--Apex Magazine has an article by Tansy Rayner Roberts:
Girl Meets House: Kitchen Sinks, Joanna Russ and the Female Gothic.
--Amal El-Mohtar, reflecting on the requirement of exceptionality for women characters in the 1970s
Sandbaggers spy series, posts
More Thoughts on Feminist Characters: Sandbaggers and Female Exceptionalism.
--Brit Mandelo reviews
The Moment of Change for Tor.com. "These poems," she writes, "are howling, and they are whispering, and they are calmly—or madly—telling stories about what it means to be a woman, any kind of woman, any person who reaches out for the name “woman.” I appreciated the inclusivity of this text, and the concern with gathering in as many voices as possible to put them in tension and in conversation. Some of the best poems of the text—and, having heard them performed, I may be biased—are JT Stewart’s “Say My Name” and “Ceremony,” one short and one long, both poems dealing with issues of race, immigration, and self-definition Also, it goes without saying, but: they are beautiful, wrenching, astounding pieces. Which is not to say that the whole book isn’t fabulous, because it is. With enough time, I would review every single poem of the approximately 70 pieces included here." You can read the whole review
here.
--Gary Trudeau distills the reality of sexual harassment and rape in the US military
into 20 frames of his
Doonesbury strip.
I rather liked the Sandbaggers and never felt that the women were merely babes. Another show that also did this was the Canadian vampire t.v. series: Forever NIght. The two women in the show were a vampire and a doctor, neither sexual partners of the main character. The woman vampire had her own agendas and was sometimes more right than Nick, the hero. Contrasted quite a lot with Twin Peaks, where the women were all doozies or sluts.
ReplyDeleteTwo strong women characters to one male character -- rather interesting.