Philosophy

Birthday Meditations on a Beatles Song

Heather Rose Jones — Thu, 12 May 2022 23:16:09 +0000

Thursday, May 12, 2022 - 16:16

For those of us of a Certain Age, who grew up in a Certain Cultural Context, there is a birthday that comes with a default soundtrack.

When I get older losing my hair, many years from now

Some sentiments in the song mark the point of view as strongly gendered—and gendered within certain specific cultural expectations.

Will you still need me?

The speaker assumes that the value they provide will eventually decline—

Will you still feed me?

--while the listener is not granted the respite of age. Nuturing and service are expected to continue.

If I’d been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door?

And only the speaker is framed as socializing freely outside the home, with the expectation that this will be tolerated. The queries and images assume a highly specific life script.

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear; we shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee

Knowing the authors, this image of respectable working-class conventionality carries an inescapable edge of satire, but a kindly satire. And today—both in the British society that spawned it, and in my own American society—the image of an idyllic, relaxing retirement in which only a little scrimping and saving is necessary to enjoy a few pleasures is out of reach for too many. Retirement age creeps upward and the equivalent of a summer cottage on the Isle of Wight may be only a fantasy. Even for those of us with traditional retirement plans, nothing is certain.

You'll be older too, and if you say the word, I could stay with you

How many people still assume that they will find a relationship in which you can expect to grow old together? My parents, and both sets of my grandparents all celebrated 50th wedding anniversaries. As a lesbian, I always knew that the legal system would deny me even the theoretical possibility of achieving the same feat. But that paradigm was always what I measured my life against and found it wanting.

I can be handy, mending a fuse...I can knit a sweater by the fireside...Sunday [usually Saturday] mornings go for a ride...Doing the garden, digging the weeds

It’s a good life. Truly it is.

Who could ask for more?

Yes. Yes, sometimes I could.

Will you still need me?

I do, you know, want to be needed—or if not “needed”, at least valued. One of my persistent psychological failure modes is the belief that I must provide value to people in order to find social acceptance. It doesn’t matter how often people assure me it’s not the case, this is a fixed part of my personality and unlikely to change.

Will you still feed me?

Feeding takes a lot of different forms. Nutrition is far from the most important way we feed each other.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view

I’m bad at the whole spontaneous casual communication thing. I remember, when I was much younger, coming near to having panic attacks at the thought of contacting someone out of the blue without a specific purpose “just to chat”. How did people do that? Social media makes it easier today (and I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if the internet had existed when I was young), but throughout my life I’ve tended to drift away from people if there wasn’t a structural context that brought us together. It’s on me; it’s not other people’s job to telepathically determine that I’d like to keep in contact. And social media still defaults to passive consumption, rather than interaction, much of the time. I’ve always hoped that being a “content creator” would fulfill my part of the reaching process and inspire people to drop me a line (see previous comment about being valuable).

Yours sincerely, wasting away

But all in all, it’s a good life. And I’m not sure it would have been possible for me to take any road but the one I’m walking.

Mine for evermore

Birthdays can be a time for taking stock—for looking backward and forward. For asking those eternal questions.

Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

(With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

Major category:

Thinking

Tags:

Philosophy

View comments (0)

Blog at Bella: An Asexual Author Contemplates Writing Sex Scenes

Heather Rose Jones — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 21:56:36 +0000

Thursday, October 29, 2020 - 14:56

I wrote something for Ace Awareness Week and my publisher hosted it on their blog. This is highly relevant to some non-Alpennia-novel writing projects I'm currently poking at.

Update 2025-03-09: I happened to check this link and discovered it gets a 404-not found reply. So I'm reproducing the article below.

An asexual author contemplates writing sex scenes

Asexual author, Heather Rose Jones, discusses sex scenes, asexuality, and writing.

When I made the choice not to write on-page sex in the was a major step toward recognizing my own asexuality. Oddly enough, the short story that is likely to be my first foray into writing on-page sex features Antuniet, precisely because I want to explore her experiences as an ace-spectrum character.

Now we get to the second part of the crux of my conflict. Reading a book is not getting married. It’s not making a lifetime exclusive commitment. It might be the equivalent of going out on a first date. It’s more often the equivalent of making a friend. And when I hear people say, “I’m not interested in reading books that don’t have explicit sex” I don’t hear “I could never envision myself marrying someone if we were never going to have sex,” I hear “I won’t have coffee with you unless we’re going to have sex.” I hear, “I can’t imagine being friends with someone if we haven’t been lovers first.” (Actual quote from the first woman I dated.)

