Here’s the second part of our interview with author Maura McHugh, whose comic Róisín Dubh – featuring a young Irish suffragette battling dark supernatural forces! – has just hit stores. Read part one here!
For any of our Irish-folklore-unfamiliar readers, “róisín dubh” is gaelic for “dark rose” and the title of a traditional Irish folk song. You’ve studied Anglo-Irish supernatural fiction at university, Abhartach appears in Róisín Dubh and the ghost of Oscar Wilde turns up in your other comics project, Jennifer Wilde. Which other myths or historical figures can we expect to turn up in Róisín Dubh, and do you have any favourite people, legends or mythological monsters from Irish history and folklore?
“Robert Curley at Atomic Diner comics pitched the core idea of Róisín Dubh to me and told me about the existing myth around Abhartach. I did what I always do: research. I thought a great deal about the time period, the story of Abhartach, Róisín herself and her situation.
For me, I need to find what I think of a ‘mythic resonance’ in a story that I’m trying to create. Making a character swing a sword and lop off a head is easy: making a story with horror and fantasy elements feel like it could possibly be real requires that it resemble mythology itself.
So, I went back to my books on Irish mythology – of which I have many – and kept reading until elements connected with what I already had in my head about the story. I added a few Irish gods into the mix, a companion character and a couple of magical items. I widened the canvas. And I gave Róisín a very painful thing to do, which happens in issue 2 and is something that will haunt her forever.
Equally, I thought a lot about Abhartach. I don’t like simplistic villains. I added to his backstory and made him into a person who does unpleasant things, but who has motivations and reasons for his view of the world. Thankfully, Rob was very receptive to me bringing all this to the characters and the story!
I’ve been reading mythological stories from all cultures since childhood. One story that holds a lot of fascination for me is ‘the descent into the underworld’. There is a variation on that in issue 1 of Róisín Dubh – though I’m not always aware of every element like this that I’m tapping into when I write the story. Sometimes it doesn’t become obvious until later.
Ultimately, when writing I try to feed my subconscious to stuffing point with lots of influences and then allow it to serve me up suggestions as I’m going on. I trust it to give me the right element at the right time. Then, some time afterwards, I marvel at how it all came together. That’s when it’s really doing its job.
But I have days when it gives me nothing and I soldier on anyway.”
Creating a comic book in this way, with a separate writer and artist, is a collaborative process, and one that tends to be favoured by most American and European publishers. How did this process work for you, how much input did the artists have, and what was it like seeing your character come to life in their hands?
“The collaborative element is what I enjoy the most. I can’t tell you how amazing it is to see the words I’ve written translated into images. Mostly, it’s better than I hoped. Sometimes we’ll discuss how a certain panel is working and ask for changes.
No one is going to draw the Róisín in my head unless I do – so I have to allow the artists to bring their version of her to the page. A successful comic book collaboration – in my experience – is about respecting the strengths each person brings to the project. The writer understands story dynamics and the artist knows visual storytelling. You have to learn to depend on the other person’s knowledge and experience to guide changes in the comic book.
Also, you have to be open to seeing things from a different perspective, and accepting change. I’m always happy when the artist makes suggestions that are innovative and work better than my original concept. We’re all pulling together for the same goal: to create a comic book people will enjoy.”
I’ve heard good things about your upcoming comic Jennifer Wilde, and when fantasy author Juliet McKenna recently told me about a charity anthology of flash fiction she was part of, Voices From The Past, I was pleased to see your name on the cover. You’re a busy woman! Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the projects you’re working on at the moment besides Róisín Dubh?
“Jennifer Wilde is a fun project. Again, Robert Curley came to me with the core idea, and I went off and did my research – and that was just brilliant. The 1920s was an amazing era of change: social, economic, and cultural. The story is lighter, and more in the detective genre – albeit with a supernatural element. Jennifer is a French artist who – through personal tragedy – becomes embroiled in a mystery that takes her from France, to England and finally to Ireland – all helped by the ghost of Oscar Wilde.
Writing Wilde is the most intimidating aspect of the project. I’ve done a lot of research on him, and he was a brilliant, complex man, but not always wonderful. I try to be respectful of who he was and to bring as much of that to the project as possible.
Most of the art is complete on issue 1, and it should be out in about six weeks. Our artist Stephen Downey has done a fantastic job. I’m currently working on the scripts for issue 2 and 3. Issue 2 of Róisín Dubh is in the editing stage at the moment, so that should be good to go soon enough.
I usually have other projects in the sidelines, in various stages of completion: non-fiction, screenplays short stories, poetry, a novel. I even have an idea for a comic book strip, which I would draw as well as write. These projects go up and down in priority depending on deadlines.
All things going well, I’ll probably write another volume of Róisín Dubh and Jennifer Wilde for Atomic Diner. I’d also like to create and write my own comic book series. I have several stories in development.
As well as this I have my job with the Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild as their blogger and website-wrangler.
It’s good to be busy!”
- Maura McHugh is an Irish writer with films, comics and short stories to her name. She blogs at Splinister and you can read her recent guest post for BadRep, in which she recommended us some horror writers, here. Róisín Dubh is published by Atomic Diner and the first issue can be bought online here, or go pester your local comic shop to order copies! Warm thanks to Maura for talking to BadRep.
