Marie-Louise Gay's Stella and Sam

Marie-Louise Gay's Stella and Sam series are some of my favourite children's stories. I love Stella's imagination and her utter joy at life. I love the simplicity of Stella and Sam playing together and the beautiful stories Stella tells Sam: about being Star of the Sea, Queen of the Snow, Fairy of the Forest and Princess of the Sky. I love Sam's never-ending questions and his innocent trust in the infinite knowledge of his big sister.

These books are the celebration of the real beauty in the relationships of siblings (when they aren't arguing over whose turn it is to clean the hamster cage or empty the dishwasher) but also how powerful the gift of imagination truly is. 

Needless to say, we own them all. :)

(image reproduced from here)

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My Top 50 Influential Women Writers!

Apparently, the Guardian did some list of the 50 most influential writers last week.

Shockingly it was mostly white men. I know, you didn't see that coming at all. (sighs)

The lovely people at ForBooks Sake made an alternate list, of which I have not read anywhere near enough! I've only read 14 from their first list and 7 from the second. (jots down homework list)

This is my list of Some of the Most Influential Women Writers. It is heavy on children's literature.

But, I love children's fiction so I'm ignoring all criticism!

My List

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
Marilyn French's The Women's Room
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Bronte's Villette

Sapphire's Push
Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
Aminatta Forma's Ancestor Stones
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
L.M Montgomery Anne of Green Gables
Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel

Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of Rights of Women
Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
 Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider

Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk Auschwitz: True Tales of a Grotesque Land
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Kate Mosse's Labrynthe
Judy Bume Are You there God, It's Me Margaret (and Forever)
Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy
Beverly Cleary's Ramona
Anne Franks's Diary

Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse

Jean Little's Mine for Keeps
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time

Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did

Susan Faludi's Backlash:The Undeclared War Against Women

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Kris Radish's The Elegant Gathering of Snows

Germanise Greer's The Whole Woman

Cordekia Fine's Delusions of Gender

S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Alice Walker's The Colour Purple

Dale Spender's The Writing or the Sex

Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit

Enid Blyton's Famous Five

J.K. rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairies

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Anne of Green Gables is a Redheaded Child Not a Blonde Playboy Centerfold

This is the new cover of Lucy Maud Montgomery's children's classic Anne of Green Gables. You remember Anne: a redheaded, 11 year old orphan who hates her hair and who is sent to live with Matthew and Marilla who wanted a boy; a girl who spends the first two books learning to love herself both as a female and one with a red hair. At least, it's been a while since I've read the book but I definitely remember Anne being a redhead and a child; not a retro-Playboy centrefold. I definitely don't remember Anne rolling about in a haystack like a supporting body in Dukes of Hazzard. Being 7 am, I have taken the liberty of checking with Wikipedia  to make sure I'm not completely out-to-lunch with this. They're pretty sure Anne is supposed to a redheaded child too. Now, I do know that Wikipedia isn't always the most accurate source of information but even they can't confuse a redheaded child with an 18 year blonde with breasts being posed in a sexualised manner.

Has it really come to the point that one of the best books written for girls by a brilliant author which has already sold more than 50 million copies and been translated into 20 languages needs to be repackaged as if the target audience is middle-aged men with a teenage girl sex fetish? Because, they've never struck me as the target audience for Anne of Green Gables. And, frankly, everything else in our culture is targeted at them. Why can't girls have one book that doesn't erase our lived experiences?

Why does everything have to reference a pornified, heteronormative sexuality?

Why do we assume young girls won't want to read a book about another young girl, especially since 50 million of us already have, if she isn't sexualised?

FFS, the whole point of Anne of Green Gables is learning to love ourselves even if we have freckles, red hair and aren't called Cordelia. It is not a book about a blond teenager learning to be a sex object. It's a book about a child discovering themselves and loving themselves.

This is precisely the kind of shit which evidences why porn culture is so insidious.

Anne should not pass the Patriarchal Fuckability Test. 

She is a child; to pretend otherwise is disgusting and creepy. 


This is the cover of the edition I have. Notice that Anne is both a redhead and a child; not a blonde woman being posed in a sexualised manner.

Plus, let's be totally honest here, there is NO WAY Marilla would let Anne prance about in a boy's shirt.

This is from the Mumsnet thread I started today. I thought it needed sharing:

FastidiaBlueberry Thu 07-Feb-13 12:04:17

Who is the publisher?

