I would love to hear peoples' opinions on Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap. I decline to comment under the terms of the post, but it is essentially a m/m romance, and the closest thing I know of to the modern genre of female authored m/m.
A completely different story, and not a female author--Robert J. Sawyer wrote a trilogy, Homonids, Humans, Hybrids about a parallel Earth populated by Neanderthals. The Neanderthal society has a kind of mandatory bisexuality. Men and women live mostly segregated lives with their same sex partner, and when the women are fertile they interact with their opposite sex partners mostly for the purpose of procreation, but they do share parenting in a way.
There's some good stuff in these books, a very stable, functional, same sex partnered society and the same sex relationships are happy and fulfilling and kind of sweet and not horribly heteronormative, but the society essentially is. Gender determines your societal role and your job, and there is a violence against women subplot that is baffling given the poly structure of the society, but he writes it as if that kind of male desire to violently control women is inherent somehow.
The books read like he could imagine individual gay relationships existing outside our social construct of gender and sexuality, but he couldn't imagine a whole society that was fully queer.
no subject
A completely different story, and not a female author--Robert J. Sawyer wrote a trilogy, Homonids, Humans, Hybrids about a parallel Earth populated by Neanderthals. The Neanderthal society has a kind of mandatory bisexuality. Men and women live mostly segregated lives with their same sex partner, and when the women are fertile they interact with their opposite sex partners mostly for the purpose of procreation, but they do share parenting in a way.
There's some good stuff in these books, a very stable, functional, same sex partnered society and the same sex relationships are happy and fulfilling and kind of sweet and not horribly heteronormative, but the society essentially is. Gender determines your societal role and your job, and there is a violence against women subplot that is baffling given the poly structure of the society, but he writes it as if that kind of male desire to violently control women is inherent somehow.
The books read like he could imagine individual gay relationships existing outside our social construct of gender and sexuality, but he couldn't imagine a whole society that was fully queer.