I'm honored to be posting about fat politics over at the Children's Book Council's Diversity blog today.
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There's a Botticelli Angel Inside, Snapping Beans:
Children's Literature, Queer Theory, Fat Politics, and other cups of tea
04 May 2013 @ 04:09 pm
01 May 2013 @ 10:54 pm
23 April 2013 @ 07:12 pm
Jeanette is now blogging updates to her situation at her own blog. Please follow and comment there. Thank you!
09 April 2013 @ 07:08 pm
Here's a note from Jeanette (read that post first if you haven't yet) about some things people can do to help.
*
Hi! If you'd like to help me out, I could use some of the following:
1. Contact PearsonVue, makers of the MTEL and tell them this is wrong. 800-989-8532
2. Contact Judy Sohn-White, educator policy, preparation and leadership, DESE 781-338-6600 xt. 6254. Tell her this is wrong.
3. Contact Cindy Wills, MTEL alternative testing accommodations coordinator (at PearsonVue) and tell her this is wrong. There's no direct line, but the MTEL number is 413-256-2892
4. Share this with your local media! If I can get media attention - then that means this inaccessibility gets media attention!
I"ve contacted Rep. Paul Brodeur (my ward/town representative) and Christopher Fallon. I've also sent a note to "Ask Hank" WHDH, Jim Shortsleeve, CBS Boston and WBUR. It couldn't hurt to send them a note about this as well. Increased noise = someone listens.
I'm preparing a file with the Department of Justice, after talking through this with their' ADA hotline. It's a Title II and Title III claim, for what it's worth. I'm also working with the Disability Law Center here in Boston MA.
Thank you,
Jeanette
UPDATE: Jeanette is now blogging updates to the situation at her own blog. Please follow and comment there. Thank you!
*
Hi! If you'd like to help me out, I could use some of the following:
1. Contact PearsonVue, makers of the MTEL and tell them this is wrong. 800-989-8532
2. Contact Judy Sohn-White, educator policy, preparation and leadership, DESE 781-338-6600 xt. 6254. Tell her this is wrong.
3. Contact Cindy Wills, MTEL alternative testing accommodations coordinator (at PearsonVue) and tell her this is wrong. There's no direct line, but the MTEL number is 413-256-2892
4. Share this with your local media! If I can get media attention - then that means this inaccessibility gets media attention!
I"ve contacted Rep. Paul Brodeur (my ward/town representative) and Christopher Fallon. I've also sent a note to "Ask Hank" WHDH, Jim Shortsleeve, CBS Boston and WBUR. It couldn't hurt to send them a note about this as well. Increased noise = someone listens.
I'm preparing a file with the Department of Justice, after talking through this with their' ADA hotline. It's a Title II and Title III claim, for what it's worth. I'm also working with the Disability Law Center here in Boston MA.
Thank you,
Jeanette
UPDATE: Jeanette is now blogging updates to the situation at her own blog. Please follow and comment there. Thank you!
08 April 2013 @ 11:10 pm
My posts on Above have been numerous and lengthy and mixed, so I'll just say this:
Leah Bobet's Above is jam packed with substance, and I am very glad it's nominated for a Nebula.
05 April 2013 @ 09:31 pm
This is a disability politics post, and it's real, and it's right now. Under the cut is a letter from my friend Jeanette Beal. Repost, link, let us know if you can help with publicity/media or legal aspects. If you do repost, please repost in full without cutting or summarizing.
( Please share: disability discrimination at the state levelCollapse )
UPDATE: Jeanette is now blogging updates to the situation at her own blog. Please follow and comment there. Thank you!
( Please share: disability discrimination at the state levelCollapse )
UPDATE: Jeanette is now blogging updates to the situation at her own blog. Please follow and comment there. Thank you!
03 April 2013 @ 12:53 am
Fat Angie, by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo
I wholeheartedly recommend e.E. Charlton-Trujillo's Fat Angie for its stumbling, bumbling, and wonderful girl-girl romance.
It has one racial construction that makes me uneasy.
The fat politics are mixed. On one hand: attraction not based on weight loss (which, face it, matters); textual condemnation of fat shaming; and some explicit textual examination of what it means for someone to be (nick)named Fat So-and-So.
On the other hand: fatness = emotional eating; a weight-loss arc, of course; textual undermining of its own examination of what it means for someone to be named Fat So-and-So; refusal to let us stop seeing Angie from the outside and for her fatness (“…T-shirt practically plastered to her wide wet torso” [142]; “Fat Angie stood with her stomach protruding over her jeans” [178]; etc); and the following textual frame:
Pre-start: “There was a girl. Her name was Angie. She was fat” [pre-pagination]. End: “There was a girl. Her name was Angie. She was happy” [263]. See what it does there? See those opposites?
In this book, Angie is adored and admired and crushed on from afar by the most critical character, just the way she is, without any weight loss. So that's one example of modeling that the book does for readers. But the book also models all the above ways that Angie's fatness is a grotesque quality, a thing that textually and therefore morally must change.
