Interface News Reporter | Intern Reporter Wang Pengkai Huangyue
Interface News Editor | Huangyue
Every Saturday, "Cultural Weekly" summarizes and presents to you the major and minor events worth knowing about in the foreign literary and art circles, publishing industry, and bookstore industry in the past week. This week we’re looking at Algerian boxer Khalif’s lawsuit against online harassment, Hugo Award winners for novels and short stories all by women, Native American writers selected for this year’s Future Libraries program, and more.
1 Algerian boxer Imane Khelif filed a lawsuit against Internet harassment, and the targets included Musk and j.k. Rowling
Recently, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif (imane khelif), who was involved in gender controversy during the Olympics, filed a lawsuit against the Internet for his encounters. Harassment, formal legal action filed against Elon Musk and author J.K. Rowling. The Paris prosecutor's office subsequently announced that its special team on online hate speech had launched an investigation.
In the just-concluded Paris Olympics, Khalif won the women's boxing welterweight championship and became the first Algerian female athlete to win a gold medal in boxing. After winning the gold medal, Khalif once again stated: "I am a woman, I was born a woman, I lived as a woman, there is no doubt about it." "All remarks about me on social media are unethical and I I want to change everyone’s mindset.”
On August 9, 2024, local time, in Paris, France, at the 2024 Paris Olympics boxing women’s 66 kg award ceremony, Algeria’s Cliff won the gold medal. (Picture source: ic)
During this Olympics, Khalif received a lot of doubts due to gender controversy. The cause of the incident was that she knocked out her opponent in just 46 seconds in the round of 16. Her opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, stated after the game: "I have never been beaten. Such a heavy punch." Later disclosures pointed out that she was disqualified from participating in the 2023 Boxing World Championships because she failed to pass the gender qualification test, but the specific reason was not stated. But on the other hand, the International Olympic Committee has questioned the test because before this, the IBA had been stripped of its status as a boxing governing body and expelled from the Olympic Games due to corruption, financial transparency and management issues. Regarding Khalif's gender, the International Olympic Committee has made a determination: "Scientifically speaking, this is not a male versus female competition." President Bach also supported it in a statement, "They were born and raised as women. Holding a passport as a woman and competing as a woman for many years.”
After the game, a large number of insults against Khalif began to appear on social media headed by On Musk’s social media Thinking this is trans, I and many others are opposed to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport." Musk retweeted a tweet by American writer Riley Gaines - "Men do not belong to women. Sports" and commented: "It is true." Former US President Trump also declared in capital letters on the social media he founded: "I will keep men away from women's sports."
Image source: Social. Media According to him, in addition to Musk and Rowling, Trump will also be involved in the investigation. "He forwarded it, so whether he is on our lawsuit list or not, it is difficult for him to avoid being investigated as part of the prosecution."
France " Le Monde pointed out that there was a lot of information manipulation in this series of debates, such as someone enlarging the photo of Khalif to emphasize the shadow on her shorts, and someone deconstructing her every move, suggesting that it showed that she Presence of male genitalia.In another edited image that went viral, Khalif stood in front of a display of queer deities at the opening ceremony that epitomized the far-right's accusations of "woke" elements in the Olympics. An attack on traditional Christian values. This all seems to echo Bach's statement that these debates around gender are more like a "culture war."
This “culture war” actually has a long history. In the book "The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports" published in June this year, the author Michael · Waters (michael waters) found that the gender controversy over Olympic athletes can be traced back to 1936, when the famous European female track and field athlete Zdeněk Koubek announced that she would undergo transgender surgery to become a male , immediately caused an uproar. A Nazi sports doctor used Kubeck as an example and proposed gender testing for all female athletes, which was implemented at the Berlin Olympics that year. As a result, the gender of any female athlete may be challenged and does not conform to historical gender. Standard women will be targeted. These policies have evolved over a long period of time, and there is still no consensus to this day.
"The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports"
02 The Hugo Award winners were announced, and the winners of short and medium novels were all female authors
On August 11, local time, the 82nd World Science Fiction The conference was held in Glasgow, England, where the winners of this year's Hugo Awards were announced.
British writer Emily Tesh's first novel "Some Desperate Glory" won the Best Novel Award. This novel, called a "queer space drama," tells a story after the Earth is destroyed: the 17-year-old protagonist Kyr and the remaining thousands of human survivors train for revenge day after day, and work with their companions and Together with the aliens, they break into the complex and wonderful universe. The Guardian said of this novel: "This engrossing novel combines thrilling action with more thoughtful content, while touching on hot topics such as artificial intelligence, fascism, and gender politics."
