Amandla Stenberg Is Bisexual: 17-Year-Old Actress Comes Out Exquisitely On Teen Vogue Snapchat

On Teen Vogue‘s snapchat last night, Amandla Stenberg — who you likely know for playing “Rue” in The Hunger Games and also for calling out Kylie Jenner when Kylie appropriated cornrows with the hashtag “#whitegirlsdoitbetter” — came out as bisexual and also as a perfect human:

“I wanna thank Teen Vogue for giving me this opportunity, I cannot stress enough how important representation is, so the concept that I can provide for other black girls is mind-blowing. It’s a really really hard thing to be silenced, and it’s deeply bruising to fight against your identity and just mold yourself into shapes that you just shouldn’t be in. As someone who identifies as a black bisexual woman, I’ve been through it, and it hurts and it’s awkward and it’s uncomfortable. But then I realized: because of Solange and Ava Duvernay and Willow and all the black girls watching this right now, there’s absolutely nothing but change. We cannot be suppressed. We are meant to express our joy and our love and our tears, to be big and bold and definitely not easy to swallow. I definitely believe in the concept of rebellion through selfhood, and rebellion through embracing your true identity, no matter what you’re being told. Here I am, being myself; and it’s hard and vulnerable, and it’s definitely a process, but I’m learning and growing. Thank you for supporting me and doing this, and thank you to Teen Vogue. This is just the beginning, though; we have a lot of work to do for all women of color. We need more representation in film and television. We need our voices to be louder in the media. And not just women of color — bisexual women, gay women, transgender women, mentally ill women. I’m sick of all the misogyny and homophobia and transphobia that I see around me, and I know you are too. Thank you for listening and goodnight.”

Please note that the post is tagged “I’m very bisexual.”

Stenberg appears on the cover of this month’s issue of Teen Vogue, for which she is interviewed by Solange. You’ll probably want to read that now. You’ll probably buy Teen Vogue this month! I don’t know, I just have a feeling you’re gonna want a copy of this moment in our lives. I have a feeling you’re gonna start following her on instagram if you weren’t already! I have so many feelings about your feelings!

Stenberg got started in show business as a four-year-old, modeling for Disney and appearing in TV commercials. Her first film role, in Colombiana, saw her playing the younger version of Zoe Saldana’s character. Next came Hunger Games, voicing Bia in Rio 2, and spots in Sleepy Hollow and Mr.Robinson. She’s also an accomplished musician, recording with singer/songwriter Zander Hawley as “Honeywater.”

Stenberg is also involved with an anti-hunger non-profit No Kid Hungry. Also, she co-authored a comic book published in 2015 called “Niobe: She is Life.” Also, she posted her “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows” school project video on her tumblr and it went viral and everybody was talking about it and it was incredible.

AND SHE IS BISEXUAL.

AND ONLY SEVENTEEN.

Bless us, everyone, it appears the odds are ever in our collective favor.

Strange Bedfellows: “The Hunger Games” and “Monster”

Welcome to Strange Bedfellows, a series in which we smush together unrelated literary or cultural works and see what happens! Today we’re discussing The Hunger Games and Monster.

The Hunger Games and Monster! Two of my favorite stories. I hope you know and love them as much as I do, but just in case you need a refresher:

• The Hunger Games is a young adult book series by Suzanne Collins. It follows Katniss Everdeen, a teenage girl forced to compete in an annual televised death match (The Hunger Games) in order to protect her younger sister Prim. To survive, Katniss must simultaneously charm audiences and murder other children. After co-winning the Games with sometimes-love-interest Peeta Mellark, Katniss steps into the role of symbolic figurehead of a rebellion against the dystopian Panem government. In 2012, the books were made into a series of blockbuster movies starring Jennifer Lawrence.
• Monster is a 2003 film directed by Patty Jenkins (which, FYI, is instant streaming on Amazon). It’s based on the true story of Aileen (“Lee”) Wuornos, a sex worker who was executed in Florida in 2002 for killing six men. Lee is played by Charlize Theron, whose performance in the film won her an Oscar for Best Actress. Lee’s same-sex love interest, Selby Wall, is played by Christina Ricci. At various points, Lee deals with child sexual abuse, police brutality and rape.

I love these stories for centering capable, interesting, complicated women. Although Katniss and Lee both spend a lot of time and energy managing male ardor, their primary motivations are protecting the girls/women that they love: Katniss with Prim, and Lee with Selby. They’re self-possessed in the face of extreme adversity, and they do the ugly and awful things that simply need to be done in order for them to endure. Yet throughout the stories, Katniss and Lee remain human, with realistic human struggles and weaknesses.

Anyway, I’ve picked a few themes to talk about, so let’s see how they line up!

Trauma and Stress

In The Hunger Games, Katniss reveals very early on (by the third page!) that for the past five years, she’s periodically woken up screaming. She’s traumatized by her father’s death in the mines and the resulting consequences: literal starvation and being forced into the role of provider for her family after her mother falls into a crushing depression. Following the Hunger Games, Katniss is consumed by thoughts of the arena, turning scenes of the atrocities over and over in her head. She’s hypervigilant, her days turbulently marking time between the staccato of unexpected anger and the legato of mistrust and worry. At night, her restless sleep is interrupted by nightmares of the Games and anxious strategizing about how she’s going to survive whatever comes next.

Although the books have the advantage of first person narration (the story is told from Katniss’ point of view), the films do a remarkably good job. While audiences no longer hear Katniss’ interior monologues, Jennifer Lawrence writes every line across her body in plain view. Her eyes abruptly fill with tears; her breathing grows ragged; her muscles tense; her fingers scrabble along the edges of objects, searching for something to ground her, bring her back.

By the end of Katniss’ first few scenes in Mockingjay: Part 1, I felt utterly emptied. Hollow, like a mechanical pencil without lead. Every subsequent reappearance of the character’s PTSD shattered me, ground me into the carpet. I ran out of tissues, then I ran out of tears. I did not run out of the theater. Mockingjay had its flaws, but Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss’ PTSD was brilliant. I had a similar reaction to Catching Fire (full on sobbing), and I fully expect an encore performance for Mockingjay: Part 2. For the life of me, I will never understand why Lawrence was awarded an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and not a single Hunger Games film.

One day I’ll have to explain about my nightmares. Why they came. Why they won’t ever really go away. I’ll tell them how I survive it. I’ll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away. – Katniss Everdeen, Mockingjay

In Monster, on the other hand, Lee has had more time to process her trauma. Although we occasionally see those visceral physical reactions (example: when Selby touches Lee’s stomach in bed, she recoils and moves Selby’s hand away, belatedly saying, “I just haven’t been feeling too good lately, you know?”), the effects of trauma manifest more clearly in Lee’s decisionmaking, actions and eventual worldview.

“Wanna call me Daddy while I fuck you, huh?” a male client asks in a pivotal scene. Lee responds, “I’ll try.” She momentarily pauses, then blurts out, “Why, you like to fuck your kids?” There’s a wild look on her face. He stares. Suddenly backing off, she laughs nervously and agrees to call him Daddy. After he gives her the money and asks her to perform oral sex on him, however, she freezes. Her eyes dart back and forth, an apparent wave of nausea overtaking her. She closes her eyes, pulls her gun and shoots three rounds into his chest. He stumbles out of the car. “Fucking child molester,” she rasps. Three more shots and he’s dead. She exits the car and takes a drag on her cigarette, smoke rising before her like a ghost.

The man is not Lee’s first kill, but his death is set apart. Last time, Lee killed in a clear act of self-defense. This time, Lee faced no imminent threat. Rather, she pulled her gun out because the man’s request triggered memories of being raped by a family friend in her childhood, resulting in a pregnancy at age 12. Throughout the movie, Lee doesn’t talk about it directly except in narrative monologue — and even then, the pieces are scattered throughout the film. The closest she comes to directly discussing PTSD is when she goes to say goodbye to her friend Thomas in the bar:

Lee: Everybody just thinks I’m this bad shitty fucking person, and all I’m fucking tryin’ to do is survive, you know?

Thomas: I know. I know what you do for a living. It doesn’t bother me. I know you didn’t dial it up on a goddamn telephone. That’s where you landed. That’s what you had to do. What you’re feeling right now is just guilt, over something you had absolutely no control over. You know how many of us came back from the war? And almost killed ourselves because we felt exactly the same thing you do, right now.

Lee: Yeah?

Thomas: Yeah. And they’ll never get it. They’ll never get it now, they never got it then, and they sure as hell won’t get fucking circumstance!

Lee: Fuck, man, circumstance, that’s exactly it, that’s exactly it. You know I feel like I never even had a fucking choice.

Thomas: You never did. But you gotta live. You gotta live.

To me, this exchange captures a central takeaway of the film: that Lee was driven to kill people by Bad Life Circumstances. Like Katniss, Lee has extremely limited options and makes choices based around her own survival. Maybe we wouldn’t make the same choices Lee did, but keep in mind that her perception of the world is deeply colored by PTSD, which tells her that she’s in immediate danger even when she is not. I don’t bring that up as an excuse (murder is bad!), but it does make sense to me as an explanation.

Suicide and Symbolic Death

Of course, Lee doesn’t “gotta live.” Two minutes into the film, we see her sitting hunched over beneath a highway bridge, pistol in her right hand, crumpled cash in her left, tears on her face and sheets of rain falling all around. “I was gonna do it,” she recalls later in the film. “The only reason I didn’t was a five dollar bill. I knew I’d probably given some asshole a blowjob for it, so it really started to piss me off that if I killed myself without spending it, well then I basically sucked him off for free. So I made a deal. I said “God, I gotta spend this five bucks, but when it’s gone, so am I. So if you’ve got something for me in this life, you’d better bring it on.”

Instead of killing herself, she walks into a gay bar and meets Selby. They get drunk together, and Selby saves Lee’s life that night by inviting her home with her. For the rest of their relationship, Lee is fiercely protective of Selby. She does everything in her power to shelter Selby, both literally and figuratively.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss also attempts suicide. The movie diverges slightly in the details, but in the book, once Peeta and Katniss have defeated their last standing competitor, announcer Claudius Templesmith changes the rules of the game to allow only one winner. Katniss raises her bow reflexively, but Peeta drops his knife. He asks her to kill him.

“I can’t,” I say. “I won’t.”

“Do it. Before they send those mutts back or something. I don’t want to die like Cato,” he says.

