Reading Against Intent: Women in fiction, authorial intent, and negative reinvention
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reading Against Intent: Women in fiction, authorial intent, and negative reinvention |
| Creator: | prozacpark |
| Date(s): | 2011 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | perceptions of female characters in fandom, Misogyny in Fandom |
| External Links: | on livejournal |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Reading Against Intent: Women in fiction, authorial intent, and negative reinvention is an essay by prozacpark. It elaborates on the subject that was laid out in her other post on the perceptions of female characters: "I’ve also seen something I am going to refer to as negative reinvention: wherein, the women characters get imposed with negative readings when there wasn’t one intended".
Some Topics Discussed
- Different positions in the narrative, different ways to approach fiction, and their relation to interpretations of female characters
- Authors being less clear on motivations of female characters leaves larger room for interpretations
- The interpretations that the fans choose and how they are influenced by cultural views of women
- Multiple examples from Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Roswell, X-Men, The Vampire Diaries, Greek Mythology fandoms
Excerpts
This is somewhat of a follow-up to my earlier meta on authorial intent fail (mainly on BSG), where I argued that writers' lack of concrete authorial intent when writing female characters leads to female characters being read in widely different ways in fandom, often in ways that the canon did not intend.
So I talked a bit before about the slut-shaming of certain types of characters in fandom, and I've been trying to figure out why reasons number 1 through 6 for hating Vala made me scoff and laugh at the person's fail, but the list calling her a whore inspired rage. Or how I'm generally amused by the Emma-hating that comes out of the Jean/Scott shipper pain, but Christy Marx dismissing Emma as a slut inspired thoughts of violence.
I think what’s especially telling about fandom’s perception of Vala as a whore and Emma as a slut is that even given the traditional (and entirely sexist!) definitions of the (sexist/offensive) words prostitute and slut, neither Emma nor Vala meet those definitions? There’s a level of patriarchal judgment going into these labels, of course. But there’s also a reinvention of canon in order to justify hating these women. (Not that it's ever okay to call anyone by those slurs.) Which I don’t think is uncommon in fandom, so I wanted to describe, name, and give examples of this phenomenon. Because I think this is why I really can't engage with mainstream fans.
I’ve always thought that part of the reason that women have a problem relating to other female characters in fiction is because so much of our fiction still approaches female characters as the other/object. So when women consume fiction, they have to make a choice: either continue to see themselves as Subject and identify with the male subject, or identify with the women and give up the subject position. This, of course, doesn’t excuse in any way the fact that most people refuse to take that extra step in trying to approach fiction from a different POV, but it’s still a factor in how women/minorities consume fiction and they're, of course, unfairly disadvantaged in this. So what happens when you actually realize this pattern consciously or subconsciously, or realize that fiction is treating women in ways that it might not treat men? You can either drop that show/comic/book, and reject it. You can repress that bit of canon. Or you can reinvent canon by writing fic, vidding, fanwanking, or having your own personal fanon or interpretation.
One of the things I mentioned off-handedly that I didn't really explore was the idea of what I called 'negative reinvention.' Where a person deliberately chooses to read a female character in such a way as to justify her/his dislike of the character. In the absence of the female POV, we're constantly forced to rearrange bits of the narrative in our heads for them to give them motivation that the narrative didn't care to explore. And I think how we do that, in large part, indicates how we feel about female characters in general.
Fan experience, in general, I think adds a kind of multiplicity to texts and adds layers that weren't there before. My favorite part of fandom is when female characters ignored by canons are taken up by bits of fandom and their canon is expanded. I'm entirely sure that there are characters out there that I love more for the fanon created by fandom than for canon reasons, and "Roswell" is a huge example of this.
But fandom does this canon reinvention outside of fanfic, too, and it often does it negatively and in gendered ways. I...don't think I've ever read a list of reasons to hate a male character that included any sort of comment on his sexuality? And even if they do exist, I'm willingly to bet that it's largely a sexuality established in canon and not a perception of promiscuity based on lack of morals/'revealing' outfits, etc.
I think people have been trained to read from the men’s POV, but I think that the writers constantly forget to write women as protagonists with their own stories and end up writing them as plot devices in a man’s story. As a result, I think the female characters often become the Other for the writer.
