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The 1998 James Tiptree, Jr. Award

Judges

Ray Davis (RD), Candas Jane Dorsey (CJD), Sylvia Kelso (SK), Kate Schaefer, Chair (KS), Lisa Tuttle (LT)

Judges' Introductory Comments

Candas Jane Dorsey

Reflecting on the "meaning" of "expressing gender issues" in the award guidelines has been an interesting challenge. As others, on this jury and in the wide world, have said in many ways, gender seems to be what people are pointing to when they use the term. In general, I think it is a social construct, but I still have a lot to learn about why, then, some people so strongly feel they have an innate gender instead of simply a set of equipment issued without palimpsests of gender pre-written on them. Because I seem to have such personal trouble foregrounding gender as an interpersonal datum, I like to think I can transcend gender, but at the same time I am the product of a very specific and powerful social process that has shaped me, not just in intellectual ways, but in mandating such intimate matters as what clothes I find sexy on what kinds of bodies. Still, it has always been such a struggle for me to learn the "rules" of gender discourse, from the status-quo rules about the presence or absence of men and women in social, sexual and intellectual discourse to the nouvelle proprieties of the hardcore theorists in the revolution against mono/hetero/sexism. The best I can manage as I go about my life is to confront my contradictions willingly, and be honest. In the jury process -- schooling myself to read for content that I often do not foreground, a change in reading habits that was remarked upon by more than one jury member -- I read for honesty, both intellectual and emotional, and for a willingness to step beyond the boundaries of what we think we know to a new and revolutionary image or landscape.

The most powerful statement that I made during the judging process was when I articulated that it's not enough to posit alien biology nor to imagine a different culture based on that biology --nor, I'd add, is it enough to tell a dystopian tale about how bad things are, nor use a cute premise to add interesting background, nor to posit future gender wars, biological mutations, genetic tampering, utopias - if that's as far as the story or novel goes. The first condition of a Tiptreeable text for me is to show beings at the edge of change, transformation, challenge -- on the boundary of questions. The second condition, equally as important, is that their story be told with surpassing excellence.

As I was reading, I also assumed that whether or not gender was the main theme of a book, if it made a significant step in how it handled gender or if it did something gender-bending in narrative or character, I considered it eligible. But I came to realise also that alternative orientations are very much in the public awareness now (if I were cynical, I'd say "Trendy!" but we read many good and even some brilliant stories which deserve better than a flippant dismissal) - and that makes, and none too soon I think, the presence of diverse characters and relationships part of the normal range of possibilities when constructing fiction in the present day. Therefore I came to believe that they are -- and should be, I think -- background, not foreground, and therefore the presence of a gender-bending element was not the only thing which would move a story into eligibility for the final list.

(It also struck me as I read so many stories from Asimov's that Tiptree juries could give commendations to venues which consistently published Tiptreeable work (or, more formally, "work which includes sex, gender, orientation, and social structures of family and relationship as important subjects of speculation"). and that certainly, on the evidence, Asimov's would deserve such a commendation.)

As I developed my reading criteria, I realised that each year, as more and more works are eligible, we see a growth in the way that gender is considered one of the core issues a speculative writer must consider: whether that be to take issues of sex and gender into consideration in creating a culture, foreground social processes around sex and gender or simply include as part of the texture and fabric of a story about something else altogether. It strikes me that as gender itself begins to disappear or to be transparent, this award could gradually phase out - and that this is a consummation devoutly to be wished. The Tiptree Award is about the cutting edge of treatment of gender issues. If there were no issues because gender had ceased to be such a consuming preoccupation among people, then the Tiptree Award would vanish too. These musings make an obvious connexion with the story I place at the top of my short list, "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", by Raphael Carter (in Starlight 2).

Among many lyrically written and powerful stories and books considered this year, this was one of the few that moved me into new territory. For a moment, I could glimpse the end of gender - and glimpse at the same moment the impossibility of living in that country ("...then I awoke and found me here on the cold hillside...")

Kate Schaefer

In our comments on individual works jurors often remark that a work is about something other than gender. As I've re-read these comments, it strikes me that the tone may comes across as a complaint that writers are not addressing gender directly. We do have this complaint, but it's a complaint peculiar to being a juror for this particular prize, rather than a substantive complaint which will carry over into our general reading. Many writers address gender indirectly, use it as a metaphor for some other concern, or treat it as something resolved; as a reader, I am interested in how well they use it for whatever purpose their art requires. As a juror, I am instructed to look for gender expansion or exploration, and when those don't occur in a piece of fiction about which I'm really excited, I'm disappointed. Another good work I can't suggest as a prize-winner, I think, and turn to the next work on the pile. I look forward to returning to my normal reading mode, in which my concern with my own enjoyment will be greater than my concern with the fiction's focus.

