I reread Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh for the first time in, like, almost thirty years. This came about because I read a review of a new biography of the author which talked about her life as a queer woman midcentury--her various partnerships intellectual and domestic--and it's really one of those things where once you've seen something in a new light, it can't be unseen.

Harriet is queer.

If you didn't read the book (I know the 90s film was popular but I never saw it--it came out when I was an older teen uninterested in babyish fare), Harriet is an 11 year old girl in 1962 New York who wants to be a writer and a spy. She carries a marbled composition notebook--seen clearly in the illustrations Fitzhugh created--which I did remember led to a lifelong preference for such notebooks. She writes about everything she observes with the acerbic voice and casual cruelty of a child, dismissing various schoolmates and neighbors as ugly, dumb, etc. The final third of the book is when this notebook is found by her classmates who turn against her.

If this isn't a parable of outting, what is?

On top of that, the beloved nanny Ole Golly who has done the better part of raising and caretaking Harriet leaves/is fired, leaving a hole in the kid's life and sinking her into a depression on top of the bullying at school. Her parents take her to a therapist, and Ole Golly writes a letter telling her to grow the fuck up and imparting an invaluable piece of adult wisdom: Sometimes you have to lie.

What I had remembered of the book most clearly was Harriet's "spy route" as she walked through her neighborhood making observations and writing them down, and the other kids' finding her notebook and being angry. I had forgotten how thoroughly cruel they become, stealing her lunches and pouring ink over her. The fix at the end with the apology isn't convincing, except as a metaphor for the social contract. If Harriet acts in a certain way, she will be "accepted." 

To recap this androgynous girl, with her short hair, jeans and jacket, writing constantly, always at the outskirts of her peers whom she despises, learns that lying is the way to fit in. FASCINATING.

 Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.

Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent in x number of soap wrappers they would send you a book as a reward. Fascinating stuff, but early on Barchas describes her study as "bibliographical slumming" because she's studying popular works (never mind that Jane Austen is part of the canon; if this was a study of popular Shakespeare editions this same method of analysis would no longer be slumming and we all no way). A colleague scolded me for repeating the phrase, however, because "slumming" is such an ethnically and class-coded term, which is fair.

But I also contemplate the problematic ways that I as a human am read because of who I am now, which is as a tenured professor at a top university. It's assumed (and not just by this one person; it's happened with other people in other incidents too) that I don't know anything about working class life and so on, despite the fact that, you know, I grew up backwoods and blue-collar and so on. Frankly I know WAY the fuck more than a number of colleagues about problems of class and abuse in the US because I have fucking lived through it. And I have gotten to a point where I need to figure out how to much more openly address these issues in a useful way.

This weekend I picked up several books from the library. I got two volumes of Milosz's prose after talking to Todd last week; apparently the reaction of both of us in the wake of political goings-on was a desire to read/reread the work of a poet about how to intellectually survive in a totalitarian regime. I had also requested the new biography Becoming Beauvoir a while back and it finally came. It is very good and imminently readable, and it was very surprising to me to hear that most of the WW2 experiences of Beauvoir and Sartre are recounted as explicating varied love affairs (which honestly needs a chart to track) than anything else. So I suppose that survival is also about reading and fucking and loving, which I guess is helpful in its own peculiar way too. 

 Prompted by recently reading somewhere negative commentary on the Wonder Woman film because her power was love and compassion. Also ass-kicking, but also love. And right now I'm rereading Tamora Pierce's Alanna books and reading for the first time her Protector of the Small books, all of which involve girls wanting to be knights and performing heroics. But all of their heroics are centered around martial arts and what we would consider traditional bravery in terms of standing up to bullies, fighting literal monsters, and so on.

And what struck me is how we kind of have this narrative of heroism = violence, and therefore women heroes have to either 1) be born warriors (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wonder Woman), 2) be traumatized and become warriors (Jessica Jones, River Tam), or 3) choose to be warriors For Reasons (Agent Carter, Gabrielle from Xena), etc.

But like, there isn't much of a narrative for non-fightey heroics?

And then on the flip-side, slightly, you get stuff like Pacific Rim that does switch it up, with Raleigh being the emotional nurturing one, and Mako being the Traumatized and Opting for Warrior one.

And so I guess my main thought is to wonder: What does a non-fightey woman hero look like? Is she possible? 

