GUEST POST: Gender, Family, Nookie: The Speculative Frontier

[helloladies]

Today we're beyond excited to welcome Kameron Hurley, author of The Bel Dame Apocraphya series, to Lady Business. This is not a drill!

Kameron's non-fiction work about writing, gender and SFF has won her hearts, minds, and two Hugo awards this year. She is a fire-breathing feminist, a writerly icon, and creator of one of the toughest ladies in fiction. It's a blogging highlight for us to be hosting her words.

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Someone once asked me why "alpha males" were so popular in so much romantic speculative fiction, and I hesitated to answer it. Not because I didn't know, but because I knew I was going to have to have a discussion about teasing out the difference between finding pleasure in something you genuinely find pleasurable and taking pleasure in something you think you're supposed to find pleasurable. This is a tough question for anyone who's taken it up — do you truly delight in displaying certain types of behavior, or receiving certain behaviors from others, or are you just taught you're supposed to like it, so convince yourself it's great? ( Read more... )