Browsing all articles tagged with sexism.
Breaking the Glass Slipper: Podcast Celebrating Women in Genre
This month, I’d like to officially introduce Fantasy-Faction readers to Breaking the Glass Slipper. The brainchild of Megan Leigh over at Pop Verse, it’s a bi-monthly podcast focusing on women in genre. Charlotte Bond and I join Megan as co-hosts. Our aim is straightforward: we want to get people talking about women, be they authors, […]
Women Dominate Graphic Novels in 2015
Looking at the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2015, of the top 8 Graphic Novels, 7 of them have women on their covers. It’s also worth noting that Attack on Titan, which is the the eighth cover that does display a male, actually stars the incredibly strong willed, skilled and determined woman – said to be as deadly as one hundred soldiers by […]
Gender and Stereotyping in Fantasy – Part Three: Balance
Last time we focused entirely on characters drawn from the YA SFF spectrum, visiting authors from Cassandra Clare to Maggie Steifvater and Meagan Spooner/Amie Kaufman. Whilst we’re still not done examining gender and stereotypes in YA, we’re going to swing the spotlight onto more regular fantasy in this instalment. Note that I veer away from […]
Suffrage or Just Plain Suffering? The Princess Problem in Fantasy
It’ll never be easy to create a Cinderella who isn’t a victim. This has clearly been a challenge for Disney, whose live action version of the classic fairy tale opened earlier this year. Modern fantasy heroines should appeal to their young female audience as strong yet compassionate, intelligent yet humble, warriors, princesses, majestic ice-castle-builders. Cinderella’s […]
Women Write Fantasy
There have always been serious issues revolving around gender parity and sexism in the fantasy community. Whether this is the depiction of women – as little more than damsels in distress waiting for the fella to rescue her – or the fact that many bookshops and even publishers seem reluctant to fully invest in the […]
Elspeth Cooper adds her thoughts on Industry’s Sexism Problem
Fantasy-Faction is lucky enough to have a good number of talented published authors – especially female authors – posting in our forums. Perhaps I am being presumptuous, but I’d like to think that each of these wonderful ladies are friends of mine and so am very interested in their opinions and experiences revolving around the […]
Jonathan Ross Withdraws from Hugos
Twitter has been alight with the news that one of the UK’s biggest and best known talk show hosts, Jonathan Ross, has withdrawn from his role as Master of Ceremonies at this year’s Hugo Awards. For those who don’t have a clue who he is, he isn’t too far from the mould of Jay Leno […]
Jen Williams responds to opinions on Bookshops’ perceived SFF Prejudice
So, yesterday we published a piece on Fantasy-Faction highlighting the observations made by three of British fantasy’s female authors suggesting that UK Booksellers are selling them and their contemporaries short. A number of comments and tweets came flooding in, and Forum Members even started a topic; the overwhelming feeling was that ‘yes, there is a […]
Bookshops’ SFF Prejudice Problem?
There has been a recent highlighting of the fact by three well-known female authors that UK Booksellers are selling them and their contemporaries short. My aim today is to take the numerous articles they’ve written and interviews they’ve been involved in and present to our readership, in a single post, along with the observations they have made. […]
Writing Fantasy Gender Stereotypes – Part One: Your Heroine is Too Beautiful
I’m not trying to open a can of worms here—I’ll say that right off the bat. I acknowledge that this topic is enormous, complex, and encompasses both a dearth of fantasy literature and gender theory, and I admit I am not an expert on either by any means. I am, however, a female who loves […]
Writing Fantasy Gender Stereotypes – Part Two: Writing the Opposite Gender
This is Part Two of a series on Writing Fantasy Gender Stereotypes. If you missed Part One you can read it here. This past July, I attended Polaris, a sci-fi conference that features panels on everything from Star Trek to anime to writing fiction. I had the pleasure of attending one panel in particular where […]
