women in sports; the people whose stories get told

I was catching up on Justine Larbalestier's blog and read her post "YA & Girls Playing Sport":

Back in early August, Doret Canon of the wonderful blog, The Happy Nappy Bookseller, wrote to thank me for linking to her and ”put in a request for a YA novel featuring girls playing sports. Any sport will do.” I misread her as asking for recommendations for such YA novels when she was in fact asking me to write ‘em. (What can I say August was kind of mental for me.) I was ashamed to discover that all I could think of was Catherine Murdock’s Dairy Queen series and my own How To Ditch Your Fairy. It transpired that Doret knows more about YA sports books than anyone else on the planet. We soon got to talking about books, sport, and YA about girls playing sport.

[...]

Justine: What do you think of the theory that girls who like sports don’t read? (I’ve had several girls write and tell me that they loved How To Ditch Your Fairy despite all the sport in it. On the other hand, I had another girl write and tell me she loved it because she’s a point guard. She comes from a family of basketball playing twins.) There does seem to be a conviction that girls have zero interest in sports books.

Doret: I haven’t heard that theory. Though I have heard that sports books featuring girls don’t sell. How can girls buy books they don’t know about. I always feel bad when a girl comes into the bookstore still in uniform mind you, searching for sports book and I have nothing to show them. It totally sucks. Also it sends an awful message to girls who play sports, that they must hunt down stories that reflect a big part of who they are. Let’s just hope that sports self esteem is working because under representation is bad for anyone’s psyche.

Justine: You said it. I can’t think of any girl sports books that have sold really well. I’m hoping that’s just ignorance on my part. Can you think of any really popular girl sports books?

Doret: No, you’re right there aren’t any sports books featuring girls that have sold really well. But, they haven’t been given a chance. It seems like such an obvious market and I don’t know why it’s being ignored. There are readers waiting and wanting and I am not just talking about the athletes. There are others like myself who simply enjoy and appreciate the games.

The bolding is mine. I was so struck by the phrasing because it so reminds me of conversations about lit with GLBTQ characters, characters of color.

Stories about who we are are so important. I remember during one of the rounds of Fail, Catherynne M. Valente wrote (and yes I know that not being able to find books about women playing sports is at a rather different level than what Cat is talking about):

Stories teach us how to survive. They tell us that our lives can be transcendent, that we can overcome almost anything, no matter how strange, that we can go into the black wood and come out again, that the witch can be burned up in her own oven, that we can find someone who fits a shoe, that the youngest, unloved child will find their way in the world, that those who suffer can become strong, can escape, can find their way into comfort and joy again. That there are secrets, and they are always worth discovering, that there are more and different creatures in the world than we can ever imagine, and not all want to eat us. Stories teach us how to win through, how to perservere, how to live.

As a child of abuse, fairy tales kept me going when I was a girl. Because Gretel could kill the witch, because Snow White could come back from death, because Rapunzel could live even in the desert--then, well, I could too. I could dry my tears and clean up the blood and keep living. This is what stories do. They say: you are worthy of the world, no less than these heroes.

And when we see story after story that has no one like us in it, a book entirely without women, a TV show where white people speak Chinese but there are no Asians visible, a movie set in California without Hispanics, image after image of a world where everyone is straight, and when we are told that it's no big deal, really, there is no race in future societies, that it's not anyone's fault if all the characters are white, that's just how they are, in the pure authorial mind, that we have no sense of humor, that we are ganging up on people because we speak our minds, this is what we hear:

You do not have a right to live. There are no stories for you, to teach you how to survive, because the world would prefer you didn't. You don't get to be human, to understand your suffering or move beyond it. In the perfect future society, you do not exist. We who are colorblind, genderblind, sexualityblind would prefer not to see you even now. In the world we make in our heads, you have been obliterated--even better, you never were. You are incapable of transcendance. You are not worthy of the most essential of human behavior. If you are lucky, we will let you into our stories, and you can learn to be a whore, or someone's mother, or someone's slave, or someone's prey. That is all you are, so pay attention: this is what we want to teach you to be.

[policing the body] "uncontrollable appetites" (sex, race)

In response to cereta's post "On rape and men" (which I previously posted about here), shewhohashope posted [on LJ and DW] "On rape culture and civilisation"

delux_vivens commented:

Is it just me, or is it really ironic that so many trappings of POC cultures are sought after by appropriators because they are 'raw', 'primal', 'authentic' or whatever, while at the same time, actual POC can be so roundly criticized for 'hypersensitivity', lack of detachment, over emotionalism, 'conservativism' etc?

