Fiction Gender Change

Time to hear, read, review and award the words of women

Disinterest in women – the overlooking of them, the walking out of the room without noticing their exclusion, the disavowal of them, the occasional hatred of them – is a profound and deep problem.

It does not only affect women in publishing; it affects women in every industry, and women who work at home. Here are a few statistics quoted by Annie Lennox on International Women's Day this year:

Closer to home – and, I concede, less life-threateningly – publishing is a predominantly female industry (62 per cent) yet most senior positions are held by men. That is, according to The Bloom Report in 2007, 68 per cent of men who work in the industry earn more than $100,000 as opposed to 32 per cent of the women.

The shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award in 2011 was announced after I'd first drafted this essay. It was an all-male one, just as it was in 2009. The question I had back in 2009 was whether the judges (Robert Dixon, Morag Fraser, Lesley McKay, Regina Sutton and Murray Waldren) were really suggesting that not a single one of the following female writers, who all had a book published in that year, deserved a shortlisting: Michelle de Kretser, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey, Joan London, Kate Grenville. And that's just to mention the women who didn't make the longlist. Several did, which meant, presumably, that the judges liked them. Those writers were Toni Jordan, Claire Thomas and Sofie Laguna. When announcing the list, Morag Fraser said she and her fellow judges had "walked out of our two-hour shortlist meeting without realising what we had done". She went on to say, "I’m sorry, you can draw no conclusions from it".

But I did draw conclusions. I drew them in 2009 and again in 2011. Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well-formed, less worldly and less worthy. The statistics are – in this humiliating and distressing matter – on my side. Since the Miles Franklin Award began in 1957, a woman has won 13 times. Four times this woman was Thea Astley, but twice she shared the award. Since 2001 two women have won, from the pool of 10 awards.

Let's do a brisk jog through the statistics for the winners of the fiction prize component of other major awards: the Queensland Premier's Prize has been won by a woman four out of 12 times, The Age Book of the Year Award 14 out of 36 times, the NSW Premier's Award 11 out of 31 times, the Victorian Premier's Award eight out of 26 times. In contrast, the WA Premier's Award has been awarded to women more often than men – eight out of 14 times. You can argue the toss about any given year; you can't argue with decades of systematic exclusion.

Male Femaling: Stereotypes in Gender Change Fiction | Nerds in ...

I started off intending to write this article as a straightforward review, but instead I found myself looking at the larger issue of gender change fiction and the aspects it often focuses on. Unlike gender swap fiction, where a character is suddenly put into a body of the opposite gender, gender change fiction is when a character either willingly or unwillingly takes on the gender aspects which is opposite to their own, more often men becoming women than vice versa. That may come from simply dressing as the opposite gender or taking on entire physical aspects. However, I’ve noticed a prevalence of that male femaling being focused on the elements of fetishism more than any other type of exploration.

One has merely to look at sites such a Fictionmania to see how active the aspect of gender change fiction is online. In many cases, when the change is not willing, the male character is dominated by a stronger female and forced to take on the role of a submissive. The theme seems to indicate that the female gender equates to being willing and being dominated. It leads one wonder why this stereotype is perpetrated through this type of fiction. As the permeation of fiction in gender change archives such as this is focused on the eroticism of changing gender roles, does it ruin the fantasy to bring reality or equality into the situation? Is the notion of a strong female character in direct opposition to the ideal of femininity, so much that men becoming women must give up that aspect of their personality?

Another prevalent theme of gender change fiction is the focus on the material trappings of what it means to be a woman. The book “Virgin Bride” by Thomas Newgen & Barbara Deloto illustrates this quite well. In the novel, a wife forces her husband to start dressing and acting like a woman, at first under the guise of going to a costume party but later it’s relied on for the aspect of domination. Meticulous detail is given during the first parts of transformation to focus on the clothing that he must wear and how that makes him feel sexually. Silk and satin is equated to femininity and that femininity is both a source of arousal as well as accepted identity. If he looks like a woman and acts like a woman, then he can become a woman. Asserting any type of resistance is seen as masculine, so he must take on the submissive role of willing female. Again, this type of novel is targeted towards the eroticism of gender change, of becoming someone you’re not to the point of being accepted within that role, so reality has no place in disrupting the fantasy created.

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