Publishers, Market Forces, and Feminism
Aug. 30th, 2007 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobet(Okay, we're pulling out the Alan Moore icon again. Baby, why you make me do that?)
I have had an interesting shot of perspective this afternoon, brought on by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coalescent's straw-poll/count of women's names on the front of the upcoming Night Shade Books anthology Eclipse and the response over at jlassen's. The chain of thought goes thusly:
1) "Huh, that is true, there are all boys on that cover."
2) "Oh, that is a Night Shade book, they are good guys and likely not participating in sexism."
3) "Okay, this is upsetting me because good people are being wailed on, and they are clearly becoming upset, and the methods of argument being used here are no-win ones."
4) GVG says "welcome to the club" and thus we get our perspective.
Now, this may just be a flaw in how I've been conducting things with regards to The Revolution. However, I'm putting it out here because I suspect it's a flaw in the discourse, or if not, it's turning into a flaw in the discourse.
I suspect that there is an element in the LJ feminist discourse where we sit around doing the Man Comes Around thing: we take names, decide who to free and who to blame, etc., and everybody won't be treated all the same. I think a chunk of the discussion around making SFF a more egalitarian place on grounds of gender has taken a turn into labelling people as sexist or not-sexist: on our team or the other team, and then it stops there.
Where do I derive this? My copious internal struggle in this case -- dealing with people I know -- versus my lack of said struggle in the case of the F&SF and sexism discussion -- dealing with people I know less well or don't know. I had people in the Good! box and am asked to move them to the Bad! box, which is harder than moving people from the Neutral! box into Good! or Bad! boxes. I think that's what we do. Move people into and out of boxes.
This is a bad thing. Here's why:
Because it trades on personality, and ultimately stunts any real change.
I'm back to the whole placebo activism idea again. I think yelling at people and then feeling better about yourself because you put them in the right box doesn't really accomplish much. Remember, sexism, racism, classism, etc. are systemic issues. If people keep saying it's the market, sure, that could be an excuse for their inaction. I suspect it's not an excuse because of that systematizing of prejudice that's reflected in other aspects of life (why's it one or two guys here if it's systemic elsewhere?) and the really fucked-up ideas we have in publishing of who has power over the whole apparatus.
We all work in the framework of the market. If the market is sexist, business decisions will carry that flavour, because otherwise those companies will go broke. Systemic prejudice doesn't just punish the people with boobs or that one drop of non-white blood. It punishes everyone who lives under it. Everyone has a role. Nobody gets to step out of line.
Here's my question then, because this shot of perspective and a small chain of logic have led me to what might be more effective to change the face of SFF. Yes, it's harder. I'm starting to think if it doesn't require some serious fucking thinking and a truckload of work, it might not actually be activism.
How do we change the market?
I have had an interesting shot of perspective this afternoon, brought on by
coalescent's straw-poll/count of women's names on the front of the upcoming Night Shade Books anthology Eclipse and the response over at jlassen's. The chain of thought goes thusly:1) "Huh, that is true, there are all boys on that cover."
2) "Oh, that is a Night Shade book, they are good guys and likely not participating in sexism."
3) "Okay, this is upsetting me because good people are being wailed on, and they are clearly becoming upset, and the methods of argument being used here are no-win ones."
4) GVG says "welcome to the club" and thus we get our perspective.
Now, this may just be a flaw in how I've been conducting things with regards to The Revolution. However, I'm putting it out here because I suspect it's a flaw in the discourse, or if not, it's turning into a flaw in the discourse.
I suspect that there is an element in the LJ feminist discourse where we sit around doing the Man Comes Around thing: we take names, decide who to free and who to blame, etc., and everybody won't be treated all the same. I think a chunk of the discussion around making SFF a more egalitarian place on grounds of gender has taken a turn into labelling people as sexist or not-sexist: on our team or the other team, and then it stops there.
Where do I derive this? My copious internal struggle in this case -- dealing with people I know -- versus my lack of said struggle in the case of the F&SF and sexism discussion -- dealing with people I know less well or don't know. I had people in the Good! box and am asked to move them to the Bad! box, which is harder than moving people from the Neutral! box into Good! or Bad! boxes. I think that's what we do. Move people into and out of boxes.
