Reading for a Friday

Today is Ursula Le Le Guin's birthday. Happy birthday, Ursula!

---It's therefore fitting that today's first link is to a description by Ryan Britt of a panel discussion, at the Center for Fiction, on the influence Ursula K. Le Guin has had on the sf/f field. The panel was moderated by David Hartwell and included N.k. Jemison, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, and John Wray. I was particularly interested to read...

In terms of her influence on the panel’s writing specifically, N.K Jemisin noted that Le Guin made a big impact on rediscovering her love of short stories. Jemisin cited “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a major revelation as the story caused so much “pain, because it’s intended to be a painful story.” Jemisin previously felt she didn’t need nor understand the medium of short fiction, but after some prodding from peers and reading the short fiction of Le Guin, she thinks totally differently.

...because it reminded me of how important Le Guin's short ficton was for me in the 1980s and how for a long while I firmly believed her short fiction superior to her novels. Eventually I decided, perhaps because the generally shared assumption that novels matter more than short fiction began to insidiously erode my conviction that the best short fiction is as powerful and affecting as the best novels, that perhaps I might be wrong. (Not that I'm not used to being alone in my critical judgments...)

---This is a bit old in internet terms, but in case you missed it: Vandana Singh's most recent column for Strange Horizons continues with the second part of her series on "Science, Emotions, and Culture."

Spread/Art Culture has a photo essay by Kisa Lala, "Visions of a Treeless World," that ranges from the Vikings' slash and burn razing of forests to Easter Island to current day Manhattan, offering striking art work along the way.

--In her essay The Balm of Sisterly Consolation: Thoughts on Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Abigail Nussbaum wrestles with Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho and finds the young Jane Austen reacting against the labeling problem women writers face now as well as then. Nussbaum notes:

It's a question that crops up again and again, whenever art by, for, or about women is discussed. You see it whenever chick-lit--the term, the publishing category, and the question of who gets classed into it--is discussed, and especially when an author of literary fiction--usually a female one--comments disparagingly on it. These discussions, if they acknowledge that chick-lit is rooted in some deeply problematic assumptions (and that it is equally problematic that women writing about the domestic, such as Austen herself, are assumed to be writing chick-lit, or at least less worthy work than male writers who write about it), will usually fail to admit that the perception of chick-lit as frivolous and shallow is rooted in misogyny, and vice versa. During the discussion of the dwindling ranks of women writing SF, there were several surprisingly negative responses from female bloggers, which were partially explained by their argument that women haven't been driven out of SF but have left it for fantasy and paranormal romance, and that the prioritization of SF is just the flipside of the tendency to discount these genres. But all is not well even within those fields: witness, on the one hand, Stina Leicht complaining about the expectation that a female fantasy writer must be writing paranormal romance, and on the other hand, M.K. Hobson's creation of a moniker for a female-oriented subset of steampunk which she dubs "bustlepunk." And then there's the fact that what is meant by literature for women is often literature for white, middle class, heterosexual, cisnormal women, as discussed in the comments to Kyra Smith's review of a romance novel at Ferretbrain.

---Over at the Nation, Ari Berman weighs in with How the Austerity Class Rules Washington:

In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.

The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Berman names some names and takes notes of the deep pockets backing "these very serious people."

---A New Scientist article by Andy Coghln and Debora MacKenzie reports that

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The image the article provides of interlocking ownerships is awesome. 1318 corporations make up the "core," but a "super-entity" of 147 owned 40% of the total wealth in the network.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Fascinating stuff. The study is to be published in PloS One.

Much More Than That

In her essay Just Like a Woman, Audrey Bilger reviews (for the Los Angeles Review of Books) two works focused on their authors' passionate devotion to the "genius" of Jane Austen. One is by William Deresiewicz, who has previously published a more scholarly work, and one by Rachel M. Brownstein, formerly famous for her feminist work Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1982). The tale that Deresiezwicz tells is one of enlightenment, evident at once in his title: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter.

Bilger begins her essay by reviewing the V.S. Naipaul kerfluffle.

If Naipaul’s goal in putting down women writers was to get attention, he couldn’t have picked a better target than Jane Austen. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any other woman whose disparagement would have garnered so much notice. In a word-association game, if I say “woman author,” odds are the first name in your head would be that of the creator of Pride and Prejudice. It’s worth noting that when I tried to talk to one of my nonliterary friends about Naipaul’s remarks, his immediate response was “Who’s V.S. Naipaul?” Nobody ever says, “Who’s Jane Austen?”

And she references Naipaul when she begins talking about Deresiewicz's book:

Deresiewicz is someone who might have agreed with Naipaul’s point about Austen’s inferiority had he not undergone a dramatic conversion. When he was a young graduate student in the 1980s, he could barely bring himself to think of Austen: “Wasn’t she the one who wrote those silly romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy.” In his misguided youth, Deresiewicz identified with manly modernist writers and their ungovernable heroes. “I was Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, raging against the machine,” he gleefully reports; “I was Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the rebel artist who runs rings around the grown-ups. I was Conrad’s Marlow, the world-weary truth teller who punches through hypocrisy and lies.”

A Jane Austen Education recounts how Deresiewicz overcame his bias against Austen and became a better person because of her. When he actually sat down to read the novels, he discovered that “Austen wasn’t silly and superficial; she was much, much smarter — and much wiser — than I could have imagined.” He blames masculinity for his initial skepticism: “If I was slow to catch on … there was a very good reason. I’m a guy, after all.” As he recounts his moral education at the feet of the author he once thought of as the “girliest novelist of all, the godmother of chick lit,” he makes a case for why men need to take women seriously and why Austen is the perfect teacher.

For Deresiewicz, Austen becomes not just a representative woman writer, but a stand-in for all women, and his ongoing surprise and delight at being schooled in the art of being human by, of all people, a female, is certainly honest, even if it leads to some cringe-worthy moments.

Bilger's discussion of Brownstein is where her essay gets interesting. Consider this passage:

Rachel Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?, shares Deresiewicz’s humanistic approach, but unlike him, she would rather we stopped talking about gender altogether. In referring to her 1982 study, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels, a foundational text for feminist literary scholars, Brownstein expresses nothing but remorse. In fact, she claims to have written this new book “to atone for joining the chorus that has ended up by imagining Jane Austen as first of all and most of all a woman, the paradigmatic prisoner of sex and gender, and a paragon of proto-feminist romance — in other words, by misreading her, and not reading her as she meant to be read.” Brownstein now wants to focus on “genius” and on how “Jane Austen’s subject is, as she wrote, human nature.”

Both Deresiewicz and Brownstein are critical of ideological readings and of the current state of the academy, and Brownstein is, in addition, particularly hostile to feminism. She begins the book by expressing discomfort at having been called, at a literary party in the 1980s, a “feminist critic,” — this would have been a new term then — and although she comes to admit that this is exactly what she once was, she wants to distance herself from “the women’s party,” as she calls it.

According to Bilger, Brownstein wants to rescue Austen:

A subtext of Why Jane Austen? is Brownstein’s own disillusionment with academia and her recovered faith in the life of the mind via this exploration of what Jane Austen means. She recalls what it was like to encounter Austen before the late-20th-century culture wars erupted: “When I was in college in the 1950s, Jane Austen was the author of great works that were by the way delicious, six peaks of pink icing on the cake of English literature (or perhaps its rich center).” In discussing what happened in the decades that followed, Brownstein claims, “the critical attack on the canon in the late 1960s, and feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism, and the new media and the sense of a new millennium” all combined to diminish Jane Austen’s status. Toward the end of the book, Brownstein writes, “We reread Jane Austen because she persuades us to be nostalgic for what we never knew, and because we want her clarity.” She concludes by identifying the history of the novel as the “story of civilization,” and she associates Austen with the highest possible meaning: “[M]any of us see civilization now as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end. Jane Austen is the focal point of nostalgia for that old story, a name for it.”

