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As with the other Lisa Nakamura books, I read this months ago and don't remember it well.

This was published in 2008, so it's much more recent than the other two books. It still feels a little dated given the gap between research and publication, but less so at least!

The book covers race and the use of AIM icons, the Alllooksame test, UIs and race in Matrix and Minority Report, the creation of forum avatars for pregnant women and their babies, and finally, how we count race on the Internet and how it could be improved.

I was extremely puzzled by the inclusion of the forum avatars for pregnant women, as the women in question are almost all white and I do not remember Nakamura talking about the construction of whiteness very much in the chapter. The study fits into the book's subtitle of visual cultures, but not much with digitizing race. The chapter was an interesting read, but confusing when I tried to connect it to the other chapters in the book.

The look at race in the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report weren't as new to me, given the amount of media studies critique in the other two books I've read on race and the Internet. And I sadly do not remember much at all about the AIM icons chapter, the Alllooksame chapter, or the final chapter. However, a quick glance at the final chapter on Amazon has a better discussion of how to think about the "digital divide," particularly how Asian Americans are probably underrepresented in censuses due to potential language difficulties. Nakamura also discusses how censuses on technology use fail to take into account how many Asians are there behind the scenes, manufacturing the technology being used. I think most of her writing focuses on Asians; there's mention of the online petitions against Abercrombie and Fitch, as well as talk of outsourcing manufacturing so that the risks involved are taken by Asian bodies. I don't remember enough to say how much she discusses other POC though.

Mostly I remember thinking this was interesting although not necessarily always exciting in its conclusions.

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This related to Bound by Your Touch in that the heroes know each other, but they barely show up in each other's stories (I like that, although YMMV).

British spy Phineas Granville meets American flibbertidget Mina Masters in Hong Kong (why all the "exotic" settings WHY?), where she saves his life at some cost to her own. Four years later, Phin wants out of the spy game, but Mina is in trouble, and he's the only person she can think of to go to for help.

Thankfully for my blood pressure, the book gets out of Hong Kong fairly quickly, so I can not have British colonialism shoved in my face again. That said, there are still mentions of Phin's older spy missions, all of which are exactly as imperialist as you might think and focus on his white man angst instead of the brown people being screwed over, but at least it's not the main plot. It's so sad that nowadays, I almost prefer that romances stay all white and all in America or Western Europe and ignore the POC there, because when they don't, there's so much fail. I managed to not think about it so I could enjoy the book, but it's still there.

Anyway! With all that in mind, I actually loved this. Mina is an excellent heroine: she is stunningly gorgeous and knows it and uses it to her advantage, she detests being caged, and she is incredibly smart. One of the most frustrating yet most rewarding parts of the book is watching Phin find this out. At first, he suspects her of pretty much everything, leading to some standard "I loom over you to threaten you and make you talk" scenes, but Mina won't have any of it. I loved her description of one of their kisses, in which she mentally notes that it's very skilled, but forced seduction is both boring and predictable.

She has constructed an entire facade that almost everyone buys into because no one, not even Phin at first, believes she could be as intelligent as the evidence shows. I was so happy when she calls Phin out on how he assumed someone had to be behind her because of course she couldn't possibly have done it herself.

I also love her entire brainless bombshell routine, as it feeds into my love of the Scarlet Pimpernel fop-hiding-something trope. Here's Mina telling Phin of when a priest ran over her dog Mongol and she used it to blackmail the priest for chocolate:

"Blackmail? We called it a friendly agreement. By the end of the year, I wished I had another terrier for him to kill. But not really," she added quickly. "Wouldn't that be too bad of me! I much preferred Mongol to chocolate. Dogs are always much better than chocolate, of course, because they're alive." She paused to frown. "Then again, if one counts mold, I suppose some of the chocolate was also alive in the end... the cherry-filled ones, you understand; I never liked cherries. Well, it's all rather confusing."

After Phin gets over his misunderstanding, he turns out to be a rather nice hero, even though I still wanted to bash him over the head in the final conflict. I liked how he actually bothers to listen to Mina, that he understands her jokes and what it means for her to call his body "beautiful" and to comment "Why you're a pocket Venus write large, Ashmore."