This really is pernicious and a brilliant example of porn culture.

Any child buying this book is receiving the message that being a girl means being sexy before being anything else. Even if the words in the book say something completely different and don't even talk about the need to be fuckable, the subliminal message is that even when you're busy doing other stuff, sexy is where it's at. If this goes on, it will almost be impossible to find pictures of female humans which don't emphasise their fuckability above every other aspect of them. Are we to look forward to a representation of Hermione Granger suggestively holding her wand in her mouth, or near her arse or something, a la 50 shades? WTF?

Who the fuck thought it was a good idea, is the publishing house full of child-molesters or something?

I mean seriously, what possesses an otherwise normal person, to imagine that the best representation of an 11 year old red-haired girl with freckles (something the book is very specific about) is a sexualised picture of a teenager? There's something actually quite sinister about this, what is wrong with the adults who authorised this cover? I really do think they should be forced to make a statement about why they felt it was appropriate to pornify the image of a child on a book whose target market is female children. It's beyond disgusting, it's actually amazing - as if peadophiles are working in the office and deciding the artwork and the normal adults there are accepting the paedophile view of the world, that every child is a potential fuck. 

And of course, we're all going to be told that we're overreacting, it's only a picture and it's fine for 8 year old girls to be brainwashed in this way.

FFS.

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Flaming Chickens of Mass Destruction

It's a reference from this book which is fucking brilliant. Everyone should read it. Especially cus I'm not telling what Flaming Chickens of Mass Destruction means. 

[It's also an excellent name for an anarcho-Feminist punk band but only if you give me naming recognition.]

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Edinburgh International Book Festival: Still Reinforcing Cultural Femicide

I think its fairly self-evident that I love reading; certainly anyone who follows me on twitter is bombarded daily with my witterings on my favourite books. I also love the Edinburgh International Book Festival but, every year, I am disappointed by how white male-centric the festival is. This year is no different. I complained here about the official catalogue which made it pretty self-evident how few women would be speaking at the Festival; and, of that small number of women, how many were children's authors. I love children's literature but women don't just write books for toddlers and teenagers. 

For a variety of reasons, yesterday was the first chance I've had to attend the Book Festival. I'd like to say I was surprised by the obvious display of cultural femicide but I wasn't. The vast majority of pictures of authors on display were male. In the bookstores, the vast majority of books on the special displays and tables were by men; including the children's bookstore. 

Now, I'm sure that the staff didn't consciously make the decision to prioritise men's writing but that's how insidious cultural femicide is.  The privileging of men's writing frequently happens at an unconscious level and is reinforced through the media and academia. The Book Festival's choice to hang mostly photos of male authors may seem a small point but it's the accumulation of such small decisions which harms women's writing. It is just as problematic as literature departments in universities only using one or two novels by women a course so as not to alienate male students. It's obviously not a problem to alienate the women students who, frequently, make up the majority of literature students in all languages.

The Festival's continuing privileging of male writers just reinforces the notion that women's writing is gender-specific and that fucks me off no end. As ever, I will fill in the comments box at the Festival [and the subsequent surveys] pointing out the erasure of women's writing but I don't expect things to change any time soon. After all, it would take someone seriously brave and radical to overhaul the Edinburgh Book Festival so it includes more than white men. I'm doing my part by only buying tickets to women writers and only buying books written by women.

These are the books I bought yesterday:

• Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees
• Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth: A Memoir
• Pat Barker's Union Street
• Scarlett Thomas' Popco
• Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y
• Lisa Cacho's Slavery Inc. The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking
• Catherine Rayner's Sylvia and Bird
• Catherine Rayner's Ernest
• Sue Hendra's Barry the Fish With Fingers and the Hairy Scary Monster
• Kristina Stephenson's Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Tale of the Terrible Secret

The only author of adult books I've read before Monique Roffey's The White Woman on The Green Bicycle which is a bloody brilliant book. We already own all of Kristina Stephenson's Sir Charlie StinkySocks books and have seen her at the book festival in previous years. They are fab books.

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Edinburgh Book Festival: Cultural Femicide at its Finest

The Edinburgh Book Festival catalogue has, once again, arrived by post. As ever, it's dominated by male authors. Lots and lots of men writing books and speaking about books and having important thoughts and questions about books. Granted, there are a number of women authors represented in photos but that's clearly an advertising fudge. At least, I think its a fudge. I haven't actually bothered to count the number of male and female authors attending and then do some fancy maths comparing them with the photographic representations. But, I'm pretty confident that the women authors are disproportionately represented in the photographs of the festival than women authors are actually speaking at it.

