Escaping the Trunk

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged very much recently is that I’ve been so damn busy. I went away for a while to a lake up north, where I worked on the story in this subject heading as well as a couple of others (I even did some foresighting work, if you can believe that). The good news is that all of the stories I was working on were requests from other people — this one came from Rudy Rucker. In his words on the story, Rudy called it “a profound and richly felt piece so closely rooted in reality that it barely feels like SF,” and “an important story-essay on women’s rights.”

This story actually came about as a consequence of my involvement in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Initially, I wrote a fictional essay about the fall of Shenzhen from a systems theory perspective, invoking Donella Meadows and Jamshid Gharajedaghi and Clayton Christensen. It was an interesting exercise, one that I delayed starting for too long because I was stymied and had been working on my novel re-writes. I was in desperate need to write some short fiction, so (as I have done before) I turned in some instead of turning in a straight paper.

The story linked above has been cut significantly from that first essay, and a new subjectivity has taken the POV position within the story because the footnotes and bibliography and conceptual framing for systems theory has been removed. It took me a long time to re-frame the story appropriately, but I finally settled on a woman in the Quiverfull movement. Quiver-minded people follow Psalm 127:3-5:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

I felt that a Quiver-minded woman would be uniquely positioned to speak to China’s only child policy, because while she eschewed any form of birth control, the women of China are legally obligated to embrace it. I’ve always been fascinated by reproductive policy, and I thought it would be interesting to bring this dichotomy into focus. I also knew it would mean delving into two worlds that I knew very little about: the factories of Shenzhen, and the farms and households of Quiver-minded families.

Conditions in both environments can be terrible.

The reasons for this should be obvious. In the worst of both cases, rigid patriarchy oppresses women who live almost barrack-style, endlessly performing the same tasks during their sixteen-hour days for very little reward and with little opportunity for open communication or self-expression. I recommend reading No Longer Quivering for insights into the consequences of the Quiverfull lifestyle, and this Fortune City post about working conditions in Shenzhen. (Or you could just read Cory’s latest, For the Win.)

This isn’t to say that I’m some sort of moral authority on either subject. I’m typing this on a Mac, which means I’m a consumer of Foxconn products, products made in factories where conditions are so awful that suicide is a regular occurrence among employees. I also don’t think that the entirety of the Quiverfull movement needs to die. Mary Pride, the author who in many ways began the movement, has since spoken out against Biblical patriarchy. Some might see this as a reversal, but to me it’s a more nuanced understanding of one’s own opinion and its consequences. I felt that I hadn’t really nailed the voice of this story until I read Pride’s post.

I also think that there are a surprising number of connections between the Quiverfull lifestyle and the DIY maker/crafter one espoused at BoingBoing and elsewhere online by avowed atheists. Having a lot of children (some Quiverfull families can have more than twenty) means learning how to stretch a dollar (that’s putting it mildly) and learning how to make consumables as cheaply as possible. In particular, I was fascinated by the women of the West family, who have turned their DIY expertise into a profitable video series for the Christian market. (Their blog is great, too. Warning: music.) Here’s a taste:

This isn’t a lifestyle that I can see myself living, but it is one that I can respect, and it’s part of how I found my way into the story. Personally, I find the idea of life without birth control horrifying, in a screamingly awful “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” kind of way. But part of being pro-choice is believing in the sanctity of the choice. Our bodies are ours to do with as we will. Anything less is slavery. And slavery takes more forms than we know.

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The other day, my husband and I caught a trailer for The Expendables, which is the cinematic result of a mad scientist’s attempt to mix the mitochondrial DNA of every American action star from the 1980’s into a sweaty, tattooed, bulging-veined chimera. We first saw this trailer during Kick-Ass, and my comment at the time (aside from my ceaseless laughter, which I think unnerved a few of my fellow theatre-goers) was: “Wow! It’s like the ’80’s mated!” As usual, my husband had a more measured reaction: “No action movie can claim to be complete unless it has Sygourney Weaver.”

Which got me wondering: if someone made a movie like The Expendables with a cast of female action stars, what would it look like?
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I got hacked this weekend.

My pal René Walling let me know about it in an email Sunday morning, and I immediately phoned up my host to ask for help. I’m hosted through Superb, a company recommended to me by the late, great Emru Townsend (through whom I met René). When Emru made this recommendation, I had no concept of the scope of his illness, or how very dearly it would cost him and his family. If I had known, I wouldn’t have nagged him for web help. But on Sunday, I was grateful that I had.

