The Green Knight's Quest

Every time your fiction is more restrictive, more opressive, less exciting than history, you need to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. Ok, you yourself might not phrase it in those terms, but it's worth examining fiction whether it lives up to the rich caleidoscope that his history.

Take, for instance, gendered stories: _'his'story_. History books are all too often written by men and from a male perspective, and that perspective still pervails. It makes a tremendous difference whether you write about the wife of Henry II and the mother of Richard and John, or whether you write about Elinor of Aquitaine, queen of two countries and powerful ruler in her own right. You can explain away every single woman who does not fit into the 'men hold all the power' trope as an anomaly, but at some points you've gathered enough exceptions that you need to ask 'who made the rule'?

And yet, in fiction...

- men go and have adventures. Women stay at home, are supportive, need rescueing or hide behind a man when push comes to shove: the climatic battle is almost inevitably 'man vs man'.
- men go and push the boundaries of knowledge; women write up results, are supportive, admire, and stand by their men.
- society are modelled on the worst, most restrictive gender relations. There were plenty of times and places where women held property, became guild members, travelled, and otherwise were valued members of society. There often was a backlash against this, (think of WWII where women found out they could be drivers and engineers *and like it* and the 1950s 'a woman's place is in the kitchen' movement), and sometimes there were legal loopholes (if a single woman could not hold property, but a widow could, some women reinvented themselves _as_ widows elsewhere.

The Guardian has a fascinating article on on where the wymmenz really were

(For 'gender' also read 'race'. Again, if history/reality are less restrictive than fiction, you have a problem.)


The male gaze is a problem that I personally am working on. Whenever I am looking for characters to go and have adventures, they tend to be male. In the Five Kingdoms, that's become a plotpoint: society has, in many ways, moved beyond 'only men count' and magicians are stifling themselves by gearing the whole education towards fully comitted male students (also, towards relatively wealthy students) Over the course of the novels I am chipping away at the male domination, but it's there to start with.
The quadrology has two male wizards as main characters, with a large amount of mostly male minor characters. The main female character is anything but weak, but there's only one of her. Source of Evil (same world) has one female character among the main set, with a second minor-but-important female character, and a male protag who questions his attitudes - but it's still mostly-male.
The previous WIP had one girl and two boys (ok, 1 boy, one half-boy/half-tree character)
The WIP has a female protag in a mostly-male oriented world which is slightly lagging behind in terms of gender equality - there *is* a female lecturer and a number of female students, but they're nearer the 25% mark, and many of my protag's friends are male.

Obviously, this is still an issue for me. Not as bad as it used to be, but single-female in male-oriented world is *also* problematic.

So tonight I'd like to ask you to go home, examine your stories/story ideas/favorite characters, and ask yourself what the recurring tropes are, and whether you are inadvertedly making your stories less inclusive than you could.

If unconscious -isms aren't a problem for you, I'd love to know how you avoid them.