A Probability of Being

People, tell me this: why is the name-changing debate so fraught in North America? I just read BeckySharper's takedown of this ridiculous defense of making women change their names, in which Dudely Dude makes the case that it should happen, and it's right that it happens, because society tends to be patrilineal, and it's useful to... what? I don't even know anymore.  I really do not understand it! In Malaysia, most of the cultures there are strongly patrilineal. This means, to me, that the father is always acknowledge within the name of the children, and the mother is not. Chinese children take the surnames of their fathers (as I do). Malay and Indian children are "son of" or "daughter of" their father, in their names.  Wives do not have to change their names. They just don't. There's no point! Besides which, the structure of our names do not necessarily lend themselves to name-changing. Siti Kamariah binte Kamaruddin does not have a la...

I recently received in my inbox an email from my father, who likes to forward me a lot of things that he thinks will interest me. Except of course, he never really realizes just how easily antsy I can get, and how willing I am to pick apart an article. (I used to hit Reply to All whenever he'd send me an email to let all and sundry know what I thought and all the problems with whatever he sent me, so now he wisely BCCs people instead.) This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue . While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss S...

These are the options for skin colour at ModelMayhem,com to insert into model profiles. It enables photographers to search for us by skin colour, or gives a photographer / makeup artist a sense of the model's skin type (for the former, lighting would be an issue; for the latter, foundation types). I currently have "Olive" picked as my skin type, but I can't say I like it. You see, whenever I go out for pizza with a friend, he always orders a pizza with cheese(s) and olives. The olives that come out are always black . And whenever I go to the supermarket, olives are green . Neither of these are indicative of my real skin colour, which is either white or tanned with a yellow undertone . And yet I have to pick Olive, because it definitely isn't an "Other" or any of the other skin colours listed. I know that Olive is supposed to be this safe alternative to "yellow" seeing as the term "yellow" has all sorts of unpleasant connot...

Recently, Queen Emily pointed out at Feministe how a new women-only pharmacy was excluding, well, women . Namely, transwomen. This is just another incident in a long pattern of ciswomen telling transwomen, "no, you're not really women, you're actually men, and we say so, no matter how you feel, because there are arbitrary rules you have to obey in order to be a woman, and you have to have obeyed them from birth and biology." Then there are some crazy so-called feminists who attack transwomen, saying, that transwomen are upholding patriarchal values by buying into the gender binary, are tearing down efforts to get rid of the gender binary by using the terms 'male' and 'female' as they like without paying attention to biology. And then there are just the plain ugly people who call transpersons "freaks" just because the latter group happen to dress in ways that they feel express their true gender which may not be consistent with how their gender...

So, I was at the Body Shop and I saw a couple of scents I'd never seen before: Moroccon Rose and Japanese Lily. What with all this talk about Orientalism and being a Person of Colour and whatnot, I just realized how American-centric (occasionally, Euro-centric, but mostly Western-centric) thought patterns appear to be in the corners of the interwebz that I peer in. Ideas of how feminism is outdated because most societies "in the West" aren't patriarchal anymore (cue the ORLY owl), discussions on how Obama is representative of a post-racial world, even the black/white dichotomy that dominates conversations of race - these are very American-centric issues. And I thought... would I ever see a scent called "American"... "Begonia"? For example. I mean, I've heard "English garden" before, but that's kind of an aesthetic, not really a scent. Why the romanticizing of these countries? These brands will be exported to the rest of the world,...

I read Ms. Pagliasotti's essay a while back, upon the recommendation of Ay-Leen the Peacemaker, and meant to make a response sooner, but decided to hold off until I had more to respond to. And I have, which I found in the innocuous description of LJ community steamfashion (which, in itself, is a fabulous community for inspiration when putting together a steampunk wardrobe). The last large paragraph within the profile is as follows: The "punk" in steampunk is a reference to cyberpunk, because when steampunk first formed it was comprised essentially of cyberpunk (that is, dystopian high tech sci-fi) stories set during the Victorian period. The word punk is a very old English term that originally meant a prostitute, but which by the 20th century had evolved into a term meaning an outsider, a street person, or a ruffian (it's fairly clear why the punk rock subculture used this word to describe itself). There is clearly no link between the people of a steampunk setting a...

So I was reading this post about how many patriarchal systems, especially here in the West, tend to assume that if a woman is a) with a man, b) clearly in a relationship to said man, and c) somewhat a spouse to the man, she must have taken his last name. This thing about women changing their last names is, quite frankly, something I never really had much experience with until I came to Canada. In Malaysia, a woman is called Puan [her name or surname], mostly to denote if she is married. If she is not, "Cik". Some of us use the marriage-neutral terms "cikgu" (teacher) or, for a teacher of religious studies, "uztaza" (which is really just Arabic for teacher, but it sounds so much more Islamic that way *rolls eyes*). My mother is called Mrs. [husband's surname] by people who know her through my father on an impersonal basis. However, when she is introducing herself, she says, quite firmly, "call me S." For official documents, she chooses ...

One of the things which bug me the most about being Malaysian-Chinese is that people mispronounce my name. Shit, I don't even like trying to pronounce my own name, because it varies according to dialect. And some people insist on asking me how to pronounce it, when they can't wrap their tongues around the accents anyway. It's not really hard to pronounce when you read it - it's two separate syllables, two separate words, each having its own sound. Some people pronounce it in a single word, which makes it sound different and it's just not my name . So I stick to the English name I use, because it's so much simpler. Then back in Malaysia people can pronounce it according to their dialect. Other Malaysians, no matter what race they are, find it easy to pronounce my name, because they've been around those names all their lives. Yay multi-culturalism. Whenever I've spoken to mainland Chinese here in Canada, I make it a point to learn how to pronounce their na...

Following up on the conversation I had with Mitchell Irons , I actually do have an issue with names, and with who calls me what. I think names are important, and what other people call you by is also important. Every Chinese New Year, when my family went visiting, my dad would appraise me of who to call what - there're terms for the varying aunts and uncles, and differ by how far apart you are from them. How you call them immediately enables them to identify who you are, too. Me, it's also weird like that. People who've known me since I was a kid or from school call me by my Chinese name. A few call me by the middle character of my Chinese name. Since I put my given name (middle and last character of my name) in the "first name" fields of any stupid Canadian form that asks for first and last names, most official places invariably end up calling me by that middle character too, which weirds me out. Even as my official documents don't have my English name, most ...