User blog:TimmyQuivy/March's Community Culture

From LUMbA Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Welcome to our March Community Culture blog. This is our second installment in this series, you can catch up with our first installment and learn about what the Community Culture blog is at this link.

Today's blog is going to put a special spotlight on women authors in honor of Women's History Month (WHM), recognize International Trans Day of Visibility that will occur this Sunday, hit some notable pop culture milestones that have occurred in the last month, and surface other posts around our network discussing WHM.

Women's History Month Spotlight

They say the "pen is mightier than the sword" - perhaps that is why in a world culture that has often been dominated by patriarchy (defined as "a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it"), written works have largely been penned and published by men.

It has been a long road from the first earliest known work written by and attributed to a woman, often cited as a series of semi-autobiographical writings of the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna around 2250 BC. But today, multiple estimates show that approximately 75% of the literature released each year is written by women. Still, modern women authors face their own challenges and stigmas to overcome.

Women authorship took a long time to rise in volume and acceptance from Enheduanna's era. It's quite telling that scanning the main Wikipedia article on women writers, less than a dozen women writers are cited prior to the 19th century. Lack of notable women authorship for the ~4000 years after Enheduanna can be ascribed to a number of societal factors: Women not receiving a formal education, women locked out of professional and religious roles that encouraged writing, and the wide-spread belief that women were unreasonable creatures whose writings were frivolous. Scholars also believe that a lot of "anonymous" works throughout this period of history were actually written by women and cited as anonymous in order to be accepted.

The handful of women authors that would get published during the Middle Ages and Renaissance eras had the distinct advantage of being in nobility, meaning they both had the luxury of a formal education, as well as the means and support to publish works that women in lower classes did not receive.

By the time that lower-class women started receiving formal education, they still faced challenges in getting their writing picked up the same way lower-class men could. Publishers believed that, as men controlled the finances of the household, men would not be willing to purchase books written by women authors. In the 19th century alone, Mary Ann Evans, the Bronte Sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Louisa May Alcott found the only way their works would be published is if they used pen names.

Even Jane Austen, perhaps the most famous woman author of all time, usually published her novels under the guise "By A Lady".

Pen names, sadly, still are sometimes encouraged by publishers to women authors in order to gain wider acceptance by readership. Most famously among modern authors, Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling was encouraged to use the "J.K." moniker to make her name more neutral sounding than her "Joanne" ("K" in fact is not even the first initial in her middle name).

Luckily, around the mid-1800s, women authorship exploded. From almost zero, women authorship was cited as encompassing about 50% of the best sellers by mid-century. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is generally considered to be the first female-penned international bestseller and, due to its strong abolitionist content, was the first female-penned book to be at the centerpiece of a major societal movement.

Even in this era of progress, much of this growth could be sourced to societal stereotypes. Women authorship became culturally acceptable because receiving a basic literary education was considered "safe", not as likely to "upset or anguish" women as, say, having to learn complex science or law. And other social problems, such as racism, largely led to women authors being mostly white and Protestant.

Even with all of these changes and improvements over the last 200 years for women's rights and education, today's women authors still face an uneven playing field to male authors. In such a broad field as literature, it's hard to get exact numbers, but here are some points generally agreed upon by a number of scholarly studies:

  • Critical reviews by respected sources are still largely done by male reviewers, leading to a heavy bias towards male-written books.
  • Similarly, cultural perceptions still exist that genres that are disproportionately-women-written - such as romance - are considered more frivolous and thus under-reviewed and under-awarded.
  • Numerous studies have shown that, even in the same genre with books of similar length, male authors tend to have their books priced higher than those of women authors, leading to male authors receiving more money for their work than women authors. Most commonly, that gap is cited around 10%.
  • Long-standing cultural stereotypes about female characters being weak, dependent on male support, or otherwise mentally feeble challenge authors (both male and female) to create female characters that successfully challenge these stereotypes without being labeled as "subversive" or "unrealistic."

Of course, all of the social issues and discrimination that women authors face have historically applied (and still apply) to women musicians, game designers, showrunners, playwrights, and more. As your post author, I am spotlighting literature because that's what I know best. But we certainly welcome comments and insights from you about some of the challenges women face in the genres and IPs you're most passionate about.

