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I own quite a few fantasy and science fiction books which ask questions about gender relations. Some of those I've written about before, but the topic is of endless interest to me.

The tricks a writer can use to discuss gender in the without-initial-rules world of alternative reality are not that many. A book could discuss gender the way it is perceived by our current societies, or it could side-step that by having gender be something different altogether (either nonexistent, temporary or officially accepted as multitudinous). This side-stepping was most famously done by Ursula le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness, but many other applications of that principle apply.

Another way to address the topic is by reversals or by assigning the traditional female roles to men and vice versa. Melanie Rawns tried that in her trilogy Exiles (which still lacks the third book), but I found the reversal unconvincing, perhaps, because the society otherwise looked too much like something from our own history books (with the exception of the magic, naturally). I kept asking how it was that women had so successfully turned men into househusbands in that world.

Sheri S. Tepper's Six Moon Dance is a more believable attempt at a reversal, because Tepper lets us learn, as the book advances, why and how the power balance of gender changed on her imaginary planet, and also because the resulting balance still favors men in many, if not most things. To give you a flavor of the book, here is the opening:

"It's all right," Mouche's mother said. "Next time we'll have a girl."

Mouche knew of this because his father told him. "She said it was all right. She said next time..."

But there had been no next time. Why the inscrutable Hagions decided such things was unknown. Some persons profited in life, producing daughter after daughter; some lost in life, producing son after son; some hung in the balance as Eline and Darhos did, having one son at the Temple, and then a daughter born dead at the Temple, and then no other child.

The reason daughters are so valuable for farmers like Mouche's parents is that there are fewer women than men on this agricultural low-technology planet. Brides cost a lot of money to acquire but are necessary for the continuation of the family line. Farmers who have daughters get lots of money for them, money, which can be invested in the farm and which can be used to buy brides for the family's sons. Thus, daughters equal wealth in this society, even though the family line is centered on the sons.

Poor Mouche. His family has no daughters, the farm is going under, and he is a pretty boy. His parents need money. What to do? They are going to sell him to a Hunk School.

You will have to read the book to find out what a Hunk School might be. Then you will also learn why married men wear face veils on that planet and in what sense the arrangement benefits or does not benefit women or men. It's all quite interesting, providing weird distorted echoes of our society and perhaps letting us see the latter with greater clarity.

A third way of examining the power balance between the sexes might be the one which Barbara Hambly used in her Sisters of the Raven and its sequel Circle of the Moon. The gender rules in her book are initially fairly easy to recognize as what one might call the traditional Mediterranean ones, with covered women and strong male dominance in the public sphere, though she also adds borrowings from other cultures into the mix.

These rules are not changed in the book. What does change is one of the sources for the male power: magic. In the past, Hambly tells us, magic was a purely male ability. Not all men had it, but no women did. It was the men with magic who called in the annual rains, the rains on which the survival of the desert society depicted in the books depended. Then, suddenly, male magic dies and the whole society faces possible death.

At the same time, a few women here and there realize that they now have magical skills. These skills don't appear to obey the old rules, however, and they come into existence at the same time as the death of men's magic.

This setting looks to me like an interesting opening for studying gender power relations, even if it unfortunately sets that power up as a zero-sum game. Hambly doesn't really take that topic very far, perhaps, because she is more interested in the other topics of the books. But I'm hoping that she one day writes a third book on that imaginary society and tells us how it all went.

Here is my last thought on this topic: I think the best way to discuss gender in speculative fiction would be to take the existing sexual power relationships and their justifications and to apply that whole network to two groups of creatures which are clearly not men and women but still somehow linked in the sense of mutual survival. Doing that could throw some real light on the questions.


(Originally from here)

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton and longtime beau Marc Mezvinsky were wed Saturday "in a beautiful ceremony at Astor Courts," a 50-acre estate in Rhinebeck, New York, according to a joint statement issued by her parents, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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Whether it's carving into women's bodies or into the Earth, the White Man finds ways to do his permanent damage without any regard for human life (women's) or sacred Indigenous ground across the U.S. that was stolen. Forty years ago towards the end of this summer Indigenous people took a stand to reclaim what the White Man named Mt. Rushmore, but which is really the Paha Sapa.

Imagine, if you're a white man, someone carving the face of your family's murderer into your flesh, as a reminder of the atrocity and to arrogantly declare "I was here". And now consider Mount Rushmore to be exactly that, except the carving was done in sacred land instead of one human being's flesh.

Next, if you're a white het man, consider how it would feel to be forcibly sterilised. Doctors welcome you into a room and when you wake up you've had your body cut into and your reproductive options taken from you. That these things happen to people who are not men and are not white is why they happen at all. How many American Indians do you think could get away with systematically and forcibly sterilising white men and be allowed to continue to do the procedure, even after it was reported?

