Annoying Teenage Heroines Redux

[mrissa]

I just finished the Stars anthology, and I want to say right here and now: Orson Scott Card's attempts at female psychology make me want to hurl. Some of his previous stuff was laughable: the idea that little girls weren't generally ruthless enough to be in Battle School, for example, made me just about fall out of my chair laughing. If there's anything more ruthless than a 9-year-old girl, I certainly haven't met it in the rest of my life to date. But this story, this just turned my stomach.

(And maybe if I was otherwise fine with a story, I'd buy that teenaged Jewish girls insisted on being called "Jewesses." Probably not, though; I am not an authoress, and I know no poetesses, and neither of those was extensively used in propaganda efforts in the last century. Am I wrong on this one? Do any of you know Jewish women who not only don't mind being called "Jewesses" but insist on it? Are any of you Jewish women of that description?)

Maybe it's just me; maybe I'm no longer giving Card a fair shake because his views are so extremely repugnant to me. (I mean, this is a man who is willing to say that my Onie (my grandma's older sister) is not part of my family just so he can deny gay people their families. Because "everybody knows" that a family is a mother, a father, and their children, and it "always has been" that way...except that it almost never has been that way, but never mind that, apparently.) But it seems like he's sliming all over more and more of his work. I liked Pastwatch unexpectedly, and I was more interested in the Bean books than in anything he's done since it became clear that the Alvin Maker books were all about Card's Mormonism. But I'm beginning to think I just shouldn't bother reading anything else he writes, because I'm going to feel slimy and sick afterwards.

I think I need some good honest death and deceit to wash my brain off after this. Ew.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think to someone like Orson Scott Card, most of my lifetime (or possibly slightly longer) has been filled with confusing new identity politics, and he doesn't understand why. Why would young women belt out a song that proclaims themselves bitches? Why would people suddenly announce that they intended to have sex with people of the same sex? Why would Negroes colored people black people African-Americans and Indians Native Americans and Mexicans Chicanos Latinos Hispanics keep changing their minds about what they were supposed to be called? It may well look random from his vantage point, just another manifestation of "identity politics," so the switch from "Jewish women" or "Jewish girls" to "Jewesses" just isn't as fraught as it ought to be.

Card has often had a tin ear for other people's communities before, so it wouldn't surprise me if he really can't hear the problem. Also, he specifically had the main character disdaining a school counselor who was "always" going on about "people of color," "even though" the counselor herself was light-skinned Hispanic, and he specifically had the main character resenting the inclusion of Jewish people in the "people of color" category because "a glance" could tell you that "it wasn't true." (Apparently Mr. Card has never heard of the difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish people.) So I think he has something of a bee in his bonnet about people's ethnic identities, and possibly their religious identities as well.