Entry tags:

carnival posts, fandom & feminism, linkspam, lists are love, no one lies on the intarweb, people on my flist are smrt, the ability to quote substitutes for wit, totally not a fan

Carnival of Feminist Sci Fic & Fantasy Part II: These Things We Love, And How We Interact With Them
Welcome to Part II of the 18th Sci-Fi/Fantasy Feminist Carnival! Part I, Women, Gaming and You!, was posted late yesterday evening, and Part III should be up by the end of the evening for me. My apologies for both the lateness of the posts and the growing length of the Carnival - there's so much stuff out there to link to that I don't want to skimp on anything.

I once again want to thank Ragnell for allowing me to host this month, and being patient with my slightly-wonky posting schedule, and to padredon who has been keeping me in chai while I've been reading many many things.

But now, on to Part II, wherein we talk about Fandom, the Media, Comics, and criticisms of these things we love.

My introduction to feminist critique of texts was through fandom criticisms of the Harry Potter books and the roles the various girls and women in the story play, and as such, fandom discussions about feminism and texts have a special place in my heart, and in this Carnival. Fandom, in this usage, is describing the people who choose to interact or react to the text through non-fiction reaction pieces such as Vids, artwork or essays.

Vids first. For those not in the know, Vids are fan-produced videos using clips from television and movies set to music. Sometimes they are "simply" like a music video - clips set to appropriate music to play up the relationships within the show. Other times they are pointed critiques of the shows and movies we love to watch.

These interactions are just beginning (in my experience) to be noticed by more mainstream media. Luminosity, part of the creative team behind the Supernatural video Woman's Work, recently did an interview with New York Magazine, Luminosity Upgrades FanVideo:

Women done more vidding than men historically. [sic]
Yes! Everyone’s always surprised when I tell them this, but most vidders are women; then again, film editing was historically a female job. There are maybe five men who attend the primary annual vidding convention.

TV and film are still dominated by male creators behind the camera. Is this part of what you’re reacting to?
Vidding is one of the central parts of media fandom, the creative responses of initially mostly female fans to TV shows and films. So,yes, at its very core, our entire history is tied into talking back to male creators, teasing out for ourselves and telling the stories we don’t get otherwise. But when all said and done, the gender of the creator(s) isn’t that important to me. What’s important is how I change it.

I find that last sentence above very interesting in light of the newly released vid Jack, or Adventures in Reading Against the Text, a Heroes FanVid by icsbanana. [Please note: I'm happy to discuss it with anyone who wants to, but really - I've never seen Heroes, so I'd have nothing intelligent to add except "Vid good"]:

Basically: this is a constructed-reality vid. The clips do not mean here what they mean on the show. There is simply noway to vid this song for this fandom without taking footage out of context. The Niki clips are the most flagrant examples--

In context, when Niki kills her rapists, she experiences it as another violation, as things done to/with her body without her knowledge or consent. In context, she's only allowed to exercise any self-protective power by re-violating herself over and over. In context, she beats up the man who threatens her in the elevator...and then goes and submits to another rape, as ordered. In context, Niki's glorious culminating moment of finally being able to integrate her mind and access her strength willingly to take part in the Final Battle is followed less than a second later by: Dad needs you. Go take care of your family. In context, Niki's integration doesn't mean a damn thing, because next season she gets the exact same plot over again.

You have to deliberately read it wrong. And I want to, because I didmake this out of love for these women and I did get teary while editing parts of it, and--I wanted to make THIS vid, the happy vid, the triumphant vid. But I know I have to lie to do it.

The link has three different ways of viewing the vid, and I really very strongly recommend it, even if you haven't seen Heroes. It's a very powerful image of women kicking butt, taking names, and planning on doing it all again tomorrow.


Moving on to essays, looniewolf (a friend of mine from way back - we met in '94 when I was all wet behind the ears) writes about sexism in accusations of Mary-Sueism directed at female characters in They call her Sue. Mary Sue:

I think one of the more dreaded accusations that can be leveled against a webcomic character is that of being a Mary Sue. For the minute portion of my readership who is unfamiliar with the term, Mary Sues are contrived characters borne of fanfiction that are better than the people around them, more beautiful than pretty much everyone else, and often wins the hearts of those around her, or at the very least grudging respect of antagonists. While the term originated in Star Trek fanfiction, it has since crept through the literary genre until any character could find the label of Mary Sue turned against them.

This is perhaps a tad unfair, especially when Mary Sue accusations are leveled against non-fanfiction protagonists. Indeed, in some ways accusations of Mary Sueism smacks of sexism. One example lies in the Harry Potter character of Hermione Granger, who has been declared by some to be a Mary Sue due to her talents as an excellent student and general know-it-all (though it may be more accurate to portray Hermione as a literary device which allowed J.K. Rowling to present information dumps to both the reader and to Hermione's friends). Think for a moment if Ron Weasley had been the "smart one" of the trio; would accusations of Mary Sue (or Marty Stu for the more rare male incarnation) have been put forward? Or would it be considered a literary tradition that comes close to cliché, but which is still long accepted?