My essay was just posted at PopMatters as part of their Star Trek issue:

In 1975, Bantam Books published Star Trek Lives!, a collection of nonfiction fan writing that included a primer on fan fiction. It was followed in 1976 by Star Trek: The New Voyages, the first of two volumes that collected fan fiction pieces in whole rather than just excerpts. Shortly afterwards, Pocket Books licensed media tie-in novels for the series, which in the early days included work by numerous fan authors who turned pro (like A.C. Crispin) or up-and-coming pro writers (like Joe Haldeman). None of these works were considered canon per se, but they explored the possibilities of life in and outside of the Federation. After the conclusion of the last television series, Enterprise, in 2005, and a change in editorial apparatus, the novels created a more coherent and canonical “world-picture” of the stories of various characters.

Unfortunately, this has led to something of a tamping-down in certain lines, such as the brief Reboot-era Starfleet Academy series that included only four volumes published between 2010 and 2012. The reason put forth for the suspension of this particular line was that certain plot elements in the books hinted too much towards the story of what would become Star Trek Into Darkness, which in retrospect was either wishful thinking or a red herring altogether.

The lead-up to the 2009 Star Trek film (alternatively referred to as XI, NuTrek, AOS for Abrams’ Original Series, or simply as the Reboot) included a four-issue comic entitledCountdown that took place entirely in the “present” of the Prime Universe. Here, Ambassador Spock is still working to reconcile Vulcan with Romulus (as seen in the two-part episode “Unification” in Star Trek: The Next Generation all the way back in 1991) and prevent its star from going nova with red matter; appearances are made by Data, who is now Captain of the Enterprise-E; Picard, now the Federation Ambassador to Vulcan; Geordi LaForge, who designs and builds Spock’s ship, the Jellyfish, that is seen in the film.

Nero is introduced as a Romulan who wants to assist Spock’s efforts to save his planet, but the loss of his homeworld, wife, and unborn child drive him to madness, and to attacking the Federation vessels that arrive to assist refugees. General Worf of the Klingon Empire arrives to render assistance, and in the events that ensue, both Nero and Ambassador Spock inadvertently time-travel—and from there, the new reality is born from the ashes of the Kelvin Disaster, in which George Kirk sacrifices himself to save his family and crew from Nero.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Reboot fandom is how it’s not a “true” reboot—the Prime Universe still exists. All of the events of TOS, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine,Voyager, Enterprise, and all of the films—they still happened. The Kelvin Timeline is distinct, with connections and callbacks to the other universe, and as such, presumably all of the characters we have seen will be seen again in other iterations. As a simple example, most recently in Star Trek Beyond there was a very brief scene with Sulu’s partner and daughter; Demora Sulu was introduced in the 1994 film Star Trek: Generations.

It’s seemingly small “seeds” like this that provide not just fan service to viewers, but more food for thought for the serious fans (and fan writers). The ongoing Star Trek comics, recently retitled as Star Trek: The 5-Year Mission, published by IDW flirt with canon in both universes, introducing alternative takes on classic episodes that are accordingly different from the original. For instance, in the retelling of “Operation—Annihilate!” Kirk’s brother Sam and his family are rescued from Deneva, with a familial reconciliation being reached. In the original episode, a reconciliation between the brothers is not needed, but the colonists all perish except for Sam’s son. Other stories in the series push forwards arcs like the Vulcans’ recovery from the destruction of their homeworld, while special issues take on favorite fan tropes, like a story told in the Mirror!universe, or a peek into yet another universe where the characters are gender-swapped.

The most recent—and concluding—arc of the series this summer was entitled “Connection” and drew together both the TOS and Reboot crews in a lovely rumination. Rather than being a straightforward crossover, the characters only meet mentally, with an interesting use of visual art to render the effect as puzzle-pieces that fit into a whole rather than only a divergence. A final connection brings us full circle, as the Enterprise’s databases now contain information from both universes.

It is this element of connection—pulling together information and stories across generations, that ultimately speaks to how fan writers and readers work: putting pieces together to create new wholes. We see this most clearly in fanon, or fannish canon, which pulls from all of the stories told officially, and unofficially. Fanon runs the gamut from character names or alien biology to the interpretation of events in characters’ lives. Indeed, Uhura’s first name, Nyota, which was first used on screen in the 2009 film, originated from William Rotsler’s 1982 tie-in book Star Trek II Biographies; it was also used in a number of other works, licensed and fannish. Similarly, Sulu’s first name, Hikaru, was first used by Vonda N. McIntyre for her 1981 tie-in novel The Entropy Effect; it was not adopted on screen until the film Star Trek VI.

