Apocalypse World and the Feminist Perspective

I had an interesting dinner where the discussion of a one-shot I had run last week came up. And the subject of how post-apocalypse fiction is way too bleak and all that was put across the table.

We started to discuss the bleakness and a friend mentioned that all the ways in which we were saying the genre was bleak were masculine. They were power based. She told me to read this and I just did. I'd read Ursula Le Guin, but not read this commencement speech.

Interesting parts:

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

Well, we're already foreigners.

In the framework of some of the discussions about how AW is too bleak or whatever, I find the whole thing interesting.

We're talking about similar things in my Contemporary Sociological Theory seminar this week, in regard to Judith Bulter's porject. Namely, what counts as a human life or a grievable life? What makes us exiles from ourselves? That kind of thing.

What post-apoc fiction does is really ask you the question: what norms are worth having? When you can do anything out on the wastes, what do you do? Are we monstrous or do we strive to be virtuous despite desire? How do with live together?

I think AW asks these kinds of questions.