Sci-fi and gender issues

[tigerfort]

I've recently read various discussions of the Bechdel test. For those who've not encountered it, the test was originally proposed in "Dykes to watch out for", and a film passes the test if it meets the following conditions:

1) it contains at least two female characters
2) who talk to each other
3) about something other than men. (One reasonable extension also excludes marriage, babies, etc, as sole topics of conversation.)

Most Hollywood output still fails this test, and a large number of books do too.

But I've not yet seen a discussion that considers the way in which the rule potentially falls down when faced with some of science fiction's most interesting - and thoughtful - studies of gender issues. (Fundamentally, the rule is a good one, and it's notable that I can't think of a single major film that includes any of the issues I'm about to note, never mind gives them serious consideration.) I should probably say before I start that I'm not too interested in edge cases; if the author only has two characters who are not normal-human-male in nature, they're probably not trying very hard (unless they've only got a very small cast, for whatever reason, or it's an unavoidable consequence of the structure or plot - although if your book is set in a monastry, might a nunnery have done just as well?)

Many of the following make regular appearances in reasonably main-stream sci-fi; some of them are a bit rarer (or are only rarely done well, which isn't the same thing), but make for interesting reading when they happen (and are done properly). So, how should the Bechdel test be adjusted to cope with:

a) human (or sufficiently near-human) hermaphrodites? (I can't think of a good example here, alas; Bel Thorne is treated very much as male both by Miles (as viewpoint character) and by Bujold herself, IMO. This would argue that one way of considering such characters is on the basis of how the author and characters treat them - but then how do you handle one who really is written as both-male-and-female?)

b) human-equivalent (or weakly superhuman) AI, or 'uploaded' human minds that have abandoned gender (either as a requirement of the upload process or voluntarily), and who are therefore genderless? (Greg Egan's "Diaspora", and related stories, provide an easy example here; effectively genderless cyborgs like Anne MacCaffrey's 'brain ships' probably belong here, too, but I'm not 100% certain about that.)

c) artificial intelligences and/or lifeforms to whom gender is a totally meaningless concept? (Almost any strongly superhuman AI will do; Culture Minds are a widely-read-about example.)

d) cultures where gender issues - and quite possible genders themselves - are completely different to the late-20th-century human state of affairs? ("The Left Hand of Darkness" is a justly famous example of this, but more strictly alien societies, such as the Empire of Azad in "The Player of Games", or the complex arrangements of the 'piggies' in "Speaker for the Dead" are also included.)

e) cultures where technology has separated gender and reproduction? I've not read any really good examples of this (although I'd be interested to be pointed to any that may exist); "Ethan of Athos" (Bujold again) describes one such possible society, and an equivalent with an all-female rather than all-male population would be (technically, but not necessarily socially) a trivial change.

f) gender reassignment issues (particularly, but not exclusively, changes that provide full reproductive functionality). This covers a range from Don(o,na) Vorrutyer (who is only ever seen as male by the reader, but was female for some forty years) to worlds where changing your gender is a matter of taking a pill, making a quick change using nano-technology (Robin/Reese is male at the start and end of Stross' "Glasshouse", but female for most of the novel) or even just making a conscious decision to switch your body from one state to the other.

Comments

[truecatachresis.livejournal.com]

There's not really much of a discussion to be had there - the Bechdel test is a useful rule, but it just doesn't always apply, and some SF is one of the areas it's just not useful. It's a simple test that can be telling, but it doesn't actually measure any more than "Does X pass the Bechdel test?" - you have to actualy discuss the piece in question to determine why it fails, and some things have legitimate reasons to fail it. A work of SF dealing with the issues you've mentioned is already at least thinking about issues of gender, which means in a sense it's passed part of what the Bechdel test makes us think about - of course, some such works fail any further examination.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with some of that, but not all. In particular, some of my examples were non-random. McCaffrey's brain-ships, for example, very often fall into very gender-typical roles (and certainly have strong gendering; they also almost invariably get paired up with an opposite-sex partner, but hey...). There isn't any consideration of the gender issues, or even of the technological issues - it's just a plot device to keep one major character fixed in place all the time.

But I should probably have expressed myself better in the original post :)

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

Part of me wants to think of the most sexist and biased works possible which nevertheless pass the Bechdel test with flying colours (pr0n might be a good place to start).

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. As truecatachresis observes, all that the test tells you is whether or not the subject passes the test. Notably, it's more helpful when you apply it to a whole oeuvre, rather than a single work - the fact that any individual Hollywood film fails is probably unimportant, but the fact that almost every Hollywood film fails tells you something significant (and distressing) about the industry.