Pasquinade ([info]pats_quinade) wrote,
@ 2006-11-20 22:45:00
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Entry tags:work

Feminist Subplots

That's possibly a bit ambitious as titles go, but it's something that I've been thinking about. My buddy Kameron is pretty good at dinging me when I make stupid gender assumptions or play into the classic stereotypes without really thinking about it, and I've had and seen some very good conversations at The Hathor Legacy and the Feminist Gamers livejournal. Because I'm on Mass Effect relatively late in the project -- well, very late in the project -- it's not my place to comment on the feminist ideas explored in the main game.

However, with the dinky little subplots, I've got the curious freedom of tinyness. The plots are supposed to take a day to write, an hour to script, and five minutes to play, and I'm always moving on to the next one. Because these are talking and conversation plots, I'm dealing with social issues some of the time, and I will occasionally get little flashes of "Hey, Kameron would suggest that I do this," or "The Hathor folks would probably complain if I did that." So I try to futz with things to create, if not completely feminist plots -- because a real study of feminism through a plot is going to be longer than the subplots I'm working on -- at least plots that won't make my friend Kameron roll her eyes at the gender stereotypes.

We'll see how it goes. 

In th first plot, the PC finds out that the military is refusing to return the body of a soldier who was killed by new alien weapons. Acting on behalf of the soldier's family, the PC confronts the military folks to find out why, then either convinces the military to turn over the body or convinces the family to accept this (because the tests that the military is running on the body could help future soldiers attacked by the same weapons). This is a pretty safe plot, and my boss didn't bat an eyelash when I made the dead soldier a woman of East Indian descent. The bad news here is that my attempt to add a female soldier ends up giving me a plot with no female NPCs -- the husband is the family member you talk to, and the military jerk is a guy. At the end of the day, I don't know that this one feels feminist, but I can at least tell Kameron that I snuck a female soldier into a plot in an area in which it wasn't like, "Haha, she's a female and a soldier, let's all stop the plot to discuss the fact that women can be soldiers!" I just had it be the assumed information. We'll see if it works. (And yeah, she's dead, but that's not a slam on her. Her entire unit got killed. It makes sense in the story. She was not decapitated like a comic-book superheroine.)

In the second plot, I get 900 words to debate the ethics of gene therapy -- is it worth curing your unborn child of the potential to develop a fatal disease if it endangers the child to some small degree, and who gets a say in that decision? This one isn't a big congratulatory back-pat for myself, as I did a first draft, sent it to the editor, and ended up having a conversation with her a few nights later in which she said that she had real trouble with how I resolved one part of the plot. She was completely right -- you can side with the guy who wants the woman to get the treatment, or with the woman who doesn't want to get the treatment. If you side with the woman, it's fine as a plot, but if you side with the guy, the fact that he is logically right ends up making it look like a "stupid woman, you have to get over your foolish emotions" plot. And I really didn't want to write that kind of plot -- but I did have to write a plot in which the PC got to choose which person to side with. The editor and I agreed that the issue wasn't "convincing the woman" but "convincing the emotional woman through logic", so I tried rewriting it so that you're not really using logic to show the woman that the guy is right. You're showing the woman that the guy isn't trying to bully her into the therapy -- he's just worried for the unborn baby, just like the woman is, and that's why they're both so frustrated and angry with each other. (This resolution is still slightly forced, I think, but it's better, and I think it's about the best I can do given the requirement that the gene therapy make logical sense -- which means that the only reason not to have the therapy is emotion, rather than reason. You side with the guy by convincing the woman that the guy is worried, not angry, and she realizes that they're on the same side, and fighting is silly, and she agrees to the therapy; you side with the woman by convincing the guy that he doesn't want the therapy for the therapy's sake -- he's just feeling overprotective of the baby for reasons that make sense in the context of the plot, and when he realizes that, he breaks down and stops trying to browbeat the woman into getting the therapy. Not perfect, but like I said -- at least now it's feeling vs. feeling. The genders are on equal footing here.)


So like I said, we'll see. Two little five-minute plots, with the help of my kick-ass editor and the shoulder-angels of all the feminists I know. They may not be feminist subplots, but I'm hoping that, if nothing else, they aren't egregiously unfeminist.


