Politblogo

Fantasy, SF, and feminism

Twisty Faster comments on a fantasy novel she tried to read, but couldn't.  I simply had to comment because I think she totally missed the point.

I Blame The Patriarchy: Twisty, Book Killer: What I can’t live with is the dependency of the fantasy narrative on unapologetically misogynist pseudo-feudal agrarian European settings that glorify patriarchal principles of war, caste systems, omnipotent deities, primogeniture, and women-as-virgin-damsels. The Curse of Chalion is about pseudo-medieval Spaniardesque nobles with names like antifungal ointments, the males brandishing swords all over the place to protect the females, who sit around the castle embroidering. The hero, Benadryl, is a 35-year-old warrior-nobleman who lusts after Rogaine, the beautiful, strong-willed 15-year-old princess.

Huh.  LMB is usually considered to be *feminist* writer.  Most of her career was spent writing about the ironies of patriarchy in her light-hearted Vorkosigan science fiction series.  The premise of this series was a highly feudal, primitive, patriarchal society suddenly exposed to a galaxy where in many/most places men and women are more or less equal.  It's told through the eyes of a man who, by accident, is deprived of many of the privileges of being a man in his (high) stratum of feudal society.  In the second-last book, one of the crises is that a woman, knowing she could run her late father's estate better than her incompetent and inimical younger brother, has a sex change done on another planet (a total sex change including the ability to reproduce as a male) but *still* has to fight to inherit.  One of the male characters, having "played the field" for most of the series, decides to "settle down", but discovers to his dismay that most of the women have passed him by and now tend to be more like those uppity galactic women, going to graduate school and piloting aircraft and expecting men to be more than overgrown children, etc.  And so on.  It's for the Vorkosigan books that she won her Hugos and Nebulas, mostly.  Twisty Faster did notice LMB's talent when she said LMB had "flair."

I think Twisty missed the point of The Curse of Chalion, though it's not entirely her fault.  "Benadryl" does not lust after "Rogaine" at all, though he is loyal to her.  But more importantly, Chalion is a lead-up novel to a series.  The next book, Paladin of Souls, is focused completely around what is a side-character in Chalion, Queen Ista.  It's the only medieval fantasy novel I know of that is focused around a bitter middle-aged widow, recovering from playing a role she hated.  The book is not "unapologetic" about its patriarchal setting, it is simply leaving aside the question.  The theology includes an argument over the nature of the god known as "The Bastard," which is precisely intended to be a feminist comment (Quintarians vs Quadrenes: can "The Mother" goddess have a willing affair with the demon king, or is any such thing by definition rape?).  But Twisty dismissed the book too quickly to notice it.

Genre fantasy is series-based, and it requires patience particularly with the first world-building novel, so I guess it's an acquired taste, so to speak.  I think SF does a little better.  It's true that medieval fantasy focuses, well, around patriarchal societies, but that's not because everyone thinks that it is a good thing.  Certainly, LMB doesn't think so from the mountain of her other work that critiques it, but she was willing to put that aside to actually experiment with the genre.  Most fantasies that ostensibly start with equal female or matriarchal societies tend to degenerate into other kinds of stereotypes, if you know what I mean.  And a bigger problem is that the fantasy genre's attraction is precisely the "inserting magic into a violent and chaotic history" pattern: that's why the medieval template is so common in the genre.  It has historical grandeur, graced with Magical Objects.   The best feminist fantasies use the same pattern to subtly and ironically point out the flaws---as LMB does.

I suspect, then, that even the "Gold Standards" of feminist fantasy wouldn't be enough to satisfy Twisty.  The first book in Le Guin's Earthsea series also, if I recall correctly, paints a patriarchal world without questioning it too obviously, but it is only in the later books where she starts to twist the knife, and she focuses completely on gender in the last book (so far), Tehanu. And I am the biggest Cherryh fan (she writes rarely directly on gender, proving that female writers don't also always have to be pigeonholed into writing gender-comment fiction---but most of her worlds are rougly egalitarian), but I suggest she steers clear of the Fortress novels.

Kennewick Man: science beats oral tradition

PZ Myers brings to my attention the good news: Kennewick Man is back to the scientists:

Pharyngula - Kennewick Man free at last: Nature reports that after 9 years of court battles, the 9,000 year old bones are finally finding their way to where they belong: the lab. While I think it's not only fair but required that Native Americans be treated with respect, I have no such compunctions about Native American superstitions, and it's about time these interesting remains were analyzed.

A 9,000 year old corpse is not reliably anyone's direct ancestor insofar as it is likely everyone's direct ancestor.  And I have little sympathy for the argument that we should take the oral histories of native people's over evidence we can discover through the remains: while there are good arguments to show that oral histories can be very well-preserved over time, these stories are not intended to be an accurate account of what precisely happened, but instead to serve a particular social purpose.  It doesn't make it any less important, but it doesn't supercede science.

In the comments to that blog entry, it was repeatedly noticed that many native American groups insist strongly on these stories or on the "we were always there" story even in the face of the evidence---and in fact some of their leaders demand that no investigation that contradicts this be undertaken.  If so, this insistence is interesting and important: having had everything else taken away from them, the knowledge that the land was always theirs and that they are firmly and totally connected to it must then be an important source of identity.  But should identity block the pursuit of knowledge?  I'm not so sure about that.  Well, honestly, my answer is simply "no."

Idle note in the midst of sorrow

I was reading Le Monde's coverage of the London bombings when I noticed an interesting mistake in an article on blog-coverage of the chaos.

Le Monde.fr : Des témoignages immédiats par centaines sur le Web:  Le blog de la mairie de Londres a également relayé tout au long de la journée les informations sur la situation, les blessés et les victimes.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the linked site is actually NOT the official blog of the mayoralty of London.  It is instead a site devoted to opposing New Labour.  Red Ken is insufficiently radical for them, you see.   But the reporter who wrote the article didn't read far enough into the blog to find this out.  I'll check back later to see if they've corrected it.

Back, sort of

Hello, I think I'm sorta-kinda back now, after a lot of travelling and a lot of business and a lot of overeating.  So we'll see.