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Dre Grigoropol has contributed to several anthologies and ‘zines, and works as an illustrator, cartoonist, and blogger. Her blogging work can often be seen addressing feminism and pop culture topics at Bust Magazine. Her latest long term project, DEE’S DREAM (pictured above) features the bohemian life of a young poet and rocker, and in particular the myriad complications of her romantic entanglements. A print version of the first episode of DEE’S DREAM, “Cosmic Wombat House” is currently available in self-published mini form. Dre’s style is versatile but always shows an appealing homage to manga lines. Her inking is particularly striking, as she moves between varying line widths for emotional effect. Aside from producing her comics and blogging, she’s also a rather astonishing body paint artist for cosplay contests and takes part in many indie comics shows in the mid-Atlantic region.

[*Disclaimer: you might well see Grigoropol's occasional reports about indie comix events featured right here on the Beat!]

 

 

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by Rachel Lieberman

I write YA, and I often ask myself, “Does my writing promote good messages to teen girls?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Stories that preach = BIG FAT NO. Making your story a mouthpiece for your beliefs is never a good idea.

This is not your job.

BUT that doesn’t mean that you’re never allowed to wonder who’s going to read your stories, and what those readers will get out of their experiences.

For my graduate lecture, I took a look at how feminist and post-feminist literary theory can help us look at YA literature and decide for ourselves what messages we want to send. Feminism is, at its core, the belief in equal rights for all genders, but of course there are many definitions and variations among those definitions. The question of choice (who gets to choose, and what they should choose) is sometimes a point of contention among critics.

I think that one of the reasons so many critics find fault with Twilight and novels like it is because Bella’s choices may be her own, but they are consistently at odds with the choices we want our girls to make. When we show characters who consistently choose dangerous, controlling partners, our fear is that young adult readers will also choose dangerous, controlling partners.

I don’t think this is an invalid concern, but my intention isn’t to debate or argue it. That’s for another time, another post. My intention is to say, that if you’re a YA writer and this is something you are thinking about, there are ways to develop a good feminist story without making it preachy or propaganda. I’ll share some methods that I found useful and talked about in my lecture.

1. What does your main character want? If it’s just a relationship, consider that in real life, a desire for a relationship is usually a symptom of a deeper desire for something else, like security or acknowledgment. Consider what other forces might be at work, and you’ll avoid creating shallow characters whose problems can be solved by a significant other.

2. Make sure your character stays active. Find places in the story that force her to act, that take away her safety net and test her. This is true of practically any story, but in YA romances, it’s especially important. She doesn’t need to be a hero, but she shouldn’t rely on her love interest too much.

3. Pay attention to your character’s love interest. Speaking of the love interest, don’t forget to pay attention to him! Or her. What does he want? Does he act in a way that harms the main character, and if so, are there negative consequences? If your character has to choose between two love interests (very common these days), is the choice made too easy (by having one character turn out to be a jerk)?

4. Romance novel vs. novel with romantic elements. A romance novel is a little different than a novel with romantic elements. A romance novel’s plot is dependent on the relationship between two characters, so if you want to write a story with feminist undertones, you might choose the other path.

5. Why do your characters get together? Think about the reasons your characters are together. Is it because they find each other so attractive? Or do they share a deep, mutual connection? The more you develop the relationship, and the reasons for it, the more likely you are to connect with readers.

6. The moral of the story. All of these factors combined puts you in a better position to control the final factor: the moral of the story. Once you’ve finished a draft, it might be a good idea to take a look around. What’s happened to the characters? Who’s alive? What have they had to sacrifice? Your character’s rewards and punishments reveal a lot about your story’s message. Is it the message you want?

There are, of course, many more factors than these six that you will need to pay attention to in order to write a great novel. But this is a place to start if your aim is to write a story with romantic elements that will both appeal to teen readers and give them characters and situations they can look up to.

Rachel Lieberman works in higher education and writes YA. Her short fiction has appeared in Opium, Awkward, Emprise Review, and others. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Tampa.

Visit Rachel’s blog: A Reputation in Digital Form: The Writerly Musings of Rachel Lieberman

Follow Rachel on Twitter: @LiebermanRachel

This blog post was brought to you as part of the March Dystropian Madness Blog Series.

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by Rachel Lieberman

I write YA, and I often ask myself, “Does my writing promote good messages to teen girls?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Stories that preach = BIG FAT NO. Making your story a mouthpiece for your beliefs is never a good idea.

This is not your job.

BUT that doesn’t mean that you’re never allowed to wonder who’s going to read your stories, and what those readers will get out of their experiences.

For my graduate lecture, I took a look at how feminist and post-feminist literary theory can help us look at YA literature and decide for ourselves what messages we want to send. Feminism is, at its core, the belief in equal rights for all genders, but of course there are many definitions and variations among those definitions. The question of choice (who gets to choose, and what they should choose) is sometimes a point of contention among critics.

I think that one of the reasons so many critics find fault with Twilight and novels like it is because Bella’s choices may be her own, but they are consistently at odds with the choices we want our girls to make. When we show characters who consistently choose dangerous, controlling partners, our fear is that young adult readers will also choose dangerous, controlling partners.

I don’t think this is an invalid concern, but my intention isn’t to debate or argue it. That’s for another time, another post. My intention is to say, that if you’re a YA writer and this is something you are thinking about, there are ways to develop a good feminist story without making it preachy or propaganda. I’ll share some methods that I found useful and talked about in my lecture.

1. What does your main character want? If it’s just a relationship, consider that in real life, a desire for a relationship is usually a symptom of a deeper desire for something else, like security or acknowledgment. Consider what other forces might be at work, and you’ll avoid creating shallow characters whose problems can be solved by a significant other.

2. Make sure your character stays active. Find places in the story that force her to act, that take away her safety net and test her. This is true of practically any story, but in YA romances, it’s especially important. She doesn’t need to be a hero, but she shouldn’t rely on her love interest too much.

