I am delighted to share that as of October 1st I will be starting a PhD at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol. Those who know me will no doubt be entirely unsurprised by the fact that my chosen area of study is at the intersection of multiple fields: politics, culture, gender and sexuality, fandom and the digital world. In my fully-funded PhD project, I will investigate fanfiction narratives and discourses of consent and sexuality in a political context.
After over ten years as a technology manager in the private sector, it was time for a change in direction. I have enjoyed my career so far, and I have learned a lot of from it. I have had the opportunity to lead business-critical projects, manage relationships with key business partners, analyse and leverage retail data to directly increase sales. I’ve recruited some great people, and I’ve had the opportunity to help my employer become a fantastic place to work for LGBT employees. I’ve worked with some amazing people, whom I will miss.
I am almost at a loss for words about how much I am looking forward to this exciting new challenge. I left my heart in research and academia, and I am incredibly privileged to be able to go back to find it. My PhD project combines many of the different strands of my interests, from the interaction between politics and culture, through LGBT issues and violence against women, to digital rights. My experience in these areas will inform my research, and I intend to continue to be an active campaigner in these areas in a variety of ways.
I will probably be fairly quiet over the next few weeks as I pack up my life and move to the other end of the country, but I expect this blog will very soon start reflecting my academic interests and research, in addition to the mix of topics you are already used to. I very much hope that you will come along for the ride.

So many times as an activist I have run into the conflict between pragmatism and idealism. One of the more useful people on the doomed Yes to Fairer Votes campaign for instance was Nigel Farage – a man whom otherwise I find thoroughly despicable. Another example is my work on QUILTBAG+ issues in the workplace. It’s easy, when confronted with a corporate environment, to tackle the “low-hanging fruit” of lesbian and gay issues first and save what a friend of mine calls “the gold-plated conversation” for a “later” that somehow never comes.
I’ve been guilty of this myself. Last year I very nearly stood up in front of an LGB conference to talk about bisexual issues and played the respectability card of “Well, I am the good monogamous kind of bisexual.” I was saved from myself at the last minute by another friend.
Read more at The F Word.

This is written in December 2013 and backdated deliberately.
I am writing a slightly meandering and still ongoing series of posts on feminist critiques of pop culture. It’s intended as introductory reading, to give people tools to examine our cultural output and think about it critically. This post serves as as the entryway to that series.
Part 1: in which we discuss the Bechdel Test, the Austen Exemption and the Sexy Lamp Test. Spoiler warnings for: Pacific Rim, Pride and Prejudice, Run Lola Run.
Part 2: in which we discuss tokenisation, othering and the Smurfette Principle. Spoiler warnings for: Harry Potter, Pacific Rim, the Hunger Games trilogy, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven.
Part 3: in which we discuss women as objects, agency, and disempowerment. Spoiler warnings for: Sandman (Brief Lives in particular), Firefly/Serenity, Doctor Who (the Donna season), Casino Royale.
An honourary mention goes to a short piece of fiction I wrote, Date Whomever You Like.

