The question of genre

December 6, 2021 3:36 AM

The whole question of genre is something that female writers of all stripes have to contend with far more than their male counterparts. Just look at people’s obsession with categorising Sally Rooney. The idea that a young woman’s pastel-covered novels about millennials falling in love might qualify as literary fiction causes a fair few commentators to start frothing at the mouth: in 2019, Will Self dismissed her work as “very simple stuff with no literary ambition” during an interview to promote (and I swear I’m not making this up) a line of macarons for the restaurant Hakkasan. Emma Hughes (@emmahdhughes) writes on women's commercial fiction in The Guardian.

However you define it, women’s commercial fiction is as diverse as the people who write it. Far from being lacking in what Winterson called “playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff”, it’s brimming with it. But there’s a tendency for all of that to get stuffed into a box with a label on it: romance, high-end commercial, up-lit and so on. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with labels: they’re invaluable in conceptualising a novel’s “package”. But they can also be limiting, and there’s no getting around the fact that their application is heavily gendered. We don’t call novels with titles like Bravo Agent Mincemeat and The Leonardo Enigma “men’s commercial fiction” – we just call them “books”.

posted by Bella Donna (37 comments total)

Will Self was quite memorably owned by his son on Twitter, who said about Self: “He’s an idiot. He’s a novelist who hasn’t sold any of his last two books so he assumes that the whole medium is dying” (can't find the original tweet but this is from a review of Self's autobiography on the Quietus.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:13 AM on December 6, 2021 [10 favorites]

Isn't Sally Rooney the one who refuses to allow her book to be translated into Hebrew because BDS?
posted by acb at 4:53 AM on December 6, 2021

Gadzoinks ago I set myself the rule that if I buy a book by a man I have to also buy a book by a woman. One thing I found out rather quickly is that in the bookshop sections I tend to haunt (“fiction” and “science fiction”) the selection of books by men is considerably greater than books by women. I think it’s gotten a bit better in recent years, but that might also be because I’ve gotten more skilled at finding books that’ll interest me.

Writing is the cheapest of all the art forms. All you need to practice is pen and paper, or a computer if you have access to one. There is certainly no uneven gender split in who aspires to be a writer, and perhaps even women make up the majority, but once aspiring writers start trying to get published, they are greeted in very gendered terms.

One is that while male writers are mostly free to choose which genre they’re associated with, women writers are pushed into certain genres, which often have high sales but lower status. And because these are considered short-term moneymakers by their publishers, the books get edited to within an inch of their life. Male writers, on the other hand, are allowed their idiosyncrasies.

Then customers like me, in a bookstore searching for strange, idiosyncratic books by women, are left reading back cover after back cover, and first page after first page, looking for those books. Because here’s the other thing, because when those books do get published, they’re usually not a priority for the marketing departments, so they don’t get pushed in the same way as similar books by men. Just hearing about them is a challenge.

And so what should be the most democratic, most representative of all artforms, ends up being just as much snowed over by the patriarchy as everything else.
posted by Kattullus at 5:05 AM on December 6, 2021 [25 favorites]

acb: Isn't Sally Rooney the one who refuses to allow her book to be translated into Hebrew because BDS?

No, she didn’t want to sell the translation rights of her book to a publisher with ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. She absolutely isn’t against having her work translated into Hebrew.
posted by Kattullus at 5:08 AM on December 6, 2021 [37 favorites]

Yup. Please let us skip derailing this thread with that topic. Thank you.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:09 AM on December 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oops, I am wrong and Kattullus is correct and again, let's just stop here, shall we?
posted by Bella Donna at 5:10 AM on December 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

acb - sort of. It's a bit of a derail, but apparently this is her statement on the subject. (Not sure why it's so hard to find the original thing.)

We don’t call novels with titles like Bravo Agent Mincemeat and The Leonardo Enigma “men’s commercial fiction” – we just call them “books”.

Absolutely true - though this is reminding me of the recent post on "Dad thrillers" (also a term much less established than "chick flicks"). And, kind of randomly, of how dark chocolate Pocky used to be marketed as Men's Pocky, though that is a rare case where the unmarked default is, apparently, not for men. Like soap and shampoo, I guess.

