The Next Big Thing: New Girl Law

Caroline Picard, my friend and publisher (of Hip Hop Apsara), has been working on a novel for a while called Death of An Animatronic Band, which you can read about (and see video based on!) in her Next Big Thing interview here. The Next Big Thing is an ever-unfolding series of self-interviews (Caroline had been tapped by Mairead Case, and you can follow the chain backwards to discover a pretty diverse and amazing wealth of upcoming books and projects), so I’ve used the opportunity to clarify some things about my pending book New Girl Law, and asked MariNaomi and Melissa Gira Grant to write about their upcoming projects next.

What is the working title of your book?

The book’s called New Girl Law: Drafting a Future for Cambodia. It’s probably too late to change it, since the book comes out at the end of the month (March 31!), and it’s already been printed, so I expect this title will stay. If I wanted to change it at this point I’d probably have to do a mass recall from the distributor and buy a shit-ton of Sharpies, which is the kind of thing I would have been willing to do twenty years ago and now couldn’t possibly make time for.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I spent several years travelling to and doing work in Cambodia around women’s issues—freedom of expression, labor—it’s a very intense place. I’ve talked about it in interviews quite a bit here, here, here, here, and here. I kept a blog while I was there called Camblogdia, and it was quite popular. Then sometime during these years I published a short-run print version of some of the blog posts that together formed a cohesive narrative. This was on a press I started, Pressing Concern, that very very occasionally publishes material relevant to global women’s issues. That little booklet got some attention, and Cantankerous Titles offered to published a more fleshed out version called Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, and I agreed to a four-book series, only the first two of which were under immediate contract. So New Girl Law is the second in this series. The first one talked about the zines we all made together, and what it was like to teach zines in a culture that doesn’t really value women’s public participation, or literacy, or media. This one is about some deeper issues that impact traditional American notions of freedom, and how truly difficult transnational gender issues can be. That’s an incredibly hard thing to write about, but when you stumble across a good way to address it, I think you owe it to folks to try.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s creative non-fiction, in the memoir/journalistic mode. I don’t really do any writing that isn’t, basically, creative non-fiction. But it is interesting, with this book, that I had to lean more toward “creative” than “non-fiction” for a couple reasons: first, to protect the young Khmer women I wrote about. And second, to more accurately tell a story that hinges on various acts of censorship and self-censorship. Because—and this will make more sense if you’ve read the book—there’s information I just didn’t have access to, like why censorship happens, so I had to find creative ways of presenting options for why it happens to the reader. The truth is that folks who aim to silence rarely articulate why. That is what real censorship is about: not needing to explain silence, just to enforce it. A book, however, requires a why, or at least a series of maybe becauses. It was a challenge to do, as someone who values the tenets of journalism and the notion of truth quite a bit.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh man, I know a lot of people are tired of this question, but for me it’s a really exciting prospect, because there’s only one white American in the story, and obviously that would be played by Anne Hathaway, or Anne Heche, or Ann Magnuson, or Anne Bancroft, because of realism. Or, to get conceptual on you, maybe Quvenzhane Wallis, who by the time this film would be cast, is likely to really have gotten her young mind around the concept of playing people named Anne, plus is awesome, and only an idiot would not put her on the short list to play them in a movie, even if the skin tones and ages and heights don’t match up. Anyway, it’s acting. She could do it. But everyone else—32 young Cambodian women—that’s a wide-open field. So we’d go to Cambodia, do an open casting call, bring in a couple seasoned actresses there maybe, but really provide young women who have few job options besides the garment and sex industries an interesting opportunity. For the most part we’d be starting from scratch, but Cambodia used to have a really thriving film industry before the Khmer Rouge. What a great excuse to help foster and strengthen a revival: a film about a group of young women just getting comfortable but still meeting barriers while making their own media in an emerging democracy. Probably the biggest question, really, would be which emerging female Cambodian director would I hire to run the thing? I’m happy to start looking at CVs now, in case the funding gets dropped in my lap.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A group of young women in Cambodia create an imaginary set of policy for a country they love, while grappling with the very real conditions of uneven economic and social development. Plus giggling. Two sentences, sorry; I am pretty good at math.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

