Sarah Gailey is one of science fiction’s great new talents and their 2019 debut novel Magic for Liars was incredibly strong; now they’re back with Upright Women Wanted, a feminist, genderqueer science fiction western novel about gun-toting roving librarians who are secretly the heart of an antifascist resistance.
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Tag: gender
Two years after a federal law banning shackling women during childbirth was passed, prisoners in America are still giving birth in chains
In 2010, the UN adopted a rule regarding incarcerated pregnant women: “instruments of restraint shall never be used … during labour, during birth and immediately after birth.” In 2018, the Federal First Step Act banned shackling pregnant women, women giving birth, and women caring for newborns; but the law does not extend to local and state jails, where 85% of the incarcerated women in America are locked up.
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Anne Dagg, pioneering giraffe biologist and feminist critic of “evolutionary psychology” receives the Order of Canada
Anne Innis Dagg was the first female biologist to study giraffes; while all the men who preceded her had observed firsthand that male giraffes are super queer (their primary form of play is a game dubbed “penis fencing,” which is exactly what it sounds like), only Dagg was willing to write it down and publish it.
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RIP, science fiction pioneer Dorothy “DC” Fontana
DC Fontana was a pioneering writer and editor for Star Trek who worked on shows like Babylon Five, the Six Million Dollar Man, He Man, and Buck Rogers, one of the most prominent women in the field. She died yesterday, aged 80, after a short illness. Science fiction mailing lists and websites have been flooded with remembrances for Fontana, but I’m especially fond of Diane Duane’s. (Thanks, Kathy Padilla!) (Image: Larry Nemecek, CC BY-SA)
Teen Vogue exec editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay: “proud to be ‘the most insidious form of teen communist propaganda'”
Teen Vogue has emerged as one of the most progressive mass-media forums in an age of Trumpism and its official misogyny and racism — it’s a Conde Naste magazine aimed at teen girls with a labor reporter who regularly dissects capitalism’s failings and writes explainers on the need for a general strike.
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Ernst and Young subjected women employees to “training” about keeping the company’s men happy
At the height of the #MeToo movement, giant management consulting firm Ersnt and Young (AKA “EY”) sent a group of women to Power-Presence-Purpose, a “leadership and empowerment” workshop led by Marsha Clark, who advised them that “Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus” and “Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”
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Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments”: a long-awaited Handmaid’s Tale sequel fulfills its promise
AOC to endorse Bernie Sanders today
Following on Ilhan Omar’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders earlier this week, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is expected to make her own endorsement for Sanders’s candidacy today.
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Kickstarting a new feminist bicycle science fiction: this one’s about dragons!
Elly Blue has kickstarted a series of successful feminist bicycle science fiction anthologies; her latest is Dragon Bike: Fantastical feminist bicycle stories, for which she is seeking $6,000 ($10 gets you an ebook, $13 gets you a printed book, $15 gets you a book and a poster).
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Annalee Newitz’s “Future of Another Timeline”: in which punk feminist time travelers battle Men’s Rights Advocates who want to stop feminism from every emerging
Annaless Newitz (previously) made a well-deserved splash with her 2017 debut novel, Autonomous; now, in her second novel, a politically charged, punk-rock time-travel tale called The Future of Another Timeline, Newitz returns with a story that simultaneously sillier and more serious than any of her other work, like “A Handmaid’s Tale” meets “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”