![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kateelliottI write fantasy and science fiction novels. I tend to write epic in length and scope, and would call myself a writer of Epic Fantasy.
Many have attempted to define “epic fantasy” as a subgenre, most recently in this extensive roundtable at Clarkesworld Magazine. Obviously I am not one who agrees with those who dismiss epic fantasy as “consolatory fantasy” or the last great hope and refuge of reactionaries secretly in love with the aristocratic system. I think epic fantasy ought to defy definition. Certainly, I see a great many differing sorts of “epic” being written, especially these days as I see a more diverse group of writers emerging who are playing with the landscape of epic.
With the understanding that I don’t identify one pure and true definition, or think that epic fantasy can or should be boiled down to one thing, I do rather like Adam Whitehead’s (The Wertzone) discussion of epic fantasy being an examination of power.
He writes: "At its root, a lot of the subgenre seems to be about the possession and distribution of power and authority, whether that is power over a family, another person, a business, a religion, a kingdom, an empire or a whole world. The clash of those people with different agendas seeking (or avoiding) power drives many works in the subgenre." [His entire post is well worth reading]
I consistently examine power and authority in my novels. One element in the “possession and distribution of power and authority” across the centuries is the predilection of human groups to engage in armed conflict and warfare to achieve their aims. Another is the way in which hierarchy supports entrenched power and in what circumstances entrenched power structures are overthrown or destabilized. Most of these societies historically are patriarchal, which I will simplistically define here as societies in which legally and by custom men have a superior societal position to women purely because of perceived or created gender hierarchies.
Like most people, I really don’t like to read about rape.
I tend to dislike when sexual violence is portrayed as a vehicle through which the female protagonist becomes scarred and/or stronger because she survives it, or when a rape victim “just gets over it” almost as quickly as if she had stubbed her toe.
I get tired of depictions of rape being endemic in much epic fantasy even though I myself argue in this post that there is a reason for its inclusion. I suspect my dislike stems from much of the sexual violence in epic fantasy being seen through a male gaze. While this can in theory and occasionally in practice be done well and realistically, it tends to define the victim as the object of rape rather than the subject of rape, which for me is a crucial distinction in terms of seeing women (especially) as people rather than as plot tools or sexual receptacles.
Obviously, men can be raped too, although I see such depictions far less often and am more likely to notice points where the writers chose, say, to beat up men rather than rape them (as in Battlestar Galactica the Reboot) whereas in a similar situation female characters would have been raped. I confess: I’m guilty of making this choice myself.
Despite my dislike and my unease, however, for me to write about war, slavery, and entrenched hierarchies maintaining their power and NOT to include how rape figures into that cycle and those institutions is to look away from, to make invisible, the horrifically real experiences of both living and long-dead people.
This doesn’t mean I feel I have to or want to write about rape in every story I tell.
I don’t, and I won’t.
But when I’m writing about war and hierarchy, I feel I can’t ignore the reality of how rape is used as a form of social and gender control, of terror in war, as a human rights violation in the specific context of war and armed conflict (something people are still struggling to get rape defined as), or simply unthinkingly in the dehumanizing shackles of slavery, where a person’s body is property to be used as the owner wishes.
Rape remains persistent in most cultures, unfortunately, and as always the most powerless are most at risk.
Shadow Gate, the middle novel of the Crossroads Trilogy, deals in part specifically with rape as a tool of oppression and social breakdown. It’s a grim book. I was driven in part by current events, the truly awful and heart-rending reports from regions broken down by civil war like the Balkans and the Congo. I can’t bear to look away from these truths because they are so bitter and because we have too often shamed the victims, not the perpetrators or a system that leaves such perpetrators in power or lets them go unpunished.
The story of Liath in Crown of Stars begins with her inability to escape from debt slavery and the attentions of a man who intends to control her and her burgeoning power. I based my portrayal of the man in question, Hugh of Austra, in part on an account of an abusive, controlling husband whose behavior one of my sisters had witnessed because the wife in question was an acquaintance of hers.
I have on occasion been taken to task for writing about rape. It has been suggested or implied that I have written the story the way I do for the cheap dramatic punch rather than because I have something to say about the way hierarchies oppress those without the power base of kinship or wealth to protect themselves, or the ways in which people look the other way when abuse is going on because the structure of society protects the abuser, not the abused.
I posit that it is exactly this degree of assumptive judgment--the assumption that there can be nothing but lurid and shallow dramatic consideration behind such a choice--that is part of what creates lesser visibility for female writers in the field.
For one: Why are the larger thematic and analytical elements within the story ignored so easily in favor of seeing the shallowest level?
For two: Why should these stories remain invisible?
I think we can’t get past the disjunction, the privileging of the male gaze and the unrelentingly patriarchal male vision of so much epic fantasy (not to mention other literatures as well as the visual media) when it comes to the portrayal of women and sexual violence, until the uncomfortable stories told from the women's perspective are seen as important and worthwhile and not as offensive or whiny or trivial.
With Liath in Crown of Stars, with Kirit/Kirya and the unnamed women in Shadow Gate, I am in part trying to give visibility to experiences we would prefer to look away from especially as we--and we do--glorify the nobility of war and warriors and the inevitability of violent conflict.
But I’m also trying to suggest that what has happened to these women (and children) is part of the fabric of the societies in which they live and therefore only one part of their greater lives as human beings. That is, the rape is not the story nor does it define them. Their suffering is not The Story. It is part of their story. It is something that happens to them, and there are reasons it happens and reasons it should never have happened in a more just world, the world they don’t live in which is also the world we don’t live in but which maybe we strive to move toward.
ETA: I wanted to add this link (via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fjm on Rape as a weapon of war against men [warning: graphic and disturbing] and how rape of men is also used as a weapon of war and why it is so rarely discussed.