3. Pay attention to your character’s love interest. Speaking of the love interest, don’t forget to pay attention to him! Or her. What does he want? Does he act in a way that harms the main character, and if so, are there negative consequences? If your character has to choose between two love interests (very common these days), is the choice made too easy (by having one character turn out to be a jerk)?

4. Romance novel vs. novel with romantic elements. A romance novel is a little different than a novel with romantic elements. A romance novel’s plot is dependent on the relationship between two characters, so if you want to write a story with feminist undertones, you might choose the other path.

5. Why do your characters get together? Think about the reasons your characters are together. Is it because they find each other so attractive? Or do they share a deep, mutual connection? The more you develop the relationship, and the reasons for it, the more likely you are to connect with readers.

6. The moral of the story. All of these factors combined puts you in a better position to control the final factor: the moral of the story. Once you’ve finished a draft, it might be a good idea to take a look around. What’s happened to the characters? Who’s alive? What have they had to sacrifice? Your character’s rewards and punishments reveal a lot about your story’s message. Is it the message you want?

There are, of course, many more factors than these six that you will need to pay attention to in order to write a great novel. But this is a place to start if your aim is to write a story with romantic elements that will both appeal to teen readers and give them characters and situations they can look up to.

Rachel Lieberman works in higher education and writes YA. Her short fiction has appeared in Opium, Awkward, Emprise Review, and others. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Tampa.

Visit Rachel’s blog: A Reputation in Digital Form: The Writerly Musings of Rachel Lieberman

Follow Rachel on Twitter: @LiebermanRachel

This blog post was brought to you as part of the March Dystropian Madness Blog Series.

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One of the most interesting discussions I saw at the AWP conference was one sponsored by VIDA, with editors and writers talking about the results of VIDA's 2013 count of female and male writers in various publications. This year, they were able to offer a particularly revealing set of graphs showing three year trends in book reviewing at major magazines and journals.

The only report of the discussion I've seen so far is that of VIDA volunteer Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown (although I'm sure it was covered by Twitter when it happened). Hoover gives a good overview of the panel and the issues. I took lots of notes, so will here add some more detail to try to show how the discussion went.

After introductory remarks by moderator Jennine Capó Crucet, the first responses were made alphabetically by last name, and so two men began: Don Bogen, poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review, and Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review. Bogen noted that, inspired by VIDA, he'd done a count of the poetry published by CR during his 7-year tenure and discovered to, really, his surprise that he'd achieved parity between male and female writers (or at least male and female bylines). How had he managed to do this unconsciously, he wondered? The best hypothesis he had was that he seeks real diversity of experience and point of view in poetry and has eclectic taste — indeed, the only poems he said he's not particularly interested in are ones that reflect his own experience. He noted that certainly the idea of parity depends on where one is counting from, as particular issues of the magazine would go one way or the other, and he tends to organize blocks of poems in between other genres in each issue in ways that have sometimes been balanced but also sometimes been entirely female or entirely male. Many times, too, he said, he does his best to read blind, paying little to no attention to a byline, and has often discovered that material he thought was "male" or "female" had been written by someone of another gender. Thus, the magic of literature.

Of the panelists, Stephen Corey seemed perhaps least comfortable with the discussion. His initial statement was simply a set of questions. (I think I managed to write them all down, but may have missed something.) When we talk about gender balance, he asked, are we talking about balance in submissions? In page counts? (Does a 30-page story count the same as a 1-page poem?) Should reviews be counted the same as poems, essays, or stories? Do you want an editor to read your work with gender in mind? Should a publication put out a call for more work by males or females? Should a publication put out an anti-call against one gender? When you read, do you care if what you read is by a man or a woman [audience: YES!], and should an editor care?

After Corey, E.J. Graff said so many interesting things I had trouble taking notes. Here's what I wrote down:

• The count is an example of why all English majors should take a course in statistics. Graff: "I wish I had!"
• The submission gap is enormous. With opinion pieces, women editors solicit women and are often turned down or need more time, whereas men often say yes and offer to get the piece done very quickly (important for current events).
• Men continually send pitches after rejections, women don't.
• Structural acculturation. We have to overcome our own socialization — and not just in terms of gender. The audience, for instance, was overwhelmingly white.
• We must make our own choices conscious because many of our prejudices are unconcious. Graff pointed to the Implicit Association Test.
• For students, there is a dramatic shift between the world of school and the world of work. It can be difficult to learn how to promote yourself. Men tend to do this more comfortably than women, because it's generally more socially acceptable for men.
• Make a posse. Promote yourself and your group. Start a movement or magazine. Challenge each other, help with drafts and careers, but as a group move each other forward.
• When lesbians and gay men started working together in the 1980s, there were many difficulties, suspicions, and prejudices. To overcome these difficulties, many groups decided on a shared leadership structure that required equal power sharing between a man and a woman rather than just one leader. Why not do that with more prizes, editorships, groups?

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The Great Readercon Harassment Debacle of 2012 has resolved with a statement from the Convention Committee that is an excellent example of how to apologize for mistakes and, more importantly, how to make amends.

When I read the statement, I'd just gotten the new album by Franz Nicolay, Do the Struggle, and a line from the chorus of the magnificent first song seemed oddly appropriate: "The hearts of Boston have a hurricane to answer for."

The hurricane's dying down. The rubble is getting cleaned up. The hearts are strong.

There are lots of things in the statement to pay attention to — ideas that will, I hope, serve as a model for other events in the future, not just Readercon. I was especially pleased to see this among the actions the committee has committed to: "Working with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center to train concom members and volunteers in swift, appropriate reactions to observed or reported harassment."