This post is actually written in December 2013 but deliberately backdated. The intention is to provide an umbrella post for my work curating @TWkLGBTQ to be used for reference.
Post 1: Let’s talk about labels. Discusses bisexual vs pansexual, whether “bisexual” is exclusionary to non-binary people, interalised slut shaming with regards to the word “pansexual”, the usefulness or otherwise of labels and the pressure to live up to your chosen label.
Post 2: Coming out as bisexual. What is says on the box. The challenges of coming out as bi, and how biphobia, bi invisibility and bi erasure exacerbate them. Personal experiences coming out to friends, colleagues and family.
Post 3: Let’s talk about stereotypes. Greedy. Indecisive. Promiscuous. Fashionably bi. Gay till graduation. Just a phase. Scared of coming out as “properly” gay. Additional discussion of sexual vs romantic orientation.
Post 4: On being invisible. Discussion of bi invisibility, bi erasure, the fact that their committed by gay and straight people alike, and the damage they can cause.
Post 5: Fictionally Bi. Discussion of bisexual representation in fiction, including a lot of recommendations of characters and works.
Post 6: Awesomely Bi. Discussion of bisexual rolemodels and the frequent absence thereof. List of indivduals bisexual people found inspiring.
Post 7: The privilege of passing, the burden of invisibility. The flip side of bi invisibility is assumed heterosexual privilege. This is often the answer to why we flaunt our sexuality.
Post 8: Bi at work. Discussion of challenges bisexual people face in the workplace.
Post 9: You’re bi? Threesomes! Discussion of the assumption of availability that is an intrinsic part of biphobia, the appropriation of our sexualities, and the disproportionate negative effects on bi women.
Post 10: Intersectionality. Discussion of how sexuality can intersect with other axes of oppression, e.g. gender or race.
Post 11: Domestic abuse in the LGBT community. Discussion of the different forms of domestic violence and abuse within the LGBT community and Broken Rainbow, the only national charity to provide support to LGBT people experiencing domestic abuse in the UK.
Post 12: Bisexuals and gender. Discussion of the differential impact of biphobia based on gender and gender identity as well as the interaction between sexuality and gender presentation.
Post 13: What I learned from Curating @TWkLGBTQ. Long and rambling post about both the process of being a curator and the content of the discussions we had.

Last week, the Abortion Support Network ran a fundraising initiative promising the first ten people to donate £10 a wordcloud based on their tweets, made by @geoffsshorts. I don’t know if you can still get them, but you should donate to ASN regardless. My word cloud is below. I’m honestly not sure what it says about me…

I first met Morna a few months ago when I wrote an article about her for ORGZine. Little did I know then that a short while later I would be giving up practically every weekend over the course of a month, staying at a hostel in Dundee (What do you mean, bunk beds?), and adding the rather fancy title of “Marketing and Media Consultant” to my LinkedIn profile. That last one raised a few eyebrows at my usual place of work. But such is the persuasive power of Morna – she makes things happen.
I may, perhaps, have thought it slightly insane to attempt to start up a business – even a Web 2.0 business – over the course of three weekends with a bunch of strangers one had found on Twitter. Then again, I appear to be physically incapable of saying no to a shiny project, so I thought “What the heck, it’ll be fun!”
FlockEdu is nothing if not shiny. It’s an educational network, aiming to make education for adults accessible and affordable. For a generation for whom a university degree will cost as much as an average house in some parts of the country, FlockEdu may be a game-changer. As someone who is passionate about education I just had to get involved, bunk beds or not!
As it was, even though the small number of shares in the business I got in return for my efforts are highly unlikely to enable me to give up the day job any time soon, I feel I got at least as much out of participating in the FlockEdu “Sweatshops” as I put into it. I got to meet in person some great people I’d only known from Twitter; I made lots of awesome new friends and potential future business contacts; and I learned a huge amount about technology, media, marketing and running a business over the three weekends.
If you want to know more about crowdsourcing a start-up from the person who invented it, Morna is appearing at a couple of events at Social Media Week in Glasgow next week. And if you have a passion for teaching, learning or both, sign up for a beta invite over on FlockEdu. I think it’s got the potential to change the world.