“Then you shoot me,” I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. “You shoot me and go home and live with it!” And as I say it, I know death right here, right now would be the easier of the two.

Desperate to find a way out, Katniss pulls a handful of poison berries from her pouch. She and Peeta agree to eat them together, denying the Games of their victor by committing double suicide. They count to three and lift their hands… but right as the berries pass their lips, Templesmith interrupts them, once again, to declare them both winners. They spew the berries out — by no means safe, but still, tremulously, alive.

I’m drawn to these narratives because I like my stories the way I like my chocolate: super dark and frequently salty. Perhaps I enjoy these types of stories because they make the turbulence in my own life seem tame in comparison. Or maybe I’m just weird and twisty inside because my life is super boring and I morbidly crave a vicarious source of life-and-death excitement. Who knows! I can tell you that I find these near misses with suicide very interesting from a literary perspective, particularly in the ways they symbolically differ in terms of narrative significance.

Katniss’ story in The Hunger Games follows the heroine’s journey. By this, I don’t just mean that she’s a heroine who goes on a journey, although she does do that; I’m talking about the narrative structure. In literature, the heroine’s journey is a storytelling model much like the hero’s journey, except that instead of taking a male perspective as default, this archetype is intentionally built to accommodate the different choices and values that often animate women’s lives. Here’s a fantastic explanation by LC James if you want to learn more, but the TL;DR summary is essentially a cyclical narrative that follows a character battling internal demons instead of (or in addition to) external ones. The journey follows a protagonist questioning authority; gaining the courage to stand up for herself; facing her symbolic death; and being reborn as a complete being.

At the start of the first book, Katniss is scraping by in District 12, surviving but not thriving. She has very little control over the direction of her life, but she has coping mechanisms (namely: hunting in the woods with a partner, and keeping her head down). When Prim is chosen as a tribute, Katniss steps forward instead, embarking on the journey which ultimately ends in her taking down the Capital. But first, she gathers a team of helpers (Haymitch, Effie, Cinna, Peeta) and undergoes a series of trials (the procession; the interview; the performance for the judges; obtaining a bow inside the Games; making her first kill; etc.). Throughout these, she grows in confidence and hones the skills she needs. By the time Cato dies, it seems like Katniss might be victorious… and then Templesmith’s voice comes on over the speaker. She embraces her own death (bringing Peeta along for the ride), and comes out the other side of it in a much stronger position: co-winner of the 79th annual Hunger Games, a beloved public figure and inspiring symbol for a great many people. This is a classic heroine’s journey, and Katniss’ attempted suicide marks the climactic “death before rebirth” step.

In Monster, Lee’s almost-suicide does not make her stronger. It doesn’t make her much of anything, really! She’s desperate and has few options before, and she’s desperate and has few options after. The plot trajectory doesn’t map particularly well to popular Western structures (probably because it’s based on true events, and real life is messy), but one way we can think about it is through the lens of kishōtenketsu.

Kishōtenketsu is a conflict-less plotting style that boils down to the following:

1. Introduce the status quo.
2. Develop the status quo’s world.
3. Introduce a surprising element.
4. Bring about conclusion of element’s change on the status quo

Looking at Lee’s story, we have:

1. Lee lives a world where she has little agency, and the people around her abuse her/allow her to be abused.
2. Lee enters into sex work. This gives her some power, but she still doesn’t have agency.
3. Lee meets Selby, glimpsing a world that stands in stark contrast with her own. In an attempt to protect Selby from the harsh reality Lee has always known, Lee takes on the role of provider.
4. Selby glimpses Lee’s world, a stark contrast to her own. She can’t handle it, and her actions lead to Lee’s arrest. In a final denial of agency/act of abuse, Lee is executed.

Within this framework, Lee’s almost-suicide is totally insignificant. Again, she has very little agency to change the trajectory of her life. Even when she tries to change professions and make money in a way that doesn’t involve sex work or killing people, the options available to her are extremely limited.

Class and Social Expectations

The bleakest part of Monster was, for me, watching middle class people repeatedly turn up their noses at Lee. It happens consistently throughout the film, from the bartender’s smirking greeting (“Ma’am, our services are for paying patrons only.”), to Donna’s scolding of Selby (“She might’ve stole something. You cannot bring people like that here.”), to the montage of interviewers callously condescending to Lee (“You don’t get to say, ‘You know what? Now I think I’d like to have what everybody else has worked their entire life for.’ It doesn’t work that way.”). No one has ever expected her to amount to anything, and no one is willing to take a chance on her.

In stark contrast, expectations are ridiculously high for Katniss Everdeen. When Katniss is only 16, practically everyone in Panem has an opinion on both her love life and whether she should or should not lead a full-on government overthrow. Even before that, though, Lee and Katniss’ experiences diverge in important ways. Like Lee, Katniss begins providing for family members at a very young age (Lee using the proceeds from her sex work beginning at age 12, Katniss using her hunting and gathering skills at age 11). But while Lee is kicked out of the house for her stewardship, Katniss is celebrated. Her family members are grateful; community members encourage her by purchasing her goods at favorable prices; a hunting buddy appears and together they form a partnership. “Team Katniss” could fill an arena, so to speak, whereas “Team Aileen” is more or less non-existent.

When Lee experiences class conflict, it’s usually because she’s at the bottom of the heap and is being denied access to something she wants or needs. Because of the unique situation Katniss is in, her experiences are a bit more complex. When she’s granted access to the way the other half lives, she finds their practices alternately appealing and off-putting. When Katniss is on the train to the Capitol for the first time, she marvels at the abundance of food and what it represents:

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by?

That first night, she stuffs herself until she can’t eat anymore; only later does she learn to pace herself. When Caesar asks her what has impressed her most about the Capitol, her answer is “the lamb stew.” Weeks later, during the Victory Tour in Catching Fire, Katniss is still impressed by the food but no longer has an appetite for it. When her prep team notices she isn’t eating, they offer her emetics. Katniss withdraws in disgust:

All I can think of is the emaciated bodies of the children that used to occupy our kitchen table in the Seam as my mother prescribed what the parents couldn’t give. More food. Now that we’re rich, she’ll send some home with them, but only the very desperate will accept anything, and sometimes not even then. Meanwhile here in the Capitol they’re vomiting for the pleasure of filling their bellies again and again. Not from some illness of body or mind, not from spoiled food. It’s what everyone does at a party. Expected. Part of the fun.

In spite of her personal feelings, Katniss accepts most offers of help. Beyond obviously strategic moves (taking the bread Peeta threw her when she was starving; letting the prep team change her look so she’s more attractive to sponsors), she lets people help in smaller ways too (allowing the redheaded Avox to wipe blood off of her; accepting Peeta’s jacket when they’re up on the roof). “Kind people have a way of working themselves inside me, rooting there,” she reflects at one point. When Katniss says in the closing lines of Mockingjay that she keeps a list in her head of every act of goodness she’s seen someone do, I imagine it’s a fairly long list. If Lee were to make such a list, I expect it would be much shorter.

It is this difference, I think, that finally does Lee in at the end. Because Katniss has had many positive interpersonal interactions, she’s able to accept help from others with relative ease. Lee, however, has not had those experiences; if I had her history, I don’t know if I’d be able to trust anyone at all. She does on occasion (for example, she accepts a sandwich from her friend Thomas, although she does say she’ll pay for it when she has the money), but at the last critical decision point, she turns down an offer of help that (possibly) could have prevented her from meeting such an untimely end.

What do you think? Any requests for future Strange Bedfellows?

FRIDAY OPEN THREAD: Witches Like Books

feature image via shutterstock

Welcome to this week’s Friday Open Thread, the digital rendezvous point for our coven to converge. This week we gather under the last quarter moon to discuss how to curb the profusion of elfin construction, swap tips for keeping mildew out of our newly-constructed moss bath mats, find out whether Nikki bought that tie, and ponder Saturn’s transit through Sagittarius.

Also: I’m dying to hear about your Staycation plans/dinner menus/latest crushes/every glorious detail of your lives.

All eyes on you, babe.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about YA Lit. Growing up, I was deeply invested in series such as Goosebumps, Baby-Sitters Club, The Dark Is Rising, Animorphs and Wayside School. Plop me in front of a Harry Potter, Fearless, A Wrinkle In Time or Sweet Valley [Anything] book, and I’d be engrossed for hours at a time, days, weeks and years on end. This all took place before the internet existed, mind you, and I didn’t have cable TV, so there were definitely fewer things competing for attention. But still. There’s something about young adult genre that demands full commitment, total immersion.

As a still-young-but-not-categorized-in-the-“young”-demographic adult, I continue to seek out YA stories. Since my girlfriend also has excellent taste, we often read these books together. When the Hunger Games series came out, we devoured those books whole. Not long after, we read the Divergent series together. I couldn’t get her to read Twilight with me, but we did watch all the movies, which was actually more than enough. (I think she would like those hours of her life back, but I maintain that we were taking part in an important cultural moment.)

How I feel about YA lit.

Most recently, I lent her my childhood copies of the His Dark Materials books. I loved those books as a kid, but my girlfriend is pretty lukewarm about them as a woman in her mid-20s. I’m considering re-reading them, but I’m afraid they won’t hold up to my fond memories. I recently re-read Sirens of Titan for the first time in a decade, and man. I just cannot get behind that book the way I did before I knew about feminism.

What should I do? And also, what else should I read? And what do you like to read? What did you love in the past? Where are you going in the future? What are you doing this weekend? Would you consider yourself more of a Rory or a Paris? What’s your story?

You, probs.

Talk to me!

How To Post A Photo In The Comments:

1. Find a photo! This is the easy part. Find a photo on the web, right click (on a Mac, control+click), hit “Copy Image URL” and then…

2. Code it in to your comment! Use the following code, and use a DIRECT LINK to the image. Your image link should end in .JPG or .GIF or .PNG or .CallMeWhateverYouWant even. I don’t care, but it should be an image suffix! KINDA LIKE THIS:

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3. Go forth and jam.

San Diego Comic-Con 2014: “Mockingjay” Gets a Trailer! Mockingbird Joins “SHIELD!” “The Last of Us” Gets a Movie!

So, San Diego Comic-Con happened. That’s cool, right? Sadly, Marvel didn’t announce a Captain Marvel movie, DC didn’t announce that Wonder Woman (or even Harley Quinn or Poison Ivy) is canonically queer and Natalie Dormer did not ask me to marry her. Still, there was a lot of pretty cool news. So let’s check it out (and warning, there are slight spoilers throughout)!

