Gender and Avoidance

[mrissa]

matociquala comments, in her lj, that "like all right-thinking perverts," she hopes to win a Tiptree. I think this makes me a wrong-thinking pervert: I have been bending over backwards to avoid making statements about gender in my fiction. Most of my stories that have a boss-subordinate relationship in them feature women in both of those roles. Why? Because this is how I can avoid making statements about gender and power, when I don't want the story to be about that.

I suspect that some of the things I see as avoiding statements about gender might be seen as statements about gender: that having women as the math professor and grad student, for example, might be considered a statement in itself. This frustrates me. "Women can be math grad students, become math professors, and have female grad students of their own," is a statement about gender in the sense that, "Most men have an X and a Y chromosome," is a statement about gender: true, but not all that interesting just now. No, it's worse than that. It's on a par with, "Some men like cheese."

In the universe of Dwarf's Blood Mead and The Mark of the Sea Serpent, the way I set things up made it hard not to go making statements, because the gods hand out some of the magic with a gender bias. Not most of it, just trivial details like whether you can predict bits of the future or turn into a wolf or what-have-you (I'm not being sarcastic -- those really are fairly trivial in the context of magic use in that world). But the thing is, we are dealing with explicitly fallible gods in these stories. The Aesir have no claims of omniscience or omnipotence, and omnibenevolence is right out. The other gods they run into are the same: omni-nothin'. Omni-annoying, maybe.

Sooooo. It gets complicated, because occasionally kids are born with magic opposite their sex. Also, sometimes kids are born homosexual, or get there with other influences. Sometimes kids are born transgendered. These factors are not related: a girl born with fourth son magic will not automatically want to sleep with girls or wish she had a male body. Because it's not a grand statement about innate gender expression when a boy can speak to spirits, it's a minor oops on the part of the Aesir, and nobody claimed they knew everything anyway, so if they didn't have a noticeable number of glitches, that would be a thing in itself. It would say that even pretty fallible people know everything there is to know about gender, at least in practical terms; they know whether you're really a boy or really a girl, or whether you really should want boys or girls or both or neither. And they don't, and they should mind their own business. That's the joy of gods lacking omniscience: minding their own business becomes a virtue for them, too, because it becomes possible*.

None of this is a major part of the stories I'm currently telling. But it gets thrown into the world in little bits: when Soldrun is asking about crow transformations, Hreinn has to make sure she doesn't mean herself, even though that's a fourth son magic and she's the fourth child but a daughter. Later there'll be reference to Kleppjarn Ljotson becoming Gigja Yrsasdottir: a long hard spell, but not an abnormal one. It's not a major part of the stories I'm telling because it's not a major thing except for the person most involved and maybe one or two of his or her close associates. "Kleppjarn decides he would be happier as Gigja" is not more of a plot in this world than "Kleppjarn decides to become a weaver": most people don't, but you often have one in your village, or at least in the next village over. Some people would be annoyed if they particularly wanted their kid to be a fisher or a farmer or a skald instead of a weaver, but the rest of the world expects them to suck it up and cope, basically.

I just don't think, "People vary; deal," ought to be considered a statement about gender, or at least not an interesting one. "It's kinda complicated; deal," oughtn't, either.

*I think I have discovered the ultimate in Norse gods, but the proof is too large to fit in the margin of this livejournal. No, but seriously, I think I mentioned this before: Loki's brother Byleist. What does he do? None of the sagas seem to know. Why? says me. Because he is the introvert-god, that is why. What was lacking in the Norse pantheon but abundantly present in the Norse? Introverts. Hermits. People who mind their own business. This is Byleist's thing. His younger brother is loud and gregarious and makes a spectacle of himself, but who needs that in a god? All it does is get him [spoilered] by [spoiler] the Deathless, so [spoilers] have to [spoiler] him, and even then he's kind of screwed, and his brother has to come fix it.