So when I contemplate writing sex scenes in my books because “it’s what the readers want,” there’s a level on which it hits me the same as dating someone who demands that I have sex with them because it’s what they want, regardless of what I want. I have chosen to have sex within relationships for reasons other than actively desiring sex. I’ve been berated and mocked on other occasions for choosing not to have sex—or even for objecting to being symbolically sexualized, whether for humorous purposes or to “go along with the gang.”

That all gets tangled up with my writing process. If I write a sex scene, I want it to be because I have chosen to do so for narrative purposes. I don’t want it to be to avoid being mocked and disparaged as an author. To avoid getting reviews that say “Loved the writing but took two stars off for no sex.” And when I do write a story that has on-page sex, I never want to feel that the book’s quality is being judged by that fact alone. We talk a lot about consent in relationships these days. I want to feel that my consent to the act (of writing) is respected. And until I believe that is the case, I will approach the topic of writing sex scenes with very complicated feelings.

Major category:

Writing Process

Tags:

writing

Philosophy

View comments (0)

Stock image:

Alpennia Logo

15 Years: Is it that Long?

Heather Rose Jones — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 14:51:29 +0000

Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 07:51

Today, my department at work is taking me out for a lunch celebrating my 15 year anniversary at the company. My plan and goal (knock on wood) is to be here to celebrate my 20 year anniversary and ideally to retire at some point shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether my career path is at all typical of my generation, but it’s certainly different from that of my parents’ generation and feels different from how my younger friends talk about career expectations. So I thought it might be amusing to set out exactly what my work history has been (with all the serial numbers carefully filed off).

When I graduated college with a BS in a life science, my initial thought was to find a job in the same town where the university was located. Something doing research, perhaps. The why is lost to time, but probably it was just a matter of not having a clear idea what to do next and that was one way to narrow the possibilities down to a manageable level. But I was a practical sort, so the first goal was to get a job, any job, to enable me to continue my career search. That’s how I ended up working in fast food. For a month. Not that the job drove me away, but by the end of that month, one of my housemates had recommended me for a position at his workplace, which had the advantage of being 40 hours a week and better pay. And that’s how I ended up working in mobile home construction. I believe that was for six months. I was continuing my more science-oriented job search through it all, but people with life science skills looking for entry level positions are a glut on the market in a university town. So when an opportunity offered itself for a “wanderjahr” in the UK, I decided it was a good opportunity—one I might never have again.

That opportunity involved room and board in exchange for…well, what it was supposed to be in exchange for was not quite what the expectations turned out to be. (Nothing horrible, but lots of emotional labor in addition to the economic productivity.) I’d originally gone thinking I might be there for a year. I stuck it out for two months, after which I still had enough money to do a further month of sightseeing before heading back home. (The job there did not include pay, so this was money saved up from the construction job.)

Heading literally “home” since I defaulted back to my parents’ house at that point. The life sciences job search began anew, but once I’d gotten a sense of the job market, I decided that the best pickings were going to be in the SF Bay Area. Fortunately I had relatives I could stay with there. I think it was about half a year’s searching to find a job. I’ve never been substantially jobless since then. That job was with a small private clinical lab (doing medical testing for doctors unaffiliated with hospitals). Mostly I did “chief cook and bottle washer” work, washing glassware, preparing media in petri dishes, running the blood chemistry analyzer. I also learned phlebotomy (taking blood samples) and did some of the morning rounds of the care homes that we serviced. I have stories. After a couple years there, I realized that the only step up in that organization was to get certified as a medical technician and perform the more complicated analytic work. And that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So back to job hunting, though not with any urgency.

The first interview I went to, I was offered the position at the end of the interview. I rushed back to give my boss notice (he was about to go on vacation), found a new place to live, and moved, all in the space of two weeks. That job was at a university-affiliated lab where I mostly worked with lab animals. The job lasted a couple years until the lab was defunded, but a former boss had a lead on a position with her new employer (a start-up biotech company) and I barely had to interview before I was hired. This is something of a continuing motif. I seem to be good at making an impression on the people who hire me.

