Secondary Characters & Gender
May 23rd, 2013Some days–most days?–my twitter feed can feel like an ongoing scolding, with writers reiterating the need for more diversity in fiction, by which they mean characters who aren’t white, male, and straight. It sometimes feels like these young ’uns don’t realize that diversity has existed in SF for a very long time.
Today all this has gotten me thinking back to my youth, and the impact a writer had on me in the early ’80s, merely by the way she used unnamed, secondary characters. I think this writer was CJ Cherryh, though it could have been Elizabeth A Lynn. Memories fade. At any rate, the technique was simple and it went like this (I’m not quoting, just making up an example.):
The cop approached with narrowed eyes, looking ready to slam someone against the pavement. “What are you doing here?†she demanded.
What’s the big deal in this made-up passage? Well, in my early ’80s mindset, at the end of the first sentence I am visualizing a big, tough-looking male cop. Then at the end of the second sentence, my assumption gets kicked head over heels. I remember that this delighted me, and it happened over and over again. I even began to think “Oh, she got me!†every time my mind insisted on visualizing what turned out to be the wrong gender, as if it was a game the author was playing with me.
What this approach did, in a very simple way, was to illustrate a society where women are neither victims nor inferior partners, but just people who fulfill diverse roles, to the surprise of no one living in that story world. And of course the approach can be reversed to show men in what we might consider non-traditional roles.
Let me reiterate, this was in the early ’80s, and these were secondary characters.
The experience really woke me up. I took the lesson to heart and I still use the technique all the time. Here’s a quote from my recent story “Through Your Eyesâ€:
Cops are everywhere, all of them in armor, and their communications gear seems to be working just fine. I start to look for Elliot, but one of the cops gets in my face. She’s almost as tall as I am, and she’s used a pigment to give herself spooky gray eyes that lock on mine. “ID?†she barks.
I understand the ongoing calls for more diversity in the genre, but it’s not like we haven’t been working at it for decades–and “show don’t tell†really can work wonders for getting the point across.
Posted on: Thursday, May 23rd, 2013 at 9:30 am
Categories: Writing.
Tags: gender, secondary characters
May 23rd, 2013 at 9:54 am
I agree that greater diversity in books is incredibly valuable and that many authors have made strides in this arena. However, one common problem is to have ONLY your secondary characters be diverse, while the four to five main characters are white, middle to upper class, and relatively good looking. True diversity should include everyone.
May 23rd, 2013 at 12:13 pm
“while the four to five main characters are white, middle to upper class, and relatively good looking”
How common is this really, in written SF? Especially the race & class? The books I read (and I don’t read nearly enough) don’t fall easily into this description.
“True diversity should include everyone.”
I may be inspired to write an entire blog post on this. 🙂 Thanks for commenting!
May 24th, 2013 at 4:48 am
For me the one that turned my thinking for SF was “Alien”. I had recently moved to a small town, didn’t know anyone locally so was in the front row dead center of the theater _alone_, staring up at a very big screen, didn’t recognize any cast names, and was in my own uncritical, “augmented” reality. And then the Great White Captain Dallas dies half-way through! That was one shock of many, and I ended up staying up all night with the lights on :). Suddenly the main female lead wasn’t just foil to the main male one, but was numero uno. I was impressed.
Sometimes it can be good to be shocked out of the complacency of thinking that everyone else is just like yourself; they aren’t. Roddenberry would refer to IDIC, and the French do say, “vive la différence”. I say how boring the world would be if everyone thought as I do.
May 24th, 2013 at 6:16 am
Alien was a great movie, and so was Terminator (another strong female lead!).
May 24th, 2013 at 6:21 am
That’s right! You remind me that my standard of female beauty these days comes directly from Linda Hamilton in T2. Nice muscles….
May 24th, 2013 at 6:38 am
Indeed!
May 26th, 2013 at 3:21 pm
SF is probably less of an offender than other genres, but it still happens.
The last SF book I ready was STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. I’m pretty sure every character was white and misogynistic, but it was written in 1961.
Recently I read the CHAOS WALKING series by Patrick Ness, which is fantasy with some SF elements. This book blew me away in so many ways, including its head-on confrontation with gender. The characters live on a planet where all men’s thoughts are broadcast to the world and all women’s are silent. A fascinating and multi-faceted story.
Sometimes I just feel like I read book after book where a female protagonist is independent and kicks a lot of butt but still plays the weaker, fairer sex when it comes to relationships (and that relationship is with someone of the same ethnicity).
Any reading suggestions to change my mind? I’ve read a few CJ Cherryh but no Elizabeth A Lynn.
May 27th, 2013 at 10:03 am
There will always be stories that fail to “get it right” in some readers’ opinions. The thing to do is celebrate the books we like.
“The last SF book I ready was STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. I’m pretty sure every character was white and misogynistic, but it was written in 1961.”
I was born in 1960, and I can assure you that the world of my childhood was vastly different, culturally, than the world of today, and in a good way. Really. Stranger In A Strange Land was a radical book for its time, but it’s not representative of the field today.
“Sometimes I just feel like I read book after book where a female protagonist is independent and kicks a lot of butt but still plays the weaker, fairer sex when it comes to relationships (and that relationship is with someone of the same ethnicity).”
I think there’s an idea floating around that violence equals power/agency, but as with the tough-as-nails male hero, readers eventually like to have the softer side revealed. In my own books, relationships tend to be a bit fraught. 🙂
Re: ethnicity–I know, right? In the wider society (in the USA), this is changing radically in many places where you might not expect to see it, like TV commercials. In my novel The Red: First Light one of the quirks of the main character (who is mixed race himself) is that he’s always trying to guess the ethnic heritage of people. I think in some circles this is frowned on, but here in Hawaii, where mixed-race marriages seem to predominate, it’s just part of the culture.