Bringing Balance to the Force: The Women of Star Wars Episode VII

This is a guest post by Lydia Huxley, a writer who loves playing music or a musician who loves writing. Is there a difference?

Upon looking at the recently-released theatrical poster for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, one character stands out more than the others. Part of it is because she’s located at the very middle of the poster: a place typically reserved for the star. Part of it is because she is – well …a she. Daisy Ridley’s character, Rey, is the first woman to fill such a spot in the previously male-dominated franchise. In the previous six films there have been a total of two women in major roles: Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Natalie Portman as Padmé. And these are supporting roles!

Ridley is not the only actress to land a major role for the latest installment of the sci-fi series. She will be joined by Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, Lupita Nyong’o voicing and motion capturing Maz Kanata, and Carrie Fisher returning as Princess Leia. With the exception of Leia, almost nothing is known about these characters, but all four appear on the theatrical poster so it’s a safe bet that they will be integral to the plot. Four women in major roles? In one movie? That’s double the number in the previous two trilogies combined.

Everything that linkspams must converge (13 June 2014)

Warning for discussion of sexual assault. Predatory behaviour and sexual assault at International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and in ed-tech:

• The original post at Medium, entitled “What is this, church camp?”, by Ariel Norling, is now deleted, Norling has since published Setting a Few Things Straight | Medium (June 5): “Both men’s actions were aggressive and symptomatic of larger systemic issues of sexism and rape culture. This topic has been too often avoided (because it is simply too intimidating for women to confess), ignored, and silenced. My sole objective was to bring attention to the fact that educational technology is a sector that still suffers from these issues, despite being comprised primarily of women.”
• #YesAllWomen and Ed-Tech Conferences, or Why ISTE is Unsafe | Audrey Watters at Hack Education (June 4): “As I’ve explained on this blog before — or actually, in retrospect, maybe I’ve just hinted — I have received an incredible amount of misogynistic and violent feedback to my work in education technology.”

New movies! Reviews of Maleficent and X-Men: Days of Future Past abound! But it seems our spam submissions have a preference…

• Maleficent is a Bad Ass Feminist Fairy Tale | Adrienne Trier-Bieniek at Pop Culture Feminism (June 3): “Maleficent has been billed as a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty… Looking closer, however, we can see that the story is a combination of a literal fight between matriarchy and patriarchy.”
• Maleficent: Finally, Disney Gives us a Positive Witch/Mother | Natalie Wilson at Ms. blog (June 2): “[T]he new Disney folm Maleficent—a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the view of the ‘villainess’—rights (and re-writes) all of these wrongs, finally breaking down the phallocentric prison within which female tales have been trapped.”
• The ‘X-Men’ franchise’s diversity problem is getting worse | Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at The Daily Dot (May 30): “While the X-Men comics now feature a very diverse range of characters, their big-screen adaptations have become more and more dominated by white men as the years progress. There is no better sign of this than Wolverine’s central role throughout the franchise.”
• Days of Future Past: Paving the Way for White Guys (Review) | Kate Reynolds at feminism/geekery (June 3): “As the start of a new X-Men movieverse, First Class gave us the most diverse cast of X-Men seen on a big screen, which I took at the time as a hopeful sign for the future. Welp. I was wrong.”

Spam!

