The Rage of the Geekette
In Huw Powell’s article featured today on the Guardian, The Rise of the Geekettes, he seems to be under the impression that ‘geek girls’ are newfangled breed of woman, fresh-spawned from the loins of our great mother, Lady Web 2.0.
I beg not so humbly to disagree.
The Internet has done fantastic things for ‘geeky’ women and girls. Especially with the advent of Web 2.0, the growing awareness of a larger community of girls who share the same ‘nerdy’ interests has helped to shatter and expose the shameful untruth hashed and rehashed by so much of our media and popular culture: the myth that only boys (and ‘tomboys’) can like science fiction and fantasy.
Caveat: I have never been a teenage boy, so I cannot speak authoritatively of teenage boy’s thoughts and experiences. I have, however, been a teenage girl whose interests were, in places, painfully out of line with what the media and society told me were appropriate or cool for girls my age. Until I found the Internet, I had no idea that there were so many other girls who had the same interests I did.
It actually took years after my first foray into the world of fandom on the Internet (I was 12 and entirely besotted with Elijah Wood’s Frodo and some of my friends at school hadn’t even seen Fellowship of the Ring, and the ones that had were getting sick of my insistence on discussing it at every possible moment) for the true beneficial effects of Internet fan communities to take hold. The confidence and assertiveness I now have in my own interests passions were hard won, and I still struggle against being shamed about them.
In our western society, female passion occupies a precariously marked position in social discourse. More learned scholars than I have written about the way in which male passion is seen as fruitful, legitimate, and vitalising, while female passion is dismissed as silly, hysterical, and somehow fake. The way we talk about female fans (and I, too, have been guilty of this) is inherently derogatory, especially when considered against the generally even-keeled picture of male fandom that prevails as the norm. There’s little real reason for this discrepancy, beyond the fact that traditionally female pursuits are often written off as frivolous simply because they (supposedly) appeal to females. (Here I’d like to ask when the last time you heard of a group of drunken female fans smashing shop windows in when their favourite band, for instance, loses out on a some award or other, simply as an isolated example of how skewed that picture is.)
Girls are brought up being told that their passions must be moderated and directed only in certain appropriate forms. Female interest in the pursuits that have, through the vagaries of societal discursive construction, been designated ‘male’ is marked: it is seen as special, different, strange. Being a teenager is not easy; your body is changing, the way you are expected to interact with your friends is changing, and everywhere there are a million rules and expectations pulling you this way and that, and even your friends tease you mercilessly for the smallest of things, and somehow in the midst of this melee you’re supposed to form some sort of independent identity — without, of course, actually being too different than everyone else.
This is no different for teenage boys than it is for girls, but the process has markedly different results. Add to the sheer amount of endless teasing that teenagers (especially girls) must endure on a daily basis the often ruthless gatekeeping that goes on in ‘geeky’ circles, usually by the legitimised male members of said circles, and then ask yourself why a young girl might struggle to announce to the class that she’s a Trekkie. (This is not to say that more traditionally female ‘fanatic’ circles don’t engage in gatekeeping as well, but for a valid, timely example on this point I can easily point to gamergate’s disproportionate persecution of Anita Sarkeesian and other female games critics.) What the Internet as a platform for broad, interest-based communication has done is created a new situation where women and girls (and boys and men) can finally look around themselves and say, ‘Hey! These people like the same things as I do! I’m not so strange after all.’ No longer are women and girls allowing themselves to be marginalised from their interest groups simply because they’re being told by whoever that ‘scifi is for boys’.
I, too, grew up reading Lord of the Rings. I would gladly talk about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy until I was blue in the face. My brother and I could recite the Star Wars films (and often did). And I fully agree with Huw’s call for greater diversity in young adult science fiction and fantasy. Where Huw and I must part ways is in the idea that female fans of science fiction and fantasy are somehow a new breed. The differences between the new, web-savvy girl geek and the ‘geekettes’ of Huw’s childhood are ones of confidence, voice, in-group validation, and not a little bit of fuck-the-gender-police attitude.
The Internet did not spawn a new generation of girl fantasy fans as if from nowhere. Women are not new to fantasy writing and scifi. In fact, many will argue that we started the whole shebang. What the Internet has done is simply allowed us to amplify our voices and given us a place to dig in our collective heels.
Could it be, Huw, that the reason you never found women who were interested in scifi in your youth was because you never thought to look for them? The ‘geekettes’ have been here all along — but it’s nice to know that at least one more person can finally see us.
