Articles with the Tag Russ Pledge

Sausage fest

Comix, Feminism
Published on 7 Comments on Sausage fest

These are the top ten comics in the Hooded Utilitarian International Best Comics Poll:

1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
5. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
6. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
7. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
8. Pogo, Walt Kelly
9. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
10.The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.

Notice anything? Yep, for an international poll it is very much dominated by American comics; even Watchmen, though created by two Brits, is very much in the American comics tradition. Worse, there’s no woman to be seen either, not until number 24, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. In total there are just eight women on the list for a total of nine entries (Alison Bechdel being the sole woman to be mentioned twice), most of which are clustered in the lower regions of the list, having gotten on with just a handful of votes:

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Dirty Plotte Stories, including My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
Furûtsu Basaketto [Fruits Basket], Natsuki Takaya
Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahash

Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the RAW Stories, Lynda Barry
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio
Moomin, Tove Jansson

I’m not going to blame the poll contributors for their appalling oversights, my own collection not being very gender balanced either and at least the Hooded Utilitarian editorial team are aware of this shortcoming, having asked Shaenon Garrity to redress the balance somewhat in a separate article. The gender skewedness of this list is just a symptom of a much greater problem, that comics as a medium is much too male dominated.

Part of that is mindset, a certain ignorance of readers and critics of female cartoonists, in which only a handful of currently active creators are well known, but the context and history in which they work is lost, each a singleton, the same problem we’ve discussedhere before regarding science fiction. Nobody is consciously suppressing women cartoonists, but there is still a systemic bias working against them, which polls like this bring to light. It’s so much easier to think of ten, hundred, thousand great male cartoonists who could arguably be part of the list than it is to find even half a dozen female cartoonists who could also be. It’s natural to think of sequences of influence like Noel Sickles -> Milton Caniff -> Al Severin -> John Buscema, but where does somebody like Marie Severin fit in?

But as Shaenon touches upon in her article, there are other barriers as well. The past ten years have seen an explosion of classic comics series, both newspaper strip and comic book being rediscovered and republished in nice, prestige editions, but how many of them have been created by women? Where are the classic female underground cartoonists to take their place amongst the Crumb archives? Where is the Daredevil Visionaires: Ann Nocenti? If the best work by women is not available, how can readers ever discover them?

Finally, and this is something that’s especially true for American comics, it might just be that the kind of work that really gets you noticed in comics is the kind of work that — certainly historical — has been the last available to female cartoonists. That’s the long form comic, the multiple decades old newspaper strip, the fifty issue plus comic book run, the one that needs time and dedication and self sacrifice. In Tom Spurgeon’s unrelated, intensly personal rant from earlier this week (which I found both moving and hard to respond to, if response is needed), he mentions at one point the “children of strip artists whose primary memory of their fathers and mothers is that person at a drawing board, desperate to get away for a few moments but deciding with an almost whole-body resignation to continue working while life-moment X, Y and Z unfolds nearby.” Which of course has always been easier for men than women to do, traditional gender roles being what they were and often, in disguise, still are. As Virginia Woolf once argued, before you could have great women writers, they need a room of their own, which goes double for cartoonists.

So, umm, yeah. It is understandable if bad that a list of the best comics a group of dedicated, clever critics can think of is such a sausage fest, but it’s just one symptom of a deeper imbalance, one not easily solvable, so what can you do? Well, perhaps comics needs to take the Russ pledge too:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

Russ Pledge: Jo Walton

science fiction
Published on

We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge.

Jo Walton joined rec.arts.sf.written at around the same time as I did, back in 1994. This was before the web had really started going and Usenet was the hot new social medium, though we didn’t call it that then. Text based, it played to Jo’s strengths and she quickly became one of the top posters on rasfw — not a small achievement in that pressure cooker full of highly articulate, intelligent people, not to mention huge egos. The same insights and knowledge she now brings to her posts at the Tor blog now, she already showed back then. Her presence was one of the things that made rec.arts.sf.written the best place to talk about science fiction online ever. Jo wasn’t just another sf fan; like so many of us she was also attempting to break into writing. Having written a couple of short stories, it was a connection made through rec.arts.sf.written, with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, that got her first novel published in 2000. Since then she has written eight more.

Her best novel so far is her latest and also her most personal: Amongst Others, published in February, is both a fantasy story and the coming age story of a science fiction fan where you don’t need much imagination to see much of Jo herself in her protagonist. To quote from my review:

But that isn’t what her life revolves around. For the most part this is the diary of a fifteen year old girl interested in science fiction and fantasy, a fan of Ursula LeGuin, Robert A. Heinlein, Roger Zelazny and James Tiptree Jr., but not Philip K. Dick or Stephen Donaldson. Her diary entries are about what’s going on with school, reading books and buying books, getting involved with her father’s side of the family and worries about the family she left behind in Wales, Grampaw and Auntie Teg and finding other people who like science fiction, including her father. These parts are where the Jo-ness shines through, but also the most universal parts of the story. There’s one heartbreaking little scene when she and her father are staying in a hotel somewhere and he gets drunk in the bar below and comes into their room and tries to climb into her bed and kiss her and she’s trying to reason it out through what she learned from Heinlein that incest is not a sin if no children are concieved but she has no contraceptives and it doesn’t feel right but it’s nice to be wanted and…

Before that, there was the Small Change series of alternate history novels, featuring the familiar concept of a Britain that has made peace with Nazi Germany, but which Jo had managed to give a new twist. Again quoting from my own review of the first book, Farthing:

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing’s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

England after all was a deeply racist country before the war, where anti-semitism was deeply ingrained, as anybody who has read classic cozies knows — even an enlightened writer like Dorothy L. Sayers could talk about a “typical Jew” with all the stereotypes that entails. What Walton does in Farthing is take the casual racism and snobbery of a Josephine Tey and makes it all slightly more explicit and horrid, but still recognisable English. No Kristallnacht, but it is quite casually established Jews cannot buy land.

