Over at the Aqueduct Press blog there have been some interesting developments on the “women in SF” debate that has been rumbling away for a while. Last week Timmi Duchamp posted expressing some confusion as to what Gwyneth Jones meant by “feminist SF”. Today Gwyneth responded, and it seems to me that the differences in definition still remain.

Before I go into this, I should note that Gwyneth explains, as I had rather expected, that the Guardian people had rather caught her off guard on the podcast. I’m not surprised. As I’ve said before, the Guardian people seem more interested in generating controversy than in reasoned debate. My sympathies, Gwyneth.

Meanwhile, back with the question in hand. In her post Gwyneth says: “I haven’t stopped being a feminist, I haven’t stopped writing like a feminist, but the Battle of the Sexes is no longer my exclusive topic.” I’m no great expert on feminist theory, but to me this sounds very much like a second wave feminism viewpoint. Let me try to explain.

First wave feminism was the Suffragettes. That’s fairly clear. Second wave feminism was the movement that started in the 60s and 70s. In theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life. In practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists. Sheila Jeffreys is a good example of how things can go so very badly wrong.

Third wave feminism, as I understand it, grew out of a cross-fertilization between feminism and the civil rights movement. Basically feminists realized that discrimination against women was just a small part of a much wider social problem. They also got the idea that working together with other groups on the bottom of the social ladder: people of color, the poor, LGBT people, the disabled and so on, would strengthen their position, not weaken it.

Third wave feminism, then, is not just about the “Battle of the Sexes”, it is about human rights. I’ll quite happily label a post about the rights of gay men “feminist”. But not everyone would. If you still see feminism as simply a matter of “men v women” then you may well see some of my posts as “seeing sexism where none exists” (as I and others have been accused of recently).

Where it gets interesting is if you consider the possibility that the idea of third wave feminism hasn’t made it very far in the UK. I learned much of my feminism in the USA, and from Australians who had been to Wiscon. In her post Timmi notes that when she first met Niall Harrison he had a very different view of feminist SF to hers. Gwyneth is based in the UK. Farah Mendlesohn, whose approach appears to be closer to mine, has spent a lot of time interacting with US academics at events like ICFA and online.

Suppose, then, that when Gwyneth says that having her work identified as feminist means that it is, “marked as unreadable by large swathes of the general sf reading public”, what she is concerned about is that her work will be seen as incorporating the ideas of second wave feminism. And she thinks that is likely because when you say “feminist” in the UK that’s most people still think you mean. That might explain why women SF writers find it harder to sell over here and, as Gwyneth suggests, by identifying them as feminist we may be doing them a disservice.

On the other hand, as I have noted elsewhere, the UK seems to be less friendly to LGBT rights as well. I suspect it may be a class thing. We Brits tend to be trained from birth that rocking the boat is a Bad Thing, and saying the wrong things may risk your social standing. That’s a gross generalization, of course, and probably unprovable, but I still think we need a good dose of third wave feminism here.

The other aspect of Gwyneth’s post that I feel I should address is where she lays the blame primarily on the shoulders of UK fandom.

The trouble is, I believe that the “problem” the fans are are worrying over is largely of their own making. We get what we celebrate, says Dean Kamon (inventor and science populariser). I don’t know much about the man, but that sounds right. UKSF fandom has not celebrated female writers. Sf’s highly active fanbase says “it’s the publishers” but I don’t believe that. I’m sure genre publishers and editors have an agenda, and they probably favour traditional male-ordered sf, but they’re not fanatics. They follow the money. If the sf community had been getting excited about women writers, if sf novels by women had been anticipated, talked about, discussed, on an enthusiastic scale, the wider sf reading public would have taken notice, the publishers would have been seeing interesting sales figures and they’d have reacted positively.

To some extent I think she’s right. As Farah has pointed out, the BSFA Awards have a particularly woeful record as far as recognizing women writers goes. On the other hand, we all live in the same cultural bubble. British readers may not have bought women SF writers in very large numbers, but equally I suspect that that when it comes down to decisions as to which books to commission, UK publishers are much less willing to take a risk on women writers than on men. If the books are not available, people can’t buy them.