On this series, I’ve been working with Cantankerous Titles, an independent publisher in the Pacific Northwest, so I don’t have to go either route. They’re a small enough team and we go back far enough in history that we have a flexibility usually only available to self-publishers, but don’t have to bring an agent in to siphon off dollars from a budget. I like agents, for sure, and am bummed that modern publishing seems more and more to leave them out of the publishing equation, but this work is really intersectional—gender and race and international politics and economic factors and and and and and—and in a publishing world dominated by BS like Lean In, what I do takes more than the easy sales pitch. I find agents make projects with the easy sales pitch work better. Self publishing is great when you want to test out ideas or communicate directly to an established group of people—especially those without economic means. And small-press publishing has historically been best suited to teasing out complex political issues.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Well the very first draft took a year, because it was kept as a journal during the year-long course of events that I describe in the book. But then I transcribed interviews with some of the young women I worked with, to allow them to tell heir own stories, and that took some time. And shaping it all into the structure it eventually became took a few months as well.

But then something happened.

The publisher of Cambodian Grrrl (and now, New Girl Law) started getting some flak from some self-proclaimed young feminists in the field of independent publishing who adopted what they called the riot grrrl tradition. Working from a long-ago rumor that I haven’t been able to verify—so I’m not sure how anyone else would—they decided to ban him from an event in supposed support of freedom of expression where I was a featured speaker, leaving me in a very awkward position. I was told at various times that I didn’t understand, that these people knew riot grrrl, and I didn’t—all sorts of weird, dumb stuff that didn’t address the basic problem, that an organization supposedly in support of independent publishing and diverse participation and freedom of expression had just banned someone from participating. And not just any participant, but the publisher of a book on fostering diverse voices and freedom of expression in a hostile environment, the writer of which was being asked to talk about that work at the event.

Aside from the short-sightedness of such a decision, the denigration of my work, and the personal attacks that emerged from it, the incident came at a really bad moment for me, when I was trying to write a book that offered a fair and even-handed look at other incidents of censorship and self-censorship of young Cambodian women’s voices. I think people who strive to shut others up don’t realize how truly and totally damaging their actions are—a problem worsened significantly by the belief that such parties are being protective. It turns out, when you believe yourself to be right, you stop listening. And not listening, I have come to believe, is the root of all evil.

Anyway, I couldn’t do it. It was another nine months before I could look at the manuscript again. And what made me pick it up again, actually, was maybe even more significant. I met one of my heroes, May Summer Farnsworth, who is probably the person that had the most impact on the way that I thought about gender and social and media justice when I was actually doing riot grrrl-stuff in the 1990s. Now, I have no stock in the riot grrrl mythos and for perhaps obvious reasons am apt to distrust anyone who tries to get me to conform to it, but the conversation I had with May about how she navigated and experienced the end of a movement that she had helped foster, and the kinds of silencing that occurred within it—it became really important to me to find a way to articulate my own silence in the face of so many acts of silencing.

What other books would you compare this story to in its genre?

Three Cups of Tea and Reading Lolita in Tehran have both been comparative titles to this series, and people often come to it when, for example, they want to find a work that describes the global economic condition of women that’s actually by and about women to replace Half the Sky in a college curriculum. But those books all advocate for something; a course of action, an organization, Half the Sky: The Movement. I actually don’t want folks to do what I did in Cambodia, as I’ve made clear in other interviews. Don’t follow my path. Let curiosity and engagement and listening forge one for you.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The amazing young women of Cambodia. Why anyone would write about anyone else, ever, is beyond me.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

My publisher has placed one gazillion dollar bill in each physical copy of the book, so there’s a really big financial incentive to buy it at only $9.95. You make, like, whatever a gazillion minus 9.95 is, not to mention that gazillion dollar bills are very rare. Of course, it might have fallen out, or a bookstore browser or disreputable distributor or bookseller may have pocketed it, so we can’t guarantee you that money. But it’s a pretty nice gesture, you gotta admit.

