RaceFail '09: This hurts us all

Micole (a poster here) was outed by W*ll Sh*tt*rly and (eta: name removed per request³). Although they have now removed her legal name, neither of them have prevented others from outing her in their comments, and WS has deleted his LJ¹ and (eta: name removed per request) has taken down the entries (be warned, the one outing Mely leads to a malware site). WS has noted he will not out anyone, but quite frankly, given that he had apologized to Mely, Willow, Deepa D, and Vom Marlowe only a month before, I do not trust anything he says (the apology was on his LJ, which has been deleted). In interest of full disclosure, I note that Mely is a good friend of mine, as well as an ally I value a great deal.

I am disturbed and frightened by WS and (eta: name removed per request)'s actions, not in the least because they tie directly back in to issues of gender, race, class, and other social injustices.

Here's a timeline of RaceFail '09, so people can decide what they think themselves.

SF media and book fandoms and power

RaceFail has, from the very beginning, had authors and editors on one side and readers and consumers on another. Although authors and editors and readers and consumers are not and never will be mutually exclusive categories, it is fair to say that those who have more power in the SF/F publishing world (Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, the Nielsen Haydens, Emma Bull, W*ll Sh*tt*rly, (eta: name removed per request)) were arguing against people who did not have power in that world (Willow, Deepa, Mely²), with the exception of some SF/F authors and editors such as Nora Jemisin, K. Tempest Bradford, and Liz Henry (eta: Nora and Tempest and Liz are also arguing against that power, as they are not as firmly established and are therefore risking more).

Veejane has posted about SF book fandom versus SF media fandom. I generally do not agree with posts that hold up media fandom (eta: this circle of media fandom, not all media fandoms) as something to be learned from, as it is not a haven to fans of color or a hotbed of diversity. However, the divide between SF book fandom, particularly the segment that is directly involved in the publishing industry, and SF media fandom exists, and as a whole, SF book fandom has had more professional power in terms of the publishing industry, more men, and probably more white people. It's not some accident or random twist of fate that created this divide. The unofficial nature of media fandom is indirectly responsible for its relatively larger diversity—and I never thought I would say this, because being more diverse than media fandom is not that high of a bar—institutional power makes it that much easier for white people, abled people, male people, middle-aged people, middle-class people to get in and to stay in. There are, of course, disadvantaged people in SF book fandom and in SF publishing, and I personally benefit a great deal from people like Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias Buckell and organizations like the Carl Brandon Society and Wiscon. But the face of SF book fandom is very limited.

This is why WS and (eta: name removed per request)'s attempts to reframe the argument in their own terms is so harmful. They are attempting to force a conversation which started in LJ and make it follow their own rules. WS is doing so after having had an LJ for many years, and both WS and (eta: name removed per request) are doing so after many people have told them repeatedly about pseudonyms and about the dangers of outing. It is widely agreed upon by nearly everyone in media fandom that outing someone is unacceptable; furthermore, this is not LJ specific. Political and personal bloggers around the internet have lost jobs by being outed, and that's only one consequence. The important thing is not that they are reframing the conversation around pseudonymity and outing, it is that they are reframing the conversation so that it once again leaves that of race and racism in SF fandom. This reframing of the argument is not dangerous simply because of this one incidence of race fail; it is dangerous because it is representative of what happens when a group with more power and a group with less power argue.

This reframing is a cousin to the tone argument (search for "tone"). Both are ways of asserting power, of staking metaphorical ground; they are rhetorical forms of control that deliberately uphold current power structures. Mely writes, "This conviction, in the face of public conversation and well-documented timelines, that a discussion about race in science fiction is about the personal grudges of white people -- this inability to recognize, hear, or speak to the people of color involved in the discussion -- this in itself contributes to the institution of racism and the continuing whiteness of science fiction." Note how frequently WS and (eta: name removed per request) refer to race and racism in their posts. There has been an amazing moving bar of who has the "right" to speak; first, Deepa and Willow didn't critique Bear's book properly because they were too "emotional;" now we are too educated, not oppressed enough. Furthermore, WS in particular has had a long history of changing the subject. The arguments happening don't start with WS talking about classism; they start with someone else talking about racism. This is power at work, trying to keep itself in power.

SF book fandom, where are you?

