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Books Close Reads Chaos Under the Corset: When Romance Covers Hide Revolution If parents had known what these romance books really were, they would be at the top of the banned list. By Leah Blaine | Published on May 9, 2024 Photo Credit: Leah Blaine Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Leah Blaine Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Leah Blaine pulls her well-worn Sunfire Romances down from the shelf to look at the importance of an innocuous book cover. As a young reader, I had the typical rotation of books befitting a young girl from the suburbs: Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and various romance books. These books reaffirmed my own life and looked like mine did: girls in school grappling with friendships and crushes, parents and homework, expectations to work for good grades, to be well-mannered, and to someday grow up to be a mother and perhaps a teacher/nurse/secretary. One series, however, blew my world wide open and the books looked even more innocuous than those prototypical books churned out for voracious 1980s book girls. Covers as cover, indeed. Sunfire Romance books were written by a collection of writers under pen names that all followed the exact same formula: a teen girl from a specific historical era with dreams of her own must choose from two very different suitors. There are glaring offenses in the book that cannot be ignored (unsurprisingly, a la American Dolls, Corey, the black heroine of her book, has escaped from slavery). And yet, in a time and place where racial, social, and economic boundaries were strictly drawn, as they were in my time and place under the Cold War and Reagan, the fact that historical characters ventured to friendships and even romances with people different than them was revolutionary to a girl in a safe box made of ticky tacky. From the covers alone, these are books that should have merely fanned the romantic passions of teen girls. A young woman stood at the center with her name, always the title, emblazoned above her while a male suitor stood at each shoulder (there would be a third suitor in the foreground for some lucky heroines). They would be dressed in easily identifiable historical clothing with a scene from the book depicted, like a kiss in front of a stagecoach or forlornly leaning on the rail of the Mayflower. There is nothing from the covers that hinted at the absolute agents of chaos living in the pages. Because this is where the formula ends. Each heroine had her own dreams and desires. Some wanted to enter the accepted vocations of women of their era; plenty wanted to be teachers and nurses and many wanted to marry and have children. Others, however, wanted to work in the circus, be a war spy, or become a journalist. One young woman, Caroline, cut her hair, dressed as a man, and went by Caro (a family name, she said) in order to make her way to California for the Gold Rush like her brothers. Another, Renee, wanted to be a reporter in New York so badly she braved the Great Blizzard of 1888 to earn her first byline.  Their choices for romantic partners were typically confined to a hometown boy and one new to town–and, again, this is where the formula ended. The hometown boy didn’t always expect her to settle down and raise a family; sometimes they wanted to travel, leave the dust of their town behind them. The mysterious (because of course he was) stranger wasn’t always interested in blowing in and out with the wind, taking her along with him to exciting and different locales; sometimes he wanted to settle and confine her to where he thought she belonged. The dreams of the heroines and their romantic partners’ ideals would also collide just as much as they would match. There was no formula for their alchemy and each heroine had to grapple with how to have her romance (the point of the books after all), but also stay true to who she wanted to be beyond the romance. Renee found fulfillment and success with her new career only to have her boyfriend expect her to leave it all behind to marry him and start a family. Caro, at least, got to keep her hair short and wear pants when her love proposed a life together; he loved her as she wanted to be, not his version of her. Credit: Leah Blaine And this is why books are banned. Not because they teach children how to rebel, teenagers know full well how to rebel, but because they show that the choices laid out by their family and community aren’t choices at all, but rather acceptable options already chosen for them. The idea that children would dare to choose something not offered to them is downright offensive to many parents and must be avoided at all costs hence micromanaging even the fiction they may come across. This is what makes the Sunfire Romances so revolutionary for their time. Because if parents knew what these romance books were doing to their girls, the girls they wanted to grow up to organize bake sales and preside over the PTA (because obviously they would only be wives and mothers) then these books would be at the top of the banned list. They were an instruction manual on how to choose your own path. Taken alone, they were harmless stories of finding a husband. Taken together, they’re a road map to finding a life free of restrictive expectations. Rife with feminism under the corsets and petticoats, each girl was able to choose the elements to keep and the ones to leave behind. Some chose traditional paths and some did not, but every time, the thought and care that went into choosing for herself was evident. They weren’t merely rebelling against expectations for rebellion’s sake, not that there’s anything wrong with that if you ask me, but considering how the expectations of others and their own desires shaped their choices so as to be true to themselves. Never was this more evident than in how we talked about these books that we devoured so quickly. For romance books, we spent very little time talking about the romance. No, we talked about how we looked up the Johnston flood after reading about Jennie (who knew Morse code and we needed to learn that, too; I can still tap out “hi” because of her) or about women’s suffrage thanks to Laura (whose mother told her to stop worrying about her rights because she needed to marry and marry fast). It’s unsurprising how many of those friends went on to be excellent researchers as this was pre-whole world in our palm days; we could