Cambodian Pride

I was extremely pleased to be invited to participate in the Cambodian LGBTQX Pride art exhibition this year, alongside some of my very favorite Cambodian and Cambodia-based artists. (My piece, a wall version of New Girl Law, is on the left; the amazing Viet Le’s love bang! is on the back wall.) The issues of silencing and self-silencing that I have been investigating in various ways for the past few years—in Cambodia and elsewhere—are really difficult to understand in the context of sexual freedom unless, as this piece in the Guardian pointed out yesterday, you are a Cambodian lesbian:

Traditionally, a Cambodian woman’s main role is to marry well and raise children. School lessons often reflect this and are geared towards preparing girls for these roles. As a result, many girls believe that this preparation is more important than academic aspirations. The Chbap Srey or Women’s Code of Conduct, which until recently was taught to all school children, outlines the importance for women to be feminine, modest and obedient thus limiting decision making power, political power and women’s social and professional capacity to express themselves and build relationships.

Although female employment is relatively high, women are more commonly employed informally by family members on a low wage. As a consequence, women are rarely financially independent and are typically dependant on their parents or their husbands. This factor is particularly significant for Cambodian lesbians as they are often financially incapable of living on their own or with their female partners. … In many cultures, women are discouraged from seeking or expressing sexual pleasure and their sexuality remains hidden.

Sound familiar? It might. Here’s how the Windy City Times talked about these issues in a piece on Cambodian Grrrl* and the upcoming follow-up, which will also be called New Girl Law:

One barrier was a simple book, a staple of Cambodian culture called the Chbap Srei, or Girl Law. The 19th-century book outlines women’s place in Cambodian society based on very traditional restrictive cultural values. Unsurprisingly, its male-centered counterpart—Chbap Bros, or Boy Law—is much shorter. …

“What I was able to see when I lived among this group of strong, independent, forward-thinking young women was that most of them still had copies of this book on their desks,” Moore said. “Yes, they were studying them from a legal perspective and attempting to be critical of them, but the fact that it was still a day-to-day part of their culture was amazing.”

By enforcing such aged constructs of gender, Cambodian culture likewise enforces heterosexuality. Moore said the young women she encountered considered it common sense that they should be married to men by the age of 24. The country is in the midst of a growing gay movement, Moore said, but the idea of any sexual relationship that defies heteronormativity is still shocking.

The Chbap Srei (Srey), of course, was the text we re-wrote during one of my stays in Cambodia, as a group. Then once the text was published, it was censored. In Cambodia. By some of the people who helped make it. And also in the US. By some of the people who claimed to want to help.

This situation, and the multiple veilings and censorings and discussions it spawned, was the basis for presenting this piece, in this way, as a part of Cambodian Pride in Phnom Penh. You can see the installation (held at Meta House, with images below and above by Jim Mizerski) here:

But significantly more important to me was the other work I contributed to in the space, a small zine-making station, with copies of How to Make This Very Zine in both English and Khmer. I was moved to tears that my work teaching self-publishing in Cambodia could help model a space to experiment in free expression, especially in the context of sexuality. And even more proud, of course, that girls got all up in it.

*The Kindle version of Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh just came out, by the way. You can get that here if that’s your thing, or nab a delightfully old-fashioned paper version here.

Chicago comics conventions

My pals over at CAKE are holding a fundraiser. I’d like you to pitch in and help them meet their goal. No, wait: I’d like you to actually give them an extra thousand bucks. New goal: $4K. You have 6 days.

Why is this important? Well, I personally like these people. They’re bright, fun, and incredibly talented. And they’re putting together one of the smartest projects Chicago has seen in years.

Maybe to you it’s just another place to shop. (If so, thanks!) But for people who make comics, conventions are both professional gathering spaces and one of the only means by which to cobble together a working economic infrastructure, especially for those who want to retain control over their work.

