Act 30

Viola’s Bookshelf–Renovator’s Heaven, Gender Exchange Remix

A gender exchange remix of Cate Kenedy’s Renovator’s Heaven is now up at Viola’s Bookshelf. The original was published as part of the remix my lit project. I was moved to remix this story (and a few others that I will post in coming weeks) partly because the original author is female, and the previous stories on Viola’s Bookshelf have had male original authors–I thought it might be time to redress the balance.

I think it is an interesting remix due to the main character’s relationship to minutiae and materialism (not in a comercial exploitative sense, but rather in an attachment to the physical), and hints that they are more comfortable with this relationship than with interpersonal relationships that they have had in their life.

Act 24

Viola’s Bookshelf–Lee Battersby Gender Exchange Remix

In keeping with the literary theme of the past few acts I have added a new gender exchange remix story to Viola’s Bookshelf. This is a remix of Lee Batersby’s Alchymical Romance, a story that was featured as part of the Remix My Lit project–an awesome project that encourages an extension of the practices employed in remix culture (that are most often applied to audio and vision) into the realm of the written word. I really liked their concept and thought it was a perfect opportunity to do some gender exchange remixing for Viola’s Bookshelf, while contributing to the Remix My Lit project at the same time.

Act 9

Viola’s Bookshelf – A Gender Exchange Library

I was really pleased with the way last weeks piece, the gender exchanged version of Cory Doctorow’s Scroogled, turned out, so much so that I wanted to expand the project. I also thought that people would be more likely to read the story if they did not have to download it, but instead were able to view it through their browser.

To achieve this I have created Viola’s Bookshelf, a new blog dedicated to making available gender swapped versions of copyright available fiction.  I have started it off by uploading the version of Scroogled I adapted in act 8, and will upload a second piece later this week. After that I plan to add one new story adapted by me per month, and as many from other people that get submitted.

From the Viola’s Bookshelf ‘about’ page:

Viola’s Bookshelf is a project blog dedicated to publishing altered out of copyright, or creative commons licensed fiction, where the character’s genders have been reversed. The idea behind this is to help provide an understanding of gender construction in fiction and to an extent in everyday life. It is also expected to have the added benefit of increasing the stories available with female protagonists and background characters.

I anticipate adding new stories to the library at the rate of one per month, in addition to any sent to me for uploading by readers. If you have a legally available story that you have given a gender exchange treatment to and you would like me to include it on the site please email me at ’sajbrfem at g mail dotcom’ (without all the spaces) and let me know.

Please enjoy the stories and comment liberally, open discussion is encouraged and appreciated. Also feel free to suggest future stories that you think would be interesting with this treatment.

Act 8

Gendered fiction exploration – gender f*&king with Creative Commons fiction
To further explore the ways in which women are represented within web 2.0 I decided to look at some fiction distributed online with a creative commons license that allowed for remixing, and then reverse the gender pronouns in order to see what effect it has on the story. For this I chose Cory Doctorow’s piece, Scroogled, a speculative fiction story set in the near future, where the Google corporation gains a contract to assist the US government with its border security. Scroogled was released with a creative commons attribution, non commercial, share alike license -meaning that anyone is free to use the work as it is or to create derivatives of that work provided they give proper attribution to the original creator and allow the new derivative product to be used in the same manner. The original story can be viewed here at RadarOnline, and my new remixed version can be downloaded here as an rtf file from MediaFire. I have not included the full text of the story here because it is over 4500 words long, but if you would prefer a browser viewable version rather than a downloadable one please comment and I will create one in a separate entry.