META: On Being a Writer of Woman-Centric Fic

[amalnahurriyeh]

Author: Amal Nahurriyeh, amalnahurriyeh/amalnahurriyeh, amalnahurriyeh at gmail dot com.
Fandoms: The X-Files; egocentrism


Written for ladiesbigbang 2010. Thanks to the mods for this exciting challenge! My other meta contribution, Redheads Who Could Kill Me, is here.



I was very excited to hear about ladiesbigbang; I like producing long works, I really love the multimedia format, and I thought it would be fun to do something on DW, not just on LJ. So the first thing I did was go to list my work as open for podficcing, and started going through my fic tag to pull titles and links of stories that were appropriate

And this was where I confronted the problem of my own writing. Because there were fewer than I thought.

***

I'm a feminist. This is probably one of the earliest things a person learns about me from interaction. I'm a feminist personally (in my own political positions and activism), professionally (in that I teach and research about gender with an eye towards social transformation), and fannishly (in that much of what I like about fandom is its status as a largely female homosocial space, as a place where female characters are seized back from their canons and claimed as heroes, etc). I'm also a lesbian, and someone whose social life is pretty female-heavy; I have male friends, including some who are very close, but my life mostly revolves around women. I think of the writing I do as Amal as substantially a feminist act; I'm a fix-it writer, and much of what I want to fix are the gendered limits on the characters I love, especially the places where there is potential for greatness and then a collapse down into stereotype.

Plus, I write in a canon with pretty much the best female protagonist on Earth. Dana Scully is gentle and fierce; she's a skeptic and a true believer; she loves with great passion and expresses so little of it. She's strong and bold and not above needing to be rescued every now and again. She can take anything you throw at her--aliens, monsters, murderers, her asshole of a partner, apparently incurable brain diseases--and bat it down without even blinking. And, from the point of view of a writer, she's complex, multifaceted, and capable of doing all sorts of interesting things. Dana Scully is magic. How could I not be writing amazing things about women in my fic? Every time Scully's on stage, how can she not be the center of attention?

***

If I asked my students to analyze the relationship between a body of work and a central concept, I'd want them to begin with a thorough definition of the central concept, complete with marking out what differentiates it from other similar categorizations. I'll take my own advice here.

Here are some some things woman-centric fic isn't.

It isn't feminist fic. At least, from where I'm sitting, and my particular feminism. That is, I think you can write fic that undermines the gender binary, and aims to redefine femininity and masculinity as social practices, and to broaden what men and women are considered capable of in our socieities, without having a woman or women as the central characters. Some examples might be stories about men doing caregiving work such as parenting, stories that focus on men but have women in leadership roles on their margins, stories about men considering the women in their lives and the ways that gender roles have oppressed them, or stories about men challenging the sexism of the men around them in homosocial environments.

(There's a parallel question here, about whether woman-centric fic is always feminist. I'll admit, I'm torn. On the one hand, I do think centering women in narratives is still a subversive act on some level, which is totally fucking pathetic given that women are half the goddamned earth. On the other hand, I've absolutely read stories about women that did not do any good to women as a class, and which actually were tools of patriarchial oppression. Perhaps the conclusion would be that woman-centric fic has some feminist value, but frequently it's shot through with other intersecting oppressions, including the oppression of many sorts of women. Anyway, moving on.)

Woman-centric fic isn't any fic with a woman in it. When we talk about the Bechdel test, we mean it as a very minimal way of evaluating a story: do women have any relationships with each other that aren't about men? But stories that have women in them, even stories where women talk with each other about things other than men, are not necessarily woman-centric. If the male characters end up dominating the narrative, taking all the leadership roles, structuring the spaces the female characters operate in, or otherwise sucking up the oxygen, then, guess what? Not so much woman-centric. In fact, this suggests a corrolary point:

It's not sexist fic. Putting a woman at the center of your story only to hate on her for being female? Yeah, not so much. The point is that the women in your story have to be taken seriously as people, as characters, as fully-rounded individuals embedded in their surroundings. If the female characters at the center of a story read less like fully-realized people with their own perspectives on the world, personalities, and voices and more like cardboard cutouts posed alongside The Tape Recorder That Only Plays Things That Please Misogynists, you're not writing "woman-centric fic," you're writing "fic about women that only serves to demonstrate your contempt for women's experiences." Generally when people write this, it's because They Have Issues. I think one sees it more in profic than in fanfic, if only because of the high percentage of folks in fic-producing fandom who are women or transmen or at least marginally feminist, and the very low percentage of folks who are dudebros.

