Quiet Insanity...
Franni's Home Page
There are times when Life seems to be one long period of re-construction... but to have a website permanently displaying the 'person at work symbol' seems unreal at best.
So a little info, some of which is likely to change:
- I'm 47, Aquarian, 178cm tall [probably the most static thing about me...]
- I live just outside Cambridge, UK
I'm partway through dividing this website into sections, meantime, navigation's probably easiest if you click on next section at the end of each part
- Cambridge
- Post-Cambridge
- Sexuality & things gay
- Rest of my life
- Research interests
- Women's place on the www:
- Science fiction
- Culture / piece
of pretentiousness
[depending on your perspective!]
- Articles
- Links
Feedback and mail
Cambridge
- The most important recent highlight in my life was
graduating from Cambridge University last year as a
mature student... the full horror of the 60 surplus
pounds I gained while at university can be seen , as well
as the ritual
rabbit!, in my graduation photos. Tis a truth
universally acknowledged that three years of hard labour
'reading' Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge can
only be accomplished with the aid of a quantity of
chocolate numerically equal in pounds annually to the
total number of undergraduates in one's college.
Or perhaps the chocolate was needed to keep up my energy as I combined being on the college graduate society's exec with the LesBiGay organising, & the odd 'extra' such as production of Varsity, the university weekly newspaper.
- My time at university wasn't all spent reliving my
wild youth...my two main areas of research were on the
effect of Interactive TV on users' perception of the news
[Online Media, a division of Acorn Computer kindly let me
loose on the volunteers on the field trial of their
hardware], and a dissertation on - Evolving
Identities:lesbianism from silent subculture to abseiling
avengers. The first was a far more successful
reflection of where my skills and talents lie than the
second - but sometimes we have to find out the hard way
that you can't always condense down your whole being and
essence into 10,000 words and include enough Foucault to
satisfy your examiners too!
Thus, had I ever seriously thought about a career in Lesbian Studies, I saw that it's on a path whose gate I'm not yet ready to leap over... or at least not whilst trying to combine it with living with a heterosexual partner, and running a consultancy.... Forced back to technology-as-career, rather than technology-as-passion, current research interests are on my company website. Mind you, on a good week, the two aren't so far apart! Yes, folks, sociology, technology and gender studies can be combined... for practical real life examples of how check out my introductory internet training sessions for women...
Post - Cambridge
- So began a transitional phase - one which I'd hoped would be only a year, but has streched to two - before returning to academia! I'm currently a junior partner in Mediation Technology, a consultancy in its third year specialising in the development and application of digital media. Effectively on a good day, this may mean I can be found in the West Room of the University Library muttering darkly over some obscure technical journal, or scratching for some facts to support a client's nebulous ideas.
- But far more often it's a case of being in front of a computer screen at two a.m. searching for inspiration for an image for presentations, making a silk purse out of yet another sow's ear on the scanner...
- However, some of it is fun... I'm proud of the fact that Mediation Technology 's commited to a percentage of the company's time being given voluntarily in community projects, and thus two of us are currently part of the committee examining access provision for the Cambridge Online City project. I'm also commited to sharing my computing skills with women who want to escape domestic slavery ...it's a personal agenda rather than one held by the business, as I see Photoshop as being an essential basic computer skill to teach a mother who'd like to return to the job market but whose creative and artistic skills far outweigh her present educational qualifications. I've set up internet skill sharing sessions for local women ... I also create websites, or speak about the social advantages of being online or the methodology for constructing caring e-communities, without charge for any non-commercial organisation whose aims and ideals fit with mine.... as I sat in snow in a traffic jam on the motorway into Huddersfield and an inadequate heater on International Women's Day this year, I wondered if insanity's actually my main driving force....
-
- The rest of my cv's in the winding pathways of Mediation Technology's website!
Sexuality & Things Gay
- My first sexual experience was with a girl called Shirley: I was 10, she was 12. I knew I was gay before I knew what the word was to describe what I was.... way before anyone ever spoke about The Personal Being The Political, I knew it instinctively.
- Like a lot of people my age, I cut my political teeth
on CHE committees, and the beliefs and convictions I held
then haven't changed much, whatever the colour of the
party I vote for might be: it isn't enough to be out in
your own life - it's necessary to be willing to stand up
for the rights of others in the community.... One of my
closest friends then was Peter Wells, who had two years
taken out of his life by our legal system simply for
sleeping with a boyfriend aged a few months short of 21.