• Kim Moir of Releng of the Nerds recommends (June 9) Brianna Wu’s talk Nine ways to stop hurting and start helping women in tech (video, June 4) [no known transcript or subtitles, you can start subtitling at Amara to help make it accessible]
• Online Harassment, Defamation, and Hateful Speech: A Primer of the Legal Landscape | Alice E. Marwick and Ross W. Miller at Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy: “This interdisciplinary project focused on online speech directed at women and seeks to provide a primer on (i) what legal remedies, if any, are available for victims of sexist, misogynist, or harassing online speech, and (ii) if such legal remedies and procedures exist, whether practical hurdles stand in the way of victims’ abilities to stop harassing or defamatory behavior… The study concluded that… there are few legal remedies for victims.”
• How Perks Can Divide Us | Melissa Santos and Rafe Colburn at Model View Culture (June 9): “As managers, our goal should be to build the strongest and most effective teams possible. That starts with being able to draw from the broadest pool of candidates possible. When we exclude people because they don’t drink beer, can’t hang out after work, are remote employees or don’t like video games, we’re driving away people who could make our teams great for irrelevant reasons.”
• Bigotry, Cognitive Dissonance, and Submission Guidelines | Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker (May 28): “On the very same day [N. K.] Jemisin made her [WisCon Guest of Honor] speech, a call for submissions for an anthology titled World Encounters went up… from the same editor who called Jemisin a [racial and gendered insult] and [gendered insult].”
• Hospitality, Jerks, and What I Learned | Sumana Harihareswara at WikiConference USA (May 30) [transcript, video and audio are also available]: “When someone is criticized for doing something inhospitable, the first response needs to not be ‘Oh, but remember their edit count. Remember he’s done X or she’s done Y for this community.’ We need to start treating hospitality as a first class virtue, and see that it is the seed of everything else. Alberto Brandolini said ‘The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.’ It has a big cost when someone treats others badly.”
• Black girls take on tech’s diversity woes | Contessa Gayles at CNN (June 10): “This past weekend, Black Girls CODE, a nonprofit that teaches coding to girls from underserved communities, hosted its first ever hackathon. “
• The Newest Frontier | Lesli-Ann Lewis at Model View Culture (June 9): “There’s a persistent lie that there is a new industry of equality in the West. There’s a belief that in this industry, there are new playing fields, even ones, where ingenuity, inventiveness and good ole gumption result in success for anyone worthy. That industry is tech.”
• Some thoughts on handling harassment and toxic behavior privately | Selena Deckelmann (June 9): “I believe in proportionate response. However, when the interactions are online and there is no physical public space, just ‘public media’, there’s a serious problem with the idea that a private response, particularly from the harassed, works at all.”
• Lean Out: The Dangers for Women Who Negotiate | Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker (June 11): “Hannah Riley Bowles… has been studying gender effects on negotiation through laboratory studies, case studies, and extensive interviews with executives and employees in diverse fields. She’s repeatedly found evidence that our implicit gender perceptions mean that the advice that women stand up for themselves and assert their position strongly in negotiations may not have the intended effect. It may even backfire. “
• How Not To Review Women’s Writing | Mallory Ortberg at The Toast (June 2): “I have gone back and forth several times over the last few days on whether or not it would be worth addressing Adam Plunkett’s New Yorker.com review of poet Patricia Lockwood’s latest book here… Also, if I am being perfectly honest, I didn’t want to seem mean by criticizing a man twice in public. I have since overcome this reluctance… It is such a perfect illustration of Joanna Russ’ How To Suppress Women’s Writing that I think it merits mentioning, if only as a cautionary example for all you future New Yorker (dot com) reviewers out there.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

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

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The effect of linkspam on man-in-the-moon marigolds (29 March 2014)

Events, fundraisers and such:

• Bring the Lesbians Who Tech Summit to New York!, ticket pre-sales to fund an event June 19–22, closing in just a few hours.
• Women in Tech Panel Event in New York City | General Assembly: Women in Tech panel in NYC on April 3rd, proceeds from ticket sales going to the Girls Who Code organisation.

Spam!

