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lechatfemme.
Since I'm here avoiding Carl Jung I thought I'd share with you something I found irritating. I'm being good though, and turning off comments even though I'd much rather be writing SNAFU than reading Darko Suvin.
Apparently slash writers write gay men because they're homophobic (towards lesbians only it seems), misogynistic, and too lazy to write female heroines. And here I thought I wrote slash because it was hot.
Copyright Lambda Rising Mar 1994. Reprinted without permission.
Women writing mainstream science fiction (SF) and fantasy have for many years created gay male protagonists, and that narrative strategy has struck a responsive chord in the wider SF/fantasy readership, a readership that has been somewhat less interested in female protagonists, either gay or straight. I think the reasons for the phenomenon range from societal uncertainty about women's roles and women's sexualities to inherited misogyny to the general willingness of SF/fantasy readers to accept just about anything "for the sake of the story" as long as the author has provided a self-consistent chain of extrapolation. Like most narrative strategies, this one has advantages and disadvantages for the writer and readers, and can be handled well, badly, or at any level in between.
When you ask "why do women write about gay men?" at a science fiction convention, the first response is often "because they always have." And this is quite true: women in SF/fantasy have been writing about gay men for quite a long time. Of course, this begs the question of why women choose to write gay men rather than lesbians. The question is often discussed at conventions--there were panels on the subject at at least three Gaylaxicons, and at the last two WorldCons--and there seem to be three commonly articulated answers.
The first answer is lazy writers and lazy readers, commonly expressed as "it's easier to write men." When one pursues the question, as I've done a number of times, this statement turns out to be shorthand for the assumption that protagonists are by definition male. Under this assumption (still held by a huge number of readers and at least some writers), the writer has to work much harder to convince the reader that a female protagonists is important enough, and good enough at her job, to be the center of a story. (This is also known in fandom as the Modesty Blaise syndrome: James Bond can do heroics by decree, but Modesty Blaise has to have a complex and elaborately defined background to explain how she can do the same things.) This is not really a surprising assumption, since most of us grew up in a sexist world and absorbed the lesson that men's stories are, by definition, more important, and that one writes about men if one wants to say something important, rather than "just" about women.
It is possible to use the readers' expectation--unconscious though I believe it generally to be--to one's advantage. Certainly, it is easy to me a political point by declaring a character to be male, powerful, respected, interesting (normal, in a book)--and queer. Provided the context is plausible, the SF/fantasy readership will accept and identify with the character. (SF readers gave a Hugo Award to Donald Kingsbury's brilliant Courtship Rite, which is set in a society that, for logical reasons, must practice cannibalism, and therefore treats its children as food animals until the survivors reach the age of five. Homosexuality, by comparison, is uncomplicated.)
This expectation, however, can also force a compromise, particularly in short fiction. When a writer is interested in exploring an issue other than gender, particularly issues like class or economic status where there are strong divergences between men and women, there is a strong temptation to make the protagonist male, in order not to clutter the issue. If the protagonist is female, that fact will come to the fore in at least some readers' eyes, and may obscure the issues that the writer wanted to highlight. A straight woman writer may choose a gay male protagonist to express some of her sense of being an outsider, while gaining the advantages of a male protagonist; a lesbian writer may make the same choice in order to write from a community that she knows.
The second reason given for writing gay men rather than women is simple, straight-forward misogyny, coupled with a touch of straight panic. I used to think that this was fairly uncommon these days--certainly the fact that two of last year's Lambda Literary Awards finalists in the Lesbian SF category were published by mainstream SF houses (my own Dreamships and the winner, Nicola Griffith's Ammonite) suggests that the mainstream publishers (and therefore the readers) aren't particularly hostile to books by/about lesbians. Unfortunately, on the "Gay Characters in SF/Fantasy" panel at the WorldCon in Orlando in 1992, two women writers agreed that they wrote about gay men because they found men very attractive, and could not imagine finding women (sexually) attractive enough to write about them as the objects of either male or female desire. At the same panel at the WorldCon in San Francisco this year, I asked if the women on the panel, all of whom had written stories about gay men, had ever considered writing about lesbians. One of the women replied that she had never had cause to question her own sexual orientation--not the question I'd asked, and a good indication of a (presumeably) straight woman's fear of being identified as a lesbian.