TV News

There was some casting and new character news announced for the next season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. This includes the marvelous Lucy Lawless joining the cast as Isabel Hartly, a longtime S.H.I.E.L.D. veteran and the announcement that Bobbi Morse, also known as the superhero Mockingbird, will likely show up, although no casting has been announced for her yet.

Haley Atwell at the Agent Carter panel at Comic-Con

Hayley Atwell talked about her upcoming Marvel/ABC show Agent Carter, which follows the Captain America character and her days helping to start S.H.I.E.L.D. in the late 1940s and seems totally awesome.

Character names for a bunch of cast members on American Horror Story: Freak Show were announced. Sarah Paulson is playing conjoined twins Bette and Dot Tattler, Emma Roberts is playing Maggie, Kathy Bates is playing Effil Darling, Angela Bassett is Desiere Duprée and Jessica Lange will be playing Elsa Mars.

A bunch of new actors are coming to Game of Thrones next season, including Keisha Castle-Hughes, Jessica Henwick and Rosabell Laurenti Sellers as the Sand Snakes, Oberyn Martell’s formidable daughters. Also, Sophie Turner emulated her co-star Natalie Dormer’s hairstyle on the panel. So that’s incredible.

Movie News

We’ve seen a few teasers for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (and they look pretty awesome) but we got our very first look at an actual trailer for the movie with footage from it! Look at that action! Look at that intensity! Look at Natalie Dormer!

Marvel announced a sequel to their new movie Guardians of the Galaxy, which technically hasn’t even come out yet. But hey, if it means we get to see more Zoe Saldana as a super-assassin, I’m all in. Also, maybe we’ll get to see interstellar girlfriends and Guardians members Phyla-Vell and Moondragon.

Evangeline Lilly with the rest of the cast of Ant-Man via Celebuzz

Evangeline Lilly, who also plays the elf Tauriel in The Hobbit films, is going to be playing Hope Van Dyne, the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne in Marvel’s upcoming film Ant-Man. If you know the comics, you know that Janet Van Dyne is also known as the superhero Wasp, who was an original Avenger and actually on the team before Captain America. So does this mean that Hope and not Janet will become the Wasp? Does it mean that the Wasp will make an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe soon? Hopefully.

Zach Snyder released the first official photo of Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I give my opinion on over in Drawn to Comics.

Joss Whedon said that women will have a bigger role in Avengers: Age of Ultron and that “There are four prominent female roles in the center of the movie, and a more balanced presence throughout the movie.”

Riley and Ellie: “Best Friends” from The Last of Us: Left Behind

In maybe my favorite piece of news, Screen Gems is producing a movie adaptation of the terrific (and queer) video game The Last of Us and they confirmed that they’ve met with little badass Arya Stark, AKA Maisie Williams, about playing the role of Ellie! Ugh, that would be so amazing! Now, who’s going to play Riley?

Actual Comic Book News from Comic-Con

The husband-wife duo who are taking over art-writing duty on Wonder Woman admitted that Wonder Woman actually is a feminist icon, despite an earlier interview where David Finch (who will be doing art duties) said he didn’t want to call her a feminist character. Merideth Finch, who will be writing (yay for a woman writing Wonder Woman!) also said that she’s excited to bring Wonder Woman back into the rest of the larger DC Universe.

Dynamite Entertainment announced that Gail Simone will be writing a “Women of Dynamite” mini-series bringing together characters like Red Sonja, Vampirella and Dejah Thoris of Mars.

Saga Book One cover art by Fiona Staples

In addition to winning Eisner Awards, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples  premiered the cover for their Saga Book One Hardcover.

Marvel announced two new female-led solo titles at Comic-Con. The first is Angela: Asgard’s Assassin, written by Kieron Gillen and Marguerite Bennett and with art by Phil Jimenez and Stephanie Hans, which centers around the adventures of Angela, a warrior woman sister of Thor originally created by Neil Gaiman. The other title that was announced is Spider-Woman, who is also getting her own ongoing solo series.

Princess Leia art by Terry Dodson

Marvel will also be debuting a new S.H.I.E.L.D. comic series based on the TV show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (although taking place in the comic book universe, not the TV show’s universe) to be written by Mark Waid. This comic will feature the comic book debut of characters like Melinda May, Fitz and Simmons. Waid will also be writing a “Star Wars: Princess Leia” miniseries along with art by Terry Dodson in March.

There was also, of course, a bunch of amazing cosplay, and what seem like two especially great panels: the “Badass Women” panel from NerdHQ, which featured Yvonne Strahovski, Retta, Jennifer Morrison, Sophie Turner, Ming-Na Wen and Missy Peregrym, and the “Women who Kick Ass” panel, which featured Natalie Dormer, Maisie Williams, Katey Sagal, Tatiana Maslany, Sarah Paulson and Nicole Behaire. So if there weren’t enough announcements about badass women, hopefully those will tide you over until next year’s Con.

Our Top 10 Favourite Introverts

By Crystal and Whitney

Introverts! We’re everywhere. We’re at cinemas, watching The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by ourselves. We’re in restaurants, reading books at tables for one. We’re definitely at A-Camp, in full force. That’s why we’re hosting not one but two Introvert Meet Ups, because there’s nothing introverts love more than a little forced socialising. Just kidding, attendance is optional. We held one of these at the last A-Camp and all us quiet queers had a nice chilled out time.

Compiling a list of ten introverts wasn’t as easy as you might think because how do you know if someone identifies as an introvert? Maybe they’re just really shy, okay! You can never really know, not unless they’ve spoken about it and some of these people haven’t because they do not exist. We’ve taken our best guess, though, ‘cause if we didn’t then there’d be no article to publish.

10. Allison Reynolds

Allison Reynolds from The Breakfast Club sat alone in detention eating cereal sugar sandwiches and making dandruff doodles and just generally being a weirdo outcast and she really owned it, too. Then she got a make-over and some male attention and, ugh.

9. Flannery O’Connor

via persephonewrites.wordpress.com

The prolific novelist Flannery O’Connor preferred birds to people. Her book of essays, Mystery and Manners, begins with the essay “The King of Birds,” that chronicles her life of raising and collecting peacocks, a hobby that started first with chickens: “What had only been a mild interest became a passion, a quest.” According to Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch, she was “pegged as quiet … self-reliant but remote” and in her childhood, she spent “most of her free time making drawings, usually of birds.” Even if O’Connor preferred to keep to herself and her birds, her novels and short stories contain a sharp awareness of human nature, precise and alert.

8. Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn played the role of the extrovert in movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but the truth is that she was “a shy, delicate and introverted person,” according to her biography Audrey Hepburn: The Paramount Years by Tony Nourmand. The loud, talkative roles she is most well known for did not necessarily come easy to her — “I’m an introvert,” she once said, “Playing the extroverted girl was the hardest thing I ever did.” Hepburn enjoyed being by herself to recharge, and her extroverted portrayal of Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly earned her a Oscar nomination.

7. Mary Anne Spier

Mary Anne is the Baby-sitter’s Club secretary, a classic occupation of introverted youth. Things Mary Anne does not enjoy include: being centre of attention, conflict, large crowds and the colour pink. Mary Anne was the first baby-sitter to get a boyfriend, which I feel is a common thing with introverts? All the introverts at my school were the first to get boyfriends.

It could be argued that Claudia is also an introvert because she spends so much time alone doing art and is really only friends with Stacey. However, she also has a phone in her bedroom and I don’t know any introverts who like answering the phone. The BSC series was responsible for all my classmates wanting their own phone line but even back that idea horrified me.

6. Emily Dickinson

When you think of Emily Dickinson, you might think of a poet alone at her table, at work. What you might not realize was that Dickinson was often composing poems while in the kitchen, elbow-high in bread flour. It’s a little-known fact that Dickinson, who kept to herself a great deal, was an accomplished baker and loved to send homemade “cakes and candies” to friends and family. The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA has records of Dickinson’s poems being scribbled out hastily on the wrappers of baking chocolate and on the back of coconut cake recipes — while she cooked, her mind was always moving to the next line of her poems.

5. Daria Morgendorffer

All of my favorite moments from Daria are related to Daria’s obvious resentment for having to leave the house and/or attend social events and/or have empty conversation. Hero.

4. Lisbeth Salander

Did you know that someone on the internet has conducted in-depth analysis on the Myers-Briggs personality types of popular fictional characters? It’s called MBTI In Fiction, aka the most amazing tumblr you’ll discover today. Here’s an accurate dissection of super intense introvert Lisbeth Salander from the Millenium trilogy:

“It is pretty clear that Lisbeth is an introvert. Analyzing, and planning are what occupy her mind most often. She justifies her actions with factual reasoning. When she does speak, it is well thought out and exactly what she means… She has a hard time relating to people, interacting in social situations, and behaving appropriately. Despite her inability to connect to most people, the few people she does care about, she tries to do good by them.”

3. Joni Mitchell

Photo by Jack Robinson via fanpop.com

Joni Mitchell describes the process of writing songs using “introvert” as a verb — “When I write a song I have to introvert and introvert because I like to scrape a bit of how I’m feeling around me and all that,” she said, according to the biography, Joni Mitchell by Mark Bego. Mitchell has said that the process of writing songs involves “exploring the inner landscape thoroughly,” and she describes this as being an introverted process that she often returns to — a process of looking inward. Joni Mitchell’s songs are often confessional and intimate, from “All I Want” (“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling / Traveling, traveling, traveling / Looking for something, what can it be”) to “River” (“I’m gonna make a lot of money / And quit this crazy scene / I wish I had a river I could skate away on”).

2. Katniss Everdeen

I feel like Katniss‘ introversion was far more obvious in the Hunger Games novels rather than the movie; the  internal monologue showed just much Katniss lives in her head and doesn’t seem to have a need to connect in the same ways that Gale and Peeta do. Not that there weren’t big flashing indicators of introversion in movie- she looked a gazillion times more uncomfortable during her TV interview than in any scene where someone was trying to kill her.

1. Waldo

Waldo (aka Wally) is arguably the world’s most dedicated introvert. He’s been roaming the world alone since 1986 and the dude hides from EVERYONE.

So those are some of our favorite introverts. Who are yours?

