la_marquise

So, a long time ago, I lived and worked in Dublin (Ireland) for a couple of years. I made some good friends, did some useful academic work and rather lost my heart to the city itself, which is the perfect size for a capital, in my opinion, anyway. Phil came out for a year, too, and it was good.
Our flight back from Dublin after Worldcon didn't go until late afternoon, so we spent the morning wandering around old haunts. My old flat on Leeson St (Upper) is still there, and, I learnt from a friendly neighbour, my former landlady, who was lovely, is still alive and doing well. The neighbourhood has gone up market, though -- fewer clubs and bars and dodgy tenements, more accountants and posh flats. Then we walked on round past the Institute where I worked, and I realised something.
I was 25 when I moved to Bublin. I'd spent the summer beforehand writing my first full novel, and the job was my first academic job. I had hopes of becoming a real person, in all sorts of ways. People told 25-year-old me that it was possible, that I might well become a respected academic, a novelist, all sorts of things.
And I did, in a sense. I worked for another decade or more in academia, published a string of books and articles, taught many many great students. I wrote another novel and a bunch of stories, three of which later sold. But none of them sold then. None of them sold until the 2000s and that was partly my fault and partly down to culture.
Because two other things happened, back then, back when I moved to Ireland. Many many people, I will stress, including all of the Irish sff fans I met and most of my colleagues at the Institute, treated me like a real person. I had many good days, many good experiences (including helping to run the first two Octocons).
But then there was the colleague who slowly, continuously, determinedly undermined my scholarship solely on the grounds that they had decided I was English. (Nota Bene: I'm not English. I'm Anglo-Welsh, and yes, that's a real thing.) There was the senior academic who attacked me in public at a seminar not on any detailed of my work but on my inherent unfitness to do that work to begin with, because, well, Insufficiently Celtic.
Now, I get it completely about how important it is for cultures that have been colonised and derided to own their own history and lore. I come from one of those myself, in part. But this person did not do this to my male, fully English colleague, only me. Because I am female, and female is not quite the same as person. And women are the soft underbelly of the perceived antagonist.
I already knew that when it came to writing, women weren't quite people in the eyes of many. I'd been in two writers' groups where this was made perfectly clear. (Not the one in Dublin, which was uniformly lovely and produced at least two other professional writers from this period.) But it was while I was in Dublin I took the first steps towards writing seriously. And fandom in the UK told me not to. Someone I trusted lit into me in public and yelled at me for daring. Someone else I trusted told me never, ever, to speak to an editor or agent at a con because I was not the kind of person who should be doing that.
And I realised that, for all I had been told up to that point, that I was only partially a person. I gave up writing (apart from fanfic) for a decade or more, and I accepted the negativity I received in academia. I did more than my fair share of admin and pastoral care, published regularly in good journals, looked out for my students, and had some lovely colleagues.
And some appalling ones.
Up until around 1998, though, I still thought I was going to turn into a person some day. I worked hard, I got good feedback from my students (students are absolutely the best thing about academia). I wrote some important articles, including one on Denmark that helped to change the field  and a book on Wales that did change the field (warning: Kari speaking well of herself. Guilt incoming). I still had two novels in a drawer and I thought about them from time to time (but didn't write original fic, because, well, I'd been told off for doing so).
Then it all came down. I was nearly 40, and I broke. It was already too late for me as an academic: I would never climb high enough, due to my gender and to that drip-drip about my insufficiency due to that English blood. Most of my colleagues were lovely, I stress, but there were one or two who made sure I knew my place. (This looks like whining, I know. All I will say is: ask me in person about what happened. I am not prepared even now to write about it where it might be seen. I will note, however, that the union were so horrified they wanted me to sue.)
And I broke, and lost my academic career. And I ceased to be a person. I had no real job. People have jobs. People without jobs... well, they not quite the same thing as *people*.
By the time I was able to start over, I was over 40. I went back to writing, and, y'know, in many many ways I succeeded. I sold a novel and it won an award. I sold a second one. The thing I had day-dreamed about since I was 6 or 7 came true and I remain profoundly grateful for that. I have been very very lucky. Twice over, because I was in the last tranche of Celticists to find any kind of job at all.
And yet, looking at the Institute in Dublin, I realised something. I realised that somehow, between then and now, I have come to accept that I am not quite, not really, a person.
Women are not fully people.
Older women are definitely not fully people.
And women are told, over and over, when they are young, to be good and wait our turn, and many of us do.
And then, one day, while the white men of our age climb up and up, and are welcomed and praised, we are told: get out of the way, it's too late for you.
More so if, like me, those women are from the Lower Orders.
Even more so, if the woman is a woman of colour.
Even more, if she lives with a disability., if she is trans or gender non-conforming or queer.