It's sort of notable that publishing, which is so addicted to slotting works into rigid categories, the better to market them (see the previous debate about what exactly makes "literary fiction" literary, as opposed to "genre fiction", and the discussion about how these are very recent categories), doesn't seem to have come up with an explicit "men's fiction" category. (Not that I think this is the direction anyone should be going in!)
posted by trig at 5:14 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

And so what should be the most democratic, most representative of all artforms, ends up being just as much snowed over by the patriarchy as everything else.

Flagged as fantastic and quoted for truth.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:20 AM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

I would read Bravo Agent Mincemeat, especially if it was a Millennial romance written by a woman.

Also, obligatory plug for Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing; it’s a quick punchy read and we’ll worth the trouble to track down.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:24 AM on December 6, 2021 [16 favorites]

Also, obligatory plug for Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing; it’s a quick punchy read and we’ll worth the trouble to track down.

Indeed! I always think of that book when a discussion like this comes up.
posted by Orlop at 5:47 AM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's sort of notable that publishing, which is so addicted to slotting works into rigid categories, the better to market them (see the previous debate about what exactly makes "literary fiction" literary, as opposed to "genre fiction", and the discussion about how these are very recent categories), doesn't seem to have come up with an explicit "men's fiction" category. (Not that I think this is the direction anyone should be going in!)

Men's Adventure fiction was a thing for a couple of decades. I suspect that there's not much audience for this anymore; people who would have read men's adventure fiction 60 years ago have more exciting things competing for their time, from video games to reddit to a million channels of television.
posted by Jeanne at 6:08 AM on December 6, 2021 [10 favorites]

Also, with the rise of TV and video games, the act of reading seems to have been feminised and stigmatised as inherently unmanly.
posted by acb at 6:34 AM on December 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Writing is the cheapest of all the art forms. All you need to practice is pen and paper

Well, not exactly. The other thing you need is time. Quite a lot of it. And the way society is structured, in the US anyway, time is an expensive resource indeed. Especially for women.
posted by gwint at 6:40 AM on December 6, 2021 [39 favorites]

women writers are pushed into certain genres, which often have high sales but lower status

You see that a lot with women who write fantasy. The automatic assumption by a lot of people seems to be that any fantasy written by a woman must be Young Adult, and therefore not worthy of their time. (I’m convinced at this stage that a female author could write the equivalent of A Song of Ice and Fire and it would get shelved in YA). Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of actual YA is very much worth reading, this type of attitude acts as a vicious circle, and makes it much harder for books by women to find their readers.
posted by scorbet at 6:46 AM on December 6, 2021 [14 favorites]

The argument that women write about the domestic and emotional spheres, and that makes them unworthy, drive me up a tree.

I will suggest that Marcel Proust is in the running for the best novelist ever. What does his magnificent novel deal with? The domestic and emotional spheres, and, by extension, all of life. If he’s worthy, then those are worthy subjects for writers.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:51 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

If Rooney is writing “women’s commercial fiction,” then I propose a new sub-genre: Women’s Commercial Fiction That Addresses Issues of Class, Sexuality, Epistemology, Marxism, and Other Things but Not Shopping.
posted by scratch at 6:53 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

I saw this briefly on twitter -- no romance list from the Guardian, despite it being the best-selling genre, because, apparently, the head of the section just doesn't know about it? But of course how can they get away with that except because of misogyny.

I do think that romance and women's fiction are different categories (with very fuzzy borders). I have read neither Rooney nor Hughes, so I am not going to place either author in a category -- I don't think either is more worthwhile, just that they are different categories.
posted by jeather at 6:56 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

That's a great article and worth reading.

So, on the one hand I've never read a book by Will Self. (I think he also publishes in magazines, so possibly I've read something of his there.) The reviews, marketing, and blurbs just never seemed to my taste, and I'm unclear what authority he brings to a discussion of women's commercial literature other than jealousy and misogyny.

But on the other hand, I've been wondering more and more what I am missing by the way books are categorized and marketed. I'm not (currently?) a reader of romance as a genre, but within it I am sure there are amazing books that I would love, but that get marketed, reviewed, and have covers that signal something different.

