A Probability of Being

Recently, on the Spock/Uhura LJ comm, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Uhura's hair. By a bit of a kerfuffle, I mean, A LOT OF FAIL . Here's a brief summary of all the usual arguments that come out of the woodwork as a result of any discussion of racism. Much like Fatima Mernissi's observation of the "Size 6 Harem" in Scheherazade Goes West , wherein control of women is done through dictating how she must look like: ... The Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look fourteen years old. If she dares to look fifty, or worse, sixty, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemned the mature woman to invisibility. So is it done to black women - not just the usual caveats for beauty, but also on what her hair means . It boggles the mind how intelligent, smart people can totally miss the point: if it really was just hair, then the afro w...

CaitieCat said , ... it occurred to me last night that the Borg? They're steampunk zombie Fremen. How's that for meta? I am so extraordinarily pleased at this intersection of my two favourite nerdy realms in the world.

I was talking to a friend the other day and we were discussing steampunk and the steampunk movement in Japan, and he said, "most Japanese steampunk movies are just regular movies in a steampunk setting anyway." He pointed out that Star Wars is a science-fantasy, a fantasy set in space, and said, all scifi are just regular stories with added science, even Star Trek. My first instinct was to argue but it did make me think. There are just some stories which can't be told in another genre. I could be wrong in this, but, to state a few examples: Howl's Moving Castle is predicated on Howl's living between two worlds - our Earth (where he has a nephew who has a computer) and the fantasy world, where he spends most of his time. There's a weird spell going on with a John Donne poem. In the movie, his curse is inextricably tied to Calcifer's. Neither of these stories would have worked realistically in a science fiction story, not without a huge stretch of imagina...

Anybody with half an ear to pop culture will know why Star Trek 's original series was so revolutionary for its time: it had the most racially diverse cast, what with Sulu and Uhura, and then there was Chekov on the bridge during the Cold War. So when I went out to see the new movie, I kept my eyes peeled to see what the racial representation was like. After the white-washing in Avatar , I needed to see proof that yes, Asians and other PoC are still valuable persons in how we envision the future. I wasn't disappointed. Yes, I was slightly disappointed when Sulu whipped out the sword and it looked vaguely like a katana - he used a fencing foil in TOS, despite the director's suggestion he use a katana, and I really liked the idea better. (Also, my father fenced in school. I sort of wish he'd made me take fencing lessons instead of piano lessons.) So I like Star Trek for giving me Sulu and Uhura. I like Voyager for giving me Chakotay and Harry Kim. (And have I mentioned t...

So, I've been corresponding with Ay-Leen the Peacemaker about our rather specialized interest of Asian steampunking, wherein I latched onto something that truly draws me in about the steampunk genre: re-writing history . For all intents and purposes, I could imagine a world in which I have no British colonial residue on my heritage (not that I hate it that much), where Asia isn't exoticized as the place where the girls are either meek dolls or dragon ladies, the men are squinty-eyed villains, or the opium is plentiful. A timeline in which Asia is not some mysterious, untraversed area because we, as in We From the Far East, LIVE THERE!!! And a place where I could, as blithely as the Japanese do but hopefully with less of the problems, take elements of whatever I want from whatever culture I please, and reshape it and innovate it into my own culture's image, and it would be a hodge-podge that fits beautifully together, with the Hodge on the Podge side and the Podge side on ...

There's a neat review of Star Trek over at Incertus , and this quote is still making me laugh after several days of it being up: Captain Janeway, of Voyager, never met a timeline she thought was above a little improvement. Alternate timelines were huge in Voyager , and throughout the seasons I watched, I think I saw the alternate timeline theme no less than three times, if even that low a number. Even the last episode dealt with an alternate timeline, with Janeway going back in time to fix some shit she thought could have gone better. I'm admittedly utterly fascinated about could-have-beens, even as I'm someone who lives in the present and apologizing for past-fuckups forever isn't my forte. In my head, I'm always re-visiting past scenarios where I think of what I could have said, or should have said, and how it would have played out. My life isn't the only thing that undergoes theoretical re-writings - ANYTHING can: current politics, stuff I see on TV, stuff ...

So I went to see Star Trek the day it opened. I'm a bit of a Trekkie, yes I am. Not so much of a Trekkie that I can tell you timelines and star systems and all the planets that are in the Federation, nor am I that much of a Trekkie that I get into frequent fights re: Picard Vs. Kirk. My vote's for neither, anyway. My captain is Janeway. I know, I know, plenty of people think Voyager is an inferior series compared to others, and in many ways, it is. Part of it is because, like so many other series, it is dependent on network whims. I believe another part of it is because a woman was in charge and nobody knew how to freaking write her. As the Hathor Legacy regularly points out: male = default, female = particular. Yeah, whatever. In a lot of these kinds of shows, women die with alarming regularity. It goes way back when to the two choices a woman has: get married or die. That's generally the ultimate fates that women tend to have. So I wasn't surprised when in Star Tre...