Sex-wise, I wish Duran had gone farther. I feel bad for pushing for dominant heroines in every single romance review I do ever, given that it's not for everyone, but there's just such a lack of them! I can still count the number of dominant heroines on one hand. It was especially frustrating because Mina clearly gets off on it in an earlier scene: she's bored until she makes Phin lose control, backs him up against a wall, and marks him. She also makes a move to blindfold him and possibly tie him up later, but then Duran turns the tables on her. I did appreciate Mina thinking that even blindfolded and tied up, she was still choosing what to give and what not to, but it was so close! I'm so frustrated by how almost all the romances I read never have the hero tied up, or even if they do, they still manage to give him control. Even with these complaints, Duran still manages to pack character and relationship development into the sex scenes, which impressed me given how hard it is to do.

And as mentioned previously, the issue of control isn't a passing one for the book. Mina has fought tooth and nail to control her own life, which is one reason why I would have liked to see more of that in the sex, as well as why I was so annoyed by the final conflict and how it's all about Phin's issues and resolving them instead of Mina's.

In conclusion: I loved this, even though I wanted it to go farther and wished it hadn't had scenes in Hong Kong. I'm also extremely frustrated, because Duran is clearly a good writer doing interesting things, but she also seems to be very into the whole "exotic" setting with white people frolicking about, which means I will probably avoid many of her books. (I couldn't even get past the first chapter of Duke of Shadows because it pissed me off so much.) These settings are not exotic, they are not backdrop, they have people who live there and speak the language and grew up there and have relatives there. And the time period these books take place in is one that devastated the places being used as mere stage settings, these places that are people's homes.

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Lydia Boyce is a spinster interested in her father's archaeological expeditions in Egypt. James, Lord Sanburne, somehow gets his hands on some Egyptian stela for purposes that I have completely forgotten. Lydia exposes Sanburne's acquisition as a fake, and sparks ensue.

I read the first three-quarters of this while not in the mood for romance, and as such, I do not remember much of what happens at all. Also, it didn't help that the spinster-meets-wastrel is one of my least favorite tropes right now in romance. And finally, I spent the entire book ranting in my head about how these people were just going off and stealing Egyptian property to study, that it was all about Egypt as this distant land way out there where these things happened, that the action was as usual all about the white people.

Yes, it was nice to know that the heroine engaged in Egyptian-government-sanctioned trade, but given the power dynamics of the time (Victorian England), how much leeway did the government have, really? Especially since this book takes place after the construction of the Suez Canal.

When I managed to not be overcome by rage, the prose was indeed lovely, and the character growth was interesting, although I am completely unconvinced of the resolution of Sanburne's storyline re: his sister.

Overall, it may be a very good book, but still. RAGE.

Links:
- oracne's review

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At Wiscon this year, Victor Raymond passed around copies of a letter the nascent Carl Brandon Society wrote to the Wiscon ConCom... on May 27, 1999.

http://carlbrandon.org/wiki/index.php/Founding_Letter

I meant to type this up for the letter's ten-year anniversary, but haven't until now. I'll also upload a PDF version of the letter sometime during the week.

Ten years, people. TEN YEARS.

And POC are still being ogled at and made to feel unwelcome.

Yes, there's been progress, but there still needs to be much more.

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I have spent most of the past year thinking about knowledge, about who gets to know what, about who gets to disseminate that knowledge, about whom people think the knowledge is being disseminated to. It is a mixture of my experiences of year one of grad school, along with a constant debate with myself on the who, what and why of my own blog.

Much of it is prompted by the extremely common fallacy that non-white people/POC do not exist outside of the white eye, that our countries are "discovered" even though we have been living there for centuries, that our cultures are there to be explained by white people to white people. I've seen this play out in person over various iterations of Racefail online, but the important point is that this is not new. This is a tool that has been used over centuries by colonizers to justify their own narratives, to make themselves the heroes of their own stories, and to erase non-white/POC contributions to history. I cannot count how many times I have picked up a book titled "The History of [Subject]" only to have it cover the Western history of [subject]. Occasionally, if the writers are "generous," we get a brief mention of Egypt or China or the Ottoman Empire, but always with the assumption that these civilizations are static ones that existed only in the past, that their contributions are blips on the radar, unconnected to anything coming before or after. Joanna Russ talks about how taking away the context and the narrative disempowers female writers in How to Suppress, and the same tactic is at work here.

( My Academic Crisis )

( The right to know and not know )

( Presumed audience and defaults )

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Yay IBARW for making me post, despite it being months late?

