Recent Media: A Surprising Number of Moms

[forestofglory]

Peter & Ernesto: A Tale of Two Sloths by Graham Annable -- a cute comic for kids about sloths and friendship.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min I mentioned to my mom that I was getting into Chinese dramas and she lent me this book. It's memoir of a woman who worked in the Chinese film industry in the 70s. It also covers her terrible childhood and being sent to work on a farm during the Cultural revolution. Oh and she’s queer. Actually there’s not much about the film industry in the book it's much more focused on her personal life than what it was like to make movies. I would have enjoyed more about the day to day of filming but l still found this book fascinating. It's not my usual thing because lots of bad things happen but I found it very compelling reading. (Content note: animal death)

Sanity & Tallulah by Molly Brooks This a super cute SF comic about two girls who live on a space station and have and adventure together. Featuring friends and mad science!

Fanfic about moms! I’ve been slowly reading through the recs that people left me on my post about fanfic. Some highlights so far include:
“Two Lilies” by opalmatrix A first meeting between Susan Sowerby and Susan Sowerby and Lilias Craven form The Secret Garden.
The President Beifong AU A series where Lin Beifong for Korra goes into politics, and has children. Not all of these are form Lin’s point of view, but they are all about complex family relationships.

Nirvana in Fire eps 6-9 Well, now a couple of episodes have failed the bechdel test, but I’m still loving the women of this drama. Mu Nihuang, the warrior princess, continues to be great. She clearly has more figured out that she’s telling. Xia Dong the inspector was also got to be really badass for a little bit. Then all the women disappeared for two episodes. I hope they come back soon. Meanwhile there are many schemes I’m trying hard to keep track of everything but it's a lot. One thing I want to know but am afraid to look up is what does the writing over the doorway of each house say? Do the houses have names? Some of the current plot centers around the discovery of murder prostitutes -- and I’m finding a it upsetting how everyone is using this for political gain and no one cares that actual people where murdered.

Queer California: Untold Stories at the Oakland Museum I loved the idea of this exhibit -- but it felt like it was too big a project for the amount of space they had. I’d love to see smaller exhibit focusing on just one part of the untold stories of Queer Californians. That said I enjoyed this and was glad I went.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I was also bothered by the prostitute murder storyline. However, there are lots of women coming up, including some you either haven't yet met or haven't yet been shown to be important.

[forestofglory]

We watched the next episode which had a brief scene of one of the prostitute brother's thanking the dude with too many names for revenging her death. Which did make me feel a little better.

I'm glad for more women coming up!

[lunabee34]

Thanks for the recs; those comics sound really cute. What age do you think they're for?

[forestofglory]

Hmm... I'm not great at age ranges. Peter & Ernesto would be pretty young maybe 6-7? Sanity & Tallulah is a bit older maybe 10ish?

[lunabee34]

Thank you! That helps. I think Fiona would probably like both of those.

[forestofglory]

I hope she does! I forgot to mention but there is a little bit of animal death in
Sanity & Tallulah, in case that might be an issue for her.

[lunabee34]

Thank you! I don't think it will be. She is currently working through kiddo versions of the Shakespeare plays and reveling in all the death. "This is a very grown-up book, Mom. I'm going to read in my office now." And then she crawls in the spaceship tent we have permanently set up in my office and reads Othello or whatever. LOL

[forestofglory]

That's adorable! Kids can be all over the place with their tolerance of these things. My three year old recently told me The Magic School Bus cartoon was too scary! So I don't think she'll be reading Othello at 6.

[lunabee34]

LOL

That sounds like me. I was scared of everything. Fiona appears to be scared of nothing. As far as I know, she's never had a nightmare. She's certainly never expressed fear of anything she's read or watched or of a monster in the closet or anything like that.

[forestofglory]

Wow, thanks impressive. I'm much more like you than like Fiona. I was scared of all the Disney movies as a child.

[lunabee34]

LOL

I distinctly remember being terrified of PeeWee's Big Top, which is, ah, an accomplishment.

[alasse_irena]

Oh! I wrote my honours thesis on young women's experiences during the cultural revolution, and how women's memories are perceived and Anchee Min's book featured. I have a lot of Opinions on how it was received, being a memoir about queer experiences in communist China.

[forestofglory]

Neat! Tell me more? How was it received? I just read because my mom gave it to me and don't have a lot of context for it.

[alasse_irena]

There is a fairly large genre of memoirs written by Chinese women who have since emigrated elsewhere about their experiences during the Cultural Revolution, and they tend largely to get dismissed by academics as sources because 1) they're written well after the fact 2) they're written in order to sell (as though no academic text has ever had to please anyone) and 3) they're written for a western market.

I remember seeing a general tendency amongst reviewers to be like "Obviously this is wildly sensationalised to sell to a western audience. Two women? Falling in love? Somewhere that's not 21st century USA? Implausible." (This is...a simplified and way more obvious version of that take, obviously. The weird combination of homophobia and sexism and racism that created these responses was I think largely unconscious.) And conversely a number of comments from (largely anonymous, for a variety of reasons) queer Chinese women expressing happiness that something they had experienced bu had never been spoken about had been put into words, even if the book was somewhat fictionalised.

I spent a lot of thesis words convincing my marker that the ways that the fact that these women are kind of organising their memories into narratives coloured by emotion and the passage of time in fact makes them very good historical sources for telling us what was (and is) important to these people, and how they interpret and want others to perceive themselves and their experiences.

(It is worth noting that 'memoir' as a genre is largely written by women, and largely dismissed by scholars.)

Hope you wanted this little paragraph.

[forestofglory]

I very much wanted this paragraph, thank you!

[alchimie]

I have not yet read the Anchee Min although I have owned it for ages, but you might find Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel deWoskin interesting? It is about a white American woman who is in Beijing in the mid-90s and gets almost accidentally cast in a soap opera about white women in Beijing, so there is a lot of interesting detail about how things were filmed and where the lines around women's behaviour (especially foreign women vs. native Chinese women) were drawn. As with so many things I read long ago I don't remember it well enough to know if it was secretly terrible, but while I wanted tons more about the soap opera and less about the author's personal life, I still found it fascinating.

[alchimie]

Also I am really enjoying reading your NiF reactions -- I wish I had been reading over the summer when you were watching it! I liked the show very very much although I was watching with a group of friends that assembled only rarely so it took us about 18 months to get through it all.

[forestofglory]

Well, we are still watching NiF. Its taken us a longtime. We are currently around episode 40. Though its hard to talk about it small chunks so recently I haven't said much about it. I'm still loving the female characters though! I want more of all of them. And I don't think I've squeed enough about Consort Jing -- but she's so smart, and good at scheming, yet kind. Plus she makes deserts and respects people's allergies.

[alchimie]

Consort Jing! Yes, I love her -- she just gets better and better.

[forestofglory]

Hmm.. the soap opera bits sound fascinating and my library has copy so one more hold for me!