The biotech company gave me opportunities to learn a lot of new lab skills and my second boss there was delighted to have me tackle database projects, SOP writing, and assorted other skill-accumulation opportunities. I enjoyed the work, impressed the management, and even got a company award. I might have been happy to stay there for quite a while, but two things intervened. One was that I’d been thinking more and more about tackling the intellectual challenge of graduate school—not in the life sciences (which is where I would have been steered if I’d done it right out of college), but in linguistics, as an outgrowth of my historic interests. So I’d investigated the possibilities at a local university and was taking some classes through extension to beef up my application. The second thing? I’d been at the biotech company for 7 years when my employer hit a snag in getting their product approved, resulting a quarter of the company getting laid off. I was laid off and laughed all the way through my exit interview because I was getting 6 months’ severance instead of worrying about when to give notice. I had some mild anxiety during the few months between being laid off and getting my grad school acceptance, but in the mean time, personal connections had landed me a job at a small fiction magazine that would be the perfect half-time job to go along with my academics.

The magazine job filled the next three years until I felt my professional development called for switching to student instructor jobs. Those carried me through the remaining (painful, many) years of grad school until I’d maxed out my eligibility for teaching positions, which meant it was time to hand in my dissertation and return to the Real World. I’d entered grad school thinking in terms of an academic career, but during the (*cough* eleven *cough*) years I was in school, the academic job market had shifted from promising to abysmal and I recalibrated my expectations. I was in my 40s, I was part owner of a house, I owned a lot of stuff™ that I didn’t want to be moving every year until I’d racked up enough short-term positions to maybe earn a tenure-track job somewhere. I said goodbye to the dream of academia and for the first time in 20 years found myself seriously worrying about being unemployed.

On the other hand, I had a lot of possible directions to go. I had experience in biotech, in teaching, in publishing, in writing…and after only a couple months of searching, I landed the perfect intersection of those skills: technical writing and editing for the documentation department of a pharmaceutical company. It was a temp job for a crunch project and the contract was up after I’d been there for five months. I liked the location. I liked the work environment. So I asked my agency rep to see if he could find me something else. Evidently my manager told people I walked on water, because I got a call from another manager saying, “I don’t really have time to do interviews, so can you just start next month?” I didn’t worry about asking what the job entailed; I said yes. And that’s how I landed a job that was even more perfect for my skillset and one I never even knew existed. (Discrepancy investigation.) The job turned permanent after four months and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since (with several promotions). There have been a couple times when I've looked into lateral moves in the company, but when it comes down to it, I love what I'm doing and I'm damned good at it.

It’s not as continuous a career path as a previous generation would have expected. It wasn’t until my present job that I had anything resembling a decent retirement plan. And 15 years is more than twice as long as I've been at any other single job. But it’s a more solid path than many of my contemporaries have enjoyed. And having a retirement plan at all is more than most people expect these days. (Retirement planning is on my mind a lot these days.) Those are just the salaried jobs. There’s also been the writing: not high paying, but fairly regular and varied. The thread through it all is broad-based technical knowledge and language skills. Sometimes the emphasis has been on one, sometimes on the other. Being able to combine them ended up being the secret to my success.

It occurs to me, in this month of graduations and students wondering what they'll do with their lives: none of the major turns of my career path are anything I would have (or even could have) predicted that day I stood at the end of a very long line of black-robed graduates to receive my diploma. (They graduated my whole division in a lump, grouped alphabetically by major. My major was Zoology.) You don't need to know what all the branches of your path will be. The important thing is to start walking and be ready for whatever comes your way.

Major category:

Thinking

Tags:

Philosophy

View comments (0)

Stock image:

Alpennia Logo

Nuances of Genre Labels

Heather Rose Jones — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 22:10:08 +0000

Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - 15:10

A Note on Commenting

Before getting into the topic of today's post, I wanted to mention that I'm currently dealing with the disappearance of my previous comment-spam filter (Mollom) and my web gurus and I are trying out some new approaches. Unfortunately, the one we're currently trying still lets about a dozen spam comments through every day that need to be manually whacked. So I've temporarily set all comments to manual approval, which means that there may be a few hours delay between posting and approval. (Given that I get an average of one "real" comment per week as compared to the dozens of spam comments per day, this isn't likely to even be noticeable, much less annoying. But just in case...)

