Genderweary.

[tablesaw]

I was reading some scribbles on gender from luxnightmare and realized something rather frightening. I had nothing at all to say. I sketched down a few responding thoughts, but as I did so, I kept thinking, So how is that useful?

I was reading Tehanu the other day, and despite reading it in one go, I was extremely frustrated with it. I love Le Guin's writing, and The Tombs of Atuan is one of my favorites. But Tehanu felt like an modern entry-level feminist tract grafted onto the beautiful fantasy world oF Earthsea. SEE the knowledge of women given the short shrift. HEAR characters muse about the relationship of gender and power. FEEL increasingly nauseated as you read the same words and the same ideas expressed by Kate Chopin or Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the modern era and many, many more before even them regurgitated.

Now it's I giving Ms. Le Guin the short shrift. But I felt very let down after The Tombs of Atuan. Atuan is such a very different story from most anything I've read or heard. The protagonist is different. The plotting is different. The structure is different. I felt like I was watching a myth that hadn't been allowed into "official records."

But Tehanu was incredibly predictable, moreso, I think, because I knew the themes and ideas it was based on. So I knew how the story had to go to complete its didactic circle. But I'm tired of reading books displaying the politics of gender in interactions. I get it. It's to the point where I see it everywhere I go, even the simplest overheard conversations are matrices of politics of all kinds. I don't need to have them splayed out on the page for me again and again. I'm tired of books that have "empowered" characters but contrived plots, making their empowerment dependent upon outside forces. I'm tired of essays and theories and theories on identity and gender and sexuality and race and elitism and classism and ageism and othering and orientalizing and everything else that dilute and complicate the issues without trying to change them.

I am so tired tired tired tired tired tired tired of reading surf reports when what I want to do is get across the ocean. I can only swim so far, and I can't get past the breakers. Why can't anybody tell me where to get a boat, where to build one, how to make one, even a canoe. Hell, I'll settle for floating log and paddle if it'll get me away from these God damned tidepools!

I'm tired. And I can't find anything or anyone to give me rest.

Comments

I think hmm

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

There seem to be to be two points here. One is that it's been quite a while since I read Tehanu, but I remember liking it. It's possible that if I reread it now I'd find it too heavy-handed, but what I do know is that I like novels about people getting old and their stories not stopping because of it. So, I dunno, maybe that would be sufficiently redeeming.

But in re the main point, what post-feminism means to me is that some people are "liberated" (whatever that means), some people are not yet liberated, and some people are so liberated that they've become annoying. And even this is an oversimplification, because people can have different bits of their life at different stages.

So what does that mean for the raft and the beach? Well, I think it means that some people need rafts, yeah, but some people are still buried up to their necks and what they really need is a shovel and a lot of backbreaking excavation work before the raft is going to do them any good.

That said, I too would like to see some more novels about people being people, because this is enough of a job in itself that I for one could use some guidance, without needing the additional work of trying to be feminist people or non-racist people or "genderqueer" people.