Anghraine

I'm cleaning up old tags because I'm finally running up against the max even for an upgraded account. And there was a period around 2012 when I'd started using tags on livejournal/Dreamwidth in a Tumblresque running-commentary-under-my-breath way even though 1) they don't work as well on LJ/DW in that way, because they're automatically alphabetized and 2) I wasn't likely to reuse those specific tags, so it's ultimately kind of a waste.

At the same time, I (obviously) prefer to preserve old posts and such as a kind of record of what I was doing and thinking and saying at the time (really putting the "journal" in livejournal!), so I haven't wanted to delete these Tumblr-style tags. They were part of what I was doing back then!

This is especially glaring for an admittedly very wanky series of posts I put together. For context, the liberal-leaning Star Wars blog fangirlblog had recently posted defenses of slave Leia and Padmé Amidala from an allegedly feminist perspective that were making the rounds at the time. I found both takes ... objectionable. It was difficult enough to put together a coherent response that I ended up simply recording myself reading it and responding in real time, and then transcribed that recording into text, ultimately spread across nine different posts. It's very 2012 in a lot of ways—including my much more overt hostility towards the prequels and the OP's extremely binary concept of gender—but also, I do still think the defenses of slave Leia (and even of Padmé in some ways) are short-sighted at best and deeply rooted in fucked-up concepts of gender at worst. In any case, I decided to preserve my tags before deleting them as organizational tags by making a new post (this one!) with the old tags listed.

Part 1: Intro (touches on gender, representation, diversity, marginalization of women in the OT and PT, and over-reliance on "Watsonian" or in-world explanations for choices made by overwhelmingly male creators in constructing narratives). Tagged: #ahoy false catch-22 #feminism marches on #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #strong female characters

Part 2: Slave Leia and constructed narratives. Tagged: #fanservice for great justice #reading comprehension failure #rotj makes me cry inside #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters

( Read more... )

Obviously, sexism influences fans and fannish practices, but I think it’s ridiculously disingenuous to suggest that internalized misogyny is the only force at work. I don’t always want to brace myself for my entertainment; it’s common to say, “[x] is my life, of course it comes with me” - I’ve said it myself, and it’s true to some extent, but sometimes I do want to just set it aside and not feel like I have firecrackers going off in my brain for a few hours.

( Read more... )

Listening back, this is probably the weakest part - partly because I was fairly frustrated, and partly because I was really unclear and had to add in a ton of editorial remarks just to clarify what I meant. But here is the last part.

( Read more... )

This was a weird section for me, and probably one of the more artificial section breaks. Basically, this is the one where -- I felt -- Tricia was arguing that people dislike Padmé because they blame her for certain poor choices and aren't given evidence of her position as a political leader. I disagree on both counts, and dislike her characterization anyway!
( Read more... )

At some point, I realized this was less about the fangirlblog post and more "Elizabeth has FEELINGS. About EVERYTHING. Hear her!"

( Read more... )

appropriate random icon is appropriate!

This response is completely off the top of my head and ended up being (1) way longer than I expected, so I'm posting it in bits and pieces, and (2) more fervent than I expected, so if you like Padmé and/or the prequels, you may not want to listen/read. But here we go. Oh, and the transcript necessarily includes the essay I'm reacting to, since I read it aloud and responded point-by-point (well, started to).

( Read more... )