But because of this, the way you set up your comics convention really matters. Who you invite, what resources you offer participants, what you put on the front page of your website, how much you charge. Each of these elements, and so many others, either let a different kind of person get excited about what you want to do, or makes them feel unwelcome, unaddressed, or uninterested. And although they seem small at the time, these sometimes quick decisions can have enormous, lasting impact. As we’ve seen elsewhere in the comics industry, tiny unacknowledged barriers can easily become accidental policy, which not only has an impact on who gets to work in a field, but what that field produces.

Another comics convention held annually in Chicago, C2E2, this year featured only 13% women tablers in artist’s alley, according to Dylan Sells’ research in my Ladydrawers class at SAIC; I only counted 16 women on the featured guests lists of 157 total names, making a total of a little over 10% featured women guests, which is a little better than the rates at which your average independent comic-book publisher publishes women artists (although not quite as good as your average corporate comics publisher does).

Now, compare this to our recent as-yet unpublished research (you gotta wait for it!), that found female-identified creators make up over 40% of the field, and you can start to understand why c2E2′s stats aren’t good enough. They’re just not trying! But Dylan found that CAKE’s featured guest list is 46% female, and tablers are 43% female. Which means that CAKE is one of the only comics conventions interested in presenting a full range of comics being made today. Through sheer force of math, that means that most of what you see there will be new, a lot of it will be good, and a healthy chunk of it will blow your head pure off.

So if you don’t contribute to CAKE financially, here are your options: find someone who will, or start a convention, distributor, publishing house, storefront, anthology, or educational program that opens up the field of comics in the same smart way. Six days and counting.

Palliatives in the age of branding

A study released Tuesday found that a full third of the drugs used throughout Southeast Asia and Africa to treat malaria, a mosquito-transmitted disease caused by a parasite that includes fever and other flu-like symptoms and disproportionately (surprise!) afflicts people who live developing nations without regular access to basic health care, were ineffective. Increasing resistance to antimalarials along the border between Cambodia and Thailand has been causing grave concern, and Lancet Infectious Diseases reported that drugs in this region of the world represented a particular problem. “Of 1437 samples of drugs in five classes from seven countries in southeast Asia, 497 (35%) failed chemical analysis, 423 (46%) of 919 failed packaging analysis, and 450 (36%) of 1260 were classified as falsified,” the journal states.

In a country like Cambodia, we think immediately of corruption, the preponderance of black factories, and the inaccessibility of the basic health education or equipment like refrigerators that may make the proper creation, storage, and administration of these drugs difficult. But the problems run much deeper than that. Watered-down versions of antimalarials offer the parasites that cause the disease the ability to build up antimalarial resistance. The counterfeits aren’t just unseemly, that is. Nor do they only affect those individuals that take them. Fake, ineffective, and expired antimalarials are making malaria a more effective disease.

Let’s leave that to sit as an open metaphor for a moment and look at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which claims to be a forerunner in the fight against the disease with classic white savior industrial complex tropes like, “We Can End Malaria,” and “Millions Saved.” In 2004, the foundation attempted to conduct some similarly saviory anti-HIV drug tests in Cambodia.

Now, HIV transmission rates in Cambodia are among the highest in Asia. Rates, though diminishing, are still upheld by a lack of effective health education, a booming informal sex industry, and insufficient access to condoms and dental dams. You’d think, if you didn’t ponder it for very long, that such a place would be thrilled to host an HIV drug-test party. But you should think about it some more.

The study required almost a thousand sex workers volunteer for the trials, but a group called Women’s Network for Unity demanded participants be offered health insurance for 30 years in exchange, in case of possible side effects. Why? Because if a sex worker falls ill in Cambodia, she doesn’t just lose her income from sex work, she loses her ability to work at all. Even if the stigma of the illness didn’t prevent her from gainful employment in the factories, which is likely, her age, probably, would. And there’s basically nowhere else for women to work.