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[info]revena
2006-11-21 05:57 am UTC (link)
It sounds like you're engaging with stereotypes in an interesting way. The first plot you describe, particularly, seems to be right in line with a post I read tonight after following a link from the latest Feminist SF Carnival - how to fight sexism in games: stop making cool female characters. I like it that, as you say, the soldier being female is "assumed information" - the character (and hopefully the player!) doesn't stop to puzzle over it, or remark on it. Yaye!

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[info]betacandy
2006-11-21 07:46 am UTC (link)
I really like the idea of the dead female soldier. It flips the assumption without - as you said - making a huge, story-stopping statement. No eyes will roll, but there may be some mutterings of "...huh."

And I'd say you took the right approach in the second scenario - it's absolutely permissible to write stories about women who are (constantly or occasionally) weak or irrational. They certainly exist! The trick is to delve a little into her motives and perceptions, so we know you're viewing her as a person, not a representative of all women. It sounds like you did that, and even if it's a bit "forced", I suspect it would be clear to me you weren't trying to put across nasty meta-messages.

And... wow. I've never been a shoulder angel before! That is SO going on my resume! :D

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[info]kameron_hurley
2006-11-21 12:41 pm UTC (link)
Couldn't you just have made the woman the "right" one?

Or had her debating the idea with her sister, who lives with her and will help raise the kid cause the husband was dead in the war? (I'm assuming no same-sex marriages even in far-future Mass Effect... even though B5 has them!)

Cause yea, having the whole, "The guy is the one who *really* knows what the right thing to do with the child you're growing in your body is" thing does strike a bit of a "erg" cord.

And I'm not exactly great at these things either, you know. I was raised in the same culture, and I still catch myself doing the stereotypical stuff all the time. It's a bitch and a half to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and go, "Did I really mean to say this or was I just being lazy?"

But it's worth it.

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[info]kameron_hurley
2006-11-21 02:20 pm UTC (link)
P.S. Oh, and to add in women characters in the first plot... you could always make the next-of-kin the dead soldier's grown *daughter.*

I tend to think that much of feminist writing is just, well, actually writing women characters - who don't suck (that is, aren't stereotypes).

Something that helped me with GW and tDW was asking myself whenever I wrote a secondary character "Is there any reason this character *has* to be male?" (because I've noted that most people's default for "I need a character" is to write that character male, unless the characer is doing a stereotypically "female" thing).

I remember that water-dueling story where you switched the grizzled war commander from a male to a female character just by changing the pronoun... and it worked. She ended up being an interesting character. Not that I'd recommend straight up pronoun changes all the time (cause obviously there are indeed ways that men and women experience the world that are very different), but it can work really well if you're on a tight deadline and want to work in some women characters under the wire.

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[info]pats_quinade
2006-11-21 04:18 pm UTC (link)
I hadn't thought of a grown daughter, mainly because I'd been thinking of her as a young-ish soldier -- 25 or so.

And, frankly, I really liked the husband -- while this isn't a big feminist battleground or anything, I'm hoping to at least give one or two male players out there a moment to go, "Huh, I figured a plot like this would be the wife trying to get the body of the husband," and the reversal might make them think.

Or not.

And yeah, I liked my grizzled, cynical female warrior. She was the best part of that mediocre story.

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[info]pats_quinade
2006-11-21 04:16 pm UTC (link)
re: Making the woman the "right" one -- in this case, no. The point of these plots is to give the player tiny little experiences where a choice is possible, and either option could be "right" under the circumstances. For this kind of plot, I HAVE to make it seem both good and right to side with either of them.

I could have made the debate partner a sister instead of her brother-in-law (the husband died from the medical condition, which is why they think the baby could have it), but when I first wrote it, that didn't seem much better -- the male-logic, female-feeling thing would have been dealt with, but there'd still be this huge "Person who isn't actually having the baby is more logical, and thus, right" thing, which also pissed off my editor buddy.

I could swap the brother-in-law for a sister-in-law now, depending on whether I've got time. There's a certain "You write these, and they're gone" quality to these plots, and I actually snuck the edits I did make in on my own time.

Definitely something for me to kick around.

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[info]kameron_hurley
2006-11-21 04:24 pm UTC (link)
Oh, I meant: couldn't the woman having the child be making the "logical" choice and the husband be championing the "emotional" choice?

And wow, if it's her brother-in-law already as opposed to a husband... can't see any reason why it couldn't be a female relative. Say, her *sister*-in-law ::shrugs::

So, two birds: you'd then have a "choice" between two female characters, and the person having the baby now wants to make the logical choice, whereas the one not having the baby wants to make the emotional choice.

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