Rescuing Austen, as Bilger reminds us, is an old, old mission. Fans of one sort or another have been battling one another over Austen's ownership for more than a century. (Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed by Deidre Lynch, which she quotes from, is a fascinating book that addresses just that subject.) But I find it hard to wrap my head around the notion that "feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism" are responsible for ruining Jane Austen, given that Brownstein seems to be fussing most about Austen's being associated with "girliness" (which isn't an association that feminist, queer, or postcolonial criticism ever makes). Unless, that is, I zoom in the phrases "the story of civilization," "nostalgic for what we never knew," "civilization as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end..." And once I do that, I'm really rather aghast. Brownstein is reading Jane Austen for that? Wow. I've never felt nostalgic when reading Jane Austen. Ever. So what is that all about? Oh: civilization. Ah, yes. The reactionary's longing for the Good Old Days, when the wealthy were ladies and gentlemen, and the poor knew their place and were grateful when the Mr. Knightlys condescended to them. Before a band of outlaws attacked the US exactly ten years ago. Now I get it.

Bilger doesn't zoom in on that, but she does go to the heart of what's at stake in the Naipaul kerfluffle:

For Brownstein, emphasizing Austen’s role as a woman limits any sense of artistic greatness. “Readers who excoriate (or, indeed, adore) her too narrowly imagine Jane as first-and-foremost a woman, a writer of romances, and/or a moralizing goody-two-shoes,” she declares. “She was in fact much more than that.”

This, from someone who used to call herself a feminist critic? Why in the world does she imagine that feminist, queer, and postcolonial critics don't see her as "more than that"? (Unless by "more than that" she means the reactionary ideologue filling us with nostalgia for the Good Old Days? For me that would be less, rather than more.) The problem is sexism, not feminism. For, as Bilger notes, "If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author." I can't imagine why Brownstein thinks that rescuing Austen from feminist and queer theorists will bring about Austen's universal recognition as a Great Writer. It certainly won't bring the day on which we stop thinking of her as "female" a step closer.

More to the point, perhaps, is Bilger's quote of Deidre Lynch:

“Shakespeare fans, we should note, can act like fans, parade through Stratford-upon-Avon every April 23 sporting sprigs of rosemary, and not put at risk the plays’ claims to be taken seriously. No one, it seems, feels compelled to take this cult audience to task for their excesses and their failure to blush over them.” Bardolatry does Shakespeare no harm, but Austen’s cult following has, in the eyes of many, branded her as a chick-lit exemplar, a frivolous writer of “feminine tosh.”

And isn't that the real problem?

So he tells himself he' s a better writer than Jane Austen. Or Virginia Woolf. Or... really, any woman

Just before boarding a flight taking me home to Seattle this afternoon, I read this.* For a moment, I felt the disorientation of someone who'd been flung back in time to 1970. But then the obnoxious voices of Airport CNN televisions blaring in stereo from each side of me (way to go, MSP!) battered their way into my consciousness, voices babbling of two alternate futures for the US (or was it the world) that US politicians would soon be choosing from (for us lesser folk, presumably, since we apparently don't get a say in such matters). And of course I knew, then, that it was really 2011, and it hadn't been I who'd ventured out of her time, but a certain delusional Nobel Laureate.

Now that I'm both home and safely back in the 21st century, I think I'm going to take a bath. The steller's jay in my cherry tree sounds as if it's laughing its head off.
________________
*Here's the choicest bit:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."

"Are writers who are women allowed...?"

Ed Champion recently interviewed Lynne Tillman for his Bat Segundo Show . (The interview can be downloaded as a podcast, from iTunes.) In the interview, Tillman talks, among other things, about striving, in her fiction, to marry emotion to intellect.

At one point in the interview, Tillman discusses a rejection of an essay-like short fiction from an editor who, Tillman thought, would never have said what she said to Tillman to a male writer. The editor, Tillman, says, “exposed her bias.” “I just thought it was disgusting, frankly.” The question the rejection poses for Tillman is: "Are writers who are women allowed to play with ideas the way men writers are-- writers like Nicholson Baker, for instance-- are they allowed to do that?"

Ed Champion then wonders if creating a neurotic female narrator is not allowed-- the way a male neurotic narrator, as in Moby Dick, is.

"Allowed," in this conversation, references a gender double standard that, I think, attaches to itself unspoken, unstated, and thus very powerful rules resulting from what I think of as the issues surrounding intelligibility, in which the View from Nowhere strikes again.

Later, Tillman asks “What do we read for?” And she and Champion discuss that. She also observes a cultural shift since the 1980s-- “a disappearance of shame”-- driven by an idea(l) of openness, in which individuals attempt to tell everybody about everything, while often not knowing the full implications of what they're saying. (I flashed, during this part of the discussion, on a certain episode of House.)

More documentation, more numbers, more "explanations"

Last Saturday, Nicola Griffith posted A shocking UK sf 'favorites' score: men 500, women 18. She begins:

Yesterday, in the Guardian, Damien G. Walter asked readers to list their favourite sf. And they did. In a follow-up blog piece, Walter estimates that more than 500 books were mentioned. I scanned the Guardian comments--yes, all of them--and counted only 18 women's names. Eighteen. Out of more than five hundred.

I admit, I could have missed one or two. For the sake of argument, let's say there were exactly 500 novels mentioned. Let's say 20 of them were by women. (Yes, some respondents mentioned titles, some author names. Apples and oranges. Sue me. Or, better, take the time to parse the comments yourself and then share.)

The ratio of women to men is 1:24. About 4%. I'm quite aware of gender bias in literature (see, for example "Hard Takes Soft" and "Girl Cooties") but this ratio, frankly, shocked me.

She then takes notes of some of the “explanations” for the disparity, and remarks:

Or, as Joanna Russ might have put it:
"She didn't write it."
"She wrote it but she wrote only one of it."
"She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist (sf writer), and it isn't really art (sf)."
"She wrote it, but she's an anomaly."

These are just a few of the classic arguments, so beautifully exposed by Russ, used by critics to suppress women's writing. (If you haven't read How to Suppress Women's Writing, your education awaits.)

Clearly, women's sf is being suppressed in the UK. Oh, not intentionally. But that's how bias works: it's unconscious. And of course sometimes it's beyond a reader's power to change: you can't buy a book that's not on the shelf. You can't shelve something the publisher hasn't printed. You can't publish something an agent doesn't send you. You can't represent something a writer doesn't submit. Etc.

You'll want to read all of Nicola's post, for she goes on to offer a list of Things to Be Done to correct the situation.

I was bemused to see a post in response to Nicola's on the Guardian's blog yesterday: The incredible shrinking presence of women SF Writers.

Is it the industry itself that is sexist? High-profile women in major UK publishing houses working in the genre – including, but not limited, to Anna Gregson, Anne Clarke and Bella Pagan at Orbit, Julie Crisp at Pan Macmillan and Jane Johnson at Voyager – would suggest that the glass ceiling doesn't exist at the business end.

Nor is there a shortage of women writers troubling the SF/Fantasy/Horror bestseller lists – Jaine Fenn, Sarah Pinborough, Marianne de Pierres, Justina Robson, Stephanie Swainston, Cherie Priest, Tricia Sullivan ... it would take more space than is available here to list every woman writer active in the genre today.

Which means, if we're looking for a culprit, that suspicion must fall on the genre's very active fanbase: as this Guardian poll suggests, if there is sexism in the SF world, it may well be a matter of representation by the readership. It's difficult to legislate for equality in an online poll such as the Guardian's: the results are what they are. With no shortage of women working in the industry, the question must be asked why the people who offer their opinions – be it in a survey, or by way of compiling a book or magazine supplement – are putting forward a demonstrably male bias.

Perhaps the received wisdom that SF really is just for boys is true. Or maybe it's just that those who take part in online polls are mainly white, middle-class men, and a very, very vocal minority out of a much wider and more representative readership. Thoughts?

The “thoughts” that follow, in the comments, range mostly from abominable to dense, and so I read only a handful of them. I wonder how much this is due to the blog author's (the post seems to be unsigned-- I couldn't find a byline on the page) suggestion that it's the fault of the fan-base...

One commenter did point to Cheryl Morgan's post on the subject Female Invisibility Bingo. In her post, after reflecting on Nicola's apt citation of How to Suppress Women's Writing, Cheryl makes this suggestion:

There should be a bingo card, and we can add to it some of the reasons I saw given this morning as to why women shouldn’t care about exclusion from things like “best of” lists.
1a. Women shouldn’t complain about exclusion because their books are more popular than men’s.
1b. Women shouldn’t complain because the lists reflect popular taste.
2a. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only critics talking and who cares what they think?
2b. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only fans talking and who cares what they think?

