quarantining the girl cooties

[truepenny]

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 Episode Issue is a good thing, when what you're saying with it is, HEY! There are enough [women/African-Americans/GLBT writers/writers with disabilities/etc.] doing excellent work in our field to fill A WHOLE ISSUE! Maybe we should all be PAYING ATTENTION!

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.]

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*Not, of course, that women are a numerical minority. Tra la.

Comments

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Good point--fixing that typo did give the theme a bit more focus, which helps.

In the '80s, it seemed as if every SF and comics convention I went to had what we began to call The Obligatory Women In Panel. The panel wasn't about how the creation of female protagonists altered the direction of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, or interesting views of the roles of women in post-apocalyptic SF. It was about Women in Science Fiction (or Fantasy, or Comics)...which the panelists were left to try to turn into an actual panel topic, since we were never even sure whether we were supposed to be talking about female characters or female authors or female fans, for cryinoutloud.

The Obligatory Women In Panel eventually grew up and turned into lots of actual panel topics at conventions about interesting gender stuff, with enough specificity that the panelists had a decent starting point for the discussion. But when I read that RoF was announcing a Women in Fantasy issue... Well, just for a second, there, I had a heck of a nasty flashback moment. *g*

(And having now performed my role as a Graying Ol' Lady of SF for the week, I'll quit thumping my cane on the floor and go take my teeth out.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I've been on that panel.