![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillThe trouble I have with reading Tamora Pierce books is that most of them are young adult stories for girls, featuring strong female protagonists who are trying to bust the Old Order Of Things while being proud of being girls (and later women).
There are plenty of male characters too; even a fair number who aren't there just for romantic material. Many are invested in the concept of equality. There's a fair amount of strife between the sexes (especially in the Alanna and Keladry series, and Daine runs into her share) but the general trend is toward progressivism. So that's good.
The problem I have with them is long-standing, though it only became apparent to me recently. While I understand that busting the Old Order means having an oppressive, sexist Old Order to bust in the first place, when that blatant sexism is challenged it still leaves the gender roles intact. Yay, Alanna became a knight, and paved the way for other lady knights! ...but in order for a lady knight to be "worthy", she has to act like the non-lady knights all the time. Gruff and (in Alanna's case) quick to anger, never showing the weakness of tears, and so on. Keladry shows compassion for animals and powerless people, which is chalked up to her being a girl, while the only other person to care to that extent is another woman, Daine. Yes, there are compassionate men -- but deep and extensive compassion is the woman's domain, even here. I think Keladry is the only female character who isn't interested in childbearing, and she's simply not into romantic attachments at all.
I know, I'm unfairly picking apart something which is supposed to be light entertainment with easy-to-understand underpinnings. But as I said, it's bothered me for a long time, because I grew up reading these books; Alanna came out when I was in my early teens. I was, at least at the time, a girl myself... and as much as I tried to identify with the heroines, the fact that their womanliness was expressed in ways that never appealed to me stopped me short. I didn't care about jewelry, or flirting, or pretty clothes, or tending children. Even when Alanna was masquerading as a boy she had those secret yearnings for "girl" things. Now that I know the reason for that (I'm not a woman) I could say oh, well, that's why I didn't identify with these characters. Except that I know women who wouldn't identify with the femminess of the characters either. And the men are all stoic, masculine figures with all the expected marks of manhood (or boyhood).
Now, as I'm reading these things again, I can start to understand the complaint that I've heard voiced by some people of color, about movies and other media: nobody here is like me. There aren't any femme boys in here. There are precious few masculine girls or women (as I say, Kel is different, but I just read three books where Aly was being very coquettish and girly even when she was in espionage up to her eyebrows). And among the Immortals and other nonhumans, the darkings are the only ones who don't fit squarely into the gender binary. It's hard to identify with a little black blob.
Maybe I shouldn't expect such things from Young Adult fiction. Maybe it's just not sophisticated enough. Which I could buy into, except that almost none of the full-adult fiction I've read has had these things either. (I would say none, but there was a gender-fluid hermaphrodite in the Vorkosigan books.) Even Sheri Tepper's "Gate To Women's Country", with all its role-reversals and playing with gender stereotypes, still had very hard lines between "man" and "woman". The few things I've seen that have masculine women or feminine men have tied those traits up with homosexuality in almost every case -- I can't speak to the Shang Wildcat, but Kel seems aromantic and possibly asexual as well, which takes her out of the running.
(Okay, Sun Wolf's Starhawk is masculine and straight. But she's sort of the exception to the rule. In fact, most of the exceptions I can think of come from Barbara Hambly -- I tip my hat.)
Non-binary genders are just hitting the public's radar. Okay. But fiction writers have always been ahead of the curve, particularly those of the quality I tend to like. I can excuse the last generation of SF and Fantasy writers; Heinlein, Asimov, and McCaffrey all had older social structures that they were subverting. Those who are writing now, though... I applaud their advancement of alternate sexualities, but are gender politics so incredibly recent that they haven't even been on the table in the last decade? Even for visionaries? Even when we're just talking about gender norms, rather than gender identity itself?
For that matter, I don't think I've run across a trans person in SF/F other than in one scene in a brothel. I dimly remember Spider Robinson having a trans character, but they might have just been a cross-dresser, I can't recall. Tamora Pierce seems to have recently written one into "Bloodhound", which I haven't read yet. Still, binary transition has been in the public consciousness for decades.
I'm not sure how I would write a trans or agender or gender-fluid person without the story being focused on that aspect of their personality. But then, I'm not a Hugo-award-winning author with multiple novels under my belt. SF/F has explored far more difficult concepts, why not gender identity and gender norms?
This post has prompted me to look at some of the lists for non-binary representation in SF/F, and they are pretty slim... apparently I need to read Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness". I was never a huge fan of Earthsea, but she's not a bad writer. Apparently it's stayed the only mainstream novel to explore gender, though, and it was written more than forty years ago.
I should see whether there's any stories specifically aimed at Millennials and the younger set; they seem to be the ones challenging the concepts around gender the most. I'm just getting frustrated with this faux-Middle-Ages world where everything is progressive except identity.
Apparently somebody else had very much the same set of complaints.