When we heard that author Maura McHugh‘s latest graphic novel Róisín Dubh – starring a young bicycle-riding suffragette who fights dark supernatural forces! – would soon be hitting stores at last, we were bubbling over with excitement. Once we’d regained the ability to type coherent sentences, our Jenni was dispatched to Interview Country faster than a speeding velocipede…
Hi Maura, nice to have you here at BadRep Towers! To get us started, why don’t you tell us a bit about Róisín Dubh , which has just gone on release.
“Róisín Dubh is a three-issue comic book series that will also be collected and bound as a graphic novel. It’s set in Ireland in 1899 and follows the adventures of Róisín Sheridan, an eighteen-year-old woman who harbours ambitions to be an actress. Her life is altered forever when she and her parents are attacked on the road by a bloodthirsty man called Abhartach who has just risen from the earth. Róisín’s parents are killed and she is left for dead… until she is given a mission by ancient powers. She has to go against the conventions of the day, and her previous notions of what is possible, to try and put Abhartach back in the ground… but the person who raised Abhartach from his 1,400-year stasis has other plans.”
What might feminist readers enjoy about the comic? As if an Irish suffragette killing demons isn’t enough to get anyone interested…
“Well, I hope there’s plenty there for everyone, but the women’s suffrage movement was on my mind from the start. Róisín has had a liberal, educated upbringing, she was allowed a lot of leeway as a child, but as a woman she’s starting to discover that there are more limits on her than she imagined.
For instance, that simple thing her father says to her: of course women should have the right to vote… but a career on the stage? It’s disreputable. The struggle for equal rights is a slow erosion of the buts. People are always full of reasons why you can have some rights, but not all.
That’s why Róisín has a bike. People forget that the bicycle was a huge boon to women in the nineteenth century – it gave them a freedom of movement that they didn’t enjoy previously, and it also helped bring about a change in clothing.
Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that she thought the bicycle ‘has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world, It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.'”
What sort of heroine is Róisín – who is she as a character? Which other comic book heroines have inspired you in the past and what do you like about them?
“Róisín is a young, idealist woman with great ambition who is prone to impulsive decisions. The events in the comic book means she’s forced to deal with tragedy while learning she has far less control over her life. These are the kinds of lessons we often learn in life, although in Róisín’s case they involve an undead creature, magicians and ancient Irish divinities!
I haven’t drawn upon any other comic book heroines consciously in relation to Róisín, but there were a number that had an impact upon me over the years. First was Judge Anderson in 2000 AD. I didn’t read many American comics when I was growing up in Ireland as there weren’t many available at the time. 2000 AD was the premiere title for young teens then, so I read it too. Her first appearance in the Judge Death storyline (written by John Wagner and drawn by Brian Bolland) ticked all the boxes for me: horror and a great female lead.
What I loved about Anderson was her humour. She was the only one who poked fun at Dredd, and I loved that the Psi-Division were given loads of leeway because of the job they did and the high risk of their brains being fried in the process. Plus, she saves the world through an extreme act of self-sacrifice (thankfully, she didn’t remain in stasis forever!).
A while ago I read a comment on a website by one of the early artists of Anderson, in which he said he thought that she wasn’t very complex and was created for a bit of titillation for the lads. That comment disappointed me greatly. I guess he didn’t realise that Anderson was one of the very few women in 2000 AD at the time, and for that reason alone she had a big impact on the girls/women who read the series. Having a representation of women in comics book series is really important, and Dredd himself is not exactly the most complex character! I don’t usually hanker after writing particular characters, but writing Anderson would be a dream project.
Another character that had a big impact was Tank Girl (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin). She had a punk sensibility and a sense of humour, and liked sex, drugs and driving a tank – what was not to love?
Other characters I like are David Mack’s Scarab, Storm from the X-Men (woefully underused, I think), Alan Moore’s Halo Jones (another character I’d kill to write) and Promethea, Warren Ellis’s Jenny Sparks, and finally, the goddess herself, Wonder Woman.
I’ve only fallen in love with the Wonder Woman character in the past year, which is completely the result of Gail Simone‘s amazing writing. I’m also now a big fan of Simone’s Secret Six and Birds of Prey – so you can include all the (many) female characters in those series on my list now. Simone is one of the best comic book writers in the industry in my opinion, and she’s particularly adept at dialogue, especially for the female characters. Her comic books consistently pass the Bechdel Test, which so many titles still don’t do.”
Like Gail Simone and NK Jemisin, you’re a writer who sticks by her conscience, and you’re not afraid to call out industry figures when something’s Just Not Right. What have you learned from this so far, and has it ever worked against you?
“No change occurs if you remain silent. It’s that simple – but it’s not necessarily easy to speak up.
As a woman you know a likely response to raising an issue – such as the lack of women at an event – is that you will be dismissed or attacked (especially on the Internet).
So, I always strive to be fair and logical in how I present my case. Sometimes that’s difficult because I feel so passionately about women getting a fair shake – well, everyone getting a fair shake, no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.
A number of people have asked me if I think I’m damaging my career with some of the issues I’ve raised. So far I’ve never experienced it, but would it stop me? No.