Let’s Talk About Fictional Kickass Heroines: Katniss, Xena, Buffy and More

by vanessa, geneva, julia, and mey

Here at Autostraddle, we love kickass women. Who doesn’t like to see a girl kick some ass, both metaphorically and physically (but only to protect herself from harm and/or save the world and/or consensually with a trusted partner and a safe word)? Unfortunately for everyone, strong, confident, awesome female leads are few and far between in mainstream media, and when they do exist they’re often deeply flawed or oddly flat characters. Nonetheless, there are some really badass fictional ladies in this great big world, and we want to talk about them.

At camp, the four of us – Vanessa, Julia, Geneva and Mey – will be leading a discussion about female heroines who have positively impacted our brains and our worlds, and contrasting them with supposedly strong female leads who actually kind of miss the mark and make us wince (hi Bella, we’re looking directly at you). What role do these characters play in society’s view of women and girls? How do they positively or negatively shape girls’ own perceptions of themselves and their capabilities? How can we as a community work to create kickass women characters in our pop culture and how can we influence the mainstream media to follow our lead?

Much as we’d love to have that conversation here on the website, too, unfortunately it’s a bit difficult to host and participate in an open thread when you’re hanging out on a mountain top without any internet access. That said, we have a feeling you guys might have a few words to say about all this and we have total faith that you are all kickass humans in your own right who can totally handle this without our guidance, so we’re presenting a list of our favorite kickass fictional heroines as a way to jumpstart this feelingsfest and leaving the rest up to you!

This list is by no means all-inclusive, all-knowing, or even all accurate. If you completely disagree with our inclusion of a character, please (respectfully!) let us know. If you think we left someone out and are totally shocked and appalled that we’ve never read your favorite book / watched your favorite teevee show / viewed your grandma’s favorite home video starring YOU as a fictional heroine, go ahead and school us in the comments! And if you wanna profess your love for Buffy, once more with feeling, we wouldn’t blame you one bit.

SPOILER ALERT: We are about to talk about all of these characters as if you’ve read the whole book / seen the whole series / watched the whole movie / own all the comics in which they appear. If you have not in fact done that you may want to skim and skip accordingly. 

20 Kickass Girls in Books, Comics, TeeVee, Movies, and Pop Culture In General

Miss America Chavez

Young Avengers (Marvel Comics)

This interdimensional kicker of butt is one of only a handful of prominent Latina superheroes in all of mainstream comics. She’s invulnerable, she can fly with super speed, she can travel through different dimensions and she’s so strong that she can “throw tanks to the moon.” She’s able to fight Norse Gods to a standstill. She has one of the best costumes in the Marvel Universe and a cool, no nonsense attitude. Plus, she has two super-powered moms.

Hermione

Harry Potter

Without Hermione, Harry Potter would not have survived past book one and then it would have been a lot shorter. She is the brains of the operation without a doubt. She might even be the smartest kid at Hogwarts and intellect is sexy and powerful. She is also a mudblood so she faces a lot of adversity within the wizarding world, but she gains everybody’s respect because she really is better at this stuff than most of the kids born into wizarding families.

Kel

Protector of the Small

Kel is the first known female to sign up to become a knight. The boys pee on her door and trash her room. They put weights in her practice weapons and make her life a living hell, but Kel carries on with a calm face. She gets up before dawn everyday to do strengthening exercises so she can’t just compete with the boys, but so she is stronger than the boys. She takes in animals who are bound for the slaughter house and fights for those who cannot fight for themselves. She is a truly awesome role model for girls.

Kaisa

Ash

Julia is desperately waiting to be cast as Kaisa in the movie version of Ash, because she wants to be her so bad. Kaisa is the King’s Huntress, which is basically his right wing woman. She rides around the country keeping everything safe and leading the hunt. She has excellent archery and equestrian skills. Her position is one of power and respect. She is also super suave with the ladies.

Zoe

Firefly

A soldier, a wife, a friend, and a kickass independent woman of color, Zoe earns her spot on this list many times over. Over the short run of Firefly (RIP), we witness her show off some impressive fighting skills, and it often seems as though she’s the only member of the crew that Captain Mal Reynolds really trusts. Though it’s a little off-putting to hear Zoe call Mal “sir” so often and consistently, that does not stop her from giving her opinions (both to Mal and to her husband, pilot and crew member Wash), and she never misses an opportunity to make subtle “I told ya so” comments when Mal’s plans inevitably go awry. It’s also refreshing to see a married woman on television retain her independence; she may be a wife, but she still calls her own shots and her husband not only accepts that, it’s obvious he respects it. Solid healthy relationship modeling all around!

Karolina Dean and Xavin

Runaways (Marvel Comics)

Karolina is a glowing, flying teenage daughter of alien supervillains who’s the emotional center of her team. Xavin is her shapeshifting Super-Skrull fiancée who’s one of the few transgender characters in all of comics. Together they form one of the best queer couples in recent comics, showing not only that you can have three-dimensional queer characters, but also that gender isn’t a simple, straightforward binary. These two are able to not only overcome their supervillian legacies, but also the racism and homophobia that they face for being an interracial lesbian couple.

Katniss

The Hunger Games

When we meet Katniss she is a young woman with almost no support system who manages to look after both herself and her family with no complaints. That would be impressive enough, but when she’s thrust into the world of the Hunger Games (by bravely and selflessly volunteering as tribute to save her little sister) her character gains strength and independence that make her an unstoppable force. Throughout the series we see her attempt to discern right from wrong, decide who she can trust and who is lying, and her humanity is celebrated even when it is not immediately rewarded, providing nice depth in comparison to a robo-girl who just kicks butt and takes name. Katniss does all this while being human, and it’s inspiring.

Tara

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Tara is arguably one of the most underrated Scoobies of the gang. She’s shy when we first meet her, but over the course of her arc she proves herself to be a powerful witch with both natural and learned talents, she stands up to her father and rejects the preconceived notions her family has about what a woman must do and be, she supports and loves Willow but also refuses to be manipulated, and she is always willing to offer wise advice, sweet encouragement, and an extra brain when it comes time to research. Honestly the only critique we can think to lob at Tara is that she’s too perfect – for real, try to think of a single moment during her entire arc when she bothered you. You can’t use the time Joss made her and Willow wear weird princess dresses during the musical because that wasn’t her fault. See?! She’s perfect and kickass. Also also also: she’s a gay lady – we love gay ladies!

Xena

Xena: Warrior Princess

Xena was originally a character on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, but her spin-off show surpassed its dude-lead counterpart in both ratings and pop culture prominence. Xena is everything we could ask for – she’s confident, multifaceted, queer and can kick the asses of most gods. She has intense relationships with a whole bunch of female characters over the course of the show as friends, enemies, family and thinly-veiled lovers, flying in the face of the widely held belief that no one will watch a women-lead action show.

San

Princess Mononoke

San, in my opinion is without a doubt the most badass Disney Princess. She sucks a bullet straight from a giant wolf’s shoulder. She charges into battle armed with just a knife against people armed with guns and swords. She wasn’t just raised by wolves, she was raised by a Wolf Goddess. San is willing to do anything to protect her family and her home. She’ll fight tooth and nail for what she believes in, even if it means trying to single handedly stop a rampaging Boar Demon.

Brienne of Tarth

A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones

In a universe notorious for corruption, violence and greed, Brienne is the one true knight. She can’t technically become a knight because of the patriarchy, but she doesn’t care and earns a place in Renly’s Rainbow Guard anyways. She’s honourable, determined, street smart and doesn’t let men belittle her. Though her journey is closely intertwined with Jaime Lannister’s redemption arc, Brienne always has her own story and her own motivations. And she kicks his ass in a swordfight.

Echo

Dollhouse

This show starts slowly, but once Echo’s character arc kicks in midway through the first season a really cool feminist narrative unfolds. Echo is trapped in a child-like state, controlled by the staff of an underground company who program volunteers to become various fantasies of rich clients. In her supposedly blank state, Echo develops self-awareness and rebels against the company. When their technology gets in the wrong hands and turns Los Angeles into an apocalyptic nightmare, Echo leads a band of guerrilla warriors to save the world from itself. The show never shies away from dealing with the misogyny and consent issues inherent in its premise, and Echo, Sierra and Adele always find a way to upset the order of the institutions trying to control and exploit them.

Ginny

Harry Potter

Ginny is fierce. She is the youngest and only girl in a large family of boys and she is totally awesome because of it. She always steps in to be at the front of the battles, even when she is told she is too young she manages to sneak in to lend a hand. She is one of the bravest/strongest characters in the series. She handles the love stuff with Harry in a mature and responsible way, she is helpful and insightful, and she knows exactly how to use a wand.

Faith

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Faith does everything we wanted to do high school – she skips school, has sex whenever she wants and rocks snakeskin bell-bottoms. Though she was introduced strictly as a foil to Buffy, Faith’s journey from teen bad girl to supervillain to stoic hero is one of the stand-out arcs of the series. Whether she’s picking fights with cops, possessing Buffy’s body or leading an army of fellow Slayers into battle, we always understand Faith’s motivations. While Faith has to make amends for her mistakes over the course of her redemption arc, she never apologizes for who she is. Faith’s as outspoken, confident and kinky after her heel-face turn as she ever was while evil.

Nani

Lilo and Stitch

Nani holds it down. She’s recovering from the tragic loss of her parents, raising her little sister, and working full-time. Not only that, but she also has to deal with government agents and a whole mess of aliens trying to take away either her little sister or that sister’s pet and best friend. Nani is by far one of the best role models in any Disney film. She’s able to show the importance of family and love, and that when someone is a part of your family, you accept them for who they are and hold to them as tight as you can, no matter what.

Bo

Lost Girl

Bo is the big-hearted, brave lead of Lost Girl who loves breaking rules. She refuses to align herself to a side in the ongoing magical war, chooses humans as best friends and lovers despite cultural stigma and makes no apologies for being bisexual. Bo and her bestie Kenzi handle monsters-of-the-week, doomed romances and the trials of being young and broke through humor and self-reliance. When it’s revealed that Bo is the prophecized savior of her people, she begrudgingly accepts her duty without ever compromising her morals, attitude or sex life.