I'm thinking of bossymarmalade's post here, where she talks about being contacted by a white woman with dreadlocks and a cat named Kali who spoke up on behalf of those that "hope that they share in a culture that they feel is richer and more raw and valid then their own".

There's also a lot of good discussion in the comments of this delux_vivens post. yeloson talks about "acceptable rape," pointing out:

Basically why the news is right there when someone plays "blame a black guy" and yet goes to cover the offenders when it's a white rugby team.

Who's doing the raping and who's being raped, etc. and what's projected as ZOMG vs. "boys will be boys"

ithliana posted Racism and Rape: Part 1 (Black women). From the comments:

cos: BTW, I remember one case of race coming up on cereta's post that you didn't mention. In response to one of those cases where, as you described, someone was countering the stereotype about black men, someone else wrote:

"I'm actually much LESS likely to feel unsafe around black guys than I am white guys (I'm a short white girl), because on the whole, the black guys I've met have been the most polite and gentlemanly men I've ever met."

I responded to that comment and suggested that may be because she was actually in a position of privilege when she's white and they're black. I think you responded to say you had the same thought.

We never went further than that, though.

paradox_dragon: Yes! I had forgotten that. I did reply saying that a lot of black guys I know are deliberately careful and extra-mannerly around white girls/women because they're afraid for their own safety to end up as the Threatening Black Man.

ithiliana: By white washed history, I mean the kind of things James Loewen talks about in his work, where it's all passive and past tense: "Slavery was horrible, and then it ended," with all agency removed, with the idea that groups with social power, and individuals of those groups who had specific power, could and did attempt genocide. American history likes to leave out all the imperialism, colonialism, genocide, and other atrocities committed by the white American government--if that history was taught (age appropriate, and also, as Loewen says, the resistance to all of those movements which also occurred), I tend to think most people in the dominant group, white in this case, might not be so horrified.

* Racism and Rape: Part 2 (Native American/American Indian women)

Comments include discussion of "emotional pornography," which ithiliana points out is tied in with privilege--the "tell me every little detail you've suffered so I can decide if you have suffered enough to be worth MY attention."

Excerpts from another comment thread:

delux_vivens: I'm going to start asking some of the people I see commenting about how 'eye opening' this information is, b/c they 'havent thought about it' before: what exactly do you think about?

rosefox: I suspect all honest answers will be along the lines of "mostly I think about myself", probably with at least a side helping of "that's all in the past, so I don't think about it because I'm focused on the present". Even those of us who have encountered a lot of this information have seen it presented solely as historical rather than as anything relevant to anyone alive now, and it's certainly never linked to things like white girls still being raised to fear and mistrust men of color and see them all as likely rapists. (I was raised that way, by my civil rights activist mother; her Nice White Lady training won out when it came to her worries about keeping her daughter safe.)

The exotic pain pornography thing is a lot of why I haven't watched or re-linked the video going around of a girl being killed in Iran. The amount of attention it's getting feels somehow indecent and fetishizing in a way that I find really troubling.

delux_vivens: but from so many people who can rattle off detailed chapter and verse about How Those Women Over There (where over there = the entire muslim world, anywhere in Africa, etc) Are So Oppressed And Must Be Saved Right Now, it seems blatant.

rosefox: I don't at all disagree. I just think people can put a whole lot of effort into worrying about Over There precisely so they don't have to think too hard (or so they can feel they have somehow assuaged their consciences) about what's going on Right Here. It's much easier to claim to care about a whole lot of faceless people than to really care about the ones we see every day, and by focusing on how awful things are in e.g. Darfur, problems here can then be brushed off with "Well, at least it's better than Darfur!".

It's disingenuous and blatant and thoroughly rewarded and supported by the white mainstream. I don't at all mean to excuse individuals by blaming culture, though; I think there's plenty of blame to go around.

ithiliana: Excellent comment--I totally agree. It's hard because the history is important, and yet it does play into the progressivist myth (students literally tell me "slavery was a problem 100 years ago), plus the white-washed nature of the history that's usually taught--and yet the racism also is omnipresent in the present (that sounds weird, but I blame the lack of Coke Zero...).