And the beat goes on...

"If it doesn't affect you, then why read it?"

Thanks to a link at Sweet Freedom, I've just read a recently published interview with Joanna Russ by Consuela Francis and Alison Piepmeir on slash fiction and related subjects. The interview was conducted four years ago-- in May 2007, which is a year after Samuel R. Delany did a phone interview with her at WisCon 30. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies offers a transcript in both html and pdf. The pdf is definitely preferrable. Here are a few tastes, to pique your interest:

JR I remember when I first got a phone call from a friend. She told me about slash, and I didn’t get mildly interested, my hair stood up on end! I said “What? Can I get that?” “Yes,” she said, “you can,” and I began collecting them, and finally when the collection began to get utterly unwieldy and huge, I sent them to Bowling Green University, the Popular Culture Institute there. I wanted them to go somewhere they would last and not just be thrown out or whatever.

AP Does that mean that you don’t have your slash anymore?

JR I don’t have them with me, no. I have the few stories I wrote, copies of those, but that’s it. I’ve found that because they’re so erotic, after I finished one of them I would have this terrible thud as I came back to reality, and I decided I just didn’t like that. So, sorrowfully, I sent them away, where they would be loved. I might think they are.

[. . . ]

AP Well, we brought you some Smallville slash, just in case you want to see it but you don’t have to take it if it feels like that would be too much.

JR Most of it is sort of pornography.

AP Well, we definitely want to talk about that.

JR If it doesn’t turn you on, it’s kind of indifferent.

AP And that was one of the great points that you made in your essay about slash, the fact that people who don’t get it, who are not turned on by it, are not the right people to criticize it because they’re missing some crucial elements, and I thought that was exactly right.

JR I think that applies to all kinds of fiction and all kinds of drama. If it doesn’t affect you, then why read it?

AP And are you going to be able to have really useful insights about how it does or doesn’t work if it doesn’t work on you? So were your slash stories sexy? I mean, your regular novels are sexy, did the slash allow you to be more explicit?

JR Yes, and make my scenes longer. Yeah, it did I think. And yet there’s a good deal of slash where that doesn’t happen, but even there it’s full of emotion and emotional intensity.

[. . . ]

AP Conseula and I have been talking a lot about female desire and the fact that it seems to us that the lessons that we have been taught as girls and women about what desire was, what it meant, what it felt like, what shapes it took, that those lessons were all profoundly, profoundly wrong. In ways that as a thirty-four year old woman who has been a feminist for years and years, who teaches Women’s Studies, I’m surprised at how surprising this is to me, because I should know this by now, but it’s like, it’s even more wrong than I thought. So I just think that our culture, that we don’t know anything about female desire.

CF And yet, here’s this world of slash where this is all these women are doing, talking about it and asking questions.

JR But they’re in disguise. They’re disguised as a man. I once noticed that in slash there are so many references to these characters’ penises that it’s like a little label that says “Hello, I am” and the name. “I have a penis and I’m therefore male,” but clearly that’s not what’s happening.

CF Why do you think that women can’t have these conversations about their own desire through female characters?

JR I think it’s something like this. As I said, the characters are not exactly male. They’re disguises of some sort, kind of like “I have the proper genitals so I am male, please remember that.” I have written a couple of stories myself in which women are disguised, literally disguised as men. You try to write about women and you don’t have the cultural tropes that you could use, there’s very little there. It’s kind of like disguising yourself as an upper-class person, as an aristocrat. It counts, it matters that they’re male. It makes what they do serious. Apparently the real message does get through, because you said a lot of the fans hate it. They don’t think it’s about men, they know better. [Writing about male characters] kind of frees your imagination or your memory or something. This had happened in the nineteenth century, quite a few women who were novelists would write stories about women who were disguised as men or they would write them from a male point of view, and that is saying “if I were only a man, I could do this or that, or be this or that.” Some were not like that, there’s an early detective novel, 1890 or something like that in which a young woman is a detective, and there’s a lovely illustration from the first publications of this thing in a magazine then, and there she is with her skirts and her parasol and her hands are teeny. A drunken lout is about to hit a woman, and she is saying, “stop, sir,” and she doesn’t look as if she could hit a cream puff, but that’s her. That did happen. But in many of them, no, it didn’t.

I think [writing about male characters] has something to do with one’s sense of oneself as an active person, as free. I mean, we have sense, we look around and we see those guys who are doing all sorts of stuff, even if they can’t do it right, they’re thinking about it. They’re making fantasies about it, there are movies about it. So this becomes not only “we will show you the personal life of these people, which is left out of the mass media, but we will write about them as we know people on the inside, and they will ring true to us, to the writers and readers in a way they would not if they were women.”

AP And I guess that’s the part that interests me and that I have not found an adequate explanation for. That reading the stories about Clark and Lex for instance, in the Smallville slash, is really sexy, I mean, that stuff is hot, and works for me in a way that the stories about the female characters in Smallville don’t work at all. Is that some sort of compensatory thing, because my identity as a woman is not solid enough?

JR No, I think that nobody’s social identity as a woman is solid enough. And when you’re doing this, you’re inventing, you’re fantasizing. It’s still very much a different world for men and women. I remember somebody, a feminist at Cornell, once said to me, “I was talking to this audience and they were looking rather unconvinced, especially the guys, and then I said, how many people here put only their initials in the telephone listing in the telephone book?” And the women’s hands all went up, and the men went, you do? They didn’t know. They hadn’t noticed. Yeah, they do. And that makes a big difference. It’s like gay friends of mine who went to the March on Washington, and said we were all over the place, we got into a subway and it was nine tenths gay people. And she said you don’t realize what a burden you carry until it’s gone. Everything just went, it was wonderful, and I think that’s true whatever the burden is. Whatever the minority burden or the sex burden, whatever it is, when it’s gone you go, oh my god.

AP The social identity of a woman is such that sexual stories with women are not . . .

JR It’s not real unless men do it, something like that, I think.

The interview is really more of a conversation than a straightfoward interview, I think. Russ here ends up asking some of the questions, and her interviewers answering, and she picking up from there.

Rachel Swirsky Connects Some Dots

Over on Big Other, Aqueductista Rachel Swirsky has posted “We know he’s busy, but why didn’t she clean the house?”, thoughts on challenges faced by female writers , which links and responds to Jeff VanderMeer's Gender Roles and Writing, another interesting post. Here's a bit of what Rachel writes:

Another time gap that feminists sometimes talk about is the beauty gap. Setting aside the pressure on women to be beautiful, let’s just look at the pressure on both sexes to maintain an appearance that’s considered acceptable. The amount of effort involved for men to maintain an appearance that will be seen as acceptable is lower than the amount of effort involved for women to maintain an acceptable appearance. Some of this is because women are judged more harshly than men; some of it is because femininity has been defined in ways that require more labor. Either way, most people can’t just opt out of grooming standards — one may be able to eschew vanity, but looking less than acceptable can impair social and professional opportunities. For a full-time, at-home writer like me, this isn’t a big deal; I just skip it on days when I’m staying in the home office. But most writers have a day job, and men and women who work outside the home need to put in time to look presentable — a task which takes more time for women than for men.

There are any number of ways that systemic sexism interferes with women’s careers, but one of the most direct is time. Time spent on housework is time not spent on writing. Time spent on hair and clothes and makeup is time not spent on writing. If women put in more of this time (and overall in America, they do), then that’s fewer woman-hours that are available for writing stories. When we start to address unequal representation in magazines, it’s important to ask questions on the editorial level, the content level, the submissions level, and so on — but it’s also important to interrogate the gendered ways in which sexism blocks opportunities for writing to occur in the first place.

Male writers and the critics' agenda

Over at the Valve, Andrew Seal considers recent novels by men that have won critical acclaim in light of Nina Baym's "Melodramas of Beset Manhood." He emphasizes Baym's focus on the critics' obsession with this theme. He concludes:

it seems to me that the literary critical project of reading American fiction according to this American myth still sets the table for what we will be served as the “best American fiction.