He later had the rest of his life taken away by the
brother of another boyfriend: he died two days after my
mother died of cancer in 1979, and shortly before his
case was due to be heard in Strasburg. I'm writing this
on the 19th anniversary of his death in February '79, and
we still haven't achieved equality in the age of
consent.... His name lives on in one of the early live
recordings of Tom
Robinson's "Glad to Be Gay". Peter Wells was one of
the kindest, generous and most supportive people I have
ever met. He taught me much, and gave me the space to
explore much of my own sexuality, and encouraged me to
write: being openly bisexual in the 70s was far less
common than nowadays... writing about being married and
gay in Gay News, which I did with his encouragement,
almost unheard of.
I remember him today with love and respect.
- More recently : I was part of a triumverate that made up the joint queer co-ordinators of Newnham College's LesBiGay group, NewBiLes, for two years : part of our hidden agenda was to make sure that of all the Cambridge University colleges, Newnham College was going to have the reunions of its alumnae be well & truly, errrrm, " Interesting" in the 21st century...
- Well, this group, together with friends who didn't
run quick enough, suffered long and hard with me through
my final year in the interest of my dissertation. They
watched films with minimal lesbian content, drunk bad
wine, and offered support and their best books with no
hope of reward... Their views on literary and classical
references in The Hunger would be recorded here if only I
had the time... One became my girlfriend for a while, and
remains the woman I feel intellectually closest to, and
whom I love dearly, even tho we're both married to
guys now...
Of course, NewBiLes has moved on: from its humble beginnings, where gathering 13 of Newbs & friends together for veggie lasagne and a trip to Go Fish was the high spot of the term, it now runs the largest mailist for gay women in Cambridge, across the university and Town. Today Cambridge.. tomorrow, who knows??
- Nowadays my enthusiasm for gay politics is being
sublimated in acting as
Wise Woman
& Elderly Crone [or aggravating bitch, depending on
your viewpoint] of one of Digital Diversity's lists. I'm
actually proud to be a member of
UK-MOTSS
the most supportive arena for online discussion in the UK
in my not-so-humble opinion... wielding the Broomstick as
one fifth of the team of List Administrators, I can even
sigh with relief when my tour of duty's complete.The
heated discussions are a particular speciality, but some
of the loveliest gay people you could hope to meet
anywhere are scattered throughout the membership.
Being an e-group that does get to meet up in real life, they add a certain amount colour to my present life... only in a group such as this would a dedicated conservative voter following the general election throw open his whole house from cellar to attic to hold a Red Party... only within this group is it possible to get a truly straight answer should you ask for advice on your latest relationship.... and only a member of this group would walk into the Town & Gown clutching a pile of CD-Roms for my eight year old godson on the off-chance that I'd be there that evening...
- Sexuality? This might be obvious if you've read this
far, but for those of you coming on this page either from
my signature file on an email, or a websearch, it may
have been a shock, so p'raps it's pertinent to explain
that as this site's situated in the West Hollywood
section of Geocities, I definitely identify myself as
gay: Queer & Proud Of It....
When pressed, usually by someone who can't see how I can equate that with who my partner is, I might expand that my particular sexuality's on the gay side of bi, but that I am [and hope, Reader, that you are, too] tolerant of the whole gay continuum... and I'm particularly unsympathetic to any form of separatism. And, yes, my partner is well aware of my sexuality, and always has been: we met on a train, and I was reading Gay News at the time...
I have friends online of all genders: I believe that as far as gender is concerned, you are the gender you choose to be. In particular, when a person has gone through whatever it takes to aligned their outer body with the gender they know themselves to be, it is cruel and inhumane that institutionalised intolerance refuses to allow them legal recognition in the gender of their choice. Ideally, passports and all 'official' documents would be gender-free... or if that's asking too much of even New Labour, at least allow for official changes in gender, to try and compensate for the intolerance.
After all,intolerance killed my best friend nineteen years ago today...
This month's interesting gay link...
Some extremely good quality slash fiction
Previous links
[ Despite the Independent's inaccurate reporting - he's still Queer !]
http://www.tantra.org/lesbian.htm
Outworld Magazine
Lesbian/bi/women only lists
STWTTF
- My vote for the most supportive and entertaining on-line group worldwide would definitely go to STWTTF.... the best bunch of people around! Recently celebrating its third anniversary, the Star Trek Women's Terrorist Task Force [alias Gender Issues In Science Fiction ] is indeed a force to be reckoned with. This list could devised the cure for all known ills, has power over good and evil, and contains professors, writers, poets, musicians par excellence. With enough technical experts to run the world's computer systems single handed, its combined wit faster than a speeding exocet, [and the killing power of ten disturbed mother tigers only when called for], this group could rule the world any day it chose... but just let us get finished analysing this episode of Babylon 5 first....