Although I had a very positive Wiscon experience this year, it was amidst a lot of fail. I heard and saw Black and South Asian women being mistaken for other Black and South Asian women, fish bowl ogling, and a lot of reports of people asking POC to be their special POC friends ("I have had no prior interaction with you before, but let me waylay you for half an hour to pepper you with questions about proper ally behavior or ask for your permission to do X!"). I personally managed to avoid a lot of fail, I think because a) I limit my panel appearances, b) I only go to panels in which I know and like the panelists, and c) I am antisocial, do not really go to parties, and only talk to people I know and like. Given the shenanigans, I do not think I will be changing my interaction habits in the future.

This works fine for me since I am, as mentioned, antisocial, but seriously. POC should not have to limit all their social interactions at a con just so they can be treated like a normal human being.

With all those caveats in mind, I was so happy to see so many brown faces this year, to make connections with people I've only seen online, to get the chance to talk in person instead of via comments.

One of the highlights of the con for me was being on a panel about Andrea Smith's Conquest with Andrea Hairston and Diantha Day Sprouse and talking with them afterward. First, I'm thankful I got the chance to apologize to Diantha for calling her too angry years ago; I read that now and think "She is so right! Make people with their horrible grabby hands GO AWAY!" But mostly, I cannot emphasize how good it was to talk to women of color from different generations than me about their journeys and their experiences.

The women I grew up with—my mother, my grandmothers, my aunties—gave me many things, but they did not give me the tools to deal with issues of social justice. And although I love them dearly, the models they have to offer aren't very radical. I think it's pretty sad that it took me going to Wiscon, which is mostly white, to find other women of color whom I looked up to as role models, but that's what happened. And I'm grateful that even though the initial connections I made with people were online or at Wiscon, they have been moving offline and outside the con. I'm glad I've been able to talk with more people locally, to have discussions in email and on the phone and in person so I can work through things without having random white passerbys ogling at my mental processes.

I can't even say how much it means for me to finally find these communities of women of color who are committed to social justice, especially in SF/F, which is what I grew up on. So thank you to the women I've gotten to know, the women I sometimes disagree with, the women I don't know, the women who have passed on, to all of you out there creating and critiquing and blogging and talking and being fannish and just being yourselves.

Having your multitude of voices means so much to me, especially as I continue to work on who I want to be and what I want to do.

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I read this several months ago, so my already bad memory is now even worse. This is a relatively early book examining race and cyberspace; it was published in 2000, and the research is no doubt a few years older.

As with Nakamura's Cybertypes, this book was compiled when much of the rhetoric about the Internet and email and Usenet espoused how cyberspace would eradicate identity politics and allow all of us to only be seen via our personalities or our text or whatnot. I keep saying this, but oh, I laugh so bitterly at that!

Many of the pieces in the book come from media studies people and examine the portrayal of cyberspace in popular movies, books, and video games. I cannot really remember what they cover, since I read this right after Cybertypes and get the two mixed up at times. What I found the most interesting was a study of whiteness online in terms of Confederate websites, a study of an "electronic village," which attempted to emulate the experience of a small shopping center, and one on the role of computers in education and how that affected the digital divide.

Like most anthologies, I got frustrated by the length; I always wanted more. This was particularly the problem with Kolko's piece on trying to include "@race" in online MUDs to get rid of the frequent assumption that if someone doesn't specify their race, they must be white. She talks about designing the @race tag and how the system would use it, but notes that she only began implementing it and has no results for the study yet.

Overall, the book is very dated, and while I appreciated the media studies look at things, I also wanted more about class and race and how it impacts people's experiences online, not just how they are portrayed as being online. I think I wanted something more like The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.

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Justine Larbalestier, whose books all feature protagonists of color, posts about the white washing of her latest book:

The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

Susan from Color Online (good blog on YA books by and about POC) also adds:

Very few have responded to my comment about the absence of color among book bloggers. Those marketing folks didn't come to that conclusion without some basis in what they see. Something shaped their perception.

What is important has already been said: this is not a new issue; it is a self-perpetuating cycle contributed by bookstore shelving, marketing expectations, and aversive racism from readers and reviewers; it is symptomatic of the larger issues of racism; and it hurts readers of color.

( Book list )


Color Online is also running a book giveaway to promote YA authors of color.