I have a fifteen  year old niece, who is smart and talented and lovely. Right now, she knowns she's a person. I want her always to know that. I want her never to wake up and realise that she no longer thinks of herself that way. Not ever. I never want her stand outside somewhere where she started out with dreams and realise that even when they come true, people can make you feel you don't deserve them.

We all should get to be people.

So, over on twitter, I have a personal hashtag of #redwriter. I use it for those moments when I'm explicitly talking about my socialism, and sometimes when I realise that something in whatever I'm working on is bouncing off that. I do it, because I am of the age and type that agrees with the slogan 'Politics is life.' And it keeps me thinking, which matters to me. I want to be mindful, in my work, in my words, in my actions, in my life. I fail all the time -- I did so earlier this morning. But I try.

And I'm following the debates about politics in books, and whether they 'belong' and the calls for 'just good stories' and so on, and, well.... Politics is life. We are soaked in them, we are created by them. As with gender and race and class and ability and sexuality, our political assumptions and the political assumptions that we grew up with help to shape and form who we are, our way of being, our expectations, our interpretations. Which means that there cannot be such a thing as a politics-free book. Every decision the writer makes in their work -- who the protagonist is, what the latter wants and approves, the nature of the threat or problem they face, the types of backgrounds depicted, who is left out -- all of those are marked by the author's own expectations and experiences. We all do it. Most of the time we don't even notice. But as a result, how a book plays for different readers depends on how close those readers' experiences and expectations are to those of a writer. 'Just a good story, no politics' is not a simply a call for books to be entertaining. It's a call for books to make specific readers comfortable. But all readers are different: we all have different levels of comfort and familiarity. The easier it is for you to find a book that mirrors your experience -- a 'politics-free' book -- the chances are, the closer you are to the hegemonic centre of society.

None of this is new: people have been saying this for years, usually in response to other people complaining about politics 'spoiling' books. People who are highly privileged are most likely to complain if they meet something that's not comfortable, not because they are necessarily bad people, but because they're used to seeing themselves at the centre of everything, and they're startled. People who are less privileged, less central to social norms are used to reading about characters and ideas and foods and places that they don't recognise, because mainstream books tend to reflect mainstream expectations.

It takes work to notice this, especially if you're one of the privileged. We don't notice things that to us are 'normal' and we expect what we read to reflect that. When we write, we often write to our internalised norms without noticing it. I can see that everywhere in my own writing. I'm a feminist and a socialist, but most of the characters in my first book are rich and powerful. The plot is mainly driven by the male characters, and the three main characters are all men. I made a conscious decision that most of the characters were not white, but I did not, in my own opinion, do anything like enough work to back that up, and I failed. Thew female characters have a lot of political and social power, but at least three of them are self-sacrificing, placing duty and the welfare of others above their own needs and survival. My internalised misogyny was speaking: women cannot succeed without sacrifice, pain and loss. I worked harder of breaking out of misogyny and Euro-centrism in my second book. I made a conscious effort to depict foods and traditions, landscapes and buildings and ways of organisation that were not just versions of what I grew up with. And I still didn't succeed. I really struggled to write Aude as a person with agency: inner training steered me towards making her weaker, more dependent, more timid and diffident. I've never found a character so difficult to depict. (The twins were easy. Ferrets do what they like, regardless of gender. Writing them was hugely freeing and great fun.) But I'm sure there are many places in the book where I failed, because I am marked by my culture, I am trained and shaped by it and it infects everything I do.

