March 2009

Women and Genre Writing in Spain and South-east Asia
By Sue Burke and KS Augustin

Sue Burke moved to Spain in December 1999. She has published two dozen short stories, along with poetry and lots of non-fiction, mostly but not always in English. In January, she began a serialized on-line translation of the Spanish medieval novel of chivalry that became the big Renaissance bestseller, Amadis of Gaul.

Despite the depressing news, KS Augustin is actually quite happy to be residing in Malaysia. For one thing, the food is great! When not at her IT job, she can be found pounding away at the keyboard, writing mostly s-f romance, or trying to talk some luckless soul into being interviewed on her podcast show, Radio Free Bliss. You can find out more about her work at www.ksaugustin.com.

Spanish Women Face Two Hurdles

I couldn't figure it out. In Spain, almost no women write science fiction, fantasy, or horror, and yet I could find no apparent sexism among editors and fans. Quite the opposite: women writers and fans, few though they are, get treated with real respect, get published regularly, and win top prizes.

What was holding Spanish women back?

The answer came from outside the little world of "fantastic fiction," as the genre is called here. Laura Freixas, author of the book Literatura y mujeres (Literature and Women ), provided some statistics about women in the arts:

On any given week, female authors account for 10% of the national best-selling fiction. Only 7% of films are directed by women. Only 5% of art exhibitions are of female artists. Only 24% of executives in the communications industry are women, though they are 46% of the professionals. In theater, among the candidates for the prestigious Max Prizes in 2008, 25% of the directors and 19% of the authors were women. Between 1977 and 1987, only 3% of the winners of annual National Prize in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry were women; between 1998 and 2007, that number increased to 13%. In the leading magazine about literature and ideas, Letras Libres, only 8% of the correspondents are women.

Outside of the arts, among the companies in Spain's stock market, only 6% of the executives are women, while 40% of the employees are women. Discrimination persists throughout Spanish society.

"The absence of women among the creators of culture," Freixas says, "produces contents that legitimize and normalize the absence of women, and vice versa." Women aren't encouraged to write, or entirely welcomed.

That's one part of the problem. But there's another.

Just as women writers outside of fantastic fiction are not taken seriously, fantastic fiction itself is not taken seriously in Spain, says science fiction writer Lola Robles, a long-time advocate for women genre writers. It's considered "a sub-genre of little or no literary quality, pure escapism for juveniles, or too centered on scientific and technological themes, therefore with an 'unmistakable American flavor,' and a direct reflection of movies, which, with a few honorable exceptions, are rarely anything other than action and adventures like Star Wars," she says. In Spain, realism reigns in literature.

Even worse, she says, within the genre, Spanish writers of both sexes have a hard time getting published. Big publishers prefer translated works from the United States or Britain because they sell better. Small publishers and magazines dedicated to Spanish authors suffer limited sales, and, as a result, magazines and publishers have lamentably short life spans.

"Keeping in mind the limited numbers of male authors in the genre," Robles says, "it comes as no surprise that practically no women were published regularly until the 1980s." Elia Barceló broke that barrier, and, very slowly, a few more women have begun making a name for themselves.

For real change, Robles says, science fiction must become more known to women readers, and there's hope. The Internet has allowed on-line publications and websites to flourish, communities to develop, and prospective fans and writers to examine the genre. Both Robles and I recommend the award-winning website NGC 3660, created and run by Pily B., award-winning female author and one of Spain's secret masters of fandom. Short stories, reviews, interviews, links, and artwork provide a good window on genre activities in Spain.

The Internet may even provide a needed end-around for creative women in all genres and artistic media. I've lived in Spain for nine years, and I've seen a lot of changes, but women are still nowhere near equal. Try as it might, Spain's egalitarian little world of fantastic fiction hasn't converted the big world yet.

The Perspective From South-East Asia

Walking through a Malaysian or Singapore bookstore is an interesting experience. The bookshelves are full of the usual categories: Business, Self-Improvement, Children's. I usually start my browsing with the Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror shelves, and I always see the same thing. A dearth of Asian names. In my most visited bookstore, you have to literally go round a wall into the furthest corner of the store before you come across Asian writers. And they're all there, higgeldy-piggeldy, memoirs mixed with contemporaries mixed with crime thrillers. With this kind of respect (!) being shown to Asian writers in general, what is the state of play for south-east Asian fantasy, science-fiction and horror in general, and for women writers of such in particular?

First, the good news. Horror is big in this part of the world. One of the most popular writers in Singapore writes horror stories for children, and the shelves are full of like-minded titles: Horror Tales from the Kopitiam, Singapore True Ghost Stories, Classic Horror Tales. However, as you've probably gathered from the titles, the trend is towards "true", realist, paranormal tales, rather than, say, urban fantasy or other horror.

After that, it's bad news. There are several writing classes on offer in Singapore, but they concentrate on memoir-type writing. Malaysia, suffering from decades of neglect of the English language, doesn't even get that far. Fantasy and science-fiction are considered frivolous, except in the realm of children's books. In fact, one has to go further afield, to the Philippines, to see a boom in the area of speculative fiction, although editor and writer Charles Tan describes this more as "magic realism" rather than the kinds of concepts you or I are used to when using the term. Like Singapore and Malaysia, there is also a fusion between more fantasy, or mythic, concepts and horror, as horror is also popular there. Another comment of Tan is instructive. He talks about the region's speculative fiction as suffering because critics fail to see the "realism" or "social relevance" in such tales. This grumble may come as a surprise to Westerners, who regard the speculative fiction field as offering an often sharp mirror to the current problems of society, but this parallel is one the more-literal minded Asian has problems getting her head around at the present time.

Another problem of dissemination is due to language. In the Philippines, you have English, but you also have Tagalog and several hundred other languages and dialects in use. Singapore runs on English and Mandarin. Malaysia runs on Malay and English, then Mandarin and Tamil. Thailand uses Thai. Cambodia uses Cambodian. Vietnam uses Vietnamese. For a writer, the best bet is probably to use English, but at the risk of alienating a significant other population. Then, too, one could say that countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines — in fact, most of the region — have their own economic problems. While everyone is struggling to merely put food on the table, creative expression takes a back seat, regardless of medium or sex.

In terms of gender, there seems to be no skew to one sex in the Philippines, although I've noticed a trend to males amongst local Singaporean and Malaysian writers. The problems facing female sff&h writers in south-east Asia are, however, much bigger than one of gender balance. The major problem is one of relevance. How relevant is sff&h perceived to be, to the life of the average Asian? At the moment, the answer is — I'm afraid to say — not at all. And just to finish off back in my local neck of the woods, Malaysia and Indonesia are both predominantly Muslim countries (total population close to 250 million), with a Muslim distaste for anything that detracts from a religious and pious life, coupled with a less than enlightened attitude to women (regardless of what the Koran may actually say). It is no surprise that I have found a fatwa against both reading and writing fiction of any kind. The region has a long way to go.