Reality check: We live in the 21st century. I can go to a shop and a robot will sell me a device that reads shiny disks and produces moving images. Right now, there are people in space. My handbag is home to about a grand’s worth of tech, including two or three relatively small devices which will let me communicate with anyone in the world as long as they too have one of those or a similar device. Over the last 50 years, while world population has doubled, world GDP per capita has risen from just under $500 to over $8000. For fuck’s sake, humanity has even managed to get its act together sufficiently to stop the ozone hole from expanding further and to hopefully start closing it soon! We as a species can be incredibly clever at times, so why are we so incredibly backward most of the time?
Imagine what we could do with the science, technology and resources at our disposal! We could feed the world. We could work out how to live sustainably on this planet. We might even be able to live in peace. Forget the jet packs – we might be able to learn to respect other human beings and our environment in general.
So why is it that a decade into the 21st century, on every single front we are having to fight people who want to drag us back into the 17th, or 18th or 19th century?
Case in point… intellectual property and copyright: Our current system of intellectual property and copyright dates back to the 17th century. It was, at the time, designed to encourage creativity – to ensure that creators get compensated for their work while others can still build on that work. Because let’s face it, no one in the history of humanity has ever sat in a dark room by themselves and invented anything from scratch. If Newton was standing on the shoulders of giants, where exactly do you think are we? Yet over the last few decades, the balance of copyright law has tipped further and further in one direction, to the point where we now can not only not build on our own culture, but the culture of the generation before us and the one before that is out of bounds. A select few people and corporations (very few of them actually directly involved in creating things) have done extremely well out of this arrangement. And now that technology has finally put an end to their monopoly – where previously distribution media were limiting and content could be made scarce we now have a situation of zero marginal cost and abundance – they are fighting kicking and screaming to restrict what the rest of us can do, to limit the technology and to reverse progress. Back to the 17th century it is.
Case in point… women in society: Hey, maybe I should be grateful that these days I’m recognised as a human being! And in all fairness, we as a society have made a lot of progress on the status of women. Women have the vote, and can work outside the home, trying to carve out some sort of financial independence for themselves, to contribute to society by more than just giving birth, trying to live autonomous, fulfilling lives. But women still get paid less than man for the same job, women are still attacked violently just because they are women, their contributions constantly dismissed and invalidated, their desire for self-determination constantly endangered. Last week an MP implied that children were responsible for preventing and ending abuse, and an MEP flat out said that women were to blame if they were raped. This week we hear that the sexual health and education of our children is going to be shaped by an organisation with a medieval view on sex. The best we can hope for from this government is to only regress back as far as the 1950s. “Honey, I’m home” and all that.
Why are these people so utterly terrified of the future? I don’t know what the future holds, but I can make some educated guesses on what we’re capable of and that gives me reason to hope. I don’t want to go back to the past: for a start it smelled. Why are these people keeping my jet pack from me?