We can always find excuses for defaulting to our norms. Let's take an explicitly political book that is also a good fun read -- and often marketed as a children's book -- Watership Down. I love WD; I read it when it first came out (I was 12 or 13) and it was a big part of my teens. It's an adventure with rabbit heroes. It's also an analysis of different political systems and their good and bad points. Richard Adams comes down on the side of a sort of democratic anarchy, with a charismatic leader setting the tone. He set out consciously to write a political novel.

And yet, his assumptions and training show through. The characters are nearly all male, and such female characters who are present are weaker, more anxious, less able to act with agency -- and presented as potential mates. The rabbits are monotheists. Male leadership is assumed as natural. Threats come from outside, not within. Creatures who are not like you are dangerous. Now, most of this is based on the fact that the characters are rabbits. It's natural for rabbits to fear predators, for instance, and wandering bands of young rabbits tend to be male. But at the same time, Adams -- and the scholars whose work he used -- were affected by their social training when they wrote and researched. Humans live in a society in which behaviour is heavily gendered. It feels natural. So when we look at other species, we assume they do the same. Yet more and more research is now questioning this -- researchers have broken the bonds of their social conditioning -- and finding that in fact, many species do not express gendered social behaviour in the ways humans do. I don't know explicitly what has been observed in rabbits since Adams wrote, but I suspect that the norms his sources detected were refracted by ingrained gender bias. And he was writing a fantasy, in which rabbits have a religion, tell stories, invent political systems. He could have made some of the active central characters female. He didn't. He was comfortable with his own status quo. And he had the excuse, if needed, of 'Oh, but the book I read said...' That books said stranger danger and few women; it did not say religion, but he included the latter anyway. He made an unconscious political choice, just as I did with how I depicted Yvelliane and Iareth and Firomelle in Living With Ghosts.

And here's another thing. Of all my characters, Iareth is the one closest to me. That drive she has to do her duty, come what may, and the problems it causes her, is mine. One of the hardest scenes for me to write in that book was the one where she agrees to stay with Valdarrien. All my instincts -- and thus hers -- were screaming at me that she must not, that it was not Good Behaviour. The first time I wrote it, she said 'No' to him despite the plot. I had to argue with myself for two days before I could rewrite it. And I still think that, had he lived, she would have left him again, in a few months or years, because of that iron sense of duty. That's my own internalised female guilt, right there. I am not supposed to put my own wishes at the centre of my life, because good girls live for others. Like Yvelliane. Like Firomelle. Not at all like Aude, who I struggle to write.

What about 'non-political' books; books in which our personal cultural comfort zone is the default? Let's take Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight, another book I read and reread, and loved as a teen. There is no over political agenda in the book: it's the story of a young woman having adventures, finding love and saving the world. At 14, it was the best book ever for me, because it was a fantasy (my favourite type of book) with a female lead who was always right. Usually female heroes are corrected by men several times in a book, but Lessa talks back all the time, does what she wants -- and the men climb down. It was wonderfully liberating. And yet.... Though the role of Weyrwoman is important, Lessa is a Unique Heroine. She is explicitly different to all the other women around her, she is special. And there can be only one of her (6 by the end of the book). Her life is very, very unusual. Everyone else important in the book is male: the other female characters are minor, unimportant and occupy gendered space: wives, servants and sluts. The political structure assumes male leadership -- and aristocratic, born-to-rule leadership at that -- and the solution to the poverty, suffering or distress of the 'common people' is not more agency in their lives, but having a better Lord (or Weyrleader). Bad lords are overthrown by good lords. Everyone is white, and the trappings of their culture reflect that. The book normalises and even romanticises sexual violence, to the point that it's almost unnoticeable. (When in the sequel F'Nor rapes Brekke, I noticed, and I was never entirely happy with their love story, but I accepted that to Brekke the rape was minor, even good, because the writer said so.) As far as I know, the only agenda McCaffrey had when she wrote Dragonflight was to put a women at the centre (just the one). But the other things are there, because they were part of her cultural norm.

