Friday Links Prefers To Be Called ‘Sir’
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
I loved this article at the Mary Sue about women in history who have held the titles traditionally belonging to men. So many interesting women - some of whom I’d never heard of before! The uses of ‘king’ by women particularly interested me because that was something I was trying to do with Velody in the Creature Court books - when there has no one but men holding the title of ‘king’ for as long as people can remember, you keep using the damn word even if there’s a woman doing it now.
Also at the Mary Sue, I loved this depiction of women’s work in World War II, one of my favourite eras/topics of social history.
Amanda linked me to this great post about 20′s and 30′s fashion and how they actually worked (and why they so often don’t look right when worn by modern women) - including some gorgeous images of classic dresses as they might be worn.
Bookseller+Publisher have released the statistics of books reviewed in Australian publications, with gender breakdowns. Eye-opening, occasionally pleasing, and mostly depressing.
I also really appreciated receiving this link, about the choice of teaching texts in high schools, and how books by and about women are being left out. Remember this one when the “oh noes all these books for girls are excluding boy readers” discussion gets rolled out again.
Cat Sparks posted her tribute to Paul Haines, from his memorial service. It’s rather wonderful, and conveys his personality as well as that of his writing very well, I think.
Elizabeth L Huede, the tireless campaigner of the Australian Women Writers’ Reading Challenge has written an extraordinary post about the way romance is devalued in our society, and the importance of respecting books by women. She addresses a regular derailment technique, that we should be dealing with ‘important’ women’s issues instead, by looking at domestic abuse, and how the men in our society are still taught to disregard women’s feelings and not look at the world from their point of view. The prioritising of the male gaze in literature is part of this - seriously, just go read it! Stirring stuff.
Slightly adjacent to this topic is Jo Walton talking about learning to love romance fiction, after a childhood of rejecting it because of the way it was gender coded - ie boy stuff is more cool than all that silly pink. It’s a mindset that I think a lot of geek girls/women will find familiar, and Jo’s discussion of becoming more open-minded as she gets older is also very compelling.
Jane Espenson talks about the importance of having female TV writers, not because they bring an especially non-male writing style or talent to the table, but because WHY NOT?
Sean the Blogonaut, fan writer, blogger, podcaster and general book enthusiast, is running for NAFF to get to Continuum this year. Let’s make it happen!
I hadn’t really thought of it before, but this article about the Hunger Games made me think about what a positive thing for young women the current YA dystopia craze could be - apart from the fact that they’re all secretly/accidentally reading science fiction, of course!
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