And since I am indeed quite passionate about reading, I'd love to share with you all some of my favorite books by women authors I've read in the last year. I've tried to make sure my recommendations span a number of genres, so you can find a book that appeals to you!

  • Throne of Glass series - Sarah J. Maas (Magical Fantasy)
  • The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff (Historical Fiction + Survivalism)
  • Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel (Sci-Fi)
  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty (Magical Fantasy + Arabic culture focus)
  • The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich (Historical Fiction + Native American focus)
  • Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver (Historical Fiction)
  • Anne of Green Gables series - L.M. Montgomery (Young Adult)
  • Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin (Historical Fiction focused on the early gaming industry)
  • Black Cake - Charmaine Wilkerson (Mystery + Family Drama)
  • Circe - Madeline Miller (Mythical Fantasy)
  • The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende (Historical Fiction with Fantastical elements)

Women's History Month Playlist

We're thrilled to share another playlist for this month! Like last year, we're continuing to shine a light on established and emerging women, femme-identifying and non-binary artists making strides in a traditionally male-dominated industry. In this playlist, there's plenty of empowering women anthems to dance to, and some emotional hard-hitting songs to cry to, and the first song on the list is a mix of both. Singer-songwriter Cat Janice released the upbeat pop track "Dance You Outta My Head" from hospice care, while suffering from an extremely rare form of cancer. It ended up being her final song, but her legacy will live on through her music, with all the proceeds from her songs going directly to her 7 year old son. Stream her music, alongside many other talented women in music below:

<spotify uri="spotify:playlist:50fUwSf3wJXebBZf2IdZMy" height="450" width="650" />

How Our Communities Are Celebrating WHM

Beyond our spotlight here, some of our communities are celebrate Women's History Month in exciting ways. Here are some links to those discussions and events:

You can also check out Fandom's previous content for Women's History Month, including other media suggestions:

Trans Day of Visibility Spotlight

In case you haven't been following our Staff Blog this week, one of our new Community Managers, Kurt (OishiiOnIno) has been sharing some incredible stories from our community in advance of Trans Day of Visibility, which will be celebrated on March 31st. Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) is a day of celebration for trans achievements, contributions and resilience that also aims to foster an environment of inclusivity, respect, and support by highlighting the importance of recognizing and affirming the gender identity of transgender people.

You can read our two blogs about TDOV here:

One other resource we thought would be appropriate to share as part of our celebration of TDOV is our Gender Identity Guidelines. Using a panel of experts, both with wiki experience as well as individuals with lived experience, we built these guidelines with the hopes of providing clarity and guidance to communities on how to respectfully document and discuss characters in pop culture who fall outside of the "traditional" views on gender.

These guidelines are now a few years old. In honor of TDOV, we are publicly committing to reviewing these guidelines and updating them in the next 90 days. We welcome your input, questions, and feedback as we continue to make sure that resource is as comprehensive as it can be.

Other Moments Worth Celebrating

Here are some other moments in the last few weeks we want to celebrate and share:

  • On March 29th, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter released her first country album "Cowboy Carter," reclaiming the country music genre, which has often been perceived as a genre for white men, despite having its roots in Black culture that have historically been erased. Only 11% of women get airtime on country radio, and that drops to almost zero when it comes to Black women. Beyoncé is breaking those barriers and taking up space in a genre that has made her feel unwelcome by becoming the first Black woman to have a chart topping track on the Hot Country chart, and to send a country song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with her single "Texas Hold ‘Em," which also resulted in more visibility and boosts in streaming for other Black women in country.
  • Earlier this week was the commemoration of Holi, the Hindu festival celebrated as the Festival of Colours, Love, and Spring. This might be a good weekend to pull up some Bollywood classics that feature large Holi scenes, such as Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Sholay, or Rang De Basanti.

That's it for the March Community Culture. We hope you enjoyed reading! We'd love to hear from you - Leave a comment below to share what's caught your attention this month. What's the best book you've read recently? A new movie you discovered? A show you rediscovered?

User:TimmyQuivy/Profile Template:Blog footer

Retrieved from "https://lumba.wiki.gg/index.php?title=User_blog:TimmyQuivy/March%27s_Community_Culture&oldid=15667"