Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I would read the hell out of an academic treatise on those books of the late 1970's and the 1980's (when YA was forming as a discrete genre and was still predominantly problem novels) that were marketed to adults but overwhelmingly read by kids and teens. Think V. C. Andrews, Stephen King, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffery. Probably a good 50% of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Weird, unashamedly psychosexual drama we mostly hid from our parents. Come to think of it, all four of those authors have written at least one incest story.

Yes, I know there was plenty of adult readership for those authors, but I'd be really curious about the breakdown; I wouldn't be surprised if the teen and child readership numbers dwarfed the adult for some titles.

What changed in genre when people started being able to market a wide variety of genres to older kids and to teens, and sell them successfully? Wither the gleeful psychosexual incest thrillers? What did YA inherit from those books, and what did adult? Do teens still sneak the contemporary equivalent of Valley of the Horses home from the library or is that what porny fanfic is for?

So diceytillerman and I have an expression, "killing the baby." For us it means that moment when an interesting thought experiment ceases to be interesting because there is a clear moral choice. (It comes from the moment in Lois Lowry's The Giver when, in my opinion, no reader can continue to think that there's a moral option in not destroying the protagonist's society. Although I have definitely learned over years of teaching the book that for many students that moral decision comes much earlier. Never seems to come later, though.)

One of the things I find frustrating about most dystopian novels is that, well, they are clearly dystopian. We don't have a word for Potential Utopia, Sort of Dystopia, Chetzi-Chetzi Dystopia/Utopia. By definition they are Bad Places™.

Yet for me, they're more interesting, not just as philosophical thought experiments, but both aesthetically and viscerally as stories, if it's more complicated than that. I don't want the dystopia to hold my hand and show me why a certain societal structure is wrong, I want the story to make both me and the story's own protagonists think about trade-offs. Is the society in The Giver one that has benefits that might offset its costs? Is the Empire really that much worse than the decadent final days of the Old Republic?

Of course usually the answer to these questions are easy. Usually there is some disastrously evil act the dystopian society participates in: infanticide, having a comically ugly evil dictator, secret slavery. But all this disastrous evil does is prevent us from having to consider the pros and cons of the two structures. All it does is make reading too easy.

I've talked about this before when I addressed my feelings about the difference between The Hunger Games the novel and The Hunger Games trilogy, how after book one I still thought the trilogy might be the dystopia I had been waiting for, the one that shows contemporary American society's dark mirror without requiring a cackling evil overlord.

Can you think of any dystopian societies where it's not that cut and dried? Ones where, ultimately, there's not a correct moral answer? And are any of them created for young audiences?

(What I think might come closest that I can think of is The True Meaning of Smekday, which isn't a dystopia at all, it's an alien invasion story. But within that alien invasion, there are constant reminders that what is the right versus wrong way to run a society is complicated. But alien invasion stories have their own genre conventions, and finding complication in your relationship to the other is, well. It was thinking about Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," that made make this post, but now I am inclined to think about her "The Word for World Is Forest" as an example of the alien-is-us trope. My first exposure to it was probably Enemy Mine. It's different, is what I am saying.)

I just read Kate Elliott on the female gaze in FSF ("The Omniscient Breasts: the Male Gaze through Female Eyes") (h/t yendi), which is primarily I think talking about adult FSF. Inevitably when I read an article like this I want to send it to every feminist who trashes contemporary paranormal and dystopian romance for teens -- as, I admit, I sometimes do myself -- and say "look what the teen love triangles have that we should be down right thrilled about!"

Yes, ubiquity in any genre gets exasperating after a while. As a reviewer, trust me when I have a pretty good sense of what percentage of books for teens currently have almost identical romance plots. But when these books get trashed by feminist reviewers, we are ignoring that an entire generation of young leaders is growing up thinking the female gaze is normal.

I don't understand why Bella finds Edward Cullen's pasty skin and under-eye circles so attractive, but the fact is she does, she dwells on them, and she ogles endlessly. Clary Fray is far from flawless as a character construction, but that girl knows who she wants, and she is perfectly happy to leer and admire while she goes for it. So often we don't know that much about what these female protagonists look like, but we know everything about the physical characteristics of the objects of their affection. That's... pretty cool.

These books are usually still heteronormative and cis-normative. They are often still relying on fairly regressive gender roles, and can have bizarrely archaic notions of sexuality. But I'm really curious what we'll see from this generation of female and sometimes male readers who have learned to read with and not against the female gaze. I suspect it might be something pretty awesome.

A friend to whom I will refer as Jules Léotard recently pointed me towards this lengthy video which is the product of Focus on the Family's "True Tolerance" program.

Direct URL / Video in accessible player


The video points parents towards the stealthy methods those "sneaky" homosexual activists are using to get into the schools, such as devious, wicked anti-bullying campaigns. (The fact that 23.2% of students who have been bullied at school because someone perceived them to be queer attempt suicide is apparently irrelevant to these people, who provide a [PDF] "model anti-bullying policy" which is not intended to prohibit expression of religious, philosophical, or political views. Presumably including "you're going to hell for being gay.")

Anyway, their list of [PDF] devious homosexual agenda books you might find in your school makes me sad, because the only thing in there that counts as fantasy or science fiction is Uncle Bobby's Wedding. Is that really the state of homosexual agenda children's and YA books in F&SF? Hero, Cycler, and some albeit adorable queer guinea pigs? (I'm exaggerating. Somewhat.)

