I had a chance to chat with James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg, on Bloggingheads.

It was a fun, rambling discussion, which Bloggingheads’ editors helpfully broke down into the following tracks:

Cataloging stuff white people like before it was cool (02:30)
The hidden meaning of zombies (03:39)
The ever-changing apocalypse (04:29)
A puzzle about culture analysis (02:08)
Is science fiction gaining cultural market share? (03:09)
The posthuman in pop culture (10:36)

Click through for these cigarette-break length pieces, or watch the whole thing.

A couple weeks ago, I published an essay on io9 about how James Cameron’s new science fiction epic Avatar is a movie about white guilt. It was called “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?” Here’s an excerpt:

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America’s foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California’s redwood cathedrals and Brazil’s tropical rainforest. The moon’s inhabitants, the Na’vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we’ve seen in Hollywood movies for decades . . .

[Avatar and movies like it are] about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

This is a topic I’ve been interested in for most of my adult life. A large chunk of my book, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, deals with race and fantasy movies; and I co-edited a collection of essays way back in the late 1990s called White Trash: Race and Class in America. At the time we published that essay collection, my co-editor Matt Wray and I were stunned at how passionately people responded to the idea of talking about whiteness in pop culture – it was as if we’d crossed a line, and some were thrilled that we’d done it while others wanted us to stop spilling white people’s darkest secrets.

Based on those experiences I should have been prepared for my post on Avatar to elicit a similarly intense response, but I wasn’t. The post wound up sparking a much bigger debate than I’d anticipated: It was covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and countless other blogs and Livejournals. I’ve also gotten a ton of email about it, mostly positive. However, it has also sparked a lot of wrath.

One of the biggest objections people have to the article is that I’ve proposed to analyze Avatar at all. “Why can’t you just enjoy it for what it is?” I’ve been asked. Or I’ve been scolded, “You’re just reading into it whatever you want to see.” Josh Wimmer (AKA Moff) wrote a great rejoinder to comments like this, which Racialicious picked up and dubbed Moff’s Law. Here’s an excerpt:

First of all, when we analyze art, when we look for deeper meaning in it, we are enjoying it for what it is. Because that is one of the things about art, be it highbrow, lowbrow, mainstream, or avant-garde: Some sort of thought went into its making — even if the thought was, “I’m going to do this as thoughtlessly as possible”! — and as a result, some sort of thought can be gotten from its reception. That is why, among other things, artists (including, for instance, James Cameron) really like to talk about their work . . . Finally, this should also go without saying, but since it apparently doesn’t: Believe me, the person who is annoying you so much by thinking about the art? They have already considered your revolutionary “just enjoy it” strategy, because it is not actually revolutionary at all. It is the default state for most of humanity.

So when you go out of your way to suggest that people should be thinking less — that not using one’s capacity for reason is an admirable position to take, and one that should be actively advocated — you are not saying anything particularly intelligent. And unless you live on a parallel version of Earth where too many people are thinking too deeply and critically about the world around them and what’s going on in their own heads, you’re not helping anything; on the contrary, you’re acting as an advocate for entropy.

Pretty much my response to this criticism too. I’m not demanding that people analyze everything, and I expect the same courtesy. Which is to say: Don’t demand that I not analyze.

The other major criticism I got was that the film wasn’t about race, but instead about the hero’s journey or self-discovery or something much broader. I got a chance to have a pretty interesting debate about this with Dan Trachtenberg on Dave Chen’s /Filmcast After Dark podcast, and if you’re interested you can listen in here. My basic point was that a film can be about many different things at once. Saying that the movie is about heroism or environmentalism does not invalidate my reading. Moreover, there are a lot of good reasons to consider this film in the context of race, not the least of which is the fact that every Na’vi character is played by a person of color and they are designed explicitly to look like stereotypical American aboriginals. Moreover, their forest looks very much like pre-industrial America, and the threat posed by the humans seems at every juncture to mirror the threat that Europeans posed to the peoples of America 500 years ago. Cameron himself has said the aliens were based on “a melange of indigenous cultures,” in a recent Studio 360 interview:

Well they’re actually a melange of indigenous cultures, we looked at indigenous cultures in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in Africa, in America–I think giving them bows and arrows probably places them in most people’s minds, you know, in your Native American sort of cultural niche. But in fact there are lots of cultures around the world that use bows and arrows, it’s a common first technology for hunting.

Ultimately I’m pleased to have helped kick-start a debate about whether Avatar has something to tell us about racial identity in the United States. How does our pop culture allow us to work through historical traumas – or to recast them in ways that are perversely pleasurable? I wanted to get people thinking and talking about this movie on a level that went beyond “wow, great special effects.” And I’m glad so many people wanted to join me in that conversation.

Now you can see my (slightly melodramatic) comments from the “Future of the Book” panel a few weeks ago at the Mechanics Institute. Here are my opening comments on why I have always considered reading to be something one does with computers. Also, I get in a dig at Facebook.

Yes, I actually used the word “fascist” in this speech, which I rarely do – but you have to understand the context, which is that our moderator had begun the conversation by talking about how e-books were basically like Nazis burning books. You can hear his comments here. And if you want to hear what everybody on the panel had to say, check out the Examiner’s report on the event.

I am honored and excited to be a part of a panel this Thursday night at the legendary Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area, this is a great chance to come check out this incredibly cool space, as well as listen to great speakers addressing an issue that’s near to a lot of book geeks’ hearts: “Is The Book Dead?”

