Tuesday, February 24, 2015

More Double-Plus Good Equal Than Others

Lately I've been seeing a lot of posts about authors in social media that have lists in them.  They remind me of Cynthia Eller's comments in "The Myth of a Prehistoric Matriarchy," where she talks about lists associated with "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven," that go something like this:

femalemale
softhard
intuitivelogical
peacefulwarlike
goodbad

Okay, so the lists aren't quite that bald, but the implication is there.  The lists that I'm seeing are a little more nuanced, because they all start straight-white-cis-male, so there's more of a matrix to play with, but they have that same feeling to them that the lists academia had in the late 1980's of old-dead-white-European-males (who are obviously a waste of time to read) .  

As a gay male Neo-Pagan who comes up against the heteronormative narrative in most of the Neo-Pagan literature I've read, I'm all for raising awareness and expanding the repertoire of voices heard in the stories we tell.  But having had the "you can't be a real pagan unless you're a woman" card played on me several times, I really hope we can leave judgments of "good" and "bad" writing untethered from an author's gender, gender-expression, and orientation.  (And yeah, I did submit to Queers Destroy Science Fiction, but I want my story to be published there because it's a good story, not simply because a gay man wrote it.)

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