Tag Archives: romance novels

GF-ish sessions at Penguicon this weekend

This weekend, April 28-30, people coming to Penguicon in Southfield, Michigan can catch a number of sessions of interest to Geek Feminism readers.

Coraline Ada Ehmke is one of the Guests of Honor (her Penguicon schedule). Ehmke “is a speaker, writer, open source advocate and technologist with over 20 years of experience in developing apps for the web. She works diligently to promote diversity and inclusivity in open source and the tech industry.” She and others are participating in a Women in Tech panel and Q&A on Saturday.

Sumana Harihareswara is another of Penguicon’s Guests of Honor (schedule). That’s me! On Saturday I’ll be conversing with Ehmke about what it could be like if free and open source software were more like fandom, a conversation which will likely include and expand upon some questions I raised here at GF a few years ago.

If you enjoyed the “Sorcerer to the Crown” book club Geek Feminism ran in 2015, you might be interested in a Saturday session I’m leading on themes in Zen Cho’s work.

Penguicon has several other Guests of Honor and there’s a wideranging schedule that includes a bunch of other sessions that could be particularly relevant to geeky feminists, and I’ll mention some here:

Perhaps I’ll see you at the con! Feel free to comment if you’re going to be there and mention any parties or sessions you’re particularly looking forward to.

cover of TRADE ME by Courtney Milan

Book Club: Thought experiments around privilege, and more Trade Me thoughts

Apologies for getting this up late; I’ve been travelling back from WisCon (where I also praised Trade Me at length!).

So as you saw in my April post announcing Courtney Milan’s contemporary romance novel Trade Me as a GF book club topic, I love this book for multiple reasons. From here on out I’ll be indulging in spoilers, so, more after the jump!

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cover of TRADE ME by Courtney Milan

Book club: “Trade Me” by Courtney Milan

Hello! I’m helping relaunch the Geek Feminism Book Club, with a bit of a tweak in the interests of getting us going again swiftly (details at end). The book is Trade Me, a new contemporary romance novel by Courtney Milan, and we’ll talk about it in a comment thread here on May 28th.

In January, I snarfled up Trade Me. It stars a Chinese-American woman studying computer science at UC Berkeley. It’s about class and classism, deconstructing the Prince Charming/billionaire trope in romantic fiction, a product launch, Bay Area tech, ally fails, how to deal with cops, authenticity and adaptation, safety and freedom, trust, parents, and work. And one of the main secondary characters is trans, and all the physicality in the relationship is super consensual, and there is a kind-of reference to Cake Wrecks, and (maybe only I see it) to Randall Munroe’s “What If?” blog. I link it thematically to Jo Walton’s The Just City, Ellen Ullman’s The Bug, and the good parts of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. It’s pretty great, and you can read the first chapter for free at Milan’s site. (ROT13’d content warnings that are spoilers: qvfbeqrerq rngvat naq gur arne-qrngu bs n cnerag.)

Overall, Milan’s work is funny and loving and moving and smart. I like how she sets up and calls back to other books within series, I love that The Heiress Effect included an Indian guy, and I’m happy that she depicts queer characters and characters with disabilities. As a woman of color (“half-Chinese” in her words) she’s also especially aware of the importance of writing fictional representations of women of color in STEM, and of fixing broken standards that lead to unequal representation.

And she’s not just a geek, but a geek of my persuasion — specifically, an open source software maker. She wrote and wants people to reuse a chunk of GPL’d software to autogenerate links to a particular book at multiple online bookstores. Also she used to use Gentoo Linux. Of course she gives her readers permission to strip DRM from their copies of her books. Basically I would not be surprised if there is super flirty pair programming or a double entendre in a bash script in a future Milan book.

So this is the book for the next book club; usually we vote on what book to discuss next, but in the interests of getting momentum going again, I figured I’d choose this one by fiat and we’ll vote on the next one. Trade Me costs about USD$5 via any of several ebook retailers, and may be available via your local library‘s ebook lending program as well. Read it sometime in the next month and then come back here and we’ll talk about it!

I Find Your Lack Of Linkspam Disturbing (9 May 2014)

First up, a number of linkspams about books, comics, and writing:

