Feminism – Page 12 – Wis[s]e Words

Anthology bashing is sometimes necessary

Published on July 4, 20112 Comments

The debate about science fiction and fantasy’s inherent gender imbalance (particularly acute in the UK) is rumbling on and one of the latest flashpoints has been the editing of the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, yet another anthology series heavily skewed towards male contributors. Rose Fox has probably the best summing up of the whole conflagration, the ebb and flow of which is intensely familiar to everybody familiar with Racefail two years ago. The editor of the series is called out, defends himself, more people chose sides, rhetoric gets overblown on both sides and it all gets a bit heated with the original point obscured. Which in turn prompts Cheryl Morgan to go meta and explain why these sorts of contratempts are counterproductive:

Before going into the specific issue at hand, let me say that I think anthology bashing is not terribly helpful. Looking at a single anthology, you have no idea where the real problem lies. It could be the editor, it could be the publisher, it could be the submissions, you can’t tell. Also, just as an individual’s reading and voting habits are more likely to be a product of cultural conditioning than of conscious sexism, so an individual editor is more likely to choose stories based on cultural conditioning than a deliberate intention to exclude a particular group of writers. The objective of pointing out gender imbalances (or any other sort of imbalance) should be to encourage people to examine their cultural conditioning, not to decide who we are going to burn at the stake.

I disagree.

Yes, these confrontations are unpleasant for everybody involved, but if you are worried about the gender imbalance in science fiction and would like to see more women being published, than you do need to rake editors over the coals when they produce female free anthologies. That the whole sf&f publishing field is guilty doesn’t excuse individual failure; blame is a renewable resource. It doesn’t matter why a given anthology has few or no female contributors, only the end result matters. Just like readers like me need to address their biases in chosing who they read, so editors need to work towards getting more female writers published if they care about the gender imbalance of fantasy and science fiction. It’s hard is not an excuse to not do this.

And especially because the majority of editors and publishers isn’t consciously deciding to be sexist and to ignore women, it’s important to call them out on their subconscious but systemic biases. Each controversy like this carries the message that it’s wrong to publish anthologies skewed towards male writers, that you will need to pay attention to which writers you approach and accept submissions from, or you might find yourself in the centre of a shitstorm. Confrontation and “anthology bashing” are necessary tools, if not always the right tools…

All of which also means that, if you’re a reader concerned about the huge gender imbalance in science fiction, you should not buy any anthologies that makes this worse. I therefore won’t buy any anthology that isn’t at least forty-sixty percent women-men. No matter how good it is.

Girl cooties in science fiction

Published on June 21, 2011

Judith Tarr comments over at the SF Signal post about the importance of the Russ Pledge:

I am actually new to SF Signal because when I gafiated, I gafiated like holy whoa. Blew completely out of the genre and went mainstream.

It’s not any better there. And my real heart is in the genre.But when I came back…well, it’s over on my guest blog. The world I found myself writing in narrowed down something fierce at the turn of the millennium. There just weren’t any choices, apart from a specfic few. And I was so disconcerted, and taken aback, and beaten down as it went on, that I got to the point where if I was going to post somewhere, I’d start, then delete it. “Why bother? Nobody cares what I have to say.”

(You’ll have to scroll down quite a lot; SF Signal doesn’t do comment links.) She expanded on the same sentiments in later guest post, detailing her own personal history with “girl cooties”:

2001:
“You want to sell some more fantasy? Great! But can you do female protagonists? And put more romance in? Romance sells.” – OK, no problem, but I’d really like to do a male protagonist for this one if I–
“No, you can’t do that. You’re a girl. You need to write about girl heroes. Also, don’t get exotic. Really. Can you write something set in England?”
2003: “Yes, I know this is a secondary series in an established fantasy world. Yes, I know it’s a great story. And it has plenty of romance. But you have to tell it from a female POV. You can’t sell male POV.”
2005: “Female POV. Romance. Fantasy. You’re good at it. Don’t write anything different. And no, no male protagonist. Please.”
2009: “We love this strikingly unusual cross-genre book! It’s brilliant! We just hate to let it pass. But Marketing feels it’s too ‘girl-friendly’ for science fiction.”
2010: “This is full-on, grand-scale, old-fashioned space opera. Twenty years ago we’d have killed to get our hands on it. Unfortunately, we just can’t sell a book like this any more, unless you’ve been publishing books like this for, well, the past twenty years.” – Actually I would have, I wanted to, I tried. But.
2011: Time to think really seriously about that androgynous pseudonym. No, not because I’m giving up. Because I’m the mood to experiment, and I like to test hypotheses in the real world. A woman writing science fiction set in the medieval period is, by universal fiat, writing fantasy. Likewise if the science fiction is set in a preindustrial technological period, though it’s actually a prequel to a cycle of space operas that predated Stargate by a fair few years. One of those got sneaked into print a few years back as, you guessed it, a fantasy. With a pointed historical sting in the tail. (Points if you can guess, accurately, which one that is.)(It’s not under a pseudonym.) Now it might be the tech level that’s doing it, but all things considered…

Now of course one woman’s experiences don’t make a trend, but at the very least it makes for a useful — as Coffeandink put it — “contradiction of cultural narratives of straightforward political progress over time”. From Judith Tarr experiences it seems science fiction and fantasy publishers have become less welcoming to anything that doesn’t fit into a neat little subgenre, exacerbated by a gender essentialism that assumes that men write/read hard sf and women paranormal romances and never the twain shall meet. The insistent rumour that only two female sf authors still have contracts in the UK doesn’t help here either.