It doesn't work that way in my mind, where I forget that Tally Youngblood never hooked up with Shay; that it was just subtext in King of Shadows; that none of those gay best friends in paranormal romances are the main characters. This is a good time of year to remind myself that for all I am used to seeing the intense social conservativism in fantasy, I mustn't discount the strong strain of it in science fiction.

Also a good time of year to make the time to read Ash. *goes to request from interlibrary loan*

Tomorrow I'm going to be teaching Virginia Hamilton's The Magical Adventure's of Pretty Pearl (alongside Donna Jo Napoli's Breath and Robin McKinley's Beauty), and I have to admit I'm somewhat terrified, as a white instructor in front of a classroom of (apparently) all white students. It's such a complicated book, and I just don't feel like I have the qualification or training to deal with the text's complications, such as its valorization of the mammy figure, or the way it presents phonetically spelled-out dialect. This is doubly complicated for me by some of Hamilton's own writings on the language. When she talks about it, she acts as if she's inventing a dialect out of whole cloth, albeit somewhat researched: She does identify her research here, and as a complete ignoramus even I recognize certain vocabulary and dialect in Pretty Pearl having origins in Gullah, not made up entirely. But she self-identifies as an outsider to this folklore and language: And then there are all the mammy issues, which in her own writing and talking about the book Hamilton identifies as strongly feminist, and I feel like my basic fandom/Internet-culture course in Intersectionality 101 hasn't prepared me for this. I feel like I need at least Intersectionality 201, and I probably need more historical context that I have.

You know how Zora Neale Hurston took a lot of crap for writing down oral traditions and making them available to white people? The more I prepare for this class, the more I feel like this is the kind of story which is a beautiful reworking of oral traditions for insiders, but in clumsy (my?) hands can just reinforce stereotypes among outsiders. I'm sure I don't have enough knowledge of musical history to be sufficiently lucid about the gorgeous call and response patterns the book evokes. I have only an academic knowledge of the John de Conquer stories, and though I was brought up on John Henry picture books like many American kids, they were decontextualized from their racial and class history, tossed in a pile with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox and Johnny Appleseed. I've been spending the evening reading selections from Alan Dundes' 1973 Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, and the very fact that I've been finding so many of these incredibly dated essays (many from the 1930s) informative is excessively worrying.

I'm starting to think I'm not smart enough to teach Virginia Hamilton. Last year I tried to teach Justice and Her Brothers. It's bad enough that the book makes no sense without the rest of the Justice cycle. I find that trilogy too difficult for me under any circumstances. I hoped that teaching it my students might bring some insights to it but they were fairly hostile and I felt too dense about the whole thing to bring any deeper understanding.

And yet at the same time, the more I read children's literature critics discussing Virginia Hamilton, the more uncomfortable I am with their overall treatment of her. Not because it's not deserved -- Hamilton is an artist, an author who writes beautiful books that frequently made me feel like a complete idiot because they are so rich and complicated. But because the towering pedestal on which Hamilton's work is placed in the context of decades lacking any critical praise for any other black writer of children's and young adult novels feels, well, icky. How much of the praise for Hamilton's work acts as a Band-Aid making people think it's unnecessary to confront the absence of critically praised black American writers for children? Yet by raising this question, am I implying the Virginia Hamilton has received praise she hasn't deserved? Because that's not what I mean at all.

I've been reading Mary Anne Mohanraj's (parts one and two) and K. Tempest Bradford's posts in John Scalzi's blog with interest and pleasure (pleasure from their powerful and eloquent posts, and because I am choosing not to spend Sanity Watchers points on the comments). The conclusion of Tempest's post, however, is what really caught my eye:



To which I had the supremely unhelpful response of "Yes, please!" Unhelpful because F&SF needs to get fixed. It can't afford to keep driving out all these wonderful people. It's wrong and it's strangling and it's stupid. It harms primarily readers and writers of color, of course, but also white readers and writers, in all of the important ways people have been talking about for months.

But I still can't help myself from thinking "Yes, please!" Because, Tempest, F&SF won't appreciate you, but YA sure as hell will.

(Note that I am absolutely not propagating the idea that any good adult writer can also be a good children's or young adult writer. Writing good young adult fiction is difficult, and it's a and it's a different skill set for a different genre. Moreover, most young adult fiction is full length novels; it's not a genre in which the short story is particularly in fashion. But that doesn't mean Tempest shouldn't try.)

It's not that we have no authors of color writing fantasy and science fiction for young adults and children -- I just reviewed Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest and Cindy Pon's debut, both due out imminently -- but nobody could argue that we don't want more.

(Note: This post started as being one about trends I see in young adult and children's science fiction, but turned into something of a critique of Farah's article. I want to preface the post, then, by saying that I have nothing but respect for Farah, and I agree with the overall thrust of her article and her point. I'm niggling because I see more positivity for the genre and the direction it's going right now than she does, not because I disagree with her overall thrust. ETA: Farah offers important clarifications.)

( Wow, this got long. Dystopias in young adult science fiction, and optimism about the genre. )

yAt! My copy of the encyclopedia Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid, has arrived. I wrote the essay "Girls and the Fantastic" and the short entries for Ursula LeGuin and Raphael Carter. I'm so pleased by it, and will shelve it right next to my Oxford encyclopedia of children's literature.

In other news, I'd like to encourage you to check out the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (tufts_dca), especially if you like photo blogs. lamentables, I'm looking at you! We post about once a week, and most of the posts involve an awesome picture from our archives. For example, my most recent contribution there, "Disaster!", features a fabulous photo of Jumbo the Elephant looking just a tad battered.