Sarah Schulman has a Soapbox piece in last week's issue of Publishers Weekly. It reads in part:
If you are a lesbian and you want to get married in California, you're in luck. But if you are a human being who would like to read novels with lesbian protagonists by openly lesbian authors, you'd better move to England....
...In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis forced America to admit that gay people exist, and for a brief period the vibrant but underground literature of authentic gay and lesbian experience was able to surface through corporate presses and hover on the margins of American letters. By the early 1990s the country's most powerful presses started presenting lesbian literature as an integrated part of U.S. intellectual life. But that's when cultural containment kicked in, in the form of niche marketing. Corporations began the process of transforming a political movement into a consumer group, by selecting particular products to be sold to queers alone. Chain bookstores literally took lesbian literature off of the Fiction shelves and tucked it away in newly formed Gay Book sections, which are usually found on the fourth floor in the back behind the potted plants. At the same time, lesbian writers who avoided protagonists as lesbian as they are were allowed to stay in Fiction. The industry created incentives for authors to avoid the specificity of their own experience, absurdly creating the only literature in the world in which the authors' actual lives are never recorded. The best known example of many would be Susan Sontag, who maintained her stature as a Major American Intellectual while never applying her prodigious intellectual gifts to a public analysis of her own condition. She even wrote a book analyzing AIDS stigma while staying in the closet.
In my opinion, lesbian fiction is shunned because not only does it have girl cooties, it has double girl cooties. (Gay fiction, on the other hand, gets a lot of mainstream respect in this country because gay boys are, y'know, boys.) But, hey, I've talked about this before in my LitBlog Co-op piece called, surprisingly, "Girl Cooties." (If you go read the article, be sure to read the discussion comments, too.)
Gender imbalance is also being discussed over at Mind Meld. I wonder if Clinton losing the Democratic nomination is dragging these concerns closer to the surface, closer to consciousness for many people. Or maybe, hey, the hot weather (we had amazing thunderstorms here last week) is just making everyone finally willing to Name That Crankiness. To which I say, Yay.
Here, too, is a new interview with Kelley talking about gender bias in f/sf.
But back to Sarah Schulman. We met in 1992, when I reviewed Empathy for Southern Voice. She did a reading at Charis Books and More, and looked a bit tired. (Touring for a book is brutal, exhausting, and confusing. In the bookshop you're a star and everyone loves you. But then everyone goes home and you go to your hotel room, cold and tired and lonely.) So Kelley and I took her out for dinner and then brought her back to our house for a bit of normalcy over a cup of tea. We had a wonderful conversation.
So, anyway, go read her piece in PW, then go buy one of her books. Go buy any lesbian's books, especially one with lesbian characters. Don't be afraid. Reading about it won't turn you queer. Unless, of course, you read Ammonite :)
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There is a reaction on, and I suspect all over. You might, with a lot of reason, ask "to what?", since the advances made over the last decades by either the women's movement or the GBLT community, if such it is, have hardly been threatening to the status quo. But nevertheless. My daughter, a couple of years ago, at eight, subscribed to the Powerpuff Girls comic book; after three issues she received a form letter telling her that it was discontinued but she would instead receive the same publisher's new comic, Little Princesses. Where the five weekly Swedish gossip magazines a year or two ago featured five couples on every cover, at least three of them illicit and one same-gendered, they now all feature five brides- or mothers-to-be. And a Swedish children's movie like the 1998 "Show Me Love" would today hardly be possible; current Swedish juvenile movies are about "proper", straight relationships. Supposedly, Sweden will this fall pass a law similar to the recent California one, allowing same-sex marriages; it has been debated for twenty years, and by now exhaustion rules the day and it seems fairly certain to pass parliament. But it may be a Pyrrhic victory; opposition has gained strength and the nation-wide "Save Marriage" movement is huge, while same-sex couples, much in vogue only a couple of years ago, now are all but nonexistant in the media.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it will pass, sooner or later. But currently, affirmation of "traditional values" is very politically correct.
And I assume you have heard that Tom Disch is dead. A brilliant, vitriolic and dark writer; a troubled man. "On Wings of Song" is unforgettable.
I think all law changes for the better are real victories. They're not the whole story, but they ensure a baseline of publicly acceptable behaviour. (The actual baseline is usually lower than the law, but without the law would be lower still. Someone somewhere has probably done a study...)
ReplyDeleteBacklash, yes. It's inevitable. Sigh. But, again, the law forms the centre line of the constant cultural pendulum swing. A law change is indicative of real change.
It must be very frustrating, though, to watch your daughter's aocial landscape/cultural language deteriorate.
I heard about Disch, yes. It was like being punched in the stomach. I never met him, but there are few enough good lgbt sf writers in the world, that I reviewed some of his work (like that of Sarah Schulman, for Southern Voice), and that we were published by Payseur and Schmidt made me feel connected to him. There again, just reading enough of someone's work makes me feel as though I know them. I'm sorry he's dead.
I'm replying here to Jennifer's comment (which was meant for this post but got appended to quotes, an occasional series, #4: native of sf by mistake.
ReplyDeleteI think we are breaking out of things, slowly (and with an occasional step backwards--see tomorrow's post, 'fainting, shame, and obviousness', for more on this, with particular regard to f/sf). To put things in context: women have had the right to vote for only 80 years in the UK (88 in the US). We really have come a long way. A long way still to go, of course.
As for Susan Sontag, hmmmn, interesting. I'd heard she was 'bisexual' (quotes intentional) and treated the news the same way I treated news of, say, Martina Navratilova's 'bisexuality'. That is, as a polite fiction given out to maintain her public profile. So thanks for pointing out the difference.
It seems to me we've come a long way with regard to out attitudes to bisexuals. But perhaps what I really mean is I think I've come a long way--perhaps because I'm married to one :)