The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

Ally Wilkes: The bisexual woman sex worker is a common bad trope... lots of biphobic implications. (Untrustworthiness, performative sexuality, greed for sex and/or money...)

Geoff Ryman: ...whereas bisexuality is often used to add glamour to men.

#NineWorlds

Ally Wilkes: The easiest way to present a character as bi is to give them two love simultaneous interests... which feeds the negative stereotype of the promiscuous bisexual.
#NineWorlds

Freya Crawford: Very few bi characters explicitly identify themselves as bisexual. There is a word. Use it. It matters.
#NineWorlds

(Two older white guys monopolising this panel, rather. Not actually bad, but... slightly too much reminiscence and windy philosophising.)

Geoff Ryman: portrayal of bisexuals in SFF differs from the mainstream because social context and attitudes to sexuality are entirely determined by the writer. Gives more scope but makes them more culpable for failures.
#NineWorlds

Now: "Promiscuous Unicorns: Depictions of Bisexuality in SFF" - starts with a slightly sad disclaimer that there are so few canon examples of positive bi representation that they'll be discussing non-canon examples as well, and please don't get cross if you disagree.
#NineWorlds

Recent Dr Who's deracialised cosmopolitanism as "so many coloured jelly babies inside a colourless (white) paper bag". - Orthia (2010)
#NineWorlds

(Picking up that last quote as a useful gloss on Kipling's "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC".)

Science Fiction as a genre originating in colonialism and its technologies (weapons, transport, communications, racialized biology) though not necessarily supporting them.

Early SF ideas of 'progress' as "a technological regime that affects and ensures the global control system of de-nationalised communication" - Csicsery-Ronay

#NineWorlds

(I remember a talk a couple of years back arguing for early Dr Who as an embodiment of British post-imperial self image - clever but not powerful, good with words, accepted in all kinds of places...)
#NineWorlds

Starting the day with "Postcolonialism in Late 1980s Dr Who".
#NineWorlds

"In archeology, if you see the same sign appearing repeatedly with no apparent purpose it's ritual or religion; in the modern world it's branding." - John J Johnston
#NineWorlds

"They should have moved all the stereotypes in Sense8 round by one, so Sun's father had AIDS and Capheus was a successful Nollywood actor and..."
NineWorlds

(At a Sense8 fan panel, because I stalled partway through Season One and I'm hoping for some fan perspectives to help me appreciate it better.)
#NineWorlds

(Today's #NineWorlds programme looks less interesting, so expect less of a toot storm.)

Next: "The Howls of Wolves in Horror and Heavy Metal Music"
#NineWorlds

(This talk is interesting, but big on plot summaries and hard to fillet insights from. Giving me some interesting new ways to read David Drake, though, of all people.)
#NineWorlds

Next: "Women Write About War" (in the 21st Century), by Marina Berlin.
#NineWorlds

(Discussion of feminised fan spaces - tumblr antishippers is the example - where toxicity is still based on over-investment but takes a different form. Weaponisation of progressive readings/critiques as a source of power, in a way that echoes infighting in progressive politics.)
#NineWorlds

(I think this is the original paper on geek identity as simulated ethnicity, by the way. Well worth a read: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/SolesKunyoGeedom/text.html)
#NineWorlds