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Tag Archives: books

don’t blame readers

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in fandom

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

books, romance

My friends. My loves. My dudes.

If you want f/f books, you gotta buy books from creators who want to write f/f. That’s it. That’s literally the ticket. The more Queer books you buy from Queer authors who are doing the work — the more content there will be. The end.

Last night I saw this Tweet go by on my timeline. I let it go by and then scrolled back to find it because it was bothering  me. And then I wrote a thread about why.

I have screen-capped the Tweet for anonymity because, as I said in the original thread, the person is making a valid point about market-driven content and the need to support creators of the work we want to see out there in the world with our dollars. I also don’t want to pile on this person I have no prior relationship with. But this is a sentiment that circulates with moderate frequency in discussions about whither the f/f romance and I have some feels about shaming and blaming readers for the fact that they aren’t finding the f/f stories they want to read.

First, this argument doesn’t engage with the fact that f/f fiction is structurally more expensive than other kinds of queer romance. I can buy three m/m stories at $2.99 a pop from authors I trust or one $9.99 f/f book from an author I have never read before. Should I be willing to pay more for f/f to support emerging f/f writers? Maybe. But what about readers who only have the $2.99? Too bad for them? Readers don’t have unlimited budgets. We make choices. Cost is a real barrier to access.*

Second, this argument flattens f/f into a single type of story you either want or don’t. Most readers have more specific tastes. I like historicals and paranormals that grapple meaningfully with gender, class, race, include meaningful chosen family networks, and have narratively significant sex. So while I want f/f, I want a pretty specific type of story — a similar type of story to the m/m and f/m narratives I gravitate toward. My other preferences as a reader don’t just swirl down the drain the minute I start sorting by the f/f category tag. If authors writing f/f are not writing in the romance flavors I enjoy, I might feel strongly about the political value of supporting f/f writers in the abstract but as a reader I have low incentive to purchase. Do I pay $4.99 for an m/m or f/m histrom paranormal my trusted social-promotional networks are buzzing about … or $9.99 for a contemporary f/f, the blurb of which makes me feel meh?

And third, those social-promotional networks really matter! Right now, the social-promotional network for f/f seems to be almost entirely separate circle on the Venn diagram from the social-promotional circle of m/m and f/m. (Much like the fandom crossover between original media that inspire f/f pairings and original media that inspire m/m pairings seems to meet only rarely.) In addition to person-to-person recommendations, the algorithimic “readers also bought…” recs in Kindle and cross-promotions at the end of m/m works are rarely (never?!) f/f.** I would totally pay $2.99 to try a new-to-me f/f author with my romance specs if they’re recommended to me by a person whose taste I find reliable vis a vis my own. This ALMOST NEVER HAPPENS with f/f. I am a queer woman romance reader, who follows a lot of queer women readers, and I almost never see this type of squeeful signal boosting of good histrom or paranormal f/f that effectively handsells the author to me (which is how I find most of my m/m and f/m authors). So the books aren’t making it in front of eyeballs is my point. The ecosystem is broken.

In sum: “Pay authors to write f/f!” is not the simple feminist fix it seems. I mean, I would be 1000% happy to be proved wrong and to wake up tomorrow morning to my mentions full of histrom, paranormal, non-transphobic, diverse, sexually explicit f/f romances for $5 or less. (Narrator: This didn’t happen.) But when I ask for recs I mostly get crickets and sympathy.

I anonymized the original Tweet above because I don’t want to attack the person who is making an important point about labor and compensation and demand. However, I think the patronising tone of the message presumes we potential readers of f/f just want good stuff for free. That we’re lazy and cheap. In my experience, romance readers — perhaps particularly romance readers who care about more diverse romance, including queer romance — generally respect author labor and care about supporting the folks who write the stories we love to read. But our feminist political commitment to supporting queer f/f writers doesn’t mean we are all rich and it doesn’t mean we want ANY AND ALL f/f content as individual readers. We pick and choose the f/f stories we will take a chance on just like any other romance purchase. And, sadly, the more times I have chanced that f/f purchase and been disappointed, the more reluctantly I approach the next offer.

One more story. There was a great panel a few years ago about the early years of On Our Backs, the lesbian feminist porn magazine. They had a centerfold — in the great tradition of porn magazines — and one of the former editors on the panel, Susie Bright, told this wonderful story.  That they used to get letters from readers AGONIZING about their feelings of desire for the centerfold. “What are her politics?” they would write and ask:

“Dear “On Our Backs,” — one letter-writer would say– “I do not know how to feel about your centerfold model. What if she’s not a good person? I do not know her politics. I cannot decide whether I should attempt to jill off to this picture when I do not know where she stands on ecology, race relations, veganism.”

