"Lots of geek girls reject everything feminine when growing up, so as to fit in with the boys. Lots of geek women still devalue their own gender by figuring themselves as different from regular, silly, squeeing, stupid women, as one of the boys. These women regularly agree with geek men who , for example, assume that any show with a primarily female fan base must be crap. They regularly agree that women, as a category, don’t get or don’t write good science fiction, but they are an exception. It’s a classic move of the anti-feminist."
-Courtney Stoker in an interview with Amanda Hess
Oh my god. I cannot even describe how amazing this interview is. It hits so many good points and there isn’t enough bandwidth in the world for me to expand upon it all.
However, one thing Courtney Stoker touches on but doesn’t really get into but is really important to me is how overwhelmingly male the characters in sci fi can be. The more I talk to people, both men and women, about sci fi, the more clear it becomes that what draws people into sci fi is not spaceships and aliens and explosions, but great and robust stories. Sci fi with a bad story is boring. A classic, Star Wars, is a really fucking impressive story.
Except, I don’t fit in to Star Wars. I can’t find something to relate to. I, as a woman, I don’t really count in the Star Wars universe. The same can be said for most sci fi I’ve come in contact with. Which is why I and a lot of the really smart women I know turn to shows like Gossip Girl, The OC, and Glee, because the story is really great and women happen to actually exist in those shows. And perhaps I’m crazy, but I think it’s important to be able to place yourself in the fantasy or the fantasy just isn’t as good.
(I think a very similar statement can be made for POC, but I’m not really in a position to make that statement. State away if you can.)
(via elizabethmarley)
I can’t say this applies to me, as a black man and as a fan of science fiction. Too often, when we talk about “Science Fiction” we’re talking about blockbuster movies and widely syndicated TV shows. That’s not the science fiction I grew up with, for the most part. Writers like Ursala K LeGuin and Harlan Ellison raised my consciousness to issues of race, gender, class, and other Grown-Up stuff long before I had any formal introduction to them. Drawing from the pulp fiction of the genre (Star Wars, Dr. Who, etc) and saying there is no place for me (or you) in SF hardly seems fair. Even a pedestrian look at the history and breadth of the genre will show that there’s a deeper discussion going on across the mediums it touches.
I also don’t agree that a genre stories need to have a “place for me” in it in the first place. Seeing things from another perspective and being drawn out of your comfort zone seems to be the point of good storytelling, and one of the things proper SF excels at. The constant need to put “relateable characters” in SF TV and film is what creates most of the embarrassing fan culture Stoker is so (rightfully) pissed about. The white heterosexual American male perspective of most popular SF is there because of the white heterosexual American 18-35 male fanboys that make the conventions the huge cash cows they are in the first place.
The solution is looking past the TREKWARSFANVERSE of SF to the wider world of the genre, there’s more that enough room for everyone.
I need to think about this more.