I’m convinced at this stage that a female author could write the equivalent of A Song of Ice and Fire and it would get shelved in YA

I agree. I also think it would take surprisingly little editing to flip that series into YA. Get rid of all the gross commentary about budding young breasts, soften the violence and language, and put the dog/wolf killings off-stage, and you would be most of the way there.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:19 AM on December 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'm actually curious about whether Sally Rooney really has been categorized as women's commercial fiction by anyone other than Will Self, whose clearly just an asshole who is bitter about his total cultural irrelevance. I haven't heard that, to be honest. I think that, like Elena Ferrante, she has generally escaped that particular pigeonhole, even though she writes about themes that are often associated with women's commercial fiction. I think that the general thesis is right, but Rooney is probably not a good example of it.

For what it's worth, I wonder if part of the reason that there's no "men's commercial fiction", even if it's not explicitly named that way, is that men are vastly less likely than women to read fiction. I could be wrong, but my sense is that women are the main market even for traditionally-male genres like spy thrillers and sci fi. (They're certainly the main market for fantasy, although you're right that fantasy by women is often categorized as YA unless there's explicit sex.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:23 AM on December 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Yeah, it's really hard to put a finger on what distinguishes "women's fiction" from "literary fiction by and about women" - there are books that are clearly too dark or weird or experimental to be salable as "women's fiction" (Otessa Moshfegh, let's say), and there are books that are clearly too... Hallmarky?... to be salable as "literary fiction" (Debbie Macomber, let's say) and in the middle are a ton of books that could probably go either way but often end up in "women's fiction" because it's a more commercial category than "literary fiction" - more commercial, but lower-prestige.

The division between "women's fiction" and "literary fiction" is, I think, the place where the problems of using "literary" to mean "better than other fiction" show up most prominently. To call something "science fiction" is not a judgment of quality - with rare exceptions, "literary fiction" isn't allowed to have spaceships and aliens in it. To call something "fantasy" is not a judgment of quality - with rare exceptions, "literary fiction" isn't allowed to have dragons in it. A book of "women's fiction" is probably almost always a book that could be sold as "literary fiction" if it adhered more closely in amorphous ways to a tone or style or voice that's coded as higher-prestige. And that coding of what's high-prestige and what's low prestige is itself shaped by a literary establishment that... is not as male as it used to be, but still very much lives in the shadow of Hemingway and Faulkner and Raymond Carver.
posted by Jeanne at 8:20 AM on December 6, 2021 [9 favorites]

Earlier, of course: Jennifer Weiner v. Jonathan Franzen.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:32 AM on December 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

Oh, one of my least favorite awkward party conversations is when people find out I'm a writer :"Oh, so you write children's books?!?"
Or even better, being repeatedly introduced, by a friend, as"This is Zumbador, she writes children's books!"
I love children's books. But I don't write them.
Does this happen to male writers?
posted by Zumbador at 9:31 AM on December 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

It is deeply frustrating to have to say, look, Will Self is an idiot, yes, Conversations With Friends is an extremely smart and sharp literary novel, yes, there's a lot of sexism in publishing, but - Normal People really is very simple stuff with no literary ambition, and the embrace of it by the entire literary world is really kind of embarrassing.
posted by wattle at 9:43 AM on December 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

Men's Adventure fiction was a thing for a couple of decades. I suspect that there's not much audience for this anymore; people who would have read men's adventure fiction 60 years ago have more exciting things competing for their time, from video games to reddit to a million channels of television.

True fact, that, and one of several points in this recent piece in the Guardian. As to current state of the biz, Manuscript Wish List gives an interesting overview of what agents at least say they want. Coming soon to a bookstore near you!
posted by BWA at 10:23 AM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

the act of reading seems to have been feminised and stigmatised as inherently unmanly.

My mom said something like this the other day and it made me so glad that I've never encountered this attitude from an adult.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:29 AM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Kattullus: Writing is the cheapest of all the art forms. All you need to practice is pen and paper, or a computer if you have access to one.

