While I like to see articles lauding Leckie

[james_davis_nicoll]

It seems to me the author of this one hews too closely to the standard forms used when writing about successful women.

For example, the photo of John Scalzi used in this article on Ann Leckie didn't have "John Scalzi, husband and writer" under it, it had "Sci-fi blogger and author John Scalzi is a big fan of Leckie", whereas Leckie's photo got (in part) with "St. Louis mother and first-time novelist.

Passages like

The first Nebula was given to Frank Herbert's Dune in 1966. Over the next thirteen years, only two awards for Best Novel went to a woman — both to Ursula K. Le Guin. That trend began to change in the late 1980s as more and more women began publishing. Since 2000 the gender split for Nebula winners, which is also awarded for novellas and short stories, has been about 50-50. But that hardly means we've arrived at a post-sexism literary world.

suggest the author means well, despite falling short.

Comments

[matgb]

One of your LJ commenters mentions that the photo captions are normally written by someone else and I suspect that's the case in this one, the lead paragraph is frequently also written or rewritten by a subeditor as well.

Also, it's a piece for her local newspaper, that she's a local mother is probably going to get people to read it in the local area more than that she's won two awards most readers haven't heard of and is likely to be the first to take the three (is that actually true, no one's won all three with the same book before?)

I just finished it this morning, and am waiting for the sequel already, first time since Old Man's War a book and background has really grabbed me and made me want to keep going immediately. And I think it's better than OMW, it's certainly the best first novel I can recall reading for a long time.

Yes, the article does get a fairly good sexist bingo score, but it is for a local paper, so I can forgive it concentrating on the point that she's local and has kids at local schools, etc.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The article was startlingly thoughtful and perceptive after the oddly sexist language in the first few paragraphs. I could wish the article's author could have stepped back and realized just how much of the issues with women in SFF are the project of exactly the thinking (or lack thereof) that went into those first couple paragraphs.

[ms-geekette.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing happens with all successful/notable women, though, not just female authors in SFF. Don't get me started about all the successful women who are posed practically naked on covers or in a sexy manner while their male counterparts generally get to wear clothes and don't have to coquettishly look over their shoulder.

But just checked the author of the Leckie article and it's a guy, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I wonder why he was staring at her feet...it's a tad creepy if he gave her a head to toe once over. But maybe I'm just being critical...perhaps he writes up the footwear of his male interview subjects, too.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

In general, in fact, you can play 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' bingo with articles about Leckie -- this isn't unusual. I remember it too with Audrey Niffenegger when "The Time Traveller's Wife" came out. People just couldn't cope with 'it's a jolly good book and people like it a whole lot' -- they had to deconstruct it in ways that belittled it.

Does this happen with male first-time novelists? (Hint: no.)

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest it certainly happens in one regard: when a genre writer writes a book that might be of sufficient quality to approach "real fiction"¹, similar tropes get hauled out to belittle the work. And in a [per|re]verse way as well, when a "real author" stoops to doing "genre work" there's all sorts of limboing going on to (a) belittle the piece as slumming, not "really serious", obviously a "bit of a vacation" etc, and/or (b) use it as a cudgel to demonstrate how the rest of the authors who inhabit this neighbourhood couldn't ever possibly be so awesome and thus deserve never to rise out of the ghetto².

But, I also think that, in these cases, it's a matter of class/artist-type/genre and not necessarily a matter of gender (and oddly, I might even suggest that it's easier for women or minorities to get away with this kind of thing anyway, because "everyone knows they're not really capable of serious work anyway, so we can understand that they'd play around like this." which, I realize, makes your point admirably, as well.)

---

¹ -- this is a phrase describing perception, not reality - that is "the defenders of quality" for some reason decide that a work has presumptions to "quality" and thus line up for the smack down because, geez, no genre work shall pass, etc, etc.

² -- viz McCarthy's The Road and anything remotely genre written by Margaret Atwood; viz nearly anything written by Michael Chabon.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I do not disagree with your point at all about the implications of the photo titling. However, I'll also point out that the people in the photos, and the captions, serve two different purposes, not the same, so to expect them to be parallel in construction might be asking too much.

Leckie's photo is in the rhetorical position of "here's who this marvelous person is, and the caption essentially captures her nature". (That it should say "mother" before "first-time novelist" is telling, true, true.)

Scalzi's photo is in the rhetorical position of "here's the professional we're using to lend credibility to our claim that Leckie is awesome". So the caption speaks to his professional qualifications: not only is he an author (in the field), he's also a blogger in the field: he's connected, he has opinions, he's with it. The fact that he's a husband and father is not relevant, because we don't need to know who he is, we just need to know that he's an authority, so it's his relevant credentials that are important.

Again, though -- it's also clear that we're seeing a post that reflects normative patriarchy, too. I get that.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Also, it occurs me that, as with novelists and the cover art, the author of pieces like this one may have absolutely nothing to do with the pictures used for the piece, or the captions assigned to them -- those choices might have been made by other people in isolation. I don't know that for sure, but I can believe that's what might happen, easily.

