birth name was Nerwen (meaning ‘man-maiden’), but she’s usually referred to as  ‘Galadriel’, which is itself a Sindarin translation of the name ‘Alatariel’, which was the name given to her by her husband Celeborn. But the coolest thing (in my opinion) is the way that elf children get to name themselves, in a ceremony at roughly age seven – or once they have reached ‘lamatyvë’, meaning ‘the ability to take pleasure in language’. Isn’t that awesome? The chosen name, the name given at birth by the father, and (sometimes) a name dreamed or foreseen by the mother, were all equally ‘true’ names – and on top of that, an elf could gain several other names in the course of their life. (If you want to read more, for some reason a copy of Tolkien’s Laws and Customs of the Eldar is actually online in PDF format…)

But hang about. If I could have named myself at age seven, I’d probably be called something I’d now find intensely embarassing. I remember at around 10, insisting to a stranger that my name was actually Xamenthynia. And this, in turn, reminds me of a conversation I saw somewhere else quite a while ago – unfortunately I’m not able to credit it, as Google has turned up up nothing, so please tell me if you know where this is from! Somebody posited the idea of a world where everyone gets a free, no-questions-asked, totally-socially-acceptable name change every five years – and at no other time. I think this is at once a brilliant and dreadful idea: I’m imagining 10-year-olds cringing at being called ‘Princess Fluffle Kittycat’ and ‘Mippetty-dippetty-boo’; 15-year-olds grudgingly writing ‘Superman’ and ‘Plesiosaur’ on their exam papers; 20-year-olds delaying applying for jobs until they can stop being ‘Ravyn Darkfyre’ and ‘Crimsin Skye’…

And to bring things round full circle – it would hopefully put paid to dismissal of the legitimacy of trans names through their (real or perceived) eccentricity. It’s rather hard for you to tell a trans person off for being called ‘Braiden Skylar’ or ‘Algernon Quentin’ when it’s a matter of public record that before you were  ‘Dave’, you were ‘Blubble Fantastico’, ‘Rocketship’, ‘Damien Darkheart’, and ‘Aloysius’.

* Incidentally, I once spent some of a car journey making myself terribly amused by (approximately) translating the names of Tolkien’s elves into forms more appropriate for the irreverent roleplaying game “Elfs”. So Lothlorien is overseen by elven matriarch Shiny Head, her husband Metal Tree, and captain-of-the-guard Sneaky, Imladris is the home of Star Hole and his daughter Posh Girl… I have no idea if anyone else find this funny, but there we are.

Genre, commercialism, and why I’m excited for Nine Worlds Geekfest

To a greater or lesser extent, I’ve been a fan of science fiction and fantasy for most of my life. I was raised on Tolkien and had read my way through the entire YA fantasy/sci-fi section of the village library by my early teens. I have since pursued a love affair with fiction that is in some way speculative or fantastical – and frequently get annoyed with the arbitrary genre distinctions forced upon it, wherein Huxley’s Brave New World and Woolf’s Orlando are respectable “literary fiction” while other works dealing with similar themes – politics, identity, the impact of magic and/or technology upon culture – become ghettoised away from mainstream literary culture and further fragmented into various genres. I recently encountered this fantastic quote  from Deepa Dharmadhikari:

In discourses around genre there are two common dividing lines. Authorial identity separates the atheist straight white dudes writing SFF and the erotica-peddling white women writing paranormal romance from the translated brown people who believe in ghosts and multiple gods and write magical realism. Narrative agenda meanwhile claims that escapism via soul-bonding animal companions is fantasy, allegory via dystopian cyborgs is literary fiction and social chastisement via talking parrots is post-colonial literature. And […] “horror” is only applied to books about zombies and not, say, genocidal pogroms…

So – genre distinctions. I find them something of a pain in the neck, and I’ve tried to approach books and film and television without much regard for how they’re being marketed. I adore stories set in worlds other than our own because they are fascinating arenas for sociopolitical critique and thought-experiments, and because (perhaps more than any other genre) they can make vividly real a plethora of experiences which are far beyond what readers experience in day-to-day life. (Also, spaceships and dragons – come on!) If a work does that, then I’m interested – no matter what label has been slapped on it, or which shelf it’s kept on in the shop, or whether the cover is just the title in a minimalist font or a brightly-coloured space battle. Still, I think it’s inevitable that with this interest in the speculative and fantastical, I’ve ended up being (more or less) a part of SFF fandom and ‘geek culture’.

