Tag Archives: Mad Max: Fury Road

Weekend Reading List: Slytherins, snubs, and social justice

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  • First up, the serious issues: is IT from A Wrinkle in Time feminist? [The Toast]
  • Also from the Toast is “reasons why I am totally fine and not freaked out to be a Slytherin” which rings particularly true for me because the new Pottermore sorting put me in Slytherin which is obviously complete nonsense because I am nothing if not a Ravenclaw. So I deleted the account, remade it, and used my old results.
  • Besides the fact that they got a weird amount of plot details wrong, this piece from the Decider on how The Guild revolutionized web series is worth checking out.
  • Instagram user queenofluna incorporates her hijab into some pretty great DC and Disney cosplay.
  • Here’s a handy list that brings together some popular works of male-authored fiction, and gives an alternative written by a woman instead. [Medium]
  • Puritan horror film The Witch is getting some great press, and I fully intend on watching it as soon as possible:
  • In honour of #oscarssowhite, Autostraddle has a spectacularly well researched history of acting Oscars being awarded to actors of colour. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty short list.
  • Jenny Beavan won the Oscar for costume design for her work on Mad Max: Fury Road, and a bunch of dudes very visibly did not clap for her. Feminist Current talks about beauty standards, the role of women, and why Beavan’s treatment was unacceptable.
  • And the Oscars prompted people to brush off some older writing, so let’s revisit Bitch‘s take on the ecofeminism of Mad Max, and Pacific Standard‘s opinion on the importance of seeing families of colour in Sanjay’s Super Team.
  • I’ve always been fascinated by how speculative and science fiction intersect with social justice movements (I mean I only started a blog about it), and recently I came across two very important pieces of writing:
    • For Harriet has a wonderful article on Black History Month, the Afro/Black experience in North America (particularly Canada), and the long-standing importance of Afrofuturism and Black science fiction in imagining alternative futures.
    • Jacobin published a very thorough piece on science fiction’s sometimes rocky relationship with neoliberal thought, collective action, labour politics, and a future outside of capitalist economies.
  • Okay okay and finally look at this podcast description: “Unapologetically Indigenous, unabashedly female & unblinkingly nerdy, Otipêyimisiw-Iskwêwak Kihci-Kîsikohk (Métis in Space), Molly and Chelsea drink a bottle of (red) wine and, from a tipsy, decolonial perspective, review a sci-fi movie or television episode featuring Indigenous peoples, tropes and themes.” That sounds amazing right? Go listen to Métis in Space!

 

 

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Weekend Reading List: Magic Schools, Magic Girls, Magic Love

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Hey cuties, happy Valentine’s day!

Top image from Balderdash!

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Weekend Reading List: Beasts, bots, and backlash

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  • I think everyone who plays tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder has had times when the game went a little off the rails, or players made things uncomfortable for others, but these stories, compiled by io9, are absolutely bonkers.
  • NEW FEMINIST FREQUENCY VIDEO YEAH. This time it’s all about sexy ladies being offered up as prizes in video games, starting with a perhaps controversial example: Metroid‘s Samus Aran.
  • Speaking of Samus, Brianna Wu co-wrote a piece about the potential for the character to be a trans woman (giving both historical evidence and reviewing the reasons why fans need more trans representation). You may know Wu from when she was on the receiving end of GamerGate’s endless cascade of filth, and much the same thing happened to her here, prompting her to write a follow up piece taking geekdom to task. [The Mary Sue]
  • At some point I’m going to rewatch Ex Machina and write a blog post detailing exactly why I fell hard for this film, but in the meantime the Nerds of Color have a piece about how there’s a difference between insensitively portraying abuse for shock value, and framing abuse to show how awful it truly is, and how awful the characters perpetrating it are.
  • This week in looking critically at Disney: Bitch has a fascinating interview with Walidah Imarisha on the racial politics of Disney animals, and Four Three Film thoroughly breaks down gender representation in animation, and how the limited ways women and girls are designed in mainstream films are insufficient.
  • The cast for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is currently entirely white, and this is unacceptable. [The Mary Sue]
  • Bitch on Mad Max, action heroes, vulnerability, and compassion.

Image by Nikkie Stinchcombe

 

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Weekend Reading List: Feminists, fighters, and failures

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  • First up, the Mary Sue on why asking “is this feminist” is rather beside the point.
  • Black Widow was never supposed to resemble Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They both have vastly different origins and motivations, but the Avenger’s recent Age of Ultron story arc, in which she wants to run away and “be monsters” with the Hulk, both needlessly conflates two of Joss Whedon’s best known female heroes and betrays Romanoff’s character development thus far. [The Mary Sue]
  • Which is nerdier: Star Wars or Star Trek? [CollegeHumor]
  • And now it’s all Furiosa all the time! Here’s a beautiful essay on Mad Max, women fighters, and compulsory femininity that also touches on archaeology, Kate Beaton, The Faerie Queene, and Tamora Pierce. So the good stuff. [Hazlitt]
  • The accompanying comic, Furiosa #1, was highly anticipated, but unfortunately fell very short of the mark. It’s wildly offensive, graphically depicts rape, and undoes everything that made the movie revolutionary for its genre, as this Shakesville article clearly and thoroughly shows.
  • And then comic co-creator Mark Sexton responded to this criticism… poorly, saying that if the Wives (who are, let’s remember, kept in captivity as broodmares) hadn’t been assaulted in the pages of the comic, they would have seemed like spoiled children who didn’t know how good their lives were. I’m not really able to respond coherently. [The Mary Sue]
  • It’s important to aim for greater racial diversity in films (and especially important not to dismiss those who advocate for it) and we shouldn’t forget about the three actresses of colour present Mad Max, and how their roles interact with the history of colonialism in the Pacific region. [Jeanne the Fangirl]

 

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Monthly Reading List III

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Top image by alphatrashking.tumblr.com.

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