CANCELED: Geek Heroines: An Author Talk with Karen Walsh (NWL)

CANCELED: The novel Geek Heroines not only tells the stories of fictional and real women, but also explores how they represent changes in societal views of women, including women of color and the LGBTQ community. Geek Heroines provides readers with an intersectional approach to geek culture that incorporates a variety of female identities. The book also details the historical problems of women's representation in geek culture including hypersexualization, bi-erasure, and transgender issues. It focuses on how characters and real-life women empower female identifications and analyzes the geek community's history of sexism focusing on how social norms lead to one-dimensional characterizations.

Speculative fiction provides readers and viewers fantastic worlds, outside the boundaries of the real world. With that in mind, they allow readers and viewers to gain empathy for people who are not like themselves. To this end, Karen Walsh set out to find 100 “Geek” heroines that offered representation for self-identification, but also looked for characters providing intersectional representation, including racial, gender, sexuality, and disability. As she walks through the reasons speculative fiction can affect social change, she also details the struggles in searching for representation across the genre.

Karen Walsh spent 11 years teaching first year college writing and has been published in a variety of academic journals. She is a Core Contributor at GeekMom®, where she writes about popular culture, comics, and parenting. In addition to her geeky work, she earns a living writing marketing content for cybersecurity companies. When she’s not working, she’s either knitting, reading, or rehearsing/performing with the West Hartford Symphony Orchestra. You can follow her on Twitter: @GeekMomK

PARKING: There is ample library event parking in the nearby Isham Garage. Please bypass the garage kiosks and come directly to the Noah Webster Library Meeting Room, 20 South Main Street, where you may validate your parking with your license plate number.