My goal is to have 1) No spam comments get through (because they tend to be nasty things with malicious links or at best porn/viagara/etc. links); 2) No captcha requirements (because I know your opinions on these); and 3) Allow for the optimistic possibility that real-time conversations might occur on occasion (so the current manual approval is not optimal). One possibility would be to block all comments that have live links in them. (Sometimes my real commenters leave links, but they could be text-only and be relatively functional.) Another possibility would be to allow people to set up guest accounts on the website and then let people with accounts comment without manual approval. The website software has this functionality, but I don't know how people would feel about needing yet one more online account to do something they're used to doing more easily. One approach that I've absolutely vetoed is the "use your fb or twitter account to comment" approach because I don't want to require my commenters to link their activity here to Big Brother's attention.

At any rate, if you run into any oddities, that's likely what's going on (and if you spot a spam comment, don't worry, I'll smash it).

The Main Event

I may very well have posted something on this in the past--sometimes I forget whether I've actually written about something or only thought it through. Having literary interests that cut across a number of different communities from various angles, I'm fascinated by the nuances of genre labels that purport to indicate the same concept. In this case: books focused on women who love women. And being a cognitive linguist, I've paid close attention to the ways people use the various terms: the contexts they're used in, the subsets of material they're applied to, and especially the types of books people will most closely associate with them when they're being unselfconsious about genre categories.

This is not a rigorous scientific study, but these are my general conclusions about the functional meanings of several of these terms. The fascinating thing is that if people are discussing their meanings self-consciously, you usually get claims that they all mean the same thing and cover the same scope of books. And it's true that any of these terms can be used for almost every book that features a female character who has romantic or sexual interest in women. But it's sort of like when people are trying to define the category "filk music".[*] You'll certainly hear people say, "Anything someone performs at a filk sing is filk. End of story." But when you pay attention to how people use the word across a large corpus of examples, it's clearly more particular and nuanced (though far from unanimous) than that. So I'm interested in the meanings that emerge from usage, not the definitions the words can be forced into.

[*] If the word "filk" is unfamiliar to you, don't worry about it too much. Or Google it. You may be fascinated.

The terms I'm going to talk about today (though far from all of them in use) are: lesfic, f/f, wlw, queer [applied to books], LGBTQ+ [applied to books]. Append the hedge "in my perception based on how I've encountered the term" to everythign I post below. I'm not going to repeat it for every statement. The descriptions below are prototype feature clusters, not hard-and-fast "necessary and sufficient conditions." (See comment about working from a cognitive linguistics framework.)

Lesfic - The core meaning focuses around the presence of the following characteristics: Protagonist(s) is clearly identified in-story as a lesbian or bisexual woman. Protagonist(s) is not in a romantic or sexual relationship with a man within the scope of the story. There is a default expectation that the author will be female and identify as queer in some fashion and that the publisher will primarily focus on the lesfic genre (unless self-published). The most prototypical members of this category will be contemporary realistic erotic romance. In general, the more differences there are from that prototype (e.g., non-contemporary, or paranormal rather than realistic, or non-erotic, or non-romantic mystery/thriller/etc.) the less likely readers will be to reflexively consider a book lesfic. (As demonstrated by things like spontaneous inclusion as examples.) To some extent, the term lesfic is associated with reader communities in which the majority of members (though not all) self-identify as lesbian. It is not uncommon for someone who identifies as a lesfic reader to read primarily or solely within that genre and to be unaware of or uninterested in books from large publishers even when they include lesbian content.

F/F - This label comes out of the terminology of fan fiction, indicating "female /female" as contrasted with m/m=male/male, or f/m=female/male, or other possible combinations and longer strings. In general, the term implies that a story is focused centrally on a sexual relationship that is usually, although not necessarily, also romantic. F/f can also encompass stories about isolated sexual encounters by women who don't identify as lesbian or bi. The use of this category label creates an expectation of some degree of erotic content. It is very common for authors who identify their work with an f/f label also write stories about other gender pairings. (And, in general, when an author who writes across a spectrum of gender pairs writes a story about two women, they are more likely to identify it as "an f/f story" than as, for example, "a lesfic story".) The use of f/f tends to imply a character-focused genre work, though the genre may be romance, mystery, sff, paranormal, etc. There is no specific expectation as to the gender or sexual orientation of either the author or reader of a work identified as f/f. The use of the term f/f in relation to publisher type is complex. Within category romance, I rarely see it used to describe books from major publishers, but major romance publishers rarely if ever publish romances involving two women. It's used for romances published by small presses or self-published. I do see it used sometimes for books from major sff publishers, and it's used for small/self-published books in all genres.

