Literary Explorations: What the hell is a "strong female character"?

(This is a ramble.  Expect ramble-ness.  Note:  there aren't many comments on this blog (you can fix that if you like), but some of my Google+ followers opened the flood gates here.)

No joke.  We hear about them all the time.  But what do we mean when we say "strong female character"?  I ask this because I've read so many different definitions, and none of them seem to offer a valid justification for inventing a special category to describe characters.  When you think about it, we almost never say "strong male character" -- granted, there are so many male characters anyway, and I suspect I'm right when I attribute "strong female character" (SFC) to a community response against the relative shortage of, well, SFCs.  Implicitly, this is a binary.  There are "weak female characters" (WFC) too, but their weakness derives from their portrayal -- a frequently sexist one -- rather than any assessment of their "strength" (broadly defined).  Identifying a WFC means exposing the ways in which writers fall prey to gender stereotypes in a way that doesn't challenge those stereotypes (or, in other words, at least exploring what it means to be a woman in a more powerless position)(I'm not convinced this is actually a good definition, though).

Personally, I find the term SFC slightly offensive -- and I'm not the only one.  In 2009, Anna at Genre Reviews opened her critique with the following:

Schedule Changes

If it's not already obvious, I've dropped some of the stuff I planned to write each week, in part because of time constraints.  I figured something like that would happen, since I'm a PhD student who is supposed to doing PhD work.  I may come back to some of those topics again in the future (as regular columns or otherwise).

Today, however, I'm going to change the schedule in a more public fashion.  Everything originally planning for Mondays and Wednesdays will now drop on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  The reason?  I'm now teaching from 9 AM to 6:30 PM, with additional time to travel to and from campus.  It'll be easier for me to switch things around.

So...consider things changed.  New "Literary Explorations" column coming tomorrow!

Adventures in ...Cancer?: If Only You'd Been Bad Asthma (Or, Leading to Up to Diagnosis -- Part Two)

(You can find the first part here.)

Where were we?  Oh, right.  The last time I talked about my cancer diagnosis, I had covered all the symptoms leading up to my hospitalization and getting over my fear of needles.  A fast heart rate, asthma symptoms, and some weird crap in my x-rays pretty much made that mandatory.

Here's the run-down of what happened after hospitalization:

Something must be said for the fact that my mother pretty much stuck by my side in the hospital, sleeping in what I can only describe as the most uncomfortable chairs and "beds" the hospital torture division could come up with.  She stayed there with me while I proceeded to freak out internally over the fact that things were going terribly wrong.  There I was, thinking I had asthma and that some nice drugs and high quality breathing treatments would put it all to rest and I could

Poll: The Retro Nostalgia Film (#6) -- Pick Again!

You know the drill!  Vote!

Retro Nostalgia: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the Hero Scientist, and the Possible Utopia(?)

There's something truly nostalgic about SF narratives that make the scientist the hero.  There aren't a lot of those narratives left, if we're honest.  Characters use science, sure, but they are rarely the creators of science, or its purveyors.  But not the old school SF movies.  Oh no.  In a lot of those stories, scientists are front and center.  They're occasionally the bad guy, but they're always the ones figuring things out, discovering the new and amazing things about the world.  Even in Forbidden Planet, in which the main scientist is, for all intensive purposes, the villain (well, not really -- his id is the villain), the romanticism of science and the scientist is crucial to the plot.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) falls into the positive variety of these pro-scientist films.  Most of us know the story, primarily because it was recently remade into what I can only describe as a film without any substance:  an alien named Klaatu appears on Earth, which terrifies the hairless ape creatures; Klaatu desperately tried to make humanity listen to him, but in the end, he's forced to use the threat of annihilation to, we hope, bring humanity in line -- for self-

Vacation! (Late Notice)

In case you didn't know, I am currently on vacation, which might explain the lack of activity on this blog between last Friday and Monday the 11th.  That means no Retro Nostalgia feature, no Literature Explorations, and not a whole lot of random stuff in-between.

Regular programming will (mostly) resume after I return!

In other news:  how are you?

Hugo Award Recommendations Needed! Inquire Within...

I've never voted for the Hugos before, which means this year is a huge "first."  Regardless, I've always had a problem filling out some of the categories, sometimes because I'm not familiar with the field (comics, for example).  This is where you all come in.  Below is the list of all the categories in which my nominations are either entirely absent or not firm.  What would you recommend I check out to help me fill the gaps?

Best Novella
Best Novelette
Best Related Work (I've got four ideas, but maybe I missed something you all know about?)
Best Graphic Story
Best Dramatic Presentation (minus Game of Thrones, as I've already seen it)
Best Fan Artist
Best Fanzine (I have ideas, but only one standout thus far)
Best Fancast (ditto)

Have at it!