I also note that a lot of the writers people like Timmi and I enjoy are not published by the big, multi-national New York houses, they are published by people like Prime, Night Shade, Small Beer, Tachyon, Subterranean and Aqueduct. Books by the successful American small presses are harder to come by in the UK than they are in the US. And that’s one reason why I am very pleased to be selling some of them. There’s no point in talking up women SF writers if people can’t buy their books easily. As Gwyneth says, if we see more sales, eventually publishers should sit up and take notice.

Update: Something had been nagging away at the back of my mind with regard to Gwyneth’s comments about publishers. Eventually I remembered it. A few days ago Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a great post for Book View Cafe. The first part is all about “literary” fiction and its pretensions, but the second half deals with publishers’ fixed ideas about YA fantasy. It is true that publishers follow the money, but as Le Guin explains they tend to follow it in a rather blinkered fashion. So once they get the idea into their heads that the SF that sells best is SF by men, then that soon mutates in their minds into “SF by women doesn’t sell”, and a consequent unwillingness to even try.

Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks project is coming together nicely. In order to help get him started I have offered him a number of reviews I did for Emerald City, and a couple of those have now appeared. They are:

• Hermetech, Storm Constantine
• Halfway Human, Carolyn Yves Gilman

More will be appearing in due course. And of course the site also offers fine reviews by several other people.

As you may have seen here in comments, Kari Sperring was a bit concerned that Ian Sales’ list of women SF writers marginalized women who only wrote fantasy. Ian suggested that she did her own list, so she has done. You can find it here. Please add your own suggestions if you have any.

Update: And I should also point you at the Feminist SF Wiki. If you want to do more detailed biographic work about a woman writer, artist or whatever, that would be a good place to post it. (You are welcome to try Wikipedia, but don’t blame me if you spend half your time fighting edit wars against male editors who challenge the importance of any women they see pages created for.)

In response to the ongoing discussion about the lack of visibility of women SF writers, Ian Sales has set up a blog that intends to review SF books written by women. He can’t do it all himself, so he is looking for volunteers to write the reviews. You can find the blog here.

One of the interesting things about having lived for some time in Australia and California as well as the UK is that you occasionally notice cultural differences. One appeared to pop up on Twitter this morning. People I followed in the US and Australia (and also New Zealand and the Philippines) were giving the thumbs up to this blog post by Nicola Griffith, whereas the reaction from UK people was more along the lines of, “those boring feminists are at it again.” This immediately reminded me of comments made by Gwyneth Jones and Farah Mendlesohn on the recent Woman’s Hour program, in particular Farah saying, “…the market in the States is far better, the market here is problematic…”.

Now of course my Twitter pals are not necessarily a very representative sample. I don’t think, however, I have a different political mix amongst people I follow in the UK to those I follow elsewhere. And of course the debacle of the feminism panels at Eastercon was fresh in my mind. I do think we could do better in the UK. (And a hat tip here to people like Niall Harrison, Ian Sales and Kev McVeigh who have been doing good work, but why do we have to rely on men to do that work?)

Anyway, regardless of whether there’s an issue with the UK or not, the issues raised by Nicola’s blog post, and the complaints I saw about it on Twitter this morning, still need to be addressed. Of course this is yet another post about invisibility and exclusion. It therefore ties in to a long history of complaints about such problems involving award short lists, anthology ToCs, guest lists for conventions (yes, you, Kapow!) and more recently the number of women reviewers, and number of books by women accorded reviews (overview here).

Is this just women being whiny? Are we finding sexism where none exists? Personally I disagree, because the point here is that sexism is a cultural phenomenon, not just a few random acts by bad people. If you define sexism and only occurring when a man does something prejudiced to a woman then you are likely to find Nicola’s post irrelevant, but unless you get at the root of the issue — what Fay Weldon succinctly described on the BBC Book Review Show as the idea that men are more important than women — then sexist actions will continue to happen. Which is why, every time we see something that suggests men are much more important than women, us uppity feminists make a bit of noise.

