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A question of gender? |
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| 07/12/2008 |
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Some encounters come about by coincidence, others by necessity. Today’s discussion at the Centro Congressi on female writers, Women and Noir, is a mixture of both. Loredana Lipperini moderated the event, which took place between this year’s Chandler Award recipient Alicia Giménez-Bartlett; Italian writers Elisabetta Bucciarelli, Chiara Tozzi and Simona Vinci; British author Sharon Bolton; and Sweden’s Liza Marklund.
The discussion focused on the state of female writers and the need to reconfirm a departure from those stereotypes that ancient, modern and, unfortunately, even contemporary societies impose upon women in general and, more specifically, female writers and all women in socially visible professions.
Lipperini immediately brought up two statistics. The first is the fact that not only are the majority of crimes committed in the home, women are predominantly the victims of these tragic acts. The second regards the representation of women on television, in real life and in fiction, in which women are either pin-up girls or victims in headlines. In other words, either an objectified body or a corpse, with little in between.
The first to speak was Bucciarelli, who referred to her character, police inspector Maria Dolores Vergani, a woman in her 40s who in order to face the daily violence she investigates reacts with everyday humanity. “In order to shed stereotypes,” said Bucciarelli, “a character must be credible. My character is fragile, as people are in real life before violence, but also strong, which does not mean adopting masculine strength.”
This was a salient point repeated by many of the writers. The female figure in novels is moved by sentiments that lead her to react to what is happening in each specific situation, and not behave according to stereotypes in which men and women are not human beings with complex identities but predefined and monolithic personalities divided among genders and categories.
Tozzi, also a psychologist, pointed out a difference between male and female writing. “In some ways, a woman can suspend things when facing a crime, she reflects on the sense of life, or, better yet, on the meaning of losing or taking a life,” she said.
Tozzi opened up another subject of discussion – whether a woman author should identify herself as a feminine writer and if so, whether this influences her approach to telling violent stories and characterizing (read: stereotyping) male and female characters, and thus to depicting the roles that the sexes can or cannot play.
Vinci offered a radical answer. “What is important is the story,” she said. “We must avoid closing ourselves off in a stylistic or narrative cage. Women should be more critical with respect to certain imposed models that stop feeling like victims.”
Bartlett agreed, also emphasizing the importance of having stories to tell, be they big or small: “Today, there are no heroic acts to relate like in the past, but that doesn’t matter. Political issues, such as class struggles, are equally important. What needs to be taken seriously is literary quality.”
A literary quality that moreover cannot be expressed by adapting masculine themes, if those even exist, stressed Bolton, who said she was “happy to have a different view.” This originality, according to Marklund, represents the chance to “know how to understand the point of view of the other.” Because, as she said, stories of emancipation and the conquest of equal rights are the result of long processes, which, in summation, do not have to mean losing the point of view of the other, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or religion. Today more than ever.
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