Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago

I was on two panels at WisCon, and despite my initial mild skepticism, they both went very well.  Interesting panelists, engaged audience members, a good balance of who got to talk when, etc.  (Both suffered slightly from my own personal need to talk constantly, but I don't think I crossed the line into Bad Panelist territory.  If anyone who was there disagrees, please please please let me know?  I would hate to be That Guy and not know it.)  The feminist fiction panel is the easier of the two to talk about, I think, and so.  Panel report!  We bounced around a little bit, topic-wise, so the report will be more thematic than chronological.

The Panelists:  Me, Kameron Hurley, Lyda Morehouse, Rebecca Maines, and Victoria Gaydosik.  (Oh!  Hey!  Someone took pictures of us.)  Victoria and I were co-moderating, and we started by explaining the concept of the panel.  A lot of feminists are concerned about the fact that younger women are less and less likely to either identify as feminists or find feminism interesting or relevant.  Many of us found fiction to be a powerful force in discovering feminism, so how can we use that to help younger women discover feminism? 

At this point, we asked all the panelists to name a few books that had been influential for them, and to talk a little bit about why.  I am going to try and reconstruct this book list, but I am almost certainly going to miss something important.  (There are not many books on this list mainly because we had fairly repetitive influences.)

• Alanna, by Tamora Pierce
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
• The Women's Room, by Marilyn French
• Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
• Books by Elizabeth someone?  Naomi, can you help me out here?
• And, in a big non-fiction ringer, The Feminine Mystique.

Okay, that list is too short.  I have to be forgetting something.  I was surprised, though, by how much The Feminine Mystique was completely relevant to the conversation.  I first read it a few years ago, after Paula Fass discussed it in one of the lectures in the social history course I was reading for.  I picked it up expecting to read it for historical significance, and was shocked to find how completely relevant it was for me, given that it was first published more than a decade before I was born.

Younger Women and Feminism: Talking about those influential books, and why they were influential for us, brought us directly back to the question of younger women and feminism.  They fell roughly into two categories: books that openly discussed the ways in which women are constrained and limited by society, and books that showed girls doing things like going out in the world and having adventures.  We used the word "epiphany" a lot when describing the experience of reading these books.  If you grow up immersed in the idea that women can't (or just don't) do certain types of things, then books like these can have an enormous impact.

The thing is, the overt rhetoric that young women growing up today hear is that there aren't limitations on what women can do.  A book can't be revolutionary or inspirational just because it shows girls having adventures, and a book that talks about the limitations placed on women isn't going to resonate with a teenager or college student who's still in a supportive environment and still being told that she can do anything.  One of the greatest victories of feminism has been the fact that girls today generally aren't told that their lives are heavily restricted; where feminism still has work to do, though, is in dealing with the fact that women's lives still are socially constrained in any number of ways.  What happens when the much-discussed younger women get a little bit older and realize that (to draw an example from an audience member) ideas they propose in business meetings are dismissed, but those same ideas will be praised when proposed by a male colleague?  Or when (drawing my example from last year's feminism-and-fashion panel) they find that they're less successful in job interviews because their voices don't sound serious (read: deep) enough, or they laugh when they're nervous.  Or when they hit their mid-twenties and suddenly realize they're surrounded by magazine and newspaper articles about how "nesting" is the hot new trend for ambitious young women. 

I know people disagree on this, but it seems clear to me that the battles feminism is fighting today are a lot more subtle than the battles it was fighting thirty years ago.  This is a good thing, overall, but it might also mean that the fiction that was written in response to the situation thirty years ago probably doesn't resonate with young women today. 

That brings up another interesting point from the panel, though, which is the possibility that younger women don't identify as feminists, or don't find feminism important, because there are so many other battles to fight.  Lyda Morehouse brought this up very early in the panel, saying that she doesn't actually think of herself as a feminist much these days; the problems she faces as a lesbian and a mother are much more important than the problems she faces just as a woman, and she's only got so much energy.  If feminist-sympathetic young women are more interested in today's big and un-subtle problems, like gay rights or war or political corruption or any one of a dozen other things, can we really fault them? 

Today's Feminist Fiction:  So what is it that we're looking for in today's feminist fiction anyway?  Just making a statement about women being strong and/or equal isn't enough, apparently, so what is?  This was the most energetic part of the discussion, I think, and I can't even begin to re-create all of it, so I'm just going to talk about the part that I found most interesting.  Which is to say, a lot of us are looking for fiction that does something more realistic or more interesting with both men and women.  Kameron Hurley pointed out that fiction that just goes "poof!  men and women are entirely equal and everything is happy!" is really kind of unsatisfying because it dodges the difficult questions. 

I brought up romance novels here, because in my (admittedly limited) experience, there's some really fascinating stuff going on in romance novels in terms of gender dynamics.  I mean, okay, the only romance novels I read are Nora Roberts books, but I'd be shocked if she's far out of the mainstream for romance authors.  And what I see in those books, over and over again, are men and women who are negotiating (successfully, of course) the complexities of gender relations.  The men -and- the women are allowed to be both strong and vulnerable.  These books are full of women who value both their careers and their families, and men who encourage and support them.  And Lyda, who's recently started publishing romance novels under the name Tate Hallaway, backed me up and went one further, saying that there's been a real revolution in romance novels recently.  As far as she can tell, she said, category romance is producing some genuinely feminist fiction, while chick-lit has become the new standard bearer for crappy gender stereotypes.

And -that- was something I found fascinating, and made a lot of sense to me once I started thinking about it.  Clearly it would be a mistake to slander the entire chick-lit genre, but I've read a few chick-lit books (and read reviews of a lot more) that do seem to follow a pattern.  "Sassy young woman thinks that she's doing a bang-up job of having both a successful career and a satisfying personal life, but when she runs into some serious conflict, she realizes that having it all is just too hard."  So that's troubling, especially given how popular these books are.

Inadequate Conclusion:  I know there was more I wanted to say about this panel, but this writeup is long, and I've been working on it on-and-off for three days, and I'm tired of it.  Sorry.  But I had a great time on this panel, and found that I kept wanting to talk about it for the rest of the weekend. 

Comments

[Dan Percival]

Thanks for the writeup! I can't think of any major point from that panel that you haven't at least touched here. I thought you handled the panel with aplomb. When someone finally starts the "how to moderate a panel" class, you'd darn well better volunteer to teach.

(I have, like, three pages of notes that I've been anxious to write up into posts but just haven't had the time. And that's just from the panels.)

[Jose]

Can't say I'm much familiar with chick lit. I tried Bridget Jones (there wasn't anything else to read) and found the attitude behind it mildly repugnant. Just as the target audience would if the gender roles had been reversed I suspect.