Let’s be realistic. I’m speaking out on issues from a pretty safe environment. If I was a female union representative in Mexico – for example – I would have a genuine risk in speaking up. Or a mother trying to access education for her girls in Afghanistan. Those people inspire me – they are taking real risks with their lives and yet find the courage to stand up for what is right.
When I think of that it puts what I do in perspective! (And it makes me donate to aid organisations that help people in those risky situations.)”
Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our interview. Warm thanks to Maura for talking to us.
- Maura McHugh is an Irish writer with films, comics and short stories to her name. She blogs at Splinister and you can read her recent guest post for BadRep, in which she recommended us some horror writers, here. Róisín Dubh is published by Atomic Diner and the first issue can be bought online here. Or pester your local comic store to order some copies!
Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988
A while back I told you about my favourite cyborg, Battle Angel Alita. Well, now I’d like to introduce you to my favourite flying plant woman, in the second in my series on really old comic books I have a tenuous excuse to blog about. Here comes the excuse…
Like feminism? Like Neil Gaiman? Then you may be happy to hear that there is a new book being put together of essays about JUST THESE THINGS. Abstract submissions have just closed, and Death, Desire, Fury, and Delirium: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman is on track to be published in early 2012.
This got me thinking back to Gaiman’s 1988 story Black Orchid. Unusual, poetic and full of references, I think it’s a cracking comic. And it’s illustrated by Dave McKean (channeling Georgia O’Keeffe) so it’s beautiful. Really – alternately lush and gritty, humming with colour, splattered with monochrome… it ruined other graphic novels for me from a very early age.
Since this is Gaiman, there are also some classy cameos: Lex Luthor, Batman, Swamp Thing (obviously) and a trip around Arkham Asylum which includes a for-once-actually-pretty-scary Poison Ivy.
What’s the story?
The original Black Orchid was a Bronze Age superhero who sounds pretty kickass (being invulnerable and superstrong and able to fly ‘n’ all…). But rather than simply rebooting the character and reworking her origin story, Gaiman does something pretty daring: he kills her off. On page ten. And with her the story sloughs off a heap of superhero clichés and leaps to somewhere and something altogether different.
As Black Orchid dies (caught out trying to infiltrate LexCorp) another being wakes up in a greenhouse somewhere else with some of her memories. The story follows her quest to discover her identity and protect herself and her clone sister – another human-plant hybrid – from the clutches of those who were pursuing the first Black Orchid, and from the abusive ex pursuing the woman she used to be.
Genderfun
I probably don’t need to say that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about identity and memory in there. There are also a lot of very feminine tropes about nature, healing, nurturing, non-violence and motherhood – the older Orchid acts as mother to her younger sister, and even Poison Ivy has some disturbing ‘babies’ in Arkham – which are certainly not commonplace in your standard superhero comic.
Poison Ivy. Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988
But this isn’t your standard superhero comic – this is a story about a superhero who isn’t a superhero. Who isn’t the same character she was when you started the book. All sorts of assumptions come tumbling down. Who’s the Big Bad? When’s the big fight? What’s her snappy comeback?
Like its contemporary Watchmen, the story questions the superhero myth and structure, upends and subverts it, teases out the stories stuck between the monoliths of Good and Evil. But it comes at it from an entirely different place. You could argue that in Watchmen the myth of the superhero consumes itself in a hyper-masculine world of science and violence, while in Black Orchid superheroic power is rejected for a hyper-feminine power of nature and passive resistance.
In fact Dr Julia Round has argued the second bit. In her paper ‘Can I call you “Mommy”?’ Myths of the female and superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid she explains firstly how the “non-egoistic collectivism” of Black Orchid’s shared, continuous identity overturns the “heroic individualism” of the superhero myth.
Even the look of the book resists the powerful iconography of the traditional superhero story – think of Superman’s ‘S’ and the bat sign, the cape, and even the idea of the costume itself:
Black Orchid inverts expectations of this type, as the Orchids are not costumed or linked to any specific logo. Instead they are characterized by splashes of colour in a monochrome cityscape and, in their natural surroundings, simply merge with the background. This aesthetic contributes to Black Orchid’s redefinition of the superheroic, using painted artwork that is feminised in its watercolour appearance and use of purple shades.
As the plot progresses, Black Orchid resists and escapes the men pursuing her, but doesn’t attack them. Batman encourages her to become a crime-fighter like the first Black Orchid, but she retreats. As Round says, “she is not a masculine defender of the state, but instead wants only to retreat from society and reproduce.” Yes, really. I did say hyper-feminine (‘a woman’s just gotta nurture!’) Much as I love Black Orchid, it certainly throws up some problems. How can I give a thumbs up for her non-violent resistance and at the same time be hoping she’s going to impale the bad guy on a tree?
The final showdown between Black Orchid and Luthor’s henchmen isn’t a heroic battle, as Black Orchid refuses to go with them but also refuses to fight them, saying just “Do what you have to do.” I won’t spoil the ending, but I can say it’s not the way Alita would have done it.
Ecofeminism
Image copyright Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean / DC Comics 1988
That said, Alita does sacrifice herself at the end of her series to save the world. But only after she’s exhausted every possible ass-kicking route. In fact Black Orchid makes an interesting contrast with Battle Angel Alita, as the ‘cyborg feminism’ for which I think Alita makes such a good figurehead was proposed as an alternative to the popularity of ‘ecofeminism’ in the early 1980s. And I can think of few better poster girls for ecofeminism than Black Orchid.