The novels he considers are The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel, and All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen. About the last two, he remarks,

while not exactly considered by anyone as the greatest novels of the past decade, they were produced by two men who have basically revived the project of Trilling-like (or Partisan Review-like) criticism in America and who have received significant amounts of attention for doing so. At any rate, there may be no two books of the past ten years more intentionally constructed to fit into the American myth than these two; reading them, I often had the feeling that the point of writing them seemed to be to create a literature which would support a rebirth of Trillingian criticism.

After reading Seal's post, I can't help but conclude that many male writers, consciously or unconsciously, seem to be driven by the implied demands of the critics, along the lines of "If this is quality, then obviously that's what I need to be writing."

Judging the Judges, Again

I've come across another interesting post on the PW woman-free Best List, courtesy of the Mumspimus, by zunguzungu, Repressive Anti-Sentimentalism: Best [Male] Writers of 2009:

The problem is that there are a lot of people in the world who would prefer to believe in a standard of value that produces only male writers as “best” than to imagine that maybe, just maybe, that standard is a function of a desire to privilege a standard of literary value that is derived from a sense of what masculinity is.

Now, this might not be a desire on the part of the judges themselves; it might simply be something they’ve inherited from a two century long American tradition of regarding real literary value as something threatened by a “damned mob of scribbling women,” using words like “domestic” and “sentimental” as a short-hand for what Nina Baym calls “the encroaching, constricting, destroying society” against which an American writer has to struggle manfully in order to be considered literary. Her argument — which, to my mind, is unanswerable — is that the entire American canon of great books, on which the standard for American literary greatness gets derived, isn’t just male in a descriptive sense, but is subjectively male: to be an American writer is to write about struggling with a feminized domesticized society embodied by the figure of the woman. As a result, since the “great” books seem to be overwhelmingly about men on boats running away from women, the woman writer, as Baym puts it, enters American literary history as the enemy.

It may not be sexism. It may just be this. But what’s the difference, in practice? When the need to believe that it is possible to “ignore gender” trumps, in practice, the need to consider whether it is possible to do so, what are we to conclude? If you assume that it is possible — and that this panel of judges has “ignored gender” — then how is any conclusion possible other than that women are just not good writers?

Do read the whole post.

A Couple of Quick Hits on Gender

By Nancy Jane Moore

1. Women and Ambition:

Bitch Magazine has a fascinating essay on women and ambition available. It discusses abuse heaped on women who dare to be self promoters, the tired excuse that "women don't submit enough," and the general problem of women being self-effacing. Here's an excerpt:

But by not owning up to her ambitions -- whether they are in the public or private realms -- a writer feeds the machine that discounts the aspirations and talents of all women writers. The silence is implicit support for editors who claim that their byline disparity is because women don't want it enough. It sets an example for other writers that ambition is something to be ashamed of. Though it might be the last thing in the world she means to do, by keeping her intentions for her work hidden, a female writer allows others to make assumptions about her work, and to decide where it will and will not go.


I note, with a touch of irony, that the author of this well-thought-out essay, Anna Clark, has not provided a bio on the Bitch website. Since she's got a relatively common name, I wasn't able to find out anything about her via a quick google.

By the way, Bitch is an excellent and irreverent feminist magazine that's just barely holding on financially. You can subscribe or donate on their website.

2. Gender Stereotypes Redux:

Some programming geeks who think word analysis can identify gender have set up Gender Analysis, a website where you can enter a URL and find out the gender of the blogger. It correctly identified my father's blog I Heard It at the Icehouse as written by a man, but it thinks my nephew's blog on his Korean English-teaching adventures, The Innocent Abroad, is written by a woman and that my self defense blog, Taking Care of Ourselves, is written by a man. One out of three doesn't strike me as much more accurate than guessing, which doesn't surprise me. I don't really think true gender is all that easy to define, even when one's biology is obviously male or female.

PS: Yes, I care about the election, but we all need a break now and then. Anyway, I've made political observations lately on In This Moment and my new site on Open Salon, Blending.

Speculating Gender: an Interview with Kelley Eskridge

by Jesse Vernon

The captivating stories in Kelley Eskridge’s Dangerous Space were my gateway into the wonderful world of Aqueduct Press. A good pal of mine, who works at Bailey-Coy Books in Seattle, handed me a copy and insisted I read it immediately. Being a former bookseller, the first place I glanced was the copyright page to discover the publisher. I was delightedly surprised to find that not only was the publisher local, but focused on feminist science fiction. I’ve been a feminist since I understood what that meant and an avid reader since the age of three but only newly converted to the worlds of sci-fi and even more recently to the genre of speculative fiction.

After re-emerging from this collection of literally personified cities, gender queering actors, and music that flows through your body and encircles your heart, I emailed L. Timmel Duchamp, one of the editors at Aqueduct. Though I had dabbled in editing throughout college and worked at a bookstore for a couple years after, I have only begun to come to terms with my need to be constantly surrounded by books. So I asked if could help out at all and here I am, the new editorial assistant at Aqueduct.

The following interview was conducted for the upcoming release of The Aqueduct Gazette. Throughout the many enthralling dimensions of Dangerous Space, the character Mars was particularly intriguing to me. Three of the seven stories in this collection are told from Mars’ point of view. They are tales of tangible desire, theatrical visions becoming real, tumbling bodies, and creative collaboration rife with tension and connection. After the individual publication of some of the Mars stories (most of them have been published individually, the oldest dating back to 1990), a peculiar thing started happening in reviews. Some reviewers used the pronoun “he” for Mars, while others used “she.” You see, Mars, being the first-person narrator, never uses a third-person pronoun as a self-reference. And none of the other characters explicitly say, “Mars, you are a man” or “Mars, you are a woman.” But very few people picked up on this fact until the publication of Dangerous Space, when Kelley began discussing this aspect of the stories in her publicity materials. So, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kelley over a pint and ask her some questions about gender as well as other experiences that had influenced her telling of these stories. The following is that conversation.

******

How has your own experience with gender/your gender identity influenced your writing? And conversely, how has the creative space of speculative fiction influenced your experience of gender (your own or others’) in everyday life?

I see them as an endless feedback process. So my response is a) not so much and b) completely. What I write comes from who I am, and to me almost everything is an issue of identity. It's why all my stories start with character and build out from there.

So, I’m intensely interested in notions of identity. But I don’t go through the world thinking of myself as a woman, or as white, or as 47, or as…I don’t know, fill in the blank. I think of myself as Kelley. I identify as a writer, and as Nicola’s partner, although I don’t necessarily identify myself as a lesbian.

Uh-huh.

In fact I don’t identify as a lesbian. I’m bisexual and that’s how I identify myself when I find it necessary, which is very rarely because who cares?

(laughing)

I believe, for writers or readers, fiction informs identity. We look for text that interests or challenges us, that we connect with in some particular way. We look for things that tell us stories about what we long to be or what we’re afraid to be.

My parents were activists in the south during the civil rights era, including helping black activists get out of Florida when things got a little too hot. So we always had people in and out of the house – black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, people who owned slum tenant houses, and the people that lived in them, sometimes at the same party. I knew black men who spoke seven languages and white girls with dreadlocks who were always stoned out of their minds. So my notions of identity in general were pretty flexible.

All the stories that I loved as a child were stories specifically about girls who did transgressive things – things that girls in the 1960s in Florida certainly didn't do. Girls didn’t dress up as boys and take off across the English moors, or run around the neighborhood and spy on their neighbors. The whole list of things that girls didn’t do was a very long one. I loved those transgressive books. The first story I ever tried to write was about girls having adventures.

Gender is a completely real thing in the world. The world is gendered; culture has notions of gender that limit both men and women. The culture is very confused about differences between gender, sexual expression, biological identity, etc. I wish people well if they want to struggle with those distinctions, but I tend to take people as I find them. I hope I make fewer assumptions than I used to.

Because I had confused you with someone else that I had met, when we continued exchanging email and arranged this meeting, I had no idea whether you were a woman or a man because your name is gender neutral.

Yeah, I thought about that.

I imagined you both ways and I just thought, well, we’ll see. It’s not important for the purpose of the conversation. It’ll just be interesting to see who you are, and your biological identity will be a part of that.

Uh-huh. Context.