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• Help send Verb Noire to WorldCon:
  

  Verb Noire needs to raise some cash to defray the expenses of WorldCon. We thought we could bridge the gap out of pocket, but money is tight and my kid's face is expensive. So, we're hoping book sales, merch sales, and anything else you guys want to suggest can make up the difference. We're already putting together the second book (an anthology of short stories) and I was vaguely contemplating some sort of naming contest, but if that's not what gets you excited then please suggest something. We really want to be there, but finding the money for attendance and such is putting a hurt on ye olde pocketbook.

  
  



• The volunteer theater program rachelmanija works at is in need of help:
  

  The organization I have volunteered with for fourteen years, The Virginia Avenue Project, is holding an auction. It's a mentoring group for kids in Los Angeles. They do amazing work, which I have personally witnessed.
  
  100% of the Project kids graduate from high school. 90% of them continue to college. 85% of them are the first in their family to do so.




• IBARW 4 is from July 27 through August 2 and we are looking for people to spread the word! Especially if you are or know a non-English blogger and/or a non-Western blogger.

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I think this book grew out of Anderson's thesis work about Native women, and in it, she explores the ways Native women's identities have been constructed pre-colonization, how colonization destroyed many of Native women's roles and enforced white patriarchy, and how Native women are reclaiming their identities.

In the introduction, Anderson introduces the idea of the subjective reader and writer. You would think this wouldn't be so revolutionary, but grad school classes on sociology seem to indicate otherwise! Going with this, Anderson introduces herself as a light-skinned Cree/Mé woman who grew up without much contact with Native communities and notes how this affects her as an author and as a researcher. She also asks readers of the book to examine their own motives for reading the book. Are they Native women looking for support or affirmation? Are they non-Native people looking to learn about "Native culture"? Are they white feminist? Etc.

My own personal reading context is as a Chinese woman who knows very little about Native cultures looking for more information on Native feminism (there is probably also a better term for this I do not know) after reading Andrea Smith's Conquest and reading blogs and posts from Native women online. I'm also looking for alternatives to "mainstream" feminism, not to adopt, but to have a better feel for where I'm ignorant.

As I had expected, there were times when it was hard for me to read this book because I had to stomp on the part of my brain that was like, "But! Excluding women from blahdiblah means blahdiblah! Clearly delineated male and female roles means blah!" It helped that Anderson herself was also working through her own understanding of past traditions and how to adopt them to today, on what things have changed and should stay changed and on what things have changed and should be reverted.

As an example: I saw her explanations of keeping women on their period outside of drum circles and sweat lodges as a veiled "I roll my eyes at the white women who keep wanting to join the sweat lodge or drum circle and protest their exclusion while having no idea what it actually means." Anderson's explanation is that women on their period already have a great deal of power, and not as a negative thing. But she also notes that in the present day, keeping menstruating women out of a specific activity can be done in a misogynist fashion not in the spirit of tradition and adds that the menstruating women should have their own area to retreat to, that they should not be ignored or ostracized. It looks like a fairly complicated situation trying to balance imported misogyny and return to tradition and how notions of tradition change over time, and I bet it is not a situation where it is helpful for white feminists to barge in and say, "This is what is feminist."

Anderson structures the book in three parts: examining the past, looking at the present, and envisioning the future. She goes through the general gender equity in many Native societies pre-colonization and talks about exceptions and norms, which was very helpful for me, because I have zero background in this. She also covers what happened once white colonization began and what that did to many Native societies, particularly the use of white patriarchy as a tool of colonization, which was more familiar to me. Although some of the book talks about Anderson's own journey, she has also talked to quite a few other Native women (mostly Canadian) about their own experiences.

I'm not doing the book justice; I found it thought-provoking and challenging. I value it for making me continue to rethink what I normally conceptualize as "feminist" and for offering a non-white feminism, especially one that emphasizes community child-raising, family, and the overall community.



I also posted a list of all the Native authors in the bibliography if people are interested.

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In response to these posts¹, colorblue wrote:

And another thing that I find very strange is that I know more of what certain Singaporeans (I would say certain Indian-Singaporeans, but that will just reveal my own backwards thinking, giving such undue importance to race in such a progressive and strangely tolerant country) go through than someone who has lived there all her life, except a part of me doesn't find that strange at all, because this is another thing that racism does.

On my more tolerant days I consider people who mouthpiece diversity and equality while viewing the world in such a strange way foolish and useless. On my less tolerant days, and this is one, I think such ignorant, willful blindness is just as destructive as the more outright forms of racism, for those forms of racism are built on excuses and niceness and strange tolerances such as this.