WLW - I have seen statements that this particular term (standing for "Woman Loving Woman") originated among black authors and readers. I haven't seen a correlation in usage that corresponds to that, but I may simply not be seeing the conversations that would provide the data, given that I'm not part of the relevant communities. I encounter this term much less commonly and so I don't have as strong an impression of the nuances of usage, but it feels to me as if it conveys many of the same genre features as Lesfic, but without the same implication of a specific author/reader community context. It feels similar to f/f in the sense of identifying the gender (but not necessarily the sexual orientation) of the characters, with the default expectation of romance as a significant plot element. I don't have a good sense of whether the use of wlw correlates with the author's sexual orientation, but I don't think I've seen it used in relation to male authors (whereas I definitely see f/f used by and for male authors).

Queer - In general, this label seems to correlate with stories that include a variety of genders and sexualities among the characters, or at least for works by authors who cover that wider scope in their body of work. There is a sense that the works identified as queer are not targeting a specific readership (other than "readers who aren't put off by the word "queer"). There is also a correlation with authors who are less likely to identify themselves using more specific terms like "lesbian". In general, I tend to see this as a genre category label more in the context of SFF than, for example, for categories like contemporary romance. However this may be due to skewing in my data collection. There seems to be a tendency for books by major publishers to use/be described using queer or LGBTQ+ rather than any of the previous terms.

LGBTQ+ - (For "+" read: any possible continuation of the acronym of whatever length and specificity.) This is a bit of an odd one and I'm going to be a bit provocative in my description here. In general, I see books, publishers, and authors use the category label LGBTQ+ to indicate philosophical adherence to broad-spectrum inclusion, while in practice I find that it signals a primary (and often overwhelming) focus on gay male characters. So, to some extent, this label is out of place within a list of terms used to identify books featuring women in homoerotic relationships. Perhaps oddly, LGBTQ+ is more likely to have this male-skewing than "queer" does. I haven't observed LGBTQ+ to corespond to any particular expectations in content, authorship, or publisher.

So that's my fuzzy cumulative impression of the emergent definitions of these words in a publishing context. Does it match your impressions? Are there other correlations that you've noticed?

Major category:

Thinking

Tags:

Philosophy

View comments (0)

Stock image:

bookreview.jpg

What the Frankentastic Podcast is Reminding Me about Lesbian Historical Fiction

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 17:55:52 +0000

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 09:55

Last week I talked about how manipulation of point-of-view can change the entire flavor of what I’m writing. This week, rather than talking about my own writing, I’d like to bring together three things that have passed through my brain recently about understanding and portraying romantic relationships between women in historical settings.

The one that really sparked this train of thought is a podcast titled Frankentastic being created by Tansy Rayner Roberts and put out by Twelfth Planet Press in fulfillment of a stretch goal for the kickstarter for the forthcoming anthology Mother of Invention. The premise of Frankentastic is a fairly straightforward re-gendering of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein read as a serial. All the male characters (which is the vast majority of the on-page characters) become female, while the female characters are converted either to male or non-binary characters. Other than names, pronouns, and gendered references (like mother/father/parent), the text remains completely as the original. But what seems like a simple little conceit makes some interesting differences in how the characters in their relationships read.

The biggest thing that struck me was how overwhelmingly homoerotic the language of the story is: not merely in the context of Victor(ia) Frankenstein and friends, but also in the context of the initial framing story of Robert(a) Walton’s sea voyage and the interactions with associates and crew. The language these characters use is effusively and overwhelmingly romantic and even sensual with regard to same-gender friends and associates. I don’t know whether it is striking me more in this audio version than it did back when I read the book due to the immediacy of the medium, or whether I notice it more when those exchanging the sentiments are women for personal reasons, or whether I’m more likely to discount such effusive sentiments as literary convention when spoken between men, or some other reason. But the take-away observation here is that an early 19th century writer, of good birth if unconventional lifestyle, considered it normal, natural, and unremarkable to put expressions of same-sex devotion and love in the mouth of her characters that—if written today—would be interpreted unambiguously as expressing homosexual desire.

