Tag Archives: media portrayals

Kickstarting a responsible communication stylebook as community infrastructure

I haven’t been writing very much on Geek Feminism in the last year – most of us haven’t. I’ve also slowed down on posting to my personal blog. And one reason is that when I think about writing anything longer than a couple of paragraphs, anything particularly nuanced, I need to budget the time and energy for pre-editing, to make sure it hits my and our standards for sensitivity, and editing after the fact in case it turns out I got it wrong.

(That is not the only reason — lives change, new commitments emerge, people come into and out of group projects and each others’ lives, new venues like The Recompiler and ladybusiness and The Bias come onto the scene, and so on. But it’s one reason.)

You know what I would love? I would love a style guide that helps me write accurately and sensitively when talking about communities and identities, especially when it comes to identities I don’t know through my own personal experience. GLAAD’s reference guide helps with one facet (QUILTBAG people and communities), and there are similar references published by other advocacy organizations, but I’d love a more all-in-one stylebook that covers race, gender, sexuality, religion, and health and well-being, especially in the context of technology.

I’m in luck!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/961164339/the-responsible-communication-style-guide/widget/video.html

Audrey Eschright and Thursday Bram are crowdfunding to edit The Responsible Communication Style Guide. It’ll be a stylebook for writers and other media creators, covering race, gender, sexuality, religion, and health and well-being, and it’s the first book project by The Recompiler. The Kickstarter deadline is in less than two days.

The Responsible Communication Style Guide: Technology and Beyond (Kickstarter promo image)

In my opinion, a style guide like this would be a great piece of infrastructure to have — not just a tool for individual pro-inclusion activists, and a guide for any blogger, marketer, podcaster, or maker who ever pauses before publishing and tries to look over what they’ve written for accidental ableism, cissexism, racist or sexist microaggressions, and so on. It would be that, yeah. But it would also serve as a shared reference, so we can say: “Here’s a standard we want to hold ourselves to, and we’ll ask our allies to hold themselves to as well.”

I’m a programmer — heck, you saw me grow as a programmer here on this blog, from talking about the learning styles that suited me, and what I needed, to finding a place where those needs were met. Other technologists, maybe you’ve had the experience of working on a codebase where there aren’t any tests, and you have to inspect changes with your eyes all the time to see if you’ve introduced a new showstopper bug. And maybe you’ve also had the experience of working on a codebase with great test coverage, where you can move faster, because you know that if you make a change that would break something, you’ll find out fast, before it has a chance to hurt anybody. As Bram writes, “I want a linter for writing!”

HOWTOs and checklists and playbooks are part of how we make inclusivity more automatic. I’d love to see what The Responsible Communication Style Guide can do to further this trend.

So, please join my household in backing this before its deadline, which is this Friday, September 30th at 2:59 AM EDT. (As I write this, they’re 65% of the way to their goal, and need about $7,000 USD more.) I’d love to be able to write faster and with more confidence, and to see what emerges when a whole lot of people with high standards for responsible communication feel the same way.

Writing violence against a woman

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I am male who wants to write a novel about a female superhero. Since this is a superhero novel there will be violence and at some point my hero will have to lose a fight (though of course she wins in the end).

I am wondering how I should write the scene where the supervillain beats the crap out out of my female hero. Should I just write as if she were a male? Or do I need to take precautions so I don’t end up glorifying violence against women?

A quick thought on this one: there’s no “just” in “write as if she were a male”. A big part of the problem is that this is pretty rare, hence the Women in Refrigerators trope and similar critiques. Your own knowledge that she’s a woman will influence you to write violence specific to her gender and to cultural tropes about male-on-female violence.

So, I think you’ve set up a bit of a false dilemma between “write what comes naturally and it will be just like as if she was a man getting beat up” or “go out of my way to de-glorify the violence against her”. Another thing you need to be careful of is “write what comes naturally and spew your cultural uglies about women and their bodies and violence against them all over the page completely unawares.”

Second thought: you don’t want to “write as if she were a male”, in any case, because she isn’t. You want to write as if she was a person. Your current thinking on this seems to be edging towards “men are the pattern for people, women are special unique cases of people” which is a little concerning for your characterisation of a woman!