Talking of the Book Review Show, the issue of gender balance came up there too. I think we can politely pass over John Mullan’s offhand dismissal that the ladies “were exaggerating”. However, Daisy Goodwin asked why women should care about recognition when they sell more books. It is a good question, but before I answer it let’s look at some of the other complaints raised.

Nicola’s post references Joanna Russ’s famous book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing [buy isbn=”9780292724457″]. In particular she quotes the part where Russ notes the various excuses made for not recognizing the contribution of women to the field:

“She didn’t write it.”
“She wrote it but she wrote only one of it.”
“She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist (sf writer), and it isn’t really art (sf).”
“She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly.”

There should be a bingo card, and we can add to it some of the reasons I saw given this morning as to why women shouldn’t care about exclusion from things like “best of” lists.

1a. Women shouldn’t complain about exclusion because their books are more popular than men’s.
1b. Women shouldn’t complain because the lists reflect popular taste.

2a. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only critics talking and who cares what they think?
2b. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only fans talking and who cares what they think?

Yes, I did pair those deliberately. That should be sufficient to make the point. Suggestions for further entries on the bingo card are welcome. (And please note that my copy of How to Suppress Women’s Writing is stranded in California. It would not surprise me at all to discover that Russ had mentioned the above excuses as well.)

Back with the point, why does it matter who gets reviewed, who wins awards, who gets anthologized? Because those things will eventually make up his-story. So when people come to look back because, for example, they have been asked to name their all-time favorite SF book, they will only remember the books that history tells them about. The others will be forgotten, and become invisible.

The issue that Nicola was talking about was not one of, “oh, it is not fair, a bunch of sexists have not chosen any books by women”. Rather it was one of, “oh look, women writers have been forgotten again.” And the sad thing is that, because they have been forgotten, people then use their apparent lack of existence to justify the fact that historical lists ignore them.

I should note here that I am not expecting a 50:50 split. Obviously it was harder for women to get published in the past, and it still isn’t easy today. I don’t think that Nicola was expecting a 50:50 split either. She just wasn’t expecting 96:4.

I note also that this isn’t entirely men’s fault. Back in the 70s feminist critics tended to dismiss earlier SF by women because it was too “domestic”. Recent academic work by people like Justine Larbalestier and Lisa Yasek has show that this “domestic” SF was a lot more pointed and satirical than was earlier thought. Justine’s book, Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century [buy isbn=”9780819566768″] provides a good introduction to some early women SF writers.

The main issue here, however, is that complaining isn’t enough. If we want women writers to get recognition we have to do something about it. We have to talk about them, and we have to get them back into print. Nicola’s post, having noted the problem, was very much all about how we needed to do something, not just sit back and complain. And that’s mostly why I was so sad to see it being dismissed as whiny.

So I’m going to be talking to Nicola, and anyone else who is interested, about getting good SF by women back into print. Suggestions of books/authors you’d like to see available again are welcome.

In my time I have met rather a lot of authors, some of whom are very famous. I have even, to my delight, shared a breakfast conversation with Samuel Delany. But one person I have never met is Joanna Russ. Possibly that’s just as well, as I would have been utterly terrified of her. Now, of course, I will never get the opportunity.

I will leave obituaries to people who knew Russ well, such as Timmi Duchamp.

For trans people Russ is less of a heroine. She came up through second wave feminism, which was rampantly transphobic, and parts of The Female Man faithfully reflect the then orthodox view that trans women were “really” men trying to replace women with compliant sex slaves.

However, as Roz Kaveney noted on Twitter, unlike some of her contemporaries, Russ was willing to engage with trans women and try to understand them. As a result, her views about them changed markedly, and she publicly apologized for her earlier antagonism.

One of these days I will re-read The Female Man and write about it. In the meantime, however, here are a couple of things to think about.

While Russ might have been re-cycling the transphobic views of Janice Raymond, to a teenage trans girl the prospect of being given a macho-ness test in school that you could fail and, as a result, be required to live the rest of your life as a woman, does not seem like oppression, it seems like potential relief from torture.

The sex slave thing, of course, comes later. Teenage girls of all sorts are not always that sensible about the future that waits for them in a patriarchal society. What Russ missed, however, is that by the time they are adults the Changed will have no more illusions. Most of them will be ardent feminists.