Hi all, thought I would post some of my thoughts in my lunchbreak before the IT Gestapo catch on and shut me down, lol!!
I remember the time when I discovered that one of my favourite authors was not a female, but a male! I was gobsmacked. I have followed the female characters so closely through out the series, grown to love and identify with them (in fact Mma Precious Ramotswe is quite an icon in the world of readers) that for some reason I assumed the author to be female. OK so the author's name might have given me a clue, Alexander McCall Smith, but no! The character of Mma Ramotswe is just so lovely and essentially female that I believe (and I'm sure Freud would agree) that I transferred these qualities to the author. Nevertheless, I still love Alexander McCall Smith, even if he is a bloke. He has given us the beautiful Precious in his series "The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'. Precious is a warm, wise, 'traditionally built' female detective in Botswana. McCall Smith delights me with simple gentle fables of everyday life in Botswana centred around virtue and compassion (within a lighthearted mystery). This experience leads me to wonder if knowing the gender of the author can make a difference to how we relate to a story. Similarly, do we identify with elements of a story through our own gender bias (as I did)?
Hey, its Friday, have a great weekend everyone.
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What an intriguing question!
ReplyDeleteI suspect you are right there must be a bit of reader transference going on for any story to connect. I know I identified with Matilda, Holden Caulfield and Boromir all characters written by male authors and like you it was the emotional connection with the characters that pulled me in.
Having said that, I have read certain best selling female crime authors and for the life of me I just cannot get in to their books (think Scarpetta etc).
This also begs the question whether we choose to read books written based on the gender of the authors?
And if we do, does this mean authors choose to hide their gender, either by using a pen name (James Tiptree Jr) or hiding by initials (J K Rowling) so as not to alienate a potential readership.
(A colleague and I once wondered how many Mills & Boons were actually written by male authors…once accepted by M&B it would be a steady side gig while you wrote the "Great Novel", even Louisa May Alcott needed a steady side gig to support her family)
As I have typed this post I have suddenly realised that outside of SciFi, Fantasy & Non Fiction, the majority of the authors that I make a point of following are indeed female, so unwittingly I really am indulging in gender bias!
Therefore it is time for my mid-year resolution: I promise to start my own affirmative action programme and balance the number of female to male authors I read.
Believe it or not there are a few husband/wife Mills & Boon writers and, yes, male authors, too. One that comes to mind is Gill Sanderson - started as a husband/wife team and now the husband has stayed writing and she no longer does. Since taking on our Romance newsletter I've read so much in the way of romance that, once I'd read about Gill Sanderson being a male, wanted to go back and re-read his stuff to see if my reaction to it was any different. And it was - undoubtedly so. But whether it was because I now knew he was a male, or because there genuinely was a difference in the style and thought, I'm not totally sure.
ReplyDeleteI review books for an online review site and often get male/male romance novels (as in gay male romance novels) and was quite surprised to find a lot of them are written by women for women. And there's a huge readership base. I wondered if they were different from male written gay books so tried some and wowsers, yes they are in some ways. Ddistinctly so.
I read a lot of urban fantasy (subgenre of fantsy) and got into Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. Butcher's comedy is vastly different from female written urban fantasy books. Stoked that I'd found something slightly different, I started looking for other male-written urban fantasy and came across Rob Thurman. Read the first 3 books in the Niko and Cal Leandros series (urban/paranormal fantasy) and enjoyed them so much...and then discovered Rob Thurman is a woman. My initial reaction was disappointment. And I'm not totally sure why - but it seemed to me that the voices of the characters were slightly coloured after that, and for the whole of the fourth book I kept overthinking comments, looking for hidden meanings and subtext *rolls eyes* Then I got over myself and re-read it and enjoyed it for the good book it was. I read a lot of paranormal and urban chick lit and thought I had discovered a male voice - that I think is becoming harder and harder to find in subgenres that are made up of predominantly women - that stood out.
I used to read Cornwell's Scarpetta series, and Reich's Bones series but felt that they had become too formulaic for me. In fact, a lot of long running book series I end up leaving partway through, because I can guess, almost to the page number, how it's going to end.
As a balance I read a lot of male written nonfiction - why I'm not sure, prob 'cause I read a lot of books about cars, computers, ipods etc. Hmm, I'm gender biased and only just now beginning to realise it. My mother is a counsellor...wouldn't she have a field day with that LOL
Thanks for the thought provoking post and comment!