Kimberly asked Kristen Simmons:

When you began writing Article 5, did you give any specific thought to developing characters that challenged stereotypical gender norms? If so, how did the dystopian genre aid or enhance your ability to breathe life into these characters and do you feel that dystopia provided the perfect setting in which to question and challenge the status quo?

Kristen Simmons Hi Kimberly,

Great questions. I don't know that I had the specific intention to challenge stereotypical gender norms, but rather to create survivors in a world that had been taken over by a morality driven regime. The dystopian setting was the perfect place to do this because the world was so harsh that the characters regularly had to make decisions that impacted their survival. (As an aside, I didn't know that I was writing in the dystopian genre at the time - I was just writing the story that came up in my head. It was later, once I had an agent, that she told me the story would be marketed this way.) That said, the world in Article 5 is such that women's roles are very defined and limited, and so in order for Ember to be able to accomplish what she needed to, she was forced to overcome those barriers in addition to those which addressed her basic needs (safety, food, shelter, etc.). Basically, dystopia is the perfect place to challenge characters in all ways, and to magnify current societal issues (in my humble opinion). :)

Thanks for writing!
Kristen

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