Broadly, ecofeminism is a branch of our beautiful multiple complicated movement that focuses on a connection (and an implied sympathy) between the exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of women. There are a lot of sound reasons to make this link: women are usually affected first and worst by environmental damage, women make up the majority of the world’s agricultural workers, and yet it is overwhelmingly men who own land and control access to natural resources. And the association of the feminine with nature and Mother Earth is a deep and powerful one, which has been cast in a renewed positive light, thanks largely to ecofeminism.
Sadly though the movement has also spawned a lot of guff – about wafty earth goddesses, women’s spiritual connection to the natural world, their innate love of cute fluffy animals and the terrifying, all-encompassing juggernaut of their need to nurture something, anything – to which I do not subscribe.
But to show I don’t hold the theory to blame, I’d like to direct you to some brilliant and important work being done in the name of ecology and feminism by the Women’s Environmental Network. Also: go and read Black Orchid, and tell me what you think.
A couple of disclaimers…
- I’m using ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to refer to the traits, qualities, symbols and associated ideas that are loosely grouped around those words in most Western culture and emphatically NOT referring to men and women.
- When I’m talking about the ‘superhero myth’ I’m using ‘myth’ in the semiotic sense (as Round does in her article) rather than ‘myth’ in the straight up stories and legends sense. There’s quite a good definition here for anyone who’s interested.
Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.
– Jacqueline Susann, after reading Portnoy’s Complaint
Last week was a busy week in the book world. Sainsburys found itself anointed Bookseller of the Year to the chagrin of actual booksellers, the beleaguered Waterstones chain was saved from the asset-stripping abyss, and the Man Booker International Prize went to the veteran novelist Philip Roth. The last of these events made the biggest splash in the mainstream press, due to the consequent resignation in protest from the judging panel of Carmen Callil, the redoubtable founder of Virago Press, who – cue shock, horror, and the frantic ordering by booksellers of Roth’s backlist – disparaged Roth as a writer and disputed his worthiness to win.
“Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”
– Carmen Callil: Why I quit the Man Booker International panel
The criticism traditionally levelled at the Roth canon is that it mines a deep seam of misogyny. Although Callil was quick to quash any conjecture that her decision to dish Roth was influenced by feminist considerations, emphasising rather her concerns over awarding the prize to yet another North American novelist, this didn’t prevent the Telegraph reporting the affair under the headline ‘Feminist Judge Resigns…’, nor the majority of reports stressing her feminist credentials – or taint, perhaps – as head of Virago. Although Callil argues that her objections to Roth transcend his portrayal of women, much of the subsequent debate centred on the misogynist-or-not nature of Roth’s writing. Several female authors appear for the prosecution towards the end of this piece, while Linda Grant and Karen Stabiner have previously argued for a more nuanced perspective.
What interested me about the whole farrago, apart from the unbecoming glee with which several respondents leapt upon Callil’s admittedly oddly graphic description of her reaction to Roth’s writing (‘[He] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.‘), was how quickly comments to many of the pieces above dived into questions of whether Roth, with his ‘priapic’ preoccupations and thematic concentration on the ups and downs of male sexuality, was just too ‘male’ a writer for Callil’s tastes and, by extension, for those of female readers as a whole. Robert McCrum in the Observer wrote of Callil:
Her expertise is as an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s. It’s hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth’s lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual (American) man.
Female readers, and especially those with feminist sensibilities, so the argument seems to run, cannot be expected to appreciate or enjoy writing by men which concentrates on the male experience. Any criticisms they might raise of such writing, based on personal evaluations of its quality, technique, or aesthetic appeal, rather than its content, can therefore be instantly dismissed because, well, you were never going to like it anyway, were you. It’s not for you. Apart from anything else, this assertion is unsound: the articles above and elsewhere illustrate that many women do enjoy and appreciate writing by Roth and his contentious ilk – Updike, Amis, Easton Ellis – and it is no less the case that many male readers really don’t. Like the comparable myths about male and female approaches to music and music writing, the suggestion that writers, and readers, can be neatly divided on the basis of gender, and their responses to art explained away accordingly, is as bizarre and unhelpful as it is frustratingly persistent.
Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine
Unsung Heroes: Wilma Rudolph
Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.
– Wilma Rudolph
The 1960 Summer Olympics, the first to be broadcast internationally (the 1948 games had been aired by the BBC, but only in London), helped launch the fame of one of the world’s best known athletes, Cassius Clay. But this post is about someone else who competed that year: the woman who would become known as “the Tornado” and “La Gazella Negra”, Wilma Glodean Rudolph (June 23, 1940 – November 12 1994).
Rudolph was not the most likely choice to become one of the best runners of her generation. The 20th in a family of 22 children, she was a premature birth, weighing only 4.5lbs. Racial segregation in the US at the time prevented Wilma from being treated at the local hospital, and the poverty caused by the Great Depression made it financially difficult for her family to take her elsewhere. Throughout her childhood her mother had to nurse her through measles, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, and pneumonia.
