Gender in Genre, Part 1: Girl Protagonists Hate Needlework, But They All Shave Their Legs
mrissa made a very cogent post earlier; in summary, having your female character Strongly Dislike Needlework is an overused and lazy way to make a female genre character interesting. It looks like I have a few posts brewing that have been inspired by that, because apparently I have things to say on the topic. Here's the first:
One of the main things going on in the Girls Who Do Not Like Needlework trope is really straightforward - it says that girls who like Girl Things are boring; girls must like boy things to be interesting. Aside from the fact that this is wildly problematic, and deserving of its own essay, it also tends to be approached in a pretty uncritical way. These tomboy characters generally dislike some set of girl things (needlework, dressing up, chasing boys, et cetera) that corresponds to gender activities that girls are not currently expected to perform. It is not revolutionary to not like needlepoint. It's not even really revolutionary to not like dressing up and chasing boys.
So where are all the girls who hate shaving their legs? Where are the girls who aren't particularly social or diplomatic? The girls who would rather fix the plow or work at the blacksmith than help run the house? There are still a lot of ways in which girls are still expected to be feminine, and we are largely not examining them in genre. In fact, I think we're not challenging these areas because these are our current set of unexamined truisms about femininity. Girls who don't shave their legs are gross and hairy, obviously. Girls are universally better with people, because evolutionary psychology. Girls don't go into trades, because they'd have to get their hands dirty. Examples of girls breaking these rules exist, but they aren't plentiful, because we're really not quite ready as a society to challenge these rules. I hope that in a decade or so, they'll be tropes, but we aren't ready to let go yet.
The examples that exist are great, and I want to give them credit. Mercy Thompson of Patricia Briggs' series is a mechanic and she is elbow-deep in an engine whenever she isn't out getting into trouble. Also, she does dress up when there's a special occasion, which I appreciate. Katniss from the Hunger Games is not exactly a tomboy, because expectations of gender and appearances are pretty different in her home culture from ours, but she is what I would call very function-oriented. She likes having hair on her legs because it's warm and soft, and also because it means the Capitol is not currently messing with her body.
I do think that Katniss is an interesting example to look at though, because she goes through periodic processes of what I would call forced feminization. And yet she doesn't hate it, except as something that's required by the Capitol, and in fact, there tend to be some tender moments mixed in with the process because it's so closely associated with Cinna. On the other hand, she is never required to be feminized when it would impede her athletic functionality; she doesn't have to go into the arena in heels, and no one ever tells her to remember to smile while she's shooting at people or not to sweat while she's on camera. (I'm going to talk more about the cost benefit analysis of femininity in another post; stay tuned.)
I think it's interesting that both of these examples exist in the more 'chick lit' ghettos of genre- YA and urban fantasy. Maybe I just need to read more explicitly feminist hard SF; I don't know. Maybe there's tons of LeGuin and Butler that does these things. But I see an awful lot of the genre that, when it bothers to address gendered behaviors at all, does it in a pretty uncritical way. If you're going to have female protagonists near-universally eschew the trappings of femininity, at least have them do it in an interesting way, all right?
One of the main things going on in the Girls Who Do Not Like Needlework trope is really straightforward - it says that girls who like Girl Things are boring; girls must like boy things to be interesting. Aside from the fact that this is wildly problematic, and deserving of its own essay, it also tends to be approached in a pretty uncritical way. These tomboy characters generally dislike some set of girl things (needlework, dressing up, chasing boys, et cetera) that corresponds to gender activities that girls are not currently expected to perform. It is not revolutionary to not like needlepoint. It's not even really revolutionary to not like dressing up and chasing boys.
So where are all the girls who hate shaving their legs? Where are the girls who aren't particularly social or diplomatic? The girls who would rather fix the plow or work at the blacksmith than help run the house? There are still a lot of ways in which girls are still expected to be feminine, and we are largely not examining them in genre. In fact, I think we're not challenging these areas because these are our current set of unexamined truisms about femininity. Girls who don't shave their legs are gross and hairy, obviously. Girls are universally better with people, because evolutionary psychology. Girls don't go into trades, because they'd have to get their hands dirty. Examples of girls breaking these rules exist, but they aren't plentiful, because we're really not quite ready as a society to challenge these rules. I hope that in a decade or so, they'll be tropes, but we aren't ready to let go yet.
The examples that exist are great, and I want to give them credit. Mercy Thompson of Patricia Briggs' series is a mechanic and she is elbow-deep in an engine whenever she isn't out getting into trouble. Also, she does dress up when there's a special occasion, which I appreciate. Katniss from the Hunger Games is not exactly a tomboy, because expectations of gender and appearances are pretty different in her home culture from ours, but she is what I would call very function-oriented. She likes having hair on her legs because it's warm and soft, and also because it means the Capitol is not currently messing with her body.
I do think that Katniss is an interesting example to look at though, because she goes through periodic processes of what I would call forced feminization. And yet she doesn't hate it, except as something that's required by the Capitol, and in fact, there tend to be some tender moments mixed in with the process because it's so closely associated with Cinna. On the other hand, she is never required to be feminized when it would impede her athletic functionality; she doesn't have to go into the arena in heels, and no one ever tells her to remember to smile while she's shooting at people or not to sweat while she's on camera. (I'm going to talk more about the cost benefit analysis of femininity in another post; stay tuned.)
I think it's interesting that both of these examples exist in the more 'chick lit' ghettos of genre- YA and urban fantasy. Maybe I just need to read more explicitly feminist hard SF; I don't know. Maybe there's tons of LeGuin and Butler that does these things. But I see an awful lot of the genre that, when it bothers to address gendered behaviors at all, does it in a pretty uncritical way. If you're going to have female protagonists near-universally eschew the trappings of femininity, at least have them do it in an interesting way, all right?