The 2004 incident lead to the shut-down of trials in Cambodia (and, later, Camaroon and Nigeria, as well as protests in Hong Kong and Bangkok). Reporting focused on the supposedly unreasonable demands Cambodian sex workers were making of the US-based trial leaders. A University of California at San Francisco AIDS researcher explained to activists and the press that 30 years of health insurance would be prohibitively expensive. Not to mention unwarranted, as the drug’s side effects included, she said, gas and nausea. But the US Health Department website told activists otherwise, listing kidney and liver failure as potential side effects.

So in addition to the big-picture economic impact that participation in the drug trials could have on individual women, researchers weren’t ‘fessing up to the full potential of medical impacts. Nor were they willing to ensure women’s safety should worst-case conditions come to pass.

But the big blind spot here lay in the social impact of allowing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation HIV trials to proceed, just barely hinted at in this Washington Post piece—the only one that gets close to explaining the situation as it’s been explained to me in country. Here’s a flash of tail from the real monster:

Soma’s friend Pich Sochea, 38, who with Soma is a leader of a prostitutes’ union, was among the first to hear about the trial, at an HIV prevention workshop in the spring of 2004. Sochea thought it sounded pretty good. The women would get paid $3 a month to take some pills — either 300 milligrams of tenofovir or a placebo — daily for a year.

Yeah. It’s the placebo.

Approximately half of the 960 sex worker-participants would be administered a placebo, a wholly ineffective sugar pill with no preventative effects whatsoever in a country where condom use still lags. In a place where women have access to little in the way of human or civil rights, especially sex workers, and where domestic violence, even when reported, goes unacknowledged. Where rape is a growing concern, proliferating alongside popular depictions of sexual violence as a male youth group activity in pornographic films smuggled in from Thailand and Korea. Where domestic prohibitions against sex with children are a relatively new phenomenon. Where popular mythology holds that sex with a virgin is one way to rid oneself of HIV, and where consistent health education has proven ineffective at fully countering such beliefs. And where the trials were already public knowledge.

What I was told, straight up, by former activists with the Womyn’s Agenda for Change, was this: if Cambodian women had participated in these trials, we would not have been able to explain to the country that it did not make us immune to HIV. Violence, abuse, and rape would increase. Women’s struggle for human rights would not advance, perhaps backslide. And HIV rates, ultimately, rise.

–

I’m working on a longer piece right now on the White Savior Industrial Complex, and have some basic ideas I’m trying to get down on its larger effects. You may be wondering why these aren’t appearing on Camblogdia, or why you can’t access Camblogdia right now at all. Well, I’ve had some sensitive work in an art show in Phnom Penh up for a few weeks, and I’ve wanted to limit access to my in-country records. But also, I’m not just writing about the WSIC as an external observer: I’ve been an agent of it too. Unwittingly, but I think it deserves careful examination. And I’d prefer that work not be fully accessible before I’ve reconsidered it. 

Anyway, all the good stuff’s in Cambodian Grrrl, and the upcoming New Girl Law. Order those. They’re cheap (on purpose!) and allow you to support my work—instead of merely observe it.

The low-rent white savior industrial complex

Al Jazeera‘s “People & Power” reporter Juliana Ruhfus released a new investigation today into, basically, a low-rent version of the white savior industrial complex. Called “Cambodia’s Orphan Business,” the 25-minute video postulates what those in the country already know: that orphanages are largely tourist attractions, for-profit endeavors that benefit owners by playing off Dickensian notions of poverty, a wretched yet noble entertainment for those unafflicted. An estimated 10,000 children live in such group homes, and you, the tourist, can not only stop by and visit during your three-day stay in Cambodia but, if you wish, return to volunteer for a longer stint—a month, three months—where you will most likely be asked to contribute your expertise on such pressing national topics as speaking English.

It all seems so easy, doesn’t it? You can go help out a good segment of the 14 million residents of the country, most of whom live in poverty, by doing something that comes so naturally to you that you probably don’t even think of it as a skill. Plus: kids are cute. Cambodian kids, especially.