The disease that had the most impact on her chances of athletic stardom, however, was polio, which left her partially paralysed and with a twisted left leg. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to walk again, let alone run. Wilma, however, was far too tenacious to be slowed down by a little thing like polio and childhood paralysis. Through a combination of intense physical therapy, corrective shoes, and a metal leg brace, Wilma regained the ability to walk unaided by the age of twelve.
My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.
– Wilma Rudolph
No stranger to physical training by this point, Wilma decided to follow in the path of one of her older sisters and take up basketball. She excelled at the sport, setting state records for scoring, and catching the attention of Edward Temple – the track and field coach for Tennessee State University. She had some track experience already from high school athletics classes, and by 1956, aged 16, she was running to a high enough standard to have a spot on the US Olympic team for the 1956 games in Melbourne, where she picked up a bronze medal.
Four years beforehand she’d been unable to walk unaided, and four years before that she was being told by doctors that she’d never walk at all. Now she was an Olympic medallist. Of course, someone who overcomes polio through sheer determination isn’t the sort of person who settles for a mere bronze medal. In 1960 Wilma returned to the Olympics for the Rome games and landed no less than three gold medals, the first American woman to do so. She set a world record for the 200m sprint at 23.2 seconds, and one for the 400m relay with her teammates Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams, and Barbara Jones.
What made Wilma’s Olympic victory go from a regular badass achievement to a triple-decker pile of brilliance, however, was what she did afterwards. Upon returning to Clarksville, Tennessee, with her medals, a homecoming parade was arranged in her honour. She insisted the parade be an integrated event, where previous such occasions had always been segregated. Her banquet was the first time in the city’s history that a large meal was held without segregation. After this, Wilma joined the protests that took place in the city until segregation laws were struck down.
You want to hear about more awesomeness? Hopefully you do, because Wilma Rudolph still had plenty more of it to deliver. Her athletic excellence had earned her a full scholarship at Tennessee State University, you see, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education. She taught for a while at her own former high school, followed by schools in Maine and Indiana. In 1967 she was asked by the then Vice President of the US, Hubert Humphrey, to take part in an athletic outreach programme aimed at underprivileged children living in housing projects in several major cities. When the programme ended she established her own non-profit organisation, the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, to continue the work. The foundation provided free coaching, academic assistance and personal support to kids in deprived areas.
The triumph can’t be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.
– Wilma Rudolph
For more detailed discussion on Wilma Rudolph’s athletic achievements and work as an educator and civil rights campaigner, check out Wilma Rudolph: Athlete and Educator by Alice Flanagan, and the good but somewhat short Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. Wilma’s 1977 autobiography, Wilma, is also good, but a bit tricky to find.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Today’s guest post came winging over to us from Libby, who runs the blog TreasuryIslands, which you should read ‘cos it’ll charm your socks off.
Very quietly, in April, a study was published that found that in American children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, female characters were under-represented by a ratio of 1.6:1. Not much happened. Then, at the beginning of this month, the Guardian wrote it up, and the Daily Mail tried their best to misrepresent it, failing to note the criteria used, representing the research as if it had been conducted in the UK, and generally being, well, a bit Daily Mail about the whole thing.
Two things then happened. The lovely lovely Daily Mail comments section went mad with people declaring (presumably based on the many years of research that each of them had done) that the results were clearly rubbish and anyway a bit of sexism never did me any harm now get in the kitchen and put my tea on. The Guardian‘s commenters largely ignored the piece, or said ‘no shit, Sherlock’ and went back to what they were doing before. So far, so par for the course.
But this lack of inquisitive attention is wrong for two reasons: first, this is a massive undertaking, so, y’know, kudos; secondly, these findings are Important. Important enough to use a capital ‘I’: at a time when children are developing their own gender identities, their literature both represents and defines what is expected of them. We need to know what those expectations are; the expectations that come not from our own choice of books for our children, but from what the literary establishment deems ‘good’ award winners are – rightly or wrongly – arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of acceptability. So when a study comes along that pays particular attention to, amongst other things, a century-worth of Caldecott Medal winners, we should be sitting up and taking notice.
Children’s books, and books in general, are not here-today-gone-tomorrow entities; they persist. In short, voices from both the distant and recent past are telling our children that women are simply not as important as men.
I’m not going to blather on about why it’s important for the message of gender of equality to be strong in the cradle and the classroom, nor why the repression of female characters in children’s fiction reinforces patriarchal gender systems, because if you’re over at BadRep you probably already know (and if you don’t, plenty has been written on the subject before).
I am going to blather on about why on earth this disparity between the genders hasn’t changed very much in a century.
So, let us return to the statistics. Since the early 1970s, studies have repeatedly found girls and women to be under-represented in children’s fiction, and this latest one is no different. It finds that in central roles male characters have a representation of 57 percent, and female characters only 31 percent. Significantly, it notes that “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent”. You can get a free PDF of the whole study, by Janice McCabe, Emily Fairchild, and others from universities in Florida and Indiana, here or read the abstract here.
