Although I agree with and acknowledge many of the essay's points, I'm very uncomfortable with the inference I draw from these paragraphs:
And the easiest way to make room in SF stories for women is to make the women into men. It is also an easy (and cheap) way, in this the beginning of the twenty-first century, to lay claim to being a feminist writer. But it isn't feminist to write about men with breasts. It's a reinforcement of the patriarchal idea (most notably expressed by Freud) that all women are simply defective men.
The question, then, is how to resist this facile and meretricious method of writing about "women." First and most obvious: don't make a character female just because you think you ought to, or because you want to be able to say you've done it. If the character needs to be female, that's a different matter, but making artificial choices about gender is just as detrimental to a story as making artificial choices about anything else.
which seems to me to be implying that once again, womens' existence has to be justified, that you shouldn't just make lots of characters women because, well, lots of people are women - that you start out with a default male, and modify his gender if you have a good enough reason - but you have to have a reason. [1]
I was particularly struck by all this because the story I recently finished had a first-person narrator whose sex I changed from male to female midway through in a burst of inspiration; as it happens I like that she's female; it allows me to have her make certain comments, it suggested the ending to me - but in no way did she need to be female, and I think that the number of stories in which the characters' sex or gender is genuinely needed, rather than assumed to be necessary by a writer or reader, is actually rather smaller than people tend to think.
I suppose the reason I'm also so uncomfortable with the 'man with breasts' bit is because that is the traditional accusation flung at women, not in fiction but in reality, who choose to move in any sphere but a very particular and narrow one - who attempt to endow their lives with conflict & a narrative arc, if you will. I think if you gave examples of characters you'd describe that way, I'd probably recognize exactly what you meant, but I still dislike it as a general rule.
I think what it comes down to - and this is more an disagreement with Le Guin than with you, I imagine - is that I don't believe that men own something just because they say they do. And put that way no one would contradict me, of course, but what I mean is that I am reflexively edgy about claims that types of plot & narrative - if not plot and narrative themselves! - are 'masculine', even when what is meant is only that they have historically been so, which I know is true.
Anyway, it was especially nice to see this today, since I just this morning read A Room of One's Own, which I had never done before -shockingly! The points in your first section in particular, on the sexualization of female characters, cannot be made too often or in enough different ways.
Proving that I still didn't manage to say what I meant. Dammit.
For one thing, I was talking about protagonists, not secondary characters. Secondary characters can be any damn sex you want them to be, and I'm as likely to flip a coin to choose their gender as anyone else (with a tendency to make them female because, well, like you said, lots of people are women). But I was specifically trying to argue that one SHOULDN'T make protagonists default male and change their gender when it suddenly seems like a good idea.
What I was trying to say seems to be particularly and aggravatingly elusive. Perhaps because, for me, the gender of a major character tends to be integral; I know it as soon as I know their name (which is generally the first thing I know)--this was true even of the transsexual character in one story. It was all there as soon as she was. And I get in serious trouble if I try to force them to have the wrong gender.
If you disagree with Le Guin, that's cool. What she says happens to work for me--as a metaphor if nothing else.
Heinlein's women, btw, are almost all what I'd describe as men with breasts, unless they're sex toys. In his later works, mostly they're both.
Thank you! V. glad to have people reading who are also thinking.
I was originally going to add a footnote to the effect that I knew you didn't actually mean what I was objecting to, only that your phrasing suggested it, but then I decided that would be obnoxious. But I do agree with you more than I disagree.
The Le Guin thing about lives which are suited to particular types of narrative is just so weird to me because, first of all, what is more flat, more unchanging, more monotonous, more dull and unsuited to novel structure than the life of a file clerk, or factory worker? Professional life, I mean, because if you get into his personal life, you're at once plunged into the private, feminine sphere. And if you want an event with a definite beginning, a steady rise, and a bang of an ending with the potential for blood, pain, angst, and trauma in the middle, you can't do any better or any more traditionally female than pregnancy. Sure, it's classically compared to war because it's dangerous, but like war, it's also got a built-in story.
