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British women in comics
After blogging about the absence of women in the line-up of the Kapow! comic book convention I had a number of lively discussions about it. I also discovered that Mark Millar twittered about this issue back on the 7th of December 2010, when someone else pointed out there were no female guests. His response, over two tweets: You realise this is being put together by 5 women, don’t you? The reason the comic guests are mostly male is because the biggest names in UK comics are male. Who is the big british female pro they’re missing here? I’m amused by ‘the comic guests are mostly male’ bit, when the guests…
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Kapow!, no women
I got an email from a regular commentator on my blog pointing me to the new comic book convention that Mark Millar is organising this coming April in the UK called Kapow! ComicCon. He hinted that I might discover something missing from the event. Well, yes the omission is pretty glaring to me: not one woman among the forty guests. This is strange. It’s not like there are no top-class women working in comics. Anyone who suggests otherwise is not paying attention. For instance, I’d recommend reading the excellent ‘She Has No Head‘ column by Kelly Thompson on Comic Book Resources for plenty of examples of the fine work women…
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cook knit sew
My mother recently gave me a small time capsule of items from when I was a kid, including this book Cooking, Knitting and Sewing For Girls. Oh, the memories! I went through a classic Irish convent education, which meant I was in an all-girl environment and taught by nuns and non-religious teachers. In primary school (that’s up until the age of 12) There was an emphasis placed on teaching us practical skills as well as the usual maths, reading, Irish, history etc. So, I was taught to embroider, sew, knit, crochet, and I also learned to play recorder and piano. My mother did a lot of cooking and baking when…
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women in horror recognition month 2011
February this year saw the inaugural Women in Horror Recognition Month, which was an initiative started by Hannah Nuerotica out of frustration because of a perceived lack of women working in the horror industry (literature, cinema, television, comics, etc.). Of course, there are a lot of women working in the industry, but there has been a historic visibility problem: women haven’t always enjoyed equal critical attention or promotion as their male colleagues. Hannah started Women in Horror Recognition Month so that women writers, directors, actors, etc. would get a visibility boost at least for the month of February. It was an excellent idea and via the blog and Facebook page…
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a woman masterchef
It was a tense final last night on Masterchef: The Professionals, but the best woman won: Claire Lara. I’d been watching Claire from the earliest rounds and believed she had the talent, focus and ability to win the show, as long as she gained enough confidence to believe in herself. She is the first woman to win Masterchef: The Professionals, and that’s hardly a surprise considering how the field is dominated by men. In the final round the last three chefs had to cook for thirty of the most influential chefs and cooking experts in the UK, and by my reckoning only two of the assembled were women (one of…
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making a difference
I’d like you to take a look at this TED talk by Sheryl WuDunn on the subject of “Our century’s greatest injustice”, which is about gender inequity: http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf 50-100 million missing women in the current world population. That’s gendercide. Ms. WuDunn has written a book with her husband Nicholas D. Kristof called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which addresses the same issue as this talk. Although, I was rather saddened to see that there is a chapter in the book entitled “Is Islam Misogynistic?” Based on my research the dogmas of most religions in the world are anti-female. When I was 16-years-old it became evident…