She also said the following to me about including those posts in the carnival:

And you are hosting and commenting on an Asian Women's Carnival focused on intra/inter/transnationalities and either you did not realize or you did not think or you did not care enough that people like me would read the posts you were linking to and expressing thanks for and find their experiences or the experiences of those they respect and care about, the injustices they've faced and continue to face, ignored and trivialized.

And this makes me wonder just who the audience for this Carnival was intended to be or pictured as being, what was considered important and what wasn't, and that is why right now I do not care about whatever you might have found in Karanguni's post that resonated with you and that is why right now your comment doesn't have much meaning for me.

First and foremost, I apologize for not only hurting people, especially people who are being oppressed and treated unjustly in Singapore, but also for taking what should have been a safe space for them and making it unsafe, painful, and a replica of the same power structures they face at home. My intentions in this do not matter; the result remains the same.

Second, on intentions. In my excitement over the Carnival, I included everything submitted. This is an illustration of how focusing on one identity (Asian women) can act as a means of excluding identities within that one (non-Chinese Asian women in Singapore), and how those excluded are almost always the people who have less power, particularly when the person directing the focus—me—has a privileged place within that identity. This is why my intentions do not matter: they were intentions that made it easy for me to focus on people like me to the detriment of people with less power than me, and therefore, they are the antithesis of good intentions.

I do not think I was the right person to compile this Carnival. To create a space that is safe we must first and always focus on those who are most at risk, and instead, I focused first on those on top, those like me. As such, I also apologize for the overall lack of South and Central Asian women, for the lack of transwomen, lesbians, women with disabilities, older women, non-English-writing women, and lower class women, as well as the lack of ethnic minority women in Asian nations. Just like the unmarked state reads as white middle-class male, cisgendered and heterosexual, an unmarked Asian woman is also able-bodied and -minded, young, middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual. Going top down by necessity reinforces these unmarked states and furthermore divides us into "default" and "default" with added widgets of oppression, none of which interact, all of which we tack on after the fact when they should be first and foremost.

No one single post in the Carnival created that type of space; my framing and compilation and editorial choices did.

To go back to colorblue's words: "[T]his makes me wonder just who the audience for this Carnival was intended to be or pictured as being, what was considered important and what wasn't[.]" I believe for less privileged voices to be heard, the first thing is to find those voices and support them in what they are already doing, to prioritize them and to listen to them and to not speak over them, and most of all, to not subsume their identities into your own.

And that is what I failed to do and what I apologize for.

---

Please do not comment saying I should not apologize, didn't do anything wrong, etc., or that colorblue is using the wrong tone or whatever. It is not true.

Also, do not comment in thanks for this; it is not something to be thanked for. What matters to me is going forward and not doing the same thing.

However, critique, privilege checks, etc. are very welcome.

---

1. As problematic as karanguni's posts are, she did not submit them to the Carnival; that they are in the Carnival is my fault. back

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ETA: please read this before reading the carnival

---

I'm sorry this is so late. I wrote up a giant post, and my computer crashed and I lost it.



These are the posts I didn't write: golden lotuses and size 9 feet; mismatched eyelids and tape; broken palms and murdered husbands; lucky nose and skimpy ears.

These are the words I can't say; not because I don't have them, but because I have too many, because they overflow and I choke on them, unable to get them out.

But, oh, my sisters and friends write—not for me, but for themselves—and sometimes I find myself in their words, and sometimes I find who I need to be in them.

I've tried and tried to write entries for this carnival and for the first one, but there is too much, and I cannot. But I can respond somewhat to what others have written.

As noted in the call for submissions, the optional theme for this issue is "hyphenates and sourcelanders and diasporas and being a minority Asian in a majority Asian country and majority Asian countries and minority Asian countries and third culture kids and thoughts about being refugees, immigrants, expats, nth generation, FOBs*, about generational gaps and cultural expectations and growing up in one place and then another and speaking one language at home and one outside and and and..."

* I think of myself as a FOB in many ways and dislike any mockery of fobbishness. Also, if you aren't one, don't use it.

Also, white people, when you're reading, don't co-opt. Don't take these pieces and use them against us. We know about intra-POC and intra-Asian racism and bigotry; we know how frequently our words stripped from us to be used against each other. Forming identities among inter/intra/transnationalities is hard; it is harder still when it is never a purely personal process, when every move we make for ourselves is taken from us and used to tar and feather all of us.