For another example, in the TOS episode “The Conscience of the King” we find that Kirk is the survivor of a eugenics-related genocide. The colony governor, Kodos, who perpetrated the murder of over four thousand civilians escaped justice and has always been a ghost of Kirk’s past that he must reckon with when it seems that Kodos has resurfaced. The “Tarsus IV Disaster” is meant to recall elements of the Holocaust; it also implies strong psychological links between Kirk’s belief in no-win scenarios and this formative childhood experience. Interestingly, while only a few (comparatively) fan stories examined the event in the period of zines, in the time of digital circulation it’s a well-known trope, with tags and even a community dedicated to sharing stories that expand on this element of fictional history.

What we might take from these volumes and volumes of licensed (there are quite literally hundreds of novels and comics) and fannish works (hundreds of thousands of fanfics online and in print) is fandom’s deep interest in exploring the possibilities of the worlds ofStar Trek in all its iterations. Just as there’s no beginning or ending to works of the imagination, the possibilities of story cannot be exhausted. Whether it’s fannish writing on page or screen, or officially licensed material, there’s always room for expansion and possibility.

Fifty years on we can still see this the most clearly through a vision of diversity: not until this year and the new Sulu has Star Trek had an onscreen gay character (though there have been gay characters in the novels, and they are abundant in fan fiction). There’s been a recent pushback on the “faux progressivism” of slash writing in fandom (which boils down to queer romances, most famously in K/S or Kirk/Spock stories), but I would nonetheless argue that decades of slash writing effectively normalized the ideas of gay relationships for a number of readers whom I have met—and many of whom also recognized and learned to celebrate their own queerness because of it. Roddenberry’s famous Vulcan principle of IDIC, or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, remains something to aspire to, both onscreen and in the real world. As in fandom, it’s a place we can get to by joining together in celebration of one.

So a few weeks ago I was in the audience as a panel of writers spoke, and one of them made a grumbly comment about reviewers and critics which has been in my mind ever since, so I thought I'd write a bit about it.

I've been a book and film reviewer for the best part of a decade; almost all of my reviews stay here on my lj, but a lot of them get published elsewhere too. I'll be blunt and say this up front: book reviews are hard work. It takes time to really read a book, time that seems even longer when you come to the conclusion that it's not a good book and that you would ordinarily put down, but you have to keep going because you agreed to do the review. The other sticky whicket is that most places don't even pay for book reviews: your "payment" is the free copy of the book you got from the publisher, so you've put several hours into reading the book and then a couple more into writing about it.

Writing about books isn't easy, either; depending on the audience of the publication, it can be difficult and frustrating. When reviewing for academic publications, you have to check that the writer did the research on their material (which sounds like it should be assumed, but nope--nope nope nope. Some editors are lazy and inattentive, or just plain don't care. Ditto writers for that matter.); you have to think about how useful the book would be for students, for teachers, for librarians. Strangely, fiction reviews are even harder because you have to OWN the fact that you like or dislike it, and then sort out why that is and what others would think about it.

As an example, I read The Very Best of Kate Elliot recently for The SFRA Review, and that was a case where I didn't like the book and I had to push through to finish it. I thought that a lot of the stories were just simply boring--nothing much happened in them. Worse, I have Editor's Brain, so I kept thinking "if you moved this scene up," "if you deleted this bit," "WHY?" etc. The thing is, that's exactly the sort of commentary you don't want in a professional review: the story is done, not workshopped. But nonetheless, how to communicate its weaknesses while keeping in mind that what does it for me does not necessarily do it for others? What I ended up doing was discussing the strongest of the pieces at length and then talking about trends in fantasy reading and publishing right now. I also gave a shorter review than I usually do, simply because I didn't think the material merited much filler.

In contrast, I just sent in a review of Eva Darrows' The Awesome to The Future Fire last night. That was a book I had a lot of FEELS about because it was YA lit with an awesome heroine and a negligible romance plot. (I am old and cranky; the current surfeit of stories where young women meet their ~one true love~ in freaking high school just appalls my sensibilities.) I flailed at length about it, and will share the review here when it's out, but that brings me to another reason why I love to review books, which is:

If a book is AWESOME I have a platform to valorize it. Maybe it's the librarian in me, or only the geek, but when I love something, I want **everyone** to know of its awesome. I love signalboosting new authors, or authors who don't get enough press, because I want them to get more recognition. One of the things I really love about The Future Fire is how they specifically try to signalboost minority writers and independent presses, which is exactly the sort of people and material who need more attention paid to them.

In short: I review things because I want to champion writers and the conversations about genre. I don't believe in reviewing to be a dick (although that is certainly the case with some reviewers, but oy), I believe in reviewing to help readers AND writers.