But while I buy into that culture, in that my shelves are full of fantasy and sci-fi, the accompanying sphere of merchandise leaves me cold. For example, I really don’t enjoy going to Forbidden Planet. It’s cool to have a tonne of books, DVDs, and graphic novels of related interest all in one place – but also gathered together are all the figurines, badges, posters, collectors’ editions which will halve in value if someone unwraps them… It makes feel queasy. I don’t like the idea I need to reify my love for a work of art – whether book, film, graphic novel, or TV series – by collecting scale models of the characters or buying Doctor Who branded stationary or whatever. And that’s not to pooh-pooh the choices of people who do love to collect things – I’m writing this from a room containing my dad’s collection of rare Tolkien imprints, for goodness’ sake – but for me, I’d rather engage with a work by talking and thinking and writing about it. (I realise I’m setting up something of a dichotomy here, which perhaps isn’t fair – I realise that critical engagement and buying merch aren’t mutually exclusive, but from my perspective they feel like very different types of fan activity. I’d be really interested to hear from people who feel otherwise!)

I do wonder if part of the artificial boundary between “literary fiction” that just happens to deal with magic or the future of technology, and the ghettoised genres of science fiction and fantasy, is at all related to the way the latter are marketed and merchandised. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t figurines of Jeanette Winterson’s talking demon from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit or officially-sanctioned Ministry of Love ringbinders and lunchboxes. Sometimes, it feels like the dividing line of genre is created (or at least sustained) by what people think they can sell to the fans.

The one convention I’ve been to – MCM Expo in London – was like my least favourite parts of Forbidden Planet, writ large. Rows upon rows of stalls hawking fan merch, a couple of samples for new computer games, a few celebrities signing autographs. Nothing that requires creative or intellectual engagement – just the requirement to buy more stuff. Consume, consume, consume. I wandered the aisles for a while, but most of the interest came from the other fans there – getting chatting over costumes or overheard fragments of conversation.

Now I’m out of university – where thinking critically about cultural production with groups of other people and then writing about it was essentially my ‘job’ – I’m champing at the bit for opportunities to do that again, about books and films that I love. So this year, I’ve decided to check out some of the less commercial, more fan-run conventions out there. I know quite a few people who have enjoyed Redemption – unfortunately I can’t head up to Coventry for it because it’s at the same time as the Tolkien Spring School! (Yes, £160 is a wince-inducing price, and not once I’m paying myself: my dad is celebrating a significant birthday this year and is taking the rest of the family out to a big fancy sports thing; as his nerdiest progeny, he’s taking me to Tolkien Spring School instead…)  There’s also EasterCon, which, again, is one that various friends have attended and enjoyed – definitely on the list. (And if I’m ever in a position where I can jet over to the USA, then I’d love to attend WisCon – the feminist sci-fi convention where Moment of Change was launched.)

But the big one that’s getting me excited is Nine Worlds – it’s a new convention, organised by some people with an excellent track record of events in the LGBT community, and it ticks a bunch of my favourite boxes. It has some fabulously diverse content being planned – as well as tracks on things like “Tolkien”, “Whedon”, and “Harry Potter”, it’s got “SF & F Academia”, “Geek Feminism”, and “Queer Fandom”. Oh my, yes please. Fan-run, fan-centred, and looking like it’ll be full of the sort of creative and critical engagement I’m craving. And there’s a robust anti-harassment policy, which (having heard from American friends about what some of the stateside conventions are like) is music to my ears. They’re raising money on Kickstarter right now – early bird tickets are £65, and if they don’t get enough by the end of the month then the convention won’t be going ahead. If anything on the site looks good to you, then do consider them backing them: I’ll be very sad if this doesn’t happen!

… so, something of a rambling post this time. I realise I’ve more gestured towards ideas than explored them, but I’d be very interested to hear more thoughts on genre, the relationship between commercialism and nerd culture, or indeed which conventions I should be setting my sights on.

(Finally, here’s a related thing I found interesting: librarian Jessica Zellers on bridging the divide between fantasy fiction and literary fiction.)