Sticking a bit to Comics, The League of Substitute Superheroes over at the ever-awesome Girl Wonder recently did an interview with devildoll, the fan who somehow lead to the infamous Mary-Jane Statue being a news-making item by merely posting a sarcastic link that lead to a lot of outraged fans, some great fanart in response, and media outlets picking up the news about The Statue. In the interview, DevilDoll talks about her history in comics, her perceptions of Comic Fandom, and how long she kept getting drive-by comments at that post. [At the time of this writing, the direct link to the Girl Wonder site is down. Yay for GoogleCache!]

GW: Has [your view of fandom as a gendered space] changed? If so, how?

“The biggest change, and the one having the most noticeable impact, is the explosion of women blogging about comics, and doing it from a feminist point of view. This has led, predictably, to an increase in the backlash associated with that kind of commentary. […] I think Lester Q. Fanboy was okay with us playing in his sandbox, and even critiquing comics, until we began critiquing them in relation to ourselves. Saying you think a story line sucked might spark a debate, but saying a story line treated a certain group badly causes a whole different kind of uproar.

“Has there been progress in bringing those issues to light, and in getting them addressed? Absolutely, on both creator and fan level. But for every person who has had their mind opened, and realized that just because something has always been a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the best way, there’s another person digging in their heels and refusing to be enlightened.

“Because of this polarization, because of the rising level of resentment, I think some forums are even less welcoming to women now than they previously were.

“On the plus side, we don’t need those forums. The number of fannish spaces welcoming or catering specifically to women is increasing everyday. And the dialog is there. People are bringing attention to feminist issues, and the Powers That Be notice. They might dismiss it publicly,but they notice, and in some cases are forced to acknowledge it. (I mean, really. The fact that Joe Quesada had to make a statement to the press about the Mary Jane statue because of something I said in my blog? That will never stop being funny.)”

Before I move directly into comics, I want to add a link to this essay by surreallis, who describes her journey into Fandom and feminist critique in This Sacred Female Space:

In as much as I have always believed in equal rights for women, I used to have several familiar opinions as well.
"The female characters are written so badly."
"There's no interesting female characters, that's why I focus on the guy."
"I'm so straight that I just cannot read romantic fic that focuses on the woman."
"I'm so straight that other women just don't interest me in fanfic."

One of the things I began noticing was that even in this female-dominated space, it was still males who had higher status. Because of the unusual number of male fans in our fandom, they were fairly visible. And the women who successfully 'crossed over' into male territory and gained their approval tended to be given a higher, unspoken status. I made this successful transition, and another thing I noticed was that many of the other women who made it with me talked badly of the women who hadn't. The unaccepted were weaker, more 'girly' and, well, *NOT manly*.

But, getting back to comics: furikku (via her post Comicry- An example of being Not Smarmy About It, brought my attention to this post in scans_daily, wherein Wolverine manages to question a woman, naked in her shower, without it being about T&A, humiliation, or sexing up the woman and making her look weak. Kalinara talks about it in more detail in her post Huh, they're right, this scene does work

It could be considered a bit gratuitous in that there really isn't a need to have him interrogate her in a shower, sure, but the thing is,this works for me. Having it in the shower isn't necessary, but it does add a special sexualized element to the confrontation without being exploitative.

There are so many ways that this could have gone wrong, so many. But instead they made it work for me. I think because a) it's Wolverine. Wolverine's not one of my favorite characters, but even I, at my most irritated with him, would never suggest the man is a rapist. He might stab her in the head, sure, but he wouldn't rape her.

Also in the "Things Comics Did Right This Month" column, Samantha at Neither Doormat Nor Prostitute reminds us that Mary Jane is Awesome, and so is her Daughter:

I love Mary Jane in this. I love how strong the writer let her be, even while doing house work to keep from breaking down. The writer let her, in those panels, consciously choose not to be a victim. She's not the hero of the piece (nor is she the one needing rescued), and her situation is completely awful, but the writer lets her still have agency, still lets her be responsible for how strong she is going to be.

Sadly, as much as I'd love a whole series of links celebrating how comics are getting better about treating women, loqia reminds us that one step forward isn't really enough in light of the Batman shown in the Japanese period-drama Shogun of Steel Elseworlds in Minus the Gaze:

Isn't she beautiful! Look at that grace, that determination, that intensity, that head-to-toe ninja outfit, those muscles and – could it be, could it possibly be? – not a single piece of cheesecake. No boobs, no butt, no cameltoe; just a badass ninja-chick scaling a wall. Isn't it just everythingyou've ever dreamt of? Everything your heart has wanted to see, ever since you were a little girl; a female hero who has all of the strength and none of the Gaze?