Such actions move Readercon from having passive policies that may (or may not) help in the event of harassment to having systems in place that actively work against the culture of rape and violence. Knowledge and awareness matter: they change how you interact with the world. By taking such a thorough and public stand and becoming a site for education and prevention, Readercon helps chip away at the forces that support and enable intimidation, harassment, and violence.

A few folks have asked if I would reconsider my resignation from the Program Committee, and I've said that while I completely support the new statement and policies, have great respect for the work that went into it all, and look forward to attending Readercon 24, I need, for various reasons, to take at least a year off from participation in the committee. This is as much for emotional reasons as rational ones, and I don't have adequate words to explain why.

For some of what went into creating the statement and new policies, see this post by Rose Fox. Lots of people worked really hard, through difficult conversations and difficult emotions, to make all this happen. We should be grateful to them for doing that work, for putting their words and hearts and minds on the line.

Here's Genevieve's lovely response to the statement.

See you at Readercon next year.

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Here's an important post from Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta regarding Republican U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin's repugnant comments about pregnancy rarely occurring from "legitimate rape" (just typing those words makes my hands shake).

Franke-Ruta makes the important point that Akin is not an outlier in the world of anti-abortion zealots. His ideas are connected to those that seek to distinguish between "forcible rape" and something else. Such dangerous delusions are central to so many of the misogynistic and ignorant tenets of the anti-abortion movement and to the sorts of ideologies that seek to downplay the frequency of sexual assault and defund the institutions that attempt to address sexual violence:

Arguments like his have cropped up again and again on the right over the past quarter century and the idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The push for a no-exceptions anti-abortion policy has for decades gone hand in hand with efforts to downplay the frequency with which rape- or incest-related pregnancies occur, and even to deny that they happen, at all. In other words, it's not just Akin singing this tune.

Amanda Marcotte explores similar evidence and ideas at The Prospect:

Akin’s comment should serve as a reminder that despite its sentimentality surrounding the fetus, the anti-choice movement is motivated by misogyny and ignorance about human sexuality. In this case, what underlies the rape-doesn’t-get-you-pregnant myth is the notion that sex is shameful and that slutty women will do anything—even send an innocent man to jail to kill a baby—in order to avoid facing the consequences of their actions.

 Akin's ideas are not a gaffe.

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One of the things I have heard men say innumerable times over the years is that the only difference between a creeper and a regular guy is whether the woman calling the bloke a creeper finds him attractive or not.

I can’t speak for all women—well, okay, I could but that would be ridiculous cause last time I looked I was only one woman—a woman who has had the odd pass made at her, er, I mean me, over the years. And, you know what? The ones who take no for an answer? Not creepy. The ones who keep pursuing me, staring at me, talking to me when I’ve made it clear I don’t want to talk to them, the ones who call me a bitch behind my back while still pursuing me? The ones who follow me home?

Creepers.

Women have made passes but they’ve never engaged in creeper behaviour. When I said I was not interested that was the end of it. Now, that’s just my experience. I know there are women creepers out there, too, just not in any where near the same kinds of numbers. For one thing most women are much better socialised at taking no for an answer.

Let me repeat: what’s creepy is not that someone I’m not attracted to is attracted to me. That’s just life. It’s been the other way round often enough. Most of us have suffered from unrequited love/lust. It’s awful, but we all get over it, and move on to people who requite our feelings.

That’s not the creepy part. The creepy part is when the person who is attracted to you won’t take no for an answer.

Think of Pride and Prejudice and Mr Collins’ proposal to Lizzy. He doesn’t give a damn what she thinks or what she says. He wants what he wants. He’s appalling. Everything he says is about him not his object of desire.¹ He doesn’t care about Lizzy. He can’t even see who Lizzy is. He repeatedly does not take no for an answer. It doesn’t fit with his narrative so it doesn’t compute.

That’s how I feel when some bloke won’t take my no for their answer. Like Mr Collins they can’t see me as an actual sentient human being with thoughts and feelings and desires of my own. They don’t care what I want. They only care about getting what they want.

So. Not. Sexy.

Also having to explain to a grown human being that they can’t always have what they desire? That just because they like someone doesn’t mean that someone is going to like them? Seriously? Aren’t we all supposed to understand that by the time we’re, like, three?

I would like to eat mangosteens every single day but I have learned to accept the fact that they are not in season every single day. That even when they are in season sometimes the weather means the crops are inadequate or destroyed. Sucks. And is clearly a major design flaw with how the world is. But, you know, that’s life. Full of disappointment.

Other things I want but cannot have: a sphynx cat,², to be taller, to play WNBA-level basketball, everyone in the universe to read my books, world peace, a pony.³

In conclusion: Um, I forget. For some reason I have this overwhelming craving for a mangosteen . . .

1. No matter how lukewarm that desire is.
2. We travel too much to have pets.
3. Oh, wait. I don’t want a pony. It’s John Scalzi who’s always going on about wanting a pony.

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It is almost impossible to avoid writing work that can be read as racist. If you’re writing about people, you’re writing about identity, and a huge part of identity is race.

We are all seen through the lens of race. We all see through the lens of race.¹ Whether we’re conscious of it or not. If you’re a writer you really need to be conscious of it. Because if you don’t think you are writing about race, you can wind up writing things visible to your readers that are not visible to you.

Often that is a not good thing.

When our work is accused of racism we writers tend to curl up into foetal position and get defensive: I AM NOT RACIST. I AM A GOOD PERSON. HOW CAN THEY SAY THAT?

First of all—no matter what the actual wording—it’s our work that’s being called racist, not us. The reviewer does not know us—only what we have written.

Secondly, we live in a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist etc. world. The odds of none of that leaking in to our work is zero. No matter how good our intentions. Besides intentions don’t count for much. If it’s not there on the page how is any reader supposed to guess what was in your head? On the other hand, there is no way you can completely bulletproof your work against criticism. Nor should you want to. Criticism will make you a better writer.