This is a bad thing. Here's why:
Because it trades on personality, and ultimately stunts any real change.
I'm back to the whole placebo activism idea again. I think yelling at people and then feeling better about yourself because you put them in the right box doesn't really accomplish much. Remember, sexism, racism, classism, etc. are systemic issues. If people keep saying it's the market, sure, that could be an excuse for their inaction. I suspect it's not an excuse because of that systematizing of prejudice that's reflected in other aspects of life (why's it one or two guys here if it's systemic elsewhere?) and the really fucked-up ideas we have in publishing of who has power over the whole apparatus.
We all work in the framework of the market. If the market is sexist, business decisions will carry that flavour, because otherwise those companies will go broke. Systemic prejudice doesn't just punish the people with boobs or that one drop of non-white blood. It punishes everyone who lives under it. Everyone has a role. Nobody gets to step out of line.
Here's my question then, because this shot of perspective and a small chain of logic have led me to what might be more effective to change the face of SFF. Yes, it's harder. I'm starting to think if it doesn't require some serious fucking thinking and a truckload of work, it might not actually be activism.
How do we change the market?
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Re: More thinky
Date: 2007-09-04 10:25 pm (UTC)Wow. Okay. Well, file it perhaps that if I ever do a thing that's found offensive, don't choose that way to bring it up? *g*
There is a power relationship here--well, strictly speaking, there are several--and I don't think it makes sense to try to behave as though there isn't.
Yeah, there are several, but I don't know that any of them are the "moral authority" ones that these discussions set up. The whole reason people wanted women on the cover boils down to "because it's wrong to have men and women not equally represented", right? And the way I see it, framing things as a rejection or acceptance letter constructs the writer of the letter as an agreed-upon authority on morals, the same way we socially agree that the editor is the authority on what's a good story for their magazine. However, both parties in this conversation have not agreed that the letter-writer is the superior authority on morals, so it's seizing a position of power, not filling an agreed one. So that's a much more contentious verbal act than a real rejection letter, which is, no, not inherently condescending or dismissive. But it isn't that because of the agreement of both parties as to what their roles are.
I've shorthanded that taking of power without agreement as "talking down". Because it garners the same reaction. It's snark. This isn't a world where power dynamics are minimal, no, so if one is to get one's point across, I think we have to learn how to work through, around, and over them.
and the tremendous power afforded to the faceless and monolithic "market", which apparently requires that specific consumers be ignored in the face of what publishers believe about how to pitch to the consumerate as a whole.
As I was kind of groping towards in the original post, I don't think the market's a fake thing. This is mostly from the bookseller end of things: watching why some books succeed and some fail, and what starts to come out when, and how it's driven not just by the consumers but what publishers think consumers want, on buying patterns based on what's available rather than what's 100% desired. The market exists, but not monolithic and...well, complex.
And yeah, the market is sexist. We know that. We knew that already, judging by the number of headless-torso-tits-ass covers on books, the leather-catsuit ones, the naked-back ones, the man-titty ones.
What I'm really chewing on right now is which thread to pull and which levers to push to change that, so books which don't slot into those semiotic boxes can do well out there and we don't have to have cover fights anymore.
Re: More thinky
Date: 2007-09-05 01:26 am (UTC)The whole reason people wanted women on the cover boils down to "because it's wrong to have men and women not equally represented", right?
Not for me, actually. In my opinion, the major issue is that the publishers are misrepresenting an anthology with a gender-balanced and, for lack of a better term, fame-balanced TOC as being full of male BNAs. As a secondary issue, they seem to be mostly ignoring people who say "I wouldn't buy this because it looks like it's full of male BNAs", even though those people would in theory be the target audience for a gender-balanced fame-balanced anthology. I don't think false advertising in the name of reaching (which is to say, tricking) a broader audience is a good business strategy, and I don't think dismissing the concerns of people who arguably represent your core group of readers is a good business strategy. I also don't think it's ethical, but I'm not trying to argue it on ethical grounds.
I really don't like tokenism or quotas and you will never see me advocating them. In my opinion, the only reason the cover names should be gender-balanced is because the TOC is gender-balanced and the cover should fairly represent the book.
More on all of this, and also on the sexist market, in my very long entry here.