Blue, blue, blue, a color and a surge

[rivkat]

I swear I’ll be gracious in a little bit, but right now my main thought is: I was worried about the early Virginia returns, and then I looked up the county by county reporting and realized that, while real Virginia had been counted, fake Virginia had not yet had its say.

Random fannish things:

ricadonna made a little greeting card for the Bowiebharata! Spike/Buffy and snark: good times.

“Shelley’s Daughters” might have been a better piece if it hadn’t gone out of its way to denigrate a genre Terrence Rafferty finds “unreadable,” the paranormal romance. Perhaps if Rafferty could read in the genre, he wouldn’t have made the embarrassing claim that paranormal romance denies “the uneasy sense that the forces unleashed inside [a female protagonist] might be uncontrollable — rampant, voracious, indifferent to natural limits and not unambiguously benign.” Much paranormal romance, including the works of Laurell Hamilton (mentioned by Rafferty), turns on the appeal and the terror of that possibility.

Rafferty makes the incoherent claim that, in the “unlamented prefeminist world,” women were “other”; we as readers of paranormal romance therefore now identify with monsters, apparently acting on some sort of genetic memory of otherness. Something is wrong with Rafferty’s understanding of readers, or of feminism, or both. One need not like the books one reviews, but psychoanalyzing the motivations of those who do often reveals more about the reviewer than about the books.

I’m also far from thrilled with Rafferty’s facile assumption that women have freely and naturally chosen not to be horror writers, as if canon weren’t constructed by editors’ and audiences’ expectations. But I was even more ticked by his assumptions about readers.

Comments

[egretplume.livejournal.com]

Good letter!