( Nationality, ethnicity, and identity )

( Language )

( Gender and sex )

( Story and remyth )

Many thanks to everyone for posting and submitting, and especially to ciderpress for starting the Asian Women Blog Carnival. Please contact her if you would like to host a future issue!

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I may get parts of this book (2002) confused with Digitizing Race (2008, also by Nakamura) or Race in Cyberspace (2000, co-edited by Nakamura), as I read all of them together.

From my vague impressions of scholarship on race and online communities, Nakamura's one of the first people who really started writing about race and the Internet. Prior to this and to Nakamura's other work, I think there was a fair amount about gender and the Internet, in terms of how the Internet impacted gender identification, acting out gender online, and etc, but not much on race.

Nakamura comes from a background in visual studies, and this book is less ethnographic and far more culture-focused. She analyzes the portrayal of race in works that affect how we think about the Internet, such as the fun times of Asian landscapes and languages without the actual people in Gibson's Neuromancer and Bladerunner and how later on, we get more mixed-race Asian protagonists (Matrix, Snow Crash). I very much liked her reading of the Matrix, particularly of Agent Smith as white male kyriarchy, but can't comment much on the others, as I only vaguely remember the Gibson and Bladerunner and have never read Stephenson.

She also dissects some of the early ads for Internet access, starting from MCI's apparently famous "Anthem" ad, which claims the Internet as a space free of those pesky things like gender and race. I am sure you all laugh bitterly at this. She notes that there's a great deal of what she calls cybertourism involved in many of them, in which the ads posit that the viewer is white, middle-class, and American and contrast that audience to the people in the ads, who are frequently POC from countries in the Global South dressed in their "traditional" wear and often posed next to animals like elephants and camels and etc.

Kali Tal (link below) notes that Nakamura is much better with Asian stuff than she is with Black stuff, and I dearly want to read a book by someone well-versed in cyberculture and African-American studies and how the latter applies to the former, as mentioned in the review.

I vaguely remember that I disagreed with some things in the book, but final papers took up my mind and I forgot. It was also kind of funny reading it, because I felt like constantly saying, "Dude, people on my reading list could tell you that" when she left media analysis and started talking about online spaces.

Interesting groundwork for the field, rather dated, and not broad enough in terms of coverage (as noted, she's good with Asian. Anything other than that tends to get the shaft).

Links:
- Kali Tal has a way better review than I do

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I'm not allowing myself to post substantially on RaceFail Part Umptynine until I've turned in this stupid 25-page paper, but in the meantime, there's a call for POC readers of SF (especially non-US and non-UK people) to represent:

Wild unicorn herd check in

I posted my comment this afternoon and was number 50-something, and oh people. There are 200+ comments now. Some are comment threads, but most are just us, raising our hands and saying, "Yes, I'm here too."

ETA: took out non-UK because my reading skills, they are teh suck.

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This is a collection of essays by First Nations writers on Native sex and sexuality, as noted in the subtitle. Unfortunately, I read this book over the span of a month or so and procrastinated on writing it up, so my memory is really fuzzy.

In terms of representation, I think there was a 60/40 male/female split, a handful of essays by two-spirit or LGBT people, and one or two by older people. I don't particularly recall essays that focused on disability or class, although I could also be remembering wrong.

The essays I remember most are the one on boarding school abuse and its affect on the author's sexuality, one on a Native woman choosing to striptease to earn money, and one on older Native sexuality. I also very vaguely remember one citing a myth on incest and hide-and-seek.

Wow, my memory is teh suck!

Oh wait! There was an absolutely hilarious one on the stereotype of Native sexuality in romance novels, and even though the collection is from Canada, I think many of the romances are either the same or extremely similar. That one I did have context for and therefore found it extremely amusing and insightful; I'm guessing many of the rest would have been as well had I known enough. Except possibly the stripteasing one, which I don't think fully encompasses the potential for abuse in the industry, even as women (usually of a higher class) can choose to participate for empowerment. I don't dismiss the potential for empowerment, but I also don't think that's all there is to the story.

Overall, I don't think I got as much as I could have out of the book, largely because I lack the right background knowledge and context to appreciate much of it. Still, that's on me and not on the book, and at least it has given me some places to start with, and many more questions than I have answers.

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The completely optional theme for the 2nd Asian Women Blog Carnival is....

Inter/intra/transnationality

I particularly want to encourage Central and Near Asian women to post, and to also note that I'd love as many Asian women's voices as possible, for all definitions of "Asian" and of "women."

