Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

A Better Way to Think of the Genre Debate

It’s hard to talk in a clear-headed way about genre. Almost everyone can agree that, over the past few years, the rise of the young-adult genre has highlighted a big change in book culture. For reasons that aren’t fully explicable (Netflix? Tumblr? Kindles? Postmodernism?), it’s no longer taken for granted that important novels must be, in some sense, above, beyond, or “meta” about their genre. A process of genrefication is occurring. ...

The modernists saw, correctly, that novel-writing, once an art, had become an enterprise. More fundamentally, it had internalized a mass view of life—a view in which what matters are social facts rather than individual experiences. It had become affiliated with manufactured culture, with the crowd, and with the sentimentality and repetitive stylization that crowds, in their quest for a common identity, often crave. In reaction, they created a different kind of literature: one centered on inwardness, privacy, and incommunicability. The new books were about individuals, and they needed to be interpreted individually. Instead of being public resources, novels would be private sanctuaries. Instead of being social, they would be spiritual.

Something of that spiritual aura still hovers around our sense of what it means to read and write “literary fiction.” And there are some ways in which the modernist critique of mass literature is just as trenchant today as it was back then. (The modernists never got to see “fandom”; if they had, I doubt they’d be pleased.)

I feel as though I should be grudgingly pleased that the freaking New Yorker acknowledges the existence of fandom--and yet, it's also this offhand dismissal of an entire MEDIUM (I'd argue that fandom is a medium, not a genre itself) of work that is produced by women and esp. queer women is so. freaking. telling.

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.

Ever since Theresa Weaver got pink-slipped from the AJC, people have been fussing over the demise of the book review in newspapers and of newspapers in general.

Look folks, mainstream media hasn't done anything worthwhile since Deep Throat got exposed and you all know it deep down. When Bill Moyers coos to Jon Stewart over his eviceration of John McCain, and Jon keeps pointing out how he's just a comedian and Bill keeps saying "no you're the NEW FACE OF JOURNALISM!" (not an exact quote, but my god that fawning was embarassing) you know it's time to wake the hell up. When all three major newspapers--NYT, Wash. Post, and USA Today--all have the exact same photo with the exact same story on the exact same day (I'm referring here to the Don Imus/girls' basketball team conference), you know things are wiggy. When the big news is covered by online journals and the stories are repeated months later in mainstream media (the Walter Reed issues, busted by Salon in July 2006, busted by Washington Post early 2007), you know something's up.

Dear Newspaper Editors,
When you stop cowing to the corporations and the moneybots, I will buy you. When you say something honest and new, I will buy you. Until then I will mourn the waste of trees as you lay littered and abandoned on the metro.

~~

About the book reviews. Here's the thing: a lot of book reviews suck. They particularly suck in the newspapers, where, whether given one page or five, they will all cover the exact same books and they will cover them badly. This is not just the fault of editors or newspapers, but our culture. We have this idea that reading is like medicine, and if it's a book it should be taken seriously and downed like medicine. This is why Ann fucking Coulter is treated with the same seriousness that Bob fucking Woodward is. This is also why genre books are seldom if ever reviewed--because if it's interesting or entertaining, it's not good for us.

Our culture is not critical. We are not taught to distinguish facts but to take things at face value. Quite frankly, you're better off watching tv if what you are watching has more merit than the book you are reading, e.g. watching Deadwood rather than reading Blowhard-of-the-Day. I know that will come as a shock to people, me being a librarian and all, but it's how I feel. Books are not medicine. They will not magically make you a better person than someone who plays video games or any other entertainment fix.