Not really. From another angle, writing is fiendishly expensive. After all, time is money, and writing is time-consuming like nothing else, especially at book length. Per Virginia Woolf, all you need is a room of your own and a private income equal to a modest salary, then a few years to work out WTF you're doing ... (which is another way the playing field is unfairly weighted in favour of men).
posted by cstross at 12:31 PM on December 6, 2021 [17 favorites]

Great article. I think this passage sums it up: "Firstly, that any book written by women about women’s relationships is a capital-R Romance novel by default. And secondly, that Romance is a genre without substance or literary merit."

To the second point, I got some recommendations from metafilter last year on what to read in the Romance genre because I've always eschewed it. I do think there's a unique character to Romance as a genre that differs from all other genres: the couple MUST get together at the end. This is the contract between the romance writer and the reader, no? This is a barrier to a lot of readers including me, but having said that I did read some really fun books as a result of the recommendations I got here. I'm definitely a legit fan of Talia Hibbert now. Still, who cares if I personally read little in the field, it's a great moment for the book world to wake the fuck up that this is a huge market with a very diverse set of sub genres, writers, and styles and that it should be included in any appraisal of contemporary books!
posted by latkes at 12:36 PM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

The heir to "men's adventure fiction" still exists: "thriller" is a genre with probably more male than female readers, and it, too, is generally considered "without substance or literary merit."
posted by PhineasGage at 12:42 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

people who would have read men's adventure fiction 60 years ago have more exciting things competing for their time, from video games to reddit to a million channels of television.

A surprising number of them are reading litRPGs, a reading experience that is basically game faqs written into a novel.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:44 PM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

I do think there's a unique character to Romance as a genre that differs from all other genres: the couple MUST get together at the end.

There's also a certain more focus given to the relationship over other plot elements. For example, I would characterize T. Kingfisher's Swordheart and Paladin series books as "fantasy novels with a strong romantic subplot", as opposed to "romance novels with a fantasy setting" (which I have also read of a lot of, and enjoyed). But it's a fuzzy line - for all I know, the author might categorize those same books as romances, or specifically (referring to the first Paladin book) as "a fluffy romance, but it ran long and with severed heads."

(Note: this is absolutely a recommendation for all four books for both fantasy and romance fans).
posted by jb at 12:46 PM on December 6, 2021 [10 favorites]

Oh funny, I'd absolutely call her Swordheart/Paladin series romances (though not the linked Wonder Engine books). I'm pretty sure she calls them romance also. (This is I think why the first Paladin book -- her second romance -- felt a lot like a retread in the way the other books did not.)
posted by jeather at 1:11 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

The heir to "men's adventure fiction" still exists: "thriller" is a genre with probably more male than female readers, and it, too, is generally considered "without substance or literary merit."

I'm actually not sure that's right: either that thrillers are still mostly read by men or that they're considered without substance or literary merit. I'm not sure they've ever been considered wholly without substance, thanks to writers like Graham Greene and John le Carré. And post-Gone Girl, the domestic thriller is pretty ascendant within the genre, and many readers of thrillers are women. Most of the authors of The New York Times's list of the year's best thrillers are women.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:21 PM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

jeather: I'd be inclined to call Paladin's Grace more of a romance (by the plot weight), but Paladin's Strength is right on the border (as is Swordheart) and I felt like the romance is more of a part of a fantasy story in Paladin's Hope. But, like I said, it's a very fine line, and you are right that the author wouldn't agree. Things also get complicated when you have series where the first book follows a Romance plot - but then there are sequels with the same couple that move onto different plot types. In the more strict Romance genre, you don't have sequels with the same couple (though you might with other couples, as in the Bridgerton series).
posted by jb at 1:51 PM on December 6, 2021

I can certainly see the argument that any of those books are more fantasy than romance. (Honestly I don't think Vernon would really care if you said they were romances with a strong fantasy element or fantasy with a strong romance element. She probably has an opinion, of course, but they do seem very on the border.)