Now it is true that they are. Cute. But it is not necessarily true that they are, technically speaking, “orphans.” In Cambodia, orphanages are, like everywhere else, homes for young people who would not otherwise have a place to live. The implication is that they do not have a place to live because their parents abandoned them, or died. But this is not always, or even mostly, the case: many orphanages in Cambodia have visiting days—days closed to tourists where parents can visit their children. Orphanages in Cambodia, in other words, don’t necessarily house only orphans.

The People’s Improvement Organization at Stung Meanchey—the district that houses the massive garbage dump that, prior to the last decade’s orphanage boom, acted as a depository for kids in a surprisingly similar manner—is help in the video as a best-practices model. Perhaps it is, but the down-the-road organization Center for Children’s Happiness, servicing children from the same public dump, was where one of the young residents herself told me she missed her mom, and couldn’t wait for her to visit, on Sunday. She then apologized, because she wasn’t supposed to tell foreigners she still had parents. She was 8. She had HIV. She spoke 6 languages.

There are in Cambodia almost 500 orphanages, and the majority rely on volunteerism to generate income. While this seems unseemly at first, many grow used to it. Everyone feels good about the work done at Cambodian orphanages, on the record. The volunteers believe they are “helping Cambodia”; the Cambodian young people, even those whose stations in life may be only marginally improved in the group home, develop an international coterie of enthusiasts and friends; and the organization, basically, keeps Cambodians—or, increasingly, foreigners who own businesses in Cambodia—in jobs, which are still rare in the developing nation.

The trouble spots are easy enough to see. Ruhfus and her crew walk in off the street and ask a facilities manager if they can take four kids out on the town for the day and, despite an increased awareness of and laws restricting child sex tourism, a few minutes later they have four kids to themselves in a private vehicle. No oversight, no paperwork. They haven’t even been asked for IDs.

Viewing the Al Jazeera report, it’s difficult to place sympathy. Two former orphanage residents are interviewed, Yan Chanty and Kong Thy, who complain of depression in the orphanage. This we would rather expect orphanage residents to experience, because it is a hard life. Forced to put on a cheery face for visitors, however, the two suffered a sort of uniquely Cambodian problem: they needed to meet the cuteness expectations of tourists. That was, more or less, how the company could survive. What we don’t like to see, but what is true, is that the Cambodians who run the orphanages keep them in deliberately decrepit conditions, because that makes the ask, from the comparatively rich tourists, much easier.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s illegal, actually, for US residents to adopt Cambodian children at the moment—this is likely true for Australia and some of the other foreign nations with strings of convicted child sex offender nationals as well—so there’s no hope that an emotional bond will grow into a permanently nurturing one. The relationships fostered can only be purely commercial.

But accurate coverage of this complex situation is not always easy to find. The Al Jazeera report, for example, opines Kong Thy’s earnings—”only $3 a day”—having claimed earlier that the average wage earned in the country is $65 per month. This is kind of true—if we look at who is earning wages at all, and what their average earnings are, and then spread this out across the number of people in the country they share those wages with, yes, we get a figure that’s about $65 per month. But we can’t pretend that the developing nation has 100% employment or that this is an average salary, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor can we, therefore, pretend that $3 per day, or an average of $90 per month—$72 per month being the national living wage—is anything less than pretty good.

It’s also unclear to me what the meaning of this kicker is: “The sad reality is that … these children could never be reunited with their parents.” If alive, or willing to step forward, the children’s parents certainly realize their kids are being offered educational and economic advantages likely unavailable at home, in all but the worst of the orphanages. That’s sort of life in a country in poverty: the 1950′s-era image of the nuclear family has little precedent in homes where three generations often live under the same thatched roof and food acquisition is a daily concern.

The report does feature, however, great interviews with folks inside the commercial volunteerism industry. It’s easy to call them jaded and cynical, but the truth is, the folks who have seen how international aid plays on the ground in developing nations and became sickened by it are the best foreign policy advisers we got.