Although a few authors and editors have come out against what WS and (eta: name removed per request) have done, where is the rest of the fandom? Like Jane says earlier, "Where are the con-comms, going apeshit to distance themselves from these serial fails of race and culture? Where are the guests-of-honor, specifically inviting underserved communities to visit at an upcoming con? (Where are the "discount if this is your first con evar" programs?) Why aren't the SF organizations like SFWA (okay, bad example) having a cow and putting out official position statements on outreach? Where are press-releases from the publishing houses, explaining their diversity efforts (in their lists and in their workplaces)?"

Why the resounding silence? Editors, authors, fans—all the people who were not talking about RaceFail and what people in their field were doing: where are they?

If the prior months of RaceFail were "both sides behaving badly" (which I disagree with), what is this, and why has no one said anything?

Mely previously wrote, "Is group protest always right or good? No, it's not. It's a way to establish and enforce community norms, and it's only as right and good as the community norms are. It can be profoundly oppressive and profoundly abusive. But silence in the face of injury is also a way to establish and enforce community norms. You don't opt out of a community by remaining in it and never commenting on its big controversies; you just opt to abide by whatever party wins."

What SF book fandom is telling me—a woman, a person of color, and a long-time fan of SF books and a con-goer—what you are telling me is that you don't care. That these are, in fact, your community norms, that you are all right with people who have more power in your community (by virtue of profession, race, and gender) using that power to harm other, less powerful, members of your community. That you are fine with the erasure of women, of people of color, of those without the same professional privileges you enjoy, and that you are willing to stand by silently and let people be hurt. This is how it affects us. This. And this.

Your silence speaks volumes.

The intersectionality of threats

Even though this started as RaceFail, it does not affect "just" race. For one, that assumes that people of color only suffer from a single oppression. Secondly, as many, many people have noted, outing can be threatening on many levels, and I would like to highlight that it can seriously harm women who are being sexually harrassed, GLBT people who are not out, POC who have been threatened, and etc. Media fandom is a safe space for some people. Again, this is something I never thought I would say, as it has proved time and again that it is not a safe space for all people. But in this particular case, it is more of a safe space than SF book fandom because of media fandom's lack of business deals and money-related matters, because of the general lack of ways to retaliate in the offline world. The act of outing comes out of the attempt to control conversation and thereby acts as an attempt to control the people having the conversation, and it comes from not just from two individuals trying to silence an anti-racist ally, but also from a community with more power in terms of gender and race.

WS and (eta: name removed per request) did not do this in a vacuum; they did it in an environment in which they could reasonably not fear many consequences (and as far as I can tell, they will not suffer consequences at all, save being banned from some blogs they probably never visited). They may not have knowingly taken advantage of this power, but they did regardless. And right now, that same environment's reaction is saying that it's ok.

This is why I think a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us. It is upholding a social norm that makes it ok to make threats against people talking about issues of social justice, and even more, it is upholding a norm that says these issues of social justice do not exist at all. I do not think feminists or GLBT activists or anti-classists or anti-ablists will be attacked right this second. But I do think the reduction of social justice is something that affects us all. If nothing else, these few years in my communities have taught me that yesterday's classism is today's anti-Semitism and becomes tomorrow's misogyny. And quite frequently, these attacks hurt the same people, because oppressions do not come singly.

What I want

I want to know if this is the norm for SF fandom. I want to know what SF fandom is doing to welcome oppressed groups—actively welcome, because simply saying "Come in" to someone who has just been assaulted in your house is not the same as showing them the precautions you have taken against further assault. I want to know if I and my allies will be safe.

But mostly, I want to know what you who have been silent are going to do.

I say this because it is all too easy for me to stay on the periphery. So don't tell me. Show me. Not via links or comments, but by making changes—in yourself, in one aspect of your life, online or offline, public or private, large or small. Help us all change.

What I'm going to do

I'd like to spend this week focusing on POC; in particular, I will try to catch up on all my backlog of book write ups by and about POC. I am going to read the 12th POC in SF Carnival. I will continue working on making my blog a safe space for oppressed people and issues of social justice. I will work on my pieces for the Asian Women Blog Carnival and the Remyth Project. I am going to continue to deal with these same issues of safety and trust and social justice offline.

eta: Also, any pointers about bringing up these things and dealing with them offline are incredibly appreciated.