Willow

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

We had a hard time deciding whether or not to include Willow on this list because of that time she raped her girlfriend via magical mind-wiping, but the world is a complicated place and we think she still belongs here. Willow begins the show with little agency as the computer nerd everyone picks on at school with a hopeless crush on her best and only friend, but she soon proves herself critical to the Scoobies’ adventures thanks to her book smarts, loyalty, and growing magical prowess. In college, Willow forms more of an identity outside of the Scoobies, joining a Wicca group and beginning a secret relationship with another witch, and she asserts herself as much more than just Buffy’s sidekick. Though her buried self-hatred, need for control over her loved ones and arrogant overuse of magic eventually drive her to become evil and try to end the world, it’s hard not to cheer for her rises in confidence and power. Having Willow mess with the established order by magically imbuing thousands of potential Slayers with their superhero powers is a kickass final act for her story.

Kaede and Taisin

Huntress

We put these two together because they are both awesome heroines in their own right, but as a team they are unstoppable. Taisin has crazy magical sage powers and Kaede is fierce and kickass. They support each other through a journey to save the world. They share a unique mental bond, as well as having the complimentary skills to complete their mission, as well as fall deeply in love with one another.

Batwoman

The first lesbian superhero with her own comic book, Batwoman is just as tough and fierce as any of her male counterparts. After being kicked out of the military for refusing to lie about who she is back when DADT was still in effect, she decided to become a vigilante in the most dangerous city in the DC universe. She teams up with the likes of Wonder Woman, The Question, her fellow members of the Bat Family and even the Justice League of America. She flirts with the Police Women who pull her over and looks great in a tux. She may share a name with Batman, but she is no sidekick.

Buffy

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

For better or worse, women who kick ass on television will always be compared to Buffy Summers. Over seven seasons, Buffy takes on the patriarchy in many of its guises – she emancipates herself from the patronizing Watchers Council, fights demons posing as douchey frats guys and abusive boyfriends, slices a misogynistic preacher in half via crotch and always has a snappy retort and ass-kicking in store for vampires who underestimate her. The overarching theme of the loneliness Buffy faces as the only Slayer in the world comes to a satisfyingly feminist conclusion in the series finale when Buffy and Willow do a spell that shares Buffy’s power with thousands of girls around the world, creating a Slayer army.

VIDEO: The First “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” Teaser-Trailer Is Here (!!!!!!)

Coincidentally, we re-watched the original Hunger Games film just last night, because it was on Netflix and it’s just really hard not to. Also, who is this trailer “EXCLUSIVE” to? I can’t figure that out. I think it’s exclusive to YouTube. Just like everything. We’re all exclusive to YouTube. [ETA: It’s “exclusive” to the MTV Movie Awards. Except also, it’s completely inclusive to everybody who has the internet. So it’s kinda confusing, actually.] Anyhow, I wish we could fast-forward to the part of my life where I’m sitting in a 400-deep line of humans who advance-purchased opening night tickets for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire!

So uh, what do you think?

Study Claims Literature Becoming Less Emotional, But Maybe It’s Actually Just Less “Moody”

Are the way we write books changing? Certainly – as changes in the world at-large would likely lead to changes in its art, since art reflects life. But just how much? A new study from the UK, out of the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham, and published in the research journal PLOS ONE, posits that literature has changed dramatically since the 1960s in one key area: emotionalism.

As Jezebel covered this story on Thursday:

“You know that feeling you get when you are reading a book and the language is so emotive and beautiful that it makes you want to break down and weep? Unless you’re a fan of the classics, probably not. A new study… shows that literature over the past 100 years has become increasingly emotionless, unless that emotion is fear, in which case we modern folks loooove being scurred.”

How that study seems to define it is based on the presence of certain “mood words.” As Jezebel writes, “Using Google’s database of more than five million digitized [sic] books, researchers did searches of mood words that fell into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise) and charted the frequency of their use in literary works from the past century.” The result seemed to be that, with the exception of those related to fear, the number of these “mood words” in literature is decreasing.

It’s easy to take a study like this, and think, as one Jezebel commenter put it, “Oh, for pity’s sake. Scratch an academic, find someone who’s mourning the death of literature.” Yet, if people do seem to want to read more about fear and less about other emotions – or that writers aren’t writing as much about things other than fear – that does suggest an important shift as a society. Lead author Dr. Alberto Acerbi notes that “periods of positive and negative moods often correlated with historical events…The Second World War, for example, is marked by a distinct increase in words related to sadness, and a correspondent decrease in words related to joy.” If there is indeed this reported change, it likely says something significant about the history of the last half-century.

via books0977.tumblr.com

But that’s if the study’s conclusions are correct. For starters, when we say that our books are less emotional, which books are we really talking about? If anything, maybe this is more the case in best-selling books because a lot of the specifically “moody” books – like romances, for instance – have been shuffled off into their own genres. As with music, as markets have gotten bigger since the middle of the century, there have been more and more ways for specific interests to be segregated into their own corners of the bookstore.

The article mentions the popularity of dystopian fiction, specifically The Hunger Games, the latest YA series to gain massive crossover appeal with adults and its own, big-budget series of movies and pop-culture tie-ins. Jezebel writes that the prominence of fear-based language is “a fact that’s hard to argue with when you consider just how much of successful literature recently has to do with dystopias, monsters or kids forced to murder one another in giant arenas.” But before there was The Hunger Games as the top-selling YA series out there, there was Harry Potter, which, while certainly very dark at times, wasn’t exactly dystopian – and made it clear that while our heroes were fighting bad guys, they were still ordinary teenagers deep-down, full of ordinary teenager hormones and able to have ordinary teenager relationships and high school drama (see: Half-Blood Prince).

And in between the two, there were the Twilight novels. I’m not going to argue that they’re great literature, but when people talk about how those books are written like “bad fanfiction” (and they are), what they mean are how emotional and descriptive the books are. And yet, those books’ “purple prose,” as some writers call it, didn’t keep them from selling like hotcakes. Romance novels in general may be a niche genre, but Stephenie Meyer proved to us that plenty of people are willing to read that kind of language even outside of that specific market.

In many ways, the last decade has been a triumph for genre fiction. This is most apparent in television – it’s hard to see a historical drama like Mad Men or fantasy like Game of Thrones taking off as they have twenty years ago, enough to spawn imitators – but it’s true in literature as well. Sci-fi and fantasy, romance and other genres that would normally get buried deep in the stacks are now on the bestseller lists, even for adults. (The rise in the YA genre in particular – largely thanks to the success of YA bestsellers like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games that had large numbers of adult readers – has helped this along. YA has always been more friendly to niche genres, and has such become a fertile ground for experiments with those tropes even outside of the realm of speculative fiction – such as with John Green’s highly-acclaimed take on sick lit, The Fault in Our Stars.)

The Jezebel take points out that one “might push this even further and say that a lack of emotional language in a book doesn’t mean that the work is in itself emotionless.” Indeed, positing that we are “a more visual culture” could explain some of the shift in language; perhaps writers today simply prefer metaphor and simile to describe beauty or love or pain, rather than literal words associated with those ideas. Twilight is a good example that, in yet another similarity to fanfiction, uses a lot of (often clichéd) metaphor to describe characters’ beauty; Edward is frequently referred to as “an Adonis,” for instance.

via Cosmopolitan Australia

A lot of this could have to do with the fact that there is a wider variety of people writing novels today than there were fifty years ago, as education in general has become more widely available. For example, a majority of high-school graduates in the United States now go on to college, which was definitely not the case in the 1960s. The increased exposure to different types of literature and greater development of writing skills that come with higher education, while hardly necessary to become a novelist, are likely to push more interested young people into the profession. As such, because more and more people have access to those resources, we’re seeing a greater diversity in who gets published – and thus, a greater diversity of writing styles. It may simply be the case that there was more of a “standard” for “moody” writing back in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas now, we have a greater variety of writers with more unique takes on how to convey emotion in literature, which may or may not include easily analyzed “mood words.”

One of the more interesting things about the study is how it indicates that the 1960s is “the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge.” The study press release speculates that “the baby-boom and the rising of counterculture” may have something to do with it, though it’s not like the UK didn’t experience both of those things to its own, lesser extent as well. The larger gap in economic prosperity between the two countries in the post-war period may be a better explanation; as the press release explains, “In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period.” This is a point that has been made relative to other art forms as well; New Yorker music columnist Alex Ross discusses this in his book The Rest is Noise with regard to differences in European and American postwar classical music. This also brings the issue of privilege back to the forefront; one of the co-authors speculates that “perhaps ’emotionalism’ was a luxury of economic growth.”

Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick, a nuclear war thriller from the early ’60s, via lib.uiowa.edu

The increase in fear-related words is just as fascinating to examine. The mid-to-late 1950s and 1960s were around the time period when paranoia about nuclear war, in the wake of the Cold War weapons race, really started to kick in and become a popular theme in fiction; before that, Americans in particular had a more positive view of “the bomb” in the wake of its use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to win World War II. Now the Cold War is over, but it’s not like we haven’t had new reasons to be paranoid since 1989, especially with the War on Terror and even before that, with atrocities such as the ethnic cleansing wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Or ongoing environmental threats like global warming. And of course, nuclear weapons are still out there and just as deadly in the wrong hands – as the latest panic over North Korea’s nuclear threats has shown us.

Regardless of what conclusions to draw from this, the fact is that changes in the modern world – from political factors like wars and revolutions, to more gradual, social issues like the extent of economic and social prosperity – have changed the way we write, and think about literature. The press release notes that changes in emotionality of words “are a signature of different style periods in the history of Western literature,” and indeed, Western art has long been defined by pendulum swings between emotional expressionism and rationalist restraint. The current trend likely won’t last forever, but regardless, it’s time to stop judging today’s literature by the standards of a past to which we can never return.

Your Best Halloween Costume Ever: Katniss Everdeen Three Ways

Nothing gets me pumped quite like a fangirl Halloween costume. Nothing. And this year is no different. With Hunger Games being released last March, you’d think that every Halloween store in town would be overrun with Hunger Games costumes, but that’s just not the case. So what’s a girl to do when all she wants is to dress up like Katniss Everdeen? Make your own costume of course! I’ve got three different Katniss costumes in — varying degrees of difficulty — to suit everyone from the die hard cosplayers to the casual last-minute fan.