Comments
lilacsigil: I remember being a teenager and identifying strongly with male characters and the occasional "strong woman" who also rejected femininity, because to accept being female was to accept being weak, unknowable, unknown, secondary. It took a long time and a big dose of feminism to realise that I was aligning myself with the same views that forced and kept me and most other people out of that subject position. It frustrates me very much to see fandom doing the same thing, over and over and over, but I do think that there is a slow, constant increase in the number of people writing and promoting characters other than the white guys. Unfortunately, the loudest, most defensive parts of many fandoms (especially large ones) are those loudly defending THEIR character and/or pairing, and casting aside everything else. After all, those other characters (and their fans) are just objects, right? The show, and everything else, tells us so!
prozacpark: YES, all of that. There's this whole perception of women as mysterious, unknowable, and some puzzle to be deciphered, and really, would it ever exist if fiction weren't constantly presenting them as the Other? I think this is very much a product of the fact that for centuries, men were largely responsible for producing literature/stories/poetry, and when women were finally allowed to write, they were women who had learned writing from reading exclusively male-written texts.
And yes, unfortunately, it is a vicious cycle, and I'm not quite sure that it's going to change until schools start making a point of introducing children to women pov fiction along with the male narratives and by making a point of introducing some feminist critique, especially when approaching writers like Hemingway, who are largely responsible for a lot of misogynistic literary ideas.
mfirefly10: I think you hit the nail on the head as far as the blame being both on the fandom and the creators. If the writers did a better job in telling the story from the woman's POV or at least making her motivations clear, it would be harder for the haters in the fandom to come up with their own misogynistic reasons for her actions.
[snipped] I can't tell you how many times I've thought I must be watching a completely different show because of the way the fandom was negatively interpreting a female character I adored. Or how many times I've had to run far away from fandom discussions when seeing how strongly people will defend their beloved male rapists/murders/general asshats while bashing women for wearing short skirts or calling their male counterparts out on their bullshit.
spankulert: Good meta!
Yes, both writers and fandom is to be blamed for how female characters are viewed. I actually hadn't analyzed my own TV viewing habits until I got into fandom. Looking back, I realized that my patters mainly consisted of women get to do stuff and say stuff and matter in the narrative, with a side of outsiders/minorities get to have stories(be it psychological "minorities", POC, old women, genderbending of any kind, non-heteronormative relationships, women doing things outside the usual gender pattern omg, etc).
But writers really shouldn't be blamed for fandom's response, because let's face it, those type of fans will twist things to suit their own pov/agenda no matter how well written the female character is(unless they identify with that one character and so ship them with their favorite beau. But of course then every single other woman is usually in the way *sigh*). Of course, better writing and more women in media will certainly help curtail those tendencies in future fans. Not to mention keep me happy ;)
aquaeri: I agree so much with this, thanks for expressing it all so clearly. My reaction to the lack of female subject characters in my fiction from a very young age (so that I can't remember when I began doing it, and certainly before I might write it down) was to invent female characters to insert into the storyline. I think I'm now too old and cynical to do it much, but yeah, I'm horrified at the way that women-dominated, fanfic-writing fandom seems to fall for shows that don't have decent female characters and will write endless slash about male characters who (when I finally watch the shows out of curiosity, I'm looking at you SGA) strike me as self-centred, boring, and as Mary Sue as you could ask for.
drakyndra: The closest I've seen to this is when certain words from a male character are criticised because "he sounds so gay" and episode which are described as being very homoerotic between the male leads as if this is a bad thing.
Though given I've only seen this sort of criticism coming from a man (and the episodes/lines in question are quite popular in the fandom where the main ship involves slashing the guys in question) I think this is more telling of that guy's perceptions of homosexuality than anything.
But yeah, I agree with what has been said above: there are issues here in how writers consistently don't flesh out the female characters as much, and how the fandom automatically assumes these horrible things.
prozacpark: What's more disturbing is that often, what marks a male character as a wimp/homosexual/not manly enough in fandom's perception is often decent behavior and not being prone to displays of masculinity that often come with a side of violence towards/mistreatment of women.