The genre of culture: Does female literature exist? And male?

In recent years, the feminine literature label, without anywhere we find a definition or a concept that tells us what they refer to. What is certain is that it has given rise to numerous questions in interviews with writers, entire opinion articles and many discussions.

This article is an attempt to understand what you mean this label and group the consequences of this classification.

Editorial Marketing

At first, we can think that women's literature is one that is aimed at women. It's actually true women, at this time, they are the big buyers of books and the great prescribers of reading: women buy to read, to give as gifts and for their children. This means that targeting women in literary marketing campaigns sells more because women buy more. This makes it even look for covers that are especially attractive to women.

Does it mean that literature is a feminine cultural manifestation? Of course not, what it really means is that literary marketing and any other product addresses the group of buyers bigger because it is where investment is maximized in advertising.

Tastes according to gender

We can think that women's literature is the one that women mostly read.

Traditionally there are books that women like more and others more like men. It is a fact. This would suppose that the books that are mostly read by women are feminine and those traditionally read by men are masculine, but instead it does not speak of masculine literature, so we understand that the feminine label does not refer to this because tastes are not exclusive, Majorities do not classify and unanimity in tastes does not exist.

The same situation would occur with sports; or with the cinema, but although there is a cliché that women like romantic comedies and men like action movies we never hear the female movie label. Why? We return to a marketing issue: reading is a lonely act, cinema, on the other hand, is social. We go to the cinema as a couple, with family or friends, as a general rule. How to classify is to exclude, no producer cares about their film being rated as masculine or feminine. And we have returned to the subject of marketing.

Literature by Author

Are the works written by feminine women and those written by masculine men? It is clear that the argument falls under its own weight, but we should not stop evaluating it.

By reduction to the absurd, the same argument could be applied to writing depending on the author's race or sexual orientationCan anyone imagine saying that Lorca wrote gay literature? And what about so many books written under a pseudonym? Are all teenagers hooked on Harry Potter reading women's literature?

This is clearly not what the label is referring to.

Literature by protagonist

Like the previous option, this classification would lead us to such strange conclusions as that Little Women, Luise May Ascott, is women's literature or that Mark Twain wrote men's literature when he created Tom Sawyer o Huckelberry finn, or that Günter Grass made children's literature with El Tin Drum because the protagonist was a child.

Literature by subject

I have found positions that defend that women's literature is the one in which Topics, in his eyes, feminine, like the maternity, abortions, infertility, abuse, the struggle to find a place in the world of business or political politics. Classifying these themes as feminine would require more than an article an anthropological essay. They are social and human issues. Society evolves and themes are enriched. Until now these experiences have been residual in literature, or at least in high literature, when they are experiences rooted in the depths of the human being, as was also for centuries, for example, racial discrimination. Literature is a reflection of the social concerns of the moment. These themes, far from having gender, provoke universal emotions, common to men and women, who reach the literature en masse with a certain delay at the same time as new topics appear, such as those contributed by millennials, for example, that enrich and revitalize literature. Continuing with the example of cinema, classifying these themes as feminine would classify most of Almodóvar's filmography as feminine, which develops very little hackneyed emotions about motherhood.

At this point, I can only conclude that literature, like the rest of culture, is universal, genderless, even if the taste for labeling leads us to confusing classifications, which for some make no sense and that those who find it do not agree on what they mean.