Quote:
Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla
Feminoxiousness is a killer, isn't it? That's why I'll probably never take up Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon again.
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I used to love MZB as a teenager. For a young woman growing up, that kind of consciously feminist (or at least feminism aware) sci-fi really helped balance out a lack of positive female characters and heroes in what was a very male dominated genre.
That said... *smiles*... a bit like any backlash or movement forwards, the pendulum overswings. There's less need for the overtly feminist sci-fi, because 'women's issues' are no longer a separate strand and female lead characters no longer speciality fiction.
I find MZB a little difficult to read now. It's a little like being battered over the head with a feminist manifesto. But it was important work at the time. It broke through some boundaries and helped school a lot of young women in a way of thinking that didn't simply accept that 'hero' was a male concept in fantasy and sci-fi.
It doesn't have to be so obvious now. I went looking for books for my niece who is into fantasy and wild rides. The choices open to her are much greater than were open to me in terms of available character templates and stories. There are lots of strong, interesting, complex and still very girly heroes for her to get her teeth into. And the gender question isn't the biggest thing to answer in these books. MZB was writing against a much more overtly gendered setting, when sci-fi was very, very male and when the position of women in society at large was a very immediate issue.
It was only in the 1990s that British law recognised the possibility of rape in marriage. There are still gender questions to look at and find answers to. But when MZB was writing, it was the big issue for a lot of women. Like all movements, the first few waves tend to be a little strident in how it expresses itself. Eventually it settles down and stops being a 'movement' and starts being just another facet of a wider society (much like the 'civil rights' movement, or Gay Pride) and the issues it raised find their way into the broad sweep of fiction along with everything else. But ya need those first few strident voices to push it along and make changes; otherwise it never does make into the mainstream and remains an excluding factor in cultural production.