use a card catalog and navigate a library with our eyes closed by the time we left high school because looking up “how many women spies were there during the American Revolution?” (thanks for your service, Sabrina) or “what were conditions like in textile mills?” (good job joining the strike, Joanna) took up most afternoons and were never evident from the covers. We talked about not only the historical events, but how young the heroines were–that was something slightly mind-blowing to girls who had to be home when the street lights flickered. Margaret left Chicago for Nebraska by herself at 15 to teach in a one room schoolhouse while Merrie stowed away on the Mayflower. Again, line the books up together and it makes for a pretty impressive list of rabble-rousing young women who also liked to be twirled about and kissed and given flowers. There is a direct line, then, from these covers to the Bridgerton screen adaptations and what romance readers have known for years: a cover that extols the virtues of a hetero romance may just be the undoing of women’s roles and expectations. And thank every heaving bosom for that.[end-mark] The post Chaos Under the Corset: When Romance Covers Hide Revolution appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of Covid-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada. The primary plaintiff in the case which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, while the filing accuses the Google video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself. We obtained a copy of the order for you here. Boies, who runs the “Élo Wants to Know” channel, states in the lawsuit that three of her videos got removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about – censorship) for allegedly violating the site’s policies around medical disinformation and contradicting WHO and local health authorities’ Covid narratives of the time. However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented unlawful and intentional suppression of free expression. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having videos deleted, the censorship also branded her an “antivaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts. The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class-action status of the lawsuit stems from it including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos dealing with Covid got censored, or who were prevented from watching such videos, starting in mid-March 2020 and onward. Google, on the other hand, argues that it is under no obligation to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and can therefore not be held accountable for decisions to censor content it doesn’t approve of – or as the giant phrased it, provide space for videos “regardless of their content.” But when Superior Court Judge Lukasz Granosik announced his decision, he noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of speech, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.” Stressing the importance that Canada’s Supreme Court assigns to guaranteed freedom of expression as a key building block in a democratic society, the judge concluded that “If (Google) carries out censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and prevents other people from viewing these same videos, it thus hinders the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.” Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it contradicts health authorities, WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensation and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, an well as “additional compensation provided for by law since the filing of the request for authorization to take collective action, as per the court’s decision.” As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on damages will be the subject of a future hearing. The post Canadian Court Greenlights Class Action Lawsuit Against YouTube’s Covid Censorship appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Northwestern's Faculty Comes Out in Favor of Eliminating Israel

A Japanese mission aimed at clearing up space debris has hit its first milestone, successfully maneuvering close to a piece of space trash it was tracking and returning a photo to Earth. Space around our planet is getting quite full. We are a messy species, and low-Earth orbit is apparently no exception to our "we'll clean up later" rule. One concern about the debris is that it could cause the "Kessler Effect" (or Kessler Syndrome). Simply put, the Kessler Effect is where a single event (such as an explosion of a satellite) in low-Earth orbit creates a chain reaction, as debris destroys other objects in orbit. Should this happen, the debris could keep colliding with other objects, potentially causing communication problems and leaving areas of space inaccessible to spacecraft. Essentially, it could end up like the film Gravity, but with less George Clooney doing great eyebrow work and more "Hey what happened to my GPS". At worst, some speculate it could essentially trap us here on Earth, unable to leave.   But this isn't some far-flung problem to deal with in the future. NASA has had to perform several emergency maneuvers to move the International Space Station out of the path of debris. Several space agencies and private companies are working on solutions to the problem, including the Active Debris Removal mission by Astroscale-Japan, or ADRAS-J. Launched in February, the first stage of its mission was to perform a series of maneuvers to bring it close to a piece of space junk; a Japanese H2A upper stage rocket body, measuring approximately 11 meters (36 feet) in length.     IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.This was no easy task, as space junk is generally not prepared to make it easy to spot visually, nor provide its own location via GPS data."The condition of the structure of the client is also unknown," Astroscale-Japan added in a statement ahead of the mission. "In addition, the attitude and altitude of the client cannot be controlled, and the client cannot be communicated with."The mission has now caught up with the debris it was tracking, and photographed it from several hundred meters away. The mission will attempt to orbit around the upper stage rocket, taking further images to assess its structure. A second mission – ADRAS-J2 – will approach the same piece of junk and obtain further images, before attempting to safely remove it from orbit using a robotic arm.