• Dinner plans for all: How conference organizers can make newcomers feel welcome | Becky Yoose at The Ada Initiative (March 24): “Take a small group of conference attendees (mix of new and veteran attendees), add a restaurant of their choosing, throw in some planning, and you get a conference social activity that provides a safer, informal environment that anyone can participate in.”
• Heroines of Cinema: Why Don’t More Women Make Movies? | Matthew Hammett Knott interviews Marian Evans at Indiewire (March 24): a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we don’t see more women on-screen and behind the camera in our favorite films and what we can do about it
• ‘Making games is easy. Belonging is hard’: #1ReasonToBe at GDC | Alex Wawro at Gamasutra (March 20): “[Leigh] Alexander says some members of the industry still feel less wanted, less welcome, and less safe than others because of who they are or how they identify themselves.”
• Wonder Woman writer and artist Phil Jiminez talls to Joseph Phillip Illidge at Comic Book  Resources, Part 1 (March 21) and Part 2 (March 23): “I’ve mentioned in other works that I believe Diana is the ultimate ‘queer’ character — meaning ‘queer’ in its broadest sense — defiantly anti-assimilationist, anti-establishment, boundary breaking. Looking back at the early works of the 1940s, sifting through all the weird stories and strange characters, you can find a pretty progressive character with some pretty thought provoking ideas about sex, sex roles, power, men and women, feminine power, loving submission, sublimating anger, dominance in sexual roles, role playing and the like.”
• Warning: domestic violence Spyware’s role in domestic violence | Rachel Olding at The Age (March 22): “In a Victorian study last year, 97 per cent of domestic violence workers reported that perpetrators were using mobile technologies to monitor and harass women in domestic situations.” [The study in question seems to be Delanie Woodlock (2013), Technology-facilitated Stalking: Findings and Recommendations from the SmartSafe Project, MSM can’t start linking/citing their sources soon enough for this spammer!]
• Impostoritis: a lifelong, but treatable, condition | Maria Klawe at Slate (March 24)  “I’ve been the first woman to hold my position—head of computer science and dean of science at the University of British Columbia, dean of engineering at Princeton, and now president of Harvey Mudd College. As my career progressed, so did the intensity of my feelings of failure.”
• The Aquanaut | Megan Garber at The Atlantic (March 13): “The first thing you should know about Sylvia Earle is that she has a LEGO figurine modeled after her. One that has little yellow flippers instead of little yellow feet. “
• Condolences, You’re Hired! | Bryce Covert at Slate (March 25): “Evidence suggests that women are more likely to get promoted into leadership during particularly dicey times; then, when fortunes go south, the men who helped them get there scatter and the women are left holding the bag. This phenomenon is… known as the glass cliff“
• Mistakes we’ve made | Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock at Hacker School Blog (March 25): Bergson-Shilcock describes ways Hacker School inadvertently deterred or misjudged female candidates and what they’re doing to improve.
• A few comments on Brendan Eich’s hiring as Mozilla CEO, and his political donations to anti-marriage equality campaigns and candidates:
  • Against Tolerance (March 24) and I know it’s not raining (March 28), both by Tim Chevalier at Dreamwidth: “Apologizing for past wrongs doesn’t undo the past, but it does help rebuild trust and provide assurance that further abuse (or at least not the same kind!) won’t occur in the future. We’ve seen none of that — only tone policing and attempts at creating diversions. The message I take away from reading Brendan’s blog posts is ‘I’ll still try to destroy your family, but I won’t be rude to you to your face. Keep writing code for me!'”
  • Civil rights and CEOs | Alex Bromfield at Medium (March 25): “Eich asks people to put aside this issue because it is unrelated to the work that Mozilla does, but it is related, especially when the chief of HR reports to him.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

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

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

When a link and a spam love each other very much (26 March 2014)

A couple of quick announcements to start us off:

• applications to attend AdaCamp Portland (June 21–22, ally skills track June 23) are open
• the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

•  Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”
• Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”
• Iconic Girls in Pop Culture: Miyazaki’s Female Characters | Raizel Liebler at The Learned Fangirl (March 21): “…one of the elements I most appreciate is the focus on girls in that frequently awkward age between eight and twelve – too old to be little and cute, but too young to be a teen – with the freedoms and heartbreak of teenagehood.”
• Game designer cracks through myths about women in the games industry | Megan Farokhmanesh at Polygon (March 21): “[Game designer Elizabeth] Sampat… covered myths such as there are no women to hire, or female candidates not fitting company culture, suggested that companies use recruiters to draw in new candidates. Recruiters should stop looking for a dedication to gaming, she said, and find candidates with curiosity and current interest.”
• Why I’m Excited About !!Con | Sumana Harihareswara at Cogito, Ergo, Sumana (March 20): “Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays… Whenever possible, Hacker School culture assumes abundance rather than scarcity; attempts to rank projects or people would defile our ecology. And now we have a conference, !!Con, with that same philosophy.” !!Con is May 17–18 in New York City.
• Not buying sexism: How inclusive games show hope for gaming culture | Katherine Cross at Feministing (March 20): “…at least in the world of roleplaying gaming, the idea that sex and sexism sell is taking another hit from the opposite direction: we now have proof that games that resist sexist caricatures and that prominently feature women as strong and fully human characters can actually succeed where games more mired in outdated thinking have failed.”
• Male Superheroes in Female Superhero Poses | Brian Cronin at The Line It Is Drawn (March 21): A big collection of comics fanart with the male superheroes in the awkward and submissive poses and setups given to female superheroes.
• A Day of Honors for Women in the Video Game Industry | Laura Parker at New York Times ArtsBeat (March 20): “Female video game designers, producers and directors were honored at Microsoft’s Women in Gaming Awards here on Thursday in an event that has grown substantially in short order.”
• Self-Citation Gender Gap | Rina Shaikh-Lesko at The Scientist Magazine (March 18):
  “A study commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that women in academia are much less likely than men to cite their own research. Because citation counts are now critical to many decisions about hiring and promotions, citations are becoming one more area where women are falling behind their male colleagues.” (The Chronicle‘s coverage is paywalled.)
• Mean Little Girls: Thoughts On Indie Game Journal | Becky Chambers at The Mary Sue (March 22): Chambers reflects on a game featuring a girl protagonist and childhood bullying in a problematic but interesting way.