Rules of discourse

I will be on- and offline periodically tomorrow, but I will still be moderating comments. I will also attempt to coordinate any ETAs on this post and the one in my LJ, although there may be a time lag depending on my internet access.

Notes:
¹ It was deleted when I wrote this, and he restored it while I was editing this prior to posting. (eta: deleted again as of 3/5)
² No, I don't think having worked nine months for an SF/F publishing house thirteen years ago is the same as being an editor or an author right now.
³ I removed the poster's name to prevent Aqueduct from having to suffer any consequences for my own statements, which are not associated with those of Aqueduct Press.

x-posted here

Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, Part II

There have been a number of recent posts, mostly on LiveJournal, revisiting topics raised in the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM (see also Cultural Appropriation Revisited). If I had to single out one post as most critical, it would be Deepa D.'s I Didn't Dream of Dragons:

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

There are far more eloquent writers who have pointed out how difficult it is to growing up reading books (and watching movies) about a culture alien to you, and how pernicious the influences thereof can be. I am lucky in that Indian culture is more widely represented in Western media than other colonised regions—when I talk about Bollywood in the yuletide chat room, there are people who have an idea about what I might be referring to, bastardised ideas of ‘pundit’ and ‘caste system’ and ‘karma’ and ‘reincarnation’ are present in the English vocabulary. Yet still, my ability to connect fannishly with people from different parts of the world is mediated through the coloniser’s language and representation. Enid Blyton, with her hideous caricatures of African tribal boys helping the intrepid British children is read from Johannesburg to Jaipur—Iktomi stories are not.

These imbalances of power are what frustrate me in several discussions regarding issues of representation and diversity in writing that I’ve seen recently. I am summarising some positions that I have heard, and my responses to them.

One of the most frustrating arguments I’ve encountered is—If you hate it so much, stop bitching and write your own.

This naive position stems from the utopian capitalist belief that all markets are equal, and individuals are free to be what they can driven only by their inner divine spark.

Other posts, roughly in chronological order (with much reference to helpful index posts by Rydra Wong):

Jay Lake, Another shot at thinking about the Other
Elizabeth Bear, Whatever you're doing, you're probably wrong
Micole, I blame Tempest
Avalon's Willow, Open Letter: To Elizabeth Bear
yeloson, The Remyth Project
Elizabeth Bear, Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver
Micole, Resistance and Individuality
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F
Deborah Kaplan, Race and reviewing
Cryptoxin, Cultural appropriation
Sarah Monette, race-(class-sex)
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F (Once More, with Feeling)
Friendshipper, Cruel little lies
Yeloson, Othered, Only Because You Say So
Betsy, Getting called on your white privilege
Deepa D., White people, it's not all about you, but for this post it is
Vassilissa, About the Current Racism and Othering Discussion
The Angry Black Woman, What Is Cultural Appropriation?

modified in the guts of the living

1.
Thomas Disch killed himself July 4. Reportedly, he'd been suffering from health issues, depression, the death of his partner of thirty years, financial straits because of the cost of his partner's final illness, and a threatened eviction from his apartment (because the lease had been in his partner's name). I have read a very odd selection of his work, not the novels or the short fiction or even the poetry, but The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, and a peculiar and delightful fable called "The Happy Turnip," which no one else seems to remember, but which I would snatch up in an instant if someone put it out as a children's book. I have several of his novels, and have been planning to read them; I have been planning to read them, and sometimes I would pick them up and look at them and put them down again.

Because I found his LJ, you see. I found his LJ, on which he published much excellent and bitter poetry and, on one of the days I happened to check, a rant against Muslims. I decided I didn't need to read his books just then.

I decided I didn't need to read his books just then, or his LJ at all; but I didn't respond to his posts, either in his LJ or mine, and I didn't decide I'd never read his books. I still haven't made that decision. I still haven't sold them.

2.
Maybe Disch would have killed himself anyway, but he shouldn't have had to worry about eviction in the meantime. It is unjust. It is laughable, almost, in New York City, the city with the most tenant-favorable rent laws in the entire country; laughable, with the kind of laughter that hurts.