Yes, it's interesting to see how an author can do a series with the same couple -- I've been working through the books by KJ Charles and she has 2 trilogies all with one couple, the rest are the more standard book about a couple, then one of that person's cousins, then their best friend, etc etc. It works because they end on HFN that are moving the couple forward, but it would not be a bad argument to say that the trilogies with one couple are more fantasy/mystery with heavy romance than pure romance. (And there are a lot fantasy authors who are in fact doing trilogies that are really both fantasy and romance, so follow the romance aspect by changing up the main relationship each time -- CL Polk's Kingston series, for instance.)

Of course this then opens the question of which genres can really coexist easily -- it's clear, I think, that romance, mystery/thriller, sff can all coexist (I'm sure others can as well) -- and why litfic alone does not share genre, and what it means.

And post-Gone Girl, the domestic thriller is pretty ascendant within the genre, and many readers of thrillers are women.

I feel there's a huge gap between domestic thrillers (a genre that is, primarily, for and about women) and traditional thrillers. Among other things, one is just a thriller, the other needs the subgenre label. Also thanks for the link, those look interesting.
posted by jeather at 2:07 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I sold a book this year, an erotic memoir, and in my equivalents, I made sure to include a woman named Loreli James. It was for a bunch of reasons, primarly that she is an excellent writer, and writing about sex that gives people joy, is a really difficult task to do well. I thought about the concise, plot driven work that had been canonized, and it's mostly decetive ficiton written by men, and thought about the recent, literary writing about sex, including Garth Greenwell, whose sexual writing I found miserable people doing miserable things to each other in miserable people.

Here is part of my proposal:

I keep thinking about Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light on Water when reading these stories–at turns filthy and lovely, sentimental and haunted, as much about the big cities as they are about small towns–for Delany, New York and Texas’ Gulf of Mexico; for me, Toronto and the small towns of Alberta. I want it to be more like the romance writer Lorelei James, with her knowing how a ranch works as much as the intersection of a cunt and a cock, than the sad filth and economic degradation of Garth Greenwell; I want it to be like those anonymous digest anthologies that were in the bins of Glad Day before it got replaced by a chic cafe; I want it to be about the way Dorothy Allison writes about furniture in her short story collection Trash; I want it to be like how you read Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life for a gossipy roman-à-clef, and end up racked out by its mourning for a lost lover.

I long for the t ime that romance is taken seriously, because it takes sex seriously, and I think Rooney saying that she is part of that traditon will help
posted by PinkMoose at 3:26 PM on December 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

cstross: From another angle, writing is fiendishly expensive. After all, time is money, and writing is time-consuming like nothing else, especially at book length.

That’s true, the demands society places on women’s time is greater than it does on men’s. However, I think aspiring writers are extremely capable in finding time to write. I was one of a small group of people who ran a chapbook series for a little less than a decade, and most of our submissions were from people who’d never been published before. A majority of those submissions were from women writers.

Now, there are two considerations to keep in mind:

1) It was a poetry series, and therefore requires a different kind of time commitment from fiction (I say this not as a dig, I’m both a poet and a novelist).

2) It was in Iceland, and I don’t have a comparable experience in other countries, so I should mention perhaps the most pertinent statistic, which is that in the year we started the chapbook series, the gender split in poetry collections released by publishers was 80% men, and 20% women, so there was a backlog of poetry manuscripts by women.

That said, there is definitely one aspect of time that disfavors women. Aspiring male writers, I noticed, simply had more time to network. They could show up at almost any event, but women were more like to have other commitments.

Furthermore, it is less risky for men to network than women. A lot of literary networking takes place in bars or people’s homes, and there’s drinking involved. And to network as a young writer, you need to spend time with older, more powerful people. For men, in most cases, the worst that can happen is embarrassment. But women have to make other calculations.

The patriarchy, besides all the other structural factors propping it up, is kept in place by fear.
posted by Kattullus at 8:49 AM on December 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

I will suggest that Marcel Proust is in the running for the best novelist ever. What does his magnificent novel deal with? The domestic and emotional spheres, and, by extension, all of life. If he’s worthy, then those are worthy subjects for writers.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:51 PM on December 6

I just have to mention Lady Murasaki here because I can't wait for the other shoe to drop.

Flaubert is another good example along the same lines as Proust (though of course more concise).
posted by ersatz at 2:41 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]