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

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

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The linkspam is a harsh mistress (19 March 2014)

Super spam today folks!

Kicking off with our traditional can of miscellaneous linkspam:

• HOWTO design a code of conduct for your community | The Ada Initiative (February 18) “Now that we know it is possible to go to conferences and not be insulted or harassed, people are starting to wonder: Why can’t we have the same thing on mailing lists and wikis?”
• Open Sourcing Feminism: The Challenge of Collective Intelligence in 2014 | Loomio: (March 8) “Sexism exists in many (probably most) work environments, so why is it so critical to stamp out in the open source community? It matters here like nowhere else because open source is about collective intelligence.”
• The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Silicon Valley VC Firm That Dares to Invest in Diversity | Wired.com (March 11) … diversity in Silicon Valley is probably not the news we missed. “Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw believe there’s money to be made in bringing diversity to Silicon Valley. That’s why they left their respective venture capital firms last month to start Aspect Ventures.”
• Ian McKellen tweets a poster image for movie X-Men: Days of Future Past (March 16) Our linkspam submitter asks “But where the wimminz? Kittyyyyy?”
• Logins Do Change | Chris’s Wiki (March 14): “Every so often it’s popular to say that you will never, ever change a (Unix) login, an assigned email address, or whatever…People periodically have excellent, compelling reasons to change their login et al… If you aggressively stick to your ‘no changes’ view, it’s quite possible that very bad things will happen.”
• Negotiated Out of a Job | Inside Higher Ed (March 13) “The worst they can say is no… Sure, you might not get everything you want, but there’s no harm in trying… Or maybe not, according to recent post on Philosophy Smoker.”
• If Male Superhero Costumes were Designed Like Female Superhero Costumes! | Who are you people? A series of sketches of male superheros in skimpy and flimsy costumes.
• Code of conduct pledge and cosigner list | Web Kunoichi (March 14) An organised list of Code of Conduct Pledge co-signers. “Now, I’m no John Scalzi… BUT I think I can help this movement by developing a list of co-signers—a bit like Mr. Scalzi‘s, but hopefully in a format that can be sorted/filtered.

The Mythology edition of Model View Culture is out, and its entire table of contents is of interest! This spammer couldn’t trim it down!

• Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work, by Kate Losse “Silicon Valley has built an architecture of compensation to distribute value, attention, and funding according to the narrow fantasies of venture capitalists.
• The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee, by Zoelle Egner “I have literally lost count of the number of looks and comments and dismissals I’ve experienced from strangers upon introducing myself at parties and industry events.
• The Making of Myths, by Laurent Bossavit “The function of myth is often to reinforce a status quo; not just any aspect of the status quo, but a particular balance of power.”
• Tech in Underserved Communities: Beyond Feel Good Stories, by Stephanie Morillo “My own story has made me believe that maybe all of the kids smiling in brochures for coding programs need to be mentored by people that didn’t come from substantial privilege.”
• Chattanooga and Kansas City: New Tech Towns on the Gigabit Frontier, by Meghan O’Dea “The emergence of tech industry in cities outside of Silicon Valley is an opportunity for conversation – about what both the industry, and civic communities should look like.”
• Towards an Afrofuturist Narrative: Tech Mythology and the Africas, by Ēlen Awalom “Behind-the-scenes with stealth startup Curatoric, and conversations with creators, historians and curators of African and Diasporic African art. Part of a two article series.”
• There and Back Again, by Misty De Meo “The story of how Misty De Meo quit programming and then returned.
• Dissent Unheard Of, by Ashe Dryden “Perhaps the scariest part of speaking out is seeing the subtle insinuation of consequence and veiled threats by those you speak against.
• The Startup Mythologies Trifecta, by Shanley Kane “They work together in concert, and in practice, function to exclude and marginalize minorities in tech.”
• The Lesbians Who Tech Summit is the First Of Its Kind, by Kronda Adair “Start Somewhere founder Leanne Pittsford dreamed of being able to network openly with other queer women in the tech industry.”
• Data Scientists, by Amelia Greenhall “At first, I mentally filed ‘Data Scientist’ in the same place as ‘Growth Hacker’ — just another one of those words men made up. But I’ve come to start to see the invention and naming of these new types of technical roles as a crack in the system.
• Hashtags as Decolonial Projects with Radical Origins, by Suey Park “Twitter activism is not to be dismissed. Although Twitter exists to generate revenue off advertisements and corporations, it can also be used subversively – to go beyond imperial timelines.”