To start with, there's an upset in Agent Carter fandom on the absence of POCs in 1940s NYC. Tamora Pierce stepped into it by stating that "If you mean the cast is primarily white, it’s the 40s. Which is more offensive to you: black help and blacks in service, or no blacks? I would like to see more POC, yes, but that was the time, and I’m not sure I’d like to see more POC if they’re always going to be in service" and it was one of those moments of OH GODSDAMMIT YOU TOO?! (Seriously, my love for Alanna is now muchly sullied. Anyway) So I wanted to blather on a bit.

So, first of all, the erasure of women and POC from everything is very much a narrative of our culture--in history, in writing, in art, everything. (I've promised myself that one day I'm going to write an essay called "My Invisible Labors" on every time my participation in something high-profile had been erased by TPTB.)

First off, this happens because of a straight-up devaluation of contributions, or what I sometimes like to refer to as "the magical elf narrative." This is when things happen magically, without people "doing" anything, because the people themselves are invisible. Think of it as like hotel service, right, you check into a room, it's perfectly clean and neat, you leave the place a mess, and come back later, and--everything is magically clean and net again, the bed all made up, the towels replaced, etc. You sometimes catch glimpses of hotel staff, but most of the time you don't think about it, because we don't value their labor. I tie this directly to Pierce's statement, because she is devaluing a specific kind of labor--but THE SAME THING HAPPENS ACROSS THE BOARD.

Think of the books that are "magically" ordered and shelved in libraries, of the author-less blocks of text in various circulars and so forth. (I remember once being scolded by a faculty member for not buying a book for her. I apologized and started looking in my records, then asked when she'd put in the request. "What do you mean?" she asked. "You wanted me to buy a book for you but I can't find the record of when you asked for it--usually I keep those on file for when I buy stuff." "Oh, I never told you about it, I just assumed you knew." "..." Yep, actual story, and a useful reminder that I don't actually have psychic powers.) There are an awful lot of things that are done anonymously--or rather, without acknowledgement, because the work is not valued.

Now, when it comes to the idea of POCs as only "the help"--well, 1) that is a very specific, privileged point of view and 2) easily disproven. Like, voila. That we don't see other roles for POC in film speaks more to the received knowledge of filmmakers--people "don't" want to see POC in lead roles, people "won't" find it believable--than to any kind of historicity, and this is problematic. I've written about this before, but once when I was in a fiction seminar and had given folks a chapter of my in-progress novel about a black girl in 17th century England, a ridiculous amount of time was spent--by white people--telling me that it wasn't realistic because "there weren't black people" back then...which led to me reciting population statistics in London and so forth because, well, me, and then finally the teacher just telling me that "even if it's realistic, it's not believable because it's too much," like there's this intellectual yard stick and it has some kind of quota system to it.

Which, you know, ALL KINDS OF BULLSHIT, BECAUSE FICTION.

[And it's funny, as I'm writing this I'm participating in a discussion on Facebook on the issues of class and poverty and elite universities, with someone decrying this as kids "feeling sorry for themselves" and others (including me) arguing that social and economic isolation have very real effects on the academic performance of students, and how there are programs developing to help with this. So, you know, a nugget of hope in the world, as it happens.]

The other thing going on is, well, how all of this is still going on. TPTB still try to limit opportunities for POC and women based on the received knowledge WHICH THEY HAVE BEEN TAUGHT. It's a full, ugly circle of power, and privilege, and really the only way to break it is through education, new texts, and (clearly) sheer stubbornness.

Plus the other thing is--aren't these erased stories just simply more interesting? I mean, think about how everyone freaking loves Downton Abbey--because the bulk of the emphasis of the story is on the less privileged. Hell, they even dabble a bit with diversity with the gay dude, even though they basically made him Neutral Evil. But--can't we hear the stories of ALL the gays, and ALL the POC, etc. etc.?

Anyways, I'll conclude this messy ramble: I didn't get accepted into a prestigious conference, and was feeling rather bummed about it, and I talked to my dissertation chair about it. Her response was basically "lol of course not--because you're writing about women, and that group has always been invested in ignoring them as much as possible. Be patient and get the last laugh!" My chair, btw, is pretty literally a rock star for writing THE book on women's writing in history, so, yeah, she would know, wouldn't she?

Now, it should go without saying, that the rest of us should have our last laughs at the expense of those writers who keep insisting we don't exist, or that we are "too much."

So I'm reading a volume of essays on Early Modern women's life writings, which can be identified as just about any nonfiction prose--including diaries, letters, autobiographies, religious writings, commonplace book material like recipes and household accounts--and personal poetry. For a long time much of this material has been totally overlooked because, you know, women's stuff, that's not historically valuable or interesting. And it's interesting to me that culturally we have this dichotomy of "darnit, womenfolks, stay in the house and let men handle the big thinkie thoughts" and "augh, women write about nothing but marriage and family and household stuff, like that's valuable, pfft." That they are there and not there at the same time.