Heterosexism: if Disch had been married to his partner, if Disch had been able to marry his partner, he would have automatically inherited all his property, including his lease. This is why marriage equality is so important.

Classism and capitalism: Regardless of marriage, regardless of income, no one should have to beggar themselves to provide medical care for themselves and their loved ones. This should be treated as a basic human right, not a privilege reserved for the middle class, the propertied, those employed by large corporations. No one should have to fear losing their home. This is why marriage equality is not enough.

3.
I've loved so many things that hurt me: so many books, so many TV shows, so many stories. So many things that tell me women don't count or brown people aren't human or Jews are disgusting. I love them still. I take what I can and leave the rest, or I try to; the hurt is hard to leave behind. But I do get how reasonable people can hate what William Sanders said and still support the magazine he edits, why people of conscience were still considering submitting new work to Helix yesterday, why I'm still reading John Milton and Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, not to mention watching rather less transcendental TV shows about ghost hunting brothers, not to mention keeping Thomas Disch on my bookshelves and planning to read his work sometime.

But. But. I am so tired, people. I am so tired of the hatefulness, the racism and sexism. I am so tired of looking in the Asimov's forums being a slap in the face because all the decent people in there can't drown out the racism and sexism spewed by S.F. Murphy and David Truesdale. I'm tired of having to forebear it.

Look, I understand why people have published with Helix in the past, especially people who were unaware of Sanders' history. But if you know and you continue to publish there, then you're continuing to support Sanders' racism. I really can't separate the personal from the political support aspects of this--I'm not sure I should, but it's an irrelevant question, because I can't. Sanders didn't separate the personal and the professional. He sent out a piece of professional correspondence with a racial/religious slur in it. Even ignoring the implications of his comments on the types of fiction he'd be willing to buy, what this says is that he expects people to accept and support his racism/religious bigotry during professional interactions. What this says to me is that supporting his business transactions is supporting his behavior as acceptable professional behavior in the sf/f field.

I won't do that. And, to be honest, I don't think other people should, either.

And also -- and this is a lot scarier to write, because it is a much bigger bridge to burn -- I do not think people of conscience should be supporting The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as long as Dave Truesdale's columns continue to be published there, either by buying the magazine or submitting stories to it. It would be another thing if he were publishing fiction or even if he were publishing nonfiction unrelated to his sexist and racist behavior on the Asimov's forums. But he's not. The same venom and prejudice displayed in his attacks on K. Tempest Bradford are displayed in his columns about science fiction, both as a literature and as a community, and clearly and demonstrably affect his reviews of books and short fiction.

[ETA 7/12 11:55pm: After I posted this on my blog, Gordon Van Gelder informed me that David Truesdale has one more column to write before the end of his contract. It doesn't sound like the contract is going to be renewed. This makes boycotting F&SF for Truesdale's presence irrelevant, although the general issues for sf/f described by N.K. Jemisin, among others, are still pressing.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to request that genre editors in general shift to identity-masked submissions, at least for slush; it's customary for scientific papers, and I think editors at Strange Horizons have said it's their standard practice. {eta to eta: I've been corrected on both points; Strange Horizons doesn't do anonymous submission sorting, and the practice is not universal among science journals.} I don't think it will be as simple for fiction as it is for orchestra auditions, since gender and racial bias affect the judgment of content as well as technique; but it might be a place to start.]

4.
I'm afraid to post this, honestly. I'm afraid people I respect will think I'm being rigid and inhumane for suggesting a boycott; I'm afraid people I respect will think I'm inethical and uncaring--that friends will think I'm not giving enough weight to their oppressions--for not feeling able to support a boycott for all cases of bigotry.

I don't think it's an easy call, or a simple call. I'm not planning to shun people who disagree with me on this, or argue against them or their work. But I am asking them, publicly and plainly, to reconsider what they're doing and whether their actions are contributing to the kind of community and literature they want sf/f to be.

Thinking About The Four Gated City on Doris Lessing's Birthday

By Nancy Jane Moore

I just finished re-reading Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City and am pleased to report that I still think it's a great book. I haven't read all of Lessing, so I will refrain from saying it's her best book, but it remains my favorite.

I was a little unsure at first. I did a panel at Capclave on re-reading, and one of the subjects we discussed, over and over, was that some books do not hold up well on re-reading, especially many years later. And the beginning of The Four-Gated City is slow, and reads like a fairly traditional tale of human relationships.