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Arena Katniss

Potentially the most recognizable Katniss look, dressing as Katniss during the 74th Hunger Games is actually not hard to put together. You may actually have many of your necessary items hanging around your house. Start with the basics: a black or green V-neck paired with some brown or tawny skinny cargo pants. Though you don’t absolutely need it, a heavy duty brown or black belt is a nice touch. Next, find a hooded zip-up black jacket. A raincoat or lightweight faux-leather works really well. If you want to be a stickler you can put a zip-up track jacket underneath this, but you’re fine either way. Similarly, in the movie, the Tribute’s jackets had a red strip up behind the zipper and around the hood. This can be done with some red duct tape or glued in red ribbon. Finally, Katniss has black motorcycle/combat/paddock style boots. I’m going to take a wild guess that you might already have a pair. Any black boots will get the point across. Finally, grab a black or bright orange backpack.

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Tees
Boots

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Now that you’ve assembled your base costume, it’s on to the Hunger Game essential details. These are potentially the most important parts of the costume. Of course, you need a mocking jay pin. While I’m sure you could make one out of pipe-cleaners/clay and metallic spray paint, I opted to spend $4 and buy myself one. I’d say this was a sound investment. Amazon is a great option, but you could also check Newbury Comics or even a Target. Secondly you’ll need a nice long side braid. If you have blonde or short hair, I suggest investigating a brunette wig. Although you might be able to finagle braiding a wig yourself, It’s potentially much easier to buy one already braided. A Lara Croft wig will suit you well and will probably be cheaper than some “Arena Girl” wigs you might find.

If you already hair long brown hair, you can certainly just braid it. If you want to go for Katniss’s long braid but don’t have quite the length, you can braid in some clip-on extensions in-between layers of your hair. For the super savvy, you can try to do Katniss’s dutch braid, essentially a french braid going around your head.

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Having never been able to french braid my own hair, after watching this video I was able to dutch braid my hair after the fourth or fifth try. My suggestion is to attempt to do so while pacing around your bathroom in a plaid flanel and underwear.

Absolutely most importantly, you need a bow and arrow. Why? Because you’re going to want to shoot toy arrows at people all night (safely and not at anyone’s eyes). You can certainly get an amazing movie replica and/or realistic looking bow, arrows and quivers. Personally, I like the idea of getting a bow and arrows that look the most like a foam toy as possible. It’s not as realistic, but it’s potentially more hilarious. Alternatively, you could go for a happy medium with a Disney Brave bow and arrow set — I feel like you’ll use that again.

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Hunting Gear Katniss

Back before The Games, Katniss was just another girl who loved hunting and the occasional bout of sexual tension with her neighbor. Start with a black V-neck and straight leg or skinny pants. Next, add some boots. Your best option are high brown boots, but honestly any leather boot is fine. Most importantly, a worn-in brown hunting-style leather jacket is critical. You can also accessorize with things like fingerless gloves, a cap or a hunting satchel to get that full Girl In The Wilderness look.

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Casual Pants
Boots

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As mentioned before, you’ll need Katniss’s signature side braid and bow and arrow. Although it doesn’t fully make sense for the book, you can also add the mockingjay pin. It may make your costume clearer.

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Reaping Katniss

The Reaping Katniss costume is by far the easiest to pull off. All you need is a light blue (or even denim or white) shirt dress that ties in the middle. It’s also a great costume if you have a lazy costuming boifriend who wants to just wear all white and an apron and go as Baker Peta.

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Day Dresses
Day Dresses

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If you really want to get fancy, you can create the ruched effect at the collarbone of Katniss’s dress if you have a sewing machine. About two inches below the shoulder on the front of each side, baste in two rows of very long straight stich. On one side, holding one end of the strings, pull the opposite end of the strings to scrunch the fabric up. Once you’ve reached your desired scratchiness, straight stich through the middle of your two basting stitches. Repeat this on the other side of the dress and you’re good to go. In addition, include some no-nonsense brown shoes. You should also braid you hair in two long braids and pin them up. Oh look, another hair video:

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The most important part of this Katniss costume? Every time someone offers someone else a trick or a treat (or a drink for that matter) you throw your hand in the air and yell “I volunteer as tribute!” Actually, whichever Katniss costume you choose, be sure to be volunteering as tribute all night long.

VIDEO: Julie & Brandy In Your Box Office #204: Hengher Gams

by riese & julie & brandy

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been pretty much sitting here staring at the wall dreaming about gummy worms since the last episode of Julie & Brandy in Your Box Office knocked my socks right off my feet onto the floor, therefore necessitating an unexpected trip to the laundromat. Yup, anticipation is high today, higher than a kite, a mountain, or a drug addict! Because today Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard are gonna make you pee in your pants! In a sexy way, though.

While the rest of us were learning about our souls at A-Camp, Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard were running around in the woods filming the “Hunger Games” episode of In Your Box Office, which they’ve entitled “HUNGER GHAMS.” It’s a different pronunciation.

A quick refresher about In Your Box Office, World’s Most Beloved Webseries:

Julie Goldman & Brandy Howard are a sensational acting/writing duo trying to cause a sensation with their romantic-comedy, Nicest Thing.

But since no one wants to make their movie or cast them in anything, they feel it is their duty to harshly judge everyone else’s work based on a sliding scale of rage, bitterness, lesbianism, and lack of any real significant training.

Also, due to popular demand — and in honor of YouTube’s new policies allowing 15-minute videos (the limit was ten, originally) — we are continuing to make these episodes a little longer than we used to. I mean, you dug it last time, so I think you’ll dig it this time too. If you watch it twice in a row, it’s like a sitcom, basically.

So, it’s time to pop your popcorn and wrap your girlfriend or otherwise-inclined real-or-imaginary companion in a warm blanket, cuddle up and see what Julie and Brandy thought about The Hunger Games, starring your girlfriend Katniss!

The MTV Movie Awards Liveblog and Harry Potter/Hunger Games/KStew Feelings Marathon

Hey you Straddlers, it’s the MTV Movie Awards! The place where Oscar-winning movies lose year after year after year to Twilight. Is it just me or did I just liveblog these five seconds ago? Nope, that’s just an emotional conflation of liveblogging the 2011 VMAs and recapping the 2011 Teen Choice Awards. Regardless they’re here again, hosted by Russell Brand, and bound to illuminate nothing about movies and everything about the falling standards of young people in America. I’m honestly deeply emotionally conflicted about whether I’m rooting for Harry Potter or the Hunger Games. It’s like choosing between your first love and your current love; they’re both so meaningful, how do you even compare them?

IF ONLY SHE WERE RIDING A HIPPOGRIFF (VIA MTV.COM)

There are a lot of nominees but writing them all out seemed like a waste of everyone’s time, so I made this handy graphic from MTV’s full list of nominees.

OH GOD THE HUNGER GAMES AND HARRY POTTER ARE IN SO MANY OF THE SAME CATAGORIES

Tonight I’m gathering with a bunch of queermos to watch/drool over the inevitable KStewpalooza, and plan to steal the snarky comments my friends make and claim them as my own here for your reading pleasure! I prepared for this epic night by quitting my job, moving out of my apartment, signing a lease in my new apartment and forgetting to cancel my gym membership. So you know this is going to be good.

Meet me back here at 9pm EST and we’ll all get through this together. Don’t forget to tweet me all of your Harry Potter/Hunger Games/KStew feelings @Ohheyitslizz!

8:50pm: I showed up early for pre-show glamour and Punk’d is on?! Where is the red carpet respect?!

8:55pm: I couldn’t be more excited about this preview for The Perks of Being a Wallflower if I read an instruction manual on how to be excited. I’m calling it, this might be the best part of the night.

9:00pm: OMG it’s happening!! Starring FUN. I love this song. Because tonight I am young. Actually technically.

9:01pm: Wait. Are the guys from FUN. wearing capri pants? I can’t support this decision.

9:03pm: I love Janelle Monae in a tux and that chorus of women in bow ties. Sigh.

CAN WE BE IN LOVE FOREVER?

9:08pm: Something about the timbre of Russell Brand’s voice makes everything he says sound the same.

9:12pm: I’m bored. This is boring. Will someone make me a cocktail?

9:14pm: Look how uncomfortable Mila Kunis looks next to how drunk Marky Mark is.

I don’t care about this. I forgot to see the movie. I need another cocktail for this.

9:20pm: I just saw a preview for the new movie “Ted” about Mila Kunis and Marky Mark and a magically alive teddy bear. I thought it was an MTV spoof. But no. This is really happening.

9:20pm: Russell Brand is not funny.

9:24pm: I support the existence of the new Spiderman movie. Emma Stone just said YOLO. YOLOOOO

THIS GUY IS YOUR NEW SPIDERMAN

I don’t know who she is but she’s kind of adorable. I like her the most out of everyone so far. Everyone ever.

9:30pm: Emma Watson can do no wrong. I give her permission to do anything.

DEAR EMMA WATSON, PICK ME. LOVE ME. CHOOSE ME.

9:32pm: Oh G-d. Best Male Performance. This is our first Harry Potter Hunger Games stand off. I don’t know who to root for. JK this time it’s Harry Potter.

Okay, mixed feelings. On the one hand I want to support Josh Hutcherson because he really loves gay people. On the other hand, I wanted Daniel Radcliffe because of the Harry Potter. On the other other hand, I wanted KStew dressed in menswear to win this category. So.

9:40pm: First KStew sighting for the announcement of Best Female Performance!

THIS IS ACTUALLY PART OF KSTEW'S ROBOT PURIM COSTUME

Why do I feel like we won a thing?! We won a thing!! Too bad Jen didn’t show up to receive. Somehow that makes her even cooler.

JLaw [looking at the golden popcorn]: I can’t eat this.

VIA ZOMBIELOVER.TUMBLR.COM

9:43pm: Who let Charlie Sheen on stage? I’m palpitating.

9:44pm: So I guess this is some sort of clip show of party movies? What I’ve gleaned is that cult classic comedies have to star men. All men all the time. Only men are funny. Only.

9:47pm: Can I be honest about how I don’t know who this musical artist is, but am I crazy or is Joan Jett on his shirt?

9:50pm: Liveblogging MTV award shows is really easy since the show is 90% commercials.

9:55pm: Leighton Meester is presenting best kiss. I think the real question is why isn’t she nominated for any kiss ever?

YOU COULD TOTALLY GET MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND GAY MARRIED ON THE BEACH IN THIS OUTFIT

Also if Hermione/Ron don’t win this shit is rigged.

Boooo. But wait. Who is that white T-shirt lezzie looking girl KStew is sitting with? And no RPat? Okay for those of you playing at home who can’t see this, KStew just tried to get someone, anyone to come on stage and kiss her. Including but not limited to super homoerotic call out to Charlize Theron. KStew, why didn’t you just call up the hot chick you were sitting with?!