Here are the details, from the Library:

Thursday, December 3, 2009 2^nd floor Mechanics Institute Library, 6:30 PM (doors at 5:30)

LOCATION: Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco

Panel: Is the Book Dead? High-Tech and the Written Word

Join us for our bi-annual Members Meeting followed by a dynamic discussion on the future of the written word, with local literary celebrities, who will debate the future of books, newspapers and printed media with the surge of the internet and merging technologies.

Moderated by Alan Kaufman, author of Matches and Jew Boy; and editor The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Panelists: Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), author of The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, A Series of Unfortunate Events, a series of popular children’s’ books. Brenda Knight, Associate Publisher, Cleis Press & Viva Editions   John McMurtrie, Book Editor, San Francisco Chronicle Annalee Newitz, former culture editor at The San Francisco Bay Guardian and syndicated columnist of Techsploitation. Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, and Dreaming in Code. Oscar Villalon, is a publisher at McSweeney’s literary journal, and the former Book Editor, San Francisco Chronicle.

So I finished my first novel last week. Which is to say, I finished the first draft of my first novel, and therefore I am not truly finished. I’ve decided to take a break from it for a few weeks and work on some short stories that I hope will turn into my second novel if I like them well enough. Of course maybe this is all just procrastination, since I am dreading plunging into the revision – partly because there is currently a major plothole in the backstory for one of my main characters. No matter how I fill in that hole I’m going to lose a detail about her history that I like.

Also, I have yet to come up with a snazzy way to sum up the novel. Currently I tell people this:

It’s your basic ninja vs. pirate story, set 150 years in the future. Also, there is a lot of robot sex.

This is not untrue, though it does gloss over pretty much all of the science and politics in the novel. But those are so hard to describe in an elevator pitch!

I am optimistic that somewhere in between drafts two and three, I will hone the perfect, sexy/accurate pitch for my novel. In the meantime, I need to get cracking on those short stories.

In other news, I posted a deceptively light rant about male nudity in science fiction on io9 – there is actually some crunchy thought in there, below the flexed abs. And I posted a deceptively heavy contemplation of the Darko Mythos, since Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly’s latest film, The Box, opened last weekend. And I reported on a new genomics discovery that could potentially lead to talking chimps.

I’m also preparing to head down to Irvine, the city where I grew up, for a futurism conference in December called The Bio-Politics of Popular Culture. I’ll be giving a talk there called “Will Mind-Controlled, Genetically-Engineered Sexbots Want to Play Videogames?” Which is just a fancy way of asking how biotechnologies will transform the way we consume pop culture devoted to sex and violence (my two favorite flavors). More on that conference as things develop.

Just got back from the literary SF/F event World Fantasy Con in San Jose. I had a great time, and got to moderate a panel about notable books from the last year.

I also, randomly, wrote a poem about it. This whole writing poetry thing has happened to me all my life. I just can’t seem to stop doing it.

For a Fanboy

your awkward charm
which involves a half-ironic use of anachronistic colloquialisms
reminds me of the way ruffled skirts sound when they are lifted
to reveal not just the warm, young legs of a steampunk cosplayer
but also a true and ugly history

beneath your lovely, confused face
beating in the muscles of your arms
swarming through your heart like remote-controlled molecular motors
there is something
speaking silently to me

it hovers between being real and being what I want
which is why desire
is really a form of storytelling
doomed to represent truth
by reporting what is there, only clothed in the sounds of demons

Law nerd David Levine just had me on his podcast, Hearsay Culture, to chat about all kinds of things, including female geeks vs. male geeks. I had a lot of fun chatting with him. You can listen to the podcast here. I wound up being fairly rambly in places, and made judicious use of the fine word “um,” but I was excited to get a chance to talk about my theory of why hacker culture is so macho. And why female geeks worry so much about looking feminine – or not.

Last weekend’s awesome festival of sex nerdery, Arse Elektronika, was captured on video at the PariSoma coworking space, where people were delivering papers on everything from transhumanist sex to inter-species love.

Check out the full video stream here. I gave a paper on the future of love, which you can see in the video below, if you skip to about 1:44.

Last week I spent a lot of time thinking about transgression, which means it was an ordinary week except for one thing. I got to consume one of those rare treats: A movie that actually shocked me. I’m speaking, of course, of the sadly overhyped new indie horror flick Paranormal Activity. I say “sadly overhyped” because the worst thing you can do to a genuinely terrifying movie (or book, or TV show) is to blast people with a zillion ads about how IT WILL REALLY SCARE YOU. Unfortunately the more you get amped up to be scared, the less scared you’ll be.

I had extremely low expectations about Paranormal Activity going in, and that probably helped me enjoy the movie so much. It was genuinely one of the most terrifying movies I’ve seen since 28 Days Later, and for many of the same reasons. Like 28 Days, Paranormal Activity is about how terrifying human relationships can be – the monsters are basically literalizations of the horrific ways people treat each other.

Check out my review of the movie on io9, where I go into more detail about how Paranormal Activity works as a horror movie about dysfunctional relationships. Also check the movie out – not just to be scared, but to watch a horror movie done right.

I also wrote a rather long essay about dragon sex in science fiction and fantasy. This is a topic I have thought way too much about, but not as much as legions of Pern fans who have endless debates over why Pern’s military is packed with gay guys having lots of psychic dragon sex. You think I’m kidding? Read my post.

This is the third year in a row that I’m participating in the sexual futurism conference called Arse Elektronika. You can come out to the Thursday night opening ceremonies at the Roxie Theater to see a lot of crazy, awesome entertainment, including me talking about gay porn mashups from Japan. And I’m also giving a paper on Saturday at 3 PM on the future of romantic love (yes, it has a future). Check out the full Saturday schedule (venue is PariSoMa), which includes appearances from luminaries like R.U. Sirius, Violet Blue, and Kyle Machulis, here. Hope to see you there!