There is certainly still plenty of science fiction and fantasy which ignores gender concerns altogether. Because of the nature of the Tiptree award, very little fiction of this sort was sent to the jurors. There is also plenty of science fiction and fantasy which does not ignore gender concerns, but incorporates them as extremely minor elements as a matter of course while concentrating on other stuff. Two stories of this sort I'd like to mention were Michael Swanwick's "The Very Pulse of the Machine", a great piece of first-contact science fiction with no gender exploration and no leftover 50's assumptions, and Bruce Sterling's "Taklamakan", a story in which a person of neuter gender is a major character. Sterling only explores the implications of a neuter person for about two sentences, long enough to establish that the idea is there, and then goes on to the rest of the story.

Candas mentions the number of stories we considered which were published in Asimov's; I'd also like to point out that we received more novels from Avon than from any other publisher, and that all of the novels we received from Avon were pertinent to the award's concerns. We greatly appreciate the generosity of all the publishers, without which we'd be hard-pressed to get through all this reading. I also appreciate the resources of my local public library, which buys a lot more new and obscure fiction than I had ever suspected.

This whole process has lead me to conclude that I don't know what the hell gender is; the more I look at it, the more it doesn't seem to be there. It has something to do with sex, something to do with genitals and what people do with them and with whom they do those things, something to do with reproduction, and something to do with what people do to earn a living and how they dress while they do it, and something to do with how people look at themselves and how others look at them, but it's something else, too. Damned if I know what it is, but I do know when a story is about it.

Winner of the 1998 James Tiptree, Jr. Award

Raphael Carter, "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tor Books, 1998

Funny, well-researched, as focused on gender as anything could be, and very likely even the truth. Hard sf at its best. (RD)

Excellent. Really does twist and exercise the mind and emotions - oddly for such a form, emotions are fully engaged - and the reader emerges with a new way of seeing gender. (CJD)

This story does the science/social sciences discourse Real Well - walks the walk and talks the talk down to the referencing. There is NO doubt it is more definitely about gender as opposed to biological sex than anything else so far. There is no doubt I love that last line. It's the detonator that blows the entire very prettily constructed deconstruction of "gender constructs" clear into the air. "He's a twelve. I know he's a twelve. How do I know he's a man?"

At the same time, the story has a couple of problems, and one of them is right in there. If "he" is NOT a man, how come you can, with such confidence, say "he?" Gender is what gives you the undisputed pronoun, "he" or "she" - so if "he" is a twelve - how come there's doubt that he's a man?

Again, the twins' differentiation of types within the overall gender binary - "woman not yet to menopause", "man with atrophied sex organs" - are all based on biological variations - subtle, fascinating, eye-opening so long as you regard gender as biologically based, and certainly does things with the idea of the bare binary pair - and this schema does allow for hermaphrodites, yes. But what does it do with performed gender identities? How would the twins categorize a drag queen or a butch lesbian in full regalia? It seems to me that although this story comes closest to overt deconstruction, even it has not completely mastered the intersection in "gender" between culture, performance, and biology.

That said, this is the closest to an overt and outright exploration of gender that I've seen so far, and for that it deserves the winner's vote. (SK)

On the political journey to understand gender, I had reached the point of thinking that gender is all external to the person; but external and manifested by the person whose gender it is. I read this story as saying that it's external and manifested by the person who is reading the gender, and what's more, either there are actually no genders, or there are many, many genders. The idea that there are as many as two, or only two, is completely dismissible. By the end of the story, the idea that gender can be known by the person reading the gender has grown questionable, and along with it the means of knowing gender.

Gender perception or lack of it is not related to sexual desire in "Congenital Agenesis", which makes me like the story all the better.

A complaint I've often had this year is that fiction ostensibly about gender turns out to be about freedom/slavery, or children, or race. The idea of The Other is so slippery, and so useful, allowing any Other to stand in for any other Other. In "Congenital Agenesis" Carter looks gender straight in the face, and gender is the thing that blinks. (KS)