If you haven’t seen it already, Strange Horizons recently released their assessment of the data for books reviewed and reviewers, divided by gender, at major SF review sources. It’s definitely worth checking out. (Yes, I mentioned this in my post on gender normativity earlier today.)
In a past episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, we (Paul, Liz Bourke, and myself) discussed, however briefly, the paucity of women among published science fiction authors in the UK. Specifically, we were talking about their minority status in the present while acknowledging the existence of a long string of incredible female SF writers in UK SF history. Though I am not an expert on the UK SF scene, my impression as an American peeking in has confirmed the notion that there is a great deal of sexism within the broader fanbase, and a systemic gender-bias problem in the publishing sphere. The latter has been attributed to sexism (today); I am not convinced that this is necessarily true — at least, not in the sense of a deliberate action. The former is probably a reflection of who speaks as opposed to a true assessment of UK fandom as a whole, and it is certainly true that this perception is changing. Perception, of course, is not everything. I say all of this not because I want to talk specifically about the UK scene, but rather because the recent discussions surrounding the Clarke Award’s all-male finalist list offers one of many gateways into what I actually want to talk about here: the perception of SF as a boy’s world. I’m certainly not the first to take on this argument, or at least to funnel it to the public. In 2009, an anonymous writer blasted science fiction for having given in to the whims of the lady folk, adopting narrative stylings specifically geared towards everyone not-male.* The post elicited a sea of negative responses (expected, really) and once again opened the floodgates on discussions about the position of women in genre. In 2011, David Barnett asked where all the women had disappeared after Damien Walter’s post calling for the public to name the best SF novels resulted in a remarkably male-centric list (I still think we’re recovering from that one). Other related discussions have occurred since: Ann Grilo recently discussed the visibility of women in our community; others covered the news that women are still encouraged to use male pseudonyms because men don’t read books by women; ladybusiness analyzed the available data to determine the gender divide among reviewers and the books they discuss; and, throughout most of 2012, Jim C. Hines explored the way women are posed on SF/F covers. Most recently, John Scalzi and Strange Horizons have dived into the debate again — the former ran the gender divide numbers on his Big Idea feature; the latter did the same for several major publications with review sections. I’m understandably scratching at the surface here… The continued discussion about the position of women within our community, whether as characters, writers, or reviewers, has made me wonder why science fiction, in particular, has remained such a boy’s club. I spent a short while trying to Google an answer to the question, assuming bloggers, critics, and so on would have covered this topic as frequently as the “absence of women” topic — but I came up empty.** There are probably a number of obvious reasons: publishers have traditionally held a bias against female writers (intentional or otherwise — as a result of submission numbers or for some other reason I know not); SF’s readership is perceived as primarily male; or a host of nonsense reasons, from “women don’t like space stuff” to “SF is written for boys.” That last phrase, however, may have some unfortunate truth to it. Before you dig your claws in, let me explain. SF has been seen as a relatively boy-oriented genre since its arrival into pop culture. The Edisonaides, the Pulp Era adventures, and so on and so forth have traditionally been viewed as the domain of men. The reason for this, as far as I’m aware, has little to do with whether the themes of SF are “men-oriented themes,” but more to do with the traditional assumptions about gender. You’ll notice that I included “gender normativity” in the title of this post. Because science, war, technology, and other traditional thematic subjects in SF are still perceived as a “male thing,” SF has maintained an image as a genre “for boys,” even while great women writers (and male writers) have challenged this perception by either writing SF OR inserting female characters into a “male world.”*** Gender normativity, as I understand it, assumes that there are behaviors and positions that are inherently “male/masculine” or “female/feminine.” In literature, gender normativity tends to function by way of associating genres with gender: romance and certain non-fiction categories for the ladies; SF, business, and so on for the menfolk. SF’s association with careers and fields that are still dominated by men has helped keep it on the male side of the spectrum, even while women have rightly challenged the paradigm within fandom (or outside of it). Let’s face it, the last decade has seen a dramatic change in the dialogue surrounding this subject… Gender normativity, of course, is complete nonsense. There is no such thing as a “female behavior” or “male behavior.” Culture determines these boundaries, which is why children are frequently indoctrinated into assumptions about what are acceptable “gender practices” throughout their lives. Girls are supposed to wear pink, play house, maybe get into the liberal arts or social sciences, and pay attention to their looks or behave in submissive ways (see Jane Kilborne’s excellent video, Killing Us Softly). Men, however, are supposed to wear “boy clothes,” play with cars or soldiers or other “aggressive” objects (even firetrucks fall into this category), and otherwise behave in aggressive ways, from asserting oneself physically to associating intellect with domination.**** When people behave outside of these paradigms, our culture does not respond kindly (see this story about a little boy who wanted to wear a dress). And it’s all nonsense. A girl playing cops and robbers is no more behaving like a boy than a boy playing house is behaving like a girl. These positions are, in
(The title for this post is insanely long…) While perusing Amazon.com earlier this morning, I came across this interesting edited collection. There isn’t a lot of information currently available about the collection, except this brief blurb: In science fiction, technology often modifies, supports, and attempts to “make normal” the disabled body. In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical “cures,” technology, and the body in science fiction. Bringing together the fields of disability studies and science fiction, this book explores the ways dis/abled bodies use prosthetics to challenge common ideas about ability and human being, as well as proposes new understandings of what “technology as cure” means for people with disabilities in a (post)human future. Kathryn Allan, the editor, is probably best known as @bleedingchrome on Twitter, and, in academic circles, is one of those rising new voices (she presented at ICFA this year and has one of those PhD things). She is, apparently, one of the few science fiction scholars working in disability studies — an interesting field I imagine. I’ll try to put together an interview with Kathryn in the relatively near future (the book doesn’t come out until August). For now, enjoy the blurb and the cover!
