The breaking of taboos is really the core of what Elefsis is, and why it relates so powerfully to Haraway’s cyborg: Elefsis is essentially transgressive in almost every important respect. Every aspect of its existence is the violation of a rule. This, for Haraway, is a great deal of what a cyborg is: a total overturning of an established order of meaning, understanding, and identity. Cyborgs are transgressive; that’s why they’re so powerful:

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination– in order to act potently.

For Haraway and Valente both, this transgression is not something that is consciously done – it’s merely an artifact of something being what it is.

For cyborgs the only verb that matters is to be.

Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in the days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all: self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position.

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At last Ixchel sat back to admire the complex layout she'd made, sipping speculatively at her tea. "You're a strange one, Adam Yuga," she murmured. "In your bones and in your starshine. You Protectorate... all those little bits and bobbles you put in your poor burdened cells. Muffles the dance, perfect. Enhancements. Fixing up your code and yourselves. It's unnatural."

She reached out, caressing one pad set to the side. "Kisin, the death star. It always shows itself when I'm reading Protectorate. You're so manufactured, the stars can't divine the difference between you and a brick."

"I’m not a brick," Adam said, self-consciously running his hands up his forearms.

"No," Ixchel said, barking a laugh. "Delta Orionis, the Orion stars, the strength of a man and his muscle, his core..." She trailed off, watching him squirm. "Sitting in the position of love and what goes with loving. No ladies for you, Yuga? No wives waiting for you back home?"

A flush crept into Adam's face, though he tried to push it back. "I don't know what you're—"

"Oh, line and orbit," said Ixchel, lifting her hands. "All that worry and that fear, perfect. And the Protectorate think themselves so advanced. It is a good thing that you mutilate your code the way you do, tacking years onto the end of your life, for you surely cut it short with all that care for breeding."

"Our ways aren’t—"

"Your ways are not natural, child," she said, and she sounded suddenly tired and sad. "So much pain, you know," she said, gesturing the pads. "None of our own carry burdens the way that you do. It is... unfortunate to see it in you."

Adam huffed a dry laugh. "It hasn't been an easy few months."

"It’s more than a few months," Ixchel murmured. “It’s a lifetime inside the bubble of perfection. We’re messy creatures, and perfection doesn't sit well with us. We're all red and cluttered on the inside.”

She reached across the table and laid her hand on his. "Tell me, Adam Yuga, of your perfect bubble or Ashwina's rambling old hull, which feels more like home?" She squeezed his wrist before he could answer. "Think on it, child, before you come to an answer. You might be surprised."

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As the clock struck midnight at Monday’s legislative session, the state Senate and House passed a balanced operating budget but failed to pass a bill that would generate enough revenue for the state.

Many state lawmakers called it a “doomsday” budget because of the severe expected cuts to health care and education if a special session isn’t called; higher education overall could see a $63 million cut, and the system could receive $50 million less in state funding, according to university lobbyist Ross Stern.

“We’re clearly upset and very concerned about the budget as passed; the only way to solve that is for a special session to occur,” system lobbyist P.J. Hogan said. “I think everything will be on the table from significant tuition increases to reduction of student services, larger class sizes, probably fewer sections; it’s going to be painful one way or another.”

Although the large reductions are in place, the House and Senate passed a capital budget — which is the money that funds construction and planning projects — that includes millions of dollars in funding to this university, affording the university all of the projects they requested from the governor.

“Everything got through that we wanted,” Stern said. “We’re very excited and happy about that.”

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Let no one grieve being poor,
for the universal reign has been revealed.

Let no one lament persistent failings,
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death,
for the death of our Saviour has set us free.

--The Easter Sermon of John Chrysostom

Far from being easily deceived, women were the first to make the connection between Christ’s teachings from Scripture and his resurrection, and the first to believe these teachings when they mattered the most. For her valor in twice sharing the good news to the skeptical male disciples, the early church honored Mary Magdalene with the title of Apostle to the Apostles.

That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered.

And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation of Christians and shouting, “He is risen!” to a chorused response of “He is risen indeed!”

Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that honor would always belong to a woman.

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And here I am, still alive, still in the world. It’s my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die. At Easter I’ll go to Glasgow and see what science fiction fandom is like. Next June I’ll take my exams and pass them, and have qualifications. Then I’ll do A Levels, as it best works out. I’ll go to university. I’ll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to. I’ll grow and change and be myself. I’ll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I’ll belong to libraries on other planets. I’ll speak to fairies as I see them and do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm — I’m not going to forget anything. But I won’t use it to cheat or to make my life unreal or go against the pattern. Things will happen that I can’t imagine. I’ll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past. I’ll be alive. I’ll be me. I’ll be reading my book. I’ll never drown my books or break my staff. I’ll learn while I live. Eventually, I’ll come to death, and die and I’ll go on through whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they die. I’ll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

That’s what life is, and how I intend to live it.

--Jo Walton, Among Others

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1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current wip.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences – and post them as they’re written.

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As an Arab-American writing fantasy fiction, I’ve been asked more than once whether fantasy’s race problem is in a better place now in the Age of Martin than it was in the Age of Tolkien. My short answer is yes, but honestly, I think such questions are almost beside the point.