Consider that genocide is accomplished in part by making it impossible for oppressed people to have their own children if they wish to, by cutting into the bodies of women without their permission and ending their ability to control their own reproductive choices. The history of the U.S. is to violate the Earth and to violate women of all colors. The White Man does both savagely, barbarically, with no accountability or justice for the lives and the Life that is harmed.

While many American Indian women are harmed, they also resist white male supremacist violence and atrocity: gynocidal, genocidal, and ecocidal to be sure. To all white men: what are you doing to support their resistance efforts? What are you doing to make surgical sterilisation illegal and criminally prosecuted and to make sure the license to practice atrocity is taken away from these savage white men?

What appears next also appears below, in the main body of the post, but I wanted to highlight this atrocity, this form of genocidal rape, because it gets so little attention in dominant media and no white man I know is organising to stop this:

40-50% of All Indian Women have been Sterilized. Evidence of massive sterilization of American Indians has been revealed by the (GAO) General Accounting Office in a study for ex-Senator James Abourezk from South Dakota in 1976. Most of these women were sterilized without their informed consent. The Same GOA Report also revealed that Indian Children are being used as "human guinea pigs," by the Federal Government in 56 different medical experiments (in most cases without parental consent). The Abourezk Report found that approximately 3,406 Indian Women had been sterilized in a three year period between 1973 and 1976, in only four states. Lehman L. Brightman, President of United Native Americans,Inc. estimates that between 60,000 and 70,000 Indian Women have been sterilized in the last twelve years. Most of the Indian Women were sterilized "unknowingly" and without their informed consent, and in many cases by outright intimidation. In many cases women were told they were going to die if they had more children, that they had cysts on their ovaries, or that the operation was reversible. Voluntary sterilization among the general population of the U.S. of some 200 million people isn't going to wipe out the country, but in smaller groups like the American Indians, it could wipe them out forever, as an example: If Every white woman in the state of California was sterilized, the white race in North America would not be in danger, but if every California Indian Women was sterilized, the Genocide of California Indians would be Permanent. President Carter has Refused on 3 different occasions to stop the sterilization and to remove Dr. Emery Johnson, the Director of the Indian Health Service. . .The man most responsible for Indian Sterilization.

From Censored News, with thanks to Brenda. Please click on the title just below to link back.

40th Anniversary Commemorating the Takeover of Mount Rushmore

I wrote an article last week about the ill-advised decision of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to cut 7.5m dollars worth of funding to crucial family planning programs in the state. This week, we are now seeing the consequences of such poor judgement. New Jersey family planning clinics, which provide crucial preventative health care services [...]

The theme of this year’s Law Students for Reproductive Justice Leadership Institute is “Justice Doesn’t Just Happen.” When I first heard the theme, I was enthusiastic because it reminded me that I am becoming educated for a worthwhile purpose that is larger than myself. I immediately knew that I would arrive in Washington, D.C. and find people that are energized, creative and passionate about making a positive difference in the world.  I could not wait to re-connect with the larger community of reproductive justice advocates.

Then I wondered, why doesn’t justice just happen?  Why is it that when we make laws, it is hard to remember that different people will be impacted differently?  Why is it that some people work to purposefully restrict access to resources and rights for others?  Why do we need to organize around a large variety of human rights issues?  Why will many of us be able to make careers around protecting people’s rights to reproductive health, access and freedom?

Personally, I occasionally get distracted from the immediate work by larger questions of humanity.  For instance, how did we arrive at the year 2010 without a healthy respect for each other?  How are we still harboring the fear that there is just not enough for everyone and so we better just grab:  grab power, grab resources, grab money?  But the truth is, people have made progress in learning about and even appreciating one another in the last few hundred years.  The important part is that I end the day with hope that we can continue to move forward and that I can make a difference, especially when I am given so many tools by LSRJ along my journey.

Jessica Wilkerson

 

I attended today’s LSOC Caucus, and I must say I was impressed by the quality of the comments that came from the participants, as well as the quality of the leadership provided by LSRJ Intern Jeryl Hayes.  It all started with an e-mail invitation to attend the Caucus during our lunch hour on Saturday.  When I got there, I instantly felt that familiar feeling of comfort when all of a sudden, I was no longer the only brown person in the immediate vicinity.  To my left and to my right, behind me and in front of me, I saw a diverse group of advocates who had one definite thing in common: our passion for reproductive justice.

 

It was a beautiful thing!  We talked about racial tensions on our campuses and the dearth of minority lawyers in the RJ field.  We talked about our personal ambitions as future attorneys and what kind of pressures we faced from our respective communities to do something outside of public interest law.  Participants also touched on issues I had not thought of before – for example, what a strong reproductive justice movement would look like in the South and how law students of color and LGBTQ law students could contribute to it.  The conversation was fascinating, and above all, I think it was so important to create a time and space to address a topic that rarely gets airtime:  the intersection of race and gender that lies at the heart of reproductive justice.