It'd be cool to know more about this point, too -- anyone in the industry care to comment about how photos are chosen and captioned for pieces like this? Or journo-posts in general?

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Generally, photos are picked by the editor or sub-editor; the writer won't have a lot to do with the taking of the photos, even if the interviewer and photographer are there at the same time. The journo has responsibility for the words, and the camera-guy for taking a lot of pictures. It may even be the case that the interviewer does the interview by phone or Skype these days, and the photographer is someone local hired for the shoot, I don't know.

If it's an important piece, then the art director might have some input into the picture selection. If it's a minor piece then their only input would be selecting the cropping. Similarly, the writer won't be writing the captions; that's a sub-editor's job, like the title of the piece.

Some papers do things differently, of course, but generally only the most visionary and penny-pinching papers will have one person doing three or more jobs. Generally, people who are good at writing aren't too hot with a camera, can't edit themselves, and have not a clue about page layout.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

My editor wife wrote all the headlines and photo captions in the small town weekly she worked for, can see how an editor could "drop the ball" on correctly labeling a photo, or inject bias.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

One of John Scalzi's quotes struck me as a bit odd:

"Part of it has to do with who she is,......She is Ann Leckie, she's a woman, a mother who spent time raising her kids. She has the background in music....."

The first thing he says about her is that she's female and has kids???

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I would bet that Scalzi's quote was in answer to a specific question that mentioned my being a woman and a mother, but the question doesn't appear in the text. I don't know that for sure, just going by my own conversations with the reporter, and how they appeared in the article. Lots of fragments of things I said, without the questions that elicited them. I don't think I was misrepresented--not, you know, beyond the unavoidable, IME there's always a sort of weird disconnect between an actual person you know and the ways they tend to be portrayed by reporters for this sort of thing--but it's interesting, knowing what I was asked and then seeing it in the somewhat different context of the article without the actual questions attached.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

so, ask John to change his ..

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I suspect one influence might have been that Leckie was interviewed in person, and Scalzi via email? (That's a guess.)

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I notice that near the end of page 1, the article refers to Ancillary Justice as having a "strong female protagonist". Does it? So far as I can recall we never learn the biological sex of the body that bears the name Breq. (In fact, we never learn the sex of most of the major characters, with only one or two exceptions.)

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Very very early in the story there's one indication that Breq is female, but blink and you miss it.

[avram]

Well, that person in the bar on Nilt thinks Breq looks female, but we’re also told that different cultures have different rules for gender, and what looks female in one place might look male in another.

[vass]

If you think the biological sex of Breq's body is what determines her gender, I think you may have missed the point.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Certainly if there's a good reason to regard Breq as female other than the sex of her body, I missed that.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I can't claim that it's a *good* reason, but from my own reading, in my head all the characters were female, including the ones who were female and looked biologically male. Pronoun usage apparently trumps physical description (or complicated personality/biology hybridization) for me.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I apologize if this offends, but no, I don't think that reason is a good one. We're told up front that the Radcha language doesn't mark things by gender; it becomes clear that English-feminine (including nouns such as "girl" for a young person) is used for "gender-unknown". I think we need to make an effort while reading to regard that feminine as gender-unknown -- leaving us not knowing the gender of nearly all the characters, an interesting and difficult place to be.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I did actually read the book and understood that point about the Radcha language. I was relating how I personally engaged with the story, because I found it interesting and difficult that the English-language-pronouns usage was apparently the thing that most strongly affected how I thought of the characters; other readers clearly find the physical descriptions most important.

I do not agree that my own reaction to the text is doing it wrong. My apologies if my own reaction to the text is unwelcome in a discussion of How The Book Must Be Read.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

"it becomes clear that English-feminine (including nouns such as "girl" for a young person) is used for "gender-unknown". "

I found it odd that while Breq uses 'she' and 'girl' etc., she refers to Annander as "Lord of the Radch", not "Lady of the Radch", somehow making Annander distinctly male.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

As Nick suggests above, the reporter is local and interviewed me in person, on the phone, and via email, over a couple of weeks. He'll have contacted Scalzi (and Rachel, and MRK, and Nora) by either email or phone, and for various reasons I'm guessing by phone.

The pictures were their own separate thing. And the photographer was awesome, I really enjoyed meeting her. I am assuming the captions and the headlines weren't the reporter's choice. I'm actually on the cover of the print edition of the RFT (I know it's awesome publicity, but introverted me would like to crawl under a rock now) and includes, across the bottom, the line, "Women are aliens, too!" I'm blaming an editor for that, and also headdesking forever.

The reporter really did mean well. He's also terribly young. Or I am getting old, because my daughter said, "Mom, it irritates me when you say grown up people look like they're about twelve. Nevertheless, I think he's still learning how to write articles."