Proposals for two conferences
Proposals for two conferences
Tolkien, Women Fantasy Writers, and Women readers (fans, writers, and academics)
These abstracts submitted for two upcoming conferences are going to become part of a larger project later on and are, as I mentioned in my previous post, inspired by the Éowyn posts I did in my Adaptations series.
First, I submitted this to the Tolkien Society’ for consideration for their December 7-8, 2024, Tolkien as Heritage (Hybrid Seminar) (deadline for submitting proposals has been extended to October 1):
“Heritage Starts with HER: Women Writers Writing Back to Tolkien’s Legendarium”
One of the most significant aspects of an author’s heritage is the influence they have on later writers. In regard to J. R. R. Tolkien, the nature of that influence and individual writers’ responses quickly become complicated. In this proposal, I combine Faye Ringel’s analysis of Tolkien’s influence on contemporary women fantasists in which she uses Harold Bloom’s concept of a strong misreading of the earlier work and Dallas Jean Baker’s concept of writing back to the earlier work. Baker defines “writing back” as “a commonly used literary strategy employed by feminist, postcolonial, and queer writers to reclaim, re-imagine and complicate normative or marginalizing narratives that are colonial or widely disseminated" (133). Both concepts focus on what elements later writers accept, what they reject, or what they transform. A quarter century after Ringel opened up this topic, I analyze how Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette’s Goblin Emperor, Victoria Goddard’s Bone Harp, and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy create a range of strong misreadings/rejections of the spiritual/racial hierarchies of Tolkien’s Elves and Orcs.
Works Cited
Addison, Katherine. Goblin Emperor. Tor Books, 2014.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Yale UP, 1997.
Baker, Dallas John, "Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy." Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and Nike Sulway, Cambridge Scholars' Publishing, 2017, pp. 123-43.
Goddard, Victoria. The Bone Harp. Victoria Goddard, 2024.
Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.
---. The Obelisk Gate. Orbit, 2016.
---. The Stone Sky. Orbit, 2017.
Ringel, Faye. “Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth. Edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, no. 89, Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 159-171.
Second, for the April 2025 national Popular Culture/American Culture conference (for the Tolkien Study Area) which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, in April. The deadline for submitting to any of the 100+ topic areas is November 30, 2024. This one has already been accepted. I am the chair of the area and have the luxury of working within a spacious conference schedule (it runs Wednesday-Saturday, from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM W-F, and until the end on Saturday afternoon). The Tolkien Studies area usually has between 5-8 sessions (a list of the paper presented each year is here).
A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Their Own ‘Tolkiens’”1
My presentation traces the complex web of Anglophone women’s reception of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium in the center of which I place his publications. When I use the noun, “Tolkien,” in quotation marks, I reference arguments by Dallas John Baker and Verlyn Flieger that are grounded in the subjective experiences of readers rather than in the outdated concept of a single, homogenous “author” with easily discernible “intentions.” Baker describes at least four ‘Tolkiens’: all “contested . . .discursive [figures],” including but not limited to “the Tolkien of history, the actual person who lived and wrote and died . . . [as well as] the subject of numerous biographies. . . [and] the Tolkien as imagined by the, perhaps millions, of people who have enjoyed his novels or the film adaptations. . .and the Tolkien as constructed in the scholarly research about his writing” (125). Flieger goes further, arguing that every individual reader has “their own private Tolkien--more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at” (8-9). I analyze the various ways in which women, and, increasingly, in recent years, non-binary people have made “Tolkien” their own even in the face of systemic marginalization and outright hostility in fandoms (Scott), sexism in genre publishing (C.M.) and what I call “Denial of Citation”2 in academia (Reid) with men’s work being cited more often than women’s (Healy, Savonick and Davidson).
Working Bibliography
Baker, Dallas John, "Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy." Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and Nike Sulway, Cambridge Scholars' Publishing, 2017, pp. 123-43.
C. M. “Sexism in the Writing and Publishing Industries.” WomanStatsBlog. 5 Oct. 2020. https://womanstats.wordpress.com/2020/10/05/sexism-in-the-writing-and-publishing-industries/
Flieger, Verlyn. "The Arch and the Keystone," Mythlore, vol. 38, no. 1, article 3, 2019, pp. 7-19, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol38/iss1/3.
Hatcher, Melissa McCrory. “Finding Woman’s Role in The Lord of the Rings,” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 5, 2007, pp. 43-54.
Healy, Kieran. "Gender and Citation in Four General-Interest Philosophy Journals, 1993-2013." Kieran Healy. 25 Feb. 2015.
Oshun. “Women Find a Room of Their Own in Tolkien Fanfiction.” The Silmarillion Writer’s Guild. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.
Reid, Robin Anne. "The History of Scholarship on Lois McMaster Bujold's Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay," Biology & Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold, eds. Regina Yung Lee and Una McCormack, Liverpool UP, 2020, pp. 13-31.
Savonick, Danica, and Cathy N. Davidson. “Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies." LSE Impact Blog. 8 March 2017.
Scott, Suzanne. Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry. NYU P, 2019.
Yep, I’m bringing Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own into the discussion! Woolf and Tolkien were not contemporaries, exactly; she was born ten years before he did, and died thirty years before he did Tolkien (1892–1973); Woolf (1882-1941)]. But given the extent to which some critics and scholars want to “excuse” Tolkien for “being a man of his time,” I think it’s important to emphasize that, as Melissa McCrory Hatcher argues,
Claiming that Tolkien lived in a different time where women were more subservient, these scholars justify this idea by insisting that “[s]exism was the norm and not subject to evaluation and attention” (Fredrick and McBride xiv). This idea of presentism, however, fails both to adequately explain Tolkien’s own sexism and to take seriously the powerful female characters in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s contemporaries were Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein and her Paris writers group. Tolkien himself worked with several strong female scholars at Oxford such as “medieval historian Margerie Reeves and Mrs. Sutherland, a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall specializing in Provençal studies”(Fredrick and McBride 4). Moreover, when Tolkien was writing his masterpiece, from 1937 to 1948, women were even controlling the home front in England—taking over “male” jobs during World War II. He and the Inklings were aware of the women’s movement and lived at a time when it was impossible to ignore. Therefore, it is certainly not adequate to make the argument of presentism to defend a man living only fifty years ago (43-44).
And even if there was not that chronological overlap, their work now exists in the world and can be brought together. As Oshun’s essay (“Women Find a Room of Their Own in Tolkien Fanfiction”) and my own approach show, there are Tolkien fans and academics and aca-fans whose reading universes comforably encompass Virginia Woolf *and* Tolkien (and, in my case, Joanna Russ *and* Tolkien)!
“Denial is citation” is a concept I coined in a feminist bibliographic essay on the scholarship about Lois McMaster Bujold’s sff for which I drew on Joanna Russ’s brilliant How to Suppress Women’s Writing.