In a telephone conversation, Maureen McHugh talked about writing gay men as a way to keep readers from identifying the woman author too closely with her characters. (To be fair, the fear of being thought to be gay may also lie behind the rarity of gay male protagonists written by men.) I think that there are woman who write gay male protagonists in order to imagine themselves as gaining male social privilege without having to reject the social values that are important to them as traditionally socialized women, and which they imagine gay men (who are, after all, "just like women") to share.
The third reason usually given for writing about gay men is the writer's need to gain critical distance from her subject. No one writes well about anything without achieving some perspective on it and distance from it, and one of the easiest ways to gain distance on a character, particularly one involved in situations about which you care deeply, is to change the character's gender. Maureen McHugh notes that she had to work much harder, to observe and to listen rather than to write just from within, to create China Mountain Zhang exactly because she is neither male, nor gay, nor Chinese. Certainly it's good exercise for any writer to try on the persona of someone of the opposite gender or a different sexual preference, and to use that persona to look at the ways our own world is constructed and biased. SF/fantasy, where by definition the writer reconstructs the world of the novel, is a particularly good medium for that kind of indirect exploration of our world, and--for the same reasons--has a readership unusually receptive to at least fictional reorderings.
The final reason for writing gay men rather than lesbians comes down to what Camille Bacon-Smith has called conservation of risk. To be a woman and to write about women is to take a risk, in a society that still doesn't know what to do with women who want their own stories. To be a woman and to write science fiction is to take a risk, in a society where fewer women than men are trained in the sciences and in a field where women are still therefore assumed to be less rigorous in their extrapolations--the extrapolation that is the heart of the genre, and the structure that allows the writer to question society. To be a woman and to write fantasy is to take a risk, in a society that only acknowledges a specific and narrow kind of masculine heroism. To be a writer is to take the risk of declaring that what one has to say is worth reading.
Not everyone chooses to take all those risks all the time and in every work. (Nor is it artistically weak or invalid to do so: Alice Sheldon's decision to publish her feminist science fiction under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr., and to keep her real identity secret for as long as possible, in no way diminishes the brilliance of her work. By not identifying herself as a woman, Tiptree was able to publish a feminist critique that went further than most other writers of her day--and to be widely read while doing so.) Writing about gay men allows women writers to write characters who are similarly oppressed, but whose issues are not the same as women's. It's then possible to talk about oppression without having to recreate, in her fiction, the difficulties that face her in everyday life. The problem with conserving risk occurs when the strategy permits a writer to deny, or never to know, that she is writing about herself and her own issues, and thus to deny that those issues exist. She can distance herself from other women and from herself, and thus reinforces the old patriarchal assumption that any intelligent, articulate woman is by definition an exception--not really a woman at all.
Women writing gay men in SF/fantasy are availing themselves of a convention within the field , and I see no reason for any writer not to make use of a successful narrative strategy.
However, because women-writing-gay-men has become a convention, I think we're seeing writers take up the strategy without thinking, out of habit rather than for a definite purpose. It has become "easier" to write about gay men: it is accepted that women will do so, and it gives the lazy or insecure--or inexperienced--writer the option of avoiding some difficult issues. I don't for a moment want to see women stop writing about gay men--why should we?--but I would like to see the strategy chosen more carefully, not as a default, but as an active choice.
Melissa Scott the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist Dreamships and of Burning Bright. Her novel Trouble and Her Friends will be published this spring.
Gosh, I'm glad that's cleared up. I was unaware that it was my duty as a female writer to write female characters, and that to do otherwise was mysogynistic. Here I thought I had freedom to be creative. Silly me -- creativity and individual preferences only apply to men. Women don't have that right. We must create by fiat according to what is 'needed' in literature today. Zieg Heil! With an agenda that tight, you know her book is as boring as spit.
POLL!
