Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, queer, tagged Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, poetry, queer coding, subtext on 2017/10/22| Leave a Comment »
You ever read something that seems very “no, it’s not queer, they’re, uh, sisters/cousins!” and you’re like
GIF: Rei from Sailor Moon tries to stop her bike, skids past Usagi, Minako, Makoto, and Ami, and crashes into a “decelerate” sign. Source.
Welcome to Christina Rossetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market.” Major spoilers below, force-feeding mention.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged horror fiction, poetry, queer fiction, queer history, queer horror, Queers Destroy Horror on 2017/10/21| 1 Comment »
Now as an adult, I turn to horror stories not to train myself to survive the world but to make sense of it. The world is horrible sometimes. Terrible things happen for no explicable reason, and the rules that run society can be unfair and cruel and horrid. But horror stories reframe the terrible things of the world. They hold a mirror up to the revolting so we can put it into some kind of taxonomy. They place wickedness and evil in a context that helps us see their limits and comforts us with the notion that darkness can be labeled, lit, and even survived. The work of the horror story is to define and demarcate the uncanny and the dark. But to be queer and to love horror stories is not always easy. Those stories are spun out of our culture and our societal norms, and the labels and definitions that come out of horror stories aren’t always inclusive or healthy. (Kindle edition, loc 60)
If you’re not familiar with the Destroy All Genres series, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy magazines have held several series respective to their genres to highlight marginalized authors under the accusation that diversity (or “identity politics” or “political correctness”) is “destroying” the genres of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. I first became aware of their “Women Destroy” series through Escape Artists, and for Halloween this year, I purchased a copy of “Queers Destroy Horror” special issue of Nightmare Magazine. Queers Destroy is one of the series, and so far there are also Women Destroy and POC Destroy Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy series, with Disabled People Destroy coming in Sept. 2018.
“Queers Destroy Horror” is broken up into several parts: Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Art, and Interviews with the artists and the authors.
Posted in bisexual, Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged horror fiction, teaching, The Husband Stitch on 2017/10/19| Leave a Comment »
Photo: Luke Braswell
For my teacher friends out there, Jane Dykema wrote an excellent essay on teaching Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” and who gets believed.
When I teach Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it’s unlike teaching any other story.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, queer, tagged comics, horror comics, Nico's Fortune, queer comics, queer horror, short horror on 2017/10/18| Leave a Comment »
Today we have a guest post from Kathryn Hemmann, whom you may know from our collaborative panels on shôjo manga/anime, about the queer horror comic Nico’s Fortune.
The short stand-alone comic Nico’s Fortune is a collaboration between American writer Ryan King and Malaysian artist Daryl Toh. This is their second project together after the disturbing and eerie comic The Games We Played, which was published in October 2016. Nico’s Fortune is still plenty creepy, but the attention it devotes to the inner lives of its two protagonists serves to heighten its emotional impact while rendering its gruesome climax all the more shocking.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged A Nightmare on Elm Street, horror films, meta horror, Wes Craven's New Nightmare on 2017/10/17| 1 Comment »
After reading yesterday’s article, I found Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare on Netflix. I had actually seen some of it on TV in college, but never ended up watching the whole thing. This meta horror, as the author of “Choosing Monsters Over Women” writes, pre-dates the meta horror in Scream, which takes place in the late 90s with a group of teens who have seen 70s and 80s slasher movies.
In New Nightmare, Heather Lagencamp, the actress who played Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Dream Warriors, plays herself, with Wes Craven, Robert Englund, and Rob Saxon also playing themselves. Nancy and Wes have both been having nightmares about Freddy Krueger. Wes has been writing a screenplay and explains that Freddy is actually some ancient evil that gets trapped in narratives, which have to be kept alive to trap the monster. (If that’s not some franchise meta, I don’t know what is.) Nancy, however, isn’t just dreaming about Freddy—he is terrorizing and trying to murder her family.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged horror film, slasher films, Wes Craven's New Nightmare on 2017/10/16| Leave a Comment »
This favoritism of a monstrous child killer [Freddy Krueger] over a strong, well-rounded female protagonist says a lot about both our antipathy toward women and our glorification of violence toward women.
Here’s an article from Lady Geek Girl and Friends that takes a look at rooting for the monster over the female characters in a horror film: “Sexualized Saturdays: Choosing Monsters Over Women.”
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, Race, tagged Annihilation, film adaptation, horror fiction, horror film, Jeff VanderMeer, whitewashing on 2017/10/14| Leave a Comment »
Annihilation! Annihilation! Annihilation!
Back in 2015, I reviewed The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. In the first novel, the twelfth expedition to Area X, which has been cut off from the rest of the continent for 30 years, is lead by a five-woman team: the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, the psychologist, and the linguist. Their mission: avoid contamination and survey the mysterious area from the lighthouse to the camp to the tunnel. Or is it a tower?
Alex Garland will be directing the film adaption.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged Alice Isn't Dead, audio fiction, horror fiction on 2017/10/13| Leave a Comment »
Image: Logo for Alice Isn’t Dead: a design of a truck with the mirror image of a stylized skull driving on a black road with an orange sky and yellow sun behind the truck”
Click here to read my review of part 1.
Keisha, our favorite truck driver, is back in part 2 of an anticipated three seasons of Alice Isn’t Dead.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, tagged audio fiction, Escape Pod, horror fiction, MySpace A Ghost Story, sci-fi on 2017/10/12| Leave a Comment »
For fans of audio fiction, I’ve got a spooky tale from Escape Pod (of Escape Artists), one of the Podcastle’s sister podcasts. “MySpace: A Ghost Story” is a short sci-fi-leaning AI-oriented ghost story by Dominica Phetteplace, narrated by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali with an introduction by guest host Angela Lee. The piece was published here for Artemis Rising, a celebration of women- and nonbinary authors on each of the podcasts by Escape Artists.
In this short piece, Phetteplace explores what might happen if your abandoned social media platforms developed consciousness.
Posted in Feminist Halloween, Gender, Media, queer, tagged queer coding, queer monsters, queer villains on 2017/10/10| 4 Comments »
In his Buzzfeed piece “How Did A Bunch Of Mythical Monsters Become Queer Icons?” John Paul Brammer asks the question I definitely had after the “gay Babadook gets appropriated by the straights” happened this year.
Image: a person with short hair uses their computer in a darkened room, which casts a shadow of a person alternating with Mothman on the wall. A picture of the Babadook is on the wall over the bed; a pair of bigfoot slippers sit by the bed; and several Venus flytraps sit in the corner of the room. Copyright: Jeff Lowry for BuzzFeed New (the original is a gif!)
Where I’m from, a small town in the middle of nowhere, the gay man was the bogeyman. He was constantly waiting to prey upon the hapless straights in their locker rooms, salivating at the prospect of converting them to the gay dark side with his bite. All things evil and repulsive were his domain — report cards, emotions, curfews, and books, to name a few. All these things were gay, because they were bad.
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The Lobster Dance 