Category Archives: science fiction

When Is a Joke not a Joke?

Laurie and Debbie say:

(Cross-posted on Feministe)

Our internet neighborhoods are buzzing over a particular piece of April fool nastiness, in which a movie reviewer, whose April Fool’s pseudonym is the rather descriptive L. Ron Creepweans, for Locus Magazine (the most prominent news magazine in the science fiction/fantasy world) thought he could be funny by posting a satirical little piece about WisCon (the world’s first and largest feminist science fiction convention, which both of us go to and love). We’ve written about WisCon before.

To tell the end of the story first, Locus staff immediately apologized and took down the article and has since pulled Mr. Creepweans’ posting privileges. As a reviewer, he had the ability to go onto the site and post material no one else had seen. He’s trying to riff off an incident a few years ago in which an invited guest of honor said some Islamophobic things on her blog (not, as our joker says, “in the mildest possible terms”), deleted the comments when people showed their anger, and was disinvited as a guest. His April Fools’ “story” relates how WisCon’s “ruling committee” was going to force all attendees to wear burqas “in sizes small to 5X” to keep from offending Muslims by the “by the amount of sinful and wanton flesh” on display at WisCon, and also to “eliminate ‘rampant looksism.”

To ice the cake, he used the name “Belle Gunness” for the WisCon chair. Unknown to most folks, the real Belle Gunness was a serial killer at the end of the 19th century.

Since the story was pulled, Mr. Creepweans is feeling very good about himself. Traffic to his own blog spiked, and we’re sure he’s getting a lot of adulatory fan mail, along with the angry letters and comments from WisCon members and supporters. And he gets to feel all censored and attacked since the piece was taken down so quickly, but lives on in Internet screen captures.

It’s almost impossible to read this story and not think about last week’s Internet storm around Adria Richards, who decided to take some pix of the guys at the tech conference telling “big dongle” and “fork” jokes while sitting behind her, and tweeted the pix to the world at large. She has since been fired for this incident. She has also joined the legion of women bloggers who have received volumes of nasty rape and and death threats when they speak out.

But, hey, it was April Fool’s Day! But, hey, those guys were just sitting in the audience talking to each other! But, hey, you’re just perpetuating the stereotype that feminists have no sense of humor!

(If you believe feminists have no sense of humor, come to WisCon sometime and check out Ellen Klages, Tiptree award auctioneer. But we digress.)

What makes a joke funny is a combination of the actual wit and humor used and the context. It’s really easy to get laughs about groups or stereotypes (or individuals) that you and your audience both hate or despise. The right audience will love whatever you say about “those people.”

When your audience is diverse, then you have to be genuinely funny. On an Internet news site, whether it’s a specialty news site like Locus or a general news site like CNN, it’s impossible to keep your jokes from finding the “wrong” audience, the one that doesn’t appreciate how you trash their culture.

Creepweans took everything he’s ever heard–and hates–about WisCon: Feminists go there! They were mean to a potential guest who was just telling the truth about Islam! Lots of them are fat! They get angry easily! They claim to be welcoming! He then tried to wrap his stereotypes up into one finger-pointing, body-shaming, misogynistic anecdote. It is extremely difficult to be mean-spirited and funny at the same time. Creepweans isn’t.

Outlaw Bodies, edited by Lori Selke and Djibril al-Ayad

Debbie says:

Lori Selke is a friend of mine and a regular commenter on this blog, so this is not an “objective” review (of course, there is no such thing as an objective review).

I have been reading science fiction for over fifty years (!). I have been hanging out in the science fiction/speculative fiction community for nearly forty years. And I’ve been a body image activist for about thirty years. But I can’t recall a single anthology or collection focused on the body, except for a few focused on extremely narrow conceptions of the body (such as androids or sexuality), let alone one which prioritizes the unacceptable body.

[ Issue 2012.25: Outlaw Bodies; cover art © 2012 Robin E. Kaplan ]

Thus, Outlaw Bodies is not only as appropriate and exciting, but also relieving, offering me the sensation of finding something I didn’t know was missing.

Outlaw Bodies is an anthology of fiction about (to quote from Selke’s introduction)

any body that defies social norms and expectations. An outlaw body is not necessarily the same thing as an illegal body, although illegal bodies are certainly outlaw. …

Outlaw bodies can also simply defy social and cultural expectations or move into spaces that the law does not accommodate. genderqueer, gender-nonconforming and transgender/transsexual people live in outlaw bodies. Individuals with physical disabilities may experience their bodies as outlaw as well. Plastic surgery performance artists join athletes who have changed their physique using performance-enhancing drugs. If a body must belong to a state, then stateless people become outlaw bodies as well.

Selke gives more examples, but that’s a pretty good taste. I’m not sure I agree with this definition of “outlaw bodies,” in part because I don’t see how it differs from “transgressive bodies” or “marginalized bodies.” I’d be interested in seeing some work that was specific to illegal bodies (and, perhaps separately, the question of whether or not a body must — or even can — belong to a state). But those are other anthologies. For this one, I’m happy to go with the editors’ definition of what they’re doing.

The anthology has nine stories, plus an afterword by Kathryn Allan. Looking for themes, I find six that are somehow about artificial or constructed bodies (including artificial constructs which replace the body), one about intense voluntary body modification,one future erotica story which sharply redefines gender,  and one about profoundly anomalous infant bodies. Obviously, all of those are shorthand descriptions that oversimplify the stories, but especially since the six about constructed bodies are extremely different from one another, that’s a taste of the variety in this slim volume.

All of the stories are at least good, and most are excellent. Flipping through the anthology to write this review, I kept getting caught in bits of prose or conceptual moments, enough to make me decide to re-read at least most of the book soon.

Perhaps most memorable is “Mouth,” by M. Svairini. Although there’s plenty of speculative erotica, it is rarely showcased with other forms. “Mouth,” a story about a private sex party, is not for the faint of heart even among erotica readers. In the world of this tale, the major division among humans, rather than gender, is preferred sexual orifice; let your imagination (or M. Svairini’s) take it from there.

Other particularly notable stories include:

“Good Form” by Jo Thomas, in which the narrator is supposed to be training a newly created android to be a companion, but instead becomes the android’s champion (oddly closely connected to the anthology’s “Elmer Bank” by Emily Capettini, in which the protagonist is uncommonly kind to his “paper wife”). “Good Form” creates a powerful empathy between reader and protagonist that echoes the empathy between protagonist and android; “Elmer Bank” offers some particularly haunting images.

“Millie” by Anna Caro, which grapples with the question of disability and technological separation of the person from the body. Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (a novel that disability activists rightly hate) tackled this theme in 1969. James Tiptree, Jr.’s brilliant “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” approached it from a different angle in 1974. In 2012, the unnamed protagonist of “Millie” has a very complex decision to make because of this separation.

“Frankenstein Unraveled” by Selke, which brings a Frankenstein whose stitches are coming unstitched into contact with the contemporary U.S. medical scene, with both humorous and ironic results.

Outlaw Bodies is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a variety of explorations of where we and our bodies might go in the near and far future and the world of the imagination. Although it is satisfying in its own right, it also whets the appetite for more.