I’ve not read all of her books, but every book I’ve read of hers was no less than excellent. What’s more, she’s not content to keep repeating her earlier successes. Her first three novels were Arthurian sagas set in a fantasy Britain: this was follewed by her attempt at an Anthony Trollope novel, but with dragons. Then there were the three Small Change alternate history novels, a return to fantasy with Lifelode and finally Among Others. Despite their differences these novels do have something in common, in that each in their own way treats with the Matter of Britain, what it means to be British to the core, in the very old fashioned last Roman in England way that Jo Walton has.

Do yourself a favour and read:

  • The King’s Peace (2000)
  • The King’s Name (2001)
  • The Prize in the Game (2002)
  • Tooth and Claw (2003)
  • Farthing (2006)
  • Ha’penny (2007)
  • Half a Crown (2008)
  • Lifelode (2009)
  • Among Others (2011)

Taking the Russ Pledge

fantasy, Feminism, science fiction
Published on 1 Comment on Taking the Russ Pledge

cover of How to Suppress Womens Writing

“She didn’t write it. But if it’s clear she did the deed… She wrote it, bit she shouldn’t have. (It’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (“Jane Eyre. Poor dear. That’s all she ever…”) She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book. It’s sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Brontë. Her own “masculine side”.) Sje wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard’s help…) She wrote it BUT…”

That’s the cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ’ classic examination of all the ways women’s writing has been written out of literary history. The cover sort of gives the game away in how that was and is done. It’s so easy to outright deny or minimise female contributions to literature, consciously or unconsciously because despite a century of feminism, we’re still living in a male orientated world. Whether we like it or not, people like me — white, western, male, straight — are the default and if we don’t watch ourselves we find it easy to ignore all those not like us, while immediately finding it strange if we’re not present in our fictions, either as author or character.

In science fiction, despite its self asserted reputation of openmindedness, things are no better. If have been following this blog for a while, you know this, as we hashed this all out last year as well. That’s why I started a project to read at least one science fiction or fantasy book written by a woman per month, just to counter my own subconscious tendency to stick to male authors. The personal is the political after all and if I don’t take the trouble to look after my own reading, I can’t really fault others for ignoring female writers. It may seem odd to police your pleasure reading that way, but I’ve found that if I don’t, I get stuck in the same rut with the same male authors over and over again. I don’t just do it because it’s good for science fiction if more people pay as much attention to female as to male writers, but because it’s good for me.

Just because a few of us felt this way last year, doesn’t mean the war is being won of course. At the moment science fiction has gotten a bit more media attention again, if only through the by all accounts brilliant exhibition at the British Library, but sadly it has revealed that it’s still the male writers who get most of the attention. As Nicola Griffith found out, when The Guardian asked its readers to name its favourite sf books/writers, only 18 out of 500 writers were female. It reminded her of what Joanna Russ had analysed so well thirty years ago and it inspired her to a call for action:

Clearly, women’s sf is being suppressed in the UK. Oh, not intentionally. But that’s how bias works: it’s unconscious. And of course sometimes it’s beyond a reader’s power to change: you can’t buy a book that’s not on the shelf. You can’t shelve something the publisher hasn’t printed. You can’t publish something an agent doesn’t send you. You can’t represent something a writer doesn’t submit. Etc.

But, whether this bias is active or passive, it’s time to attack it on several fronts:

  • reexamine and rewrite Best Of lists to take into account women who have been relegated to also-rans (this will involve public discussion and reevaluation)
  • rexamine and republish Classics to include those women who, through the process Russ delineates, have slipped down the rankings (ditto)
  • revive the old-style Women’s Press list of sf, historic and contemporary, by women writers
  • acknowledge, in media pieces, likely inherent bias
  • writers, stop self-censoring
  • agents, stop narrowing the funnel
  • editors, consider balancing your list
  • booksellers, pay attention to your readers and categories
  • readers, give books and writers a chance
  • etc.

And always, always name the behaviour around you: we can’t change behaviour until it’s named.

From there on, Nicola called for The Russ pledge:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

This in turn inspired Ian Sales, who had been part of the debate last year as well, to start the SF Mistress Works blog, dedicated fto establishing a line of potential “Mistress Works”, classical sf novels written by women, ala the actually existing Gollancz SF Masteworks line. He’s calling for reviews of those works he has already put up as potential Mistress Works, either existing or new ones; I might just take him up on that.

As long as it’s not as natural or easy to think of female sf writers as it is to think of male ones, the Russ Pledge and initiatives like Ian Sales’ are necessary. As Maura McHugh says in in the title of her excellent summing up of the current “controversy”, be part of the solution. Take the Russ Pledge today!