We should pick another series
I am becoming increasingly dismayed by the amount of cultural space taken up by A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, especially in what I'll call, for lack of a better term, nerd feminist discourse. This isn't just another "I'm tired of popular thing I don't like" complaint. Wherever I go to read women's thoughts about the fantasy genre or fandom or female characters in popular fiction or feminism from a nerdy, bookwormish perspective, a big part of the conversation is dominated by ASOIAF. So many women spend so much energy dissecting this series, analyzing its gender dynamics, defending its female characters . . . and yet the author is a man, and a man who makes creepy, fetishizing comments about abused adolescent girl characters and who has never even pretended to be even slightly feminist-friendly at that. The longer it goes on and the farther it spreads, the more desperately I want to know Who the hell put George RR Martin, of all people, in charge of setting the terms of conversation about women in fantasy fiction, and why are so many intelligent women who have some awareness of feminist issues so ready to accept that state of affairs?
Yes, I know the standard answer is "That's a lot of female characters!" But I'm not satisfied with that. First of all, ASOIAF is a long series that has a lot of characters, period. Soap operas have a lot of female characters too, and at least their sensationalized rape storylines aren't handled in a way that has "MALE GAZE" stamped all over them. Secondly, those characters in the books are a little too obviously written by a man for an audience of men. I understand that the HBO series is supposed to be somewhat better in terms of letting the more negatively portrayed women have some human qualities, but it's also worse about gratuitously inserting explicit sex with gross power imbalances, so yeah. Finally and most importantly, there are plenty of real life women who have written stories about multiple female characters, and very few of those have gotten the level of attention and wide-ranging discussion that ASOIAF and some other male-authored texts I can think of have recently received even from women who are all about the feminist analysis.
The only women authors I can think of right off the top of my head who take up a comparable amount of cultural space are Jane Austen (who didn't write fantasy) and J.K. Rowling (whose children's books do feature more prominent male than female characters and whose non-fantasy adult novel is still pretty well overshadowed by the earlier children's fantasy series). Stephenie Meyer has name recognition, but her work is treated as a (very, very stale) joke in the circles I run in, and her reputation as a bad writer who became popular with teenage girls is often wielded as a weapon against other women who want to write novels, participate in fandom, or just have their opinions respected. The closest thing I can think of to a woman-authored ASOIAF equivalent is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which is somehow mysteriously just not considered as fitting a topic for ongoing serious discussion and is often dismissed out of hand with highly inaccurate comparisons to Meyer's Twilight. All the others just kind of fall through the cracks. Somehow. Just like Joanna Russ said. Speaking of Joanna Russ, she and the other feminist SF authors of the seventies and eighties wrote about a lot of female characters, and some of them wrote more "grim and gritty" fiction than Martin or Richard K. Morgan or the rest of the "grim and gritty" fantasy dudes could ever envision. Sure, it's dated in some ways, but I've been surprised more than once by how many "second wave" concern are still relevant today.
So, to sum up, I am: a) SO sick of discussions about female characters being driven by a man, b) fully intending to come up with a list of science fiction and fantasy by women that includes many female characters and perhaps does other things that ASOIAF gets credit for and does them better, and c) especially sick of seeing it implied or stated outright that women who find Cersei Lannister a poorly written aggregation of misogynist stereotypes instead of a sympathetic portrayal of a woman coping with patriarchy only feel that way because of our own internalized misogyny.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/81270.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Yes, I know the standard answer is "That's a lot of female characters!" But I'm not satisfied with that. First of all, ASOIAF is a long series that has a lot of characters, period. Soap operas have a lot of female characters too, and at least their sensationalized rape storylines aren't handled in a way that has "MALE GAZE" stamped all over them. Secondly, those characters in the books are a little too obviously written by a man for an audience of men. I understand that the HBO series is supposed to be somewhat better in terms of letting the more negatively portrayed women have some human qualities, but it's also worse about gratuitously inserting explicit sex with gross power imbalances, so yeah. Finally and most importantly, there are plenty of real life women who have written stories about multiple female characters, and very few of those have gotten the level of attention and wide-ranging discussion that ASOIAF and some other male-authored texts I can think of have recently received even from women who are all about the feminist analysis.
The only women authors I can think of right off the top of my head who take up a comparable amount of cultural space are Jane Austen (who didn't write fantasy) and J.K. Rowling (whose children's books do feature more prominent male than female characters and whose non-fantasy adult novel is still pretty well overshadowed by the earlier children's fantasy series). Stephenie Meyer has name recognition, but her work is treated as a (very, very stale) joke in the circles I run in, and her reputation as a bad writer who became popular with teenage girls is often wielded as a weapon against other women who want to write novels, participate in fandom, or just have their opinions respected. The closest thing I can think of to a woman-authored ASOIAF equivalent is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which is somehow mysteriously just not considered as fitting a topic for ongoing serious discussion and is often dismissed out of hand with highly inaccurate comparisons to Meyer's Twilight. All the others just kind of fall through the cracks. Somehow. Just like Joanna Russ said. Speaking of Joanna Russ, she and the other feminist SF authors of the seventies and eighties wrote about a lot of female characters, and some of them wrote more "grim and gritty" fiction than Martin or Richard K. Morgan or the rest of the "grim and gritty" fantasy dudes could ever envision. Sure, it's dated in some ways, but I've been surprised more than once by how many "second wave" concern are still relevant today.
So, to sum up, I am: a) SO sick of discussions about female characters being driven by a man, b) fully intending to come up with a list of science fiction and fantasy by women that includes many female characters and perhaps does other things that ASOIAF gets credit for and does them better, and c) especially sick of seeing it implied or stated outright that women who find Cersei Lannister a poorly written aggregation of misogynist stereotypes instead of a sympathetic portrayal of a woman coping with patriarchy only feel that way because of our own internalized misogyny.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/81270.html. Please comment there using OpenID.