The feminism in A Civil Campaign is largely
the effect of Bujold's female characters' resemblance to white,
middle-class USian women of the late twentieth century. These
characters usually do not display the sorts of behaviors and
personal characteristics typical of persons raised in the extreme
sexual oppression characteristic of Barrayar, but are simply inserted,
by the will of the author, into a society that could never have
produced them. They cope with the effects of masculine gender
privilege as though it were bad weather and negotiate a position
within patriarchy on a strictly individual level. This version
of feminism, I think, wishes to celebrate the changes that US
women have brought about in themselves over the last thirty years
without challenging institutionalized masculine privilege. Bujold
manages this through restricting her characters' activities and
ambitions to the private sphere (or taking them offplanet when
they do wish to exercise agency in the public sphere). This separation
of public from private and individual from society causes me,
as a reader, deep frustration, but may actually be what many of
Bujold's most enthusiastic fans like best about the series...
getting fat, as Julian Barnes would have it in Flaubert's case,
on having one's cake and eating it too.
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