KStew: Huntsman? Huntsman?

10:04pm: Awesome. Two old men to present an achievement award (“The Generation Award”) to Johnny Depp. I totally appreciate and love Johnny Depp but there hasn’t been a single gay on stage yet. Didn’t the producers of this see the Emmys? Gay sells people.

Also this is tragically boring.

10:08pm: So Johnny Depp is playing the guitar with the Black Keys. Reactions from around the room:

My Friend: Johnny Depp was cool, he just got so much cooler
Me: Are you kidding? He’s playing guitar at the MTV Movie awards. He just got 100% lamer.
My Friend: Well… he’s only lamer if he tries to launch a full music career after this.

10:12pm: Sometimes I feel like Johnny Depp speaks with a pseudo fake british accent.

10:20pm: Joel McHale is so fucking hilarious. Also a fake archery instructor is a stupidly funny concept. That was the funniest thing of the evening. That’s really unfortunate. Why is Community being canceled? Whyyyy?

10:23pm: Wow totally real fight scene between Charlize Theron and some guy.

Friend A: Wow great fight scene.
Friend B: Oh. Get ’em girl
Friend C: Huntsman? Huntsman?

There is not enough booze in the world to make me care about this category.

VIA PSYCHO-PENGUIN.TUMBLR.COM

This is correct! Go team! Only Emma Watson bothered to show up! Womp Womp. Just in case anyone is curious, she goes to Brown where I am going in the fall. I think we all know what’s going to happen when we meet. Love forever. That’s what.

10:34pm: Awesome more white guys presenting awards. And making illiteracy jokes.

10:36pm: Am I supposed to know who Big Dick Richy is? Is this a thing?

I love Elizabeth Banks. We have the same name. Also her outfit looks like what a spider wears after it gets magically turned in to a woman.

SPIDERWOMAN

10:40pm: So Emma Stone is getting The Trailblazer Award? I think it’s a joke but I also don’t understand if maybe this is a joke. I do love a good montage though.

My Friend: Wait. Oh. For that whole time I thought they were talking about Emma Watson.

10:44pm: Okay even post-acceptance speech I have no clue what this award is for. Is this because of The Help? Is this because of Spiderman? Does Emma Stone go around the country giving emotionally inspiring speeches to high school students?

10:47pm: Okay so a preview for Channing Tatum’s new movie where he plays a male stripper just came on and now I understand that man-stripper joke before. Sorry guys, I’m just trying to stay on top of everything.

10:49pm: Joseph Gordon Levitt dresses the way I wish all hot butch chicks dressed. All of them. Love his red watch.

10:50pm: Seriously though, I don’t think I can move on from Joseph Gordon Levitt’s outfit. That’s what everyone should wear to weddings this summer.

10:52pm: Yeah I’m still not over it. With the red button? With the corresponding but not too matchy tie? This is a win guys.

10:53pm: I was so distracted by Joseph Gordon Levitt’s outfit that I forgot to point out how fucking weird this whole Batman END OF THE STORY worship thing is. I mean, it’s Batman not Harry Potter — it doesn’t actually ever end.

I mean, I’m not arguing with exclusive footage, I just didn’t realize this movie series was such a bit deal. I mean I love these movies but I’m a giant nerd-face.

11:00pm: Okay we’ve finally reached best movie. Thank G-d.

11:02pm: Finally! A gay on stage! Jodie Foster! Her jacket looks like a futuristic motocross situation?

Oh wow. That’s a fucking shocker.

11:05pm: MTV should go back to the days when they used to stage controversies. It was actually somehow more entertaining.

I See White People: “Hunger Games” and a Brief History of Cultural Whitewashing

By Lindy West

Attention, everyone: Racism is BACK! [Electric guitar riff.] As you may have heard (because it’s both bonkers and everywhere), our national brain trust of semi-literate racist teenagers is not pleased with some casting choices in the newly released Hunger Games movie. And lo, they took to Twitter with a fury.

“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” wrote one. (Okay, you’re racist. And you left out a “k.”) “HOW IN THE WORLD ARE THEY GOING TO MAKE RUE A FREAKIN BLACK BITCH IN THE MOVIE ?!?!?!??!” wondered another. One didn’t mince words (or use them correctly in any way): “Sense when has Rue been a nigger.” (Sidenote: Pretty much all of these teens have since locked or deleted their Twitter accounts—because it’s totally cool to be racist in front of your friends, but the rest of America can be a real drag, bro.)

First of all, I can’t even figure out what race means in the context of a futuristic dystopian vision set in an alternate-reality America where children fight to the death for the amusement of Katy Perry’s wig collection. Like, how do our present stereotypes even apply? Do these kids think Cinna only got into fashion school because of a post-apocalyptic affirmative action program? Do they conceive of 12-year-old Rue as some sort of tiny welfare queen from space? It makes no sense.

Second of all, and more importantly, this is obviously horrifying. But is it really that surprising? Those tweets raise knotty questions about what we see when we read—how our brains conceptualize things that aren’t explicitly dictated, the ways our subconscious is conditioned to fill in the blanks. The characters that these racist garbage-teens are so upset about are either explicitly described as having dark skin (to the point where, while reading, I felt a little weird about the demographics of Panem—did they seriously just make District 11 the black-people district?), or not specified at all. But, of course, if it’s not specified, it must be white.

The ubiquity of whiteness in popular media is so overwhelming that, in the absence of any racial signifiers, I would guess that the majority of white people and a significant number of non-white people automatically assume that characters are white. I know I do. (To be clear: I am a white lady.) I mean, Jesus, the impulse to default to white is so strong that the above child prodigies defaulted to white even when explicitly told not to. (I guess they assumed that “dark skin” meant, uh, dark white. Like George Hamilton or something.) Also, speaking of Jesus and white people, let’s not forget WHITE JESUS. White people’s PR campaign has been so comprehensive, we’ve even managed to make God white—to the point where even black people worship white Jesus! And Jesus was hella not white. Like, at all.

You can see whitewashing in a grillion places—from old chestnuts like black characters always dying first (get out of the way! White people have stuff to do!), to more recent developments like 2011’s HawthoRNe being only the third primetime drama ever to feature a black female lead. Third one ever. In 2011. There’s the fact that if you have more than two black characters in a television show it becomes a “black show.” There was Avatar: The Last Airbender (which I reviewed here), in which M. Night Shyamalan cast white actors in explicitly Asian roles—but only the heroes. The villains were dark-skinned south Asians. Remember the sassy black friend in 2011 rom-com Friends with Benefits? Probably not, because she only exists for like two seconds at the very beginning of the movie to establish that our heroine has an ethnic friend, and then disappears forever. Because that’s enough! Tip o’ the hat to you, black people! You’re welcome! Now quiet down—the white people are talking.

I asked comedian/actor Hari Kondabolu about his experiences auditioning for roles as a non-white person. He said this:

I see how white is the default every time I have to audition for a part and there’s an indicator that the actor can be “any race” or open to any particular look. It’s a reminder that most, if not all, of the other parts are meant for white people. Shouldn’t most parts be open to anyone?

Only in revisionist Shakespeare, you silly goose!

And beyond that, when television shows and films do manage to cast non-white people in significant roles (usually maids or prostitutes, but, you know, baby steps), or create meaningful gay characters, or allow people from non-dominant groups to participate in the conversation in any way, it’s treated like charity. As though inclusion—or even just acknowledgement—is a gift that those groups should be grateful for. Fuck. It’s like expecting people to be grateful for an invitation to their own family reunion.

In 2010, someone suggested that Community treasure [and black person] Donald Glover should be cast as Peter Parker in the forthcoming Spider-Man reboot (the role eventually went to Andrew Garfield). White people went FUCKING BERSERK. Glover received death threats. Just for the idea of him being allowed to audition for a movie version of Spider-Man (a movie that, by the way, already exists with a white actor in the lead role). And just like with Rue and Cinna and Thresh and the racist Twitter-teens, it’s a proprietary thing-if Spider-Man is black, then he isn’t ours anymore. He’s theirs. Waaaaaaaahhh! In MY America, Spider-Man is white! In MY America, I don’t have to worry about non-white people all browning up my young adult fiction movie adaptations! It’s not fair—it’s like this isn’t MY America at all anymore.

Pro tip, fellow white people: It never was.

Additional Reading:

Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed
A Character-by-Character Guide to Race in The Hunger Games
Jezebel’s Full Hunger Games Coverage

Originally published on Jezebel. Republished WITH PERMISSION MOTHERF*CKERS.

Autostraddle Book Club #5: The Hunger Games (Plus Movie Feelings OPEN THREAD)

Tonight at midnight, the Hunger Games movie will open in the US, and be the most important cinematic event since Harry Potter, or Twilight, or ever, depending on how you feel about the books/Jennifer Lawrence. The Hunger Games phenomenon — the books, the movie, the combination book/movie hysteria — and commentary on it are sweeping the internet, and for good reason. I don’t know a single person who’s read The Hunger Games without finishing the whole trilogy in a feverish series of all-nighters and loved it. And a lot of smart people have a lot of smart things to say about both the books and the movie!

The Hunger Games’ heroine, Katniss, is being hailed as “a hard-ass hunter with a talent for butchery who becomes a revolutionary folk hero” who doesn’t need to rely on male characters to solve her problems. Salon says it rejects “chrysalis moments” and Cinderella stories by making it clear that Katniss’s pretty dresses and transformation into a “beauty” are a performance, not her authentic self. Also, possibly it’s also going to solve climate change. So there’s that.

Between the movie and the book and THE MOVIE, we all have a lot of feelings. Perhaps you will have feelings about our feelings, even!  Mostly we just all really like Katniss. I mean, number one feeling, you know?

Laneia

I read The Hunger Games right after I finished Breaking Dawn in 2008, so it’s possible that my expectations had been beaten mercilessly into the ground, but I couldn’t get over how brilliant this book was. It has all the things I want a book to have: imperfect-but-badass female protagonist, personal sacrifice, yelling, crying, suspense, a train, archery and Appalachia. More importantly, it doesn’t have any of the shit I can’t stand: batting eyelashes, helpless females, obsessive emotional dependencies, girl-on-girl hate, diets, shopping, and terminal illnesses. And ok, it’s not like I’m proud to admit this, but I actually kind of liked all the violence? It was fascinating to imagine these children viciously killing each other just to stay alive, and you want Katniss to win obviously, but then that means wanting the other kids to DIE these horrible deaths which is just such a mindfuck!