In fact, most of the women authors seem to be children's authors. Now, I'm a huge fan of children's fiction [except for Twilight and books about magic ponies. Those are just all kinds of awful] but we all know that in the world of literature, children's fiction just doesn't quite cut it which is unfortunate as, apparently, J.K Rowling is one of the only billionaires in the UK who actually pay proper income tax. [Not that I'm suggesting anyone who hasn't read all her books needs to run out tomorrow to buy them, but a brilliant woman author who pays tax? The Tories won't find one of them]. Children's literature is dominated by dead, white men. Newer, more popular, children's books are derided as rubbish and dull. The Harry Potter books, some of the best-selling books ever, are frequently dismissed with "at least, it gets boys reading book". Talk about damning with faint praise. Now, I do happen to think that there are a lot of children's authors who write literature [as opposed to popular fiction which I enjoy just as much]. Women like Kit Pearson, Jean Little and Madeleine L'Engle write literature [however poncily you want to define that term]. Authors like Jacqueline Wilson, who is a constant presence at EBF and financially successful to boot, are relegated by snobbery to being unimportant. The dismissal of books aimed at children is part of cultural femicde because it denies the very power and success women writers have with audiences of children, who are just as critical about the quality of books as adults are.

There are some incredible women authors attending EBF. I'm looking forward to Caroline Moorhead's The Resistance Women Who Survived Auschwitz. I am interested in the contested definitions of resistance as is applied to the Holocaust and how the label of "resister/resistance" is culturally appropriated or denied depending on political context, who has the right to label themselves resister and who has the right label others as resister. This debate is clearly played out publicly in discussions over Fania Fenelon's memoir Playing for Time; a book which is both feted for its honestly and critiqued for its rewriting of history. I'm also looking forward to Jeanette Winterson, Kate Summerscale and Monique Roffrey. I have, for the past few years, tried only to see women authors speak but it is difficult, particularly when one is starting from a feminist position.

Interestingly, and totally opposite to the rest of my ranting about the EBF in general, is the Anobii First Book Award given to either writers of their first book or overseas authors whose book has just been translated into English. This award seems to have gender parity which raises some interesting questions. I don't actually know how authors are selected; if they volunteer or are chosen by committee. However, if they are chosen, then it does seem like the emphasis on "Important Male Authors" is a deliberate [if subconscious] policy. It also reflects an ageism since the women writers nominated for the Anobii prize are all very young, reflecting both their status as first-time published authors but also, perhaps, an acknowledgement of the cultural femicide inherent in the book industry. At least, I hope so. Either way, the Anobii prize is quite odd considered the gendered nature of the rest of the event.

And, finally, I'm also slightly perplexed by the keynote question which is "should literature be political?" How, precisely, can someone argue that it isn't. Even the drivel which is Twlight [and it is serious fucking misogynistic drivel about loving your abusive boyfriend and cutting out all your friends and family so he doesn't hurt you] is political. Hell, its the ultimate Patriarchal Handmaiden text written by a Mormon evangelising the no sex before marriage bullshit which works out so well for society. Literature is, and always has been, political; as much when it focuses on the private lives of individuals as it does on the public political and cultural structures of society. Also, the panel to discuss it seems to include no one in possession of a vagina. Obviously, because women never write books about political issues.

I do love EBF. I love the hope they maintain every year in holding the festival in a bunch of tents in Charlotte Square. I love the fact that its a mud swamp by day three. I love the whimsy involved in tossing random rubber ducks into the swamp for decorative purposes. Most of all, I love the fact that the slide show shown before every session only contains pictures of lovely literary people having picnics in the grass on the one day a year that the festival isn't a mud swamp. You can't argue with that level of cognitive dissonance. Yet, every year I'm disappointed by the lack of women writers, by the lack of overtly feminist writers. As a general rule of thumb, EBF is a lovely day out with a great bookstore but the Independent Radical Bookfare held in October has a greater variety of authors and a better gender parity.

Oh, and before I get any pissy comments telling me to calm down or that I'm over-reacting, women buy more books than men. Women read more books than men. There are more women involved in the publishing industry than men and it's women's volunteer labour which makes many book festivals possible. We should expect gender parity in book festivals when the vast majority of people involved in the industry have vaginas.

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