by Terri
Chibi Ariela and chibi Terri are both very tired. They have the swirly eyes to prove it.
The accompanying image really says it all. It's been a wonderful weekend, but we're both quite conned out. Next week, I will regale you with tales of my very first WisCon!
Do random haters on twitter call you an SJW pejoratively? Embrace your defending side with this oath.
While a a warrior isn't a profession you typically find on a resume these days, social justice issues are very pertinent to the geek world. So much so that "SJW" is thrown by one side at the other as an insult, and simultaneously embraced by those who feel that they are fighting the good fight. Many people choose other "classes" besides Warrior, so this print is also available for Bard, Cleric, Mage, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue. None of the classes use gendered terms - that's on purpose.
As with our other professional oaths, items in the illumination around the edges are the accouterments of the trade. Social justice is a really abstract thing to illustrate, so Ariela went for the RPG classes' tools instead. Drawing from cultures around the world, it is an array of items, many of which could be used by several of the various classes. It was very important to us to move away from the Eurocentrism found in most fantasy role playing settings, which is why many of the items might be unfamiliar to you.
Unlike our other oaths, this one is not humorous. We think that humor definitely has its place in the social justice movement, but this is not its place.
The Social Justice $_CLASS Oath is 11" x 14" (matted dimensions) and costs $45.
If we did not include your preferred RPG class in our list, please contact us. We can make an oath happen.
by Terri
Chibi Terri & chibi Ariela are ensuring that All The Art is properly labeled.
Once again, we get to go to a con TOGETHER!*
Ariela and I will both be attending WisCon 41 this weekend at the Madison Concourse hotel in Madison, WI. Con starts on Friday and ends Monday.
Our art is also attending! The WisCon Art show will be open from Friday afternoon through Monday. Our selection will be a small subset of what is available on our website, but there will be lots of everything we bring, including a new product and a con exclusive. Also, the art show there is instant sale only, no bidding, so whatever you buy can leave with you immediately.
The art show formally opens at 6 on Friday with a meet and greet until 7:30. We will both be there, so please stop by and say hello!
I will be attending panels, being Nervous At The Art, and generally having a good time and meeting people. If you're there, you can probably spot me due to my Art Show Shawl in our business colors.
Ariela will be on the following panels:
Saturday
Wait...This Is About Sex?
8:30am-9:45am
Capitol A
Fairy tales are full of sexual symbols, stories, and injunctions. Come listen as our panelists unpack some of your favorite stories.
Sunday
Where the Fuck Are the Femmes in Space(s)? The Radical Nature of Femme
10:00am-11:15am
Conference 1
There have been a number of panels in the past centered around the place of "femme" within the feminist context, particularly within feminist spaces. But for those who identify as femme, such constant need to justify our identity serves as both threat and erasure from a sphere where femmes are constantly engaged in emotional labor. This panel seeks to move beyond the question of "can femme be feminist?" and instead explore the ways in which femme is a radical identity, including some of its history and evolution as a term originating in queer community that is being co-opted by the mainstream straight lexicon.
F*ck You, Pay Me: Equally Compensating Marginalized Creators
1:00pm-2:15pm
Caucus
"Do It for the exposure! Aren't you just grateful to have this opportunity?" Too often, marginalized creators are thrown these aphorisms as compensation for their hard work and creativity instead of receiving financial compensation for their endeavors like their privileged counterparts. In this panel, we'll discuss the importance and obligation of equal compensation for equal work. We'll also discuss the benefit of outreach, and how that's led to opening geek culture markets to creators and consumers who don't look or think like the "good ol' boys."
You can also catch us at the Dessert Salon, as well as perusing all of the usual things a good con has to offer. Hope we see you there! If not, be warned - our twitter feeds will probably be a lot more active than usual.
Our art is also going to Kansas! It travels more easily than we do. If you are at ConQuesT in Kansas City, KS, you will be able to see and buy our art in the art show there as well.
*When your best friend and business partner lives halfway across the country from you, shared time is precious. Shared fandom time doubly so.
by Ariela
Old Economy Steve longs for the days when he could avoid people telling him how offensive his views are.
Sensitivity readers have been quite the hot topic in some parts of teh interwebs lately.
What is a sensitivity checker? When a creative type, in my case an artist, wants to use cultural elements from a culture not their own, you employ someone from that culture to act as an expert guide, telling you things that are important to know, and giving feedback that should help you to portray the culture in question accurately and in a way that is not offensive. This can cover anything from preventing embarrassing errors like those from our Jewish Stock Photography Fail Blog, to the horribly offensive error of making Nazis the good guys in a Holocaust novel supposedly told from the point of view of a Jewish girl (we won't link to that book, but here is a scathing review by Katherine Locke).
In some ways, it is no different than consulting any other expert so you don't make ignorant mistakes, but here the stakes aren't just your own embarrassment but the possibility of perpetuating oppression of real people.