There is much more to explore as we return to our campuses and try to make intersectionality a bigger part of our LSRJ chapter advocacy.  But I believe the seeds have been planted for a keen awareness about how our identities impact what we say and how our words are heard by others.  As a Latina law student, I appreciated the opportunity to reflect on how my identity brings a different perspective to conversations about reproductive justice on campus, at my internships, and in the lives of people I talk to everyday.

Lucy Panza

Anna sent me this video from GRITtv about reproductive coercion. Scary stuff...

This post was prompted by a line in my post entitled "Toddlers are not grown women" in which I said:

I also believe that parents should play a role in helping their child make decisions and that they should view their child as a partner in this regard.

In the comment section of that post, Anonymous challenged my idea that children could or should ever be viewed as partners with their parents, suggesting that parents' roles in their children's lives should be that of "bosses" who make decisions for children because they are not capable of doing so on their own until adulthood (which I read to mean legal adulthood, suggested by this commenter in another comment that was not posted due to its tangential nature, to mean 18 years of age).

Anonymous said:

Raising kids by being their "friend" results in horrible, maladjusted kids with a lot of selfishness and problems.

First of all, nowhere in that post did I suggest that parents should act as their children's friends. I do not even suggest that children should be viewed as completely equal partners with their parents. All I meant to suggest was that children should be viewed as more than objects to be controlled by their parents. I'll expand on that idea here.

I'd like to clarify that I do not have any children. However, I have experienced a type of parenting that I would not want to replicate if I ever had the desire to raise children of my own. In the middle class, white American culture I grew up in, there is an overarching idea that children have little capacity for personhood. They are treated like objects or pets that should be, in essence, ruled over by parents who always know what was best for their children, without question. Children's opinions and desires do not matter because of their age. In effect, children are lesser people, if they can even be considered people at all.

I have a huge problem with conceptualizing children in the same manner as one might think of a pet. I do not believe this mindset is healthy for the parent or the child. It has the potential to create dependence in children that may make it difficult for them to take on "adult" responsibilities once they reach legal adulthood and it presents a way for parents to place on their children an unfair burden - the responsibility of making their parents feel useful. When the roles of parents and children change as children grow up, it cane be difficult on everyone.

I believe that this idea that children just are not capable of doing certain things is, largely, due to socialization. If parents treat children as if they are incapable of making any decisions at all (as opposed to only life-altering ones), children will not have to rise to the occasion and will fill their parents' low expectations. If parents expected more out of their children and viewed them as capable of doing more, I think a lot of people would be surprised by how much children are capable of.

I also want to stress my belief in parents' roles in helping oversee their children's decisions and helping them navigate the world while teaching and disciplining when necessary. However, allowing children appropriate amounts of control over aspects of their lives is important because no person, small or not, should be ruled by someone else who denies them the opporunity to exercise any amount of power over their lives.

This acknowledgement of a child's personhood throughout life (as opposed to waiting until a child reaches some arbitrary age) could easily create more independent children who are better equipped to handle "adult" situations and responsibilities without doubting themselves. Treating children as smaller people could also easily create within the minds of children reasonable expectations of respect. When they are not used to thinking of themselves of subjects under their parents' rule, it might be easier for them to fight for their rights and perhaps even those of others when they finally leave the nest.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Sully R. drew our attention to a set of images of wedding-related dresses at brides.com. She searched through the thumbnails of brides in the entire gallery; out of 684, there were about 43 African American women, a few identified as Hispanic, and none, as far as she could tell, of Asian women. She also points out, “Of all the models that could be considered full-figured or curvy, most…were black.”

There’s something else going on here, the type of thing that just makes you wonder, given how much businesses spend on marketing and design and such, how it still made it through. Here is an image of the front page of the gallery, showing the only two thumbnails with Black women in them:

Did you catch it? The only two pictures that have Black women in them…are in the category “Maids in Heaven.” I’m sure this was referring to being a “maiden” or something of that sort (I first thought of “bridesmaid,” but then it’s a bride in one picture, so that doesn’t really make sense).

I can’t really fathom how no one noticed and thought, “maybe we should change that title, just to be safe.” It shows, at the very least, a remarkable insensitivity to part of the presumed audience —  not thinking about how the language of the categories might have different meanings depending on who it referred to and that for some groups, the use of “maid,” however innocuously meant, would have unpleasant connotations.

Interestingly, the one area where Sully noticed interracial groups, including Asians, was in pictures of flower girls:

She said there were actually quite a few Asian girls in these photos. Presumably this is a safe place to show interracial mixing; it implies a childhood innocence where everybody gets along and is less likely to alienate adults who might be more uncomfortable with images of an interracial couple getting married.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)