Bechdel in Bookshelf

[lb_lee]

Rogan: Last night, I found myself pondering what narrative story books/movies of mine (no essays!) fail the Bechdel Test.

First of all, much to my surprise, both our books from the 1800s passed with flying colors! Charles Chesnutt’s short story collection, The Wife of His Youth, has multiple stories with a focus on women and the effects of race and colorism on them (“Cicely’s Dream,” “Her Virginia Mammy,” “the Bouquet”), while the Crafts’ Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom has Ellen Craft (in white male disguise) being mooned over by white girls and, later, interacting as herself with the female abolitionist who reassures her about her safety.

As for the failures, we quickly noticed that they fell into a few camps:

• extremely short works (often porn) which may only have 2-3 characters tops, so it depends entirely on the genders of the couple involved—if it’s straight or gay, forget it! (Iris and Angel was an exception, a M/F porno but Iris talks a lot about her taxes and such with her female roommate/friend. The Pound was also a shocking M/F exception, with the very last panel of the never-finished issue #2 involving the girls dragging their female boss out for drinks.)
• gay male works, of any length. Only ONE of those passed: Leonard and Larry, which has lesbians discussing breaking into a car, coming out, female relatives talking, etc. Gay male stories regularly take place in all-male environments, much like lesbian stories regularly take place in all-female, though the lesbian stories (Bound, Oracle Bone, the Handmaiden) are far more likely to have men talking about non-ladies than the other way around.
• Miscellaneous. The interesting ones:

1. Dharma Punks, by Ant Sang (2003). Punks planning to blow up a McDonalds equivalent in 1994 Auckland and everything goes wrong. Arguably BARELY passes, if one female character screaming at the sight of a (male) dead body and the other covering her mouth and hissing “shut up!” counts. This one is maddening, because it’s a 400 page book, with FOUR important female characters, all of whom are around each other, but they somehow only ever end up talking either TO or ABOUT the guys in the party. Aaaaah!


2. Johnny Public, by Sean Frost and Wendi Strang-Frost (n.d.). Multi gathering everyone together for a roster meeting because oh shit, they’re multi. Similar deal: multiple female characters, but they never end up talking to each other, only the males in the party. But at least it’s not 400 pages!


3. Danny, the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl (1975). Only one female character who speaks.


4. The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson (2001). A young boy starts living underground in a psuedo-Disneyland with an old lady and discover a dastardly plot. Only two female characters who speak, never encounter each other.


5. Callahan and Company, by Spider Robinson (1977-1986). Three-book compilation of “man walks into a bar...” sci-fi stories. Oh hey, just realizes it does barely pass, “Post Toast” has Susie and Suzy marveling that Callahan’s is online in our cyberspace, but it’s a full-group, mixed-gender conversation. Technically that story isn’t in THIS omnibus, but it was in the other one, so we printed it out anyway.


6. The Genocidal Healer, by James White. Sci-fi medical procedural, and every character but the protagonist has the pronoun “it,” so it fails both Bechdel AND its reverse! Rare!


7. The Book of Job. Man bawls out God and his sanctimonious male friends. No female roles that speak.


8. Incognegro, by Smith and Pleece (2008). A black reporter goes undercover to investigate lynchings. Female characters, but uncommon and never encounter or talk to each other.

Of those eight books, three (Dahl and Robinson) were ones we adored in childhood, three were from college. The final two are James White, who truly EARNED his goofy Bechdel failure, and Job, my favorite book in the Bible because it remains transgressive 2000+ years later.

What is a blog for, if not this minutiae?

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

The Genocidal Healer, by James White. Sci-fi medical procedural, and every character but the protagonist has the pronoun “it,” so it fails both Bechdel AND its reverse! Rare!

This is a great example of why I like the Bechdel test as an industry critique, but find it of more limited use for individual stories. Sometimes there are really good reasons for writing things a particular way.

[lb_lee]

Yup! Admittedly, had I read more of White’s books, I would’ve learned more of the protagonists’ pronouns and been able to puzzle out the “true” gender balance (and it was probably male-dominated because he wrote from the 1950s-1990s), but still, I feel like White did what he did very intentionally. He’s writing aliens, and part of how he removes human scales of reference is by removing things like gendered pronouns. And it’s entertaining to have a book that fails all the tests very deliberately! He clearly thought about what he was doing, and I have seen no other writer handle gendered pronouns the same way. It’s part of why I like him.

