Feminism – Page 7 – Wis[s]e Words

So how many female writers do you review?

Published on March 17, 2013Leave a comment

Over at Lady Business, they’ve looked at the coverage of female writers on science fiction and fantasy blogs:

Project thesis: when looking at a sample of bloggers reviewing SF/F, a majority of men will skew toward reviewing more men. A majority of women will skew toward a more equal gender parity, or the opposite in which they review a majority of women. There will be a handful of outliers.

Which meant it was time to check my own reviewing, to see whether or not I’m an outlier or not. A few years ago I re-examined my reading habits, coming to the conclusion I read too few female writers, then set out to correct this. However, though I strive to review each book I read, the reality is that I largely don’t succeed in doing so. Last year I read 91 books, but reviewed only forty.

Luckily I keep track of which books I review each year, so it was easy to do the math. I reviewed forty books, of which twentyfour were written by men, sixteen by women, for a very clean division of sixty to forty percent male vs female writers reviewed. That’s better than how the average male reviewer is doing in the Lady Business study (74 to 25 %), worse than the average female reviewer (42 to 58, slightly more skewed towards female writers) and still not gender balanced.

The numbers are somewhat skewed by my Pratchett rereading project, which accounts for eight of those twentyfour, or a third of my male writers. Without those, the ratio switches to sixteen male to sixteen women, or a perfect fifty/fifty split. All done by accident though.

Why Marvel is more diverse than Fantagraphics

Published on March 14, 2013Leave a comment

In a CBR interview with Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson, the anonymous interviewer asked a question that got me thinking:

Right now, fans of mainstream superhero comics seemed to be more engaged than ever in conversations about women in comics, the need for women creators and the need for strong female characters. While that was never a primary consideration for you two, do you think conversations like this one help? Does it actually accomplish anything or are there other things we need to do if we’re serious about involving women in the industry?

Because while mainstream comics, ie. Marvel and DC and perhaps Image are not doing well in being all that diverse in the talent they’re using on their books, at least this lack of diversity is talked about, if not quite acted upon yet. And if we actually did get serious about diversity as a comics community, it would be relatively easy for a Marvel or DC to get more women, more people of colour on their books, just because of the kind of books they publish: assembly line comics with an emphasis on the characters rather than the creators.

Yet what about a publisher like Fantagraphics, the exact opposite of Marvel and DC, a publisher that prides itself on publishing the very best cartoonists publishing in English? If you look at their catalogue and the people they publish it isn’t any more diverse than the socalled Big Two are.

The thing is, it would actually be harder to “fix” Fantagraphics than it would be to fix Marvel justbecause the people being published by Fantagraphics aren’t interchangable cogs. Therefore, if the publishers, Gary Groth and Kim Thompson would want to increase the diversity of their catalogue, they need to do more work: find the sort of cartoonist that would fit in well with Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware, but is a woman, or a person of colour. Either that or move away from the Fanta “house style” and find new, interesting areas of “art comics” that unrepresented groups do better at.

“Let someone else be on the poster”

Published on March 10, 2013Leave a comment

When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude … In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same … Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude’s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy. My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, it’s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she’s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though that’s exactly what she is.

[…]

We don’t need Lady Shepard to verbally eviscerate a racist or punch an ass-grabber in the face to know she’s tough. We know she’s tough by her non-explicitly-gendered actions — the same way we know Dude Shepard is tough.

Yes, I’ve been playing Mass Effect this weekend, about five years behind everybody else. And like everybody sane, I’m playing FemShep, as who’d want to play an overmuscled meathead if they don’t have to? To be honest, I usually play as a female character if I get the opportunity; gaming after all is as much about being somebody else than your normal self as it is about anything else.

Underneath the surface FemShep, the female version of Mass Effect’s hero, is quite literally the same as her male counterpart: they share the same animations, the same dialogue trees, etc. Which means, as Lesley Kinzel explains above, that female Shepard is treated the same as male Shepard and people respond to her personality and actions, rather than to her gender or race. This is interesting, rarer than it should be in pop culture, let alone real life. It’s not completely unproblematic, still a standard sort of sci-fi adventure, but the ability to play a competent, tough female action hero and it’s no big deal, is worth it.

History is more than just an excuse for your own sexism

Published on December 8, 2012Leave a comment

Dan Wohl at The Mary Sue examines the idea that actually existing historical sexism can excuse sexism in fantasy fiction, on which Tansy Rayner Roberts elaborates:

History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.

But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

A good example of that last point can be found in Kimberly Klimek’s dissertation Forgetting the Weakness of Her Sex and a Woman’s Softness: Historians of the Anglo-Norman World and their Female Subjects, which looks at a particular period in history often used as inspiration for fantasy novels, which was particularly rich both in historians and powerful women both.

We Can Stop It

Published on October 19, 2012Leave a comment

What I like about Scottish anti-rape campaign is that it approaches it in the way a drunk driving campaign would. So whereas with traditional campaigns the mephasis is always on rape prevention by the victim, this campaign is talking directly to potential perpetrators, using the same sort of techniques that helped make drink driving from something you bragged about to something you do furtively, if at all.

Not that rape is anywhere near as accepted as drunk driving once was of course, but rather that the way most of us, especially blokes, think about rape is about the stereotypical man in a dark alley physically overpowering a random woman. What this campaign instead is saying that actually, there are quite a few situations in which no physical force is used that are still rape or sexual assault, that consent is always required with sex and that decent, normal men know when it can and cannot be given.

What it does in short is to denormalise all these situations in which you can fool yourself that you’re not actually doing wrong in forcing somebody to have sex with you, by explicitely stating that no, having sex with a woman too drunk to stand up of her own accord is wrong. And it does it largely without putting the hackles up of its target audience, young men, who can get very defensive when talking about rape, for obvious reasons.