But it moves on to include the best comprehension of the phenomenon we call the Sixties I have ever read. Written during the Sixties by someone who was open enough to see what was happening and old enough to make sense of it, she gets to the heart of the matter, melding together swinging London, communal living, and exploration of the mind in a way that both validates my own experiments of the time and makes me blush to realize how superficially I understood what I was doing.

More important -- at least to the readers of this blog and to me at this stage of the game -- it's science fiction. The book moves from conventional explanations of insanity into mind exploration, using some ideas that might be Jungian, but going farther into potential telepathy. The appendix is pure near future apocalyptic SF.

And while The Four-Gated City's near future is our recent past, the fact that the predicted catastrophes didn't happen in the extreme way presented in the book doesn't weaken its power, because the truth underlying those catastrophes (climate change, new plagues, dangerous and foolish governments, people who get stuck in negative scripts in their brains) are all quite familiar to us at present. Here's one of a hundred lines that struck me:

It can be taken absolutely as an axiom that the populace will not be told the truth, nine-tenths because the governments concerned won't know what is the truth, will be as much in the dark as anybody else, and one-tenth out of panic, greed, hysteria, fear of their own citizenry.

Sound familiar?

Here's what really caught me on this re-read: This is the book that paved the way to science fiction for me.

I am not one of those people who read SF as a kid. I didn't disdain it, but I didn't focus on it. In college I came across Dune, the Foundation Trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, and (of course) Lord of the Rings, but while those books affected me, I didn't separate them into a separate category from other reading.

It was a few years after reading The Four-Gated City that I began seriously reading SF, because it was in SF that I found the same kind of complex ideas that Lessing raises. At the time, much so-called literary fiction was mired in stories about middle and upper class people and their failed marriages -- a subject that bores me to death -- while SF looked at at any number of ways we might live.

No wonder I'm not in the Analog Mafia -- I didn't come to SF for science and technology themselves (though they bring a lot to the mix). I came for thinking that made me question the most fundamental things -- what does it mean to be human, how does the human race become civilized, what capacities do we have that we are ignoring?

No wonder I'm impatient with formulaic fantasy and space opera, much as I love a good rollicking adventure story. I want ideas, even in my adventures.

Blame it on Doris Lessing. She ruined me for superficial SF. Give me ideas, meaty ideas, ideas that haunt me for years. I first read The Four-Gated City in 1973 and I'm still thinking about it. It's just possible I'll still be thinking about it when I die.

Helix SF Magazine Publishes All Female-Authored Issue. Verdict: Cookie Allotted.

The science fiction magazine Helix SF, which describes itself as publishing "controversial" stories, has posted an issue featuring all women writers.

It features fiction by authors such as Esther Freisner, Eugie Foster, Yoon Ha Lee, and Samantha Henderson. There's also a nice selection of poetry by authors including Jane Yolen and Joselle Vanderhooft.

Sanders wrote an editorial about his decision to make this an all-women authored issue. I appreciated this bit: "Certainly it's not intended to prove that women can write SF, or that they can write it well. That's something that doesn't need proving; it's been proved over and over again — anybody who needs further proof by now is beyond hope."

I was also interested in his discussion of the motives: "The truth is that all of the stories you see in this issue had already been accepted before I decided to do this. In fact that's where the idea originated: I was looking over the stories I had in stock, choosing which ones I wanted to use for the next issue, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of excellent stories by women — and had in fact already picked several of them — and suddenly the light bulb went on and I said to myself, "Self, you ugly old son of a bitch," (myself understanding this to be in the spirit of good-natured bandinage)**, "why not an all-women issue?"

And indeed, why not?

He adds, "But you know, in a way it's a pity that this should even be worth talking about. Really, if things were as they should be, nobody should think it surprising or remarkable that an SF magazine should publish an all-women's issue — any more than if, say, all the contributors were from Illinois, or all their last names began with R, or they all had red hair...Or if they were all straight white guys. That happens all the time, and nobody seems to find it strange."

