International Women’s Day and Highlighting Heroines: How Author Beth Barany Empowers Women Through Speculative Fiction

“What if we had a culture where women supported other women?” I wondered in a recent interview. “And women raised their sons to support women — what would that look like?”

These are some of the questions that motivate my work, and more specifically, that motivate my trilogy, Henrietta The Dragon Slayer.

You can read more of the article, “Highlighting Heroines: How Author Beth Barany Empowers Women Through Speculative Fiction,” here: http://www.dailycal.org/2018/03/04/author-beth-barany-interview-scifi-fantasy-feminism/.

The journalist, Molly Nolan, wrote:

“Barany has been able to use fiction as a medium to fight back against the history of problematic gender roles and representation that have dogged both our society and the media it has created. Women are rarely portrayed as the central protagonist or the hero; they are instead are often exhibited in a position of subservience, with minimal personal agency. The phenomena of the “female automaton,” sometimes called “fembots” or “gynoids,” was a common trope in science fiction going back to the 19th century, equating women to lifeless, controlled machines.”

Thank you to Molly for the wonderful interview.

More about my kickass heroine adventure tales here: https://author.bethbarany.com/ya-fantasy/