I was taking a course at Rare Book School last week on the history of the Stationers' Company of London, and was delighted that there was a brief section where we discussed women stationers. For many years I was sternly told that, you know, women printers didn't actually print or anything, they were just, you know, there and stuff, at least of course until they remarried or died. Which, you know, that little story is being firmly taken down now, but the insistence on that narrative always struck me: the idea that women couldn't possibly run a business or be knowledgeable about a trade because reasons. Anyway, in class we talked about how women were sort of "written around" in the ordinances--the rules that men could only teach the trade to his sons and his apprentices--with the implication that wives and daughters probably knew the trade, they just wouldn't expect to one day set up their own shops. And then in the late seventeenth century you start getting women who *do* formally apprentice themselves in the trade (this means that their parents pay the trade master $$ for the seven year apprenticeship, and then they live in the master's house working for room, board, and some pocket money) and are then made free. And it's a very small group, but it *happens.*

Anyway, digression. But we look at women's work and devalue it as a matter of course--witness the fact that it's 20fucking14 and women still make, on average, $0.70 to a man's $1.00. If we don't value the work women do in offices or in homes, why would we value their writing?

I have a friend on FB who has several times mentioned starting a blog to talk about being a single mother and stuff, and we had a conversation once where she wondered about putting a donate button on it because she felt bad being seen as "asking" for money from women like her who were her intended audience of working moms, and I was like, "Dude, no, the rest of the world will insist your writing's not valuable as is, so why help them with that assumption?" Similarly, for a long time fans who had a donate button on their sites, or just bloggers, would be attacked for daring to think they should be paid--for work that often, you know, requires paid domain space, sometimes advertising, etc. etc. MedievalPOC has been through the ringer for that too recently, and never mind she has a *huge* site that has become a reputable historical and fan resource for locating books and material on POCs in history and SFF.

I'm fascinated (repulsed, but fascinated) by this cultural notion about being unable to recognize women's writing. I mean, I'll be honest, until I started reading this book, recipe books hadn't occurred to me, but of course they are: they show what's available, what people are doing, and often little histories like "this is my grandmother's" and whatnot--which, I did know they were often useful for geneaologists, but as documents of *writing* hadn't occurred to me.

And then, looking at other forms of contemporary writing: We have social media, of course. I've had this lj for a decade at this point (I remember when the first sort of blogging software/online diaries were a thing and people pooh-poohed them as a sort of exhibitionist writing, as if you could care about a stranger writing about their life, god!). There's an interesting transition to be seen in the trend of blogs that become books (or, like Julie and Julia, sometimes movies too). Can we see this as an analogue to the transition from manuscript culture to print culture, or no? Especially in terms of authority and value. (How does it change when you read a blog versus pay $20 for a book that reprints those blog entries? Is that different from collections of newspaper essays and such?)

I tend to read a lot of SFF blogs, but also cooking blogs, and I think there we start to see similar material to 17th c. stuff, in terms of people recording recipes but also talking honestly about things like depression, job-hunting, relationships, etc. (Seriously, I dare anyone to read Hyperbole and a Half's piece on Depression, and not find it visceral and brilliant.) I post a lot on FB, mostly just sharing SFF and news stories with my own (brief) commentary that I find to be of interest. Sometimes those posts become precursors to longer pieces of writing here; more often I just like having on and off conversations with people throughout the day because otherwise I get bogged down in the solitude of reading. I don't consider that material "published" in the same way that I do my lj stuff, though; I guess because it takes more effort and thought to put together an lj post than a FB post. Also the difference in venue/audience: people on lj are here because they like/want my writing, whereas some people are on FB because of my writing and work while others are relatives, social acquaintances, and so forth. (Scott once referred to my FB as my version of "LinkedIn" which I think is very true.)

Anyways, to conclude: If contemporary historians are revising what they consider to be historical writing, how/does this also apply to writing through social media? How do you even begin to preserve that material (and do you want to)?

So earlier this morning I sat down to read Sidney's "The Defence of Poesy" and was reading the introduction and there was a really interesting bit on Renaissance writing and imitation. English Renaissance literature--prose and poetry--grappled with imitation as they came out of the Continental European Renaissance and its preoccupations with classical culture; you can see this particularly in the concurrent shift in reading practices (intensive to extensive) where you go from reading the Bible and Aristotle to reading the Bible, Aristotle, Cicero, Herodotus, contemporary pamphlets, etc. etc. etc. You have a shift not just in texts but in how to *read* the texts: from memorization to being able to crossreference or gloss.

