Tiptree grumping
May. 3rd, 2002 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinianI like Ken MacLeod's work a lot, and I quite enjoyed Dark Light. But shortlisted for the Tiptree award? Come on, folks, we've been over this ground before.
If you haven't read the book (or maybe if you have; I had to think a minute to recall what was queer about it), it might be useful to know that it contained a society of "primitives" whose genders were determined by task and social role (and a bit by sexuality, it seems). You do this, you're a man, else you're considered a woman, regardless of whether you started out a boy.
And the Tiptree-worthiness is where exactly? Okay, okay, it "explores and expands the roles of women and men." But not in a very original way, you know? I've seen it before, I've thought of it, it even happens to some extent in my society -- just not in a regimented way. (Male kindergarten teachers can catch a lot of crap, for example.)
I think I'm always going to be a little cranky about anything else being given the same award as "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", which is maximally brilliant in my opinion, but the past LeGuin winners were also quite worthy. Dark Light, though? At least it didn't win.
I would also have been cross if The Fresco had won. It was good fun and had nonstandard sex roles for aliens, but it's not up to my (apparently inflated) Tiptree Award standards. I haven't read the winner, and have actually never seen it. Amazon has it listed as mainstream fiction, which might have something to do with that. I'll have to track it down and see if I am peevish about that too.
If you haven't read the book (or maybe if you have; I had to think a minute to recall what was queer about it), it might be useful to know that it contained a society of "primitives" whose genders were determined by task and social role (and a bit by sexuality, it seems). You do this, you're a man, else you're considered a woman, regardless of whether you started out a boy.
And the Tiptree-worthiness is where exactly? Okay, okay, it "explores and expands the roles of women and men." But not in a very original way, you know? I've seen it before, I've thought of it, it even happens to some extent in my society -- just not in a regimented way. (Male kindergarten teachers can catch a lot of crap, for example.)
I think I'm always going to be a little cranky about anything else being given the same award as "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", which is maximally brilliant in my opinion, but the past LeGuin winners were also quite worthy. Dark Light, though? At least it didn't win.
I would also have been cross if The Fresco had won. It was good fun and had nonstandard sex roles for aliens, but it's not up to my (apparently inflated) Tiptree Award standards. I haven't read the winner, and have actually never seen it. Amazon has it listed as mainstream fiction, which might have something to do with that. I'll have to track it down and see if I am peevish about that too.