The theme came from some noodling here and here, and I really apologize for the title! I figure it is probably pithier than "hyphenates and sourcelanders and diasporas and being a minority Asian in a majority Asian country and majority Asian countries and minority Asian countries and third culture kids and thoughts about being refugees, immigrants, expats, nth generation, FOBs*, about generational gaps and cultural expectations and growing up in one place and then another and speaking one language at home and one outside and and and."

Submissions due 1 June your local time, and the issue will go up a few days after.

ETA: Future hosts still needed! Please contact ciderpress if you'd like to host.


* I use this as someone who is proud to be a FOB and dislikes any mockery of fobbishness. Also, if you aren't one, don't use it.

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/828184.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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I found this to be very eye opening, but I also don't know much about global agriculture or environmental justice, so YMMV. I admit that I've been a bit skeptical of various environmental movements before, not because they're wrong, but because there are way too many examples of privileged white people espousing environmentalism while culturally appropriating and especially not thinking about how their movement fits in with other social justice movements. Patel specifically addresses these issues, especially in terms of class, colonization, and global agriculture.

Patel touches on a huge number of topics, from the rise of soy in everything we eat to high-fructose corn syrup to how big agricultural companies use genetically modified crops to control small farmers. But the central threads through the book are Patel's critique of the system that rewards big agricultural companies and the middlemen between farmers and consumers, how they are privileged over farmers and consumers, and his understanding of how this works globally. I find the last bit most helpful; Patel doesn't just look at the UK and the US, but focuses a lot on the Global South*. He also makes an effort to focus not just on the "big" players, but also on grassroots organizations and farmers themselves.

I had a problem with Sonia Shah's The Body Hunters, which is on big pharma, because I felt the focus was so much on those organizations that the people they were testing medicine on became a faceless crowd of victims. Patel does do this more in some chapters than others, but the sense I got from his writing was that he's worked very closely with the farmers he's writing about. As such, they come across as people, not victims. It also helps that he continually returns to solutions that small farmers and consumers have come up with; he focuses on how they help themselves, not on how the same international organizations that contributed to the poverty of the Global South are "saving" them.

One thing I took away from this book and others I've been reading (ex. Conquest, Dragon Ladies) is the power of bottom-up movements, how important it is for movements to focus on the people who are the most oppressed and have the least power in the system, because it generally seems easier to start there and end up with solutions that benefit everyone, whereas going from top-down tends to generate solutions that help those on top, but overlooks those on the bottom, particularly people who suffer more than one oppression. For example, feminism's focus on middle-class white women, the male focus in a lot of anti-racism and LGBTQ movements, etc. Of course, this is not saying that those of us who are more privileged should just not do anything, but just that we cannot center movements on the more privileged. I am still trying to figure out how to apply all this to my own attempts at social change and to IBARW, but right now, I have more questions than answers.

Anyway, highly recommended and very eye opening for me.

Links:
- furyofvissarion's review
- sanguinity's review


Note: Patel uses the term "people of colour" to describe non-white people (he is from the UK). I can't tell if this is only in the US edition, because it preserves the British spelling of "colour." I also can't remember if Patel footnoted or explained this usage or not; I, uh, already returned it to the library.

* He notes that he prefers this term over "developing countries" or "third-world countries." I have the same problems he does with the prior two terms, and I like that "Global South" does not sound like it is passing judgment, but I think it may overlook countries in the Northern hemisphere that also suffer the effects of colonization.

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Er, hello new people!

Most of the time I am very boring and blog about books, manga, books, manga, tv, books, manga, sakura of DOOM, manga, and the incomprehensible awesomeness of Yuki Kaori, which is so incomprehensiblly awesome that every time I talk about her stuff I think of new things I forgot! Like the flying whale.

... like I said. Welcome to my LJ! I hope you will pardon me as I go off on strange tangents involving whales, wings with eyes, and zombie angel embryos, and of course, if you get bored or just don't have time or hate me or anything, it is always defriending amnesty day here.

That said, some links:

• fight_derailing has info on fundraising to send POC to Wiscon (this started because several POC had mentioned they wanted to go to Wiscon and lacked funds/a place to stay/transportation/etc and is definitely not about pressuring people to go somewhere they will feel unsafe).
  