Thirdly, it’s not about us. It’s about the reader/reviewer’s life and experiences, about what they bring to the text in order to make meaning. This is how we all read and this is why we all have such different views of the same texts. It’s why I think Moby Dick is the worst, most boring piece of crap I’ve ever endured and why many people, even some whose views I respect,² think it is a work of genius.

We writers have to accept that despite due diligence, despite how careful we are, readers’ responses to our work are exactly that: their responses. They will not always read our carefully crafted, thoughtful words the way we want them to. Sometimes they will find meanings in our work we did not intend them to find.

What follows is a discussion of how I have dealt with having my last solo novel, Liar, criticised for racism and transphobia. If you have not read Liar there are spoilers, though I have kept them to a minimum. But here’s a cut anyway:

Racism and Liar

Liar was largely well-reviewed and won a bunch of awards, including one I’m extremely proud of,³ the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, which is given to a book “dealing with issues of race and ethnicity.”

It meant a lot to me because throughout my career, in every novel, every story, I have consciously written about identity and race. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and listening and writing and talking about race and racism.⁴ Those conversations, that reading, shaped Liar. Here was an award from a wonderful organisation recognising my hard work. And bonus: it was named for a novel by one of my favourite writers, Octavia Butler: Kindred.⁵

However, even if you are consciously writing about racism, in order to show how bad and wrong it is, your work can be read in ways you did not intend. This is especially likely if you are unfamiliar with the history of the people you are writing about, or the history of representation of that people.

Take a look at the outcry around Victoria Foyt’s Saving the Pearls. From reading the first chapter and looking at the promotional video I feel fairly confident in saying the author knows little about the history of blackface, or racial role reversal stories, or, indeed, of writing about race, racism and identity. Her intentions may well be good but she managed to step into every conceivable offensive stereotype. If you are unfamiliar with those stereotypes deploying them is almost inevitable.

Then again you can be familiar with those histories and debates and still stuff things up.

I was fairly certain when I wrote Liar that I had not stuffed things up. The book was vetted by many smart, knowledgeable writers, black and white, who I trusted to point out said stuff ups. For instance, we had long discussions about whether Micah would use the word “nappy” to describe her hair and if it was okay for me as a white writer to deploy the word. We agreed it was absolutely the word Micah would use.

It’s a word that many black people have come to embrace, which is why there are salons like Oh My Nappy Hair. However, just as many hate the word. It has a long history of being used as a negative, derogatory descriptor of black hair. Just think of what Don Imus said. It is particularly problematic when used by a white person.⁶ So while Micah is black, I’m not. I kept taking the word out and putting it back in right up to publication.

I’m proud of what I achieved and Liar is a book that has been important to many people. More than any of my other books people—of colour and white—have written to thank me for writing it, thanked me for representing them in ways they had never been represented before. Being thanked like that is extraordinarily heartening. It makes me feel like what I do is worthwhile.

But Liar also hurt people. If I take credit for the people for whom it worked then I also have to take blame for the people it harmed.

They, mostly, do not write to tell me so. I know about it because I have found, or others have pointed me to, blog posts about my book, which talk about Liar‘s racism. These are reviewers who know nothing about me or my politics, who have not read my blog where they would find that I write often about racism, that I think about it. They’ve picked up my book randomly with no context for me—other than my author photo—or the kind of books I write, and found it racist.

But, you know what, that’s how most people read books. Hell, that’s how I read books too. I rarely have any idea about the politics or ethics of the author. Not unless I’ve met them or have been reading them for years and read their blog, essays, interviews. But a brand new book I picked up? Not so much.

Books have to be able to stand on their own. I am a white woman who wrote a book about a black teenage girl who is a liar. There are a whole set of obvious assumptions about the book that stem from that fact. Assumptions that I was conscious of while writing the book and that I worked hard to counteract.

But for some readers I failed.

As we predicted my use of the word “nappy” was criticised. But not nearly as often as I thought it would be. Even so when I see people saying that the word hurt them I wish I hadn’t used it. Even though I still believe that it is absolutely the word that Micah would use.

Sapphires, Jezebels and the Tragic Mulatto

Some people were enraged by the cover image with the word LIAR emblazoned across a black woman. That’s one of the many reasons I did not want a representational cover for the book. In fact, that was the main criticism the book faced. Liar has an unreliable, lying, sexually active, possible-murderer protagonist who is a black woman. Here we go again. Why is it always black women who are liars? Who are violent, angry, and highly sexualised? Why are they always Jezebels or Sapphires?

Those are question I thought about a lot while writing the book. That’s one of the reasons all the main teenage characters are of colour. The murdered boy, Zach, is Hispanic. His best friend, Tayshawn, is African-American. So is Zach’s girlfriend, Sarah.

I also made sure Micah, Liar‘s protagonist, was not highly sexualised. When the book starts she’s (maybe) had sex with one person: Zach. Sex is important to the story, but I was very careful to make Micah no more sexualised than most teenage girls. She thinks about sex. She’s attracted to some people. She’s also way less sexually active than the two main male characters, Zach and Tayshawn. If anyone is slutty in my book it’s Zach, not Micah.⁷

I ran into the problem that he bar for being considered sexualised is way lower for a woman than for a man. And even lower for a black woman.

There is also the running metaphor about Micah and her family being an animal/beast. Again this has a long horrible history in depictions of black men and women. Which is why I made it something that comes from the white members of Micah’s family and why I made her mixed race. The other members of her family who identify with animals are her white grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts. Not her black father. There is in particular one white character, not a relative, who also identifies with animals in the same way that Micah does. I wanted to be very clear that this animality is not because Micah is black.

I also wanted to make it clear that part of her understanding of her sexual drive comes from her identification with those animals and how she imagines their sex drive to be. Again it’s not because she’s black.