Many have attempted to define “epic fantasy” as a subgenre, most recently in this extensive roundtable at Clarkesworld Magazine. Obviously I am not one who agrees with those who dismiss epic fantasy as “consolatory fantasy” or the last great hope and refuge of reactionaries secretly in love with the aristocratic system. I think epic fantasy ought to defy definition. Certainly, I see a great many differing sorts of “epic” being written, especially these days as I see a more diverse group of writers emerging who are playing with the landscape of epic.
With the understanding that I don’t identify one pure and true definition, or think that epic fantasy can or should be boiled down to one thing, I do rather like Adam Whitehead’s (The Wertzone) discussion of epic fantasy being an examination of power.
He writes: "At its root, a lot of the subgenre seems to be about the possession and distribution of power and authority, whether that is power over a family, another person, a business, a religion, a kingdom, an empire or a whole world. The clash of those people with different agendas seeking (or avoiding) power drives many works in the subgenre." [His entire post is well worth reading]
I consistently examine power and authority in my novels. One element in the “possession and distribution of power and authority” across the centuries is the predilection of human groups to engage in armed conflict and warfare to achieve their aims. Another is the way in which hierarchy supports entrenched power and in what circumstances entrenched power structures are overthrown or destabilized. Most of these societies historically are patriarchal, which I will simplistically define here as societies in which legally and by custom men have a superior societal position to women purely because of perceived or created gender hierarchies.
Like most people, I really don’t like to read about rape.
I tend to dislike when sexual violence is portrayed as a vehicle through which the female protagonist becomes scarred and/or stronger because she survives it, or when a rape victim “just gets over it” almost as quickly as if she had stubbed her toe.
I get tired of depictions of rape being endemic in much epic fantasy even though I myself argue in this post that there is a reason for its inclusion. I suspect my dislike stems from much of the sexual violence in epic fantasy being seen through a male gaze. While this can in theory and occasionally in practice be done well and realistically, it tends to define the victim as the object of rape rather than the subject of rape, which for me is a crucial distinction in terms of seeing women (especially) as people rather than as plot tools or sexual receptacles.
Obviously, men can be raped too, although I see such depictions far less often and am more likely to notice points where the writers chose, say, to beat up men rather than rape them (as in Battlestar Galactica the Reboot) whereas in a similar situation female characters would have been raped. I confess: I’m guilty of making this choice myself.
Despite my dislike and my unease, however, for me to write about war, slavery, and entrenched hierarchies maintaining their power and NOT to include how rape figures into that cycle and those institutions is to look away from, to make invisible, the horrifically real experiences of both living and long-dead people.
This doesn’t mean I feel I have to or want to write about rape in every story I tell.
I don’t, and I won’t.
But when I’m writing about war and hierarchy, I feel I can’t ignore the reality of how rape is used as a form of social and gender control, of terror in war, as a human rights violation in the specific context of war and armed conflict (something people are still struggling to get rape defined as), or simply unthinkingly in the dehumanizing shackles of slavery, where a person’s body is property to be used as the owner wishes.
Rape remains persistent in most cultures, unfortunately, and as always the most powerless are most at risk.
Shadow Gate, the middle novel of the Crossroads Trilogy, deals in part specifically with rape as a tool of oppression and social breakdown. It’s a grim book. I was driven in part by current events, the truly awful and heart-rending reports from regions broken down by civil war like the Balkans and the Congo. I can’t bear to look away from these truths because they are so bitter and because we have too often shamed the victims, not the perpetrators or a system that leaves such perpetrators in power or lets them go unpunished.
The story of Liath in Crown of Stars begins with her inability to escape from debt slavery and the attentions of a man who intends to control her and her burgeoning power. I based my portrayal of the man in question, Hugh of Austra, in part on an account of an abusive, controlling husband whose behavior one of my sisters had witnessed because the wife in question was an acquaintance of hers.
I have on occasion been taken to task for writing about rape. It has been suggested or implied that I have written the story the way I do for the cheap dramatic punch rather than because I have something to say about the way hierarchies oppress those without the power base of kinship or wealth to protect themselves, or the ways in which people look the other way when abuse is going on because the structure of society protects the abuser, not the abused.
I posit that it is exactly this degree of assumptive judgment--the assumption that there can be nothing but lurid and shallow dramatic consideration behind such a choice--that is part of what creates lesser visibility for female writers in the field.
For one: Why are the larger thematic and analytical elements within the story ignored so easily in favor of seeing the shallowest level?
For two: Why should these stories remain invisible?
I think we can’t get past the disjunction, the privileging of the male gaze and the unrelentingly patriarchal male vision of so much epic fantasy (not to mention other literatures as well as the visual media) when it comes to the portrayal of women and sexual violence, until the uncomfortable stories told from the women's perspective are seen as important and worthwhile and not as offensive or whiny or trivial.
With Liath in Crown of Stars, with Kirit/Kirya and the unnamed women in Shadow Gate, I am in part trying to give visibility to experiences we would prefer to look away from especially as we--and we do--glorify the nobility of war and warriors and the inevitability of violent conflict.
But I’m also trying to suggest that what has happened to these women (and children) is part of the fabric of the societies in which they live and therefore only one part of their greater lives as human beings. That is, the rape is not the story nor does it define them. Their suffering is not The Story. It is part of their story. It is something that happens to them, and there are reasons it happens and reasons it should never have happened in a more just world, the world they don’t live in which is also the world we don’t live in but which maybe we strive to move toward.
ETA: I wanted to add this link (via
fjm on Rape as a weapon of war against men [warning: graphic and disturbing] and how rape of men is also used as a weapon of war and why it is so rarely discussed.