... on Catcher in the Rye. Go here -->
lechatfemme.Since I'm here avoiding Carl Jung I thought I'd share with you something I found irritating. I'm being good though, and turning off comments even though I'd much rather be writing SNAFU than reading Darko Suvin.
Apparently slash writers write gay men because they're homophobic (towards lesbians only it seems), misogynistic, and too lazy to write female heroines. And here I thought I wrote slash because it was hot.
Copyright Lambda Rising Mar 1994. Reprinted without permission.
Women writing mainstream science fiction (SF) and fantasy have for many years created gay male protagonists, and that narrative strategy has struck a responsive chord in the wider SF/fantasy readership, a readership that has been somewhat less interested in female protagonists, either gay or straight. I think the reasons for the phenomenon range from societal uncertainty about women's roles and women's sexualities to inherited misogyny to the general willingness of SF/fantasy readers to accept just about anything "for the sake of the story" as long as the author has provided a self-consistent chain of extrapolation. Like most narrative strategies, this one has advantages and disadvantages for the writer and readers, and can be handled well, badly, or at any level in between.
When you ask "why do women write about gay men?" at a science fiction convention, the first response is often "because they always have." And this is quite true: women in SF/fantasy have been writing about gay men for quite a long time. Of course, this begs the question of why women choose to write gay men rather than lesbians. The question is often discussed at conventions--there were panels on the subject at at least three Gaylaxicons, and at the last two WorldCons--and there seem to be three commonly articulated answers.
The first answer is lazy writers and lazy readers, commonly expressed as "it's easier to write men." When one pursues the question, as I've done a number of times, this statement turns out to be shorthand for the assumption that protagonists are by definition male. Under this assumption (still held by a huge number of readers and at least some writers), the writer has to work much harder to convince the reader that a female protagonists is important enough, and good enough at her job, to be the center of a story. (This is also known in fandom as the Modesty Blaise syndrome: James Bond can do heroics by decree, but Modesty Blaise has to have a complex and elaborately defined background to explain how she can do the same things.) This is not really a surprising assumption, since most of us grew up in a sexist world and absorbed the lesson that men's stories are, by definition, more important, and that one writes about men if one wants to say something important, rather than "just" about women.
It is possible to use the readers' expectation--unconscious though I believe it generally to be--to one's advantage. Certainly, it is easy to me a political point by declaring a character to be male, powerful, respected, interesting (normal, in a book)--and queer. Provided the context is plausible, the SF/fantasy readership will accept and identify with the character. (SF readers gave a Hugo Award to Donald Kingsbury's brilliant Courtship Rite, which is set in a society that, for logical reasons, must practice cannibalism, and therefore treats its children as food animals until the survivors reach the age of five. Homosexuality, by comparison, is uncomplicated.)
This expectation, however, can also force a compromise, particularly in short fiction. When a writer is interested in exploring an issue other than gender, particularly issues like class or economic status where there are strong divergences between men and women, there is a strong temptation to make the protagonist male, in order not to clutter the issue. If the protagonist is female, that fact will come to the fore in at least some readers' eyes, and may obscure the issues that the writer wanted to highlight. A straight woman writer may choose a gay male protagonist to express some of her sense of being an outsider, while gaining the advantages of a male protagonist; a lesbian writer may make the same choice in order to write from a community that she knows.
The second reason given for writing gay men rather than women is simple, straight-forward misogyny, coupled with a touch of straight panic. I used to think that this was fairly uncommon these days--certainly the fact that two of last year's Lambda Literary Awards finalists in the Lesbian SF category were published by mainstream SF houses (my own Dreamships and the winner, Nicola Griffith's Ammonite) suggests that the mainstream publishers (and therefore the readers) aren't particularly hostile to books by/about lesbians. Unfortunately, on the "Gay Characters in SF/Fantasy" panel at the WorldCon in Orlando in 1992, two women writers agreed that they wrote about gay men because they found men very attractive, and could not imagine finding women (sexually) attractive enough to write about them as the objects of either male or female desire. At the same panel at the WorldCon in San Francisco this year, I asked if the women on the panel, all of whom had written stories about gay men, had ever considered writing about lesbians. One of the women replied that she had never had cause to question her own sexual orientation--not the question I'd asked, and a good indication of a (presumeably) straight woman's fear of being identified as a lesbian.