Ultimately, A Song of Ice and Fire, like the Lord of the Rings, is the work of a brilliant and conscientious writer who is nonetheless writing in his own time and place. The United States in 2012 is, far too often, and even with a black president, still a culture rich in racist stereotypes and xenophobic fear-mongering. Expecting a writer to remain entirely unstained by this is expecting a person to live underwater without getting wet. If we still find troubling racial assumptions and caricatures in fantasy – whether on the page, or on the big or small screen — this probably tells us more about our culture-wide problems than it does about a single writer’s, or a single show’s issues. A Song of Ice and Fire is indeed our American Lord of the Rings, and if Westeros has its race problems, they are simply a powerful reflection of America’s.

In addition to offering object lessons in bad reading comprehension, Hunger Games Tweets—there are now more than two hundred up on the blog—illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The a-hundred-and-forty-character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be. (“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” wrote @JashperParas, who amended his tweet with the hashtag #ihatemyself.) They also beg the question: If the stories we tell ourselves about the future, however disturbing, don’t include black people; if readers of “The Hunger Games” are so blind as to skip over the author’s specific details and themes of appearance, race, and class, then what does it say about the stories we tell ourselves regarding the present?

...Perhaps the most telling: “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture,” she wrote. She cc’ed a friend on the tweet, @EganMcCoy.

“That tweet was very telling, in terms of a mentality that is probably very widespread,” says Adam, speaking softly from his office high above Toronto’s downtown financial district. He doesn’t sound angry, but he also isn’t amused. The phrases “some black girl” and “little blonde innocent girl” are ringing in my head as he talks, as are thoughts about how the heroes in our imaginations are white until proven otherwise, a variation on the principle of innocent until proven guilty that, for so many minorities, is routinely upended.

Adam tells me that, on the post featuring a screenshot of Alana’s tweet, he added, “Remember that word innocent? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.”

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Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.

Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it's exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.

Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.

...The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?

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Before being escorted off the House floor for violating dress code rules, Rep. Rush called for an end to racial profiling and said that Luke 4:18 teaches us that “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”

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I have been getting pretty visceral lately with my anger and it comes up in strange ways, hot wide surges of fury as unthwartable as magma, and I don't always like it either but what else do you do. The older I get the fewer fucks I give. These days I am an open wound, a walking gash--oh, do you see what I did there--a woman whose anger radiates outward like a heat haze. I am angry about a lot more than Jonathan Franzen--I am an ace at anger, a real multitasker of fury. I am large, I contain multitudes. I have energy to spare, believe me, I have energy to fire up a nuclear bomb. I can be angry about so many things at once, I can be angry about the big things and the little ones, the massive injustice of Trayvon Martin and the gnat that is Jonathan Franzen's opinions, I can be angry about the abortion ban that just passed in Mississippi and the books that are being banned in Arizona, and I am not in any way saying that these things are the same things, that they are weighted equally, but we have to live with all of them, and here's the thing. Nobody, but nobody, gets to tell me what to be angry about. What it is and is not okay to be angry about. I think you know how to be angry about a lot of things, too. I think you know anger is not a pie: there is always more to go around. Let us never be less inventive than the people who hate us, do you understand? Our thoughts be bloody or nothing fucking worth.

I don't know how to do anything else other than be angry and if I had the answer I would give it to you, believe me, if I had the secret, the secret that would make it okay, the secret that would make sense of all this shit, I would give it to you, but I don't have that. What I have is rage and also maybe some love. Love for the warriors, the fools, the people who are also crazy, the people who are giving up but never, ever giving in. Fucking Cool Hand Luke, all of us. We're not going to win but we'll die trying. And I am telling you that if you are fighting I love you, if you are standing up I love you, if you are refusing to back down I love you, and we will find each other, we will. I promise. I can't tell you how to make sense of it but I can tell you there are more of us than you think. What I am saying, really, is that I want you to be angry, all of you, I want you to be angrier than you have ever been in your lives, I want you to be a fucking beacon of white-hot rage burning so bright no one around you can miss it. Whatever it takes to stoke the fire. I want us to be so loud and so angry and so visible and so terrifying that we cannot be mistaken for anything other than the future, a future that looks like us. In all our kinds of bodies, in all our kinds of love. Waiting for the time when none of us are angry anymore because the only thing left is the world we want to live in. When the hardest thing any of us will know is teaching ourselves how to live without anger altogether.

Until then: whatever it takes and fucking fight.

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In fact, this is precisely the problem that empowers the Mike Daisey's and Tom MacMaster's to get creative: because reality won't cut it, isn't outrageous enough, we must sex up the story for it to get any traction, and it must get traction, it MUST. Children literally working their fingers to the bone? That's outrageous. But children who grow up into a world of endless toil, one that offers little human dignity or hope of self-realization but only metaphorically "works their fingers to the bone" will produce little outrage. That's normal, our normal. Yawn. And that "yawn" at what is and should be maddeningly outrageous is not even a new problem: Upton Sinclair thought that when people read The Jungle, they would get upset about the capitalism, about the working conditions, about the crushing and cruel exploitation. In fact, people got upset about the thought that there was rat shit in their food.

Beyond the narcissism, this is where the lies come from, and where the belief comes from that a lie is true, must be. The truth is not enough, these people think; I have to tell the story that will get results, results that will testify to their deeper truth.

But the deeper problem, I think, is that telling stories is the only way these people can conceptualize getting results. And because appealing to the public sphere to be scandalized and to demand reforms is the only kind of result they can envision - because this is how they imagine justice works - the story will inevitably become what it needs to be to appeal to that kind of conscience, whatever will appeal to that sense of the public's fickle taste. No one in the West will care about the reality of Syrian repression, thinks Tom MacMaster; I need to invent an Angelic White Victim to speak in place of those whose stories are not, as such, sufficiently compelling to compel action can only speak and be unheard.

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