So the question is, then, what is woman-centric fic, if it is not feminist, or any fic with a woman in it, and if it excludes fic that is outright sexist? It would seem to be a piece of fic that puts a female character at its center, and lets her dominate the not just the content, but the shape of the story. She's not just the person on the page the most, she's the person in control of the narrative. I mean that in a Doylist sense--she's not the person who makes everything in the story happen from within the story's framework, but, for the writer, she's the reason that the story exists, and it's shaped around her.


***

Let's look at what I write.

We'll start with Machines of Freedom and the affiliated Caseyverse, because, you know, it's pretty big. There were a lot of things I did very consciously in it. I wrote Casey explicitly to subvert the gender norms of canon: as I said in the author's note, taking a story about fathers and sons and inserting a (game-changing) daughter. My underground world-saving bunker is full of women running the show: Isabel the genius engineer, Monica who manages everyone with grace and brilliance, Scully as warrior-queen of them all. In fact, I deliberately handed Scully the reins of the anti-apocalypse wagon, because they may have been Mulder's to start with, but, let's face it, running around and yelling at people can't save the world. By this point, Mulder couldn't do it all himself; he needs the team that the Stark Insurgency has, and he is, frankly, all but useless to the endeavor at this point.

So, I'm totally in solid woman-centric fic territory, right? Right? Wrong. Because you know that scene between Isabel and Scully in the command level, where Scully uses the simulator program for the first time? That scene is the only reason MoF passes the Bechtel test. (There's also the opening chapter, where Scully talks to Wendy, her assistant, and then has the coded phone conversation with Monica; it passes as well, technically, but neither conversation is substantial.) Nearly every conversation a woman has in the story is with a man: in specific, Mulder. Mulder is just plain there for almost every scene in the book. I actually had to switch from having one POV per chapter to multiple, just because I realized Mulder had to take POV at least once in every chapter after we got to Stark, and I couldn't let myself not let Scully talk for half of the book.

I'm not the only person to notice this. I'm a bit of an egomaniac, so I spend a reasonable amount of time looking for discussions of my work. After one of my later stories in the Caseyverse--I think Dangerous--someone commented to the effect that the entire Caseyverse is about Mulder, even when he's dead. And I can't deny the accusation. Mulder defines the Caseyverse, even more in his absence than in his presence.

Or there's The Keeping of Secrets. Written for the galpalficathon, specifically intended to be gen about Scully and her friend, Ellen, who we glimpse in a first-season episode and never hear from again. It's a ten-part story of Scully and Ellen's friendship, from friendly chatty moments to the great griefs of the series. And it is, certainly, woman-centric in that it's a story of Ellen and her friend, Dana, who she doesn't always understand.

But let's back up. The prompt wendelah1 gave me was "What about your partner?" Yes, that's right: Mulder is the prompt. More than that, he's there in every single scene, visible or invisible: on the phone with Mama Scully; in the handkerchief Scully pulls out of her pocket to stem her nosebleed; leaving Scully dirty voicemails while she's at the movies. (What did you think she was smiling about?) The two scenes from that story that everyone comments on? First, the scene in the bathroom at Mulder's funeral, which: IT'S MULDER'S FUNERAL. Second, the final moment, when Mulder finally appears on camera for the first time, and Ellen immediately confirms what was said about him at that first moment: that he's cute. The entire cycle of the story builds up to the reveal of Dana's mystery man. This story of women's friendship has, at its structural core, somebody's boyfriend.

Or let's look at last December's output. I wrote two very nice stories for xf_santa, both for people I personally like, which is a pretty much optimal position. Except it wasn't, because, goddamn, those were the two hardest stories I ever wrote back-to-back. Why? Because wendelah wanted early-season Scully-centric gen, and colebaltblue wanted Scully-centric UST. And, so help me God, writing 5000 words of ScullyScullyScullyScully with a Mulder who appeared only as a prop (bearer of Snickers and hotdogs, in particular) was next to impossible. Now, I rather love Triptych with Luggage, because of the Little Baby Scully who appears in it, and Chasing Ghosts is dear to me both because I think it's sweet, and because I set it somewhere that has deep personal meaning, and I can't help but feel those resonances. But that was a hard month of writing.