And the editor was like: “Here is the gift of a naked woman! Can you not just accept this gift if it makes you feel good??”

“But I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel if I don’t know her stance on nuclear proliferation!!!”

Women who desire women (cis and trans alike, though we experience cultural pressures differently) experience a lot of shame and anxiety about not getting desire “right”. Am I feminist enough? Am I gay enough? Should I enjoy penetration if I’m a lesbian and a feminist? If I’m not turned on by this woman is it a sign of internalized misogyny? When I speak with other queer readers yearning for f/f romance in the marketplace we acknowledge the shame and self-blame that happens every time we read an f/f story we feel less than enthusiastic about: Is this just not a story I like OR AM I A BAD QUEER FEMINIST??? 

So shaming queer women for not buying more f/f — and blaming them, as reader-consumers, for the lack of f/f stories being published — is all tangled up in this long history of queer, feminist women worried about getting our sexual pleasure correct politically. OF COURSE readers have absorbed all manner of biases (sexist and otherwise) as part of our cultural stew. Asking ourselves why we are compelled by certain narratives and not others is TOTALLY valid. But, “buy f/f and stuff you like will eventually be written!” is…not that call to self-reflection.

*I don’t talk about libraries in this post in part because they are another access point/barrier to reading queer romance. I have a library widget on my browser that tells me if a book is available at any of the three public library networks I have access to. Only rarely are the romance novels I am looking for available to me free from the library. So readers who cannot afford even the $2.99/book pricepoints have even more barriers to access.

**Unless it’s an f/f by the same author — thankfully an occurrance growing in frequency

thirteen books

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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books

Bookshop in Old Aberdeen (2003)

Bookshop in Old Aberdeen, Scotland (2003)

According to GoodReads, I have thirteen books to read before the end of the year in order to make my (entirely self-imposed) goal of 104 books read in 2015. Below are the titles on my bookshelf that I plan (hope) to get to before the year is out.

Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World
edited by Heike Bauer

Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World
by James Boyce

The Diabolical Miss Hyde (Electric Empire #1)
by Viola Carr

The Devious Miss Jekyll (Electric Empire #2)
by Viola Carr

Welcome to Night Vale
by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink

Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice
by Brantley W. Gasaway

Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America
by April Haynes

Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957
by Matthew Houlbrook

Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism
J. Semaine Lockwood

Reflections (Indexing #2)
by Seanan McGuire

After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion
by Anthony Petro

The Shepherd’s Crown (Tiffany Aching #5)
by Terry Pratchett

Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations
by Jane Ward

What have you been / will you be reading in the final months of 2015?

october on minden st.

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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books, boston, movies

CShFc8pWoAAlIpUMinden St. from Heath St. across the Hennigan school yard. October 2015.

October is one of my favorite months, generally speaking, in terms of both weather and rhythm of life. We’re passed the dog days of summer and over the panic spiral that is the first month of school. I’m mostly spared the academic stress these days, due to no longer being in school, but Boston being one gargantuan college town it still seeps into the cracks on the pavement affecting everyone. We’re all, more or less, on the academic timetable in these parts.

This year’s October careered by at inadvisable speed. Hanna and I were both busy at work with that busy that seems to move various deadlines closer yet never quite manages to shorten the list of things to do. I got some things done, had to postpone others.

Hanna and I both at that point in our working lives where we’re figuring out how to “lean out” perhaps more than we lean in — carving out time to enjoy each other and our life together while still taking pride in our work and bringing home enough income to put food on the table, keep a roof over our heads, and have enough “pin money” left over to enjoy our morning coffee and maybe take a trip every so often. Continue reading →

the universal is specific and the specific is diverse

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

books, politics, random ranting, the personal is political

(This is an expanded version of a Twitter rant I went on this morning.)

This morning on Facebook a friend shared, critically, this story at the Guardian about a crank objecting to the pleasure others’ find in diverse literature:

Campbell had said that “there are so few books for queer black boys, but there are just too few books for all our marginalised young people”. Rosoff, author of How I Live Now and other bestselling titles, responded that “there are not too few books for marginalised young people. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them”, and that “you don’t have to read about a queer black boy to read a book about a marginalised child”.

“The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented,” wrote Rosoff. “You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice in Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.”

