Episode 8: SF Trans representation (GUEST: Cheryl Morgan)

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This week’s episode is our first look at the work of the Wachowski sisters – Lilly and Lana – who are the most prolific SF creators on the WMSF list with their work expanding across several platforms. We watched Jupiter Ascending (Wachowskis) – our first screening since September – and are avid fans of Sense8. We are joined this week by our SPECIAL GUEST science fiction critic, writer, editor, and publisher Cheryl Morgan who has some fascinating insights into their work and trans representation across different forms of SF. After a run of fairly serious space and science/fiction films we wanted to watch some pure space opera – but this is a Wachowski storyworld so it was never going to be that simple…

@WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSFPod

Intro/Outro music: Inspire Glitches (2017) by Yuriy Shishlov (CC-BY-NC-SA)

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MENTIONS

• Cheryl Morgan cheryl-morgan.com
• Wizard’s Tower Press wizardstowerpress.com
• The Decade that Women Won – Cheryl Morgan writing for Vector
• Changing Images of Trans People in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature – Cheryl’s paper for ICFA in 2010 – excellent introduction
• Apologies to Lana and Lilly if we have mispronounced your family name
• Review for The Bad Batch (2016)
• We have now included all of the Wachowski’s SF on the #WomenMakeSF watchlist
• The Matrix is a trans narrative
• Tank Girl (Talalay, 1995)
• Sense8 (2015-2018)
• Sean BEE-an (we missed Cheryl’s excellent pun 🐝)
• The Theory of Everything (Marsh, 2014) – starring Eddie Redmayne (Balem Abrasax)
• Cripface, cripping up 
• Apologies to Rachel Talalay if we have also mangled your name
• Chimera – genetic chimera (the splices in Jupiter Ascending)
• Tuppence Middleton (Kalique Abrasax)
• Drive (Refn, 2015) – starring Ryan Gosling
• Gugu Mbatha-Raw (deer lady/Famulus)
• Also apologising for missing Cheryl’s reference to Pygar (John Phillip Law) from Barbarella (Vadim, 1968). Gutted I missed a chance to also discuss Barbarella as inspiration for Jupiter Ascending 
• Like the Abrasax family, Altered Carbon (2018-2020, created by Laeta Kalogridis) includes an elite who have lived for multiple lifespans called Meths (a reference to the Biblical figure Methusela)
• The world is saved by a floppy disk on Buffy The Vampire Slayer (it contains Jenni Calendar’s transcription of the Ritual of Restoration). They don’t use it to reboot the world. Becoming Parts 1&2, S2: Ep21&22
• Soylent Green (Fleischer, 1973) 
• Prior to oestrogen being commercially synthesised for use by transwomen Premarin was used a (complex of conjugated equine estrogens) it was and is still made with PREgnant MARes’ urine
• PETA article on Premarin
• The youth serum produced by Abrasax Industries is called RegeneX. It is used by used by the Entitled  to extend their lifespans. It comes from harvesting human populations.
• Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey mono-myth The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
• In Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon novels the AI hotel is not Edgar Alan Poe. In Kalogridis’ adaptation The Hendrix and its servile woman host (AI generated to be what the user wants) become The Raven and Poe. He is not was Kovac wants but he is what the audience needs. “We always knew that we wanted to have that because it was just so gloriously weird” – Laeta Kalogridis
• Silent Running (Trumbo, 1973)
• Damaged white masculinity films of the late 1990s/early 2000s: Magnolia, Se7en, Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space
• If you are interested in gender and computer sciences take a look at Mar Hicks’ exceptional (and affordable) Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
• Pat Cadigan @Cadigan
• The Matrix is a powerful metaphor for the trans experience
• Lilly Wachowski on THE MATRIX’s Switch as a Trans Character
• Deadnaming
• Amy’s paper on The Exorcist (free to read for everyone)
• James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) ‘The girl who was plugged in’ (1973).
• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
• “There’s a critical eye being cast back on Lana and I’s work through the lens of our transness. This is a cool thing because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static. And while the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.” Lilly Wachowski accepting a GLAAD Award with her sister in 2016
• Kathleen Stock
• Galaxy Quest (Parisot, 1999)
• Sense8 (Lana Wachowski, J. Michael Straczynski, Lilly Wachowski, 2015-2018)
• ‘Sense8 and the failure of global imagination’, NerdsOfColour.Org
• The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women’s health
• Promising Young Women (Fennell, 2020)
• Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (Feder, 2020)
• Video advert for Disclosure with Lilly Wachowski and Jamie Clayton (Nomi in Sense8)

“I was participating in writing a character who I had aspirations to become.”

DISCLOSURE’s Lilly Wachowski looks back on writing Nomi and coming out to Jamie Clayton on the set of SENSE8 pic.twitter.com/CpHZ9vFogZ

— NetflixFilm (@NetflixFilm) October 12, 2020

• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018- )
• Nimona (webcomic/graphic novel, Stevenson, 2012/2015)
• Noelle Stevenson @Gingerhazing
• ‘She-Ra’: Noelle Stevenson on Making Her Lead Character Gay and Inspiring a Generation, IndieWire
• Amy went to a Manchester School of Art Research Centre (MSARC) lecture by Deborah Shaw (not Dolores Tierney – both Shaw and Tierney work on Latin American cinema) and Rob Stone who are the editors of the forthcoming edited collection: Sense8: Transcending Television (Bloomsbury, 2020).
• Read Amy’s tweet thread on the talk about Sense8 given by Shaw and Stone
• Stephanie L. Young and Art Herbig (2020) “I Am Also a We”: Exploring Queer Worldmaking in Sense8. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7(2): 69-93 https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.2.0069
• Mr Whispers (Milton Bailey Brandt) is a reference to sexologists Ray Milton Blanchard and a recent exponent of his work J. Michael Bailey https://sense8.fandom.com/wiki/Whispers
• Recommend not reading the work of Blanchard (he doesn’t need the clicks), but Julia Serano (http://www.juliaserano.com/) has written both academic peer-reviewed responses and more accessible public articles on Blanchard and Autogynephilia Debates.
• Oodles of white-male-doctor privilege
• Interested in science, science history and discussions of science and power? Subscribe to Audra J. Wolfe’s Never Just Science https://audrajwolfe.com/never-just-science/
• FYI Science is political.
• J. Michael Straczynski @straczynski writer/creator of Sense8 and “creator of the best science fiction tv show ever made” (which is of course Babylon 5, 1993-1998)
• Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series, Tor.com