Or let's take what is probably the best thing I've ever written, Sweet Nothings for the Numb. This is an odd story for me, because I'm not really sure why I wrote it. I know I'm a little obsessed with how incredibly fucked up the Emily arc is; it's cruel and unusual, it's a graphic display of how canon robs Scully of even the tiniest bit of power whenever they remember she's a girl (see: Season 8), and it's all zeroed out and excised from the canon by next week's episode. (Trufax: Christmas Carol/Emily aren't on the mytharc DVDs. Tell me what the hell those episodes are if not mytharc. I ASK YOU.) It also serves nicely to serve my kink for fic where the wrong/hot value is maximalized. But I don't have an easy narrative for why I wrote this story, like I do for White Board (the house! it wasn't that messy! plus, did you notice Mulder was depressed, and Scully was really toppy?), or Five Times Mosely Drummy Wishes He Never Met Fox Mulder (because Mo! could have been awesome!), or even Narrative Thrust (because there's no fucking way Fox Mulder is 100% straight, FFS! and of course Scully ships it!).

A story about how Scully deals with the emotional aftermath of her daughter's death is a quintessential Scully-story. It's centered on her feelings of loss and abandonment, the betrayal of her body and of the people around her. The first part of the story, "Curse and Salvation," is absolutely like that: she's angry about what's been done to her, and she wants to take it out on someone. And Mulder is always everyone's whipping boy, so eager to take the blame, even when he deserves it.

But the second part, "Crime and Punishment," is where that version of this story, as a Scully-story of anger and grief, falls completely apart. "Crime and Punishment" is Mulder's story of watching Scully the morning after, struggling with figuring out what to do for her. His twin mantras are that he loves her, and not to think about it--where it is Emily's death, his love for her, or last night's round on the living room floor. Even as they have sad, desperate, incredibly hot sex in their airport hotel room, he's all caught up in his internal process--his love for her is overwhelming, and confusing, and so large it becomes its own player in the room, even more than the actual woman in bed with him. He understands his love for her, but he can't understand her, because she's not feeding him signs he can decode. He doesn't know what she means by crawling into bed with him; he doesn't know why she doesn't want him to fuck her; he doesn't know what he needs to do. He, he, he; "Crime and Punishment" is Mulder's story, and like all of his stories, it's all about him.

The third part, "Facts and Conclusions," veers back and forth between the two POVs; Scully's got more than twice the word count of Mulder (2616 to 987), though he's got the last word. And certainly she's the one with agency in that section; having snapped out of her catatonia of the previous day, she's trying to reassert control through her grief, and even her choice to keep Mulder with her at the end (that he can't understand) is about moving forward, figuring out where she goes next, getting the wish from the first section.

But here's the thing: I don't think the word count is what matters. Because this is what I remember about writing that story. I wrote the first part in an awkward little jag, and then hemmed and hawed about it for months. Then I sat down to write the second part, made a two-song playlist of Rihanna's Disturbia and Lemme Get That, put it on infinite repeat, and wrote the entirety of "Crime and Punishment" in a single night, the words just pouring out of me. When people compliment me on that section, I'm embarrassed, because I'm not sure I wrote it. It just...emerged, from somewhere in my deep unconscious. Writing Mulder having sex with the woman he loves, and knowing she's not there while he does it, was something I could do without having to pause to think.

***

I don't ever need to pause and think with Mulder. I just need to write, and he emerges, beautiful and fucked up, an asshole and a hero and an idiot and a genius and a flawed yet loving father and partner. So when I sit down to write, I sit down to write Mulder, because I know him, in a way I can't really parse or explain.

But Scully. Scully I have to work at. Scully I write to understand, because she makes so little sense to me at times. Scully I write out of character, because I want to write her angrier and opener than she is. Scully I write feeling things I don't know if she's feeling, because I don't know what she's feeling. Neither does Mulder; we're safely in the same boat on that one.

