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quarantining the girl cooties
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yuki_onna has a good, chewy post about Realms of Fantasy's plan for an All Women-Authors Issue. What she says about it, of course, goes for any minority group: women*, African-Americans, GLBT writers, writers with disabilities, etc. etc. etc. I think there's a point in the process of opening a genre where the Very Special But, returning to the specific circumstances, that's really not where women SF writers are anymore, and hasn't been for, jeez, thirty years. Because, seriously, a whole issue of Realms of Fantasy (or any other magazine) is, what? Six stories? Seven stories? Ten if they're small? I guarantee you there are more than ten women writers doing excellent work in sffh. As Cat says, a Very Special Issue is tokenism. (It also suggests, subliminally, that women writers are fragile flowers and can't compete with men head-to-head, that our stories wouldn't be good enough to fill a whole issue without this special enclave, like we're a rare species of owl or something.) It neither causes nor promises fundamental change in the way a magazine is run or the way an editor makes decisions.
I should say here that I don't know what the motivations are at RoF. For all I know, this is a sincere attempt to cut through the male-dominated bullshit and champion the cause of feminism and women writers. And it's a very attention-getting way of doing it. I'm just not sure it's the best way.
[ETA: as
jimhines kindly points out, Douglas Cohen explains some of the editorial thinking in the second comment to the announcement.]---
*Not, of course, that women are a numerical minority. Tra la.
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I dunno if Shawna McCarthy edited the first feminist speculative fiction anthology (Amazon has one, Space of Her Own (http://www.amazon.com/Space-Asimovs-Science-Fiction-Anthology/dp/B000NQBZGY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262723073&sr=1-2), from 1983, and check out the gender politics of that cover), but citing that credential actually just reinforces my point: she edited an all-women-authors SF anthology THIRTY YEARS AGO. Have we not moved on at all?
This is not to diss Shawna McCarthy, and CERTAINLY not to diss the fact that she edited an all-women-authors SF anthology in 1983--because that's an honorable achievement, and I know it. It's just to say that this feels like we're stuck in a time warp.
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http://feministsf.org/anths/index.html#editorindex
I really hope this ROF issue isn't going to compound tokenism with suppression of history.
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Sometimes, dude, when you have a cool idea, you have to keep thinking beyond the initial "ooh, shiny!"--an even cooler idea might be on the other side. (For example, the article he mentions would just as easily fit into a Very Special Issue about gender, which would, or at least could, be cool.
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