This is one of the books that seems to feel it can have it both ways about fatness because Angie isn't thin at the end, she's simply less fat. I disagree. The presence of a weight-loss arc is far too powerful a message (in our current culture, with everything it invokes) for it to matter to me that a certain character needn't become thin, she need only become less fat.
We're pining for fat characters who don't have a weight-loss arc. We're parched for fat characters who are not tragic -- fat characters who are fine the way they are.
It has one racial construction that makes me uneasy.
The fat politics are mixed. On one hand: attraction not based on weight loss (which, face it, matters); textual condemnation of fat shaming; and some explicit textual examination of what it means for someone to be (nick)named Fat So-and-So.
On the other hand: fatness = emotional eating; a weight-loss arc, of course; textual undermining of its own examination of what it means for someone to be named Fat So-and-So; refusal to let us stop seeing Angie from the outside and for her fatness (“…T-shirt practically plastered to her wide wet torso” [142]; “Fat Angie stood with her stomach protruding over her jeans” [178]; etc); and the following textual frame:
Pre-start: “There was a girl. Her name was Angie. She was fat” [pre-pagination]. End: “There was a girl. Her name was Angie. She was happy” [263]. See what it does there? See those opposites?
In this book, Angie is adored and admired and crushed on from afar by the most critical character, just the way she is, without any weight loss. So that's one example of modeling that the book does for readers. But the book also models all the above ways that Angie's fatness is a grotesque quality, a thing that textually and therefore morally must change.
This is one of the books that seems to feel it can have it both ways about fatness because Angie isn't thin at the end, she's simply less fat. I disagree. The presence of a weight-loss arc is far too powerful a message (in our current culture, with everything it invokes) for it to matter to me that a certain character needn't become thin, she need only become less fat.
We're pining for fat characters who don't have a weight-loss arc. We're parched for fat characters who are not tragic -- fat characters who are fine the way they are.
30 March 2013 @ 11:15 pm
Sendak's last book: My Brother's Book
Tony Kushner's full notes on the back cover:
This is Maurice Sendak's last completed book. It's the kind of fairy tale a grieving child tells, a lament, a consolation, and a farewell. It's Maurice's elegy for his brother, Jack, for his partner of fifty years, Eugene Glynn, and for himself, for the world of astonishing beauty he created in his books. In these pages, Maurice seems to have gathered up that world, all of it, every corner, in a gorgeous, mad, heart-stopping condensation of every theme, every rhythm, every poetic and visual trope associated with the name Sendak, and then released it. Before our eyes, he makes his world dissolve into mist.
Resigned and impassioned, in love and desolate, wise and terribly young, My Brother's Book is Maurice's gut geschrei and grown-up goodbye. We'll miss him forever.
I agree with everything Kushner says, and I find his notes to be an art of their own. Kushner is one of my favorite people to read about Sendak, and I think he has the most to say, the two having worked together on Brundibar and Kushner having written the enormous and beautiful The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present.
My Brother's Book is terribly sad. I recommend it to everyone, but choose it when you want sad, when you're already grieving or are looking for grief artwork. It will mean the most to people who know at least some of Sendak's work already; it has the feeling and pattern of a frightening dream that's threaded through (as Kushner says) with Sendak's body of work. In My Brother's Book, I most palpably feel We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, In the Night Kitchen, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life. I'd be interested to hear what pieces of Sendak's work are striking other people inside this one.
Yes. I will miss him forever.
This is Maurice Sendak's last completed book. It's the kind of fairy tale a grieving child tells, a lament, a consolation, and a farewell. It's Maurice's elegy for his brother, Jack, for his partner of fifty years, Eugene Glynn, and for himself, for the world of astonishing beauty he created in his books. In these pages, Maurice seems to have gathered up that world, all of it, every corner, in a gorgeous, mad, heart-stopping condensation of every theme, every rhythm, every poetic and visual trope associated with the name Sendak, and then released it. Before our eyes, he makes his world dissolve into mist.
Resigned and impassioned, in love and desolate, wise and terribly young, My Brother's Book is Maurice's gut geschrei and grown-up goodbye. We'll miss him forever.
I agree with everything Kushner says, and I find his notes to be an art of their own. Kushner is one of my favorite people to read about Sendak, and I think he has the most to say, the two having worked together on Brundibar and Kushner having written the enormous and beautiful The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present.
My Brother's Book is terribly sad. I recommend it to everyone, but choose it when you want sad, when you're already grieving or are looking for grief artwork. It will mean the most to people who know at least some of Sendak's work already; it has the feeling and pattern of a frightening dream that's threaded through (as Kushner says) with Sendak's body of work. In My Brother's Book, I most palpably feel We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, In the Night Kitchen, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life. I'd be interested to hear what pieces of Sendak's work are striking other people inside this one.
Yes. I will miss him forever.
30 March 2013 @ 06:51 pm
I will be fascinated for the rest of my life that some of the same things are archetypal and intertextual and deep when written well, but are stale derivatives when written poorly.
