Lea Hernandez' Grant Nan; with a wider thesis on awards generally

Sooo... Lea Hernandez recently announced her grant for female creators of webcomics. I think this is a fantastic idea. Needless to say, there are those who disagree. (The first page is silly but mostly inoffensive. It gets head-smackingly bad later on in the thread.)

Now, the thing is, the argument that gets trotted out every single time something like this is done or even mooted for discussion is that having an award for women (black people, Latinos, lesbians, people with disabilities, [insert minority here]) is in itself a form of discrimination, and thus just as hateful and unjust as the form of discrimination the award is attempting to combat. I used to be troubled by this kind of argument, until I realised that there's an unspoken premise involved relating to the purpose of these kinds of awards: if you think of awards and grants as an attempt to reward inherent merit and/or work done, naturally the idea of an award given only to women, or only to black people, seems unfair. Think of all the good work done by men! you might cry, if that was your line of thought. Don't they deserve to be rewarded too?

The key word in the above sentence is "deserve". Now, the whole concept of "deserving" something is difficult and messy once you start examining it, but this is a comics blog, not a philosophy blog, so I won't get into specifics. Let's just turn the spotlight on some other awards to expand the range of the debate. Take the James Tiptree Jr. Award. The Tiptree Award is highly specific: having been founded in memory of the great SF writer James Tiptree Jr., who wrote a lot of fascinating and thought-provoking stories on the subject of gender, the award is given to authors of "science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender". Now, I ask you: does the Tiptree Award discriminate against those authors who don't write science fiction or fantasy? Or against those who write SF or fantasy, but don't care to "expand or explore our understanding of gender"? Well... of course it does. But so what? It's an award intended to encourage a particular kind of writing. For it to discriminate against the creators of other kinds of writing is just plain sensible. It wasn't made for them.

The same goes for other highly specific awards -- the Sidewise award for alternate history, for instance (which was won by Warren Ellis and collaborators in 2004 for Ministry of Space). Now, an objector might say that these kinds of awards are not unjust because they do not discriminate against categories of people, only against the works the people produce. Perhaps. But I am inclined to think that in fact, awards more general in their scope are in practice identical in purpose. They are not there to be an objective assessment of inherent merit. They are there to be an encouragement to creators -- either creators of particular kinds of works, or creators from a particular category of people. It may be that people in general need to be encouraged to create a particular kind of work; it may be that a particular category of people need to be encouraged to create, full stop.

I think this is what Lea Hernandez has in mind with her grant: to encourage women to create webcomics. And the uncomfortable fact, the fact people aren't particularly good at owning up to, is that men (considered simply as men) don't need encouragement, because men dominate this culture[1].

Oh, perhaps poor men need encouragement, or black men, or Latino men, or men from rural areas, or gay men -- after all, our culture is capitalist, white-dominated, heteronormative, and urban-oriented, as well as being sexist and patriarchal. But whenever there's an award that claims to be an objective assessment of inherent merit, the fact that men dominate this culture[1] means that the award becomes, in effect, an award for men. So, the fellow in the comments to this blog entry by Colleen Doran who says "My gut reaction on first reading about it is is to want to set up a grant for male comics creators…" has missed something: it already exists. It's called the Xeric Foundation Grant for Self-Publishers.Do you doubt me? Well, granting that there are no overt barriers to women participating, the award is still overwhelmingly male-dominated. I've just done a count of male versus female names in the list of recipients since the awards were begun in 1992. The highest ratio is in the 2005 grant list -- 7 males to 4 females. In 1992 and 1994, no awards were given to women at all. In 1993, 1995, 1996, and 2004, only one woman got an award (compared with, respectively, 6, 10, 9 and 12 men or all-male teams).

[EDIT 07/07/2006: I just did an extra calculation: by my estimate 83.5% of Xeric award recipients were male, 16.5% female. This figure may be a bit off, as some creators have gender-ambiguous names (though if that was obviously the case, I did try to find extra information about the creator), but it's unlikely to be off by more than 3 percentage points.]

I'm sure similar figures would come out of an analysis of the Eisner awards. If anything, the Eisners would probably be worse, since they include mainstream comics (the Xeric grant recipients are "indie" by definition), and mainstream comics are far, far worse than indies when it comes to gender parity.

Does the need for the Grant Nan seem more obvious now?

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[1] YES THEY DO. Do not even think of claiming they don't. Even if you could make a decent argument that men don't dominate Western culture in general (and no, you can't, but I won't eviscerate you for trying), the idea that men don't dominate Anglophone comics culture is so ludicrous as not to be worth debating. Try, and I will laugh at you.