And yes, completely yes, to the video of the girl being shot in Iran. (I thought similar things of a lot of the media coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.)

* Racism and Rape: Part 3 (Asian/Indian/South Asian Women)
* Racism and Rape Part 4 (Latina/Chicana/Hispanic Women)

While I've highlighted comments discussion from ithiliana's posts, her posts also contain lots of reading lists.

Also: Anti-Oppression Linkspam Community

And as always, sparkymonster's links for clueless white people.

policing the body

Monday morning at the gym, I saw GMA's segment on Marianne Kirby and Gabrielle Gregg.

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Seen today via Dave Chen: Abercrombie and Fitch banishes girl with prosthetic arm to storeroom because she doesn't fit the "look policy"

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Yesterday, I was reading a rant about the way Zoe Saldana's skin gets described in fanfic, and in reading something about Zoe Saldana getting described as "light-skinned," I read something (though I can't find it now) that commented that up until recently, being a light-skinned black person meant being the product of a white man raping/coercing a black woman.

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Marianne Kirby takes issue with Purex's “As things get simpler, they get thinner. They get better.” ad campaign.

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I read Marianne Kirby's complaint about Bravo's Fashion Show (and an even better blogpost from mo pie on Big Fat Deal) and I remembered something I had seen from Virgina Postrel.

As it turns out, Shapely Prose had already seen Postrel's article.

Sarah: My most charitable read is that she’s distinguishing the average weight from the mean weight. Her argument, as I see it, is that it’s in the economic interests of the clothing companies to make clothes near the mean (rather than the average simply because that’s how they can maximize the number of people who can wear their clothes while minimizing what they spend on developing different sizes.

IOW, even though the “average” size may be a 14, that doesn’t mean that’s the single size (or range of a few sizes) that the greatest number of women can wear. There’s a big range of sizes above a 14, obviously — and those all affect the average size, but that doesn’t mean that any *one* (or two or three) of those plus sizes is common enough to pull in lots and lots of customers, at least to a brick-and-mortar store. So the sizes promising the greatest numbers of customers wouldn’t be the *average* size (or range of sizes), but the *mean* size, which (she claims) brick-and-mortar stores already do try and cater to.

Yes, Sarah, that was my read of it as well (and I wasn't actually going out of my way to be charitable). Shapely Prose links to Jezebel's response to the article, which makes some really good points.

Speaking of fashions for fat ladies, Gabrielle Gregg's YoungFatAndFabulous has lots of pretty pictures (interestingly, I read "Beth Ditto, fashion's Magical Fatty" and then saw Gabi's "Beth for Evans" and "Ditto" posts). Also, I love that the cover model for "Full-Figured Fashion Week" is a hott woman of color.

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Medical-related readings from today:

Problematizing the obesity=>diabetes stats.

A depressing story from "First, Do No Harm: Real Stories of Fat Prejudice in Health Care."

WLS may increase bone fractures

A small study by the Mayo clinic as reported on Forbes.com showed that one in five people they reviewed after weight loss surgery suffered a bone fracture within 7 years, on average, after having the surgery. The group showed nearly double the fracture rate in post-WLS patients as in other patients.

"We knew there was a dramatic and extensive bone turnover and loss of bone density after bariatric surgery," study senior author Dr. Jackie Clowes, a Mayo rheumatologist, said in a Mayo news release. "But we didn't know what that meant in terms of fractures."

You mean they really didn't realize that an extensive loss of bone density would lead to more fractures? Isn't that, you know, why osteoperosis is a concern in the first place, because the loss of bone density leads to increased fractures? They didn't realize that by putting people through radical surgery that reduced their ability to get proper nutrition might, you know, also prevent them from getting proper nutrition? Like Calcium and vitamin D? That makes for the strong bones? really? Never occured to them?

RaceFail (boosting the signal)

oyceter posted: 2nd Asian Women Carnival: Intra/inter/transnationalities

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The Willow posted about the impending The Princess & The Frog movie and etc.