For the last week or so, I have been in Bulgaria, on something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a holiday. There are generally two certainties about being in Bulgaria for me: family drama and culture shock. I’ve been having plenty of both, but I’ve gleaned an insight out of them, so I guess it’s been worth it.
Majorities and in-groups have a way of building a narrative to justify their being a majority or in-group. That narrative is deeply embedded in the in-group culture, so deeply that debate about it doesn’t happen; or when it happens it only goes as far as someone asking a rhetorical question so that the other party to the conversation can take the opportunity to re-affirm their belonging to the in-group. An example of this I witnessed a couple of times recently was the discussion among my Bulgarian contacts around Sofia Pride: someone asks “This ‘gay parade’ thing, do you think it should be happening in Sofia?” and there’s a chorus around them of justifications and excuses as to why, of course, there should be no such thing. Here’s how that chorus goes:
1. I’m a great fan of $gay_celebrity, but I don’t see why all of them should be parading about. (This is, of course, the pre-cursor to “I have a gay friend and thus I’m not a homophobe” in a country where most people won’t know that they have gay friends because people just aren’t out.)
2. Even $gay_celelbrity says they don’t feel the need to parade about. (Might that be because the social pressure is so strong that they feel if they did take part in Pride their career might take a dive?)
3. I don’t feel the need to parade around just because I’m normal. (Do I really need to dissect this one? Alright then. Firstly, you aren’t “normal”, you’re “heterosexual”. The two are not synonymous. And secondly you are, right now, contributing to the continuation of a heteronormative culture in which you, effectively, parade around all the time while a substantial minority of the population has to live in hiding and is denied basic rights which you take for granted to the extent that you don’t perceive them as rights.)
After four days of this, both in the national media and in overheard conversations, I felt the need to move on the debate. The constant heteronomative self-reassurance, self-justification and – yes – parading was rather getting on my nerves. So when someone had the temerity to ask me last night whether I thought there should be a Pride march in Sofia I said “Yes, and had I been in Sofia over the weekend, I would have been at it.” The three seconds of stunned silence that followed were well worth it. We then went into a brief argument centred around point 3 above, but as it was late and I was heading for bed already, we didn’t get very far into it.
What I do hope has happened, though, is that I have made a tiny crack in the self-perpetuating heteronormative narrative I’ve been listening to for the last four days. I hope that this person, now that they know someone who doesn’t agree with that narrative, will over time start questioning it; that they will start asking questions, start finding out more information. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t; but if I continue to be the one dissenting voice, the one voice that moves on the debate, then maybe one of the many people I talk to will, and that will be progress.
Here’s another example: I’m beginning to feel my way around the building blocks of the narrative that straight white men have built for themselves, of the cocoon they live in. Even men who are close to me, who I think are decent human beings – my father, my partner, my best friend – fall prey to this to some varying extent.
My partner was shocked when I talked to him about the pervasiveness of violence against women – he simply didn’t know. It’s something that’s clearly not talked about enough. My best friend and I have an on and off discussion about feminism where he occasionally comes out with arguments that sound very like “But what about equality for the menz?” and we have to go back to basics. I am not saying the issues he brings up aren’t real, aren’t relevant, or don’t need addressing – but it is a matter of perspective and of relative seriousness of the issue. The classic example here is anonymity for rape defendants. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a numbers game – for as long as more women get raped every day than men get falsely accused in a year, I know where my priorities lie.
My Dad, too, came out with some classics over the last couple of days. We had everything from “Women’s hands just aren’t as good as men’s for heavy industrial work.” (Dad, the Second World War couldn’t have been fought without women who did all the heavy industrial work.) to “Well, maybe I do want equality of opportunity for everyone, but I don’t think it can be achieved.” (Dad, if we all thought like this, we would probably all still be living in caves, and nevermind about women still being chattel.)
These are all parts of a narrative that straight white men don’t even know they tell themselves. But they do, and it hurts not just women, or gay people, or black people, it hurts all of us, straight white men included, because it limits all of our opportunities and choices. And so I have been the dissenting voice again. I have been trying to explain to my Dad, with varying degrees of patience, what life looks like from the perspective of the out-group. It took me a good half-hour to explain that he is part of an in-group to start with. I’m slowly tackling the different ways in which boys and girls are socialised and educated, what society deems acceptable behaviour for each gender, how this pervasive gendered culture impacts even my own outlook to the extent that I have to consciously fight it. I threw some stats at him about violence against women, and that had him silent for about five minutes.
The tactic I find most successful is to mix in the statistics and general points with personal experience. The personal is political, and the more I can draw out into my Dad’s (or anyone else’s for that matter) consciousness the crass contradictions between statements like “You’re my daughter, you’re very clever and have had a lot of unique experiences, you have no reason not to be confident, and you can achieve anything” (personal, connected to someone he knows well and cares about) and “Women’s hands have no affinity for industrial work” (generalised), the more (hopefully) they will start questioning their narrative. It is easy to generalise about the womenz or teh gayz, it’s difficult to argue with someone’s personal experience. When that personal experience is then backed up with hard stats, paradigms hopefully will begin to shift.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to say with all of this is that it’s always worth being that one dissenting voice. It’s not always a comfortable experience, it can be incredibly difficult. However, staying silent, staying under the radar, will never change anything. Don’t be afraid to stand out, to speak out, to dissent, to question, argue and persuade. The changes we want to achieve can only be achieved through debate, discussion, argument and persuasion: one person at a time.