And housework, which is famously never done, and has to be done over and over the same way with no outbreaks of adventure? well, farming is like that, and there's no shortage of (male-authored) literature about cyclical, rural, pastoral life - even if much of that is boring, like Virgil's Georgics. (Stupid Georgics.)
So I can see the distinction between different types of life & therefore story and the need for differing modes and narrative arrangements, but I can't see that even in considering the most role-bound people they have much to do with gender - except for the fact that women are always being accused of being passive and dull.
Re: housework: have you read Angela Davis's essay about its approaching obsolescence? (It's in Woman, Race & Class.)
LeGuin's problem, IMO, is that she doesn't think about the politics enough, not even when writing about gender after her discovery of feminism. Gender, as Christine Delphy writes (http://www.lagauche.com/lagauche/article.php3?id_article=27), is linked to division of labour, and is entirely social, as the wide fluctuations that occur between cultures prove. Women are oppressed not because women's work is inherently boring or dull or unsuitable to adventure stories, but because women are exploited, and it is to justify this exploitation that all the politics and propaganda linked to gender arise. (Cf. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism, by Joanna Russ.)
what is more flat, more unchanging, more monotonous, more dull and unsuited to novel structure than the life of a file clerk, or factory worker? Professional life, I mean, because if you get into his personal life, you're at once plunged into the private, feminine sphere.
The nearest I can think of is:
Primo Levi, The Wrench (the protagonist is a rigger, the narrator is a chemist) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (working in a Siberian labour camp, it's not all about his work - bricklaying and such - but a large amount is)
Particularly the first one. It's interesting that both these authors went through concentration camps, Levi surviving Auschwitz and Solzhenitsyn the gulag. They're both mostly about manual jobs, they do have rather a different attitude to work than most authors. It's significant that out of a collection of, let me guess, 800 or 900 books (fiction of some sort), these are the only two I can think of.
That's how I read it, too, and I object because it's a criticism of process, not of outcome, and assumes that a certain kind of arbitrary assignment of attributes in the beginning will lead to a finished work that looks arbitrary from the outside. Which I don't see why it should.
And while I don't believe you can deduce the method from the finished work as a rule - this being the root of my objection - I would still bet anything that Heinlein never thought of doing the changing-random-men-to-women bit - his women are women in his mind, whatever they are in ours.
Okay, so my own feminist agenda: I want people writing women characters to THINK ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS when they're writing. Not to just change the pronouns when they're done and feel smug because they've put women into an sf story and can claim to be all liberal and open-minded and shit.
No, neither objective nor balanced. But they didn't ask me to write a lit-crit analysis of female characters in sf. They asked me to write an article about how to write strong female characters. And I ended up writing an article about why it's hard to write strong female characters, and especially in sf.
The article's about process. And please note: I didn't say ANYTHING about the methods used by published authors, living or dead. I couldn't. I don't know thing one about them. I don't know how Heinlein came to write such embarrassingly sexist and implausible depictions of women, but I'd tend to agree with you that he didn't play the pronoun switching game. I never said he did.
I was trying to offer advice based on my own experience and my general feeling that the more self-aware one is as a writer and a person, the stronger one's characters will be, and the better one's stories.
And, you know, maybe it's lousy advice. I don't know. But they asked me to write the article, and it's what I had to give them.
And not just the sexualization of female characters, but only the heteronormatively attractive ones, at that.
This is what's been annoying me about the stuff flying about LJ on female characters lately. Nobody's asking where the ugly women are. Or the middle-aged, or heaven forfend, old ones are. And of course we mustn't suggest that these women *gasp* have SEX or anything.
I'm tempted to do my own reading list on LJ for aging and/or unattractive female characters, because these days they speak to me more than just about anyone or anything. It'd be a heavily LeGuin list, of course, but not entirely.
