"The book publishing industry is notorious for white-washing book covers by replacing the minority main character with a white (and sometimes male) figure who might not even be in the book.
Now Tara Sparling brings a new scourge to our attention: ingenue-washing.
A surprising number of books are being published with a faceless 20-somthing girl on the front cover:
Sparling explains in her post that publishing has taken the lazy way out (my words) and settled on 20-something white chicks as the symbol of all femininity rather than design covers to suit the content.
...It has almost become a cliche, and it's not the only time we've seen it.
Even the reprint of The Bell Jar was afflicted by the same stereotyping.
And so was Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, as well as other books.
And the problem gets worse when we move beyond the western world.
...Is the book set in the Arab world, or was it written by an Arab?
Then obviously it needs a woman wearing a headscarf or niqab on the cover:
A surprising number of books are being published with a faceless 20-somthing girl on the front cover:Sparling explains in her post that publishing has taken the lazy way out (my words) and settled on 20-something white chicks as the symbol of all femininity rather than design covers to suit the content.
...It has almost become a cliche, and it's not the only time we've seen it.
Even the reprint of The Bell Jar was afflicted by the same stereotyping.
And so was Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, as well as other books.
And the problem gets worse when we move beyond the western world.
...Is the book set in the Arab world, or was it written by an Arab?
Then obviously it needs a woman wearing a headscarf or niqab on the cover:
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