About a year back, I made a conscious choice to read more work by women to align my reading practices with my critiques of media and my field. You know, as one does when one wants to embody change.
Now, writing the dissertation, this was hard: philosophy is an unsurprisingly dude centric field. However, the attempt resulted in a massively diverse set of readings for my syllabi, as well as reshaping my engagement with the field.
But that’s not what I want to talk about: I want to talk about how choosing to consume more fiction by women ruined my reading habits.
(No, douchebags, I’m not using ruined literally: I’m using it ironically.)
There are aesthetic elements, flourishes of world building that women (and folks who aren’t cis-dudes) seem to “get” in the way they reveal the worlds inhabited by their characters. That is, the world built and the characters within seem interdependent in specific ways.
I think the best way to put it is that the worlds aren’t just described, they’re interacted with by the characters in such a way as to make the world a character in it’s own right, rather than mere window dressing for the characters’ journeys.
As an example, the Shalimar in @RoanhorseBex Trail of Lightning seemed to me to be alive, a character within the narrative that is possessed of it’s own vitality, it’s own experience in the same way that many of her characters were.
And the same could be said of, well, everywhere in Space Opera by @catvalente which is unsurprising given the author and the book in question. However Space Opera stands out for how vivid the world is and how much of a character it becomes.
There are others like the restaurants in Jade City by @FondaJLee and the various stations in the Murderbot Chronicles by @marthawells1 which are only briefly featured but are so very full of life, life which interacts with characters as if they were characters unto themselves.
And here’s the ruining bit: I didn’t realize how much of this was lackluster in my fictional worlds until I started reading more women and folks who aren’t cis-dudes.
(Dont @ me dude folks: I’ve read your faves and found many of them wanting. Moreover, I have the framed pieces of paper and student loan debt that marks me as something of an expert on this.)
Which is to say that diversity in authorship means more than diversity in characters and narratives: it is diversity in WORLDS. And this is where I’m going to get phenomenological on y’all.
If the world unfolds from our bodies, then it unfolds differently for different bodies. How the world unfolds differently means different possibilities, different potentialities are disclosed differently to different bodies.
To bring in some Dewey, imagination, as a capacity to project possibities for action, to recognize potentilities in nature, would project different potentialities and recognize different possibilities for action. It means that our possible worlds unfold differently.
And this difference of unfolding matters when we integrate past and present for the sake of a possible future, or when we make present that integration as a history, a qualitative unity in art. Different bodies imagine different possibilities and embody them differently in art.
Which is to say that if your canon is full of cis-dudes, you’re wandering generally through the same worlds in the same way because of the way cis-dude bodies and imaginations unfold in interaction with the world.
(Yes, there are many cis-dudes whose worlds unfold in super novel ways due to positionality, embodiment, or sheer skill, don’t @ me, I’ve read them. This isn’t about them.)
So, if I’m gonna make a pitch for folks to read beyond the cis-dude canon, it would be this: fiction is supposed to make present the possibilities of new worlds in imagination. If your fiction only unfolds from dominant bodies, you’re not really exploring new possibilities.
You’re rehashing similar possibilities due to the similarities between orientations of experience and that’s not actually what fiction, what art, is for.