In all, the report is a cogent evisceration of Cambodia’s orphanage system, supported by international volunteer placement agencies like Projects Abroad, which charges “volunteers” around $3000 USD per placement, sends around $9 of that—total—to the local organizations, and pulled in profits of around $3mil last year—a third of which was split between the two directors.

In this way it becomes clear: The low-rent version of the white savior industrial complex supports child sex abuse, disallows genuine emotional connection, and turns a mighty profit for the white savior industry at large.

But, you know, the kids are cute.

The cartoonist, the marketing agent, and the terrific male graphic novelist

Now, before you ask, I’m not going to tell you who sent this, either to me, or to whoever sent it to me. I don’t think it matters and on condition of publishing it I agreed to keep all names out of it. (I have taken the liberty of keeping Twitter, You Tube and Facebook logos intact just for visual pizazz. Also because those logos are now so bland that they may actually counteract the notion that a single entity may be behind a note like this one, when in fact, it’s a bigger phenomenon than that—just try finding someone interested in “male graphic novelists” on Facebook!)

What I will tell you is that this happened fairly recently. And that the person who received it identifies as female, and as a cartoonist, although has a gender-ambiguous name (kind of), which I’m not exactly certain the marketing agent, who is also female, understands. I won’t here go into the full range of implied differences between calling someone a “cartoonist” and calling someone a “graphic novelist”, but the bottom line is that the latter was a term invented to try to sell more expensive books inside bookstores—as opposed to comics shops—which makes it a marketing term, and kind of a useless distinction. Unless you’re a marketing agent, I suppose, when marketing terms are what matters. And in this case, a “graphic novelist” was seen as necessary to the project.

A male one.

The cartoonist’s response was thoughtful and far more engaged than mine would have been, considering that the cartoonist had no hope of being compensated for either the friendly suggestion of the graphic novelist—or of landing the gig herself. In other words, by even responding, she was donating her labor, to the cause of terrific male graphic novelists.

To which the marketing agent responded, quite hurriedly:

Now, as I said, the specifics of this project don’t matter to you: it’s dumb, you can trust me on that. And the brand I’ve hidden from your view—the reason “it has to be a guy”—is equally unremarkable (although you can apparently find them on Facebook, if you’ve ever seen that site). To put this plainly: the individuals involved in this particular exchange don’t matter. What matters, and I think it matters a lot, is this logistics of this exchange:

CARTOONIST: Hm, I can try to do some free labor for you if you tell me a little bit more about what’s involved and also why you are specifying a gender for the laborer?

MARKETING AGENT: Now you must sign a NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT.

So I write about gender, and labor, and IP issues, and marketing. You all know that. And when the cartoonist first asked me about this situation, I thought it sounded bad, the perfect conflation of friendly-seeming but coercive marketing and the standard-issue gender-based discrimination that we’ve come to expect in comics. But I didn’t think it was illegal. Now I’m not so sure.

Here’s what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says about such things [emphasis mine]:

Sex discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person’s sex. … The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment. … Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted). The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

Smartly, the cartoonist flatly refused to sign the NDA, and politely begged off of recommending anyone for the project.

Still, the marketer persisted …

… utilizing the “we’re all in this together!” theory of marketing (forgetting that, in fact, she wasn’t actually helping out this particular cartoonist, but using her to find one she could ”help out”), with a heavy helping of “I used to be just like you!” BARF.

The cartoonist, sympathetic, understandably responded with an email agreeing not to mention her name, or her employer’s, or the client’s, to anyone. I respect that. As I said: this type of exchange happens often enough that it’s not actually just about this one bad marketing agent, or this dumb firm or lame brand. It’s about who believes who owes who what, and who owns what is said in the course of negotiating it. In an email I won’t reproduce, the cartoonist again refused to sign the NDA, and refused to recommend anyone for the project, but she did agree not to make a big stink about it.