  Uh. This puts me in an awkward position, because while I completely do not want to pressure people to go anywhere they feel unsafe, I am also definitely going to be at Wiscon and would love to meet up with people there.


• verb_noire is already at its goal (way past its goal, awesomesauce!) for contributions, so I am super late to the party, as usual. But I am sure more could never hurt!
  
  


• You have until April 3 to submit to the Asian Women Blog Carnival!


• The Remyth Project is perpetually ongoing (I think).


• The POC in SF/F Carnival has a special edition coming out soon, on Interrogating the Text, De-Colonizing the Mind: An Intra-POC Dialogue. Submission open until March 27.


• ibarw is looking for newsletter moderators.

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Like Cunningham's Crowns (same photographer, different interviewer), this is a a gorgeous book of photography coupled with personal interviews, only this time, it is on... hair! Yes, Actual Black Women (tm) talking about their Actual Hair (tm)! Hopefully those tormented by curiosity about the subject will at least read this instead of springing unwelcome questions on random Black women.

You can see many of the portraits on his webiste, and they really are gorgeous. But as with Crowns, I love the interviews the most. This book has a larger age and geographical range than Crowns, probably because I got the sense in Crowns that church hats were not being picked up as much by the younger generation (is this true?). I also love that he has several Ghanan women from a hair-braiding school included. There are pictures of women in their every-day hair, pictures of women in showcase hair, pictures of women in ceremonial hair. And there are also pictures of the hairdressers themselves, along with interviews.

There's discussion of natural hair and good hair and "nappy" hair and "bad" hair, of jheri curls and afros and straight perms and locs and braids and cornrows and ringlets (and one mohawk, yay), dyeing and cutting and shaving, and the importance of the local hairdresser and barbershop. There are stories from women of all ages, all of whom have decided to do different things to their hair for different reasons.

It's just a lovely collection; go read. Or if you can't find it, definitely visit his site and check out the pictures.

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This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large—there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages, although I could be remembering wrong. I was especially pleased to see good representation of South and Southeast Asian women. I think there could have been more by and about queer women and differently-abled women, though I really loved the round-table with three punk queer Asian women.

I had read about half of this maybe half a year ago; I reread most of it and dashed through the rest to cope with some RL race-related unfunness. I find I don't read these kinds of collections of fairly personal essays by WOC very often, but when I do, they are so inspiring and so life-saving. Maybe that's why I can't read them often... I have to save them up so I have something to turn to when it feels like everything is working against me. I'm not going to be particularly academic in this write up because my reaction is so emotional. This book inspires me and makes me want to do more and to do better, to keep working at things, to try to give back some of the support that I've found within.

One piece that particularly stood out for me was "Bringing Up Baby: Raising a 'Third World' Daughter in the 'First World'" by the mother-daughter team of Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Das Dasgupta and how jealous I was that Sayantani Das Dasgupta had her mother when she was growing up, how she had a personal role model for radical politics. I hate envying other people's positions, because I'm sure they have problems I do not, and because I am and will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Taiwan. But my family and almost everyone I grew up with were not particularly radical (or liberal even), and I wish I had had something outside of ink and paper, someone human and alive and breathing and talking to go to when I was growing up.

Other themes that struck me were all the mentions of grassroots organization and community outreach; several groups described in the book are grassroots organizations started by women of color to fight sexual violence in communities of color or lower-class women of color mobilizing to fight racism and classism and sexism. It reminds me of how Andrea Smith starts from Native women in Conquest and works out from there, and how by doing so she finds solutions that help those women and help many other communities as well. But I was thinking of activism and fighting oppression and how important it is to start from the ground up, especially because of how oppression works from top down. I am also not sure I am making sense here; I'm still working through what I can do and how I can do it.

One of the pieces was annoying, with the American woman author talking about a group of women in another country, and it just felt so condescending and "I am the outsider talking about these foreign people." I am pretty sure it was Deila D. Aguilar's "Western Feminism and Asian Women," but I am not entirely sure because I do not have my copy of the book next to me.

That said, overall I very much liked how international the book was, how so many of the pieces recognized that many of us might have been born in the US, but we still have families in other countries, still have stakes there that we cannot give up. I also liked how the book not only pointed out racism in the US, but also global structures that support racism, such as the piece on Canadian healthcare and how much of the cost of national healthcare has been offloaded onto immigrant Filipina nurses.

I found this book so personally necessary and so comforting that I have no idea how useful this write up will be to anyone who's not me. Still, recommended!