But despite the fact that I did what I could to address those criticisms there were still those who read Micah as a racist caricature in a direct line of descent from the Jezebels and Sapphires.

There have also been a few readers who were struck by Sarah, the official girlfriend, being lighter-skinned than Micah the unofficial girlfriend. Except Sarah isn’t lighter-skinned than Micah. I worked hard to make it clear that Sarah is darker skinned than Micah for precisely the reasons those readers outline. I absolutely was not going to feed into the noxious notion that the darker your skin the more animal you are; the lighter your skin the more virtuous you are.

But they did not read the book that way despite my efforts.

When I first saw that criticism I was inclined to roll my eyes and complain about their crap reading skills. But is it their fault?

In Liar I was writing against centuries of racist misrepresentations of sexually-active, strong black women. We’ve been taught to read those women as having darker skin than the good girls. To value them less than the light-skinned girls.

To turn that on its head I had to be very, very careful and very, very clear. I went far enough for some readers but not for all. I’m the one who needs to do better. When you’re working on toxic ground created by centuries of racism you have to be very, very careful.

I believe it’s incredibly important to write against these stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes. Plus why can’t women of colour have as wide a range of representations as white men? No one looks at a book about a white man who’s an habitual liar and assumes that it’s a comment on all white men. I’ve never heard anyone complain that, say, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley is an indictment of all white men and clearly means they’re all psychopathic liars.⁸. White men never have to stand for their entire community.⁹

Then there’s the myth of the tragic mulatto, the mixed race woman who can pass as white, who is torn between two worlds, who is constantly victimised and has almost no agency, and always dies at the end of the story. She has to give up her black family and identify solely as white, though because she is not white, she can never truly succeed: and that is her tragedy.

This myth is entirely the creation of white writers. We white writers have been unhealthily obsessed with the tragedy of passing for centuries.

Any white person writing a character who passes white, really needs to think long and hard. They need to know everything they can about the myth of the tragic mulatto. They need to immerse themselves in black writing about identity. Funnily enough in novels by black writers where passing is part of the narrative the character who passes does not always have to give up all connections to black communities and family and they don’t always have a tragic end.¹⁰ For a fabulous YA example read Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl where the woman passing does so, not because she really wishes she was white, but for practical reasons: she wants to fly. Passing is the only way she can. She does not leave her family behind. Seriously, read Flygirl, it’s wonderful.

I was very determined that Micah not line up with the tragic mulatto. Micah’s father has a black father and a white mother, but he identifies as black largely out of a desire to have as little to do with his crazy white family as possible. Micah’s mother identifies as white though there are hints that she may not be entirely. She is estranged from her family.¹¹

Micah is relatively light-skinned, but unlike the tragic mulatto she cannot and would not pass as white. She identifies as black, not mixed race, or biracial. (This identification, like her father’s, is partly fuelled by her rejection of her extended white family’s illness and animal identification.) She is not torn between the world of whiteness and the world of blackness. She does not long to be white. She is not a passive victim. Spoiler: She does not die at the end of the book.

Yet some have read her that way despite all those lengths I went to in order to prevent that reading. Clearly, I need to go further and write clearer and better.¹²

It’s Much Harder for Black Writers

I’d like to point out that my black writer friends cop way more criticism for all of this than I do.¹³ They are constantly being asked why their books can’t be more uplifting. Why do they have to depict the negative aspects of black life? Why can’t the girls they write about be good girls? And the boys dutiful, law-abiding, and church going? Why do these black writers hate their race?

No one has ever asked me why I’ve written white characters who are not perfect: who lie and steal and murder. I’ve never once been asked why I hate my race.

No one reads Moby Dick and wonders why all white men are obsessed with killing whales.¹⁴

This is why it’s such a huge problem that there are a million more books about white people than about black and brown people published in the USA and Australia.¹⁵ It means every single character of colour bears the weight of representing their entire race. If there were more representations, more variety in those representations, and if there were way more books by people of colour, it would be way less of a big deal.¹⁶ This also applies to movies and television and pretty much all art, ever.

If we lived in that world Micah would not be read as standing for all black girl teens. She’d just be Micah.

Transphobia

One set of criticism of Liar that I did not anticipate and therefore did nothing to address was that Liar depicts a trans character who is a liar, mentally unstable, and identifies with animals and that therefore Liar is transphobic. There is a long history of trans characters being depicted as psycho killers. A famous example is Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.

This reading concludes that Micah is a trans character because early on in the book she pretends to be a boy. She does this because she is mistaken for a boy and thinks why not go with it?¹⁷ Within two days she’s found out and she only lasts that long because she stays out of most people’s way. After she’s found to be a girl—again because she’s not good at passing—she claims to be an hermaphrodite.

I intended both lies to be opportunist, plucked-from-the-air lies. As is her next lie that her father is an arms dealer. Micah gets more pleasure from people believing fantastical lies than from relatively easy lies.

She also makes this claim very early on in the novel:

I’m undecided, stuck somewhere in between, same way I am with everything: half black half white; half girl half boy; coasting on half a scholarship.

I’m half of everything.

This is the main passage that gets quoted by people who read Micah as trans.

Here’s what I intended with that passage: I meant it to be read as Micah being self-aggrandising and overly dramatic. Very much part of the m.o. of an habitual liar.

She start with the claim of being “half black half white” then moves to “half girl half boy.” Those are large claims in terms of identity: our race and our gender are two of the fundamentals. But where does she go next? To class? Ethnicity? Sexuality? Religion?

No, to the fact that she doesn’t have a full scholarship. Which is not only not the same kind of claim. It undoes the drama of the previous claims. It’s as if she were to say, “I’m strong! I’m smart! I collect tiny tea cups with lizards painted on them!” One of these is not like the others. It was meant to be wryly funny. I am aware that very few people got that joke. I failed.