More helpful still: the Tor blog has a tag for post-binary gender in SF.
There are plenty of male characters too; even a fair number who aren't there just for romantic material. Many are invested in the concept of equality. There's a fair amount of strife between the sexes (especially in the Alanna and Keladry series, and Daine runs into her share) but the general trend is toward progressivism. So that's good.
The problem I have with them is long-standing, though it only became apparent to me recently. While I understand that busting the Old Order means having an oppressive, sexist Old Order to bust in the first place, when that blatant sexism is challenged it still leaves the gender roles intact. Yay, Alanna became a knight, and paved the way for other lady knights! ...but in order for a lady knight to be "worthy", she has to act like the non-lady knights all the time. Gruff and (in Alanna's case) quick to anger, never showing the weakness of tears, and so on. Keladry shows compassion for animals and powerless people, which is chalked up to her being a girl, while the only other person to care to that extent is another woman, Daine. Yes, there are compassionate men -- but deep and extensive compassion is the woman's domain, even here. I think Keladry is the only female character who isn't interested in childbearing, and she's simply not into romantic attachments at all.
I know, I'm unfairly picking apart something which is supposed to be light entertainment with easy-to-understand underpinnings. But as I said, it's bothered me for a long time, because I grew up reading these books; Alanna came out when I was in my early teens. I was, at least at the time, a girl myself... and as much as I tried to identify with the heroines, the fact that their womanliness was expressed in ways that never appealed to me stopped me short. I didn't care about jewelry, or flirting, or pretty clothes, or tending children. Even when Alanna was masquerading as a boy she had those secret yearnings for "girl" things. Now that I know the reason for that (I'm not a woman) I could say oh, well, that's why I didn't identify with these characters. Except that I know women who wouldn't identify with the femminess of the characters either. And the men are all stoic, masculine figures with all the expected marks of manhood (or boyhood).
Now, as I'm reading these things again, I can start to understand the complaint that I've heard voiced by some people of color, about movies and other media: nobody here is like me. There aren't any femme boys in here. There are precious few masculine girls or women (as I say, Kel is different, but I just read three books where Aly was being very coquettish and girly even when she was in espionage up to her eyebrows). And among the Immortals and other nonhumans, the darkings are the only ones who don't fit squarely into the gender binary. It's hard to identify with a little black blob.
Maybe I shouldn't expect such things from Young Adult fiction. Maybe it's just not sophisticated enough. Which I could buy into, except that almost none of the full-adult fiction I've read has had these things either. (I would say none, but there was a gender-fluid hermaphrodite in the Vorkosigan books.) Even Sheri Tepper's "Gate To Women's Country", with all its role-reversals and playing with gender stereotypes, still had very hard lines between "man" and "woman". The few things I've seen that have masculine women or feminine men have tied those traits up with homosexuality in almost every case -- I can't speak to the Shang Wildcat, but Kel seems aromantic and possibly asexual as well, which takes her out of the running.
(Okay, Sun Wolf's Starhawk is masculine and straight. But she's sort of the exception to the rule. In fact, most of the exceptions I can think of come from Barbara Hambly -- I tip my hat.)
Non-binary genders are just hitting the public's radar. Okay. But fiction writers have always been ahead of the curve, particularly those of the quality I tend to like. I can excuse the last generation of SF and Fantasy writers; Heinlein, Asimov, and McCaffrey all had older social structures that they were subverting. Those who are writing now, though... I applaud their advancement of alternate sexualities, but are gender politics so incredibly recent that they haven't even been on the table in the last decade? Even for visionaries? Even when we're just talking about gender norms, rather than gender identity itself?
For that matter, I don't think I've run across a trans person in SF/F other than in one scene in a brothel. I dimly remember Spider Robinson having a trans character, but they might have just been a cross-dresser, I can't recall. Tamora Pierce seems to have recently written one into "Bloodhound", which I haven't read yet. Still, binary transition has been in the public consciousness for decades.
I'm not sure how I would write a trans or agender or gender-fluid person without the story being focused on that aspect of their personality. But then, I'm not a Hugo-award-winning author with multiple novels under my belt. SF/F has explored far more difficult concepts, why not gender identity and gender norms?
This post has prompted me to look at some of the lists for non-binary representation in SF/F, and they are pretty slim... apparently I need to read Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness". I was never a huge fan of Earthsea, but she's not a bad writer. Apparently it's stayed the only mainstream novel to explore gender, though, and it was written more than forty years ago.
I should see whether there's any stories specifically aimed at Millennials and the younger set; they seem to be the ones challenging the concepts around gender the most. I'm just getting frustrated with this faux-Middle-Ages world where everything is progressive except identity.
Apparently somebody else had very much the same set of complaints.
More helpful still: the Tor blog has a tag for post-binary gender in SF.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-26 16:45 (UTC)I know you have the talent. I challenge you to create what you're complaining about the lack of. :)