Female POV

[dreamer_easy]

Just caught a mention of a discussion about whether feminist writers should write from a female POV. I can give one reason straight up, albeit a dated one. You see, I have a guilty pleasure - reading SF short stories from the late fifties / early sixties. In these stories, the female characters are often barely recognisable as human beings. You couldn't get inside their heads, because there's nothing in there. It must have been quite a shock when the New Wave hit, bringing with it fully formed female characters with inner lives and motivations and stuff.

A more up-to-date reason may come from our TV screens. All SF shows are about a white guy and his friends (with the exception of two of the Treks). That's the SF most people consume, and I'll bet most SF readers are also watching the white guys in space. Discuss.

Comments

[pedanther]

Liz posed a writing problem (which also recurred later, when the Doctor's companions were a Time Lady and a computer): one of the companion's purposes is to ask the questions the audience would ask if they were there. When the companion is as smart as the Doctor (or, as in the latter case, smarter), that gets a bit difficult.

With Liz, they got around it a bit by giving all the baffled questions to the Brigadier (which, arguably, damaged his character in ways that persisted even after the blonde flutterbrain showed up).

[tysolna]

Yes, I thought so. I wish they could have had one clever and one, uh, not-so-clever companion who could then ask all the questions. It could have worked like that with Tegan and Nyssa, if only.