Look out for an interview with Model View Culture founders Amelia Greenhall and Shanley Kane on Geek Feminism tomorrow!

And finally, Julie Ann Horvath left Github, describing harassment and other inappropriate workplace behaviour. Some coverage and responses include:

• Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit | TechCrunch (March 15) “Horvath has given TechCrunch her version of the events, a story that contains serious allegations towards GitHub, its internal policies, and its culture. The situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.”
• Prominent GitHub Engineer Julie Ann Horvath Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment | Re/code (March 15) A recap of Horvath’s tweets.
• Update on Julie Horvath’s Departure | Github (March 16) “We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.”
• Warning for account of racist violence On GitHub and speaking out | Global Nerdy (March 17) “I’ve seen this scenario time and again, in which a privileged group fails to see a problem and makes speaking out difficult. I’ve also seen it happen to me.”
• managers are awesome / managers are cool when they’re part of your team | tecznotes (March 16) “Github employees can work on what they feel like, subject to the strategic direction set for the company. There are no managers. This bothered me a bit when I heard it last summer, and it’s gotten increasingly more uncomfortable since.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

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

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The Velveteen Linkspam (13 Aug 2013)

• “If I Can’t Have a Hugo Fan Award, Then No One Can!”: “This campaign to dismantle the Hugo Fan Awards lest they fall into enemy fans is not just toxic, selfish and reprehensible, it is an attempt to slam the doors of fandom shut in the face of yet another generation of passionate and devoted fans.”
• Snarky comebacks for sexists in academia: Captain Awkward takes apart “you’re only here because of affirmative action”.
• Sexual Harassment Conversations, in Comic Form: Jim C. Hines hits the nail on the head with the responses women receive when reporting (or not reporting) sexual harassment [Warning: the comments contain exactly the apologia the comic is mocking]
• My experience with game industry hiring: “The final answer was that culture matters most and I didn’t fit into their culture. What would that culture be, if not being a gamer, technically-inclined, and caring about their company’s products or audience. Looking around the room, it seemed that fitting into that Kulture they were talking about would mean being white and male.”
• Why Are Female Developers Offered Such Low Salaries?: A company which allows bidding on tech employees by potential employers finds that women generally receive lower bids than men.
• Sorry, Mario Bros!: … but Princess Toadstool can rescue herself. “The game spans three of Super Mario Bros’ original levels, this time from right to left, as the Princess jumps, stomps, floats, and warps her way from the dark castle dungeon up to the bright and wonderful Mushroom Kingdom, proving that female protagonists can be just as awesome as male protagonists.”
• Debunking the ‘gender brain’ myth: ” ‘In the majority of cases, the differences between the sexes are either non-existent or they are so small so as to be of no practical importance in, for example, an educational setting’ “
• On The Border: An Interview with Heather Logos: The Border House interviews Heather Logos, who has worked in the games industry as a contractor, an academic and a game designer at Telltale Games.
• The Banal, Insidious Sexism of Smurfette: “Today, a blockbuster children’s movie can invoke 50-year-old gender stereotypes with little fear of a powerful feminist backlash.”

—

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on 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).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Dystopian/Scifi stuff with strong female characters?

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

I watch a lot of dystopian/post-apocalyptic movies, and one RECURRING theme is “once there are no laws, women are cattle” in one form or another. I find it a. ridiculous, and b. a sad commentary that it is just assumed that with no one to stop them, men will just rape and enslave women to their heart’s content.

I really want to see a (non-sketchy or “omg they rule by being sexy”) matriarchal dystopian/post-apocalyptic setup, just for a change of pace, or a “hey, even though things got crappy, there is still a shred of humanity in more than JUST the protagonist of the movie”

The friend who forwarded me this question said someone else had mentioned Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin, but feel free to explain why they fit below for those who aren’t familiar with their work. Still, they can’t be the only people to have explored this type of dystopia. Does anyone have any suggestions of movies, books, games or other media that fit the bill?