If you have been following the Hugo Awards discussion, then you’ll be familiar with the various forms of this argument: if you don’t show up and do the work, then you should stop complaining. In the Hugo discussion, it translates to the following: you don’t like how the awards work, but you don’t bother to show up to the meetings, so your opinion is really irrelevant; if you don’t like it, show up and change it…or STFU. To illustrate, I present you some actual examples: Firstly, the WSFS Business Meeting is entirely self-selected. It is not a representative body of any description : the people who participate are there entirely on their own recognizance, & the only opinions they can reasonably be expected to bring are their own. So, to expect them to “engage with wider debates,” when the people who consider themselves to be part of those “wider debates” don’t bother to come themselves, or to form committees & send delegates to represent their views (thus splitting among ten or twenty people what can be the problematic costs of attending a Worldcon), or to “engage” with the people who do attend in any other fashion than writing derisive comments about them on the Internet, seems a bit (to use your words) “self-serving”. And: Want to be a SMOF? Volunteer to work on conventions. Come to Business Meetings. Get involved. Be competent. Convince others to vote for things you want. In short, cooperate with other people and show that you’re not a crank. But even that relatively low bar is too much for some people. And (this one is actually ironic, since the WSFS system is not actually properly democratic): I had complaints and gripes about the system. People told me how hard it was. They said, “Don’t bother.” I did it anyway, by the book and within the rules. Sometimes I lost, sometimes I won, but the fact that Democracy is Hard Work wasn’t by itself sufficient to discourage me. If you really think this is important enough, then do it already! Otherwise, I’ll continue to consider it whinging. And: So let me pose a hypothetical. You own an apartment in a building, or a flat for the British. And your complex has a management committee that sorts out things like communal gardens, upkeep, roof maintenance and the like. Typically these things are voted on and people take part. Would you feel just as entitled to moan about how decisions were taken if you’d never been to a meeting, never attended and done nothing other than write letters complaining about how everybody else did it? Because I’m sorry, that’s what I am seeing a lot of, and I see it pretty much every year, either complaining about the Hugos, or moaning about how expensive Worldcons are to attend and how unfair it is to charge so much. That can’t be helped. But as you point out, there’s a lot more to Fandom than the Worldcon and the Hugos. But just because you are a Fan, it doesn’t mean that that is a two way street. These arguments are repeated over and over, defended ad naseum, and accepted by a select few as “the way things are, and the way things should be.” Jonathan McCalmont has called this a strategy of derailing and silencing. I’m not convinced of the latter, but it is certainly a variation of the former. At worst, it is a tactic used to devalue an entire subset of opinions by identifying them as “outside” a given arena of engagement, where only quality action occurs. If you are not an attendee of that arena, your opinion is inherently worthless (or at least worth less than anyone who takes the time to follow the “proper channels”). These arguments should sound familiar in another sense, too: they are often used against marginalized groups to de-legitimate civil disobedience. I don’t want to suggest that the folks speaking out about their frustration with the Hugos are a marginalized group; rather, I make this connection because I find it strange that a tactic of the immensely privileged has been re-purposed to marginalize “dissent,” even when that dissent arrives from other privileged individuals (most of us are white males, after all). The problem with this tactic is that it is completely impractical, and downright classist. In an ideal world, you could easily verbally slap someone for bitching about something in which they take no part. In that ideal world, we’d all have access to cheap and fast transportation. In that ideal world, we’d all have Star Trek transporters in our living rooms. But we do not live in that ideal world. In a very real sense, we live in a far less ideal world than we lived in as little as 6 years ago, before the recession took its toll. Many of us are making less than we ever did before, or aren’t making anything at all. Some of us are trying to get our degrees. Still others live in parts of the world where the cost of transportation is prohibitively expensive — hence why the World SF Travel Fund exists. I happen to be attending Worldcon this year. There are a number of reasons for this: If #1 and #2 weren’t true, I wouldn’t attend (and I’m not sure if I’d pay for a supporting membership). For me, Worldcon is prohibitively expensive in general. Maybe fortune will change that in the future. Currently, I am both a graduate student at a major public university and adjunct faculty as a state college. In terms of my finances, that means I receive a small stipend as a student and supplemental, non-guaranteed income from adjuncting (i.e., my course load is not fixed and I am paid by-the-class, rather than a standard salary). Last semester, I worked roughly 80-100 hours a week to make enough money to qualify as lower middle class. If you’ve lived as an LMC, you know that’s not a lot of
If you don’t follow me on Twitter, then you are unaware that I am attempting to teach a somewhat unusual American Lit survey in the fall. Basically, I am not teaching the traditional American canon (i.e., the greats of U.S. literature). Instead, my course will offer a broader interpretation of “American” to include works from U.S. writers and writers from the Americas at large — North, Central, South, and the Caribbean. Essentially, this course will be designed to challenge the traditional canon in almost every way; even the U.S. texts I select will offer a challenge. While I am familiar with a great deal of work from these regions/areas, there is always the possibility that I’ve missed something I should seriously consider for inclusion — hence, this post. If you have a suggestion for a short story, play, or novel that is from one of these regions, please leave a comment. I am also open to suggestions for U.S. works written by traditionally marginalized groups (Native Americans, people of color, etc.). So suggest away! P.S.: Translations are more than welcome (and expected, considering the range I’ve selected). As long as I can get it in English, it’s open game.
The Hugo Awards discussion continued quiet eloquently with this post by Renay at LadyBusiness. She does a fine job adding depth to thoughts I have had since Justin’s harsh criticism for the awards and its process (thoughts I also shared in the latest episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show). Hopefully Renay’s thoughts will bring us all down to Earth, even if only for a little while. Go read!
