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elfsThere's an interesting article at Shattersnipe about Female Fantasies, that is, fantasy novels written by women, that feature "the female gaze."
The author, fozmeadows, starts with the concrete notion of the male gaze in genre fiction: that men are initially depicted based upon what they can do, but women are initially assessed on their physical attractiveness, their sexual attributes.
Fozmeadows then goes on to say she likes books written from the point of view of "the female gaze," but never goes on to define what that is.
If I am to take women at their word, as writers of that great genre of the past 30 years, the romance novel, the female gaze assess men based upon their capacity of providers and defenders (their physical attributes being only part of that, and their sexual abilities more or less irrelevant until the heroine has assented to granting him access), and assesses women based upon the threat they present to the heroine's ensnaring a man.
This is what sells, after all.
As near as I can tell, what Fezmeadows means by a "female gaze" is one in which women are assessed based upon what they can do, and men based upon what they are.
The author, fozmeadows, starts with the concrete notion of the male gaze in genre fiction: that men are initially depicted based upon what they can do, but women are initially assessed on their physical attractiveness, their sexual attributes.
Fozmeadows then goes on to say she likes books written from the point of view of "the female gaze," but never goes on to define what that is.
If I am to take women at their word, as writers of that great genre of the past 30 years, the romance novel, the female gaze assess men based upon their capacity of providers and defenders (their physical attributes being only part of that, and their sexual abilities more or less irrelevant until the heroine has assented to granting him access), and assesses women based upon the threat they present to the heroine's ensnaring a man.
This is what sells, after all.
As near as I can tell, what Fezmeadows means by a "female gaze" is one in which women are assessed based upon what they can do, and men based upon what they are.
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Date: 2011-02-21 07:42 pm (UTC)Now, was that true of the Regency romances of twenty years ago? Of course not. Part of the setting of those romances, though, was that finding a husband who could support her was *the only option a woman had*. She couldn't go to school on a scholarship and become an astrophysicist. If she was lucky, her husband would be a decent guy who could and would support their family. If she was really lucky, he might not be horribly ugly and thirty years older than her. It was only if she was really really REALLY lucky that he would love her, value her strengths, AND be good in bed.
Now, having grown up during that 30 years that you're talking about, things hadn't actually changed all that much from the time period of Regency romances up to the '70s or '80s. Hell, I have friends *now* whose mothers try to get them to do the things they need to do in order to "catch a good man who can support you"... because that's what the norm was in society. My friends' mothers grew up in a time and culture which enforced that their only value in society depended almost entirely on the wealth and stature of the man they could attract, and the only way they could hope to do that was by being attractive.
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Date: 2011-02-22 03:21 am (UTC)