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gloss linked to something The Willow had said complaining about white people posting with RaceFail or Racism in the Subject Line but then going on to merely navel-gaze and self-congratulate.

mona commented:

Uh-huh. I've come to realize, after following and participating in many an internet or IRL argument, that the ego is hands down the most exhausting, obstructive entity in existence. How curious that it's so very preponderant among privileged POVs, but so rarely the reverse! It's almost as if some people are taught their voices are more important than others'! :O

I just wish, when playing at allyship, people's FIRST act was to sit and listen (and think! and deconstruct themselves! BASICALLY: What bell hooks said), before they tried to yell and scream and maintain their socially enforced positions as Most Important and Listened to Speaker at all costs. Trying to maintain privilege in this area truly obstructs even approaching unpacking it everywhere else, and yet somehow there's this privileged assumption that talking and posting and dripping privilege and ignorance all over the world is a great form of allyship, something that's going to help you, and the people around you, learn and grow and change! It all comes back to ego, I guess: I'll get more out of basically talking to myself, of talking over you and convincing myself that I'm saying something new and changing slowly but surely, than I will out of listening to you.

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coffeeandink pointed out that "science fiction fandom is not a special snowflake and media fandom is not the greatest place ever for racial discourse."

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delux_vivens wrote:

something i've seen repeatedly brought up on lj over the years are objections to the concept of 'safe space'.

and particuarly, the objections that somehow if there is a 'safe space' the people in it are somehow depriving themselves; of a commitment to intellectual rigor, of any opportunity for mental growth and development, of any sort of opportunity to learn from people that are different from them because, of course, safe space means that you squelch any and all dissenting opinions, about, well, everything.

I was under the impression people within a particular community can be a part of that community and have extreme disagreement, but also agree to disagree. Case in point: sex_and_race and interracial dating. I'm just sayin'. There's folks there who are married to white people, and those who refuse to ever even consider the possibility of ever letting a white person see them nekkid and most likely cut someone for suggesting it. Yet and still they manage to understand each other's position, no matter how much extremity people may feel about it.*

This is fascinating to me. because, really, participation in an online (or offline) community somehow means that I and others am devoting my life to the pursuit of avoidance of aaaaaaaaany exposure to anything else *but* that community? Somehow by doing that I can insulate myself from the larger world that as Hanifa Walidah** put it 'dont wish me right' and make it all just go away.

Uh huh.

This sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me, so i'm starting to wonder if this means something else.

So when brownfemipower asks this question: But isn’t that interesting how when women of color control the space, racist ignorance is not rewarded? I'm starting to think its about safe space as a challenge to power imbalance. I'm just saying.

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I was on sparkymonster's LJ the other day, and in a WisCon writeup, she wrote, "I discovered Shapely Prose thinks rolling around in straight white cis privilege is AWESOME and was not amused."

isilya commented:

I would not have felt this fear if Kate had not set herself up as a platform, if she had simply admitted that Shapely Prose is a bunch of white girl friends with white girl voices, and that is how she likes it.

But it terrifies me that someone can be "committed to diversity" and yet choose someone who "feels like part of the family" or "someone who feels like they just fit in" or "someone they click with" instead.

A) I am going to make a hell of a lot of potential employers feel uncomfortable. I challenge the status quo, I am not what they are expecting. I am everything a white male doctor is not. It scares the fuck out of me that even white people who are educated about white privilege can still decide to rely on their "gut feeling" that they "click" with other white people and not even look any further.

B) What the fuck does diversity even mean if your primary criterion is "someone who feels like they are already part of the family". Does that mean someone who feels white?

'cause taxi drivers are always funny (eyeroll)

I have read ... not nearly enough, of the posts around RaceFail, PseudonymGate, AmazonFail, and MammothFail -- though I can do a not wholly incompetent job of summarizing them.

Someone recently commented, "I also can't work out why the song ["Everyone's A Little Bit Racist"] was so referenced in RaceFail rounds one and two, given that what is said in the song was patently *not* what was being said by those same people, but anyway."

I had a total "Bzuh?" moment. I had heard the song title batted around for years, and the first time I actually read the lyrics of the song was like, "What? I am not okay with some of this. This is not actually helpful toward understanding the pervasiveness of racism." (Though I suppose I do have to give the song credit for pointing out that being racist does not consist solely of committing hate crimes. But the song seems to basically be about racial prejudice, which it's calling "racism," which I find problematic, since I find the definition of racism as prejudice+power to be really useful. Plus, "don't be so PC" as a moral is WAY problematic.)

The only time I saw it in connection with RaceFail was a post by nojojojo about the problematics of the song.

I was just rereading the lyrics to "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist," and I must have only skimmed them the first time, 'cause I kind of wanted to vomit this time.