I recently had my first serious sensitivity check. Our product release next week will include a picture of a keris, which is a Malaysian dagger with serious cultural significance. That's the sort of thing you don't want to just assume you can just chuck into a piece of art when you don't know anything about the culture surrounding it. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, we were connected to Jia-Ling Pan, who was incredibly helpful. We highly recommend her, if you need a sensitivity check for anything from Malaysia. (Let us know if you would like to be put in touch; she said she would prefer a referral than a link.)
Here are a few basic takeaways from the process.
This should go without saying, but alas, it needs to be said. Giving someone a crash course in the intricacies of one's culture isn't a privilege, it is work. Listening to and answering questions, many of which may be ignorant and even offensive is hard work. Giving constructive feedback is work.
This is true for art and even more true for reading a manuscript, which takes a heck of a lot longer.
Pay them. If one cannot afford to pay someone from the culture one is writing/singing/art-ing/movie-making about to do a sensitivity check, then one doesn't get to play in that sandbox.
This doesn't mean you don't get to create, just that this particular avenue is not available. Lack of money sucks. It sucks for you as a creator, but it also sucks for people whose culture gets trampled over insensitively and are then asked to help someone else make sure they're doing it right for free. Sensitivity checkers need to be paid.
You employ a sensitivity checker because they know things you don't. Sometimes that means answers to your questions, but other times that means telling you the answers to questions you didn't even know should be asked. Give your sensitivity checker some unstructured space to talk rather than framing everything within a Q&A. Your questions are shaped by your own assumptions after all, and they may not translate into the culture you are trying to learn about. You might even wind up getting more material out of it in ways you didn't anticipate.
Sometimes a sensitivity checker will say things you don't want to hear. You have to be willing to go into the check alert to the possibility that you might have to rework part of your project, a lot of your project, or even scrap your project entirely. The earlier you ask, the less likely this will be, so check early and often! Though even that is not a guarantee.
It's never easy to hear negative feedback, particularly when it means losing a lot of work. If you are only interested in affirmation and will come up with reasons why you don't need to take the negative feedback too, don't bother to have a check done at all.
Mary Robinette Kowal has an excellent blog post about this. Please check it out.
As in any group, different people will react to the same thing in different ways. Just because your sensitivity checker reads things one way doesn't mean that other people won't have a different take. Having more than one sensitivity checker is a good idea, particularly if the source material is emotionally significant or you are using a lot of it. And even if all your readers say it's fine, there's no guarantee that someone else will not be offended. Which brings us to:
If someone else is offended by the thing you made, even if you had a sensitivity checker, the responsibility is yours. It is not the job of a sensitivity checker to tell you how to do something so that you cannot be criticized for it; they're just there to give your their own read, and possibly make a best guess at how others may feel. The mere fact that you hired a sensitivity checker is not a shield against criticism, and if the work offends someone, then it is not the sensitivity checker's fault. It is on you to own up to any damage caused and decide how to proceed, apologize, make amends, fix it, etc.
#OwnVoices is a campaign to lift up the work of people in various marginalized identities telling their own stories. It is not enough to have white people telling stories centering People of Color, or straight people telling stories about LGB people, or cisgendered people telling stories about trans people. No matter how skilled or well-intentioned the creator, they will not get it all. People have a right to portray themselves. And we should support them when they do by patronizing their work.
That said, I am very much not in the camp that says it is never okay for someone to portray a person outside their own identity. That leads to other kinds of erasure and normalizes the idea of homogenous societies. But when we do paint pictures of other people, with words or brushes or songs or cinema, we need to make sure we do it with care and respect. That's where sensitivity checkers are so important.
There are lots of people out there who do this work. Writing in the Margins is a great directory if you are looking for someone to keep you from accidentally putting your foot in it.
A large blue plush version of the rhinovirus, accompanied by a blue tinted microscopic image of same. Image courtesy of ThinkGeek, where you can buy this cutie.
by Terri
...so we're calling in dead. Both Ariela and I are getting over various forms of rhinovirus, and Monster* decided to celebrate Daddy coming back from California by running a nasty fever. So neither of us has the brainpower to be clever at our wonderful public. We'll be back next week to talk about the importance of employing** sensitivity readers.
*My 3.5 year old daughter, whom I do not publicly name on the internet
**Employing being the operative word
by Terri & Ariela
The world of stock photography is an inherently odd place to visit. Where else can you get photos of kitchen demolition side by side with any flower you could possibly think of?
Themed stock photos can get... interesting. Just typing "$_HOLIDAY Stock Photos" into a Google Image search can set off nightmares or fits of giggles. Really, there are things that should never be Earth Day themed. But when you start searching for stock photography of non Christian religious holidays, the photos don't just look strange, they look like an alien's attempt to pass as a Hyoo-man. For example, there seems to be a compulsive need to put either matzah, a tallit,* or a Ḥanukkah menorah in almost all of them to scream JEWISH very loudly. Even if the image is tagged for a holiday containing none of these ritual objects or foods. Like Tu B'Shvat.**
Ariela's day job involves email marketing for the Union for Reform Judaism. This means finding images to go in said emails and results in her spending a lot of time combing through stock image catalogs, particularly around Jewish holidays. This, in turn, led to her IMing Terri in fits of disbelief so that someone else could share in the WTF-ery.
