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Posts Tagged: gender

Unreliable Men

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The unreliable narrator lends a particular type of voice to a story. After breaking down unreliable narrators by gender, Elizabeth Weinberg concludes that there are differences between male and female unreliable narrators—primarily, that male narrators lack empathy.

I’m a firm believer that although most fiction isn’t autobiographical in the sense that the events of a story actually happened to the writer, writers tend to write about what they find psychologically compelling, and they tend to write about what they, on some level, know.

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Gender, literature, and criticism

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Women’s work has always been awesome, just as the work written by people of color, minorities, and other classes of people who aren’t white men has been. The work of white men has been awesome, too, but it has benefitted from a system where their work has been assumed awesome, rather than graciously granted the chance to be awesome.

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“It Happened To Me” Aftermath

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Rumpus cartoonist MariNaomi wrote a powerful essay at XOJane about being sexually harassed during a comic convention panel.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Years ago, at another comic convention, a fellow panelist blatantly looked me up and down and said it was “getting hot in here” — onstage, humiliated in full view of an audience of hundreds.

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This Year in Literature and Gender

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Matters of gender and sexuality come to the surface repeatedly in the scuffles discussed in The New Yorker piece called “Literary Feuds of 2013.” In the past year, there have been debates over the double standard to which the personalities of female protagonists are held, criticism of a female writer’s novel as being “too macho,” and an article promoting the idea that mothering more than one child can be detrimental to the work of female writers.

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Pong Was Not For Boys

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How did video games go from being completely gender-neutral to being the centerpiece of a male-dominated, often misogynistic subculture?

Polygon’s Tracy Lien investigates in a fascinating history of the industry’s relationship to gender.

It’s interesting whether you’re into video games or not—though, as the article points out, if you play Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or even Windows Solitaire, you may be more into video games than you think.

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A Wild Excerpt from White Girls

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Guernica has a lengthy excerpt up from White Girls, the genre-warping new collection of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and who knows what else by the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als.

It’s complex, challenging, and completely, enthrallingly beautiful, so it’s impossible to choose just one quote to represent it, but here’s an attempt:

We were something dark and unforeseen: two colored gentlemen who moved through the largely white social world we inhabited in New York (the world where art and fashion and journalism converged) who did not exploit each other or our obvious physical traits…for political sympathy or social gain.

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White Girls and Cultural Appropriation

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White people clamoring to up their cred by appropriating nonwhite culture do so hoping to be rewarded for choices that are falsely seen as inherent in people of color.

In an essay on cultural appropriation for the New Inquiry, Ayesha Siddiqi dissects “the awkward sexism of white supremacy” and what we really mean when we say “white girl.”

It might rearrange your whole way of thinking about certain intersections of race and gender.

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Reductress: Women’s News. Feminized.

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In lieu of a “Funny Women” column today, please read all of Reductress, a new satirical women’s web magazine like The Onion that “tells the stories of real women, written by real women, for other real women who like to read about women.” At last, a news magazine that “that empower[s] women with feminine ideas, feminine emotions, and feminine products.”

Reductress “parodies woman-focused marketing and the consumer identity built around it, taking on the perk and patronizing tone that saturates online media today.

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Women are Bitches

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“Women are bitches,” says a young man as he sits down. Apparently a woman at the bar wouldn’t give him her number. He’s talking to the man sitting on his left in spite of the fact that I am sitting two feet to his right and at the same table.

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Trigger Warning

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I was not surprised to see that a large number of reviews took issue not with the writing or the plot or the structure, but with the main character’s sexuality; but even I was startled by the vitriol of many of them, the insistence that a story about a girl who fucks cannot be a story with any value at all.

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Sometimes Bodies Are Just Bodies

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For decades now, sympathetic portrayals of trans people in the media have usually made use of the same phrase: “a man trapped in a woman’s body” (or vice versa).

Though it may help some cis people start to understand the basic concept of trans-ness, it’s not always very accurate.

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I Am Sorry, Women

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I haven’t been getting along very well with women lately. I don’t like admitting this. To admit this is, I have been told, is to admit that I don’t like myself. That I have a problem with myself.

What’s wrong with you?

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“When My Husband Came Out as a Woman”

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Feminist theorist Judith Butler criticizes gender as something culturally constructed while “sex is just as culturally constructed as gender.” According to Butler, the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

In Anne G. Sabo’s essay, “When My Husband Came Out as a Woman,” Sabo reveals the struggles and mixed emotions she experiences as her husband makes the transition to become her soon-to-be wife.

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To The Skin

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“It” is the overlap between homeless and trans. Oh, did you have a body? When you’re trans and homeless, this is really what the “for customers only” restrooms sign say, below their cheerily simplified depictions of “men” and “women”. Did you have a body? Did you think you could eat, shit, live?

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