When I first read that last line, I was cheering it, but then I realized that its meaning is ambiguous. It could mean that the editor acknowledges that straight white men are the default state, and that no one finds it odd when issues are all straight white men because the assumption (pre-feminism and anti-racism) is that everything everywhere will be all straight white men. He could be referring to the phenomenon whereby a group of people that is less than half women will be perceived as "all women." He could be referring to the recent study about conversation in which it's demonstrated that if women and men are forced to speak for equal lengths of time, both parties perceive the women as completely dominating the conversation.

However, it's also possible to read the statement another way: which is that no one pays attention to straight white male authored issues because feminists and anti-racists want special rights, and whites and men have "no one" arguing for their interests.

The more I think about this comment, though, I have trouble sustaining my second reading. In order for the second reading to work out, Sanders would have to believe that there are as many all-women tables of contents as there are tables of contents filled with authors who are straight, white, and male. But that doesn't seem to be the case, since he acknowledges that an all-female TOC is still worthy of comment, while TOCs of only straight white men happen all the time.

However, an editorial by Helix guest editor Melanie Fletcher reveals an unambiguous example of the condescending attitude I'd feared: "it's not a big deal that the Summer '07 issue of Helix is pretty much all female — like the almost all male Hugo ballot this year, it just shook out that way. And yet there was much hue and cry across the land about the 2007 Hugo nominees' preponderance of testosterone, so we're probably going to catch some shit about the clouds of estrogen wafting about this issue. Frankly, both complaints strike me as pretty damn stupid because it shouldn't matter what flavor of gonads a writer is packing; what does matter is whether or not they can tell a cracking good story."

Fletcher appears not to understand what is meant by systemic sexism or unconscious bias, from the way that she mischaracterizes the feminist critique of Hugo awards. She appears to be offering this issue as an example of how sometimes things "shake out" to female benefit -- but she's countered by the very fact that there was a conscious effort to put together an all-female table of contents. There was no conscious effort to skew the Hugos. Unconscious gender bias did that all on its own, as it does monthly in the table of contents for magazines like Harper's.

I am inclined to give Sanders the benefit of the doubt and say his heart was in the right place when he orchestrated it. It's harder to believe him when he says this isn't a publicity stunt since he complained about the lack of attention he received for doing it. But I'm inclined to forgive publicity stunts; he's trying to grow the audience for a small magazine.*

However, the editorial by Fletcher makes it clear why an effort like this isn't usually greeted with open arms. It's hard to tell what kinds of concealed motives people have for these kinds of actions. In this case, Fletcher seems to have been trying to hide a GOTCHA under her coat, even if it was a particularly ineffective one.

While I remain cagey, I'm going to go ahead and say this: Good on you, Sanders. Cookie allotted.



But you know what's better on Sanders than an all-women issue? The fact that (if we are to go by the statistics listed in his editorial) of the 28 stories he published in his first year, 13 were by women. Sanders, and editors like him who publish an equal or near-equal gender ratio, are definitely part of the solution.

There's one more net result that's unambiguously positive: seven female short story writers, and six female poets, have sold their work. They will be paid and their work will be read. I urge people to read this issue, and throw in a couple of bucks to the authors if they think the stories are worthy.

UPDATE: Sanders points out that there are a lot of people of color who have written stories for this issue, also, such as Eugie Foster and Yoon Ha Lee. The name that jumps out at me is N. K. Jemison who I was fortunate enough to see speak last year at Wiscon. She’s brilliant. You can find her at her personal blog, but she’s also got the keys to Angry Black Woman’s place, where she’s recently written aa guest post or two. There may be other writers of color on the TOC besides these talented three, but those are the only three I know of for sure.

--

*And hey, complaining worked. I wouldn't have written about this if he hadn't complained. Of course, the fact that my health issues have been mostly cleared up! meant that I now have time and attention to write, which I didn't have when the issue initially came out. (I did consider writing about it then.)

**Sanders also gets a musical-theater-related cookie for quoting Ruddigore.

Science, Speculation and Gendered Narratives

Timmi's post is weirdly coincidental as I was teaching a Masters session on Media, Health and Science at Cardiff University today, and one of the issues we were discussing was the distinction made in various 'factual' media forms between illegitimate speculation about the future - science fiction - and legitimate speculation about the future: the language of potential and promise or the use of modelling tools for extrapolation - and how sfnal is that? Legitimate speculation is authorised by the taken-for-granted expertise of the speculators - scientists, regulators and legislators heavily invested in the science = progress model, or of the genres in which they publish - although peer-reviewed scientific journals have come in for much criticism - external and internal - of late in the wake of significant scientific frauds such as the claim by Professor Hwang of Seoul National University to have produced patient-specific stem cell lines via therapeutic cloning.

