arionhunter (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} arionhunter) wrote,@ 2007-09-30 17:54:00 |
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This post isn't about a specific story, but the flaws of two pieces we read that came to irritate and frustrate me with their willingness to follow cliché: Planet of the Amazon Women and La Malcontenta.
My main problem with the all-female society is one of its most essential components: the idea of queerness as a choice. We now have a good body of scientific work that has determined queerness is by a large part genetic. Yet this science is rejected or ignored, and an all-female society is cast in a suspiciously heternormative tone.
Because bisexuality is so commonly stigmatized and often little understood by society, it is often left out of stories that could sorely benefit from greater knowledge of it. Instead, most all-female societies are cast as an all-or-nothing proposition: one is with a partner or without, and there is no middle ground. If one really considers the realities of how a single gender society would function (ignoring the transgender population entirely for the sake of argument), children would more than likely be raised in a variety of environments.
The idea of the two-parent family is firmly grounded in notions of opposite gender partnerships; without opposite genders, there's no need for the standard to be a nuclear two-parent family. Furthermore, single parent homes or group parenting may be common among women who have little to no interest in romantic relationships with women. Planet of the Amazon Women makes brief, easy-to-disregard attempts at addressing this concern, but it instead drives right past this point toward its futile ending. In fact, pretty much the entire logic behind the Hippolytan society is ignored for sake of a pseudo-scientific tale that very quickly gets the reader lost among its numerous undefined terms.
From my perspective, the moral behind La Malcontenta, fighting for your true "male and deviant" love, is almost offensive. It attempts to recast the hetereonormativity of our society in a vacuum. And as with most things where an author attempts to create within a vacuum, the work utterly ignores and brings into question (in this case) the rights queer people have fought years to gain, because it just sets queer people up to be feared. "Well, look what would happen if the queer women took over! We should think twice about letting them live their lives."
By asking, "Well, what if being straight were 'deviant'?" La Malcontenta treats queerness as a choice, as if a single gender and single-gender partnerships could ever dominate society. A society that is entirely one sexual preference is not entirely impossible, yet the author "treats a complex, charged, often misunderstood subject matter reductively and in a facile manner," as a friend said. Without proper research into the nature and incidence to bisexuality, or proper background in general, this question is ultimately unanswerable.
My main problem with the all-female society is one of its most essential components: the idea of queerness as a choice. We now have a good body of scientific work that has determined queerness is by a large part genetic. Yet this science is rejected or ignored, and an all-female society is cast in a suspiciously heternormative tone.
Because bisexuality is so commonly stigmatized and often little understood by society, it is often left out of stories that could sorely benefit from greater knowledge of it. Instead, most all-female societies are cast as an all-or-nothing proposition: one is with a partner or without, and there is no middle ground. If one really considers the realities of how a single gender society would function (ignoring the transgender population entirely for the sake of argument), children would more than likely be raised in a variety of environments.
The idea of the two-parent family is firmly grounded in notions of opposite gender partnerships; without opposite genders, there's no need for the standard to be a nuclear two-parent family. Furthermore, single parent homes or group parenting may be common among women who have little to no interest in romantic relationships with women. Planet of the Amazon Women makes brief, easy-to-disregard attempts at addressing this concern, but it instead drives right past this point toward its futile ending. In fact, pretty much the entire logic behind the Hippolytan society is ignored for sake of a pseudo-scientific tale that very quickly gets the reader lost among its numerous undefined terms.
From my perspective, the moral behind La Malcontenta, fighting for your true "male and deviant" love, is almost offensive. It attempts to recast the hetereonormativity of our society in a vacuum. And as with most things where an author attempts to create within a vacuum, the work utterly ignores and brings into question (in this case) the rights queer people have fought years to gain, because it just sets queer people up to be feared. "Well, look what would happen if the queer women took over! We should think twice about letting them live their lives."
By asking, "Well, what if being straight were 'deviant'?" La Malcontenta treats queerness as a choice, as if a single gender and single-gender partnerships could ever dominate society. A society that is entirely one sexual preference is not entirely impossible, yet the author "treats a complex, charged, often misunderstood subject matter reductively and in a facile manner," as a friend said. Without proper research into the nature and incidence to bisexuality, or proper background in general, this question is ultimately unanswerable.