In general, from the discussions currently going on in especially British science fiction/fantasy circles, it does seem as if the options for female writers in particular have only narrowed over the past thirty years, with less women being published, less being read/reviewed and those who do make it forced towards what publishers think are typically female subgenres: urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on. What I’m wondering about is how this trend correlates with that other trend of increased commercialisation and globalisation of publishing in the past thirty years. Because I think it does.

Back in the seventies there was room made for more diversity, for feminism in science fiction because writers, editors, reviewers and publishers were able to act outside of narrow profit/loss considerations. Not that publishing ever was a charity, but it makes a difference if you’re working for an independent family business or if your publisher is part of a multinational media conglomerate which sees novels largely as fodder for its television or movie investments. The bean counters have taken over and they’re wary of taking chances. What they want is predictable, repeatable successes, formula fiction and anything that doesn’t fit a succesful subgenre is not even considered.

And of course this sort of thinking reinforces the systemic biases already present in science fiction, with the result that it has become correspondently harder for women — and writers of colour — to be published…

The Russ Pledge

Published on June 18, 20113 Comments

backcover blurb from Sign of the Labrys

That’s from the backcover blurb of Sign of the Labrys, a 1963 sf novel written by Margaret St. Clair. Even then the idea that it was new and different for women to write science fiction was laughably ignorant, but that didn’t stop whatever unnamed marketering genius who came up with that quote.

This blurb is the perfect illustration of why the “Russ Pledge” is important. No male writer would’ve been introduced like Margaret St Clair was here, as both representative of his whole genre and as something new. That’s one part of what Joanna Russ wrote about in How to Surpress Womens’ Writing: the constant emphasis that this female writer is an exception, that female writers are rare and strange. Though things improved since this blurb was written, we’re currently — with allegedly only two female sf writers having a book contract in the UK — in danger of moving back towards a situation in which it once again becomes easy to imagine such blurbs, unless we actively work to prevent this.

As Farah Mendlesohn made clear in her contribution to the SF Mindmeld linked to above, it is especially important for male sf writers, editors, reviewers and readers to take the lead in this. Though women can obviously share the same biases and are caught in the same distortion, it’s been us men who’ve — consciously or unconsciously — been setting this trap. Moreoever, if we don’t change our behaviour the same power dynamics will continue to be in force. Obviously. Hence the Russ pledge and its importance. What I’d therefore like to do, apart from reading and reviewing more books by female sf writers, is to do a series of posts on my favourites and why they’re my favourite female writers: people like Jo Walton, Mary Gentle, C. J. Cherryh, Leigh Brackett, Lois McMaster Bujold…

You don’t prove your feminist credentials with racism

Published on June 18, 2011

You may know Sugar Ray Leonard as a seventies boxer. He recently released an autobiography in which he admitted he had been sexually assaulted by an unnamed boxing coach, just before the 1976 Olympic Games. Not an easy admission to make, especially not for somebody coming from the macho world of boxing. You therefore expect a leftwing, feminist blog to both take his confession seriously and treat it sensitively. Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes is here to prove you wrong:

I have a hard time imagining that a very middle aged gay man would have chosen Sugar Ray Leonard to make a sudden, un-negotiated, physical sexual assault against just as he was about to win a gold medal in BOXING. Boxing, repeatedly and skillfully and forcefully hitting an evenly matched opponent in the face and head in order to inflict damage up to and including knocking him unconscious. Boxing is not track and field, it’s not gymnastics, it’s the training and practice of how to do physical damage to someone. No matter how physically attractive Leonard was, the possibility that he might beat you to a bloody pulp if he didn’t welcome your entirely unannounced, unapproved physical advance would have made him an unlikely man to choose to make one on.

Though he never quite comes out and says it, everything McCarthy says is based on the assumption that Black man = violent thug and especially that a Black boxer is a violent thug. Obviously it’s absurd to assume that just because Sugar Ray Leonard was a career boxer, he would beat up people outside the ring as well, as if boxing and criminal assault are the same thing. To make his case McCarthy has to ignore all other power considerations that could exist between a young, Black boxing hopeful and a well established, white boxing coach, has to ignore what the likely consequences for Sugar Ray had been had he indeed physically attacking this coach, had to ignore the very fact that awareness of sexual assault, especially sexual assault aimed at men, was pretty low in 1976. Instead he has to rely on unspoken but understood stereotypes of young Black men, dogwhistled through emphasising Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing career.

Without this racism he only has own incredulity as an argument, but just because Anthony McCarthy finds something hard to believe doesn’t mean it didn’t happen — I found it hard to believe any self declared feminist could engage in victim blaming this blatant, yet Anthony made it happen anyway.

The Mammoth e-Book of Mindblowing Mars SF

Published on June 17, 20111 Comment

Need something cool to read this weekend? Here you go:

The Mammoth e-Book of Mindblowing Mars SF (2009) presents 20 of the finest examples of mind-expanding, awe-inspiring, 21st-century Martian science fiction that are free and ready-to-read on the Internet. The storylines range from a spunky young bride-to-be truding across Red Planet sands, to a classical concert on Earth interrupted by unannounced guests, to a brutish psychic that roams the twisting urban alleys of the north face of Mars. These are works that take you across time and space -– from today’s top-name contributors, including Camille Alexa, Kage Baker, Terrie Leigh Relf, Patricia Stewart, Mary A. Turzillo, and Liz Williams. So sit back, adjust your glasses, and prepare to have your mind blown!

Bonus question: what’s different about this anthology?