Not only are there fewer female characters in books in the first place, but “reader response research suggests that as children read books with male characters, their preferences for male characters are reinforced, and they will continue reaching for books that feature boys, men, and male animals”. This disparity of gender representation is made even more significant when we learn that boys redefine female protagonists with whom they identify as secondary characters1 and recast secondary male characters as central when retelling the same stories2. Educators, too, make a distinction between the genders when choosing appropriate literature for their classes, opting for stories with male protagonists more frequently than female even when their self-reported politics would suggest they do otherwise. 3
It is worth mentioning at this stage that the numerical representation of the genders and the stereotypicality of the behaviours those genders present are separate issues, and while the latter is fascinating in all sorts of ways, it is a large enough arena of study to warrant a separate post.
Children’s literature is particularly sensitive to sociopolitical forces. It’s probably not surprising, then, that this study finds spikes in the parity of gender representations coinciding with the second – and third – waves of feminism, so the books published in the 1930s-1960s show less gender parity than those published before and after, and more equal representation of the genders in books published after 1970.
Take this graph – Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters across the full set of 5,618 books the study analysed, spanning a century from 1900-2000:
These peaks and troughs in the equality of gender representation paint a worrying picture. When the feminist movement is active, female and male characters do move towards a parity of representation. But when feminism goes off the boil, so does gender equality.
What does this mean for the futures of feminism? Are we destined to keep pushing the message, safe in the knowledge that it will be quickly unlearned if we stop? We cannot rest on our laurels. The third wave feminist movement has, arguably, made feminism more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. But history teaches us that we need to take the waves out of feminism, to keep working, to question inequality whenever we see it mindful that old habits die hard.
“Ending discrimination”, says Kat Banyard in her book The Equality Illusion, “will require a no less than a total transformation of society at every level: international, national, local and individual.” Our children’s books are an indication of this, and a litmus test by which progress can be measured.
You can find more musings on various aspects of kid lit over at my blog TreasuryIslands, including an ongoing series on feminism for beginners with heaps of recommendations. Meanwhile, here are a few of my fabulous feminist favourites.
Totally awesome feminist children’s books:
Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, translated by Chantal Wright
Isabella doesn’t like being a princess. She doesn’t like being waited on, she doesn’t like smiling all day and she doesn’t like her pretty frocks. She’s had enough. Throwing her crown into a pond, she awaits her punishment from the king, but when he sends her to live in a pigsty, the results are far from what he expected…
Captain Abdul’s Pirate School by Colin McNaughton
Pickles is a pupil at pirate school. A reluctant student, Pickles learns how to talk like a pirate, make cannon balls, fight and get up to all the mischief expected of a pirate at sea. Leading a mutiny against the teachers, Pickles shows bravery, cunning and compassion.
Only on the last of the book’s 32 pages is Pickles revealed to be a girl named Maisie.
Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Dr Mairi Hedderwick
With a little help from her dungaree-wearing, tractor-driving granny, Katie Morag delivers the mixed up post on the Scottish island where she lives. She’s a great young heroine with a seriously badass gran.
Give Us The Vote! by Sue Reid
Based on the true story of Dora Thewlis, 16-year-old suffragette. A Yorkshire mill worker, Thewlis took part in a mission to break into the Houses of Parliament in early 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned, a move which found her on the front page of the tabloids nicknamed ‘the baby suffragette’. Part of the My True Story series, Give Us the Vote! is an excellent lesson in first wave feminism.
Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.
Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
- a finding by Elizabeth Segel, whose 1986 work is referenced in the study. [↩]
- Bronwyn Davies noted this in her 2003 book Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender, and it’s also referenced. [↩]
- Deborah A. Garrahy’s 2001 study “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior” is worth a look for more on this, in The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 81-94. [↩]
What the Hell, Advertising?
So, here’s a cigarette advert from several decades ago. Y’know, back before they knew cigarettes killed you and stuff. Also back when gender representations in advertising were even more terrible.
But hey, that was decades ago, right? That was from a time when people held far more dubious views, hell people had only recently stopped using tape worms as a miracle diet (no, seriously). It was a less enlightened time, but we’ve moved on since then, yes?
Well, no, not so much. The world of advertising is still filled with dubious messages, awkward depictions of race and gender, and terrible division of products along gender lines (“This is a girl product! Make the packaging pink so they’ll buy it! This is a boy product! Fill the advert with explosions!”) So what we have here is a collection of half a dozen or so recent magazine adverts that have taken their attitudes straight from the 1950s.
Mr. Clean
It was Mothers’ Day in the US recently, and Mr Clean decided to run this advert for the occasion. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the advert. Maybe Mothers’ Day in the US is a bit different to the UK. Either way, the apparent message of “Get back to the cleaning! And get your daughter to help, she needs to learn!” seems a little… well, off.
Goldstar Beer
Goldstar Beer have an interesting view of how drinking works, one that manages to simultaneously insult both men and women. Women are complex and have to worry about matching their drinks (girly, fruity drinks, naturally) to their outfits, because they’re shallow like that. Men, meanwhile, are simple-minded creatures who are only capable of desiring one thing: beer. And not even good beer. Crappy mass-market beer.
Goldstar have another advert in this campaign that manages to be even worse on some levels – take a look for yourself here.
Nike
It’s not just gender that advertising fails on either. Here we get a delightful intersection of gender and homophobia from the fine folks at Nike. Because ballet isn’t manly, you see, and you don’t want your son to do something that isn’t manly. Best buy him some Nike trainers as soon as you can and get him doing something macho like soccer, before the homosexuals lure him into their sordid world of energetic dance routines and toned calf muscles. Because that is totally how reality works. Yes.