Like I said, she's beautiful. There's just one problem.

That's not a woman. That's Batman.

Of course, one cannot discuss the current state of Batman without talking about Frank Miller. (Or can one? I can't. And comments about Frank Miller are about to become common in this Carnival, just as a head's up.) Void-Star.net talks about how Frank Miller's attempted at doing Batman: Year One seems horribly ham-fisted in light of later attempts to make the series dark and gritty by other authors, and addresses right up front the issues in Miller's treatment of women and men in A Tale of Two Gritties:

The other female characters don’t get off much better, but as I mentioned this is more-or-less expected so I’m just going to drop it for now. Because there’s another group in this book that get royally shafted in the characterisation stakes, too. The men. And here’s the deal, you see, because while Miller’s mindless misogyny is well-known, what is hardly ever mentioned is the fact that he’s a rampant misandrist, too. Miller’s men are no less one-dimensional and dangerously stereotyped than his women are; almost to the point where you can probably take any Miller characters from anyof his books, swap them around, and still end up with the same story to the point where I felt like shaking my laptop and screaming, “You’re Bruce Wayne not Bruce Willis for gods sakes!” The main victims in Year One are (of course) the titular character but more dispiriting than that was the treatment giving to Jim Gordon. Now, I really likeGordon and the poor guy really doesn’t deserve getting turned into the sadistic sleaze ball Miller portrays him as. There’s really a sort of ‘uncovered meat’ vibe going on here in that you kind of… you knowGordon is going to end up banging the ‘sexy’ partner lady simply because that’s how she’s set up. She has literally no other function in the story other than to ‘tempt’ Gordon away from his wife. And you knowhe’s going to do it, because (again) this is a Miller book and no man in the Millerverse can resist a short skirt, apparently. And this is what I mean by Miller’s secret misandry, because his men have no room for depth of character, either; if all the women are whores then all the men are over-sexed sadists. And, let’s face it, that’s not doing anyone any favours.

Speaking frankly (heh) of people we cannot discuss comics without talking about, bellatrys has been doing a series of images based on showing the way the poses female comic characters are shown are disturbing when you put men in them - and are implicitly gendered by the fact that they're always seen on women and never on men. You can see a great example of this in the pose Wolverine is in on the right. In ...they'll think it's a revolution, she talks about the process, as well as including other artwork she's done on the subject.

So while I'm going through various archives of covers- which is really depressing*- if any of you readers know of any covers done within the last ten years that have a good clear view of a male figure from the back in an action pose (or heck, even a non-sexed-up female figure, if you can find one) it would speed things up & I'd be grateful.

Meanwhile, I did a quick'n'dirty remix of the Ultimate X-Men #85which was the subject of another "Is It Gratuitous?" query in the past,because looking at all those galleries of covers hammered home to me just how hard it is to find any pictures of Storm looking badass,rather than "stripperiffic," or "CSI Victim of the Week" even. You'd think she was the weakest member of the team, based on the way she's always shown downed, or terrified, or just standing still sticking out her T&A as if she were on the runway. So I raided the closets of Aeryn Sun and Evil!Angel (Logan's always wanted those leather pants) and lent Ororo my favorite summer top (the one with built-ins upport), and we re-enacted the scene with roles reversed, just for the fun of it.

I don't know what your reaction to seeing Wolverine in that pose is, but mine totally took me aback - he looks like he's waiting for his lover to come home for a night of sweet sweet lovin'. I've become so blinded to see women in these poses on the cover of comics that I don't even register how completely sexualised it is.

You can see her re-imaging of WitchBlade (questionably unsafe for work - everything's covered, but *wow*), all of her artwork where she re-does Storm's poses with other characters, and all her discussion on the process at her LJ.


In my experience, though, you can only really criticise what you love - and there are a lot of feminist writers out there criticising the state of things in movies, television, and books, as well as comics.

Elizabeth Bear (author of lots of great books) talks about the backlash against women authors and comic creators in Dear Patriarchy:

Dear Patriarchy:

I don’t care what you think.

I’m not here to convert you. I’m not here to enlighten you. I’m not here to try to earn your respect. I don’t need it.

I am not scared of you.

You see, I can win without you. I can make a living without you.I can reach a broad readership of women–yes, and men too! lots of men!men who are enlightened, and emotionally secure!–without you. It’s really kind of awesome. After fifteen years working in corporate America, actually, where I usually had to do what a particular type of authoritarian men wanted if I wanted to keep my job, these days, I can pick the audience I care to appeal to.

nolove, Bear.

