I reread Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh for the first time in, like, almost thirty years. This came about because I read a review of a new biography of the author which talked about her life as a queer woman midcentury--her various partnerships intellectual and domestic--and it's really one of those things where once you've seen something in a ( Read more... )

 I wrote a long post on FB inspired by a conversation from a friend who recently rewatched the DS9 ep "Far Beyond the Stars" and was under the impression that its portrayal of SFF publishing practices was accurate. So:

Cait rants about the erasure of science fiction history:

One of my problems with the current resistance to canon-formation and its ( Read more... )

 Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.

Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent ( Read more... )

 Incomplete thoughts on pop culture consumption and spoiler anxiety--and keep in mind this comes from a Gemini, so I'm going back and forth on this a lot.

One of the big papers--prob the NYT--had a piece yesterday about how everyone watching Game of Thrones talked about it on social media while watching or immediately afterwards, as if this was a ( Read more... )

 Prompted by recently reading somewhere negative commentary on the Wonder Woman film because her power was love and compassion. Also ass-kicking, but also love. And right now I'm rereading Tamora Pierce's Alanna books and reading for the first time her Protector of the Small books, all of which involve girls wanting to be knights and performing ( Read more... )

Last month I was invited to write a brief essay as part of an online discussion of fan texts by various scholars. There's going to be one such post a day for the next two weeks, so you guys should go check them out. :)

Crossposted at MediaCommons:

Fandom Beyond: Reconsidering Genre and Fan History


( Read more... )

My essay was just posted at PopMatters as part of their Star Trek issue:

The Continuing Voyages
'Star Trek' Reboot Fandom and 'Prime Universe' Canon

BY CAIT COKER

28 September 2016


( Read more... )

There's an increasing pushback against slash in acafandom that I have mixed and, increasingly, uncomfortable feelings about. On the one hand, I totally get the comments about how slash valorizes white male cis-bodies at the expense of, uh, pretty much everything else, and how it acts as a misognizing and internalized misogyny factor. But there's ( Read more... )

So a few weeks ago I was in the audience as a panel of writers spoke, and one of them made a grumbly comment about reviewers and critics which has been in my mind ever since, so I thought I'd write a bit about it ( Read more... )

I wrote this on Facebook, but thought I'd share here:

In one of the Nimoy remembrance threads on my wall there's a discussion about TOS and hope, and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit more. I was at a con a number of years ago and someone in the audience said something like "of course TOS was optimistic, things were easier back then," and a ( Read more... )