DeBeers
Women, you see, are basically like magpies, only larger and incapable of flight. So not very good magpies. But like magpies, women are innately drawn to shiny shiny things; the shinier the better. And as DeBeers know, if you feed her craving for shiny objects then she’ll pretend to like you and sate your desperate need for validation. Which, of course, is all women are good for. (That and cooking you dinner, which is a talent the common magpie rarely excels at.)
Wait no, all of that was wrong. What the hell, DeBeers? Really?
Prudential Financial
Social values, 1950s style. Cooking, cleaning, caring for your child. These all start with C. More importantly, they’re all things that the wife does, because hey, it’s not like she has a job, right? Women in the workplace? Madness! And all of those things are time consuming; why, hiring someone to do them all would be fairly expensive. When your wife dies, you won’t be grieving over the loss of your life’s love, you’ll be wondering who’s going to make dinner if you can’t afford to hire a cook. So you’d better get life insurance out on her. Or, I guess, buy some diamonds and lure a magpie, either way.
Qsol Servers
I was going to say something bitingly snarky and witty, but… I just… wow. I’ve been defeated by this advert. Just imagine I said something hilarious and cutting and you’re all very entertained.
So, defeated by that last advert, I’m going to stop here. I implore all of you to go out and get jobs in advertising and make better adverts than these, so that we can someday feature them in Found Feminism.
It’s a guest post! Rai got in touch with us on Twitter to see if they could do anything about our lack of posts on gaming (apart from Markgraf’s brow-furrowing loving critiques of Assassin’s Creed, natch). “Welcome aboard!” we said. Here’s the first of what’ll hopefully be a series of entries in BadRep’s Gamer Diary.
March saw the eagerly anticipated release of Dragon Age II; the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening (along with all the extra DLC that became available during the interim period). Dragon Age, for those of you unfamiliar with the games, is a fantasy RPG in which you guide your character through quests and the main plotline, battling all manner of nasty creatures and unscrupulous types along the way. You gather a team made up of mages, warriors and rogues who may be human, elf or dwarf, and they help you defeat the forces of evil.
One of the key features of games like this is that you can build your own character: you pick the gender, the hair style, the facial features, the class (e.g. a mage), and in some instances you can even pick the voice. I, for example, have a male warrior elf with ginger hair in Origins and in Dragon Age II my character Zakarianna Hawke is a female, white-haired rogue with a facial tattoo (you can see a visual of her below left). The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they’re still fairly comprehensive.
Other popular games that boast this feature include the Mass Effect series and the Fable series, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. I was, however, quite late to the Mass Effect party for one very key reason: I thought you had to be male. That is to say, the advertising and marketing for Mass Effect gave me no inkling that there was any other option than to be the character that features in the trailers and the stills.
Normally this doesn’t bother me (pretty much all the games I have ever played have a male protagonist) but I read an unfortunate article that suggested Commander Shepard – Mass Effect’s protagonist – was a bit of a womaniser. So I wrote it off.
I then, much later, got a little overexcited by all the sales after Christmas in which I saw Mass Effect 1 and 2 for a little over a tenner. I asked my brother what he thought of them and ended up buying the games – turns out, you can play as a female character! Plus all the womanising depends entirely on the decisions made in-game by the person directing the character (again, my take on Commander Shepard, Drakhoa Shepard, is just below left further down).
This little surprise, combined with Dragon Age II’s recent advertising prior to its release, made me wonder why games that allow you to play as male or female are only ever marketed using the preset male appearance. For illustration purposes I have collected a few trailers courtesy of YouTube:
- Dragon Age II “Destiny – Extended” Trailer
- Dragon Age II “Rise to Power” Trailer
- Mass Effect 3 “Debut” Trailer
- Mass Effect 2 “Full Cinematic” Trailer
- Mass Effect 2 “Launch” Trailer
- Fable II
- Fable III
From those trailers alone, would you have any idea that you can actually play through as a female protagonist? If you knew nothing else about these games, I doubt there’s any chance you’d be able to guess the female protagonist option from the advertising. This could be quite off-putting to gamers (not just female gamers either) as the advertising doesn’t highlight the option of choice that you get in the game; to be a character that you want to be. It certainly put me off: when confronted with the limited information and the possibility that the male protagonist was a character I wouldn’t be able to stand, I chose to look elsewhere. Even though, for me, that elsewhere was probably going back to a First Person Shooter with a male protagonist: at least most of them don’t talk, and you forget the character when you’re facing down hundreds of Replica soldiers or when a Necromorph just came bursting out of an air vent to tear you to pieces.
I’m not trying to fault these RPG games here, though they do all have some downsides – I’m just wondering why the distributors and the marketing bods decide to exclude one whole section of their demographic in one swoop. I’m sure there is some (weak) reasoning to do with demographic statistics and some blanket statements about who buys these games, but surely that’s wearing a little thin by now? I certainly got sick of seeing the preset male character’s smug face in all the Dragon Age II trailers.
Well, if we look over at Blizzard and some of their teasers for Diablo III (coming out later this year) then there are some positive developments on the horizon. They’ve begun releasing trailers relating to each ‘class’ of character for the upcoming game – all of which can be played as a male or female version – and, most importantly, they’re telling us all about it in their advertising!