And although Shelley’s work placed this language in the mouths of male characters, I know from the research I’ve studied for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project that similar language was considered normal, natural, and unremarkable between actual women in everyday life. We know this from correspondence and diaries and reported conversations, as well as from the depictions of emotionally intense female friendships in literature of the time. It’s one thing to read books are articles discussing this phenomenon, but somehow it’s a viscerally different matter to listen to it being expressed in audio, and particularly in a context where gender-swapping has highlighted the import of the conventions.

So, there’s that.

The second stream feeding into these thoughts is having just read Farah Mendlesohn’s Spring Flowering (set in the same era) and seeing how noticeable the contrast is between how her characters express and enact the spectrum of same-sex emotional (and sensual) relationships, reflecting the same conventions we seen in Frankenstein, as compared to the depiction of historic characters more commonly found in lesbian historical fiction that attributes a very modern-feeling guilty self-consciousness around experiencing and expressing same-sex romantic desire. The characters in Frankenstein feel no need to reassure themselves or their companions of the purely platonic “no-homo” nature of their relationship, just as their real life sisters felt no embarrassment or guilt at the most effusive expression of emotional bonds with each other. Because that was how close friends were expected to act with each other.

Now, you may protest that close friends may have felt free and unselfconscious to act in that way precisely because there was no actual erotic component to their relationship. But we know that isn’t the key, because we know that some early 19th century persons who wrapped the enactment of their romantic friendship in this effusive passionate language and behavior also had erotic relationships. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But some of them. And we know—from our admittedly scanty scraps of direct evidence—that they did not consider their feelings to be a separate species of relationship from non-erotic romantic friendship. And I must acknowledge that the differences between male and female sexuality may make the two experiences diverge somewhat on this point. But the point is that you can write an early 19th century story in which two women proclaim their love for each other publicly, express themselves in the most passionate terms in correspondence, writing of the desire for kisses and embraces and the longing to sleep together and the dream of sharing their lives together, have these desires and expressions be known to all their associates, and have them be free of both internal and external condemnation and suspicion for those expressions. (Which isn’t to say that there weren’t occasions when women’s passionate friendships did rouse suspicion and censure, but only that it was a far from universal consequence.)

The third stream of thought on this comes from editing an author interview for my podcast where the author is talking about honoring how brave and daring and ground-breaking woman-loving-women in history were. And this is where I long to immerse people more in the historical context—the ways that actual women in history expressed and enacted their same-sex relationships. Because they weren’t all lonely, daring radicals—not necessarily and not generally. Not until the 20th century, that is. For the most part, they were finding ways to express their love and desire for each other in ordinary and conventional ways that their society considered not merely acceptable but, in many cases, praiseworthy. To be sure, the ways they found generally did not involve making public proclamations of the sexual nature of their relationships, or of political agitation for legal equality (hard to do when women as a class did not have legal equality!). But the depiction of pre-20th century women who loved women as having the same sort of tormented and conflicted internal life that we see depicted for early 20th century women is simply flat-out historically inaccurate. And I’d love to see more historical fiction that reflected that. Perhaps what we need is more familiarity with literature of the times that depicts intense same-sex emotional relationships—and if we can’t find them with women, then gender-flip the men and enjoy the ride!

Major category:

Tags:

View comments (4)

Stock image:

bookreview.jpg

The Uncanny Valley of Fictional Representation

Heather Rose Jones — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:17:44 +0000

Sunday, October 15, 2017 - 19:00

(If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “the uncanny valley” in visual representation, this Wikipedia article is a useful start, especially the section on computer animation.)

I had something of an epiphany the other day when reading Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads and following discussions online about a recent lesbian romance novel and contemplating other books in my past that have poked at me in uncomfortable ways around the issue of representation. Representation in books is something of a hot topic these days-- the idea that everyone has a right to see the many facets of their own identity represented in the fiction they read, complicated by the nearly infinite number of intersectional combinations those identities can create.

My epiphany is this: sometimes I take more joy in a book that comes nowhere near to representing my own specific identities as long as it clearly shows a world in which I could exist. That is, where the individual points of representation are distributed widely enough across the spectrum of the possible that I can find myself in the interstices. Sometimes this can be more satisfying than a book that comes much closer to representing my own specific intersections and yet erases the possibility of some essential aspect.