But as to the gendering of this speculation, the ways in which biological processes are imagined and the effects this has on research programmes, check out the work of Evelyn Fox Keller. Her analysis of the use of gendered root metaphors in the conceptualisation of science can be found in the titles Reflections on Science and Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. Emily Martin's work in The Woman in the Body also points to the ways in which the process of fertilisation of women's eggs by men's sperm was rendered in biological textbooks as a narrative of romantic conquest with active questing sperm, and passive receptive eggs. More recent texts represent a more equal co-operative enterprise, only thinkable, she argues, once gendered inequality had been raised as a social issue. Apologies to Fox Keller and Martin for sketchy late night renderings of their work, but it is superb and highly to be recommended - along with the work of Rose and, of course, Donna Haraway for their sensitivity to the material impacts that narratives - linguistic and visual - have on the practice of science and on gendered social relations writ large.

The Resurgence of Feminist Science Fiction

By Nancy Jane Moore

In January 2006 I gave a talk at the Library of Congress here in Washington, D.C., on what I see as a resurgence in feminist science fiction. My thoughts on that subject seemed an appropriate way to start out my contributions to Ambling Along the Aqueduct, so here is a slightly edited version of my speech:

To talk about the current situation in feminist science fiction, I think it's necessary to look briefly at a history of feminism. One thing we frequently forget about feminism is how very recent it is. It dates loosely back to the late 18th Century and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women -- a little over two hundred years. Given that the human race has been around for several hundred thousand years, a couple of hundred years is virtually nothing. And in the reality of science fiction -- where we often extrapolate futures hundreds, even thousands, of years from now and frequently speculate on increased human life span -- a couple of hundred years is a mere blip.

Modern feminism started as a movement in the mid-19th Century. That first blitz of activity in the US ended with women getting the right to vote in 1920. To put that in perspective: When my father -- who is still hale and hearty at 88 -- was born, his mother didn't have the right to vote. The automobile is older than that -- both my grandmothers owned automobiles and drove everywhere before they were allowed to vote.

While women made some progress over the first half of the 20th Century -- changes in divorce and property rights law -- the next real wave of feminism was in the 1960s and 70s. That's all within the last 30 to 40 years -- not long at all.

There are lots of reasons for the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s. It was a time of great social ferment, including the Civil Rights Movement. And, in fact, the 19th Century movement was tied into major social change, too, with the abolitionists. But one key element of the new feminism of the 60s was scientific in nature: The Pill. That advance was tied in with activism, because most of the legal decisions that gave people the right to contraception came in the 1960s themselves, culminating in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Feminism is connected to science – particularly to biology.

And science fiction has always had a feminist connection -- the boys of the Golden Age notwithstanding. You can find a significant number of science fiction stories by 19th Century women authors, often about inventions that reduce the backbreaking work of pre-industrial housekeeping or about the relationship between men and women. Many of these fiction writers were also activists -- abolitionists and suffragists.

The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s produced an amazing amount of excellent feminist science fiction -- many consider the feminist work of that era the defining science fiction of the time. Obviously there's Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which is arguably the finest angry feminist novel in any genre of that time. But there are also Russ's other novels and stories, Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy, Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness (and also her short story "Winter's King," set in that same time and place, but playing with pronouns), Suzy McKee Charnas's work and --obviously -- James Tiptree, particularly in "The Women Men Don't See."

I was hungry for women authors back then and I read a lot of the mainstream feminist fiction. Most of it was so angry as to be unreadable. Only in science fiction were people able to channel that anger into good fiction. I suspect that may be partly the effect of the science -- or maybe it's just the quality of science fiction writers.

But that was 30 odd years ago. We've spent those years integrating the social change brought by feminism and other social change movements, and while things are far from perfect -- witness the U.S. Supreme Court's recent abortion decision -- things are considerably different. Women have options today that we only dreamed of in 1965.