So, I had early exposure to the idea that identity is fluid and that, in fact, culture doesn’t determine identity. People can step outside the lines of what’s acceptable or what’s appropriate in their own culture. And when I started reading science-fiction and speculative fiction in particular, that was reinforced in many, many ways. Speculative fiction is the perfect territory for anybody who wants to explore the power of difference and it’s fertile ground for any writer who enjoys metaphor the way I do. I like to say that speculative fiction is the place where we can make metaphor concrete. I don’t have to be J.D. Salinger and write from the perspective of an alienated youth, I can write about real aliens if I want to. I can put the reader into the head of the alien or the head of the person who represents the norm, or I can even turn all those paradigms on their head.

I started seeing [authors doing this] – and I saw all kinds of [it], because I read everything: Heinlein, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Suzy Charnas, Vonda MacIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, the list goes on – and I thought, well this is amazing. It made me understand that in the same way it was possible, although not always easy, to step outside the boundaries of cultural identity, it was also possible, although not necessarily easy, to step outside the boundaries of "literature" [said with a British accent].

Uh-huh.

I was at dinner recently with some friends, one of whom had read Dangerous Space and one of whom had not. And the person who had not read the collection couldn’t understand the fact that Mars is not gendered as a character. And said to me “But…but…but…whether someone’s male or female is the first thing we notice. The first thing we ask about a baby is, you know, is it a boy or a girl. And if you’re going to meet someone you want to know, if you can’t tell from the name, is it a man or woman. How can you possibly create a setting or a situation in which none of those cues…where people don’t talk to someone as if they’re a man or a woman? When it's so important! How can you do that?!” [This person was] pounding on the table and I finally got a little irritated and said, “This is speculative fiction – I can do whatever I want.”

Exactly! (laughing) That's great. It's perfect.

And then we changed the subject…

These things go deep.

They do go deep. I understand that there are folk in the world who walk around with biology and gender so closely intertwined for them that they are inseparable. I know it’s true, but I don’t get it. I don’t have a hard time imagining a fictional character doing that, but I certainly have a hard time imagining me doing it. And I have a lot of behavior and presentation that people will regard as gendered – my hair is colored, my body is waxed, I wear make-up when I go out for nice dinners. I do that stuff. And I’ve also been through significant periods in my life where I did none of those things – I had very short hair and wore big boots and had my labrys and shocked the hell out of everybody in Atlanta with my hairy legs. But I didn’t do that to shock them and I don’t do this to pass. I do what I want. I do what feels good to me and what I think best expresses me. So I don’t have a problem with people having a gender or expressing gender along expectation lines. I think people should do what they want and be who they are.

That's one of the biggest myths about feminism, which I've never understood – that feminism calls for androgyny or that feminism is against any gender expression. I've never understood that misconception. It's about choice.

Exactly. It's about informed choice.

Yes, exactly.

You’ve said elsewhere that some readers view Mars as a puzzle to solve, as if somewhere, hidden within mannerisms and conversations, is an authentic gender identity. You’ve responded saying,

By refusing to create a gender context for Mars, and by doing my best to remove any cues in the story that support assumptions about Mars' gender, I was trying to create a character whose experience any reader might be willing to access. It's too easy for people who subscribe to expected gender norms to then use gender as a way of denying that a certain experience is possible to them.*

Will you explain more of this process? Are there many subconscious cues that you find yourself including when writing a gendered character? Intentional cues that you add later to gender a character? Like, when you wrote Mars, did you need to later go back and take things out that might gender Mars? What was that process?

I’m hearing it as a two-part question, so let me answer the first part first.

Definitely.

The conversation with my friend at dinner brought home for me in a very real way how much we – the cultural ‘we’, the generic ‘we’ as readers – want to hang labels on characters. We want to codify a character so that we understand how to respond to that person, so that we understand whether that person is being appropriate or inappropriate, if they’re being a rebel or if they’re going right along the party line, etc. And I get that. That’s what we do. Human beings make assumptions about the world in order to get through the day. But it's too easy for people to conflate cultural expectation and human possibility.

I believe no emotional experience or human intention is denied to anyone because biologically they’re female. I probably will never have a morning erection, but that’s a biological experience that’s hard-wired into the body, the same way that most men will never have the experience of menstruation. (I say “most” because I like to leave a little door open…) My ability to be human isn't compromised by my chromosomal make-up. I don’t think anybody's is.

I had an experience when I was in my twenties and living in Chicago. A man I worked with asked, “What are you doing for your vacation?” and I said, “Well, I’m going to drive to Florida to see my mom.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I just didn’t understand. I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You can’t do that, it’s dangerous.”

So I said, “Of course I can,” and he said, “No, you can’t,” and I finally just had to say, “Watch me” and get in my car and drive to Florida. This was one of my first direct encounters with the idea that somehow because women didn’t do ‘x’ that I was literally incapable of doing it.

I had another of these conflation experiences with a very lovely, very religious, straight woman who told me that she had gotten to grips with the fact that my partner was a woman, and didn't hold it against me, but she was so sorry that I could never have children. And I said, “Well, thanks, and you rock, but this part of my body works fine. If I want to have children there are many ways in which I can.” And I could literally see her brain rearranging itself – because for her it was an absolute truth that if there was no man involved in a romantic way, then I couldn’t have children.

So, my process with Mars is to not get into those kinds of conversations. I create a context where people are accepted for their skill or talent, for fitting in to the world in which they find themselves. They're not accepted because they conform to cultural expectations of men and women, per se, but because they meet the cultural expectation of Can you do your job? Can you hold your own? Can you be with us? That’s how I’ve always approached my own personal experience, so being able to do it for Mars is a joy – to find the reality in which it really doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time having gender-norming conversations.

Honestly, the hardest part of writing Mars is when there’s any kind of sex involved. And mostly that’s just a question of not naming body parts: of focusing on emotional responses to sex, or finding the ways of describing the physical experience that don’t turn into gendered cues. So we don’t talk about breasts, we don’t talk about penises.

I really believe that human experience is possible to everybody. If a human being does something, it’s a human thing to do and it’s possible to any of us. It just is. I resist notions of norming, that there’s this group of us who are normal and then there are all these other people who aren’t. The human pond is big, and I think it ought to be. I think that we’re all swimming together here. And that’s the pond I’m trying to swim in with Mars – the human pond, where the point is “What kind of person, what kind of human being does it take to have the experiences that create this story?”

And it doesn’t matter what kind of body the character is wearing. We all live in our bodies, absolutely, but the big moments in life – love, death, sex, joy, fear, loss, being given everything you’ve ever wanted – those moments of feeling too big for the world or feeling too small for the world – those are all human moments. And it doesn’t matter whether we are a boy or a girl. Everybody feels those things.

So writing Mars is not that hard to do. I appreciate when reviewers talk about the skill or the difficulty, but for me it’s really not that hard. It’s just a question of balancing. In “Dangerous Space” in particular, which is the longest of the Mars stories, I made a very deliberate effort to balance anything that might lead people down a gendered path. So, for example, Mars is introduced as a sound engineer. That’s a typically male profession. But at the same time that we learn this about Mars, we also see Mars being attracted to a man on the stage...a rock-and-roll singer, so everybody assumes a boy/girl dynamic and now maybe Mars is a woman. Except then we see Duncan Black [the rock star] kissing a man as well as a woman, so now who the hell knows what’s going on? Mars is a character who ends up against a wall with a man’s hand in his or her pants at one point, and has a bar fight at another. So now do you hang a male tag or a female tag on this person, based on your own experience of the world? Based on my experience of the world, I can see it going either way. That’s really how it is for me.

And it’s not a game. It’s not a game. There is no right answer except that Mars is human. And hopefully anybody who is adventurous can slip into Mars’ skin for the duration of the story and just feel what it’s like to go there.

Yeah, that was, in some ways, the experience that I had reading these stories. And now I'm understanding it a lot more because it's not necessarily absence of markers, it's balance...or this amazing...I can't quite figure out the word. This wonderful confusion. Confusion without any negative connotation. Like this great freedom of humanity.

It's absolute freedom.

Because it's that back-and-forth, back-and-forth and if you keep searching for [gender markers], then you find that you have to step away and just experience [the story] and not be like [making air tally marks] tally, tally, tally.

