Explaining cause someone in the tags wanted to know:
A lot of fantasy worlds carry structural misogyny that mirrors our own world, that many readers take for granted, because we are not necessarily used to using the fictional space to imagine radically different worlds and consider what “no misogyny” looks like.
So for instance, even in worlds that an author might textually tell us “treat women equally”, and they prove it by having a woman be a warrior (“see? Women can do any job a man can do!”). But, if there’s no particularly different structure to society to handle domestic labour and childcare, then much like our modern world, it places a high burden on women to occupy dual roles in society. They must often be both carer and breadwinner (and also Hot, let’s not forget these settings always want all women to be Hot, and all “ugly” women are evil), while male protagonists are simply “themselves”. They are not truly equal with women because actually, they can look however they want, and also care work is not expected of them. It is rarely a constant passive part of their lives (when it is present, it is a very active part of their narrative, distinguishing them from the “norm” of the world). Women continue to occupy invisible roles in these narratives as the stay-at-home parents, the cooks in the kitchens, the hags, whose stories are unimportant to the narrative because they aren’t considered full and real people with rich interiority. The work of caring itself dehumanises them. The closest we typically get to valuing “carer roles” in fantasy is to create archetypes for the Healer, which are invariably very femme-coded and often tied to damsel-in-distress stories. (The Healer must often then distinguish herself from the devalued image of association with care work and femininity by becoming a warrior as well.)
And then, of course, there’s the uncritical reproduction of systems of violence and war that typically impacts women and other marginalised groups more than anyone else… because “fantasy”…
but the point isn’t to create an ever-moving bar here, because we could talk about all the ways in which this stuff shows up til the cows come home, but to talk about what it means to exercise the attempt to imagine what “no misogyny” looks like. Exploring the possibilities that open up when you ask, “what if childcare was structured communally instead of by individual families and how would that shape our heroes?” and “what if this society assigned gender roles differently/at a different age?” And “would a history in a different world full of female leaders conceive of territoriality differently compared to the Westphalian notion of the nation state as demarcated by men?”
If it starts and stops at warrior women, that’s no different from thinking feminism ended when women got the vote, or the right to die in the army. Fantasy is where our imaginations should explore possibilities, not be trapped by the limits and chains of our current political reality.
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