The site was hacked by a person claiming to represent the “Lebanese Cyb3r Army.” (During the examination of my corrupted files, I hesitantly asked my tech support serviceman, “Is it covered in L337 speak?”) The graphic taking the place of my site made reference to the FlotillaFAIL. Ironically, I had met a very sweet Lebanese couple Friday night after seeing Splice. They offered me a lychee cookie, and then we talked about our favourite desserts. They recommended some local Middle Eastern restaurants. “Go to Jerusalem,” the husband told me. “The restaurant! Not the city.”

“No, not the city,” I said. “The city would be too stressful.”

I said this casually, but perhaps I shouldn’t have. The truth is that people navigate the streets of Jerusalem daily. They work and dance and pray and have families there. At some point, the reality of war must fade, like the high-pitched ringing of tinnitis, into something shrill and persistent but easily forgotten during moments of pleasure. At least, that’s what the recollections of my friends Kung Fu Jew and Miriam Libicki would have me believe.

KFJ has been to Jerusalem. Multiple times. He’s volunteered there, studied there, dated Israeli girls there. The first time he returned, he said, offhandedly, “You know they’re bulldozing homes in Gaza.”

“Empty homes?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

He later went on to say this:

What Israelis and conservative American Jews don’t seem to care is that a surfeit of dignity for prolonged periods of time foments extremism and increases hatred. If Israel was looking for a policy that would enable it to be rid of Gaza, then it chose the stupidest one possible.

It’s safe to say that I’m with KFJ on this one. I hate what happened aboard that ship. I advocate a withdrawal from Gaza. I advocate peace and dignity for the people who live there. I think Israel’s government should listen to its young people in the diaspora, who are steadily refusing to “check their liberalism at the door” when it comes to Israeli politics. I think KFJ is right when he says that the conflict is not between nations, but between innocent people and purveyors of violence.

I don’t know why I was hacked and I still don’t. But if it forces me to express myself on this very thorny subject, so be it.

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So glad you asked. Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about modifying Miranda warnings, or the warnings suspects are given upon arrest in the United States that inform them about their rights to silence, an attorney, termination of questioning, and possible contact with a consular authority. Current Attorney General Eric Holder is pushing Congress to modify the rules for terror suspects, specifically to change when Miranda warnings can be read, and to whom they apply.

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When I wrote this post, I had no idea the kind of response it would generate. It was just something I thought to do while we were driving home listening to “Carry On My Wayward Son” for the tenth time. I’m very lucky that the post was pushed through to the top of the Tor.com queue. It’s since been featured at Making Light and BoingBoing, and Peter himself linked to it in his account of Monday’s events.

In other words, a lot more people are reading my posts than usual, and I’ve been getting some really wonderful emails and comments here and elsewhere that I’m really very grateful for. It seems that readers really wanted a personal perspective on what happened Monday and what has been happening since December, and I’m glad I was able to provide a little of that. As I said in an email to Caitlin yesterday: “I am glad that there is some form of narrative out there that describes a little of what this chapter in our lives has meant for us. When I was a history major, descriptions like these always made the context of an event come alive for me and allowed me to situate myself within the culture.”

I honestly don’t know how I was able to communicate even a sliver of what we were all feeling, that day. I spent most of that afternoon feeling like my skeleton had left my body. But I do know that people have responded strongly to this particular version of events. And that, I think, is an example of why stories work: they let us stand up a little higher and get a better view of things. Anyone can read what happened in the public record. But it takes some storytelling to understand what it all meant. There’s a reason I always remember what I learn from well-researched fiction better than what I read elsewhere. Stories help us remember. They make the information sticky and harder to scrape off. So, if I can wiggle my baby toe in that tradition for even just a moment, I’m very happy.

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You might not know this about me, but I went to prom with another girl. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We weren’t dating. I just wanted someone to go with me, and due to pure social fuckery and indecisive bullshit on my part, none of the males in my romantic life were really available (nor was I available for them).* She agreed to go after I blurted out an invite, and we actually had a good time. We ate a nice dinner together, danced to utterly pedestrian music at absurd volume, and sacked out in her bed that night. If we had only been in love, it would have been a perfect date.