A friend, who was a scholarship kid, read Micah’s claim as being very matter of fact. As shorthand for saying she was halfway between the rich kids and the poor kids. Which is a very big claim about identity, specifically about class.

I’m embarrassed I didn’t see either of those alternative readings.

I did not intend to write Micah as someone who feels like a boy trapped in a girl’s body. Micah strongly identifies as a girl, just one who is not especially good at fitting the various stereotypes of femininity. And, yes, that is something I took from my own life. When I was a teenager I felt the same way.¹⁸ I was also once mistaken for a boy. Micah, like I was, is amused that anyone would think she was a boy. She thinks it’s fun to run with it to see how long she can get away with the trick. She gets away with it longer than I did. I was busted as soon as I said something.

Notice, of course, that I’m talking about what I intended. Readers are not privy to my intentions. They’re not mindreaders. They’re coming to my work with their own life experiences.

As someone who is not trans, and has known very few trans people in my life, and none of them particularly well, it did not cross my mind that anyone would read Micah as trans. My cisgendered privilege made me completely unable to see that reading of my novel until it was pointed out. I could see only what I intended.

Were I to write Liar now I would write that part of it differently. Not because I want to lock in one true reading of the book—that’s not possible or desirable—but because clarity is always worth striving for.

A singular reading is not desirable because art exists only in the interaction between the text—whether that text is a poem, a book, a graphic novel, a song, a sculpture, a painting, a movie, or whatever—and the reader. If everyone responded to our work in exactly the same way we would be living in a blasted cultural hellscape of total boredom.

Those readings of Liar and the anger and hurt expressed has made me find out more about trans politics.

I was familiar with some of the absurd arguments around whether transwomen can be part of feminism or not given that some feminists argued they were not “real” women and thus could not understand patriarchal oppression because once they were patriarchal oppressors. Pro tip: any argument that employs the word “real” to qualify identity is always going to be a rubbish argument, whether they’re trying to define who’s a real woman/man/black/white/Star Trek fan/gamer or whatever. But I knew little beyond that.

Three years ago, when Liar was published, I was unfamiliar with the term “cisgender.” When I was at university the term used was “gender normative” and, from what I can tell, it did not have the range or nuance of “cisgender.” I still feel awkward using it because it’s still a new term for me.

I have been reading and talking about feminist and sexual and racial politics for decades now. I feel confident about writing across that terrain though I am, of course, still stuffing up, still learning. I do not have anywhere near that level of knowledge or comprehension when it comes to trans politics.

I will be reading and listening for a long time to come.

In Conclusion

For those of you have not thought much about any of these questions, I hope laying out these examples, showing you my thinking in writing them, and the critiques that have been made, give you a sense of what is at stake and why it matters. Why you should be thinking and reading about identity and politics.

No matter how thoughtful you are about race, gender, sexuality, class etc. etc. there will always be readers who will read your work in exactly the ways you were working hard to avoid. If you write racist characters their actions and words will be read by some as proof of you-the-writer’s racism.

But that’s good. It keeps us writers awake to just how hard our job is, just how much work has to be done to change the world we live in to make those readings impossible.

We cannot use “it’s too hard”, “I’ll be criticised” as an excuse not to write ambitious books, not to write thoughtfully about thorny issues of identity. Doing so is our job. Yes, even when writing comedy. Yes, even when writing a book with only white people in it. White is a race. White has a history. So does white supremacy. There is, in fact, a whole field of study: “whiteness studies” that you should have a look at. Toni Morrison’s collection of essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a great place to start.

Always do your research. Here’s a page of links to useful posts on writing about race. If you’re writing about black people, even if you are black, read black writers. As Chauncey de Vega puts it:

Please people, I am begging you, stop mentioning that damn essay [Peggy McIntosh’s "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege"]: deferring to white people’s expertise when talking about racism is itself an act of white privilege and white supremacy. Start with Du Bois, and other people of color before you become giddy with the “discovery” of white privilege. Black and brown folks were doing it better, first, and many years before the Invisible Knapsack of Privilege first circulated on these Internets.

On the other hand, it’s also good to know our limits. I will not be writing a trans character any time soon because I simply do not know enough. As I said I’m very early in the research phase and I’d love to get more recommendations for good books by trans people.

None of this is easy. We all get it wrong. I hope my examination of Liar above shows you just how hard it is. But I hope, too, you can see how worthwhile it is. And how getting defensive and putting your head in the sand helps no one least of all the writer that you aspire to become.

For me that is the joy of what I do: striving always to be a better writer.¹⁹

TL;DR: When writing about identity you will stuff up about race/gender/class/sexuality/etc etc. Do not let that stop you doing due diligence. Write the best you can, as thoughtfully and well-researched as you can. Be ambitious. Learn from your mistakes. Listen to criticism. Keep writing.

1. Yes, even if you think you don’t see a person’s race.
2. Hello, Megan!
3. Which is not to say I wasn’t proud of the other awards. I was and am!
4. I touch on why I have so doggedly wrestled with issues around race and racism in these posts.
5. If you haven’t read Kindred or any other books by Butler, DO SO. Genius.
6. Though it is by no mean only white people who get called out for using the word. Look at the controversy over Carolivia Herron’s book, Nappy Hair.
7. I kind of wanted to hug the readers who commented on that.
8. Co-incidentally—or not, really—Highsmith was a big influence on Liar.
9. Yes, there are many more than one white community. But, guess what? There are loads of different black communities too.
10. In Nella Larsen’s Passing for instance the character passing has a double who does not pass, which cuts across the grain of the familiar white version of the story.
11. Putting it like that I suddenly realise that perhaps Micah’s mother qualifies as a tragic mulatto. Crap.
12. That sentence DOES NOT break grammar rules. And even if it does I did it ON PURPOSE. #stupidpedants
13. And to make it doubly unfair, white writers like me also tend to get more praise for writing black characters than they do.
14. Or with writing overly long really boring books about men who are obsessed with whales. With white whales no less.
15. The two countries I know the most about.
16. Notice the “of” there in “it would be way less of a big deal”? That’s a USian extraneous “of” what we Australians don’t use. See? I am a USian-Australian! Bilingual, me.
17. It was also a sly reference to Scott’s Leviathan books, which he was writing at the same, where Derryn is passing as a boy in order to serve in the armed forces. Having grown up on books like Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders, I have always wanted to write the classic girl-pretending-to-be-a-boy-in-order-to-do-something-cool novel. So far Liar‘s as close as I’ve gotten.
18. Sometimes I still feel that way.
19. Thank you, Doselle Young, for your notes on this post and for the conversation over the years that led to it. You are the best.