In a telephone conversation, Maureen McHugh talked about writing gay men as a way to keep readers from identifying the woman author too closely with her characters. (To be fair, the fear of being thought to be gay may also lie behind the rarity of gay male protagonists written by men.) I think that there are woman who write gay male protagonists in order to imagine themselves as gaining male social privilege without having to reject the social values that are important to them as traditionally socialized women, and which they imagine gay men (who are, after all, "just like women") to share.
The third reason usually given for writing about gay men is the writer's need to gain critical distance from her subject. No one writes well about anything without achieving some perspective on it and distance from it, and one of the easiest ways to gain distance on a character, particularly one involved in situations about which you care deeply, is to change the character's gender. Maureen McHugh notes that she had to work much harder, to observe and to listen rather than to write just from within, to create China Mountain Zhang exactly because she is neither male, nor gay, nor Chinese. Certainly it's good exercise for any writer to try on the persona of someone of the opposite gender or a different sexual preference, and to use that persona to look at the ways our own world is constructed and biased. SF/fantasy, where by definition the writer reconstructs the world of the novel, is a particularly good medium for that kind of indirect exploration of our world, and--for the same reasons--has a readership unusually receptive to at least fictional reorderings.
The final reason for writing gay men rather than lesbians comes down to what Camille Bacon-Smith has called conservation of risk. To be a woman and to write about women is to take a risk, in a society that still doesn't know what to do with women who want their own stories. To be a woman and to write science fiction is to take a risk, in a society where fewer women than men are trained in the sciences and in a field where women are still therefore assumed to be less rigorous in their extrapolations--the extrapolation that is the heart of the genre, and the structure that allows the writer to question society. To be a woman and to write fantasy is to take a risk, in a society that only acknowledges a specific and narrow kind of masculine heroism. To be a writer is to take the risk of declaring that what one has to say is worth reading.
Not everyone chooses to take all those risks all the time and in every work. (Nor is it artistically weak or invalid to do so: Alice Sheldon's decision to publish her feminist science fiction under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr., and to keep her real identity secret for as long as possible, in no way diminishes the brilliance of her work. By not identifying herself as a woman, Tiptree was able to publish a feminist critique that went further than most other writers of her day--and to be widely read while doing so.) Writing about gay men allows women writers to write characters who are similarly oppressed, but whose issues are not the same as women's. It's then possible to talk about oppression without having to recreate, in her fiction, the difficulties that face her in everyday life. The problem with conserving risk occurs when the strategy permits a writer to deny, or never to know, that she is writing about herself and her own issues, and thus to deny that those issues exist. She can distance herself from other women and from herself, and thus reinforces the old patriarchal assumption that any intelligent, articulate woman is by definition an exception--not really a woman at all.
Women writing gay men in SF/fantasy are availing themselves of a convention within the field , and I see no reason for any writer not to make use of a successful narrative strategy.
However, because women-writing-gay-men has become a convention, I think we're seeing writers take up the strategy without thinking, out of habit rather than for a definite purpose. It has become "easier" to write about gay men: it is accepted that women will do so, and it gives the lazy or insecure--or inexperienced--writer the option of avoiding some difficult issues. I don't for a moment want to see women stop writing about gay men--why should we?--but I would like to see the strategy chosen more carefully, not as a default, but as an active choice.
Melissa Scott the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist Dreamships and of Burning Bright. Her novel Trouble and Her Friends will be published this spring.
Gosh, I'm glad that's cleared up. I was unaware that it was my duty as a female writer to write female characters, and that to do otherwise was mysogynistic. Here I thought I had freedom to be creative. Silly me -- creativity and individual preferences only apply to men. Women don't have that right. We must create by fiat according to what is 'needed' in literature today. Zieg Heil! With an agenda that tight, you know her book is as boring as spit.