Other works, like Dharma Punks and Johnny Public, are much more frustrating because of how CLOSE they come to passing. By their very failure and how easily they could’ve not, it brings attention to why they failed. White failed very deliberately; Johnny Public and Dharma Punks just weren’t thinking about it.

It was also interesting to think HOW the silly little test was passed. Women talking about breaking into cars, about having a cup of tea, about magical mushroom infestation, about feminism and ancestry and science and exorcising ghosts. What do women talk about and care about? All sorts of stuff!

[dray]

Agreed that the test is a good way to quickly highlight how people think about women in their stories when they pass or fail, whether it's by accident or very intentionally. Always a little heartbreaking to dig into when you had a fav and go back to realize it was less 'having your back against the general melange of patriarchy' then it might have felt as a youngster, though.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: yeah, I can’t be too chuffed about most of it, since I own a good amount of short queer male stuff and I’m not about to feel guilty that my 20-page two-character boner comic has no one but the two boning in it, and the eight books that aren’t short/gay, we keep for specific reasons. There are only a few that make me go “man, so close!” and they’re all focused on OTHER forms of oppression. So I can’t be too mad about it!

Mori: plus I have (not including floppies, porn, or the lesbian mysteries I plan to give away) six books that don’t pass the reverse Bechdel. So at least we’re close to equal on that front!

If you’re curious, the six reverse failures are:
1. The Genocidal Healer, by James White (1991), as mentioned earlier.
2. Sacred Bodies, by Ver (2025). Arranged marriage between human woman and bird person. No major male characters because the bird people you see are overwhelmingly agender.
3. The Dancing Bones part 1, by Jackarais (2024). Lesbian lovers dive into a pit of raver skeletons. All-women society, no male characters at all, not clear if men even exist here.
4. The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, by Carolyn Gage (1994). Radical feminist plays, overwhelmingly lesbian, no male roles at all.
5. Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings, by Anita Cornwell (1981, 2025). Overwhelmingly essays and poetry, but I feel like it counts since one of the series are letter conversations between women about racism and sexism, and come on, that counts as conversations and characters.
6. The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader (1992), edited by Joan Nestle. Lesbian book, few male roles.

So, overwhelmingly lesbian books, with Ver and White the lone hold-outs because nonhuman genders take up so many roles. And I am positive that none of them failed by accident, except MAYBE Ver.

I will note that a couple of my lesbian books did have men talking about non-women, though. That happened WAY more often than the reverse!

[ravenna_c_tan]

Yeah, I feel like it's a bit different when gay or lesbian literature has consciously chosen a single-gender milieu, versus authors of fiction just sort of forgetting to give the female characters any speaking roles, or if they do, it's just to validate the existence of the male characters. But it's still super interesting to examine works that weren't "about" gender to see how the dynamics run. Dharma Punks, wow? For a graphic novel that was considered kinda "woke" at the time of its publication, that's interesting. (Also interesting, a total aside: there's a memoir out there entitled Dharma Punx, by a guy named Noah Levine) and various buddhist groups around calling themselves that now. Wild.)

Also, hi, this is Cecilia on my fannish dreamwidth. (From Arisia last year)

[lb_lee]

Hi Cecilia! Good to see you again!

We’re just happy you know Dharma Punks, since it was a self-published NZ comic and we only knew about it because we lived there for a bit, soon after it wrapped.

Mori: Dharma Punks is the one that drives me most nuts, because Tracy, Mewt, and Hiroshima are characters I like so much! They’re messy and different and dealing (or not dealing) with their own shit! Hell, Tracy, Cat, and Hiroshima were all friends and yet... AND YET...!

[ravenna_c_tan]

Yeah! I used to be very into both the zine and indie comics scene. I fell off the comics wagon when the store I used to hang out in, that was run by a slam poet friend of mine, closed down and he moved out of state. The only one I keep up with these days is Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, but I usually wait until the graphic novel compilation comes out and get it at the regular bookstore.

[lb_lee]

Haha, well be careful, you hang around us and you’re liable to get sucked in again, we love (and work in) that stuff!

Dharma Punks was nigh-impossible to get even by the time we reached NZ; we only got to read it because of the anarchist library at the time (also responsible for introducing us to Flatland and the works of Shaun Tan). When that Canadian omnibus popped up in 2016, we dived on it like it was the the last hot dog we’d ever eat!