If people are consciously searching for cues throughout the story, then either the reader is really not the right reader for my work, or I haven't done a good enough job as a writer. The reader ought to be pulled right into the story and go there with Mars. And based on how the reader is choosing to read Mars, at some point they’ll come up against a place in the story where they go, “Whoa...whoa, okaaay.” But hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, they’ll just go with it because they are already connected to Mars on an emotional level, a human level, that has very little to do with, “Well, a boy wouldn’t do this” or “A girl wouldn’t do that.”

What other kinds of feedback have you received about the perceived gender (or lack thereof) of Mars?

People simply read the character however they want, as male or female. And proceed from there to look at the more obvious explorations of gender or contravening of gender convention. In the first Mars story [“And Salome Danced”], the antagonist literally changes gender in the beginning of the story, so reviewers focused on that and were interested in the fact that no political point was made about it. In “Eye of the Storm,” Mars is part of a group of four people who are all fighters, men and women who sexually pair off with each other in whatever combination they happen to. The assumption in the world-building is that this is common; nobody makes any remark about it. Feedback often focuses on that, and also on the coupling of sexual expression with violence and aggression – which I think is why most people assume that Mars is a man in that story. As if a woman is incapable of being violent and finding violence sexually exciting. Go figure.

I want my stories to be emotional experiences for people. I want them to fall in love with the characters and care about what happens to them. I would love nothing better than to have readers leave the Mars stories with a sense that some space inside them is opened up a little bit more. Something that says, “Well, okay, if I’m a woman reading this story and Mars is a woman, what does that mean for me? If I’m a man reading this story and Mars is a man, what does that mean for me? How could I bring that character into my world and into my identity?” I would like nothing better than to touch people that way.

How has creating Mars affected the way that you gender the rest of your characters?

I’m not really sure that it has. Mars is the only character with whom I consciously check for gender cues. I’m very happy writing about characters who have gender identities and who are gendered in their behaviors in ways that are appropriate, or not, to their biological sex or class or race or age.

We’re skirting the edges now of a question that Timmi [L. Timmel Duchamp] asked me. I’m paraphrasing now, probably reducing it a little bit more than she would, but it's the question of whether or not a writer writes in a gendered voice. She talked about quotes from both [Joanna] Russ and [James] Tiptree[, Jr.] which had to do with writing more truthfully by finding a “male” voice, given the time and place in which they were writing, and who they were as people. Timmi asked about my response to that. And my response is that I acknowledge that gender has a huge influence on the way that we respond to each other. Gender expectations and the choice to conform or not to conform to those expectations is a decision that affects everyone who makes it in one way or another.

But, having said all that, it’s not important to me as an "issue." I don’t write about issues or themes. I don’t write about gender. I don’t write about politics. I write about people. Everything to me is character and that character’s human experience in the world. If that experience is gendered, then that’s what I write, but I’m not interested in educating anybody about anything. I will leave that to people who are better equipped to do it. I find theme fiction uninteresting to read, and I don’t write it because I don’t know how to shape a character to the needs of cultural debate. I do know how to articulate the layers of debate that go on within our private selves. That’s what I do.

I don’t worry about gender role of characters being correct or incorrect. I don’t feel a lot of responsibility or compunction to explain why character are or are not acting "masculine" or "feminine," and I don’t feel any need to apologize. As long as it’s understandable in the context of what the character is experiencing, then it should work. And if it doesn’t, then that’s my failure as a writer.

The next fiction project that I’m working on, probably my project for next year, will probably be a young adult novel.

Cool.

Those years are so much about identity and fluidity. And worrying, of course, about what’s appropriate because that’s a huge time of being subjected to peer pressure. And at the same time, it’s also understood that in high school there will always be people who fall outside of what’s expected. You have the example of difference all around, people trying on different sets of images. I’m interested in exploring that in ways that are both very gendered and very much not gendered.

Wow, that sounds really exciting. I love young-adult novels.

I'm really excited about it.

Have you ever heard of Born Confused?

No...

It's a really good young adult novel by Tanuja Desai Hidier. It's about an Indian-American girl that grows up in northern New York state and her best friend is this skinny beautiful white girl – it's all about growing up and dealing with her family and different cultures. It's amazing. The epigraph is by Nietzsche. It's a really rich young-adult novel. It was one of my favorite books to recommend [while working at a bookstore].

I love young adult novels; I've been reading a huge amount of them. There's a novel called Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson…

I remember seeing the cover.

An amazing book about – and I'm not really spoiling it because it becomes pretty clear early on – a girl coming into high school who has been raped at a party and can't talk about it. She doesn't know how speak about it. Now there's a gendered experience. Anderson does an amazing job of writing a girl's story, and at the same time she's anybody. I have to believe that any man who loves character-based fiction who read Speak would identify with the experience of being hurt in a way that he couldn't talk about – because it was too unexpected or frightening and it turned the world inside-out.

It goes right back to what you were saying earlier about what it means to be human. That's exciting. ::sigh:: I just want to read all the time.

So, going back to the idea of conflations: many people tend to conflate sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation – i.e., a biological male will necessarily identify as a man and will necessarily be ‘masculine’ and therefore attracted to women. Your characters tend to challenge these assumptions across various lines of identity. Can you talk more about encountering these assumptions (in readers and perhaps yourself) and what it’s like to play with those boundaries?

Boy, it's a big question.

Some of us like to live out on the edge, but most of us, I think, like to operate from our zones of comfort, and categorization of other humans is a very comfortable thing to do because then we know how we’re supposed to behave with them.

I found pretty early on in my own life that I got tired of people making assumptions. I got tired of people assuming that because I didn’t have a boyfriend, I was a lesbian. I got tired of my lesbian friends assuming that because I didn’t have a girlfriend, I was straight. I spent a lot of time alone before I met Nicola, so I got very tired of people assuming that I must feel lonely. Sometimes I was, and sometimes I really wasn’t. I found out that making assumptions about what people will or won’t do with their feelings or their bodies is pretty much a fool’s game. It really is. Because we never know. If we’re open at all to the world, we just don’t know what we’ll do. It’s nice to have rules and feel safe and to have a sandbox within which we play, but I’ve learned that most of those limitations are self-imposed. If one were going to characterize my life, one way to characterize it would be that I have crossed categories in so many ways. I’ve jumped [economic] class. I’ve been identified as straight, as lesbian, as bisexual. I like to drink beer in pubs and very expensive wine. I travel well between various cultural groups – I’m good at picking up cues, and at participating as fully as I can within different cultures. And because that’s been my personal experience, I tend to write about people who do that. Because I think it’s fun.

So what’s it like to blur those boundaries? It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s freeing. It feels naughty sometimes. It feels transgressive. And I like being transgressive. And I don’t do it for its own sake, but if I can be myself and raise someone's eyebrow, that’s fine with me. I enjoy confounding people’s expectations. And I hope I’m enough of a grown-up that I won’t just do it for its own sake, but I also hope I’m enough of a grown-up to say, “Yes, this is who I am right now. This is what it is.” And to no longer feel compelled to apologize. And so I’m having enormous fun with my fiction – to cross boundaries, to push back on assumptions.

I’m writing a commercial script right now, and Hollywood’s very, very, very antediluvian about these things. It’s just astonishing to me, actually. I’m working very closely with a producer who I really like. We have an intense creative relationship, and I’ve learned so much from him. He, and the people who read for him and give him feedback, have some very serious notions about what men do and what women do, especially in the movies. It's been interesting to push back on these boundaries with him, and the thing I like about him is that he listens.

An example of this is: I wrote a scene in which a woman is arguing with her boyfriend, trying to make a point that’s important to her, a point of identity, a point of self. The feedback I got from my producer was, “Well, the readers think she’s awfully tough and aggressive, and he seems a little weak. So maybe we can have him have the last word or tell her strongly to calm down.” And I said, “Okay, let me just make sure that I understand correctly. You’re saying that it’s okay for him to yell at her, but it’s not okay for her to yell at him?” There’s was a silence on the phone, and he said, “Huh, point taken. Never mind.” And off we went to the next thing.

That's great. That's a good producer.

It is great and it's why I like working with him.

I wasn’t writing a scene where a woman was being aggressive, I was writing a scene where a person was pissed off at another person. And then here come these assumptions about gender… I thought, okay, I’m not going to have the gender argument. I’m not going to say, “A woman can do anything she wants.” I’m going to say, “Are you telling me that it’s okay for one human being to do something but not another? Because you’re going to have to help me understand why this is the case.”