The world represented in The Salt Roads is one in which it is an assumed and given fact that women have connections with other women. That those connections will be of widely varying types. And that those types will include a range of romantic, sensual, and erotic connections. The Salt Roads is a book that makes me feel like I exist somewhere within that world even though I have very little in common with the protagonists on the basis of culture, ethnicity, economic status, and life story. It isn’t that the characters represent me--none of them come close to representing my own romantic and sexual experiences--but that the world has a place for me within it.

What do I contrast this with? Books where women live lives of isolation. (Or where women don’t exist as multi-dimensional human beings at all.) Where all their key relationships are to men. Or where women are unremarkably exclusively heterosexual in every emotion and action without ever straying from that path. Books where every single character is driven by motivations that I find incomprehensible, with no indication that other possible motivations exist.

You might think that, as a lesbian, I would find a great deal of inclusion and representation within the field of lesbian fiction, but here’s where the other part of my epiphany kicks in. Contemporary lesbian romance--and that’s the core prototype and dominant market presence in the lesbian fiction industry--depicts a world in which women experience a fairly narrow range of types of relationships, interactions, and expectations. There is, as a rule, an expectation that there will be certain types of attraction, that relationships will progress according to certain types of scripts, and that the eventual goal is taken from a specific set of outcomes.

I can hear people saying, “But wait! There’s an incredibly wide variety of personality types and relationship shapes and plot arcs within lesbian romance,” but that comes from looking from inside that set of expectations. You aren’t comparing it to the possibility of what could be. It’s a bit like being a white American and looking at an entire literary genre and seeing all the diversity in it but failing to notice that all the protagonists are white Americans. Or, for a more frivolous comparison, it’s like being excited about the enormous variety of offerings from See’s Candies and failing to notice that they all have chocolate in common. No they don’t! you protest. There’s that one item in the Nuts & Chews box that’s just peanuts in nougat. I’m sure there’s at least one choice that doesn’t have chocolate. My case rests. You aren't thinking about the existence of fresh peaches. Or tomatoes. Or roast beef. You're still thinking in terms of chocolate and not-quite-but-almost-chocolate.

The discussion that was the other half of the inspiration for these thoughts revolves around a recent contemporary lesbian romance novel with the “shocking revolutionary twist” that one of the protagonists is asexual. Now I think it’s a lovely idea to have asexual protagonists in books, though setting them in a formulaic romance may undermine the point a bit for the reading public. I haven’t read the specific book itself, so I’m not talking about whether the topic was handled well or badly in that specific instance. I may or may not read it--I’m not sure I’d enjoy a novel that treats asexuality as an “afterschool special” educational project, given that contemporary romance isn’t really my thing in the first place.

But what struck me was the significant number of readers within the lesbian fiction community whose response was along the lines of, “Wow, this is fascinating, I never knew that such a thing as asexuality existed! I don’t know any asexual lesbians! This introduces me to people and ideas that I’d never encountered before! Thank you for educating me on this topic! Nobody’s ever written about it before.” (Hint: Yes, people have written novels with asexual and aromantic protagonists before. Please don’t erase their existence.)

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Of course you already knew that asexual lesbians existed. You’ve met them, both online and in real life. You just called them “frigid” or “sexually hung-up” or “full of internalized homophobia” or "repressed" or “emotionally unavailable” or any of the other popular labels for people whose erotic response is radically different from yours.

And the people saying this--that they didn’t know asexual lesbians existed--are saying it in online social spaces where people like me have been participating all along. It means that they’ve never seen me. They’ve never actually listened to any of the things I’ve said in those online communities around the topic of representations of desire and sexuality in fiction. I don’t exist for them. It means that every time I’ve interacted with them, they’ve pasted a picture on top of my existence that’s something other than who I am and interacted with that, because they literally didn’t believe that I existed.

And that’s what I mean by books that create worlds that I could exist in. If an author of lesbian fiction literally doesn’t know that asexuality is a possible thing, they certainly aren’t going to write fictional worlds that represent it, or that have a space in which it could exist. That part of the map of human territory won’t be an empty space labeled “here be sea serpents and mermaids” there won’t even be an empty space on the map it could be penciled into.