(This would be the point where I'd mention, just parenthetically, that I'm an overeducated, misanthropic loner with a massive ego, a major trauma in adolescence, and emotionally distant parents, married to a detail-oriented, highly repressed woman who refuses to talk about anything of emotional consequence using actual words, and who I have essentially coerced into being my secretary. She doesn't have her own desk, either. Yeah, I'm not subtle.)

***

So here's my problem. I'm a feminist, a lover of stories about women, someone who wants to make critical transformations to the text around questions of gender.

And I'm a Mulderist.

I don't know how to fix this.

***

And yet. I keep coming back to the most important way that Scully is central to my writing. She's central because Mulder makes her central. Scully is necessarily essential to any (non-Scully-hating) Mulderist, because she is at the core of Mulder's emotional life. She is his black hole, the thing that deforms his universe. I have tried writing Mulder without Scully all of once, and I had to go all the way back to Oxford to do so plausibly. (And it was the porn battle; it so doesn't count. Jack Harkness/Everybody = OTP, is all I'm sayin'.)

Scully is objectively amazing. But I understand her so much better when I write her through the prism of Mulder's almost stifling love for her. It gets easier to write her, then, with his eyes on her, tracking her across every room.

***

So, when you evaluate it: have I written much woman-centric fic? Keeping of Secrets, I vote yes; Scully's the pivot point of the story, and the Mulder-reveal says something about his importance to her, but he doesn't openly dominate the narrative shape. Machines of Freedom is more ambiguous--while Mulder dominates the time on the page, I'd argue that the person the narrative bent around, from my POV as writer, is actually Casey--without her, hey, guess what? Very different outcome. Much of the Caseyverse is the other way around: Casey and Scully as the characters on screen, Mulder as the black hole distorting the structure of the thing. I think Sweet Nothings gets the nod, because Scully and her grief are the driving force in the story, even at the moments we're watching her from Mulder's confused eyes. (I'd be interested to hear, from folks who know my work, if they agree with these evaluations. It's very possible I'm wrong.)

More to the point: as someone who understands Mulder so much better, who wants to write him more, should I abandon hope of being a writer of woman-centric fic? Should I be content, instead, to write feminist stories with well-realized female characters who do things that are important to the narrative? Should I aim to write ensemble pieces, to bring women into the center of my writing that way, rather than try to chase the man (and, don't get me wrong, it's not men, it's this one dude) out of my stories?

Perhaps. I don't believe there are no "shoulds" in writing, that you just write the story you have; I believe you frequently take the story you have and make it be more of what you think it should be, or at least should try to be. But I do believe that one needs to start with the story you have, and not try to pick a new one out of the air because it's the right story to write. I want to write Scully, but I need to acknowledge that Mulder will always be there, dragging the story along with him--and when I write Mulder, Scully burns the brighter for it, because she always does in his mind, anyway.

Comments

[naraht]

It's so nice to see some really thoughtful X-Files meta. It's been a while. And I think it's really cool that someone took the option to write meta for ladiesbigbang.

As context for my reply I want to emphasize that I'm definitely coming at this one from the other side of the aisle: I'm a Scullyist. Without question. I watched the series once or twice by myself, and then I watched it again with my mother, who turned out to be a Mulderist. That was the first time that I found myself actually looking at Mulder when he was talking. Before that I had watched Scully when she wasn't talking, as you do, and also watched Scully when she wasn't talking, in order to see those wonderful reaction shots. So the third time through it was like seeing a different series entirely. This says a lot about me.

Even so I think it's very, very hard to write Scully-without-Mulder. It's almost as hard to write Mulder-without-Scully, because the whole point of the show on a relationship level is the codependence, the enmeshment, the way that the universe narrows around the two of them until there's almost nothing left.

People do write slash about Mulder that leaves Scully out entirely. This puzzles me greatly. Those people are really watching a different series from me. But there is at least a possibility there. Mulder does interact with Skinner and Krycek, they are people who move in his orbit in a way that Diana and Marita (isn't it weird that I feel the need to use their first names?) don't move in Scully's orbit. Scully has her mother, and I find that refreshing, but besides that all she has is her dead sister and a friend that she hasn't seen since season one. It's not easy to be woman-centric with Scully for the simple reason that she's not woman-centric herself. She lives in a male world and when it comes down to it this is one of the more important things about her.