I like that approach. It seems that initially he or the readers saw it as you being the one that gendered [the situation]. And to pull that back on him, ya know?

Exactly. I'm sure they think I'm this right-on lesbian feminist writer pounding the table… I've tried to explain over and over again that I have no agenda about this. I need the character to be strong because she's the hero of the movie. She needs to act like a hero. Another one of my arguments when we get into these conversations is to say, “Okay if this were Tom Cruise in this role, wouldn't you expect him to do something like this? So why can't this character do it if she's the hero?”

I’m just not interested in fighting for “the cause.” I would rather model the behavior.

It sounds like everything that you do is really grounded in experience – personal experience and, more generally, human experience.

Personal experience is the wellspring of identity. I grew up relatively poor. I grew up as an only child. I grew up in a house where all different kinds of people were welcome based on who they were as people, how they behaved, what they did, what they brought with them, and it wasn’t about anything else. I learned pretty early on about the effects of racism because the little girl whose grandmother lived across the street suddenly wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore because there were black people in my house. It wasn’t the same kind of experience for me as it was for the black people, but it was my doorway into the experience. And it was the beginning of the opening up of my imagination as to, “Well, okay, so what must it be like for these people?”

But I really do have a horror of the co-mingling of art and politics. A lot of people do it and they do it very successfully, but it’s not part of my process at all. I think that conscious theme is the death of good fiction and good music and good art. But that’s just me. Mileage varies hugely in this regard.

My work is for me. The things that I want to explore and express are about freedom. I want to take a reader, metaphorically, by the shirt, pull them up close and say, “Imagine…imagine a world where it wasn’t about who was normal and who wasn’t, it was about the spectrum of experience – here’s one experience of love, here's a different one, and here's something else….” If we can find doorways into all those different experiences because they are all human experiences, maybe at the end of the day we can sit down and think, “Holy shit, those people are so different from me and, you know what? I get them. I am not them, but I get them.” Or even, “I don’t get it but at least I see what is. I don’t get it but, wow, isn’t that an interesting way to be human?” Even if there’s just that amount of connection… and so I’m not about polarizing. I’m not about the lens of harsh reality. I think there’s enough harsh reality in the world. I’d rather just look at human experiences: how are they congruent, how do they flow together, how can I relate to that?

There is a place in our world, a need in our world for people who make the argument on a global scale, who fight for the cause, who proselytize, who take the issue out to the people, and god bless those people. Actually, I don’t believe in god so I shouldn’t say that. Bless those people. But I’m not one of them. My way is through relationship and personal experience, through making connections with people and asking them to re-imagine the things that they do.

Have I answered your question?

Oh, yes.

******

For more information about Kelley Eskridge, check out her website. To purchase Dangerous Space, go here.

*Kelley Eskridge, “Identity and Desire,” Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism, ed. Helen Merrick and Tess Williams (Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1999), http://www.kelleyeskridge.com/essays/identity-and-desire.

Kelley Eskridge Talks about Dangerous Space on Public Radio

This weekend, Kelley Eskridge discussed her Mars stories on PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge in a show devoted to transgender identity in life and art. You can listen to an MP3 download of it, available on the show's site.

The Syntax Police Are on the Move: Equal Must Be Separate

What does it mean when a right-wing ideologue slings the rebarbative infamous epithets of “girly” and “sissified” at those who use a syntactical structure he’s declared anathema?

It is not easy to write with dispassion of the odious semicolon, but let me try: Except for its function in one copy-editing circumstance, the semicolon is worthless. It is the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented. Sensitive editors should abolish it forthwith. Forthwith!

So begins James Kilpatrick’s attack on the very idea of allowing two equal, independent clauses to be joined within the marriage of a single sentence. (God forbid that three equal, independent clauses be joined in one sentence: this idea is so unthinkable that Kilpatrick doesn’t even mention it.)

The semicolon is a belly-up guppie in a tank of glorious Siamese fighting fish. It's girly. It is not just probably the most useless of all forms of punctuation. It is absolutely, positively the most useless of all such marks ever invented….Why is the semicolon so obnoxious? For one thing, it serves no useful purpose not already abundantly served by the period and the colon. For another, this pathetic hybrid is so shy, so bashful, so gutless, so easily overlooked, that a reader runs right over it. We stumble. We backtrack. What happened to the sentence that was there a minute ago? Now you see the semi, now you don't.

Pathetic, bashful, gutless, easily overlooked… Oh yeah, that’s “girly” for you. I scent an ideological agenda here: equal, for Kilpatrick, must, it seems, be separate and held apart, such that two ideas lacking a proper hierarchical relationship are never allowed to be part of the same thought. He is willing, after all, to allow two unequal clauses to exist within the same sentence. A sentence made of two unequal clauses will not be “run right over” or overlooked; a sentence made of two unequal clauses will, rather, be “a glorious Siamese fighting fish,” manly, a veritable warrior of a sentence.

Okay, so I understand that Kilpatrick is a reactionary right-wing ideologue: naturally he hates even the faintest whiff of egalitarian practices and attitudes. But why is he so worried about everyone else’s manhood? Presumably he’s not just worried about the manhood of the men he’s addressing in his column, but of the women, as well. (If that weren’t the case, then he’d be directing his remarks to a minority population, speaking for and to a Special Interest Group, viz., literate males, and of course James Kilpatrick would never do that.)

See, I’m one of those “creative writers” he mentions in his column who embrace the semicolon with both arms. Is he calling me “girly” and “sissified”? Since I was a girl for the first couple of decades of life, being called “girly” is, I suppose, meant to infantilize me. And yes, babies are bashful, shy, and gutless. Maybe even pathetic. But “sissified”? Last time I heard, that was one of those homophobic epithets meant to terrorize boys and men into becoming mean bastards and support the party line. (Siamese fighting fish?)

Do I want my sentences to be Siamese fighting fish? Sometimes. But why must every sentence I produce constitute a vector for aggression? Is discourse merely a tank of Siamese fighting fish?

I don’t get it. But I suppose that's because when I was a girl, of all the fish in my parent's aquarium, I preferred the guppies. It bothered me, of course, that they ate their young, but their grace and beauty fascinated me. I haven't laid eyes on a guppy in years. Maybe they'd strike me as bland now. Or even pathetic and gutless. But even so, it would never occur to me to put them in the same tank with Siamese fighting fish.

I guess that's because I'm just a girl.

Another Brief Conversation with Nisi Shawl

Timmi: Nisi, you wrote in a comment on my conversation with Anna Tambour:

I don't think that analogizing the woman artist/muse relationship from the man artist/muse relationship works. As a writer, I see it more as a process of identification, or rejection of identification, than one of romantic desire. More about a mirror than a kiss. For women artists, our muses are our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, as well as our lovers. Our babysitters. Our deepest and/or highest selves.

At least, that's been my experience.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions for me. About 30 years ago the received idea about male and female psychology was that while “normal, healthy” men desired women (the assumption was that men who desired men were sick and aberrant), women only desired to be desired. At the same time, though, psychologists saw “normal, healthy” girls as learning to identify with their mothers and other adult women (whom they would themselves become as adults). As it happens, I've just had the pleasure of watching Sally Potter’s film Orlando again, and was struck by the scene where Orlando, now a woman wearing a huge hoop skirt in a salon in 1750, listens to Mr. Pope, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Addison make generalizations about women. Mr. Pope looks at her and remarks that she looks angry. All the men look at her and wait to see what she has to say. And she replies something to the effect that though all these poets take women as their muse, they despise women. Though the men protest this characterization of their attitude, they say that women ought to be led by their fathers and husbands. What if they have no father or husband, Orlando asks. Why then they are lost, the men reply. Also apropos to our conversation is that the significance of male desire is played out throughout the film. Near the beginning, when Orlando is a man, he tells Sasha, the woman he is in love with, that she belongs to him simply because he desires her. (She rebuffs him.) Near the end, the Archduke Harry proposes to Orlando and tells her that she belongs to him because he desires her. (She rebuffs him.) Sally Potter is, of course, showing us the modern gendered (albeit pre-1990s) view of desire.