At no point did anyone tell me this wasn’t allowed. Not her parents. Not mine. Not my ASB rep. In fact, I don’t even recall wondering whether it was allowed or not. The concept of “allowed” never entered my mind. Maybe that was because my high school had already make it clear that they took all sorts. Or maybe I just honestly never expected it to be an issue, and amid finals and hormones and the afore-mentioned social disasters going on in my eighteen-year-old life, it got lost in the shuffle.

That’s not the case in Mississippi, where Constance McMillen’s high school shut down prom rather than allowing the openly lesbian student to attend with her girlfriend. When sued by the ACLU, the school re-opened prom, but parents of the school’s other students organized a private party, and Constance’s “official” prom was only attended by seven people.

This isn’t just hate, it’s spite. It’s petty spite. It’s ignorant petty spite. It’s PIG-ignorant petty spite. I could throw out more adjectives, but there’s one other P-word that describes what went on. Privilege. These (pig-ignorant, petty, spiteful, hateful, moronic, dastardly) townsfolk were privileged enough that they knew they could get away with this. That’s what privilege does: it shapes who you are and what you do, by (and this is the most important part) creating your possibilities for you.

I was privileged enough to have a lot of possibilities open for me. My prom was nine years ago. I went with another girl. It’s strange, and very sad, to think that something that was a foregone conclusion for me then could be such a problem for another young woman now.

*Story for another time.

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Rebecca isn’t Hitchcock’s best film. Not by a long shot. But everything that made him a good director is visible here: the way he frames each shot, his fascination with the transformation of a girl into a woman, his willingness to trust in the strength of the original source material. (I only wish he could have hooked up with Bernard Herrmann before 1955, because a Herrmann score for Manderley would have been both lovely and appropriately eerie. The real score is flowery and over-wrought. Oh, well. ふくすいぼんにかえらず.) He also made several good decisions on the picture: he didn’t cast Vivien Leigh in the role of the unnamed narrator (though oddly enough I always imagine her, when I imagine Rebecca’s character), and he waited until his producer Selznick was away to get the subtler, creepier ending that he really wanted.

The thing that struck me watching the film this time was Joan Fontaine’s nervy, twitchy lead performance. She does all the heavy lifting, which is saying something when her co-star was Olivier. Even Judith Anderson can’t really touch her, except for during a few quiet moments when she’s actually allowed to speak and not simply loom over the set. (That looming is still quite powerful in its silence; I think it informed some of the animation of Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Tremaine, ten years later.) duMaurier’s novel was met with indifference by critics, but Fontaine’s performance really pulls out the discomfort the narrator feels in her new position, and makes the viewer feel it, too. She’s almost grating in the first quarter, which makes the fourth that much more rewarding. Part of it is Hitchcock’s ability to pluck out all the relevant tensions and flay them open: after a discussion about the narrator’s father, Olivier’s deWinter instructs the narrator to eat her lunch “like a good girl.” There are similar moments throughout, but that one tells you everything you need to know. Even before we meet Mrs. Danvers, there’s something intrinsically horrifying about the situation. Then it all unravels, gorgeously, into a story about the vicious competition that can exist between women, and the danger of comparing oneself to an ultimately hollow ideal.

Thanks, Mom, for introducing me to the book.

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It occurred to me this morning that yoga is a lot like writing. There are a hundred tiny movements in one single transition, and you must be aware of all of them to execute the total process (the series of transitions) to its best effect. Unfortunately, each of those tiny movements can be draining if not outright painful, and your awareness of this fact does nothing to build confidence.

Maybe you’ll understand if you try it:

The thing I both love and hate about yoga is how aware it forces the practitioner to be of all her failings. It can be easy to hurry through other workouts: when I lifted weights, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth and refused to breathe as I counted out each chest press. This is part of why I never got anywhere with it: the pain was negligible, but I deliberately made it unpleasant for myself. I put myself in competition with everyone around me (yes, I’m the psycho at your gym who stares at your toned shoulders and silently resents you for them, that’s me) for no reason. I made it impossible for myself to succeed, much less enjoy myself. I was focused on the numbers, raising them every week, but didn’t gain any sense of accomplishment from doing so. That’s because I hadn’t accomplished anything but putting additional pressure on my spine.