There's three forms of imitation: Greek mimesis, which is imitation of representation (drawing an apple, say); Latin imitatio, which is literary and stylistic imitation from a model (an argument using Cicero's rhetoric); and emulation, what is believed to be readerly imitation (reading Sidney and then writing an essay).

So we have this entire humanist vocabulary for dealing with adaptive texts. This is why you also have the rhetorical devices of "I heard this story" or "I found this source" for wholly fictional works, because that was what was respectable for a lengthy period of time. It wasn't until we got to the Romantics with their emphasis on valorizing self-expression--and of course, the accompanying image of the heroic (dare I say Byronic? I dare! I dare!) and struggling author--that we truly shift to the modern preoccupations with "originality." It is also worth noting that this is concurrent with the development of copyright culture; where print culture is truly modern in that only printed books are "published" and the circulation of written material is directly tied in with ideas of professional authorship and ownership and livelihoods.

And so OF COURSE I had to tie all this in with our contemporary attitudes to adaptation and, of course, fan works. I recently picked up Diana Gabaldon's newest book; she had a rather famous spat with fandom a few years ago (I'm linking to the Fanlore wiki because a lot of the original stuff has been scrubbed from the internet); the gist of which is that she felt that fanfic was like raping children (yep, actual words) and then she backed off only slightly when people called her on her crazy. Anyways, in her newest book, there's a cameo with Natty Bumppo, you know the hero of the Leatherstocking Saga, or, if you prefer, young Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans (y'know, either/or). And what I find continually interesting is how the use/re-use of famous characters becomes imminently respectable if done in a "literary" fashion--eg. legit publication, the bigger the author and the publishing house, the more legit it is.

I mean, when we quote Henry Jenkins, we always talk about "textual poaching" in the context of fan writing, but what about the textual poaching in publication? I mean, sure, Fifty Shades of Grey and other Twifics began life as fic, but once they got bought up and published by various presses, they become (magically!) adaptive texts, in dialogue not only with Twilight but with the other texts. (Archontic literature at its finest?) Once it's been bought and paid for, it's no longer "fan" writing; it's legitimizing bastard texts, if you will. And people complain about all this, rightly or wrongly, but that doesn't change you have an entire body of work in conversation with each other and with a clear line of descent. In comparison or contrast, you can look at Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books, which originated in Harry Potter fic--and her HP fic that, itself, quoted extensively (and some places where it wasn't quoting so much as cutting and pasting...) a number of other media texts including Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I maintain a major weakness of the film version was there were no Whedon actors involved; imagine if Jace had been played by a CGI de-aged James Marsters, and how much more sense everything would have made then!!!)

In conclusion: the cultural capital we assign various works varies greatly depending both on time period and material, and--at least seemingly--happenstance.

So earlier I had a conversation in comments with afearfulthing that got me thinking; the context was of reading only fic, blogrolls, and recs. In short, the selective reading of only trusted sources etc. There's nothing unusual in that, per se, except the reflection/self-consciousness of choosing to read from a body of free, communal, and public work versus industrial/pop culture production. I think that self-conscious choice is the key part, here, because it implies not only active choice in selection but also active selection.

A project I'd love to pick up one day is the history of women's private reading. Reading is of course both fascinating and difficult because it is in many ways invisible: How do you know who read what? And what she thought of it? There's a rabbit-hole of locating information from marginalia, from bookplates, from notes and diaries, from eyewitness discussions of women in line at bookstores, etc. etc. There's the story about Anne Boleyn's Bible: how she made marks in it with her fingernail: this visceral, bodily connection with a text that is still almost literally invisible.

A lot has been done on women's reactionary writing--especially in fandom, where fanworks are operators of critique and in some ways recovery: bids to "rescue" characters we love. But I'm not sure much has been done on reactionary reading--I'm writing this freeform without having done any research.

I'll use my own experience to talk about this a bit: I often find a lot more reading material of interest to me in fandom than in traditional publishing. Part of this is an access issue: what I want is a really good story with x, y, z. In a brick and mortar store or a library, you can ask clerks for recs, or see what they are promoting at the moment; but these depend on that individual person, and--sometimes--the necessity of building a relationship with them. In an online bookstore, you can run a search and sort by popularity, but this is limited by the interface's algorithms and the site's own audience. You go to a fansite, or AO3, search by tags and recs, and boom--you're done. Because you're automatically in a community of the likeminded. Going back further, you end up with similar situations in print zines, because the zines were community-based--if you were in that community, you would probably already like its content.