Does the drive to write (the muse function) work differently in men and women? (I’m not implying any sort of essentialist reduction of male and female here: I’m talking instead about most men and most women who make art in our culture without reference to biology. Nurture obviously plays a role.) I ask this question, Nisi, because I have no idea! But I’m certainly interested in exploring it. (And “explore” is probably the correct word, since I’ve long had the sense that desire [though not of a sexual object per se] is the motor of my own drive to create, though since I’ve never thought much about it I’m not at all sure what exactly the nature of that desire is.)

Moreover, although received attitudes about women and desire have recently changed (at least partly, I believe, because lesbians have become considerably more visible and less pathologized), I’m curious as to whether this has had an effect on how younger women conceptualize their drive to write. Are you aware of any changes? Or is it your impression that younger women continue to find identification or a refusal of identification more powerful in their drive to create than sexual desire.

Second, for me first as a young girl and then as an adolescent, identifying with women I admired (whom we called “role models” back then) constituted the most powerful emotional relationships of those years, and such relationships continued to be important to me through my mid-twenties. So when you say that for women artists, our muses are “our deepest and/or highest selves,” I find this a seductive and appealing idea. Your mentioning the “rejection of identification” is equally fascinating. I have an idea of what you mean, but I’d be interested in your elaboration of it.

Third, you say “at least that’s been my experience.” I’d love to hear more specific details of your experience.

Nisi: Oh, there's so much here. So much in your questions, and so much in the mind I draw my answers from.

The first question you ask is whether the muse function, the drive to write (or to create using other arts) works differently for men and women. Perhaps the drive itself is the same. My thought is that women's relationships to that drive are different from those of men. Say, everyone creative wants to create, but the ways we discover and express that desire, how we accommodate it in our lives and recognize it, and what we expect from it, are different.

The identification of arts and civilization with the feminine goes on in many societies, Western and non-. For instance in my African-based spiritual tradition, Ifa, Oshun is the goddess of sexual love, culture, and money. So if the creative drive is feminine, and I perceive myself as feminine, obviously I'm going to have a different relationship with creativity than someone who perceives that they are other than feminine.

The case could be made that the traditional male artist's relationship with the Muse, mapping itself along the lines of romantic and sexual relationships between men and women, is a mere shadow of the more intensely intimate relationships women can achieve.

As a budding writer in the 1970s I was offered the longstanding muse model at the same time that a wave of feminist thought challenged my understanding of sexual roles. I could have done many things in response to the contradiction between my vision of myself as a creative person and the dominant vision of women as inspirational rather than productive. I did do many things, some of them simultaneously, some of them at odds with one another. I played as best I could the muse role to certain men; I chose a woman I loved as my muse; I chose men ditto; I created art that I meant to function as a muse does, causing my audience to create their own art.

Desire played a part in all I did in this regard, of course. Desire is integral to creation. And for me, desire is integral to everything, really; I tend to equate sexual and romantic desire with many other sorts, so that it's easy for me to slip aside from the consideration of the muse as babysitter to that of the muse as crush. I did indeed say that for women the relationship could be likened more to "a mirror than a kiss." That's because the former has been more fruitful to me than the latter. Also, though I didn't say this then, there are so many other paradigms for the muse/female artist relationship that I believe the kiss to be outnumbered: in addition to the lover who gives or withholds that kiss there are the mother, the daughter, the sister, the rival, the teacher, the goddess, the grandmother, the healer.

Here is the one poem I wrote for the woman I wanted for a romantic-model muse, Barbara Drubel:

I Saw Her

I saw her burning flowers
As if death were a gift,
A benison.

She has nothing to make anything out of
But she creates, anyway,
A certain
Destruction.

I've written many, many stories, and two novels, which owe their existence in some sense to the mirror. (Though maybe a better analogy would be a window, one made of Bob Shaw's "slow glass," as in "The Light of Other Days.") In these, my muse is a young girl. She appears as Anniette in "The Rainses'," Ousmani in "The Pragmatical Princess," Mo Kree in "Matched" and The Blazing World, and so on. I love her very much. I court her, and I also try to protect her, and to provide a place for her to have adventures in. In some sense she is my daughter, as I'm older than her and protective of her. In some sense she's my mother, as I have come to be the woman I am through her.

Those "role models" you mention, the women we admire, I call flashlights. Or torches or candles. Stars or moons. We want to burn like them. They show us the way. The only example of my doing this that I can come up with from my finished work at the moment is another poem, "Good Job." It's too long to quote here, I think. It's about my godmother, the Ifa priest Luisah Teish. (I'm working on another story right now that is inspired by Sandy Denny and, in a very roundabout way, by Octavia E. Butler. It probably qualifies also.)

Deep communication with divine creativity is available through possession. Oshun, Ifa goddess of desire and the arts, has spoken directly to me at ceremonies. I have danced with her.

As I've said, the most productive model for me so far has been the mirror. The muse as a version of the self. As I've also said, while part of what happens with this model is the incorporation of the characteristics of whomever or whatever is being cast as mirror, another part is the rejection of or differentiation from them. We do both these things with our mothers, of course; I'm betting there are psychology courses covering that. This is also what friends are for, especially during adolescence. How do I know I'm fat? Because you're thin, and we're different. How do I know I'm a lily? Well, you're a rose, so I most definitely am not. I'm something else.

It's too late to ask Alice Sheldon if that's what went on with her and her mother. It could have. "You're a writer? I must be a painter, then." And perhaps assuming a masculine persona helped her to accept authorhood because it rejected another characteristic of her mother's: her feminine identity.

My mother gave birth to three children. I have none. She had a career as a high-level manager in a government bureaucracy. I freelance. My refusal to follow her example has shaped my whole life, including my life as a writer. I learned in recent years that my mother is afraid to write! It's like climbing on a roof in platform heels for her. How could I not have known that? If I knew it, and at some level I must have, I rejected that fear, would not allow it to become my own.

In your questions you bring up the denigration of women's romantic and sexual desires by the literary and psychological establishments. As I've mentioned, those desires are strong in me, and I believe they're important. I have these kinds of feelings for men as well as other women. I've tried to use various men as inspiration and have gotten the occasional song out of it. That tactic has been a little more successful in terms of quantity than my attempt to do the same thing with Barbara Drubel, but rightly or wrongly, I view the work I've done in this vein as less worthwhile, less significant than my other accomplishments. It's certainly smaller in scope.

Here's what I've mostly seen happening as far as desire and the idealized masculine: groups of young women bonding through their shared attraction to the same male figure (I can't say "the same man" because it often turns out that what they're attracted to bears the same relationship to a human man that the White Goddess bears to Robert Graves's Laura Riding). Desire and idealization are there in these interactions, but they never seem to lead to the creation of great art, unless you count Harry Potter fanfic.

But perhaps this is different for younger women writing. I don't know. Do they even think about muses?

I do feel sexual arousal when writing well. This has nothing to do with what I'm writing. It is all about the act itself. The words turn me on, the shaping and placing of them. The balance and fill of them. The hum. The thrum. The thinking thought, the choices chosen. I'm pleasing myself.

Rather than desiring to be desired, I desire to feel desire, and to be satisfied.

When I write now (and for some time this has been true; I am a bit fuzzy when it comes to dating this sort of stuff) I invoke for a whole boatload of helpers. I invoke my ancestors. I invoke the Trickster, Exu Elegba, who is almost always personified as male. Still, I don't view Exu as my muse in any traditional sense; Exu opens the way but does not necessarily lead me to or along any particular path. In other words, he *enables* my creativity, but that's not the same as compelling, inspiring, or rewarding it. I offer my three Exus honey, sacred to Oshun, and I eat honey myself also. There are other Orisas, spiritual entities, whose aid I ask depending on the story I'm writing. If it's about business, or death and transformation, I invoke Oya; political and social tension and resolution, Yemaya; justice and defending children, Chango; and so on.

The stories themselves come from and through my head. In Ifa cosmology, your Head is venerated as a source of wisdom and a connection to the divine. Your highest and/or deepest self. Your best self. Your true self. Your you.

I hope what I've written here makes sense. It does to me.

Timmi: Thanks, Nisi. You've given me even more to think about. I'd be interested in hearing more about this from other writers, especially younger writers. The muse, after all, is not a subject likely to come up in science fiction writing workshops...