On the commute to work I couldn’t stop thinking about this notion that advocates of diversity are being “too literal,” and that what we expect is “a mirror” in literature that maps one-to-one against our own personal life experiences. I kept thinking about how, elsewhere in the Guardian piece, the Ms. Rosoff is quoted as saying (in response to social media pushback:

I really hate this idea that we need agendas in books. A great book has a philosophical, spiritual, intellectual agenda that speaks to many many people – not just gay black boys. I’m sorry, but write a pamphlet about it. That’s not what books are for.

This framing of increasingly-diverse participation in the world of literature and public speech as agenda-driven and somehow antithetical to “Good literature [that] expands your mind” is a tired, reactionary position. And it tells us far more about the speaker than it does about the individuals who are busily creating an ever-more-diverse literature that fully represents our human experience is all of its’ myriad universal-yet-specific particulars. Continue reading →

five books

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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books, feminism, genre fiction, history, technology

goodreads_aug2015I can’t seem to get it together to write reviews I haven’t promised to third parties this year. So in lieu of a subject/verdict post here’s a list of five books I’m currently reading, five books I’ve read recently, and five books I cannot wait to read.

You’re also welcome to stalk me on GoodReads if that’s your kind of thing. I’m ahead on my goal for the year! That’s what reading a lot of novellas will do for you, I guess. I’m still irritated there’s no good way to count fan fiction toward the total…

currently reading

Delirium
by Lauren Oliver

The Feminist Utopias Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future
edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kaunder Nalebuff

Orphan Number Eight 
by Kim van Alkemade

The Red Heart of Jade
by Marjorie M. Liu

Reflections (Indexing serial #2)
by Seanan McGuire

have recently read

Everything Leads to You
by Nina LaCour

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
by Sarah Vowell

Never After (short stories)
by Laurell K. Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Marjorie M. Liu, and Sharon Shinn

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
by Whitney Phillips

The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels
by Valerie Weaver-Zercher

cannot wait to read

Archival Desires: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (November 2015)
by J. Samaine Lockwood

Chapelwood (September 2015)
by Cherie Priest

A Red Rose Chain (September 2015)
Seanan McGuire

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (August 2015)
Heather Rachelle White

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel (October 2015)
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

booknotes: the sex myth

04 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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books, gender and sexuality

IMG_20150710_171202Rachel Hills’ The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality (Simon & Schuster, 2015) is released today in the U.S. I’ve had the privilege of watching this book grow into being on the Internet over the past half-dozen years and — full disclosure — in 2012 I became one of the over 200 interviewees whose stories form the backbone of Hills narrative. It was with some measure of bystander pride, therefore, that I cracked open the spine of my reviewers’ copy last month and sat down to read the final iteration of Hills’ research on the sexual cultures of our English-speaking world (primarily Australia, Britain, and the U.S.).

The Sex Myth is a book-length work of well-researched journalism, drawing from various disciplines — history, philosophy, psychology, sexology, sociology — as well as personal narratives gleaned from those one-to-one interviews to explicate what Hills refers to as The Sex Myth. Continue reading →

“come as you are” is finally here!

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

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books, npr, sexuality

[UPDATE: The embed function isn’t working so for now, here is the interview I tried to embed: 7 Sex Education Lessons From Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are]

Back in 2010 I discovered this quirky blog, Emily Nagoski ::sex nerd::, that that gave me a term, “sex nerd,” for how I approach thinking about and exploring human sexuality. Over the past five years, I’ve had the pleasure of engaging as a commenter on Emily’s blog, discussing human sexuality via email, and serving as a reviewer on early drafts of what is not being published as Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life (Simon and Schuster, 2015).

(Emily, I’m so glad you stuck with this title, as it has been a playful favorite of mine since you first tried it out!)

I haven’t always been a fan of every population-level generalization Emily makes about cis female sexuality — that is, some of her generalizations haven’t rung true with the way I, personally, experience arousal and desire — but hey, that’s what scientists mean when they talk about what is generally for the population under discussion. (See? Because I read ::sex nerd:: back in the day, I can make that distinction now!)

So I’m pleased to see all of the exposure that Emily’s getting, what with her recent op-ed in the New York Times and the extended conversation above, which appeared on the local WBUR show “Radio Boston” last week. I hope if this is the sort of thing that interests you (or you think it will interest a person in your life) you’ll take a look at or listen to what she has to say!

forest hills cemetery [photo post]

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

books, boston, photos

We were supposed to travel this weekend, but Hanna was unwell so rather than push ourselves and land her with three weeks of pneumonia like last fall — that was fun! — we revised things and stayed in place. On Saturday morning we took our coffee and pastries (thank you Ula Cafe!) and went out to Forest Hills Cemetery to sit and read in the October sun. Continue reading →

vacation reading! (aka #bibliojoy)

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, holidays

22024-book_cat

Toby camouflaged as a book in my pre-Boston library! Very sneaky.

