Las | fanfic masterlist | livejournal | dreamwidth (mirror) | AO3 | spn tags i guess | vive la meg (mod) | ensemble (co-mod) | what is ben edlund? (co-mod) | double misha what does it mean (co-mod) | Feel free to leave prompts in my askbox whenever, though it might be a while before I get to them. | askbox
This is currently my favorite picture. It’s from an after party at SDCC, our last one as a cast, and I’m pretty sure anna is making fun of ME making fun of HER. On set I loved to toss around my pretend flowing-long-blonde hair every once in a while, at the expense of Lady Torv.
(via liminal-zone)
(Source: amypoehler, via destronomics)
“Queen you shall be until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear…..” [x]
(via -reginamills)
(Source: bound-for-life, via fuckyeahrizzoli-isles)
Released today!
PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE is a collection of thirty young adult short stories featuring lesbian heroines. As ghosts and witches, aliens and vampires, the characters in this extensive and varied collection battle monsters and inner demons, stand up to bullies, wield magic, fall in love, and take action to claim their lives–and their stories–as their own.
Written by wife-and-wife authors Jennifer Diemer and Sarah Diemer, this volume of stories, with genres ranging from science fiction and fantasy to the paranormal, is part of Project Unicorn, a fiction project that seeks to address the near nonexistence of lesbian main characters in young adult fiction by giving them their own stories. PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE contains the full first three collections of Project Unicorn stories: The Dark Woods, The Monstrous Sea and Uncharted Sky.
Available On:
Amazon (for Kindle)
Barnes and Noble (for Nook)
Smashwords (for all other eReaders + online reading)
Createspace (paperback)eReader edition on Etsy (all proceeds to authors)
Signed paperback on Etsy, PLUS free eReader edition!
(all proceeds to authors)There are countless young adult books in existence. And among those many stories, there are very few which contain lesbian main characters. If we were to look at YA books as a reflection of the teenage population, we’d have to assume that there were only a handful of lesbian teens in existence.
And that’s simply not true.
There are so many amazing, vibrant, heroic young ladies who spend every single day living out their own stories. They go to school, hang out with their friends, get great or terrible grades, and they happen to date and fall in love with other girls. These ladies are not mythological figures or legendary creatures, but their virtual invisibility in young adult literature–the very genre meant for them–renders them as rare as unicorns.
When you’re invisible in your own cultural reflections, that suggests a few painful, though unstated, things: You don’t exist. You’re worthless, unimportant. You just don’t matter enough to have your own story.
That’s not true.
And we need to stop saying it’s true by not telling these stories.
We grew up as invisible lesbians. We went to our libraries, desperately searching for stories that reflected us, and found none at all. If the Internet had existed back then, we may have had a bit more luck finding that ever-rare lesbian YA book, but, unfortunately, we didn’t have that resource until Sarah was in her later teen years.
We know what it feels like to be relegated to invisibility.
It’s 2013. We can make instant coffee with the push of a button. We can touch screens and talk to our phones and do all sorts of awesome, space-age things, and we still don’t have lesbian main characters in young adult books. There’s something woefully wrong with this situation, and, as storytellers (and YA authors), we decided to do our part to change the trend.
And Project Unicorn was born.
Project Unicorn: A Lesbian YA Extravaganza! is a fiction project that seeks to address the near nonexistence of lesbian main characters in young adult fiction by giving them their own stories. For an entire year, we’ve pledged to put out two short stories each week, each with a lesbian heroine, and each a genre story (science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal, etc.).
This first volume collects the first three months of the project’s stories. Within these pages, you have girls who save themselves and each other, girls who rise up against terrible circumstances and find their own strength and courage, girls who deal with real-world problems and decidedly otherworldly ones…girls who live and love and create their own ever afters.
They are reflections of the real heroines who live and love today. Now. Everywhere. Lesbian girls who are not invisible at all, who matter deeply, who are cherished human beings.
This book is for every girl who has never found a story about someone like her.
These stories are for you. <3
(via quigonejinn)
(Source: freakoftheday2011, via fragmentsshoredagainstmyruin)
I think a lot of us in fandom can agree on one thing: f/f doesn’t get enough love. So for the next month, let’s try to do something about it.
I pledge to focus my creative energies on ships between women for the month of February. While m/m and m/f shipping is great, let’s make this month all about the ladies.
I will make two fanworks—or more!—devoted to a lady ship. I’ll use my creative power to increase the number of f/f fanworks out there and the awareness of these awesome ships. And I hope you’ll join me in this.
How to participate?
Reblog this post!
If you’re a fanwork creator—whether a fic writer, a fanartist, a graphic maker, or something else (fanmixes, podfic, cosplay, anything goes!): decide to focus on f/f for the month. Make (at least!) two fanworks for f/f pairings throughout the month. Tag them #femslash february.
Whether you’re a creator or not: signal boost the shit out of this! Track the #femslash february tag! Show your love for the awesome works that are sure to come out of this!
Have questions? Just excited? Put it in the #femslash february tag or come talk to me, soaringrachel!
Let’s get creating!
(via nyokala)
LIZ LEMON AND LESLIE KNOPE RULE THE GALAXY, filed under ‘movies i’d watch ten thousand times’
(Source: tinafeyys, via liminal-zone)
Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”
I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).
So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.
Awesome.
THIS POST LIFTS ME UP
IT GIVES ME LIFE
MORE LIFE THAN I’VE EVER HAD
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT IN THIS WORLD
AND IT’S ALL THE POST I NEED
Read, read, read, everybody. You’ll be wiser for having read all of the above!
Every time someone lays out some historical facts like this I think of the monastery ruins I visited in Sweden this summer. Nuns lived there in the middle ages. That’s not unusual in itself, of course, but one of the saints revered in their Church was Katarina (St. Catherine) of Alexandria, an Egyptian Princess who suffered martyrdom and became a Saint. She was very popular across large parts of Europe, and many of the nuns in this monastery (Gudhem) actually took her name. For those who do not know, upon becoming a nun a woman will shed her secular name and take the name of a saint. And we’re talking about Northern Europe, people. Katarina of Alexandria, being an Egyptian princess before she became a saint, must necessarily have been a woman of colour. So that whole shit thing about white peeps in Northern Europe never having heard of nor seen POC in the middle ages is just so utterly absurd.
(via beenworkingonacocktail)
At first, Pocahontas wanted to chase after the settlers, but then she found a little mermaid.
(via thegeminisage)
FINE, TWIST MY ARM ALREADY!!!!!!!!
#i have pictures stashed in boxes that are going to incriminate me as one of the dorkier #weirder #less attractive teenagers that have grown up to have positive self esteem #i hate it when people are like OH MY GOD YALL I USED TO BE SUCH A DORK #and they show a picture of themselves at 17 wearing like #converse sneakers and a tiara #and they are perfectly acne free and ADORKABLE New-Girl-Style #but when i tell you i was a dork i am gonna also share with you a picture of myself wearing a silk scarf around my straightened and messy hair #while playing the recorder as i sit in a circle i have laid on the floor that is comprised entirely of ALTOID cans #connected together #because i used to have a weird thing for altoids #and there was not a sense of irony at all #because i was still in high school and didn’t know what literal irony was #cause my only experience with it was in sad books (via sugarbooty)
