Okay, well, a little. Here goes - on topic even - (r) -- La Femme Nikita Fan Fiction Message Board

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Date Posted: Friday, November 18, 12:21:46pm
Author: Nell
Subject: Okay, well, a little. Here goes - on topic even - (r)
In reply to: JayBee 's message, "Oh, c'mon...(r)" on Thursday, November 17, 03:32:55pm

It's about the whole 'female' characters thing, and is mildly related to the femeslash/slash debate as well.

1. First, character is a theoretically neutral term, but female characters - all of them - get put together into a single subset once you deploy the modifier 'female', leaving character - unmodified - to apply to everyone else, ie, the ones with dicks - who become the norm, against which *all* women, by default, are something not quite normal. This has begun to *really* bug me.

2. Once you ask people - as various memes around lj have been doing on and off for a few years now - 'what kinds of female characters do you like' - you start, or return too, or continue on I'm not sure which - the practice of putting women into neat little boxes labeled "likeable" and "unlikeable" - and usually only those two boxes. This is bothersome in (at least) two ways.

a) It presumes that women are only out there to be liked or disliked - that to be liked is the highest honor imaginable to a women, and to be disliked the most shaming. Fuck that. Or to be judged 'interesting' and 'dull'. Fuck that too - women in fiction can have roles beyond to entertain or intrigue audiences.

b) The way the question is often raised, and answered, female characters instead of being presumed to have full and unfettered access to the full range of characteristics availble to human beings (or animals or whatever) in an infinite array of mix and match, get lists of qualities the must have - usually more or less in their entirety - if they aspire to be liked, and other lists of qualities that if they have (and here, it is usually any one or two) they will be consigned to the unliked box. These lists are almost always, in practice, in my cranky feminist view, both incredibly limited and limiting (rather like Darcy and Georgiana Bingley's initial list of what it would take for a woman to truly deserve the title Accomplished, for all you fellow Austen geeks out there), and wholly subjective.

Buffy is one person's courageous, genre busting unwilling hero, and another person's despised bitch. Usually for the same qualities.

Which you know, is absolutley fine. But trying to get reductive about what that means, what qualities a female character *must have* to get counted among the likeable (or 'interesting'), is, I've come to suspect, a tar pit.

As long as women are over here, having purposeless discussions about which qualities a female character must have, and which ones she can't, women continue to play into the old patriarchal game of dividing women into good and bad piles, so that the bad ones can be shut out entirely and the good ones get just enough good stuff that they won't complain, lest they loose that minor power/treat/roof over her head.

As long as women readers/fic writers continue to play this game - putting bars between themselves and the characters who happen to be women - that the characers who happen to be women have to climb over just to even get in the game - we don't need 'men' holding us down. We're doing a pretty damn good job of holding ourselves down.

I recognize that there is a really important difference between saying "Star Wars has very few characters who happen to be women, and none of those really ping me for whatever reason" and saying, "generally, I don't care for female characters." It's the latter that, lately, has had me spitting at the computer.

Which is bad for my keyboard. ;-)

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Replies:

It's tricky to reply to this (r) -- JayBee, Friday, November 18, 03:37:57pm
- I'm not sure if I should respond here, or your lj... *g* (r) -- Nell, Saturday, November 19, 09:30:41am