I just joined this list. I'm a woman living in Toronto, Canada. Just
finished reading the archives, so you're still all a blur in my mind.
Someone talked about slowly realising that all Heinlein's women
characters were strong, brainy women; except when it came to their
relationships with men. I had the same slow discovery. I think it
crystallized about the point of _Time Enough For Love,_ and by the time
that _Friday_ came out, I couldn't stand to read his writing any more.
I've been reading sf in one form or another since I was a kid. I think I
was able to find good female (and *child*) role models because I read a
lot of kid's fantasy, where my sense is that there were more women and
girl protagonists. I did identify with male protagonists, though, and I
remember the unconscious splitting of my awareness that I had to do in
order to accomplish it. And it wasn't that hard; since most of the
protagonists I was reading at the time were adult, and adulthood all by
itself was such unknown territory, breasts were just as alien to my
concept of self as penises (penii?) But it was still strange. I read a
lot of Marvel Comics (didn't like DC so much). Really identified with
Thor, the Silver Surfer, the Sub-Mariner and Daredevil. Now, let me
recomplicate this: I'm Black. I find it as amusing as horrifying that I
managed to convince myself that Daredevil was Black, but ONLY WHEN HE WORE
HIS COSTUME. I knew quite well that his alter-ego was a White man, but I
got confused if I tried to think about that too much. It was nice when
Marvel came out with the African Ororo/Storm character (but girl, that
pressed hair has got to go!). But now I'm slightly off topic. When I
first discovered the feminist (and new wave, to be fair) writing in sf, my
reading of it really took off. It finally stoped being solely escapism
and began to have something to say to *me* and the things I was struggling
with. I remember devouring Elizabeth Lyn's work, and Ursula Le Guin, and,
and... I remember discovering Samuel Delany's _Dhalgren_ and that was
mind-blowing, and moving on to read _Triton,_ and for the first time
starting to think about was gender means.
Someone said something about Whoopi Goldberg having been inspired by
Nichelle Nichols. Well, I think Whoopi's repaid the favour, because for
me, seeing the movie "Jumping Jack Flash" (anyone remember that? I think
it was her first, before she had to go commercial, and it was nominally
sf, since so much computer hacking was involved) was the first time I'd
seen a character I could identify with up on the big screen. And she got
the guy, too. She wasn't the loyal sidekick who gets killed off
poignantly near the end and never gets to kiss anyone.
-nalo
"Words. She knows so many. She knows seven languages, and all of them
different, and in all of them she is hungry."
-Candas Jane Dorsey, _Black Wine_
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:05:56 PDT