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Kelly over at Stacked just wrote a powerful post on being a woman and speaking your mind. If you haven't already, head right over and read it. I'll wait for you. *quietly scrolling through tweets*

Ah, good. You're back. Kelly has a couple of, oh, ten or twenty cogent points, eh?  She is speaking truth to power - and to us.

The issues of gender and power, girls and power and the destructive subtlety of people speaking and working against women who wish to be themselves and self-directed has been a lifelong concern of mine. As a young fire-brand librarian I was active in Women Library Workers, a feminist library network and support group that now is in an embers stage of it's existence. I have stood down from much of my active work but I have never believed for a nano-second that we are in a "post-feminist" age.

My partner is a guy with a voice pitch that is slightly higher than encountered in most guys. He has spent considerable time on the phone in his jobs. When men on the other end of the phone mistakenly think they are talking to a women, to a man, they are patronizing, dismissive, abrupt and sassy. When the person on the other end thinks my partner is a man, he is treated completely differently.  This has been a conversational topic between us for over thirty years. "Post-feminist age," my eye.

When Kelly talks about the expectations that men and women have for women and girls I hear her talking. As I commented on her blogpost: "I was reminded of a photo going around FB where Jada Pinkett Smith was asked why she let her daughter shave her head. Pinkett Smith wrote, 'The question why I would LET Willow cut her hair. First the LET must be challenged. This is a world where women, girls are constantly reminded that they don't belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power, or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit, and her mind are HER domain. Willow cut her hair because her beauty, her value, her worth is not measured by the length of her hair. It's also a statement that claims that even little girls have the RIGHT to own themselves and should not be a slave to even their mother's deepest insecurities, hopes, and desires. Even little girls should not be a slave to the preconceived ideas of what a culture believes a little girl should be.' "

This spring I attended a wonderful and enpowering unconference at UW-Milwaukee called "Out of the Attic and into the Stacks: Feminism and LIS". Lots of students and lots of old-guard feminist librarians. It was great to be around that living timeline of  feminist librarians. One question that came up from the students to the vets was, "How do you bring feminism into your work?"

This is what I said: You bring feminism into your work every day in every way. By making sure that you purchase and display materials that highlight strong women and gentle men; that open up the hidden contributions of women and that highlight girls as strong and not just frilly.  You do programs that empower girls but also don't shut out either gender. When girls come in to your library, you compliment not their hair or clothes but tell them they are looking strong or tall or smart today. The messages that we give - no matter how small - matter.

We need to stand strong together on these issues of women and girls and power. It does make a difference and will make a difference for decades to come. But we have to commit to doing the support every day in every way.

Image: 'Superhero'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/51336161@N02/5416260011 Found on flickrcc.net

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Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. I was a junior in high school that year and I wish I could say I was with it enough to know about the book but I didn’t even know who Margaret Atwood was back then. Not until I got to college and took a literature by women class did I learn about her. We did not read Handmaid’s Tale in that class. Instead, we read Surfacing and Cat’s Eye. Surfacing is tied for first with Alias Grace as my favorite Atwood book. Over the years I have managed to read Atwood’s poetry, a good many of her essays, and all but two of her novels, The Robber Bride and The Handmaid’s Tale.

I don’t know why I waited so long to read Handmaid’s Tale especially since I went to the dark side in college and became a feminist. Maybe it is because the book became so very popular and for awhile, especially when the movie came out (I did see that) everyone was reading the book. I am not generally accused of hopping onto bandwagons, so I stood aside and watched it drive on by. And after that it just became one of those books I needed to get to.

Well, I finally got to it. I was kind of disappointed. I liked the book and everything, don’t get me wrong. I found it intense and frightening, a story that is still all too possibly real. The writing is good, the story moves along and I found myself fearing for the safety of Offred. I hated the ending. That might be a big part of my disappointment. When I closed the book I had a “that’s all?” sort of feeling. I was expecting more, something bigger, something more damning of the way women are treated. But the style of the book, while not a diary, is diary-like and sort of documentary in a way. And even though I had feared for Offred, I didn’t get an emotional payoff at the end. Having the final chapter be a conference in the future on the history of what happened during the time of the book featuring a discussion on the provenance of the “tale” I had just read is such a bland way to wrap things up. The end needed punch, something like Orwell’s 1984 where Winston ends up loving Big Brother. Not that I want Offred to end loving the totalitarian state of Gilead, but something with a bit of oomph would have been more satisfactory.

Ending aside, Atwood does a fantastic job of creating Gilead and of explaining how it all came about. What resonated most for me was this simple bit:

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

Isn’t that how a good many horrors happen? These lines made me think of WWII and the people living practically next door to concentration camps who said they had no idea what was going on. I like to think I would notice something like a concentration camp or even the small changes towards a totalitarian society but when I read books like Handmaid’s Tale there is a small part of me that worries I wouldn’t notice, that I would ignore. I don’t know what I fear more, the possibility of being a person who ignores or living in a society like Gilead.

The book isn’t all doom and gloom, well it is, but there are moments of wry Atwood humor:

The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen.