I agreed to no such thing. From this moment on, with full respect (and admiration) for the cartoonist who sent me this exchange in the first place, I’d like to request this: If you’re asked to sign an NDA during an informal exchange, don’t do it. If you’re a female identified creator in the comics industry asked to work for free on anything, don’t do that either. And if someone uses gendered, raced, or classed language—even if we’re just talking about art, or comics—get a lawyer, file a complaint, go public, or do whatever else you have to do to shut them down.

Why? Because these are bigger issues than any individual can see. We’ll soon be releasing Ladydrawers stats that talk about average earnings by gender, average submission rates by gender, and average publication acceptance rate by gender, and they. Are. Bad. I won’t ruin the surprise for you. What I will tell you now is this: male-identified creators are earning over three and a half times as much as female-identified creators, at the same average level of experience and doing the same amount of labor in the industry, in a divide that just barely straddles the poverty line (favoring, of course, the higher earners). Those who don’t identify along a gender binary in comics? That’s where it gets really rough:  We’re seeing numbers that indicate they pull in about a seventh of what female creators do. Not enough to cover a single month’s rent in any city I know of.

In other words, for people who work in comics that don’t identify as male (or, for that matter, as “graphic novelists”), biased hiring practices and our widespread willingness to remain silent about them are an issue of survival.

In the pipeline: The Hip Hop Apsara

Angee Lennard of Spudnik Press has been making this crazy cover for my upcoming Green Lantern Press book, which you can read a little bit more about here, and which features images from Phnom Penh’s emerging middle class first previewed here and here, as well as a brand-new essay. Perhaps the most exciting part is that we had to invent a font—rather, Danielle Chenette did—which is awkward and crazy and cool. I’m working on a book trailer for it, and will post when that’s ready.

New Adventure School Comic!

I know I have already told you about the Adventure School for Ladies Comics Intensive but there is a new, awesome, amazing, cool comic up by Nicole Boyett that explains what it is, and I thought you might like to read it, here.

Capitalism and Its DisconPANTS and Cambodian Mass Faintings

Hey! I made a new book, mostly as an excercise to teach myself to silkscreen, but also because of my love of working really hard on pointless projects that end up being very frustrating involving pants! Speaking of which, I also have a new piece up on Truthout:

About a year ago, record numbers of garment laborers in factories across Cambodia—which exports 70 percent of the garments manufactured there to the US—were reported to be suddenly and mysteriously falling to the ground, unconscious. Hundreds at a time – sometimes less, although sometimes more. Workers at many scenes reported foul smells, difficulty breathing. Halting investigations took place at select plants by various parties involved: government officials; labor unions; human rights groups; business associations; monitoring organizations; and, weirdly, the international big-name brands that sell the clothes being made. A consortium of factors was considered: hypoglycemia, the direct result of workers not eating enough; minor factory infractions that managers promised to address immediately; a common cold outbreak emanating from Canada; overwork; mass hysteria; workers partying too hard over the weekend; and spiritual possession. In the end, no single cause was named for the nationwide epidemic. Besides a 5$ “health bonus” for qualifying workers, no sweeping policy changes were offered to keep the incidents from continuing.

It seemed to be just more bad luck for Cambodia… [but] the real bad luck for Cambodia … is that thousands of workers falling ill on the job isn’t enough to catch the fashion industry’s attention.

Read “The Fashion Industry’s Perfect Storm” here. (You will probably wish to know in advance that the story, which lists 3,000 faintings over the last year, is no longer accurate, as 500 more occurred within five days of publication.) Buy the limited edition red-white-and-blue silkscreened book, Capitalism and Its Discontents, here.

Adventure Schooling!

Ah! Do you people even know about this crazy thing we are doing over at ChezEM this summer, called the Adventure School for Ladies: Comics Intensive? For reals, it will rock your world—and there are only a few weeks left to apply! QZAP has generously agreed to create a scholarship, funding a student to attend our innovative programming. We’re still in negotiations on the name of the scholarship, but it will probably be really funny.

(If you you have money upwards of ten dollars, we will also name a scholarship fund after you. But it better have a good name.)