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Old 09-11-2010, 03:33 PM   #76
TimMason
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Pontoise, France
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Quote:
Is sexism ok as long as it is anti-male?
when Virago started up, publishing was heavily male-dominated; they went some way to correcting an imbalance. They were explicitly feminist. I think it's difficult to argue that they were not, at that time, doing something that needed doing - and many of their authors agreed with them. Not only did they print new women's writing, but they also put back on the shelves books that had gone out of print, and for which they helped forge a new readership.

You could argue that that was then, and now is now, and that there is no longer any need for what Virago does. But I'm not sure that, say, 'Tipping the Velvet' would have made it into the big bookshops if Virago hadn't been there to publish it. And they still publish challenging books with a feminist perspective. There are Marxist publishing houses, there are libertarian publishing houses, there are houses that publish for all kinds of niches (including publishing houses for geeks and publishing houses for sports), so it seems to be fair enough that there should be a publishing house with a feminist outlook. It's not as if they prevent male authors from being published!
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