One of the first male book bloggers to sign up for the Australian Women Writers Challenge was Sean Wright, well known as @SeanDBlogonaut on Twitter, and author of the blog Adventures of a Bookonaut. Sean kindly agreed to discuss why he signed up, his experience of gender bias and his journey with the challenge so far.
Sean Wright:
I am really enjoying being involved in the Australian Women’s
Writing Challenge this year and appreciate the chance to speak to others
interested in the challenge. I’ll
discuss why I chose to join the challenge and what I have observed about women
writing in Australian speculative fiction that might be different to men.
Why did
I decide to enter?
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| by Deborah Kalin |
It was a culmination of things.
Last year I began listening to the wonderful feminist podcast Galactic Suburbia, three women, each with a unique place in the speculative fiction landscape
- Alisa Krasnostein, a small press publisher from Western Australia, Tansy Rayner Roberts, an author from Tasmania and Alexandra Pierce, a reviewer from
Victoria.
Their approach to promoting feminism (indirect and conversational)
got me thinking about my own reading and resulted in me completing a
comprehensive review, a gender breakdown on the reading and reviewing on my
blog.
It was a lesson in implicit gender bias for me. Prior to the review I believed that I was
reasonably well-balanced reader. I had
no issue with reading female writers and was quite pro-feminist. The results were embarrassing to say the
least, the split being somewhere around 18% female to 82% male, novels read.
I made a decision that year to try and balance up my reading and
reviewing. For the general reader I am
inclined to say read whatever you like, but for a reviewer like myself I
think there’s an obligation to try and be balanced.
My end of year result was a 60/40 split in favour of men. A distinct improvement but still not the
balanced result I was aiming for. I
found that towards the end of the year I simply reviewed what came in the mail
box and wasn’t too focussed on making sure that I was a balanced reader. In that sense I feel that I probably fell
into well established and largely unconscious preferences.
This year, with more self awareness, I decided that I really
needed to enforce some blatant structural change (I see this as the only way
for me personally to get around implicit bias).
So I signed up to the Franklin-fantastic
(read 10 and review at least 4 books) level and the dabbler category. I have already hit that target 10 books and
10 reviews but the intention is to keep going, because frankly the speculative
fiction scene in Australia is bubbling over with excellent female writers.
The other reason is that I think it’s probably
necessary to swing my reviewing in favour of female writers to make an impact
as a consciousness raising exercise.
Having favoured women authors this year I am
comforted by the freshness and the quality I have discovered. This depth of
quality in the field has me laughing at those who might cry tokenism when it
comes to preferencing women over men, who might foretell a fall in
quality. That view assumes that men who
get on our best seller lists are there purely by virtue of merit. My own personal view is that as a culture, we
generally preference quality men’s writing over quality women’s writing.
In the speculative fiction field do women write differently
to men?
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| by Rowena Corey Daniells |
Where I do note differences is around some
subject matter. Some women authors will
include plot points or devices that probably would not feature in a male author’s
story. Tansy Rayner Roberts for instance
has a character in her Creature Court Series that works as a dressmaker.
This profession forms an integral part of the character and the plot,
it’s a continuing feature and focus in what is a violent and sensual
fantastical adventure. I am not sure I
have come across a male writer who has used a female profession* in quite the
same way.
The consequence of including such devices or
plot points is that it makes the work fresh especially for me as a male
reader. It’s offering something
different than the standard fantasy tropes.
Kim Westwood, whose work is on my reading list, is another writer who
comes to mind in her exploration of gender. I’d be hard pressed to think of a
male speculative fiction writer who is exploring similar issues.
Margo Lanagan’s most recent book, Sea Hearts dances around the interaction
between men and women, mothers and sons.
Claire Corbett manages to fuse both hard science fiction, with mystery,
social commentary and issues of parenthood in When we have wings. In Madigan Mine, horror novelist Kirstyn
McDermott cleverly inverts gothic horror tropes by altering the gender.
Conversely I can also think of other female
writers who tend to write in a more
traditional vein, Deborah Kalin with The Binding Duology and Rowena Cory
Daniells with her King Rolen’s Kin Trilogy
(although this does feature a non-stereotypical gay relationship) readily spring
to mind.
So that’s a somewhat indecisive answer. What I am finding though is that female
authors of speculative fiction in Australia are in the ascendant, they are producing
an abundance of work and it’s pretty much all top shelf.
I‘d like to thank Elizabeth for the opportunity to guest post, I
love the challenge and the expansion of my perception with regard to women’s
writing in Australia.
* By female profession I mean that it is one in the book and
there is more than passing reference to types of dresses, stiches etc.
Sean Wright is a blogger, reviewer and genre commentator writing
at Adventures of a Bookonaut. He
currently works as a casual relief teacher for the Department of Education and
Child Development in South Australia. He aspires to be a published author but
does more aspiring than writing. He can
be found most of the time on twitter under @Seandblogonaut. His blog has recently been nominated in Sydney Writers Best Blogs 2012 competition.