So a lot of people want to tell us that feminism did its job, that we've achieved social equality, and that there's no need for any kind of feminist movement, much less feminist science fiction.

But if that's the case, why are we seeing so much feminist science fiction? And even some feminist fantasy -- especially urban fantasy? There are several reasons:

1. As I said before: These changes are really new. We've have a sea change in the legal rights of women in the last half century and we're only now beginning to figure out what it all means. That confusion is working itself out in fiction.
2. We've made equally mind-altering progress in biology and, based on that, in medicine. The human genome project, cloning, genetic modification, sex change operations as a regular medical practice -- all of these things have the capacity to raise fundamental questions about the real meaning of gender and they're just the things that are already going on. (I've commented before -- and I'm far from alone -- that we're actually living in the future predicted by the Golden Age of SF.) Science fiction is the most obvious place to work out those issues, because you can take the facts just a few steps beyond what we can do now and open up a brand new can of worms. And there's the potential of taking this a few hundred years into the future and coming up with some very different conceptions of gender.
3. Religious fundamentalists -- from many different religions -- are attacking women's freedoms. This ranges from the Christian right here in the US attacking birth control and abortion to the fundamentalist Muslims who require women to wear the burqa and otherwise limit their actions. Certainly there have been some major changes in religion brought by feminism, but those changes have energized the fundamentalist opposition.

The feminist science fiction being published these days is not nearly as angry as The Female Man. It's also not as focused on some old ideas of the differences between men and women -- with an assumption that women are superior (though there certainly are scientific discussions these days on our differences). And it's not just being written by women.

I see four types of feminist SF and fantasy out there:

1. There are a lot of stories that fall into the "Sword and Sorceress" format – meaning they are similar to the short stories Marion Zimmer Bradley bought for that series. Sword & Sorceress was fantasy, but similar stories exist in space opera: essentially adventure stories in which women have the major adventures. As someone who loves adventure stories, and who grew very tired of having to identify with the male characters, I love these stories. Women wrote a lot of them in the 80s and 90s, and now a lot of men are writing them as well. Many of these stories don't exactly provide thoughtful feminism, though; I recently tried to read one of the Honor Harrington books and gave up in frustration. Here we had this future society in which women supposedly had full equality, coming up against a throwback sexist society, and Honor reacts with all the issues and concerns of a modern day female government official dealing with Saudi Arabia. I'd like to think that after a few hundred years of gender equality, both women and men would be confused and puzzled by such a throwback, that their reactions would be something completely new and different.
2. There are a lot of more complex works that tell the stories of women acting in the world in a much broader scope than the roles allowed them in the past. I'd put my book Changeling in that category. It's a coming of age story, but the coming of age aspect involves learning to deal with power -- that of others and that of oneself.
3. There are many stories by male authors, and about male characters, that are looking at gender issues as well. It's no accident that several recent Tiptree winners, John Kessell, M. John Harrison, Matt Ruff, Joe Haldeman, and Geoff Ryman are male. These issues are no longer of interest only to women.
4. And finally, there is some very sophisticated science fiction that takes up the possibilities that are opening up from biology -- and artificial intelligence as well -- and makes us re-think everything we've ever thought we understood about gender. We no longer need to come up with aliens who have different genders -- one or three or half a dozen or none; we can create all these variations for ourselves out of human beings.

All of these types of stories are important, because all of them are helping us figure out what our social changes mean. But it is the last type that really use science and fiction to help us work out what gender will mean in the future. I've played in this area myself -- in fact I have become very fond of creating humans who are both male and female. But my favorite example of this type of SF is Gwyneth Jones's book Life (pictured above). This book is set in the future of the day after tomorrow, so the characters are struggling with the integration of the changes brought by the feminist movement. The main character, Anna, a biologist, is also studying what she calls "transferred Y" -- a chunk of bases from the y chromosome moving over to the X. The book is ultimately about what such changes on the genetic level mean for human beings, as well as being about the life of Anna and some of the people she knows in a complicated world just a few years from now.

A new heyday of feminist SF is upon us -- not just because of movements for social equality, but because science is raising the same questions. Coupled with the rise in the small presses and the better online publishing experiments, we're going to see more and more fiction that challenges us to think about what it really means to be human -- and what, if anything, -- gender has to do with it.