But why should we limit the horror to just the two of us? So we present: Bad Jewish Stock Photography. And when we say bad, we mean REALLY BAD.
We have not included images in this post that are just mis-tagged, like when you search for Passover and get Easter results. That's wrong and sometimes offensive, but not what we're listing here. All photos are watermarked with the image source, unless we can no longer find them at the source. We acknowledge that this post is very image heavy. The captions contain the best descriptions we can write, the commentary on the images is in the body text of the blog post below them.
And yes, we know about this article in The Forward. But that photo isn't even the tip of the Jewish stock photography fail iceberg. It's a small chip off the glacier.
Image shows an open Hebrew prayerbook on a stand, a blue velvet kippah with silver embroidery, a ḥanukkiyah with all its candles lit, and a folded tallit with black and silver stripes.
This one originally came from iStock, but can no longer be found there. The lit ḥanukkiyah with the tallit is bad enough - a tallit is worn during the day and the ḥanukkiyah is lit only at night - but if you look closely at the text of the open book, it is open to the evening service for Yom Kippur, i.e. not a text you would ever need at Ḥanukkah. Anyone who knows any Hebrew could have told them not to do this.
This was the photo that originally inspired Ariela to do an ongoing series on bad Jewish stock photography.
Image shows a wood framed slate with "HAPPY PASSOVER" written on it in stylized chalk lettering. Surrounding the frame clockwise from noon are: pieces of square machine made maztah, un-shelled walnuts, a red-brown haggadah, red tulips with yellow stripes, a wine glass on its side with a splash of wine still left, a bottle of pink wine on its side, a stack of three round hand made matzahs on a white cloth, more un-shelled walnuts, a leaf of lettuce with an egg on it, and more tulips.
It's Passover, not Easter. Why the tulips? Also, why is a mostly drunk wineglass lying on its side? How is that happy?
Image shows an older balding man wearing a tallit and holding an open siddur standing next to a table. To his left is a seated woman with short hair, to her right is a young boy in a sweater vest, button down shirt and Hanukkah themed suede kippah. To the right of the older man is a seated man in a long sleeved polo shirt with a red satin kippah. There is someone seated next to this man, but the image cuts off everything but some arm in a blue sleeve. On the table is a silver plate with square machine made matzah and an unlit ḥanukkiyah with all of the arms holding blue and white striped candles.
The image description for this photo on Thinkstock is "Parents and their son and a rabbi at a Hanukkah ceremony." Just what is a Hanukkah ceremony, pray tell? There is very little to say about this image that the provided description doesn't cover. The words, they escape us.
Image shows a tallit with blue and gold stripes over white painted wooden slats. Positioned over the tallit are (clockwise from top): glass bowl with honey and wooden dipper, two broken sheets of square machine made matzah, a ḥanukkiyah lying flat on its side, a shofar, and a silver kiddush cup partially filled with wine and sitting on a silver coaster.
The only thing this picture illustrates effectively is "We have no meaningful understanding of Jewish holidays."
Image shows a lit red pillar candle sitting on the pages of an open Hebrew prayerbook.
No. Just no. You might wish to pray by candlelight, but if we ever catch you with a lit candle on your siddur, we will hurt you.
Image shows a tallit with blue and gold stripes on a rough wooden surface. Arranged on and beside the tallit from left to right are: a teal suede kippah with a silver border, 4 mostly empty silver kiddush cups in a diagonal line, and a shofar.
Once again, juxtaposition fail. One does wear a kippah to the Passover seder, but not a tallit. And a shofar isn't a Passover ritual object at all.
Image shows a blue and gold striped tallit (with atarah showing this time, for variety) on wooden slats. Over the tallit are (from left to right): a shofar, a black suede kippah with a gold border embossed with Jewish stars, and matzah. Once again, juxtaposition fail.
This is a whole genre. See more here.
This has been scrubbed from all the stock sites we could find. We don't blame them. What the heck were they thinking?
Yes, that is a model of the Ark of the Covenant positioned next to a piggy bank sporting clovers and "good luck" painted on its side. The two are positioned so that the carrying rod of the ark appears to be jammed up the piggy's butt.
There was another in this same series that showed the same model of the Ark perched on the top of someone's foot with what appeared to be an industrial site in the background. We don't understand.
We have never run across any other Jewish Stock Photography fail so egregious, and we hope we never will.
*Prayer shawl worn by Jewish adults during daytime services. It is only ever worn at night once a year, on the eve of Yom Kippur.
**The 15th day of the month of Shvat (lunar month, generally falls around February). Often referred to as "Jewish Arbor Day," the Talmud lists this date as "the new year for trees." In the Mediterranean, this is often the beginning of springtime. It is celebrated by eating dried fruit and planting trees.
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