Hanna and I are starting our vacation-at-home today, and will be enjoying a wage-work-free ten days here in JP while Hanna puts on her historian’s hat to finish a conference paper on memes in Irish nationalists’ life writing (damn cool, huh?) and I get my reading on. I super happy to be spending ten days reading books that I specifically do not plan on reviewing. Anywhere. I need to do some reading purely for fun, and that’s what this vacation is gonna be about.

I’ve made some heavy use of the delightful Brookline Public Library’s inter-library loan system and assembled myself the following titles:

Briggs, Patricia. Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson. Ace, 2014.

Feder, Ellen K. Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Harris, Charlaine and Toni L. P. Kelner. Home Improvement: Undead Edition. Ace, 2011.

Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting. Da Capo Press, 2014.

Rybczynski, Withold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. Viking, 1986.

Susanka, Susan. Not So Big Solutions for Your Home. Taunton Press, 2002.

And we will also be binge-watching season two of Orphan Black which has been sitting on my desk since mid-July. Hell yeah.

the marilyn ross memorial book award

08 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

being the change, books, family

Marilyn Ross with her daughters Bonnie and Janet

Marilyn Ross (1925-2013) with her daughters Bonnie and Janet
Photograph by Duncan Ross

Today is my maternal grandmother’s birthday. She passed away in June 2013, a year and a month to the day before her husband, Duncan Adam Ross, followed.

Marilyn Coe Ross was born in 1925 to single, working mother Marguerite Scott Coe, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan, with her mother and younger sister Barbara (b. 1927). While she was unable to afford college or extended professional education, she was — among many other things — a lifelong lover of books and libraries. One of my most enduring memories of my grandmother is that a visit from her always meant new books to read. It was she who introduced me to such beloved childhood classics as The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare and The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill. When my grandparents relocated from Michigan to Oregon in the 1980s my grandmother began volunteering at the Bend Public Library, a relationship that lasted decades and endured even after a stroke left her partially paralyzed. Her active enjoyment and eager sharing of books and the act of reading within community remains one of my inspirations for pursuing a life of letters — of reading, writing, and sharing the life of the mind through librarianship.

This past spring, while Hanna and I were participating in our third year of Massachusetts History Day judging, I noticed that the special topical awards given out for student projects — labor history, local history, military history — didn’t include any awards for the history of projects related to women’s or gender history. Each year, many students do excellent work exploring the history of women and girls, gender, sex, and sexuality — and it seemed to me a shame that this work would not be recognized to the same extent that more traditional fields of historical inquiry would be.

So I decided to establish a book award in women’s and gender history — and I decided to name the award in honor of my grandmother. As I explained in the award letter:

Congratulations on winning this year’s Marilyn Ross Memorial Book Award. This prize is awarded annually at the state level to the best Junior or Senior individual project on the subject of women’s and gender history.

As an undergraduate student in history and women’s studies I was the recipient of several book prizes. It was very meaningful to me that faculty paid attention to my research and selected an award that fit my own particular scholarly interests. In establishing this book prize, it is my intention to support the work of the young scholars in my own field as I was once supported by my own mentors. I celebrate your hard work and encourage you in whatever direction your historical curiosity takes you!

…I award this prize in the memory of my maternal grandmother, Marilyn Ross (1925-2013), who was one of my inspirations for pursuing a career in librarianship and writing.

The inaugural award was presented in May 2014 to Gayatri Sundar Rajan for her individual documentary “Smile, Laugh, Charm: Expectations Placed on Women in the Work Force.”  

The idea of the book award is to reward and encourage the honoree in their continued work as a scholar by selecting a book that reflects the topic of their project but branches out in a tangential direction. This year I selected two titles (the second being an apology for an unwarranted delay in selection and presentation of the prize) in labor history:

  • Rocking the Boat:Union Women’s Voices, 1915-1975 by Brigid O’Farrell and Joyce L. Kornbluh. Rutgers University Press, 1996
  • Women Strikers Occupy Chain Stores, Win Big: The 1937 Woolworth’s Sit-Down by Diana Frank. Haymarket Books, 2012.

I look forward to presenting many more books to eager young scholars in the years to come!

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