Mostly when I write, I use Mulder as a way of viewing Scully. Not as a way of understanding her, because I understand her far better than I understand him, but as a way of seeing her from the outside, viewing her through a lens other than her own.

Having said this, for my own part there was a point where I really did feel like I had to get rid of Mulder to... I don't know what exactly, but to get rid of Mulder. Hence the Samanthaverse AU, which really did let me breathe more freely in some ways. It ends up being more about Samantha than it does about Scully--actually I may find Special Agent Mulder's inner life more interesting when she's a woman. So writing radically woman-centric X-Files fic means, for me, less of a focus on Scully.

Your mileage, naturally, may vary. Hope that some of my dramatic monologue was interesting and/or relevant.

[chaila]

I enjoyed reading this quite a lot. I think this sort of self-examination is really useful and, I think, sometimes half the battle? Too often, I think it's easier for writers (fanfic and otherwise) to slip into the male POV because it's far more often the "default" in fiction; I didn't watch TXF, but I've always gotten the impression it was largely from Mulder's POV. But it's one of those things that, for me, even just *realizing* it was enough to make me want to change it; as both a feminist and, like, you, someone who likes the parts of fandom that reclaim and center women, just realizing that the default male POV is so prevalent and that it bothers me is often enough to make me think of other ideas for stories about women I want to read or write, to break away from the default. Just thinking about the issues helps motivate me to work harder to give a POV to female characters the canon might not have given as much time to.

I also sometimes find it's easier to identify with male characters who interact with my favorite female characters (what I call, "men who are in love with the women I love"). I don't think it's problematic at all unless it becomes a *pattern*, unless a writer always finds themselves identifying with the male POV instead of the with the female character they also love. I don't really write that much fic, but I found myself getting itchy when my first foray into a fandom was from a man's POV, even though half the story was about how awesome he perceived the woman in it to be. What I disliked about that as a pattern, though I totally agree that it can still be female-positive and feminist, is that it still defines the woman through her connection to a man, through her effect on him; in short, through the prism of him. And while I *love* those stories for women I love (me and the male character are fascinated by her!), I worry when it starts to feel like that's the only way I can define her, and start to want to write something else for her too, even if it's harder. So again, I don't really worry unless it becomes a broader pattern; but I do think it's worth thinking about and noticing, like you're doing here.

And I do think it's important for writers who wish to center women to break away from that default male POV now and again, even if it's a little less comfortable. Because I do think there's a different kind of value in a story from a woman's POV, about how she sees herself and her choices, especially if we didn't get that in canon. Which isn't at all to say that not always writing from a woman's POV is wrong or less valuable!

I don't believe there are no "shoulds" in writing, that you just write the story you have

Yes, this. I don't think you abandon hope of being a woman-centric writer at all. But I don't think the fact that you write primarily Mulder POV or find that a bit easier means you should give up trying to understand Scully better, now and then, even if it's a bit harder? Like, not trying or discounting that there's any added value to Scully's POV, just because you noticed it's easier for you, as a feminist, to write Mulder's, would be the real failure; by even wondering how to solve the problem of wanting to center women and finding it easier to write Mulder, you're clearly not doing that.

Um, yeah, that got to be a bit about me. This was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!

[51stcenturyfox]

This is great (linking!)

More to the point: as someone who understands Mulder so much better, who wants to write him more, should I abandon hope of being a writer of woman-centric fic?

I think you can write Scully well, in a way that's not defined completely by her relationship with Mulder, but characters and real people are intertwined with each other, and people do look/feel/seem a certain way when viewed through the eyes of those who love them and mean a lot to them.

...when I write Mulder, Scully burns the brighter for it, because she always does in his mind, anyway.

This, yes.

[trascendenza]

This was a really interesting read -- I especially love the way you break down what is and isn't woman-centric fic, because I had a lot of similar thoughts myself when I was trying to figure out how one features a woman in writing. I've been looking back and analyzing a lot of my own fic and seeing how sometimes even if a woman is at the forefront of a fic, it doesn't mean it's about her, and I'm really glad this 'fest has given me a chance think more deeply about all the layers there.