Demon Hunter and Wizard are two of the classes you will be able to play as in Diablo III; the others are Monk, Barbarian, and Witch Doctor. The latter three are automatically presented as male, but Demon Hunter and Wizard are automatically presented to us as female on Blizzard’s website for Diablo III, despite the fact all five classes can be played as either. It is interesting as well that at BlizzCon2010 the 19 minutes of gameplay footage included in the press kit featured both the female Demon Hunter and Wizard as the protagonist.
Clearly, then, not all RPG gaming advertising is male-centric, and hopefully more companies will start to follow down the path that Blizzard is taking – showing the audience the variety that is available in-game, instead of just marketing it at male gamers and assuming female gamers (should such a fabled beast exist – haha!) aren’t going to get offended at being ignored or forgotten about.
They are, as I mentioned earlier, all good games (Fable, Dragon Age, Mass Effect) so don’t let the advertising put you off playing them, but equally let’s not resign ourselves to the notion that male-centric advertising will never change. It is changing; it just happens to be very slowly.
- Rai, at the tender age of 23, has been gaming for 15 years and writing for 10 – perfect combination! Watch this space for more Gamer Diary.
- Have an idea for a guest post, or a project you’d like to tell us (and the world) about? Send us an email.
Unsung Heroes: Helen Taussig
You know you’re pretty awesome when you’re credited with founding a field of medicine. Not just a particular technique or methodology, which is impressive enough in itself, but a whole field of practice. It’s the sort of achievement that you drop into conversation and then everyone else feels a little bit bad, because they will never do anything quite as cool. One person who can claim such an achievement is Dr Helen Taussig, pioneer of paediatric cardiology.
Helen Taussig, taken during her time as a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Taussig (b. 1898) had other ideas. Having studied at a series of prestigious schools, including Harvard, Taussig graduated from Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1927, moving to Johns Hopkins Hospital to spend several years specialising in cardiology and paediatrics. In 1930 she was appointed head of the Children’s Heart Clinic, making her one of the highest ranking women in American medicine at the time. She noted that infants with another particular heart deformity (patent ductus arteriosus, which allows blood to flow between the aorta and the pulmonary artery) who suffered from Tetralogy of Fallot tended to have better survivability than those with Tetralogy of Fallot alone.
Based on this, Taussig came to a conclusion that had evaded everyone else up until then: by creating an artificial hole, or shunt, between the two arteries it might be possible to overcome most of the problems caused by Tetralogy of Fallot. She took her ideas to Robert Gross, a surgeon at Boston who had pioneered patent ductus arteriosus ligation (the tying off of the hole between the arteries to stop the flow between them). Gross dismissed the idea, acting on the accepted wisdom of the time that stated the condition to be impossible to fix surgically. Without the help of an experienced cardiac surgeon, there would be no way to actually test Taussig’s ideas.
In addition to the resistance from established surgeons, Taussig faced another obstacle to developing her idea: Around the time of graduating from Johns Hopkins she had become profoundly deaf, something which seemed, at the time, like it might put an end to her career. How could one practise cardiology without being able to hear heart rhythms through a stethoscope? Taussig was not one to be stopped by such trifling matters though, and developed an exceptional proficiency for feeling the rhythms by hand instead of listening to them, later crediting some of her discoveries to this talent.
You must learn to listen with your fingers.
– Dr Helen Taussig
This might be the point where a less awesome individual might give up, might let their idea drop and become just another footnote in medical history. Instead, Taussig approached Alfred Blalock, a recent appointment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Together with his surgical technician, Vivien Thomas, they began to develop the idea, and by 1944 were ready to perform their first operation on a person.
The first operation was a qualified success – the initial surgery went well, but the patient didn’t survive a follow up surgery the following year. The following two attempts were wholly successful, and by 1952 over 1,000 patients had undergone the Blalock-Taussig Shunt procedure, as it became known, with around 85% survival rates. Taussig and Blalock lectured on their technique in Paris and London, where surgeons experienced similar success rates.
But pioneering a new field of medicine and improving the life expectancy and quality of life for countless infants wasn’t enough for Taussig – she had more awesome achievements still to go. In 1957 the sedative drug Thalidomide was distributed to thousands of clinicians in the US for testing, proposed as a safe drug for a variety of conditions. We now know, of course, that the drug was far from safe for this, having massively teratogenic properties. Taussig was one of the doctors, along with the FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, who provided evidence for the dangers of the drug. This lead to its being refused approval for sale in the US, and eventually removed from other markets once its dangers had been exposed.
So that’s twice that Taussig was a key figure in improving the quality of life of infants, thus arguably making the world a better place through her actions. In addition to this she campaigned for the legalisation of abortion and became one of the first women to be appointed to a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University in 1959, and the first to serve as president of the American Heart Association. One of the four colleges of the Johns Hopkins medical school still bears her name.
Her 1947 textbook, Congenital Malformations of the Heart, is worth reading whether or not one has a medical background, as it stands as an example of a very well written work by one of the field’s most incisive minds.
[Taussig] was truly a remarkably notable woman in health care.
– Harold Ellis, Journal of Perioperative Practice
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!