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Gender Discrimination and the Publishing Industry
This is a grad school paper I wrote in 2009. The publishing industry seems less biased toward cishet white male authors now, at least in part thanks to independent presses. Admittedly, that might have a lot to do with what books catch my eye. It’s finally much easier to find an abundance of queer authors and characters. However, nowadays organized fascist bigots — including politicians such as the governor of Florida — are banning and attacking authors and subjects that aren’t from a cishet white male Xian perspective.
The original paper includes some extensive direct quotes that I’ve chosen to delete/summarize here on Medium because of copywrite.
Publishers Weekly’s November 2009 list of what the publication deemed the year’s best titles is glaring proof that discrimination against women authors and against gynecocentric perspective is still alive and thriving. Many readers and female authors criticized the list of ten male names, and in response, “Louisa Ermelino, the novelist and Publishers Weekly’s reviews director, said it had ‘disturbed us’ that its list was all male, but said: ‘We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz’” (Britten 2009). Thus the judges not only showed a dismissive attitude toward women writers, but additionally refrained from analyzing why they did it.