So excited for the movie that I’m obviously on the verge of a hysterical coma. All Rue all the time.

Crystal

As I write these words there are approximately four hours until I get to watch the Hunger Games movie. I’m super excited but also crazy nervous because I don’t want to be disappointed, if this movie adaptation is shit then it might just break my heart. Anyway. My favorite thing about the Hunger Games is Katniss. Such a tiger.

Liz

As of Wednesday at 10pm I’m only about a third of the way through the second book. By Thursday at 10pm I fully expect to be a third of the way through the third book.

So first off, I feel like it’s impossible not to project yourself in to Katniss’s role. I have to admit, I can’t help but want to be a selfless, brave girl with dozens of admirers. It’s easy to imagine myself gallivanting about the woods; hunting, running, surviving, pointing out dangerous herbs. I mean, if you set aside the fact that I’m completely clumsy and lack any sense of direction. But that aside, who wouldn’t immediately want to be Katniss? I have a sneaking suspicion that brought to life on screen, Katniss’s agility, cunning and skill will be all the more apparent. Plus, Jennifer Lawrence is totally hot.

Still, I’m nervous to see The Hunger Games on screen. Here’s the thing about the first Hunger Games book: there is just a ton of gory violence. I’m really curious to see how they handle that in the movie. On the one hand, the The Game scenes are undeniably exciting. On the other hand, Suzanne Collins does a good job of making the violence seem abhorrent and gross. I see her message as directly linked to the abhorrence of war. I’m worried that in the movie the violence will be too glamorized and the point will be lost. Plus, if the Games aren’t horrific then the whole book doesn’t really make any sense.

Also, Cinna is totally gay, right?

Brittani

Right now books are particularly hard to come by because at any given moment I may be lacking money, identification, or a mailing address so when I was home over Christmas and discovered my sister owned the Hunger Games trilogy, I had no choice but to read all of them in the next three days in a Harry Potterian fashion. Rue is my favorite character for the same reason Obama is my favorite president…because they both love music. Like any good queer starving for representation, I had to ship Katniss and a female character. I chose Madge so obviously I am full of rage that she won’t be in the movie. I’m so legitimately upset that I’m in no rush to see the film because seriously, what the fuck. Her name is almost vadge. No amount of Lenny Kravitz could make up for this grave oversight.

Carolyn

First of all, I found the Hunger Games awesome and still can’t believe it took me as long to start reading them as it did (post-Mockingjay). Second, what makes The Hunger Games so compelling for me is what a reluctant hero Katniss is. She’s such a badass, but she’s not actually interested in being a badass — she just wants to survive, and have enough to eat, and take care of herself and her sister and mother. It’s everyone around her — particularly the people watching at home, who so obviously desperately need any symbol of hope whatsoever — who make her into something else. (Even later in the series, which I am about to be purposefully vague about, she is left out of people’s plans because they recognize that the thing that they’re trying to do is not her thing in and of itself). In fact, Katniss is really just out to survive, which means that she would be hugely unsympathetic if her actions weren’t for Prim (who, especially later on, seems to function as a symbol of her humanity).

But, in her attempts to survive, she becomes a strong independent female hero — not one who functions like an innately good action hero figure, but one that is more complex, and much more interesting.

Laura

T-minus 11 hours until I get to see The Hunger Games. I’m really excited for the movie but I have a small list of concerns because I want it to do justice to the book. The number one thing I’m worried about is how terrifying the movie will be. See, I need it to be really, really dark so that everything makes sense. If the dogs at the cornucopia don’t feel threatening or if President Snow don’t ooze evil, how am I supposed to believe in the characters I loved? Books are something that you read alone, but movies are something you get to experience in a room full of a hundred other people. I want to love it and I want everyone there with me to love it too.

The second thing is Taylor Swift and her feelings. One of the main reasons The Hunger Games was such a good book was that it totally flaunted the expectation that a teenage girl have nothing but boys on her mind. It wasn’t just that Katniss was too preoccupied with feeding her family to care about romance, she actively made the decision to keep people at an arm’s length as a tiny act of rebellion against the Capitol. I guess I’m just hoping that the fact that Taylor Swift has a song featured in the movie doesn’t mean that the whole faux relationship with Peeta gets turned into a bunch of sentimental Twilight nonsense.

My last concern is about how meta this whole thing is. To be honest, it’s really more about me/society more than about the movie itself. So we’ve got this girl who’s being thrust into this horrific voyeuristic “game” where sponsors pay to help the contestants and viewers cheer on their favorites, right? And now we’re making a movie — with all the swag and advertising that comes with it — about it. I know Panem isn’t real, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable when I went to the store yesterday and saw “Hunger Games Capitol Colors” nail polish for sale. Isn’t capitalism weird?

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I just wanted to say that Rue was my favorite character and that I can’t wait to see Cinna’s designs!

Discussion questions for you, dear readers. Both book and movie feelings are welcome here, as well as feelings about the book being a movie.

+ Number one feeling?
+ Number one character?
+ Number one wishful thinking gay character/relationship?
+ What does Katniss’s popularity mean in a post-Bella world?
+ Is there a commentary on violence that we’re supposed to specifically understand?
+ How do you feel about how heterosexual relationships (or the performance of them) are figured?
+ Are you worried about the book-to-movie conversion at all?
+ Why do you think this appeals to so many people? Were you skeptical about liking it before you picked it up?
+ How are you going to make Jennifer Lawrence your girlfriend?

Midweek Video Party: Jennifer Lawrence on Dave, Ellen on Cash Wrap & More

So many funny and strange videos, so little time!

THE HUNGER GAMES

HOW EXCITED ARE YOU ABOUT THE HUNGER GAMES? I have tickets for Friday night. Did you know that Jennifer Lawrence is the greatest thing? I bet you already did know. You guys always know this stuff before I do.

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ELLEN DEGENERES:

Ellen DeGeneres returns to the New Orleans JCPenny store that once employed Ms. DeGeneres. She causes a ruckus and makes me laugh so much that I forgive myself for enjoying a nine-minute commercial:

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KONY 2012

This is a video of Jason Russell speaking at Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University, aka the University of Evil. Queerty’s post about this video was entitled “WATCH: Jason Russell’s Speech At Liberty University Is Gayer Than A Purse Full Of Rainbow-Colored Penisess,” just FYI.

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DANCING WITH THE STARS

Last night world-famous tennis playing lesbian Martina Navratilova, Dancing With the Stars’ first lesbian contestent, did the foxtrot. The judges on this show make me wish I lived in a private sea colony with enough string cheese to feed me for life, so I couldn’t watch that part, I can only imagine how delighted they were to see her in glitter!

Autostraddle Book Club #5: We’re Reading The Hunger Games!

Usually we take a slightly queer-er tack for Autostraddle Book Club; for instance, Dorothy Allison and Eileen Myles come to mind. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly gay about The Hunger Games without doing some serious slashfiction work of your own. But the 2/3 of the editorial team who has read it is obsessed with it, and I feel like the only way I can justify taking the time to read it to myself is to make it about work, so here we are! Seriously though, I don’t think any of us will regret this. Remember how excited Laneia was about the trailer for the movie? I know, right?

Before there was a movie, however, there was a trilogy of books — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay — which every single person I knew was reading but I still didn’t pay attention to because, I don’t know, a lot of people also like Rachael Ray’s show. But it would appear that they are very enjoyable books to read! And unlike a certain other popular book series that has since become a major motion picture, The Hunger Games features a strong female protagonist who, like, makes decisions and stuff. What decisions exactly? I DON’T KNOW. I HAVE TO READ THEM TO FIND OUT. I do not believe they are entirely centered around a dude, though, so that’s cool.

We’ll be reading all three books, which sounds like a lot but from what I hear you will have no problem finishing the whole trilogy over the course of a week. What’s that, you say? You didn’t get the trilogy for Christmahanakwanzakah and you’re not sure whether you want to buy three whole books, even though it seems like a foregone conclusion that you’ll love them? Well, you lucky dog, this is your day, because we are giving away one set of books to a randomly chosen commenter! I have yet to have anyone satisfactorily explain to me why the deadly competition in THG is called a “hunger game” specifically, but it always makes me want a sandwich when I think about it. So, to enter your name into the giveaway, leave a comment on this post explaining what delicious thing you plan on snacking on while reading for book club, and we’ll enter your name into a random drawing to win the trilogy for free! We’ll keep taking comments up until midnight EST on Wednesday (as in, the end of Wednesday and the beginning of Thursday) and announce the winner on Friday. My answer is Hyderabadi Hungama flavor Masala Munchies. What about you?

After we all have our books and have read them like the bright-eyed chipper little fans that we are, having been prepared for this opportunity by years of intense Harry Potter devotion, we will reconvene here in the last week of March to share our feelings. Does that sound good? Good! Go forth and comment, and then later read! May the odds be ever in your favor! I saw that on the Internet somewhere!

Reading Rainbow 2012: The Things We’re Finally Actually Going To Read This Year

2012 is the year of moving forward without everything that’s holding us back. But sometimes it’s worth looking at whether it’s ourselves holding us back, or at least our reticence to pick up the copy of that book that we borrowed from our best friend or mom or ex and have kept on the coffee table for eight months and really are going to read one of these days. You know what I mean — like the copy of Anna Karenina or The Woman Warrior that you’ve kept through like three different moves but still never opened? Well hey, it’s a new year, and we’re all still bright-eyed and optimistic and the hangover is mostly gone, so why not make it today? Or at least one of the coming 365 days in 2012?  We looked deep inside ourselves in a very honest and searching way, and came up with the books we’ve been meaning to read and are finally going to take the plunge on, or finish the very extended plunge on, depending. Here are our choices. What are you going to read in 2012?

Rachel, Senior Editor

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Once Upon a River: A Novel

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Gravity’s Rainbow

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 Lucky Girls: Stories

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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Carmen, Contributing Editor

Inferno (A Poet’s Novel)

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Mad About Madeline

Crystal, Music Editor

One Hundred Years of Solitude

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The Town and the City

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Freedom

Laura, Contributing Editor

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future

Laneia, Executive Editor

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Riese, Editor in Chief

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Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

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No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

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This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

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The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

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Glory Goes and Gets Some: Stories