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

"Kleppjarn decides he would be happier as Gigja" is not more of a plot in this world than "Kleppjarn decides to become a weaver": most people don't, but you often have one in your village, or at least in the next village over. Some people would be annoyed if they particularly wanted their kid to be a fisher or a farmer or a skald instead of a weaver, but the rest of the world expects them to suck it up and cope, basically.

This seems like a statement about gender to me. :)

I don't think there's much you can do about the tendency for people to read statements into things. Or to ignore intentionally made statements, for that matter. People who are looking for gender bias, statements about gender bias, or analogies for the mating habits of the German roach are probably going to find what they're looking for. Just like some people insisted that Sauron and Morder were Hitler and Germany (or Stalin and Russia, or <"bad" leader> and ) no matter how often Tolkien swore they weren't, some people are going to assume your Hreinn and her "boy" magic are a metaphor for gender dissociation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify the genders of my original sentence, it should be:

"...when Soldrun [female] is asking about crow transformations, Hreinn [male] has to make sure she [Soldrun] doesn't mean herself, even though that's a fourth son magic and she's [Soldrun is] the fourth child but a daughter."

Still. Point. And I can't even say that people are necessarily wrong to see statements about gender in texts where the author didn't intend them: authors who assumed girls couldn't do anything interesting rarely consciously said, "I will write a book about how girls can't do anything interesting!"

It's just that I don't want to make things, y'know, trivially easy on them.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

And I can't even say that people are necessarily wrong to see statements about gender in texts where the author didn't intend them

Exactly. Maybe we'd be better off dropping the idea of a "statement." You're always going to be making choices, consciously or unconsciously, about how to represent gender (or power, or religious faith, or aesthetics of house decoration) in your writing, and those choices will have meaning to them. It isn't the same thing as setting out to Make A Statement, and frankly, I generally prefer it when writers go the more subtle route.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that's one of my problems with awards based on ideology or even interest/focus instead of some broad category: I'd much rather that writers sidled up to things sideways, too.

[redbird]

I'll note that when I was a Tiptree juror, I was looking for books that gave me new or interesting ideas about gender, not for Statements. I can't speak for my fellow jurors, but I don't recall anyone saying that they were looking for a message.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

I just don't think, "People vary; deal," ought to be considered a statement about gender, or at least not an interesting one. "It's kinda complicated; deal," oughtn't, either.

imnsho, those are *crucial* statements about gender. i think they're not the sort of thing that the tiptree is set up for, but i think they're crucial.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, sometimes crucial and boring get pretty close. "Be kind to others," for example.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

ha! this is true.

[seajules]

It sounds like you handle the idea of gender statements much the way I do, which is that I don't want my work to be about that, for the most part, so I avoid it by defaulting all characters as female unless they inform me they are male. Except, of course, that is a statement, or several of them, and people who are looking for such a thing are going to get hung up on that even when I'd prefer they pay attention to other story elements.

It seems like "I don't think it's a big enough deal to make a Statement" is still a statement. The difference is the capitalization, apparently.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The gender thing is actually mostly in short stories for me, as my novel characters all have firm opinions about gender, but sometimes short story characters are waffling around an idea.

[seajules]

Short stories, poetry, and possibly a novella or two are all I'm writing at the moment, and they usually come to me with a woman as the protagonist. Sometimes she's in a role that would, in our society, be considered more masculine (or androgynous, which frequently seems to default to masculine in our society), but I only notice that during the writing if it's the same way in her society.

I think I do address gender a lot more in my poetry, most of which is based on traditional fairy tales, but it's an unconscious thing. A lot of writing is like that for me. I throw everything in the pot of my brain, let it stew, then ladle up the words that become the narrative. It's left to the taster to figure out what's in it, to a large degree.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Who cares about making gender statements?

You get chocolate.

And a tiara.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do get chocolate! And I can wear my ambers as a tiara.