#

This is not shrill, aggressive, evangelical feminism. I am not here to prove anything to you. Those who went before me have done the hard work, the hardest work, and created the opportunity for me to have that market. And that market exists not because a vast feminist conspiracy has taken over publishing and they’re not printing what men like to read, but because a certain percentage of the women and the men who do read are more interested in reading books like mine.

Thene at Aaru-Tuesday takes the bulk of science fictions authors to task in 1958, in which she talks about the "usual" roles of women in "hard" science fiction novels, and proposes the Frank Miller Test:

I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

I said, alonglongtimeago,that I'd get back to the whole general mess of how sex work gets portrayed in sci-fi & fantasy. It's a happy coincidence for me that Yonmei recently wrote about this vile story CS Lewis penned in 1958because if she hadn't, I would've had to search it out and reread it,ewwww. It's a short exploration concerning sex on an exploratory mission to Mars. 'Sex' meaning to Lewis exactly what it often means in sci-fi and in video games - sex between the male adventurer and the female prostitute. Go read Yonmei's post, because I can't bear to rehash this vile example. Gist is, women can only come to Mars if they're going to be prostitutes. (The really cringlingly awful part is that when I first read it - I think I was 14 or 13 - I swallowed this shit whole.)

There's a lot of supposedly 'speculative' fictions where it's still 1958.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, estrangere talks about "chick lit" and "boy's lit" in fantasy, asking why chick lit is considered light and fluffy and bad in Gender of Writing, Chick Lit, and Fantasy:

I had two agendas with this thread : pointing out the sexism in calling some books Chick Lit in order to dismiss their quality, and questioning which specific images and idiosyncrasies were associated with which gender and why. The thread saw much more discussions about the first point, both in agreement and disagreement, although some people did good effort to answer my second point as well. The discussion grew in some points somewhat heated and even wanky, but wasn't uninteresting.

A certain amount of people did agree that"Chick Lit" described a specific genre of book about female protagonists in urban, modern setting with an irreverent tone and some sexual situations, that such a genre had nothing to do with Kushner's writing. Some people also agreed that Chick Lit wasn't a good name for such a genre because it described what kind of market the genre is aimed at instead of the content of the books; and because it can cause confusion about other books, like Kushner's. Although lots of people still disagreed about that, so I'd hardly call it a consensus.

Broad Universe talks about the strong influence that feminist fantasy & sci-fi authors have had in light of discussions at WisCon in this month's Broadsheet, Influences: From L'Engle to Lessing:

It was at WisCon during one of these sharings that I heard Madeleine L'Engle's name. "Who?" I asked. "She wrote A Wrinkle in Time,"my friend said. "Oh, I loved that book," I replied, and in that moment I realized my love of science fiction hadn't begun with Asimov after all. It had begun much earlier, before I became conscious of author names. It had begun with a woman writer, in a male-dominated genre.

[A Wrinkle In Time is one of the first books I vividly remember reading. I can close my eyes and see the cover. I read my copy to tatters, read the other books in the series, and more than one character has chanted "At Tara today in this fateful hour / I call on all heaven with its power".]

revena manages to compliment the recent increase in great roles for women in Fantasy movies while reminding everyone that questing narratives are not just for boys in A Quest of One's Own:

I tend to think that things are getting better for women in fantasy movies, generally.The recent film versions of the Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia featured expanded and less-sexist roles for some female characters, which is a positive step. And there are movies with young women in the central hero role of the classic fantasy quest story, like the title character of Ella Enchanted. Though,of course, Prince Char has a lot more going for him in terms of capability and personal power than the female romantic interests in more typical questing stories ever do.

So, yes, there are lots of great female characters in fantasy movies, and even some really wonderful heroines. But I can’t think of any that quite rival the classic male heroes of the genre. Which is weird. Is there really anything about a quest story, or any other classic fantasy narrative, that makes it unsuitable for a female lead? Of course not.

limyaael continues her very popular and excellent series of "Fantasy Rants" by suggesting Seven More Things Heroines/Female Protagonists Can Do [hosted on JournalFen, which is currently having server problems]:

The title of the rant explains itself, I think. I’ve put “more” in there because I’ve written rants in the past about different ways to diversify female characters, and slashed heroines/female protagonists because of the unfortunate connotation that “heroine” sometimes has.

Thanks so much for continuing to read! Part III should be up later this evening in Western Australia, which includes reviews of specific television shows, movies, and books, odds and sods that I accidentally left out of Part I, and bonus links to fandom-inspired music that rocks my socks off, and hopefully will rock yours off too.

But, if you're impatient, don't hesitate to check out the last 17 Carnivals! They have some great reading in them, and I can't recommend them enough.

Part III is now up! Reviews, Reactions, and Recommended Further Reading.