"Desperate Glory" Author Emily Tesh
American writer T. Kingfisher won the Best Novel Award for "Thornhedge". This novel is a reinterpretation of the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty". The elf in the story is neither beautiful nor vicious. In order to protect the princess in the thorn bush, she is always restless and will turn into a toad due to fatigue. It wasn't until she met a Muslim knight who helped her overcome her two hundred years of fear that the secret between her and the princess was gradually revealed. In the 2023 Hugo Award selection, Kim Fisher won the Best Novel Award for another dark fairy tale "Nettles and Bones" adapted from "The Wild Swans". She specializes in weaving dark themes and unsettling elements of horror into seemingly light-hearted stories that leave a deep and lasting impression on readers.
American writer Naomi Kritzer won the Best Short and Medium Novels and Best Novels for her two works "The Year Without Sunshine" and "Better Living Through Algorithms" Best Short Story Award. The former work tells the story of the diverse communities in Minneapolis uniting and cooperating to successfully survive after a disaster; the latter work comes from the imagination of current artificial intelligence. The author fictionalized an application called abelique. Software has only one purpose, which is to make people's lives better. It encourages people to prioritize personal life, such as painting, walking, eating well, and even helps users deceive their bosses. It is very popular in society, but as the software Promotion, the resulting privacy controversy has gradually expanded, and the detection and intervention of artificial intelligence in private life has aroused people's vigilance. People have begun to think about where the motivation for life comes from - self-will or instructions from software? At the same time, the secrets behind this software are gradually revealed.
2024 Hugo Award Trophy
In addition, Chinese-Canadian writer Xiran Jay Zhao, who was disqualified in the controversial incident last year, won the Marvel Award for Best New Writer at this Hugo Award. Her debut novel "Iron Widow" immediately received widespread attention after it was published in 2021. It once ranked first on the New York Times bestseller list and won the British Science Fiction Association's Best Young Adult Book Award that year.
The hugo award, founded in 1953, is a world-renowned science fiction and fantasy literary award. It is worth noting that after the controversial incident in 2023 in which some writers were disqualified, the organizers of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention also released complete voting statistics and a detailed administrative report at the same time as the awards were announced.
03 Native American writer has been selected for this year’s Future Library Project, and his work will be revealed in the next century
Recently announced news shows that Native American writer Tommy Orange has been selected for this year’s Future Library Project (Future Library Project) ), becoming the 11th participating writer in the program. This also means that the work he will complete next will not be revealed until the next century.
The Future Library is a century-long public art project launched by British artist Katie Paterson in 2014. The Guardian once called it "the most mysterious library in the world." The organizers invite a writer every year who "has made outstanding contributions to literature and poetry, and whose works can inspire the imagination of current and future generations" to create a manuscript, regardless of language and length. The manuscript will be stored in a forest near Oslo, Norway. Cottage until 2114. At that time, these works will be collected and published together.
Future Library Plan (Image: futurelibrary.no)
In the meantime, Patterson will plant 1,000 trees in the forest to use as printing paper for publishing these works a hundred years later. She sees trees and books as a polyphonic correspondence: conceiving and creating a work in the hope of finding a willing reader in the unknown future, “I imagine the tree rings as chapters of a book, those unwritten The words are activated year after year, becoming more concrete, and the slow growth of the trees also contains the writer’s thoughts, like an invisible energy,”
noted in announcing this year’s inductees. M. Orange's writing "profoundly explores identity, belonging, and intergenerational trauma" in an Aboriginal context. "His work is as much a critique of historical and ongoing injustices as it is of Native Americans." A tribute to the enduring strength and resilience of community. His writing is a force for change destined to resonate with 22nd-century readers."
Orange was born in Oakland, California, and is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. . His first work "There There" was shortlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and his latest work "Wandering Stars" was just shortlisted for the Booker Prize announced last month. . After learning of the selection, Orange said: "It means I can have hope that there will still be books in our world a hundred years from now. I think I need to keep this hope alive and continue to work on the human project." Actively cultivate it."
Native American writer Tommy Orange
Orange also pointed out that writing for the distant future is obviously very different, both in terms of readers and context, "It's actually kind of scary, for those who are very People who may write in many ways see us as stupid and inferior, just like we look back at all the problems we saw a hundred years ago,” as Patterson said when launching the project, which questions the present. The tendency to think in a short time and make decisions only for life at this moment, "The scale of time is a hundred years, which is beyond the life span of most people, but close enough that we can understand and relativize it face to face."
All selected writers will submit their works at the handover ceremony the following spring. Prior to this, 10 writers had been selected and completed their works.The first inductee was Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who submitted a work called Scribbler Moon. In addition, the shortlist also includes well-known writers such as David Mitchell and Han Jiang.
Reference:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/jk-rowling-elon-musk-imane-khalif-olympics-b2595971.html
https://www.lemonde.fr/ en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/08/09/paris-olympics-the-disinformation-campaign-against-algerian-boxer-imane-khelif_6712033_8.html
https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2024- hugo-awards/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/12/native-american-author-tommy-orange-selected-as-the-next-future-library-writer
https:// www.futurelibrary.no