The third book I’d like to bring into this discussion is Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword. I’ve previously spilled a fair amount of ink over how that book was an emotional flash-point for me, because it came so close to being the perfect book for my emotional core...and then it veered sideways and was a perfect book for someone who was not quite me. Reviewing my reaction in the context of the current topic, I think one of the places where it failed me that I hadn’t been able to articulate properly, is that the female same-sex relations that I’d seen represented in the world of Riverside were fairly narrow in scope--in part because of the relatively small number of examples. Riverside is a world where it seems like half of the men have been in some sort of romantic or sexual relationship with another man, but whatever the author’s intent, we don’t see a similar normalization of women’s relationships. For that matter, we don’t see a full range of women’s relationships at all. To quote my post-review analysis:

“There’s a point in Katherine’s sexual explorations with Marcus where a point is made about ‘having sex with your best friend’ and I think that was when it hit me that The Privilege of the Sword doesn’t seem to show women having serious, genuine friendships with other women. Men have deep and binding friendships with men. Men and women can have genuine friendships as well as relationships based on desire or familial bonds. But women’s friendships are shown as being contingent (“do our husbands get along?”) or as play-acting (Katherine and Artemisia) or as part of power jockeying (the two actresses).”

Here was an excellently-written story of a daring, resourceful, and passionate young woman, and it existed in a world where women don’t seem to have genuine friendships with each other--much less enduring passionate feelings for each other. It came so close to hitting my personal target and then denied the existence of things that are at the core of my being. (Note: the Riverside serial Tremontaine has been a bit better about representing a variety of women’s interpersonal and same-sex romantic interactions.)

So if you’ve ever wondered why my reading habits and my reviews don’t align on a simple “lesbian books good, non-lesbian books less good” axis, it’s because I’m not only a lesbian, and all the other parts of who I am are just as important to me as that one. In the aggregate, they are more important. I’m not interested in reading and praising lesbian novels that nevertheless leave me feeling like an alien from another planet whose existence the author doesn’t quite believe in.

Major category:

Thinking

Tags:

Philosophy

Reviews: Books

View comments (9)

Stock image:

bookreview.jpg

Random Thursday: An Questionable Phrase

Heather Rose Jones — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 20:41:16 +0000

Thursday, July 6, 2017 - 08:00

There is an expression—a phrase, an image, a verbal trope—that I am trying to eliminate from my critical writing: “Does not disappoint.” When I think about it, I’m a bit embarrassed that it took me so long to identify it as something I wanted to stop using, because I’d already examined a different model of the underlying issue from another angle and identified what it was that would eventually start bothering me about “does not disappoint.”

Here’s the thing. If I’m talking about a property (a book a movie, a meal, a performance) and describe an expectation I have for it, and then—having consumed the property—I observe that it “does not disappoint,” it seems to me that I’ve rejected the possibility of being surprised by joy. I’ve set the standard of my base-level neutral experience and determined that the property hasn’t fallen below that base level. It’s as if I’ve set up a job performance rating scale with only two options: “disappoints” and “does not disappoint”. Or, that if the rating scale includes “exceeds expectations,” I’m indicating that the experience didn’t exceed them.

And I don’t think that’s what I ever intended to convey when I used the expression. I don’t honestly believe that it’s what anyone else ever intends to convey when they use the expression. And yet, having seen it from that angle, it’s very difficult not to feel the gut-punch of, “So is that all I managed? I succeeded in not disappointing you?”

And here’s why I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to come to this point. Once upon a time, there was a couple in my social circle whom I’d had a chance to observe over an extended relationship arc. I listened to how Partner A talked about their expectations and interactions with Partner B, and it seemed to me that Partner A was operating on “disappoints/does not disappoint” performance rating. That—based on how their interactions were framed—the most that Partner B could hope to achieve was “does not disappoint.” It struck me as tragic. I felt strongly enough about it at the time that I spoke to Person A about my perception, no doubt being marked down as an obnoxious busybody as a result. And A and B are still together more than a decade later, so perhaps my perception was out of line. I don’t know.

But that’s why I’ve been trying to eliminate that phrase, in any of its forms. Because I want everything I consume to be allowed the possibility of surprising me with joy, not just failing to disappoint me.

Major category:

Thinking

Tags:

Philosophy

View comment (1)

Stock image:

hrj-20150506.jpg