My spine and I have a weird relationship. You see, it’s curved. It used to be more curved, and when I was younger there was some debate as to whether I should be put in a back brace. I wished and hoped and prayed that this would not be so, and then it wasn’t. Now I wonder if maybe I should have just worn the damn thing. Orthodontic braces fixed my molars, after all — maybe a prescription corset could have fixed my posture. Today, at 26, I’m plagued with persistent lower back pain and occasional neck pain. Part of that is my inability (or unwillingness) to sit up straight as I’m typing. To date, yoga and Pilates are the only semi-permanent fixes I’ve found for these issues. Painkillers and hot packs work in the short term, but they do nothing to relieve the tightness in the muscles or the misalignment that creates it. To fix the problem, you have to address the root cause, and re-align from within.

I’d love it if yoga sculpted my body into something I could enjoy looking at. I’d love it if it made me measurably healthier, if it slowed my pulse or improved my circulation. But the real reason I do it is so that I won’t hurt any more.

I write for basically the same reason. I get the same sense of accomplishment from both activities: that awareness of incremental progress, the once-difficult stretches slowly becoming more fluid, the Hey, I kept my balance, this time, when it all works. By no means am I proficient, but I have a definite sense of improvement. I know I’ve succeeded if I can stretch just that little bit further or bend that little bit deeper. It has nothing to do with numbers. It has to do with me, alone on the mat, trembling. In the end, the blank page is not so different.

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Via David Forbes, I found this post by John Haffner. It’s a strictly philosophical (read: Kant gets name-checked) discussion of rights and freedoms as they pertain to immigration, a summary of a panel on the subject held at Sophia University in Japan. Japan’s stance on migration is problematic to say the least: for a variety of reasons, it has always resisted granting citizenship to foreigners. Instead, it relegates them to a labyrinthine system of visas and second-class rights. However, the population of Japan is declining as the economy dies out (Roland Kelts describes that phenomenon here) and as feminism gains a stronger foothold*, leaving a rapidly aging population with a shaky tax base to support them and only temporary workers to care for them. Naturally, this has brought up discussion of immigration as a means to solve the problem.

The first obstacle, as pointed out by philosopher Mathias Risse, is that historically the right to international migration has been largely defined as a right to leave one’s own country. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave or return to their country, and a right to movement within their country, but there is no established right to settle outside one’s country. As such, Risse pointed out, the right to move—as it exists now—is more akin to other liberty rights, such as the right to marriage, than to claim rights, such as a right to emergency medical attention. Just as people have a right to marry, but no right to demand that any given person marry, individuals now are widely recognized to have a right to leave their own country, but no right to demand to be let in somewhere else. They must first find a partner willing to accept their claim.

It’s an interesting discussion that might be of interest to anyone who enjoys learning about Japan’s position internationally or about the migration discourse in general.

*Note: I don’t want you to think that I’m blaming feminism for lower populations, because I don’t think there’s anything blameworthy with lower populations whatsoever. Our planet is over-crowded, and in all likelihood, you could probably be doing lots more to contribute to the greater well-being of your fellow humans than simply making another one. I mention feminism here because statistically, better-educated women have fewer children, and career women have children later in life. Since educational and workplace equality are goals of feminism, ones which are being accomplished in Japan, I felt clear to bring it up.

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A while ago, I proposed an SF Signal MindMeld column on anime, and this is the result.

My section is by far the longest, but that’s because I spent the weekend watching anime and was feeling re-invigorated about the medium. I had lots to talk about, and I was still pinging about the subject on Monday. I felt a little embarrassed about how long-winded I was, but it’s also heartening to realize how engaged I still am about the topic. I’m glad that my enjoyment of the medium hasn’t diminished, because after writing a master’s thesis on it, I suspected it might. But no — after watching some new films this weekend, and perusing some old favourites, I felt oddly centred. My faith in live-action television has been renewed by series like Supernatural and Chuck, but for a long time I just wasn’t watching a lot of fleshy TV. (That came out wrong. Moving on.) I think that means that anime is sort of my “home” media in a way that it isn’t for a lot of people outside Japan.

On Monday, I had a meeting with my co-writer for a paper on fansubbing, and we talked about how fannish trends in the consumption of global media makes diasporans of us all. The oldest scholarship on anime fandom talks about how, when fansubs first became popular in the 80’s and 90’s, white kids entered Chinese, Japanese, and Korean corner stores for the first time. Suddenly they were living one tiny slice of immigrant life: finding your home media at the store that sells goods from home. I think that’s a small but important consequence of globalization as a whole. Globalization in general is easy to characterize as the homogenization of the planet, but the flipside is that moment when people go outside their comfort zone and then expand it to include new territory.

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