Genderflipping covers

[mizkit]

So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full

Comments

[r_ness]

Making covers more neutral can’t be just about making them more appealing to the male of the species; that’s still assigning them a gender preference, the one we regard as default.

Agreed. There's quite a lot of this which is about policing the construction of masculinity; that men are very much trained not to show effeminacy. Walking around with a book with a fem cover is Not Okay.

The other bit this reminds me of is the different covers Harry Potter got in the UK. Apparently the publisher felt that adults might be embarassed to be seen reading a young adult novel on the tube, so they did some very lit-fic covers for that market.

[mizkit]

Right. So we're not really trying to fix book covers here, we're trying to fix society. Which is a somewhat larger task. @.@

They did that in America too, with the Harry Potter covers! Not right away, but they didn't do it immediately in the UK, either. Yeah.