Gender and SF

Griffith said some friends had advised her that setting her novel Ammonite, which won the Tiptree award in 1993, on a planet of women was a mistake. One suggested that the women should have rituals and ceremonies which demonstrated how much they missed the women. Gender has continued to influence her work; her most recent book discusses what happens when you rewrite the world in terms of gender.

Eskridge also said gender and speculative fiction are integral to her past and planned work. Samuel R. Delany had challenged her Clarion class to test the assumptions, regarding gender, sexuality, and race, that they brought with them to the writing. Her Tiptree award winning story "And Salome Danced", which has a narrator of unspecified gender, is a reply to Delany's challenge and a question she has returned to in other stories.

Ruff indicated that he doesn't consciously explore gender in his writing, but that in his first book, he'd felt the female characters were not as well realized as the male characters. Part of this, he realized, was that as a new writer, he was taking writing cues from a generation of male writers who did not perceive women as friends. Only as he became more sure of his own voice as a writer could the fact that he had friends who were women be reflected in his writing.

DuChamp said in her usual direct way, "I write about gender because I'm a feminist. I came to feminism before I started writing at all. When I started writing, I wanted to create women characters who could do interesting things and have interesting lives." For her, gender holds special pitfalls that a writer must be aware of, and when a female character is shown doing something a male would typically do, that it is hard for a reader to overcome the moment of "This doesn't make sense!" Early on in her writing career, she started experimenting with stories where she switched gender roles. This is how she became aware that gender was something she'd always be grappling with in her work.

"I'm always aware that gender is a kind of stumbling block - less for me than for the people reading the work. The question of whether the reader will turn against the character is one that a writer has to worry about with female characters. Readers are willing to cut male characters a lot more slack." A story appearing in the anthology "The Gift" illustrated this point: female editors found it interesting, but male editors inevitably hated, telling her so in no uncertain terms. "That's the basic conundrum in writing speculative fiction: there's no point in a writer pushing farther than the reader will get, but at the same time if you don't push, you don't get anywhere new."

Called upon to provide an example of making a gender-related change to control readers' reaction to a narrator, she pointed to a story written at Sycamore Hill and recently published in Paraspheres, "The Tears of Niobe." Initially written in first person, it begins with the narrator upbraiding the reader, or rather what turns out to be voyeuristic visitors to her place of employment.

Sycamore Hill readers were offended by this opening and expressed little sympathy for the character, no matter what happened to her later in the story. In the next draft, DuChamp took out the "you" address and had the character talking about the gawkers in the third person. "The root of the problem was that people reacted to a woman complaining about being looked at in a way that a man making similar complaints would not experience."

Griffith pointed to a shift in her own recent writing where she has moved to first person viewpoint characters, which she feels has let her try to write from a woman's point of view more easily. "You usually model what you're writing on what you've read, and most of the writing out there is modeled on male narrators," she said. "When writing in first person, I can make the character either sex in a way I can't with third person."

Eskridge noted that she found it interesting that the question inevitably comes back to the fact of the writing. "The reader won't stick around for polemic or politicizing, thet're here for the story. If you start getting too political, well, down that path lies disaster..."

"...or boredom," Ruff added.

Eskridge felt that the viewpoint, a straight white middleclass woman who's married and has a child, of her current novel in progress was unfamiliar for her. "I worry that it's too boring, or that I'm being dishonest as a writer," she fretted. "And then I'm baffled to find myself worrying about this. How do I take a character so clearly not the Other and make her fully realized and imagined?"

Ruff explained his theory that mainstream characters (white, middleclass) have no "overhead" to be accounted for. Usually you have to account for each point of difference, he said, and with a character who has no points of difference, there is nothing to explain.

Gender, Duchamp noted, is a system for making meaning. "This is why it can play so tricky and explosive when writing - gender determines who gets to do what and who defines meaning in the context of the story. The dictionary definition of gender has shifted over the past few decades, but the minute you use he or she in a story, all sorts of meanings click into place. If you leave out gender, the reader will either unconsciously fill it in or think it's some sort of game to be tracked down through textual clues."

"The meanings of actions undertaken by characters can change completely according to the gender of the person performing the action," added GUnn

DuChamp has been thinking about how the focus of the issue of gender in feminist speculative fiction has changed over the last thirty years. Where earlier it tended to focus on reproductive roles as the most conflicted area of gender, nowadays, this conflict takes place in sexuality itself.

Griffith noted that the nature of sexuality has changed. "Every hip young dyke I know has been to strip shows and had lap dances. Where gender used to be thought of in terms of torture or prison, metaphors of constraint, nowadays the new metaphor is E-ticket ride or fashion statement. While not everyone is, some segments of the population are treating it differently, taking hormones for example. There's lots more room for change in gender than there used to be. Part of this is the availability of alternative thinking made accessible through the Internet."

"Identity is more malleable," Eskridge added. "You can be friends with people all over the world and never be in the same room. Identity has become story."

The Tiptree anthology launched at the panel celebrates works that explore and expand gender, and includes stories by both DuChamp and Gunn as well as other Tiptree Award winners and short-listed stories.

Print Article

Email Article

View All Articles

How to subscribe to feeds