Breaking the Glass Slipper

In this episode, Charlotte and Lucy talk to writer and lecturer Tiffani Angus. They discussed the estrangement of women’s bodies in apocalyptic fiction and the trends Tiffani discovered in her research on the subject. While there is a lot of genre fiction written about the apocalypse, many would fail a ‘realism’ test when it comes […] The post Where are the tampons? with Ti...

In this episode, Charlotte and Lucy talk to writer and lecturer Tiffani Angus. They discuss the estrangement of women’s bodies in apocalyptic fiction. While there is a lot of genre fiction written about the apocalypse, many would fail a ‘realism’ test when it comes to basic bodily functions. Women menstruate. They go through menopause. They […] The post S03, E05: Where are...

All stories require conflict of some kind… but does it always need to be violent conflict? There is certainly a trend in fantasy, science fiction, and horror to find narratives driving towards a massive violent conclusion. These have become set-pieces, the very things that sell Blockbuster films to audiences. We expect them in our genre […] The post Violence as climactic conflict first...

Do science fiction, fantasy, and horror narratives require violence? Are there other ways of creating conflict and tension in genre stories? This week, Charlotte, Lucy, and Megan look at how violence is used in genre fiction as the default approach to conflict. Full episode notes including further reading and all texts mentioned can be found […] The post S03, E04: Violence as climactic confl...

Back in 1985, Alison Bechdel had the characters of her cartoon strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, jokingly make a gender equality ‘test’ for films. 33 years later, the Bechdel (or Bechdel-Wallace, to give credit to her friend Liz Wallace for the idea) test is still used to determine whether a film has any claim to […] The post The Bechdel-Wallace test first appeared on Breaking the G...