International Women’s Day: Successful Women of Fandom (@HP Alliance)
The Harry Potter Alliance in conjunction with Hunger Is NOT A Game (The Imagine Better Project) invited me to write an essay for their International Women’s Day “Women Who Kick Ass” project, representing “successful women in fandom and their favorite fictional ladies.”
International Women’s Day is a day to honor the women who have changed our lives, the women who have been our role models, our teachers and our friends both in real life and in stories. In a world that often makes it so much harder to be a woman, the strong female characters created by Joss Whedon, J.K. Rowling and so many others can be some of the most amazing role models. Fictional characters like Katniss, Hermione and Buffy teach us that women are just as smart, just as capable, as any man. They have shown us how to stand up and speak out, how to challenge the rules and show our stuff. How to face down the dark and say “Alright, I get it. You’re evil. Do we have chat about it all day?”
Here’s a copypasta of my essay, and here is where you can submit your own favorite fictional heroines to be featured on the HPA site!
Editors, Ambition, and Breaking the Ideal
V. Arrow is a prominent blogger, fanfiction writer, fictional cartographer, and pop culture analyst whose first book, The Panem Companion: An Unofficial Guide to the Hunger Games series from Mellark Bakery to Mockingjays, will be released by Smart Pop Books in December 2012. Her works about The Hunger Games have been additionally featured on The Daily What, io9, Crushable.com, Daily Dot, The Mary Sue, and many other entertainment news websites.The fictional female characters who have influenced me most are largely people who you’ve probably never heard of: Gloria Gopher from Under the Umbrella Tree was the first; Ginny Weasley, probably the most “controversial” (although I maintain that if you read her as either The Exceptional Woman trope or as Harry’s delusional fangirl, you’ve missed something integrally important in the Harry Potter series’ construction).
But the most influential female character in my life is the utterly obscure Becca Fisher from Disney’s short-lived Flash Forward (1997; played by Jewel Staite). Becca, at the outset of the series, is very much a Gen-X eighth grader – almost a miniature Georgia Lass from Dead Like Me, minus the swearing and being killed by a deorbiting Mir II toilet seat – who takes no guff from anyone and doesn’t seem to either see or acknowledge gender differences or bias. In the show’s pilot episode, Becca’s primary objective is to be made the editor of the school newspaper because she’s put in so much work over the last two years, but she misses the signup for whatever reason, I can’t quite remember.
What I remember is her impassioned protest to the (male) adviser of the paper, who suggests that the boy he’s made the editor would be happy to print any “Letters to the Editor” that Becca wants to write in because she’s so talented and invested in the school:
“I don’t want to write Letters to the Editor. I want to BE the editor.”
Written out that way, it doesn’t look like much. But in 1997, it was validation of my own feelings and goals – and yet it also reaffirmed my niggling belief that despite being only ten years old, and despite being a Spelling Bee champion and honors student and already taking high school writing courses, I wasn’t doing enough. I wanted to BE the editor, but I wasn’t sure how.
The next year, the Harry Potter series came out in the US, and I discovered J.K. Rowling. No, she isn’t fictional, and maybe that isn’t allowed for this blog series, but she was a huge influence in my life as a woman “charting my own path.” I’d always known that I wanted to be a writer – ever since I typed up my first short story when I was three, which was, incidentally, fanfiction for the Jesse Bear books (“Jesse Bear Gows to the Zoo to Sea the Mawonkinks and Eliwonks”) – but I didn’t really know how to approach that goal other than obliquely.
J.K. Rowling changed that for me, and showed in a more tangible way how one single woman – and that was an aspect that really affected me, because so much of “girlhood” culture is predicated on Finding A Husband To Take Care Of You and that never appealed to me – could change the course of her future through writing.
J.K. Rowling, okay, was not the editor. But she had an editor, and that seemed noble, too.
So now, I’m writing this in one Word document while the last, extra chapter of The Panem Companion, due to be released in December 2012, is open in another. I have to send it to my editor in the next few hours. On the outside, it would look like I’ve achieved some of that goal (although passionately yelling, “I DON’T WANT TO WRITE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR; I HAVE AN EDITOR!” doesn’t have the same ring).
But I have to confess: writing this post feels somewhat fraudulent. I’m not sure that I would consider myself “a successful woman,” and I’m not convinced that anyone else would, either. To paraphrase from feminist writer Courtney E. Martin, I am of the Millennial Generation of women who were told “You can be anything” and heard “You have to be everything.’ ”
Yes, I have a book coming out in December, which means I will be a published literary critic at 25. Yes, I graduated from a high-ranking liberal arts college in five semesters; yes, I had articles on pop culture and sociocultural analysis published by fairly well-respected magazines when I was in my early 20s. I copyrighted and produced a play at 18; I sent off my first novel manuscript to be utterly and completely (and, um, rightfully) crushed at 12.
But I don’t think that I am a “successful woman.” Not yet.
A big part of my innate reluctance to classify myself that way stems from the societal expectations of women: it would be unfair braggadocio to admit any level of personal achievement; because I am happily single in my mid-20s while I work to achieve my ultimate goal of publishing original fiction, my professional success is somehow at the expense of personal success; the fact that I mostly work by sitting around in my jammies drinking tea and yelling at Tumblr means that I must be unkempt and not really taking life Seriously with a capital S. For as long as we live in a culture that does need to specify one day to celebrate the achievements of women, it will be hard to feel like “a successful woman,” because in such a culture, truly successful women… they’re impossible.
Another fictional woman, or perhaps a somewhat-fictionalized-amalgamation-of-many-successful-women-I-admire, is the titular character on the BBC’s Miranda, starring Miranda Hart, who bemoans the impossibility of being “the ideal woman” in second series opener:
“I’m going to become the kind of woman who…you know, the kind of woman who just leaps out of bed and just does that *tosses head around* and their hair looks perfect. And they grab a homemade muffin out of their caffe kits and polka-dot biscuit tin and head to work wearing trainers at the bottom of a skirt suit to show off they’ve power-walked in. They have pot plants that don’t die on them. Their fruit bowl isn’t full of 3-week-old rotting pears because they actually eat the fruit! They have day bags, evening bags, and a clutch, y’know. They just grab a wheat-germ smoothie in-between work because that’s enough to keep them going, even though at lunchtime they jogged and enjoyed it! Because they don’t have flesh that moves independently to their main frame. And finally, they have easy access to pens, to finish a crossword at a bar where the man that they just decided to take as a lover the night before says to them, ‘Hey, last night was great.’ You know, be that kind of woman.”
To that end, the fictional(ized) women that I admire are those who are not ideal. They aren’t the archetypal or trope-borne “Women’s Lib” archetypes, anymore, who would stand in their teacher’s office and yell that they want to be the editor. They are the girls and women who, quietly, have become the editor (or the joke shop owner, like Miranda; the TGS with Tracy Jordan writer like Liz Lemon; the City Council hopeful like Leslie Knope; the secretly-published romance novelist like Mia Thermopolis; the reluctant revolutionary figurehead like Katniss Everdeen) and redefine what “successful” means for themselves.
And maybe “successful,” for me, means typing up this essay, hiking up my jammie pants, making another cup of tea, reblogging some photos of jellyfish and British boy bands, and finishing up a chapter about the literary structure of the Hunger Games series for my very own editor to fully (and rightfully) crush come morning.
