 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Blackout CodaNovember 10, 2007 Just in case yesterday's "Blackout Meditation" wasn't long enough, here's an addendum. In the days when I was discovering, listening to, dancing to, singing along with, and eventually selling (in my bookstore days) "women's music," a friend outside "the community" shook her head and wondered why I was "limiting myself" to music by women. My immediate reaction was defensive: the implicit accusation was so much sexist claptrap, period, end of report. As usual, the unfolding-over-time reaction was more interesting. Limiting myself? How could anyone think I was limiting myself when my horizons were expanding so fast that I didn't know where to go next? Exploring "women's music" -- what women musicians were doing, what women were doing in music -- led me into totally unfamiliar areas, like blues and jazz, and introduced me to cultural traditions about which I'd known nothing, like harmony singing of Balkan women and the choral singing of South Africa. Once I calmed down, I couldn't help noticing that my friend's listening habits were less than adventurous -- homogeneous, even: overwhelmingly Anglo-American folk/pop by mostly male bands with occasional female vocalists. Similarly, my fascination with women's writing led me to start exploring fantasy and science fiction, where, it was obvious (to me, anyway), some great writing by women -- great feminist writing was happening. My prior acquaintance with f and sf had been minimal: I loved Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and read certain novels, like Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, because all my college friends were reading them. I was willing to follow my passion for women's writing wherever it led, but I soon learned that many of my friends were less adventurous: they wouldn't touch anything that smacked of fantasy or science fiction. In many cases the resistance was pretty irrational. Their ideas about f/sf were a couple of decades out of date, or totally based on cover art (which in those days mostly featured either spaceships or bimbos with bouncing boobs, and sometimes both at once). Something else was happening, though I didn't learn about it till years later, when I got pulled into the WisCon orbit: male sf readers and writers thought that the influx of women, especially feminist women, was destroying the genre. Shades of Dylan plugging in at Newport! But with a difference, because Dylan, after all, was a man, albeit a young and headstrong one. Women, even significant numbers of brilliant women, are easier to marginalize, if not completely ignore. I suspect that whatever traditions you're born into and whatever traditions you adopt as your own will eventually lead to every other tradition, if you get enough lifetimes and if you're willing to follow where they lead. If you're not -- if you decide, for instance, that what you already know is good enough, and that those other traditions are too dangerous to be explored or too trivial to be bothered with (note that when people are afraid of something, they'll often dismiss it by calling it "trivial") -- well, you'll wind up blocked in one way or another.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||