Thoughts like this are rather out of character for me - I usually read fiction for fun and for plot, and leave the deep analysis for my work-reading. (Yes, I'm a social scientist, I study things like gender roles for a living, lol.) But this just seems to stand out from the story in ways that make it seem a purposive element rather than a sidebar.
This makes sense, to me, and thank you for clarifying what you meant. I confess that I'm not that deliberate when I set out to write. The characters come from their societies -- in as much as I can create a society well enough to contain them -- and the interactions of people with different cultural backgrounds and expectations naturally give rise to some of these elements. They'd almost have to. In that sense, it's not a deliberate choice on my part. It's more the determination to be true to the character voice, or to let the character voice to true to itself, if that makes sense.
So many times we see characters flouting gender conventions yet experiencing no psychological or social discomfort for it. These characters experience both the tension between their gender roles and their personal or historical roles, and also experience the psychological discomfort in ways that make the gender role conflict a primary theme in the storyline, for me at least.
So let me go back to this point. There are many, many things depicted in various forms of entertainment which are given short shrift due to demands of the medium, or perhaps the audience, depending on what type of entertainment it is. One of the things that used to drive me crazy about mysteries on television (or in book form) was the total lack of grief showed by the bereaved.
We can show people being shot or murdered; we can have their homes burned down; we can see them being stalked, or beaten, or etc., and yet the sense of consequence, the profound psychological changes that any of these would have to cause -- these happen off-stage or off-camera. I think the lack of emotional consequence is socially costly, for a variety of reasons.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what happens after. I'm more interested in writing the funeral than in writing the death; more interested in the cost of action than the necessary action itself.
I suppose, because I do think of these things frequently, some of that is bound to filter into my writing. Sometimes, it's more obvious, and sometimes less -- but consequence gives things the emotional weight they otherwise lack. So in that sense, yes, the gender issues have weight or consequence because they're significant to the characters' lives -- but I think the significance is part of a broader effort on my part.
I know I'm not always successful at this, and sometimes my writing is a bit on the dense side (as opposed to me being on the dense side, which we can take up in a sidebar), but that's a deliberate choice on my part. And yes, it adds words <rueful g>.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-12-01 04:38 am (UTC)This makes sense, to me, and thank you for clarifying what you meant. I confess that I'm not that deliberate when I set out to write. The characters come from their societies -- in as much as I can create a society well enough to contain them -- and the interactions of people with different cultural backgrounds and expectations naturally give rise to some of these elements. They'd almost have to. In that sense, it's not a deliberate choice on my part. It's more the determination to be true to the character voice, or to let the character voice to true to itself, if that makes sense.
So many times we see characters flouting gender conventions yet experiencing no psychological or social discomfort for it. These characters experience both the tension between their gender roles and their personal or historical roles, and also experience the psychological discomfort in ways that make the gender role conflict a primary theme in the storyline, for me at least.
So let me go back to this point. There are many, many things depicted in various forms of entertainment which are given short shrift due to demands of the medium, or perhaps the audience, depending on what type of entertainment it is. One of the things that used to drive me crazy about mysteries on television (or in book form) was the total lack of grief showed by the bereaved.
We can show people being shot or murdered; we can have their homes burned down; we can see them being stalked, or beaten, or etc., and yet the sense of consequence, the profound psychological changes that any of these would have to cause -- these happen off-stage or off-camera. I think the lack of emotional consequence is socially costly, for a variety of reasons.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what happens after. I'm more interested in writing the funeral than in writing the death; more interested in the cost of action than the necessary action itself.
I suppose, because I do think of these things frequently, some of that is bound to filter into my writing. Sometimes, it's more obvious, and sometimes less -- but consequence gives things the emotional weight they otherwise lack. So in that sense, yes, the gender issues have weight or consequence because they're significant to the characters' lives -- but I think the significance is part of a broader effort on my part.
I know I'm not always successful at this, and sometimes my writing is a bit on the dense side (as opposed to me being on the dense side, which we can take up in a sidebar), but that's a deliberate choice on my part. And yes, it adds words <rueful g>.