links for 2011-03-25

March 25th, 2011 by Andrea

  • FUCK YEAH BIOWARE!!! "The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer”. They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else."
  • "If social media is going to be a public “face” of organizations, and drive kinship with the populace, we have to do more than rely on a bunch of 30 year-old White people to do so. As an industry, we cannot fall into the same trap that the advertising business did, whereby they continue to struggle with attracting and retaining a diverse workforce 30+ years after it was first identified as a shortcoming. I realize the labor pool for social media is tight. The Jay Baer Job Fair component of my 3-2-1 newsletter is always full of open positions. But let’s make sure social media practitioners look like the people with whom they are supposed to interact: our customers."
  • "So many disabled people, nonwhite people, transgender people, people of colour, poor people, adamantly refuse to identify with feminism in its current incarnation in the United States. ‘Feminists’ talk about this in the sense that we’re all really feminist in how we think, behave, and act, we just have some irrational resistance to the label. No, we’re not really feminist. The model of feminism we see is one where oppression perpetrated in the name of ‘activism’ is acceptable, where casual ableism, racism, classism, transphobia run so deep that many of us don’t even bother to point it out anymore. The model of feminism we see is one where a handful of people profit at the expense of others. And that’s not how we think, behave, and act. That is not what we believe. Our resistance to the label is not ‘irrational.’"
  • "When one lives in a settler-colonialist state, when one is ashamed of or conflicted about one's settler privilege or the actions of one's ancestors, it can appear to be emotionally simpler, easier, to identify with an indigenous viewpoint. "If I had lived then," so many of these books and movies say, "I would have done differently. I would have been on the side of the Natives." [4] Almost always: would have done. Would have been. Almost never: am doing. Do you know what I long for? Truly, truly long for, from these white children's book authors who are guilty and unsettled about their settler's privilege? Books that engage with that. Books that discuss how to be white and in possession of settler-colonial privilege, how to look that in the face without going into a destructive tailspin of amnesia, guilt, futiliy, and appropriation."
  • "Don’t tell me that this film is magically fine because there is Zhang Jizhong who got Gaiman on board in the first place or because there will be Chinese actors in the cast. That would be to overlook a cultural power dynamic of putting this inherently Asian work (and it is Asian: it is an East Asian story founded on a Chinese pilgrimage to India along a route that stretched through modern Iran and northern territories that were not Chinese then – it is a journey, a proper epic journey, not just through geography but also history) into the hands of Western media professionals whose bibliography or filmography demonstrate a clear disregard for the heritage of cultures not their own."
  • "First thing to remember is that one therapist is not just as good for you as another. And that, as with trainers, you have the power to choose. So make a point of investigating your options before you settle in with one. Ask questions of their experiences working with histories and backgrounds like your own; ask them to explain to you their philosophies of working with clients. Listen for things that sound right — or things that make you uneasy. Trust those reads even if you’re not completely sure why. Your working relationship with the therapist needs to be a comfortable one, because you’ll be telling her or him some uncomfortable things."

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  • http://chainreading.com/profile/baiskeli Baiskeli

    Can I just say that Bioware’s response just made my day.

  • K*

    I dislike the post at This Ain’t Livin. While SE Smith has the right to that opinion, I feel that feminism gets dogpiled on way more than all of the other *isms for not being “inclusive” enough. While feminism is a too white, which I will agree with, I don’t see people stepping up to refute that and claim otherwise. I see that within the disability rights movement, which SE Smith is a member of.

    For instance, a huge concern of the deinstitutionalisation movement is that plenty of people need care, and the responsibility for that care often goes back to the family … which means that it often goes back to the women in the family. The less resources a family has, the more likely it is that women will have to provide care for a mentally or physically disabled family member. This is a problem, mostly for women, but particularly for women of color, who have the least financial wealth of all groups.

  • Anonymous

    Nice response from Bioware. A pity they didn’t offer a similar response to complaints about racial issues (or lack of) in DA2.

  • Sierra

    Thanks for so eloquently demonstrating feminist disregard for the disabled community (which, after all, has NO WOMEN in it anyway). Deinstitutionalization IS a women’s issue, because women are disproportionately more likely to be institutionalized, ergo this is something that affects women. By focusing solely on able women caretakers, you erase all of the disabled women in the equation, which incidentally are majority of the disabled PEOPLE we’re talking about (nevermind women are more likely to be disabled because longer life expectancies make it more likely women will need care).

    Just out of curiosity, have you been institutionalized? It comes across as immensely privileged to imply that we should pause deinstitutionalization or that it disregards women (wtf) if you haven’t ever experienced that yourself. You could have simply chosen to focus on the fact that caretakers often don’t have the resources they need to care for their loved ones, but you chose to criticize the *deinstitutionalization movement?* Yeah let’s stop that until we’re sure all the able people are comfortable with it.

    And by the by, while I can’t back this up, it would not surprise me at all if people of color or women of color were disproportionately likely to be institutionalized.

  • http://jasminllenadegracia.blogspot.com Jasmin

    it would not surprise me at all if people of color or women of color were disproportionately likely to be institutionalized.

    Yes, they are. Black people have the lowest rates of mental disorder, according to studies, but higher rates of institutionalization. There’s a “visibility hypothesis” that suggests that Black people are seen as “standing out” in predominantly White neighborhoods, so their behavior is under greater scrutiny/more likely to be seen as “abnormal”.

  • Arkstar

    Bioware: Uh-huh. Sure sounds nice. Fact is, though, if you play the ‘straight male’ option in DA2 the rest of it’s just wiped — you’re excluded from ever knowing that, say, Anders had a gay lover in the past.

    It’s a step forward, but by auto-silencing all the queer content and making it opt-in, I think they excluded themselves from progressive saint status.

  • beka

    You mean ONTD_F? *carefully raises eyebrow*

    Yeah, as a disabled person + coloured person + non-Western person… the term feminism doesn’t sit well with me anymore.