Oh, you mean with the Tiptree? Well, whatever; certainly chocolate and tiaras are nice, for those who don't have them.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

A certain number of people tend to read "statements" into my writing about real-life stuff, even when they know me in person well enough to know that the "statement" they see makes no sense in the context of me, my life. Some people, or people sometimes, see/hear/read what they expect to be there, and I know of no way to stop them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, no proportionate and legal way, anyway. Certainly no advisable way.

living with gender

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

I think we are at one of those moments in time where the issue of gender is sensitized. I know I can't read anything without a part of me feeling the 'writer' out for where they stood at the moment they wrote the story. If I were completely solid in my understanding of my own thoughts and feelings about gender it seems likely to me that I wouldn't experience this sensitized behavior - it is only when I am still exploring that I consistently challenge my inner perceptions to see - moment to moment - what do I really think or feel. My take on it is that I'm evolving my position, what it means to be 'gender' and what the absence of gender assignment might be like.

I can say that readers get pissy if I use a character without assigning a gender to that character. It makes readers sincerely uncomfortable - so much so that I've occasionally got seriously lambasted about it. I figure that people have a 'view' and they want that 'view' to be supported and when it isn't it makes them feel less safe - they don't want to discover they've picked the 'wrong' side in a story - at the end when they figure it out because that might MEAN something and they were damn sure not ready to look in that closet just yet or maybe ever...

Re: living with gender

[aet.livejournal.com]

May-be, from other point of view, we are in opposite point.

As, in pre-internet time, there were very few situations when interaction was possible between people without knowledge of gender of participants. (here I should be careful not to slip into endless ramblings about developments and possibilities of epistolary genre in general)

Anyway, interestingly enough I WOULD want to know gender of fictional heroes, while with real people it does not bother me at all when it turns out I have been mistaken in my assumptions of gender (or it turns out I have failed to make those assumptions altogether). May-be the need to have an image of a fictional hero in my mind is stronger than need to have the image of person (computers with personality problems are still fictional, I would guess) behind keyboard ...

Re: living with gender

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I make more of an effort not to come up with specific visual images of real people if I don't know what they actually look like. If I imagine the wrong things about fictional characters, no one is actually harmed, but if I make too many assumptions about real people, someone might be.

Re: living with gender

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I can say that readers get pissy if I use a character without assigning a gender to that character. It makes readers sincerely uncomfortable - so much so that I've occasionally got seriously lambasted about it.

Interesting. I've had people not get why I obscure my gender online, but it's never to my knowledge bothered anyone.

I do seem to have a tendency to write nurturing men and assertive women, but I don't think of that as anything specifically politicised, it's just how they come to me. I also write a fair number of non-gendered angels, AIs and aliens. [ One of these years I'll move on to something beginning with B. ]

I do at some point want to write a boy who dresses up as a girl in order to go out in the world and make his fortune, but I'm not sure that plugs into anything else I have at the moment.

Re: living with gender

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would read your "boy who dresses up as a girl" story happily. But I would have to stop and think about it being subversive/reversing tropes, if I was working on a book in the world of DBM and MSS, because if I'm still thinking with half of Soldrun's brain, of course this would happen and the opposite would not.

Re: living with gender

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, for some people I think it's not so much about supporting their view of gender as a concept -- what the characters do or say and whether it's masculine or feminine -- as that in most contexts aside from (as aet points out) the internet, gender is one of the first things you know about just about anyone you interact with. When I've complained about baby cards being too gendery, friends have pointed out that this is one of the main pieces of information we have about a newborn. We don't know whether she will like hockey or writing long letters or Hopi dances or John MacDonald novels or all of the above, but we know what bits she's got. For people who are using visual or auditory imagination as they read, gender can be a large part of how they imagine the story on a basic level: what does this scene look like, as much as (or more than) what is this character going to do.

I get annoyed with people who claim that everyone assumes a non-specified narrator is male, though. That's a very small percentage of "everyone."