Yep; her, although she did keep the pen name, even after her real name was revealed.
9 Likes
Weird how it always ends up being about some dude and how he feels, and not the actual problem at hand.
O_o
11 Likes
I guess making any kind of criticism about misogyny or racism makes some people feel like it’s a direct attack, when it’s generally not. We’ll never fix this stuff if we can’t get to the root of the problem. It’s not just some bad apples, of course, but systems of power that shape our lives.
15 Likes
Maybe that’s intentional.
10 Likes
In some cases, I bet so… in others, it’s probably more a case of ignorantly spouting a line, because they just don’t see a problem. Either way, it’s unhelpful and destructive.
9 Likes
Real talk.
9 Likes
i had no idea computers ever had gender. it’s a cover-up! the feminist agenda!
it’s actually fascinating how women ( who primarily held the job of “computer” - one who computes or tabulates ) were present and active in the early development of electronic computers and software engineering, got shoved out of the way and their contributions overwritten.
same as for video games ( where gamers got swiftly separated by gendered marketing campaigns in the early to mid 80s. ) same as for sci-fi, true crime, the novel itself.
it happens again and again. women contribute groundbreaking work, but (white) men hold the keys of power so that work gets swept under the rug. a generation later, and men are saying: see women just don’t even like this stuff, were never there developing it, and have no right to be involved now.
it’s ridiculous. and yet the wheel keeps going round and round.
17 Likes
Obligs:
Same as it ever was.
12 Likes
9 Likes
JOHNSON: Let me ask another question, probably one you’ve been asked before. When I look at Joanna’s work what I see is an interroga- tion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror literature for the sexist value they embody; a sort of cultural critique is happening in her work and, on another level in stories like her adventures of Alyx, she is claimingthis literature for women. How do you, as a black writer, feel abou this entrance of blacks and women consciously as blacks and womeninto the field?
DELANY: Well, again: science fiction grows up outside this established set of literary texts and I think it’s always easier to appropriate the margin; it always has been for blacks and women, for anyone who i in a marginal position. In that sense, this is what people in a margin social position have been doing constantly, appropriating what is marginal in the rest of cultural production, so that’s nothing new. Wha causes the problem of course, the conflict, is when people in a marginal position try to appropriate the center. And that really goes back to you first question: Why aren’t people who are in the center of the spotlight looking to what is in the margins? Well, they never have, and there’s not too much reason to expect them to do terribly much about it other than in a token way.
Good point. That system has been seen (and used) as a tool for several decades to promote ignorance and compliance. We see it in textbook publishing, institutions that promote religion and sports over everything else, and decreasing focus on the basic skills or critical thinking needed to function as an adult.
I used to think that access to less filtered sources of information could overcome the disadvantages caused by limited resources and gatekeepers with an agenda. Instead, we have people struggling to stay afloat in a sea of content, unable to separate fact from “truth.” Educators are worried about students who depend on devices, and consume video or audio to the point they no longer read or write. After what was erased from history has been restored, it’s still a challenge to convince others to learn about it and believe it.
4 Likes
I’m 4 percent in and questioning the first story.
The Miracle of the Lily.
Mind you, the lily hasn’t actually appeared yet. Just bugs.
1 Like
Alice Mary Norton published books as “Andre,” literally the most masculine name she could think of.
5 Likes
know your market.
also
And so the question remains: if women were a small but generally welcome part of the early SF world, why did so many adopt androgynous or male pseudonyms? The short answer is that most didn’t—and those who did had good reasons for their deception that had little to do with their SF careers. Almost all of the twenty-six authors featured in this anthology published primarily under their own, clearly feminine names, or under female pseudonyms; (Leslie F. Stone, Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley) were given androgynous names at birth but published as women. (Throughout this volume, we’ve used each story’s original byline; real names are provided in the Biographical Notes.) In the few well-known cases where women deliberately concealed their true identities, they did so for complex professional reasons. Catherine Lucille Moore became “C. L.” so as not to jeopardize her banking job during the Great Depression. Alice Mary Norton reinvented herself as Andre Norton (also writing occasionally as Allen Weston or Andrew North) when she first launched a career writing boys’ adventure tales. Alice Sheldon, spotting a jar of Tiptree marmalade on a supermarket shelf, came up with the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., to protect her identity as a former CIA agent and budding experimental psychologist. As each of these examples suggests, the problem was not the reception of women in SF per se, but patterns of sexual discrimination across American culture. Pseudonymous authorship was common practice for male SF writers as well, and is one of the genre’s fascinating quirks; a couple of the apparently female authors we considered for the present volume turned out in fact to be men.
The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin . Library of America. Kindle Edition.
2 Likes
No one beats Joanna Russ
2 Likes
I’m tickled by the fact that when I started reading her at the age of nine I’d never heard the name “Andre” and just assumed her name was Andrea or something like that.
1 Like
I absolutely agree that Octavia Butler is brilliant and without parallel, but it looks like this collection only covers the 20s through the 60s (the last entry is Le Guin from '69). Since Butler didn’t start publishing till the 70s, I don’t think it was an intentional slight or oversight to leave her out, just that her work didn’t fall into the “early” sci-fi period–hopefully there will be another anthology for the next generation of sci-fi stories by women and she’ll be at the top of the list.
6 Likes
Yeah-- it doesn’t cover avowedly feminist science fiction.
So who were the women of early SF? The story of women in this field has long been celebrated by fans, who do the important cultural work of preserving genre history amongst themselves, and, more recently, by authors and scholars who share this history with others outside the SF community. However, such efforts are often overshadowed by “commonsense” assumptions about the historic relations of gender and genre. These assumptions have all but taken on the status of myth and posit that: (1) Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is a foundational SF text, but few other women participated in the genre until the advent of feminist SF; (2) women sometimes wrote SF before the 1970s but had to disguise themselves as men to get published in a community that was inherently hostile to their sex; and (3) even when early women SF authors did write under their own names, they followed the lead of their male counterparts, celebrating science and technology in ways that reinforced rather than transformed our understanding of science and society. These myths remind us of what we value in the present moment, and enjoy in increasing abundance: women who write scientifically responsible and socially daring fiction that encourages us to see our own world and its many possible futures in startling new ways. But they also beg an important question. Where did all these modern wonder women—writers like C. J. Cherryh, N. K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, Jo Walton, and Martha Wells, to name just some—come from in the first place?
I do believe that as educators, we do need to meet students half way. The one’s I meet in my survey courses tend to have been under served by the public education system. It’s partial on educators to make them understand how these things are relevant to their lives.
I agree, and I’m trying very hard to do that.
5 Likes