“Pen Is Envy” Ha!

The Handmaid’s Tale has made its way onto high school and college reading lists. I am very glad for that because it seems a good book to foster discussion about women, religion, and politics. The book is jam-packed with juicy discussable things from the big and obvious to the small and subtle. I will leave you with one of my favorite subtle bits, one that gives me a chill every time I read it:

Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Now I suppose I should get around to reading Robber Bride so I can be all caught up on Atwood novels. Perhaps a book to put on my 2013 reading goals list.

Filed under: Books, Feminism, Margaret Atwood, Reviews

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On this the first day of Women's History month, the issues of gender and power are much on my mind.

Hi Miss Julie just wrote one of the most powerful posts I have read on the issue of the politics of this power and how woman are pushed towards silence. She turns a burning light on this in particular in her own life and then in relation to the world of children's work within librarianship.

This post links directly with her earlier post on recognition and youth work. For those in youth work who read this earlier post's comments section, it was stunning how utterly and completely some of the comments missed and blew past the point of her post. Dear Abby advice on how to "put yourself out there" wasn't where Julie's post was going. My read was she was calling out the larger world of librarianship for the disregard and disrespect for the marvelous and powerful work youth librarians are doing (although one commenter insisted that youth librarians don't really do anything innovative...oh, why yes, that *is* the sound of my teeth grinding).

There have been some ugly bullying of women bloggers, FBers and tweeters in the recent past - most swirl around the picayune-ness; the paltry-ness; the unimportance of our concerns - from Arcgate to our observations on how we appropriate cultural touchpoints. It's ok to provide book recommendations for another librarian's offspring but shut-up will you in the world of politics and opinion. Smile and be nice.

It is the subtle and not so subtle pushing women back and down - and in youth work, where our clientele is devalued because of their powerlessness in the larger society, we work under the burden of powerlessness by association in the eyes of some in our profession. Is it reflective of the larger society that so devalues women by insisting our little minds can't handle our own decisions on our lady parts? That continues to put roadblocks to upward mobility and insists that we need to be uber people that parent, work, achieve, clean, and look fetching and smile, smile , smile all the time? Um, yes.


The discussions on blogs and twitter have been painful and eye-opening. Here are some of the links that have particularly made me think deeply and know I - and many other women and youth library workers - are not entirely nuts in thinking "What the deuce is going on with our colleagues?" I thank Kelly Jensen and Sophie Brookover for some of these links.

Kelly over at Stacked
Kristin at Action Librarian
Ingrid at Magpie Librarian
Nicolas at information.games 
Justin at Beerbrarian
Me (I know this is so self-regarding)

There are more posts out there on the issues of women and librarianship, power and gender. Please share and let's keep this conversation going. These are issues of long standing, my friends, and battles that have been going on since long before I was a SLIS student and young librarian decades ago (I'll share those stories another day). I am just discouraged that 40 years later, we see the same poor behaviors.

Gender matters. Being supportive matters. Making sure there is an interlocutor between brain and mouth or fingertips matters. Let's get started on supporting each other and celebrating the work we all do on behalf of varied clienteles. Nobody is better than anybody. We are all in this together. Like that.

Image: 'The Hidden Beauty!'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/44345361@N06/5929570738 Found on flickrcc.net

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That's the way it feels to me lately. The issue of gender in librarianship, especially as it relates to those of us who work in youth librarianship, has been sleepily in the background for a long time.

A number of issues that have cropped up recently have brought the subject back to the forefront and women and men are standing up and saying, "Whoa! Wait! Stop!" "Let's back up here and get real again!". It feels as if powerful people who have long been sleeping are once again awakening and looking around - and want to claim -or reclaim -some power that has long been lost or trivialized.

Part of the discussion has been in the blogosophere; part on twitter and part on a librarian group on Facebook, Think Tank. What started in a somewhat rancorous way is building to something slightly different - an open and honest exploration of the roots of discourse on gender in librarianship. People are talking, exploring and sharing.

Kate Kosturski over at Librarian Kate blog has written two posts in the last few days tracing the scholarly research on gender and librarianship (here and here) and they are fascinating.  Her part 3 will be on youth librarianship as it relates to gender issues.  Please read the posts and consider sharing your experiences of gender bias in youth work with her at librariankate7578 at gmail dot com. I think we need to read more.

I can imagine the research is might thin on this topic. Other than recent blog posts , some of which I cited in my last post,  I have seldom read of youth librarianship and bias issues in my almost 40 years in the business. What there is probably was probably published in small presses and gathered in the marvelous Alternative Library Literature anthologies (edited by Jim Danky and Sandy Berman) of the '80s through early part of this century.

I, for one, am glad we're waking up to have this discussion.

Image: 'Open wide.....'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2884630721 Found on flickrcc.net

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In this, the 10th Oxford Comment, Lauren and Michelle investigate what makes a classic beauty icon, learn about appearance-based discrimination, talk body politics, and discover the threads that tie fashion to beauty.

Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

You can also look back at past episodes on the archive page.

Featured in this episode:

Historian, archaeologist, and classical scholar, Duane W. Roller is emeritus professor  at Ohio State University and the author of eight books, the most recent of which is Cleopatra: A Biography. Read his OUPblog posts here.

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Deborah L. Rhode is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and Director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University. She is the author or editor of over twenty books, including The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law.

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Margitte Leah Kristjansson is a PhD student in communication at UCSD whose work is situated within the emerging field of fat studies. She is interested in all things fat, and blogs about her interests at margitteleah.com and riotsnotdiets.tumblr.com. Margitte recently completed a documentary on fat female bodies and visibility available for viewing here.

Jessica Jarchow is a body acceptance activist in San Diego, CA. When she’s not blogging at 0 Comments on The Oxford Comment: Episode 6 – BEAUTY! as of 1/1/1900