Do you have a writing group who review each other’s drafts? Does this group contain women? Obviously the women in your writing group should be reviewing all the work that your male peers do, not just “hey, I have a woman-centric bit here, so now you’re the expert, but I’ll ask John about the rest of my writing.” But you could ask the group in general for feedback on this and since you can show them the actual draft, they may have more specific thoughts.

You could perhaps get some of the way with playing around with reading and writing drafts of your violence scenes gender-switched and with more ambiguous pronouns in order to try and keep the uglies out of it, but I think this is where we need some fiction writers to step in. What think you?

Remorseless husband-stealing no-good linkspams (15th August, 2011)

Susannah Breslin, Why Women Shouldn’t Go to Tech Conferences (there’s too much of a culture/values clash between women and tech) and Meagan Adele Lopez, Why Women Shouldn’t Write about Why Women Shouldn’t Attend Tech Conferences:

And still, she never answered why the ENTIRE female gender shouldn’t attend tech conferences. We shouldn’t attend because one panel about social media talked about feelings[?]
“Android for Girls?” HTC Bliss Coming to Verizon:

Oh, and here’s the best part – the phone is also rumored to ship with special women-friendly apps, like a calorie counter and an app for shopping. Groan.
Meredith Gran on women in comics:

My sincere thoughts on how to promote the presence of women in comics: Pay them. No, seriously. Pay them with money.
The Ten People You Would Never Want To Duel, highlighting Julie d’Aubigny, noted duellist.
50 Women to Watch in Tech:

Femmeonomics is thrilled to announce its first list highlighting 50 women to watch in tech… Femmeonomics plans to highlight the ambitious and creative women flying just under the radar.

Nominate yourself or other women in tech until September 16.
Lifetime Earnings Gaps, by Sex and Race/Ethnicity:

… the gaps calculated here are only for full-time, year-round workers and do not include periods out of the workforce… yet women still make about 25% less than men at the same educational level.
The TV show that had ALL the complex and strong female characters: Battlestar Galactica:

It’s been almost two and a half years since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica aired. It’s been two and a half years since we’ve had a show where a diverse group of women played a central role in a major sci-fi production. Am I the only one who misses not only the show but the possibilities that the show presented?
What if male superheroes posed like Wonder Woman?:

Here’s the latest Justice League comic cover– Wonder Woman the lone female character surrounded five males. She is the only one in her underwear looking not so much like an invulnerable superhero and more like some male comic book artist’s dominatrix sex fantasy
On tech conferences and the amazing invisible women — Feministe: Why don’t women speak at tech conferences? is at least in my top-ten favorite questions, somewhere behind Where are all the women bloggers? and Why aren’t there more women CEOs?… If only there were answers to those questions.
Stellar Four: The Origins of the Slave Leia Costume:

There’s a lot of talk going around the intarwebs this week about the Oh, You Sexy Geek panel at San Diego Comic Con. Basically, this was supposed to address the implications of the sexy women in nerd culture.

(Warning, some of the language in this post seems slut-shaming to this linkspammer.)
Dreamwidth: Non-native English celebration fest?: Pushing back against some sentiment hostile to non-English writers in the Dreamwidth community.
What Do You Mean When You Say You Want “Strong Female Characters’?:

These calls for strong female characters start to run into trouble with trans women, nonwhite women, and women of colour in pop culture. Because women in all three of these categories are automatically expected to be strong.
Penelope Trunk, Are Startups Better as Single-Gender Affairs? (If you want to know why you shouldn’t do a startup with women (if you’re a man), read on.) Jean Hsu, Why Should Startups Try To Hire Women:

What infuriates me the most about posts like these is that people have the nerve to make blanket statements about gender based on their own experience. So you’ve found startup life and family hard to juggle? Write about that…
While we struggle to attract women to tech, the skeptics already have a plan.:

First off: Pink! Pink is every girl’s favorite color… As an alternative to these measures, you can treat women like unique individuals whose desires and aspirations can’t be pinned down by their gender.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).