fiercelydreamed

Looking for something in particular? The easiest way to find it is from my tags -- you can browse by fandom or go straight to my fanfic. You can also check out my website, which exists due to the benevolence of svmadelyn and anatsuno.

Questions? Leave a comment. : )

From the foc_u community description:

This community [Fen of Color United] was created in response to RaceFail 09. It serves as a place for POCs and white allies to discuss the issues pertaining to RaceFail and to counterract its destructive effects. While foc_u was created in response to RaceFail, it isn't just about RaceFail. This community also serves as a place to celebrate and affirm POCs of the speculative fiction genre, celebrate our favorite POC characters and storytellers, and it's also intended to be a fun place where we can come and discuss our fandoms, recommend movies, books, authors, etc.

It is also intended to be a safe space to discuss issues of race, gender, orientation and how they affect speculative fiction.

As part of today's "Shatter the Silence" Protest, fen of color are posting in celebration of POC fans, characters, storytellers, etc. Tell your story, express yourself, but most importantly celebrate yourself [quoted from the organizing post here]. I encourage all those interested to go join in, if you're a fan of color, or to go read the posted links regardless.

My apologies to those of you who have both my journals friended and are reading this twice.

Amazon.com is censoring books featuring GLBTQ characters or homosexual relationships by stripping them of their sales rankings, which makes it less likely that they will appear in searches. When contacted regarding one of the books, an author was told, "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists." However, several of the books stripped of rank include autobiographies, young adult novels, self-help books, and other books with no explicit sexual content. It also includes major works such as Brokeback Mountain, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Stone Butch Blues, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Am I Blue?, Gender Outlaw ... books that, for those of us who are queer, or questioning, or transgendered (and notably: for those of us who are also people of color) are likely to be the first time we read about our own experiences, or read something that makes us feel loveable, or represented, or make us make sense in our own heads.

I encourage those of you with the time, particularly those of you who routinely purchase things from Amazon, to contact them and demand rankings be restored to books with GLBTQ content. There's a web page here that offers various ways to contact Amazon. ETA: There's also a petition you can sign.

I shop at Amazon for its cheapness and convenience. That's not enough of a draw for me to subsidize my own cultural erasure.

I have a website.

svmadelyn is my most generous host, and the wonderful anatsuno does most of the heavy lifting. It's been there but unannounced for a while now, and today I finally got around to making the tweaks I wanted to make. In the process, I discovered that WordPress is exactly as idiot-proof as Ana'd promised, so I went ahead and uploaded my newest stories plus the older stuff that had been flocked over at the_drifter.

This all sounds very business-like, but the truth is I'm secretly totally gleeful. I have a website! It's like I actually exist on the internet now or something. Plus, should the frequently-forecasted, rarely-appearing LJ apocalypse ever arrive, it's nice to know that everything is available online somewhere else.

Enjoy. :)

I'm in the process of trying to upload all the parts of a 30,000 word story, and LJ is being a wee bit touchy. It may or may not happen tonight (we've got company coming over). I'll try to keep the posts private while I deal with the formatting issues, but apologies in advance for the inevitable blips as I post this. Once I've got it all uploaded and I've created an index post, I'll make it all public.

Doing a bit of LJ housecleaning today: tagged about a year's worth of stuff over at my main journal (okay, I can see why you all got into that, it's kind of fun), and filling in a minor gap in archiving over here. This journal has become the home for my meta as well as my fic, and since I think at least a couple of you got here by way of the former, I checked my memories to see if there were any old meta posts at the_drifter worth linking. I only found two, which surprised me until I thought about it and realized that I tend to get my theory on mostly in the comment-threads on other people's interesting posts.

Kink, BDSM, and consent in the author-reader relationship. This was the post that really ended up connecting me to metafandom. Some backstory: shaenie posted Catalyst, a much-awaited novella-length installment in her Lotrips series Convergence (the series can be found at her website, if you're interested). The whole series deals very directly with kink and BDSM -- part of the reason for its popularity -- and Catalyst was no exception. For some reason, though, people reacted very strongly and in totally divergent ways to how she handled the D/s and S/M aspects of one of the central relationships in this installment. This post was my response to some of the issues that had come up about whether, and how thoroughly, an author is obligated to warn for kinky or potentially "disturbing" content.

Slash as activism = slacktivism? I'd forgotten about this totally until I checked the memories at my main journal. It was my two cents on the question of whether all slash is intrinsically consciousness-raising and whether m/m slash automatically constitutes a form of activism on behalf of gay men. I kind of wish I'd remembered to take a look at it when ithiliana, cathexys, and heyiya were holding their discussions on slash fandom as a queer female space; it relates to some of the questions that came up. My sense of the scope of slash fandom has broadened considerably since I wrote this (for one thing, I've encountered much more slash that is overtly and intentionally political), but I think I still agree with my basic points.

In which gender does a triple axel, and I send up every fanfic convention I can think of.

Title: Tab A Slot B
Rating: R/NC-17 (though more for language than anything else)
Summary: The men spend the entire meeting trying not to stare at each other's tits and failing miserably.

( Read more... )

Afterword
While this story plays with issues of gender and embodiment, it wasn't written to address the real experiences of intersex and transgendered people. Their struggles are not as easily resolved as those of the characters in this story.

Because the bodies of intersex people do not match medical norms of maleness and females -- norms that are in some ways quite arbitrary -- they are often subjected to a battery of medical efforts to bring them into conformity. These interventions can include aggressive hormone treatment and genital surgery beginning in infancy, often carried out in the absence of health risks, to the detriment of adult sexual functioning, and without the understanding or consent of the person. Activists like Cheryl Chase of the Intersex Society of North America are working to end unnecessary medical intervention on intersex infants and helping intersex individuals grow up with understanding, without shame, and with the right to determine their own identities and bodies.

While intersex people have their natural bodies taken from them, transgendered people are often held hostage by their bodies and by what legal, medical, social, and cultural systems say those bodies mean. Moving beyond the gender they were assigned at birth means passing through an endless series of gatekeepers: clerks, judges, psychiatrists, and physicians, to name a few. Transpeople are frequently denied the rights to have their gender identities recognized on legal documents, to receive equal work for equal pay, to safely and affordably make physical changes to their bodies (or to stop short of full gender reassignment if they do), to be guardians of their children when custody battles occur, and to live with safety, respect, and the full protection of the law. The National Center for Transgendered Equality believes we can do better, and so do I.

These may not seem like women's issues, but the technologies of power that have long defined women by our bodies are the same as those that seek to control the bodies and identities of transgendered and intersex people. Both of these organizations support all kinds of women too often marginalized, ignored, or exiled by more traditional women-centered groups -- as well as all kinds of men, and people who identify as both, or neither, or whose identities are too fluid and complicated to be easily named. Empowering women doesn't mean strengthening walls -- it means building bridges.

14 Valentines: Body Image

The Shooting Lesson. Billy/Lando, 1873, the Colorado Territory.

Expect a little more action here in the coming weeks -- I've got a long-overdue sequel to one of my first stories getting ready to go up, a piece of total crack written for 14valentines, and a large project that's been in the works for a while which should be going public soon.

Final Hand.
Billy, 1874, New Mexico.

His vigilance fits seamless and easy on his skin, as though he'd never shed it, and he wonders, sometimes, if he ever did.