I imagine the closest analog to this community appeal in traditional publishing is how some companies--and I'm think specifically of Marvel and Harlequin here--build their lines for specific demographic audiences. Both companies literally have dozens of titles and each of them is for a specific audience: older readers, younger readers, African-American readers, queer readers, etc. I'm curious if anyone can think of other companies that do this?

I'm also thinking of the ongoing schisms in fandom right now, particularly on the topics of race. Check out N.K. Jemisen's GOH Wiscon Speech for more, but here's a key bit:

Maybe you think I’m using hyperbole here, when I describe the bigotry of the SFF genres as “violence”. Maybe I am using hyperbole — but I don’t know what else to call it. SFF are dedicated to the exploration of the future and myth and history. Dreams, if you want to frame it that way. Yet the enforced SWM dominance of these genres means that the dreams of whole groups of people have been obliterated from the Zeitgeist. And it’s not as if those dreams don’t exist. They’re out there, in spades; everyone who dreams is capable of participating in these genres. But many have been forcibly barred from entry, tormented and reeducated until they serve the status quo. Their interests have been confined within creative ghettos, allowed out only in proscribed circumstances and limited numbers. When they do appear, they are expected to show their pass and wear their badge: “Look, this is an anthology of NATIVE AMERICAN ANCIENT WISDOM from back when they existed! Put a kachina on the cover or it can’t be published. No, no, don’t put an actual Navajo on the cover, what, are you crazy? We want the book to sell. That person looks too white, anyway, are you sure they aren’t lying about being an Indian? What the hell is a Diné? What do you mean you’re Inuit?”

But the violence that has been done is more than metaphysical or thematic. Careers have been strangled at birth. Identities have been raped — and I use that word intentionally, not metaphorically. What else to call it when a fan’s real name is stripped of its pseudonym, her life probed for data and details until she gets phone calls at her home and workplace threatening her career, her body, and her family? (I don’t even need to name a specific example of this; it’s happened too often, to too many people.) Whole subgenres like magic realism and YA have been racially and sexually profiled, with discrimination based on that profiling so normalized as to be nearly invisible. How many of you have heard that epic fantasy or video games set in medieval Europe need not include people of color because there weren’t any? I love the Medieval PoC blog for introducing simple visual evidence of how people like me were systematically and literally excised from history. The result is a fantasy readership that will defend to the death the idea that dragons belong and Those People don’t.

An ugly truth in publishing is systematic erasure of choice--just check out what's going on with Amazon right now.

[Direct linking because the embedding code just isn't working: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/t1nxwu/amazon-vs--hachette---sherman-alexie]

The commentary on first-time writers and publications is as fascinating as it saddening and disgusting.

As such, we as readers (and writers) are left to make our own alternatives where possible--and then we see this co-opted as well in terms of the major publishers that give mega-contracts to fanfic authors with proven track records (most recently, literally two days ago, a 1D fan bags a mid-six figure deal for her fan novel), and Amazon's own Kindle Worlds.

This cycle of production and consumption is fascinating--I have a whole 'nother piece I want to do on historical disruptions in terms of women's writing and reception--but what we see here is how publishers are taking advantage of alternative communities and trying to use them for more profit.

So I've had my mind on writing this post for a few weeks but I just haven't quite crystallized all my thoughts, but then I decided better to get it out and screw it up than never get it down at all.

Okay. So. This post is brought to you by a few different moments in the past weeks.

1) A conversation I had on Facebook about YA literature in which a male acquaintance (with all best intentions; I mean, he loves Tamora Pierce so he's not all bad, he's just...misplaced) said multiple problematic things, of which the one I found most irritating was a statement that he doesn't like the trend in YA novels of having romance plots/focus, because he didn't find that empowering for women at all. (Subquestion: How does a man even get to talk about women's empowerment? I mean, really? Skipping Joss Whedon who, while problematic, still gets 90% more than everyone else with a penis.)

2) In a Romance Studies panel at PCA, a speaker mentioned teaching a class where she asked her students to name their favorite books/writers, and all the women gave answers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway and other white male western canon writers, whereas the men were all over the place, and when they talked about it in class, esp when they broke out into gendered groups, that a lot of the young women were giving performative answers because of fear and shame. (Subnote, the area co-chair of Romance Studies at PCA is Eric Seeger, a dude, who is one of the few/only male academics I have seen who does everything RIGHT when interacting with women scholars and letting them talk and then responding, and basically I want to sponsor a session where he can teach other men to do that, because damn.)

3) My interests in fandoms, book history, women's writing, etc. just really highlight the gender divides of how we deal with women writers and publishing etc. I posted on FB about the recent SFWA fracas and an article talking about how much more professional the Romance Writers Association is in championing their writers and publications, and another guy I know wanted to have the lolz. And it's like, um, hey that romance genre that is so derided? Yeah, it is responsible for 55% of American/British publishing. That means that more romances are published and sold every year than textbooks, religious texts, other fiction, and nonfiction com-fucking-bined.