Hubris, thy name is linkspam (12th July, 2011)

• Trigger warning Assange’s Account Looks Like Accusers’ Account: Assange’s own attorney now effectively concedes that was, at best, what happened here: His victims gave subsequent consent to sexual activity for which explicit consent was neither sought nor given
• Why We Can’t Let Design Become a Boys’ Club: This is all such a bummer! We haven’t vaulted ourselves very far above the 1960s stereotypes presented on Mad Men. But it’s not as if women designers and illustrators aren’t out there.
• What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member?: interviews with women in hackerspaces.
• Open Source Business Resource’s July 2011 issue focuses on women entrepreneurs. Authors interrogate norms around gendered expectations of entrepreneurship and consider infrastructure that supports women founders.
• Bitch Radio interviews Geek Feminism authors Valerie Aurora about what the Ada Initiative’s already done (including a success with a conference anti-harrassment policy) and Sumana Harihareswara about the Wikimedia gender gap.  Audio and transcripts available.
• Girls gone missing: kids’ movie posters in 2011 a set of movie posters demonstrating the things described in Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously: that is, how girls and women are often absent in children’s media.
• Video: Net Talk: Brenda Wallace. Brenda talks about open source; geeks and women in tech; OLPC; copyright law changes; and privacy.

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).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The objects of the linkspam gaze (26th April, 2011)

• Adelaide, Australia: 15th International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists: The International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES) has been held every three years since 1964 and provides an important forum for the exchange of information and ideas for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). 19–22 July.
• Matt K is looking to put together a panel on Privilege in Geek Communities at Seattle Geek Girl Con in September. Reply on the forum if you want to help out in some way.
• Trigger warning: account of harassment, extensive quoted misogynist, homophobic and transphobic language. An occupational hazard?: a long musing on and set of experiences of photography and related harassment.
• From Alexander Pope to “Splice”: a Short History of the Female Mad Scientist … there seem to be few female mad scientists. Which is odd, because the first significant fictional mad scientist was a woman.
• Women in Computing: A close friend suddenly found himself in position to influence efforts in this area by a Fortune 50 IT company. The company’s declared goal is to make IT careers more attractive to women, starting at K-12 level. The writer wants suggestions. (Warning: many faily existing comments including, eg, suggestions of forced testosterone supplementation!)
• A Ten-Year-Old’s Rant To “Boys Around The World”: Not very geek per se, but very feminism in the "stereotypes are bad" way.
• Drawing women: the evolution of Lois Lane – The F-Word: In 1941, the executives who ran comics juggernaut DC forced the artists behind Superman to change the look of Lois Lane, with the aim of turning her into more of a tasty dish.
• Web Designers vs. Web Developers (Infographic): a snarky footnote doesn’t fix this fail.
• Mother entrepreneurs respond to anti-mother sentiment: Response to VC CONFESSION: “I Have Doubts Once I Think Of Women Founders Having Kids…”

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).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

She was only appointed because she’s a linkspam (8th April, 2011)

• Words and Offense: Of course slurs are still bad… Offense is just not the reason why. Systemic oppression, concept association and a phenomenon known as hostile tagging (where the phrase either tags a person as someone to be hostile to and exclude or tags an area as a hostile place to any oppressed people that come in) are the actual reasons why…
• Duke Nukem Forever – Wallowing in sexism: In some games we find sexism buried within plot points or seen through the stereotyped portrayals of female characters. Duke Nukem Forever is not one of those games. There is no need to look deeply into gameplay or storyline to find issues. Duke Nukem Forever is simply a game that wallows in sexism.
• Geeky enough for you?: What I’m curious about here is this: what does the word “geeky’ mean to you? How do you define it? Also, how do you define not-geeky? I’m interested!
• Trigger warning. Power switch: social media gives victims new ways to fight back These days if a woman is abused or humiliated by men belonging to a macho institution, she needn’t cop it. She can shop her story and shine light on the injustice herself.
• Women of Color in Tech: How Can We Encourage Them?: But Viva couldn’t get a job in the Valley—despite introductions that I gave her to leading venture capitalists… It raised a red flag in my mind.
• Hanna Director Joe Wright Slams Sucker Punch‘s Girl Power: Wright… trac[ed] the “alarming” brand of sexually-exploitative girl power found in Sucker Punch back to the Spice Girls.
• Can we declare victory for women in their participation in science? Not yet: Over the last half-century, efforts to recruit and encourage women to pursue careers in science have been very successful, but they have not been evenly distributed… In physics, though, [the] numbers have barely budged…
• BGG (Black Girl Gamer)–LFG, PST!: It’s not just the standard girl gamer war, where there is incessant name calling, references to genitalia or even the normal male chauvinist crap. The battle is having to defend why we are even playing games, in the first place. Why would we be playing games, because black women don’t play games.

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

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.