- Some of the best writing from this group is only to be enjoyed in its day to day interaction - but browse thru' some of the best of the published work here
Rest of my life
- Apart from my piles of books acquired during the course of my degree, which I'm still getting through, though I admit with more pleasure now than when speed-reading to meet deadlines [this is why they call it 'reading' for a degree - because your booklists could last you the rest of your life?], my interests are technology, science fiction - especially Anne McCaffrey & Babylon 5,cats, I'm a secret Archers fan... yes folks, I confessed online to shedding tears while listening to every repeat of the death of John Archer! Hell, one of my earliest memories is listening to the repeat of Grace Archer's death... that programme probably has an awful lot to answer for!
- Musical taste - summed up as Virgin radio's original
playlist, with a little pink added. As a child, I moved
house so many times that I can usually accurately tell
you the year of any hit of the late 50s and 60s not
through any great feat of memory but because I can
remember where we were living when it was playing. I'm
sure there's a piece of research to be done on how the
adverse affects of a childhood spent in army garrison
towns can be mitigated thru exposure to music... but I
found working thru countless deadlines while at
Cambridge, that Virgin brought back a lot of memories...
that, together with a dozen CDs got me thru to my
finals...
What I choose to listen to, when I'm sitting working on a deadline at 3am are various Tom Robinson CDs, plus Janis Ian, Sheryl Crow, kd lang, Loudon Wainwright III, Neil Young [unplugged], Tina Turner, Joan Armatrading... Judging musical taste by what I'd put my hand in my pocket and pay for in a month when the clients have been slower than usual in paying... Tom Robinson comes top of the list. Why? It isn't only that there are few rolemodels for those of us who are out there as queer [rather than bi] but who happen to being relationships with members of the opposite sex... it's also picking up yet one more compilation wandering 'round HMV in a break from jury service, and hearing a voice of sanity... the verses of Glad to be Gay on compilations which keep you in touch with Queerstory... and the guy gives you musically everything from punk, jazz, country [ yes, really], rock. With lyrics some of which you can too painfully identify with, others laugh with... some you spent your wild youth getting drunk to, then later nostalged over at the Cambridge Folk Festival, and of course, the *only* song I can find the chords for on a guitar is Too Good To Be True!
- What else do I do?
Apart from spending an awful lot of time in front of a screen? Anything which can be loosely defined as a craft - embroidery, silk painting, Photoshop, creating huge fluffy mohair sweaters, web, papercraft, weaving, glass painting, fundraising, jewelry making, cookery.... with an awful lot of etceteras on the end!
- Family?
I have a son, Daniel, who's 24 & just returned from Toronto having graduated in Philosophy summer 96, and is now working in London. I love him dearly, even though as two Aquarians together we're too opinionated to comfortably share the same physical space for long!
We've one cat (Gemma) who's got the best pedigree in the household, and one rabbit Sophie.
- Life history? I'm far less attached to it than I once was. I'm an incest survivor, and although I define myself as gay, my sexuality has nothing to do with being abused: my first sexual experience was with another girl, long before the abuse started. I've zero tolerance for those claiming that False Memory Syndrome accounts for a lot of alleged incident: when you get abused late into your teens, you don't need a therapist to unearth memories, you're stuck with them and they can run your life till you find your own way of dealing with them. I've also survived and continue to survive heterosexual marriage. This is not to say that I regard either of these as being necessarily negative states! In 1989, I was finally able to yell back at my drunken and abusive parent, and I look on this as probably the most important step I took in becoming my own person...
- More links coming, particularly to friends of all sexualities, who have produced the sort of website this aspires to be [eventually].
And finally...
For those desperate for intellectual content...a little gem for you:
- Z is the letter of mutilation: phonetically, Z stings
like a chastising lash, an avenging insect; graphically,
cast slantwise by the hand across the blank regularity of
the page, amid the curvs of the alphabet, like an oblique
and illicit blade, it cuts, slashes, or, as we say in
French, zebras; from a Balzacian viewpoint, this Z (which
appears in Balzac's name) is the letter of deviation..;
finally..Z is..the initial of castration, so that by this
orthographical error committed in the middle of his name,
in the center of his body, Sarrasine [in Balzac's
Sarrasine] receives the..Z in its true sense - the wound
of deficiency. Further, S and Z are in relation of
graphological iversion: the same letter seen from the
other side of the mirror: Sarrasine contemplates..his own
castration. Hence the slash (/) confronting the S of
SarraSine and the Z..has a panic function: it is the
slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of
hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction
of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of
the paradigm, hence of meaning. [R.Barthes (1974) S/Z
Basil Blackwell,Oxford]
Thanks for dropping by...
Franni