All books are political. All books have agenda, conscious or not. Because we are all products of our cultures, and those cultures show.


Skirt of the day: blue cotton parachute (in non-parachute mode).

Just did my tax return. I think it's right. Now all I have to do is send it in, assuming I can find my online filing details.
The marquis held my hand. He made me create a spreadsheet.
I am so not good at things involving numbers. (Useless writer is useless, sigh.)
Goes away and shivers, possibly with beer.

Skirt of the day: lilac, was petticoat under Gudrun blue dress.

It's a new year. Happy New Year, people.
I don't do resolutions -- the marquis made me give them up a while back as I am too good at frighteningly punitive ones. But, having said that, and with his permission, I have made one for this year.
I'm giving up paying attention to silly rules acquired from other people.
What, you may ask? Let me explain.
I have a silly rule. It goes like this: 'If I ruled the world, nobody over the age of 10 would be allowed to appear in public wearing shorts (short pants, for the USians) unless they are exercising/playing sport/on the way to or from doing same.' I don't like shorts, I find them aesthetically ugly. I don't wear them. My characters don't wear them. In my world, nobody would wear them, except as outlined above.
I occasionally express this thought, and other people laugh at me or express disagreement. As far as I know, no-one has every felt that they should obey this rule just because I expressed it. (If there is anyone out there who avoids wearing shorts at me, however, then thank you! It's not necessary, but it is appreciated.) I don't expect other people to obey it, I have to say (even if I wish they would. But that's my problem).
Everyone has silly rules, things they don't like or wish others wouldn't do. Most people ignore these.
I don't. I am far too prone to taking stray remarks as absolutes that *must* be obeyed lest I cause terrible offence. Even if the person is not there and has probably forgotten what they said. And if I do find myself breaking one of these silly rules, I feel horribly guilty, I stop enjoying whatever it is, I feel I am a bad person.
This, frankly, is daft. I'm not talking rules around courtesy or consideration. I'm talking the 'Kari hates shorts' kind of rule. I waste time and energy fretting and feeling I should make amends even if the person in question is miles away and will never know that I read X type of book/dyed my hair X colour/wore X item.
So, as of this year, I'm resolved to stop doing this. Yes, desperance, this means I may occasionally wear blue in your presence. I know you hate blue. You know I like blue (and I know you don't mind if I wear it, because you're a grown up and you don't expect me to adopt your rules, and you think it's daft that I do). It means I will read certain subgenres without fretting (even if Y thinks it's a waste of time), enjoy cloudy weather, talk to friendly dogs, and generally let myself have my own reactions to minor things rather than feeling obliged to be a walk-on in my own head.
So there.
I also need to do some work around more serious rules, like the one that tells me that if someone else expresses a need, I must prioritise that over everything else in my life, even if to do so causes me direct damage. But that's a lot harder.... I'll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, anyone want to share their silly rules? I promise to flout them.

Well, I've done a lot of stuff^TM today. As in:

sorting out the reviews column for Vector (not a small job, hampered by an attack of stupidity, in which I typed up a review that had come by post, pressed the wrong key and had to type it all over again).¹
cleaning
cat sorting
baking
further sorting of reference for nice ex-student.

Conspicuously absent: writing. This evening, this evening... And I seem to have forgotten how to spell. I mean, I had to look up conspicuous. If this is due to age, then I don't like it.

Skirt of the day: black tiered long skirt.

¹ Dear Reviewer, if you are going to review a book I didn't send you -- which is fine -- please could you at least include the publisher and date. Page count, price and ISBN would be nice, too. It's not always easy to track those down. No, not even using Amazon as a database.