If you haven't found it already (and for anyone else interested), cavlec's started the discussion (http://www.livejournal.com/users/cavlec/38947.html).
I enjoyed the article. I could think of a specific instance where I'd read a book where one of the main characters was a man with breasts. She was a warrior that acted just like a male warrior. You are correct in that it is easy and cheap to write that kind of a character. Even if a woman receives the exact training and battle experience that a man receives, she will approach her skills from a slightly different angle. (Not worse, just different.)
Sometimes I think authors don't know how to create differences between men and women because "male" traits have traditionally been desirable and "female" traits undesirable. For a woman to actually be a woman can be perceived as a weakness. So the author tacks all these desirable manly traits onto their female character and makes a monster that doesn't exist in real life.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 07:27 pm (UTC)And the easiest way to make room in SF stories for women is to make the women into men. It is also an easy (and cheap) way, in this the beginning of the twenty-first century, to lay claim to being a feminist writer. But it isn't feminist to write about men with breasts. It's a reinforcement of the patriarchal idea (most notably expressed by Freud) that all women are simply defective men.
The question, then, is how to resist this facile and meretricious method of writing about "women." First and most obvious: don't make a character female just because you think you ought to, or because you want to be able to say you've done it. If the character needs to be female, that's a different matter, but making artificial choices about gender is just as detrimental to a story as making artificial choices about anything else.
which seems to me to be implying that once again, womens' existence has to be justified, that you shouldn't just make lots of characters women because, well, lots of people are women - that you start out with a default male, and modify his gender if you have a good enough reason - but you have to have a reason. [1]
I was particularly struck by all this because the story I recently finished had a first-person narrator whose sex I changed from male to female midway through in a burst of inspiration; as it happens I like that she's female; it allows me to have her make certain comments, it suggested the ending to me - but in no way did she need to be female, and I think that the number of stories in which the characters' sex or gender is genuinely needed, rather than assumed to be necessary by a writer or reader, is actually rather smaller than people tend to think.
I suppose the reason I'm also so uncomfortable with the 'man with breasts' bit is because that is the traditional accusation flung at women, not in fiction but in reality, who choose to move in any sphere but a very particular and narrow one - who attempt to endow their lives with conflict & a narrative arc, if you will. I think if you gave examples of characters you'd describe that way, I'd probably recognize exactly what you meant, but I still dislike it as a general rule.
I think what it comes down to - and this is more an disagreement with Le Guin than with you, I imagine - is that I don't believe that men own something just because they say they do. And put that way no one would contradict me, of course, but what I mean is that I am reflexively edgy about claims that types of plot & narrative - if not plot and narrative themselves! - are 'masculine', even when what is meant is only that they have historically been so, which I know is true.
Anyway, it was especially nice to see this today, since I just this morning read A Room of One's Own, which I had never done before -shockingly! The points in your first section in particular, on the sexualization of female characters, cannot be made too often or in enough different ways.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 07:40 pm (UTC)For one thing, I was talking about protagonists, not secondary characters. Secondary characters can be any damn sex you want them to be, and I'm as likely to flip a coin to choose their gender as anyone else (with a tendency to make them female because, well, like you said, lots of people are women). But I was specifically trying to argue that one SHOULDN'T make protagonists default male and change their gender when it suddenly seems like a good idea.
What I was trying to say seems to be particularly and aggravatingly elusive. Perhaps because, for me, the gender of a major character tends to be integral; I know it as soon as I know their name (which is generally the first thing I know)--this was true even of the transsexual character in one story. It was all there as soon as she was. And I get in serious trouble if I try to force them to have the wrong gender.
If you disagree with Le Guin, that's cool. What she says happens to work for me--as a metaphor if nothing else.
Heinlein's women, btw, are almost all what I'd describe as men with breasts, unless they're sex toys. In his later works, mostly they're both.