And so there's a lot of things going on, and so I want to kind of break them down a bit.

What women write/publish, esp. with regards to genre.

There's a great quote that I can't remember, but it's about how if a man writes a book about war, it's touted as being a universal tale of experience, but if a woman writes about family, it's drivel. And I think that is probably one of the best and most cogent appraisals ever.

Henry King has that seventeenth century dedication "To a Lady" where he talks about how women aren't allowed to write anything but romance (and so we know how far back that goes, at least) (and for context the poem is part of a gift of a blank book with the rest of the poem being about how he hopes the recipient will fill it whatever characters and fancies she likes), and I think there's way scary truth to that. I mean, look at those few women we have allowed to enter the western canon:

*Jane Austen
*Charlotte Bronte
*Emily Bronte
[poor Anne Bronte always gets left out, doesn't she]
*Mary Shelley
*Virginia Woolf

So that's three writers of what we would call romances, an SF writer, and a writer whose best-known work, A Room of One's Own, eliminated the women writers of the past. Damn, guys, agenda much?

Why women write/publish genre.

Er, see above? Self-fulfilling prophecy, in many ways.

(See also, What If All Book Covers Were Given a Chick-Lit Makeover. See also, Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, come to that.)

There's also this whole thing of, okay, women aren't going to be "allowed" into conventional/respectable literature, so they end up in the genre ghettos, and then the corollary of the recent John Green saved YA backlash. (*Note: I have not read any John Green, nor do I want to. From what I've seen in articles and Twitter he seems to be a white dude trying to be an ally, BUT, he is also a white dude getting exorbitant praise from the establishment at the expense of women and POC writers.) Which, can we even really talk enough about just the IDEA of a man "saving literature"? Oy.

And then the flip to that is of course Nicholas Sparks as the "only" writer of "love-tragedies." Erm.

The very vocabulary of our publishing and genre discourse.

Where the word "hack" used to mean prostitute and so "hack writing" is cheap and unartistic writing.

Where "streetwalker" used to be the term for the women who were out in the streets selling the pamphlets that they often also wrote and published and now that's a term for prostitution.

Where "gossip" used to be the term for a community of women, often professionally, as of midwives, and is now a term for scurrilous information.

Bonuses:

"Book clubs" as a feminine activity, with the addition of "book club guides" in published volumes often being in fiction, very occasionally nonfiction, and *always* being tied in to books by or about women. Like, seriously, ever notice how heavy political books never have book club guides? Not even the scary far-right ones? I'm just saying.

Book and literary histories that try their best to deny the agency of women in all levels of book publication and production. The "stigma of print." The history of removing women from public discourse/vilifying them if they ARE in public discourse.

What it means.

The social expectation of denouncing popular writing by women, whether romances, SF/F, whatever, while often at the SAME TIME those same books sell immensely and get book deals. I can literally name on one hand the times I have heard someone SAY they actually liked: Twilight, Divergent, FSoG, etc. JK Rowling and Harry Potter and Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games are the ONLY ones that have gotten free passes, I assume because male protagonist one the one hand and dystopia on the other. That's "cool."

The flip side being if you DON'T denounce them or don't denounce them quickly enough, you'll get ragged on for low tastes, etc. etc.

Basically we're reinforcing the cultural capital of elite white male writers at the expense of all else. Good job, team.

~

Where do we go from here?

Well, Tumblr. >_>

Seriously though, if you look at the creation of "safe places" for women to talk about writing or to write, it is online space, frequently LOCKED space (back to that public/private discourse again). There are probably arguments to be made about zine culture too, but I know zine culture best through the lens of SFF fandom, and, well, hey, what do naked collating parties in the 70s say about the culture of women's writing then?

(And of course, zine culture will be trashed at the expense of artist books and arguments about vanity publishing, etc. etc., but that's a WHOLE OTHER ARGUMENT about means and ways of production.)

Anyway, to conclude: There are very specific histories and stigmas associated with women's writing and reading, even before we get into specific genre stuff whether romance or SFF. The farther you go back, the more you can see about acknowledgements of what's going on as well as the attempts to subvert it and create new spaces, which are then often taken over themselves to that they can "be saved." Think of the "Fake Geek Girl" phenomenon despite the open history of women saving Star Trek or even that a woman INVENTED SFF (whether or not you want to specify whether that woman was Mary Shelley or Margaret Cavendish). So.

I think I may have just made a book outline. Shit.