  • Politics Belong in Science Fiction | Foz Meadows at Huffington Post (May 2): “Science fiction both is, and always has been, a political genre. When we tell stories about a future in outer space populated entirely by white people, who constitute a global minority; when we describe societies set a hundred, three hundred, a thousand years in the future but which still lack gender equality, and whose sexual mores mimic those of the 1950s, that is no less a political decision than choosing to write diversely.”
  • Dear columnists, romance fiction is not your [slur] | Kay Mayo at The Drum (April 17) (update: warning for gendered slur, with violent implications, in the title of this piece): “I’d like to know: why is romance fiction the punching bag of the literary world? Why are romance readers the laughing-stock of feminist commentators? Why can’t people just let women read sexy things without telling us we’re doing something wrong? When writers deride romance readers for their reading choices, their argument becomes meaningless, and here’s why: not all romance books are the same. When someone insists that there is a formula for romance fiction, it’s clear that they haven’t bothered to look at any serious analyses of the genre, nor do they understand what “genre” actually means.”
  • Comics Legend Brian Michael Bendis on Sexism and Making a Nonwhite Spider-Man | Abraham Riesman at Vulture (May 2): “When you become the writer of Spider-Man, all of a sudden, every day, every week, every month, someone of color — all different races — comes up to you and tells you, “Spider-Man was my favorite and this is why,” and then I hear a version of this story: “My friends, when I was a kid, wouldn’t let me be Superman, wouldn’t let me be Batman, because of my skin color. But I could always be Spider-Man, and Spider-Man became my favorite. As a little kid, I didn’t even understand why he was my favorite, but it was because anybody could be Spider-Man under that costume, because it was head-to-toe.” That’s not why we created a Spider-Man who’s a person of color, but afterwards, I was like, “Oh man, this was subconsciously why we did it.””
  • Silence Is Not Synonymous With Uproar: A Response To John C. Wright | foz meadows (May 7): “So, author John C. Wright wrote a thing on the evils of political correctness in SFF [..] Let me show you the problem I’m having. [..] You cannot state, as your opening premise, that SFF fandom is being handicapped by silence and an unwillingness to speak out, and then support that premise by stating the exact polar opposite: that there has, in your own words, been vocal uproar.”
  • Don’t Be a Dick (Or 15 Great Sounding SFF Novels Available in 2014) | Lady Business (April 24): “Dude makes a list of 13 books that demonstrate why 2014 is going to be a banner year for fantasy novels. List contains 12 books by men and a book by a lady which has been pushed back to 2015. Okay then. I decided to fight books with books. Here’s a list of 15 SFF books by women that I’m excited to see published in 2014.”
  • The Trouble With Wonder Woman | Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman at Dorkly (May 6): [Online Comic] “I’m just sick of it! They make a bunch of Batman movies, then a Green Lantern movie, and a Superman movie. Thought I’d be next – but nope – Batman again. […] I’m one of the three biggest DC heroes in history!”

And now some links from our regular linkspam:

  • Is the Internet Intrinsically Sexist? | Laurie Penny at The Debrief (May 8): “Teenage girls are a perennial target of technological concern-trolling – ‘what will this weirdscape of social sexting, selfies and outraged hashtags mean for their fragile pubescent morality?’ – but, in this instance, the concern is far from baseless.”
  • Approaching Conferences From a Different Angle | satifice (April 28): “If you say you want or encourage diversity in your CFP, but nowhere do you say that diverse applicants will receive support to attend, you don’t want poor people to attend. Now, I’m sure that some people are thinking “well, if it is a professional conference, what poor people?”, which is disingenous particularly for acdemic related conferences […] Moreover, are we really going to ignore the intersections of poverty with disability, race, gender, and other axes of oppression? If you experience just one type of oppression, your chances of being poor are higher. If you experience multiple axes of oppression, these chances only compound and increase.”
  • If it Doesn’t Exist, Build it: An Interview With Jasper Nance | Alison Dorantes-Garcia at Huffington Post (May 5): “Alison: Something that initially discouraged me from attending hackerspaces was the lack of people who I could relate to and identify with. For a while I didn’t see many women, queer identified people, people of color, or working-class people. Did you ever feel any trepidation coming into hackerspaces, and if so, how did you deal with it? What advice would you give to a new (potentially shy) person going to a hackerspace? JN: Have a project, and ask for help! Don’t go into [a hackerspace] with any expectations of what other people are doing or think of you. If you ask a lot of questions, you would be surprised how nice and helpful some people can be at hackerspaces.”
  • Ally Smells: Fear of Speaking Up | Julie Pagano (May 3): “An analogy might help here. Imagine if someone came upon your open source project, didn’t check your README or contributor guidelines, did no background research, and demanded you add a bunch of features that made no sense or have already been discussed ad nauseam. You’d be annoyed. Some people might be kind and discuss it with them. Some might gently point them at documentation. Others would tell them to RTFM (read the fucking manual). Now imagine this happens on your project every day or even multiple times a day. Over time, the RTFM response becomes more common as people run out of patience and energy.”
  • It’s Different for Girls | Heidi Roizen at Advanetures in Entrepreneurship (May 3): “It pains and somewhat embarrasses me that I am not recommending calling out bad behavior and shaming the individual or individuals responsible.  In a perfect world people would have to account for their behavior.  But as an entrepreneur who spent years in a daily battle for existence, I did not feel like I could afford the hit I’d take in exposing these incidents.”

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.