Thank you! V. glad to have people reading who are also thinking.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 08:32 pm (UTC)The Le Guin thing about lives which are suited to particular types of narrative is just so weird to me because, first of all, what is more flat, more unchanging, more monotonous, more dull and unsuited to novel structure than the life of a file clerk, or factory worker? Professional life, I mean, because if you get into his personal life, you're at once plunged into the private, feminine sphere. And if you want an event with a definite beginning, a steady rise, and a bang of an ending with the potential for blood, pain, angst, and trauma in the middle, you can't do any better or any more traditionally female than pregnancy. Sure, it's classically compared to war because it's dangerous, but like war, it's also got a built-in story.
And housework, which is famously never done, and has to be done over and over the same way with no outbreaks of adventure? well, farming is like that, and there's no shortage of (male-authored) literature about cyclical, rural, pastoral life - even if much of that is boring, like Virgil's Georgics. (Stupid Georgics.)
So I can see the distinction between different types of life & therefore story and the need for differing modes and narrative arrangements, but I can't see that even in considering the most role-bound people they have much to do with gender - except for the fact that women are always being accused of being passive and dull.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 10:43 pm (UTC)LeGuin's problem, IMO, is that she doesn't think about the politics enough, not even when writing about gender after her discovery of feminism. Gender, as Christine Delphy writes (http://www.lagauche.com/lagauche/article.php3?id_article=27), is linked to division of labour, and is entirely social, as the wide fluctuations that occur between cultures prove. Women are oppressed not because women's work is inherently boring or dull or unsuitable to adventure stories, but because women are exploited, and it is to justify this exploitation that all the politics and propaganda linked to gender arise. (Cf. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism, by Joanna Russ.)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-06 10:46 pm (UTC)The nearest I can think of is:
Primo Levi, The Wrench (the protagonist is a rigger, the narrator is a chemist)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (working in a Siberian labour camp, it's not all about his work - bricklaying and such - but a large amount is)
Particularly the first one. It's interesting that both these authors went through concentration camps, Levi surviving Auschwitz and Solzhenitsyn the gulag. They're both mostly about manual jobs, they do have rather a different attitude to work than most authors. It's significant that out of a collection of, let me guess, 800 or 900 books (fiction of some sort), these are the only two I can think of.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 08:02 am (UTC)And while I don't believe you can deduce the method from the finished work as a rule - this being the root of my objection - I would still bet anything that Heinlein never thought of doing the changing-random-men-to-women bit - his women are women in his mind, whatever they are in ours.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 03:09 pm (UTC)No, neither objective nor balanced. But they didn't ask me to write a lit-crit analysis of female characters in sf. They asked me to write an article about how to write strong female characters. And I ended up writing an article about why it's hard to write strong female characters, and especially in sf.
The article's about process. And please note: I didn't say ANYTHING about the methods used by published authors, living or dead. I couldn't. I don't know thing one about them. I don't know how Heinlein came to write such embarrassingly sexist and implausible depictions of women, but I'd tend to agree with you that he didn't play the pronoun switching game. I never said he did.
I was trying to offer advice based on my own experience and my general feeling that the more self-aware one is as a writer and a person, the stronger one's characters will be, and the better one's stories.
And, you know, maybe it's lousy advice. I don't know. But they asked me to write the article, and it's what I had to give them.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 07:42 pm (UTC)This is what's been annoying me about the stuff flying about LJ on female characters lately. Nobody's asking where the ugly women are. Or the middle-aged, or heaven forfend, old ones are. And of course we mustn't suggest that these women *gasp* have SEX or anything.
I'm tempted to do my own reading list on LJ for aging and/or unattractive female characters, because these days they speak to me more than just about anyone or anything. It'd be a heavily LeGuin list, of course, but not entirely.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 06:57 am (UTC)YES PLEASE.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 09:09 pm (UTC)Sometimes I think authors don't know how to create differences between men and women because "male" traits have traditionally been desirable and "female" traits undesirable. For a woman to actually be a woman can be perceived as a weakness. So the author tacks all these desirable manly traits onto their female character and makes a monster that doesn't exist in real life.